No chai for the fbi
Claire Keane
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we're not kids anymore.

JVL

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if i look back, i am lost

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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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DEAR READER

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pixel skylines
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

Kaledo Art
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Xuebing Du
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@am-i-doingthis-right
No chai for the fbi
Image by Arielle Fragassi, via Flickr Commons In May of 1967,ā writes Patrick Iber at The Awl, āa former CIA officer named Tom Braden published a confession in the Saturday Evening Post under the headline, āIām glad the CIA is āimmoral.āā With the hard-boiled tone one might expect from a spy, but the candor one may not, Braden revealed the Agencyās funding and support of all kinds of individuals and activities, including, perhaps most controversially, in the arts.
Bennettās personal experiences are merely anecdotal, but his history of the relationships between the Iowa Writersā Workshop, the explosion of MFA programs in the last 40 years under its influence, and the CIA and other groupsā active sponsorship are well-researched and substantiated. What he finds, as Timothy Aubry summarizes at The New York Times, is that āwriting programs during the postwar periodā imposed a discipline instituted by Engle, āteaching aspiring authors certain rules of propriety.ā
āGood literature, students learned, contains āsensations, not doctrines; experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.āā These rules have become so embedded in the aesthetic canons that govern literary fiction that they almost go without question, even if we encounter thousands of examples in history that break them and still manage to meet the bar of āgood literature.ā What is meant by the phrase is a kind of currencyāliterature that will be supported, published, marketed, and celebrated. Much of it is very good, and much happens to have sufficiently satisfied the gatekeepersā requirements.
In a reductive, but interesting analogy, Motherboardās Brian Merchant describes āthe American MFA system, spearheaded by the infamous Iowa Writersā Workshopā as a ācontent farmā first designed to optimize for āthe spread of anti-Communist propaganda through highbrow literature.ā Its algorithm: āMore Hemingway, less Dos Passos.ā As Aubry notes, quoting from Bennettās book:
Frank Conroy, Engleās longest-serving successor, who taught Bennett, āwanted literary craft to be a pyramid.ā At the base was syntax and grammar, or āMeaning, Sense, Clarity,ā and the higher levels tapered off into abstraction. āThen came character, then metaphor ⦠everything above metaphor Conroy referred to as āthe fancy stuff.ā At the top was symbolism, the fanciest of all. You worked from the broad and basic to the rarefied and abstract.ā
The direct influence of the CIA on the countryās preeminent literary institutions may have waned, or faded entirely, who can sayāand in any case, the institutions Whitney and Bennett write about have less cultural valence than they once did. But even so, we can see the effect on American creative writing, which continues to occupy a fairly narrow range and show some hostility to work deemed too abstract, argumentative, experimental, or āpostmodern.ā One result may be that writers who want to get funded and published have to conform to rules designed to co-opt and corral literary writing.
Damn thatās some shit. Filing this underĀ āarticles I would like to post to my facebook were I not postblocked for 30 days due to posting ass pics in gay fb groupsā
If Bangladesh had the same population, but with the population density of Mongolia, it would be approximately the size of Africa, Asia, and Europe combined.
ah yes Greater Bengal
reblog before dec. 17th guys
me: care about people
half the notes: youre the real oppressor for telling me what to do.
the other half: cut out this useless liberal proselatizing. you are an invertebrate and you will perish in the revolution.
we have a new prize comment which isĀ āpretty neurotypical of you to assume i have the capacity to care about other peopleā
Iām drunk so I logged on tumblr for the first time in ages sorry followers just keep scrolling
me when i talk about ska
******* #BLACKOUT Facebook at 8 PM EST, 3/27/18 !!! *******
If we all deactivated our Facebook accounts for even 1-2 days, do you realize the immense amount of revenue from ads that Facebook would lose? Ads account for 98% of ALL of Facebook's revenue: in 2017 alone, FB made 40 out of their 41 billion dollars in revenue from ads. (Source: https://www.statista.com/ā¦/facebooks-advertising-revenue-wā¦/) Don't you realize how much power we have? If all FB users deactivated for one day alone, that would be enough to wipe out 109 million dollars of revenue. Meaning even if only a fraction of those users deactivated for only a couple of hours, it would still be MORE than enough to cause a huge dip in Facebook revenue and lead to a mass spiral of investors' stock withdrawal, who'd see the company as too mercurial and precarious for investment.
It's capitalist greed that FB acted on when they sold us out to conservative election campaigners; but we have the power to turn the system against itself. When are you going to fight for your right to live without your personal information being tracked, stolen and sold against your will by Facebook to seedy individuals who've tried to control your political decisions and thoughts through their targeted ads, and who have admitted to even attempting sex trafficking in some of their schemes? (Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy-9iciNF1A , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ0bFAgTGwk)
What about the rights of trans folks to socialize without threat of their accounts being deleted because they refuse to use their legal name which doesn't match their gender identity; or the rights of immigrants, some of whom we now know are being tracked and deported thanks to private information Facebook hands over to ICE; or the rights of citizens to organize and protest without Facebook cooperating with oppressive authoritarian regimes to delete their FB events or block their access to this website altogether? But we've known for a while that Facebook has a dismal human rights record. This platform was never created with your interests in mind, and from Facebook's inception Zuckerberg has called FB users "dumb fucks" for even trusting this website with their personal info. (Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/ā¦/14/facebook_trust_dumb/)
How many more egregious violations is it going to take before we finally decide to stop being complicit--in the erosion of our civic institutions, our freedoms, our dignity? If you believe in the power of individuals to create change, please join me and others in deactivating Facebook starting at 8 PM EST tonight. The longer you deactivate, the greater the impact. The sacrifice is small compared to the potential outcomes; for until those come, Facebook is an unethical company antithetical to democracies and civilized societies everywhere. You have nothing to lose except your chains. Feel free to copy and paste this as a status. #BlackoutFB
Fuck stepping on a legoāyou ever scrape your knuckles on one of these?
fuck stepping on a legoāyou ever scrape your knuckles on one of these
^Haiku^bot^7. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes. | Who do I read? | Contact | HAIKU BOT NO | Good bot! | Selfie | Meep morp! Zeet!
bottoms up... and the devil tops
Janku fudo, Masashi Yamamoto (1997)
Do insects feel pain?
Ā Many people have this question and itās one that entomologists talk about frequently.Ā Humans have nociceptors (also called pain receptors) that can detect uncomfortable stimulus (heat, cold, mechanical etc.) over a certain threshold. This neurological response is called nociception and a similar process has been identified in fruit flies but insects do not have nociceptors. The study Iām referencing poked hot pins in the sides of Drosophila larvae and they would uncharacteristically roll out of the way. So without nociceptors how do they exhibit a nociception response? It was found that a single class of neuron (class IV multidendritic neuron) is sufficient and necessary to cause this nociception behavior. Dr. R. Y. Hwang postulates this behavior evolved to avoid a parasitoid wasp, and the larvae are innately encoded with the directionality in which they roll. So they are not thinking, āOuch this hurts. Iām rolling out of the way.ā They are genetically preprogrammed with this behavior, and given a certain physical stimulus they roll out of the way. Fruit flies are the best-studied insects and are considered a model organism, so it goes to reason if they experience nociception other insects may also. Some activists tout these two studies as proof insects feel pain. I do not. It has always made sense to me that an insect should be able to feel something akin to pain; because it would help them learn to avoid things that could kill them through the unpleasant nature of the experience. But nociception is not pain. The current definition of pain requires an emotional response. Humans can feel pain without any physical stimulus and are capable of emotions associated with pain; like suffering and terror. Are insects capable of conscious or unconscious experience of emotion? Is consciousness required for emotions? This is where it gets controversial; because how do you quantify if an insect is experiencing an emotion or if insects are conscious? I usually tell people that insects are hardwired with predetermined behavioral responses to external stimuli, but this is a simplification.Ā From the current literature you cannot definitively say insects have emotion, but there have been many interesting studies on the complexity of insect behavior. Honey bees, ants and other social insects have complex behavior and it has long been known that foraging bees will come back to the hive and dance for other bees to express where resources are. One study even shook bees in tubes and measured their agitated responses. They claim bees are capable of expecting bad outcomes and can exhibit a vertebrate-like emotional state. This was a controversial study, but it raises important questions. Even solitary dragonflies have selective attention to snatch individual prey out of swarms. But do these complex behaviors and cognition elucidate the emotions required to define them as experiencing pain? Iām not sure.Ā I learned in my undergrad insect biology class that insects can learn but they cannot think. Iāve held on to this as I progress through my graduate degree, but itās a much more complex issue when you try to define āthinkingā and āemotionsā and āconsciousnessā. Some scientists are seriously considering if insects are conscious. On July 7th 2012 The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was released. It explains what some of the top scientists in relevant fields think about āconsciousnessā. Consciousness is not a definitive line, but a moving scale.Ā From The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness:Ā We declare the following: āThe absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical,Ā neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.ā So where do insects fall on this scale? Probably further away from mammals and even cephalopods. But how do you KNOW? We donāt. New studies are coming out and it will be exciting to follow them.Ā As of right now the animal testing regulations draw a line between vertebrates and non-vertebrates (with the exceptions of some cephalopods). I do not think any research to date warrants a discussion of moving the line, but at the same time I do not think we should rule out the possibility that insects are capable of pain, albeit through different neurological pathways.Ā As Carl Sagan popularized, āExtraordinary claims require extraordinary evidenceā. Insect pain and suffering is one of those extraordinary claims and is going to require extraordinary evidence to definitively say one way or another. However, in the meantime I will not expose any insects to undue suffering when I use them in experiments or add to my insect collection.Ā This was a long answer to a short question, but it is fascinating to think about.Ā Further reading and sources: Dragonflies have human-like āselective attentionā http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoa-dhh121812.php Do bees have feelings? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=do-bees-have-feelings Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2811%2900544-6 Can invertebrates suffer? Or, how robust is argument-by-analogy?Ā http://www.scopus.com/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-0001460737&origin=inward&txGid=Fefoa6RxV0qF3gMVRibiJw3%3A2 Pain and suffering in invertebrates? http://www.vliz.be/imis/imis.php?refid=212638 Insect Brains and Animal Intelligence http://bioteaching.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/insect-brains-and-animal-intelligence/ On the Consciousness of Animals ⦠http://www.itsokaytobesmart.com/post/30601585978/on-cambridge-declaration-of-consciousness Consciousness in a Cockroach http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jan/cockroach-consciousness-neuron-similarity#.UYKKYiv72Do Unconscious Emotions, Conscious Feelings, and Curricular Challenges http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/unconscious/ How Pain Works http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/pain3.htm I donāt know who wrote this Wikipedia page, but it really is excellent.Ā http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_invertebrates
2018 is the year i finally make whatever memes i want