the space race may be the funniest point in history period and i'll stand by that. the US is like "yes whoever gets into space first will prove once and for all that our economic model is superior and that we are, in general, the superior country of superior and smarter people." then the soviets just went and did it and the US freaked out and needed to cover their ass so were like "WE MEAN THE MOON, WE MEAN THE FIRST TO LAND ON THE MOON."
When I was a freshman in a red-state college, I had a professor who taught Newtonian physics with a super thick Russian accent. The student body was unusually conservative for a state college, so there was a sort of general bemusement about learning physics from a Russian, but even back then the Cold War was far enough in the past that not even the red tribe was inclined to stir up trouble about it.
He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though. Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be âMirâ specifically. And heâd always use âcosmonautâ instead of âastronautâ, that kind of thing.
One day about halfway through the semester, heâs doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little. So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, âHey professor, whatâs the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?â
And this beautiful man spins around on one heel to face the class, whiteboard marker triumphantly over his head, clearly having been waiting for this moment the entire semester:
âCosmonaut go to space first! Ha!â
one thing you need to know about 2014. is that what does the fox say was playing pretty much everywhere you went. and everybody was just relieved it wasn't blurred lines
The way some people react to the Monty Hall problem is a good illustration that correctly identifying that you're being tricked and correctly identifying how you're being tricked are two separate skills. Some folks immediately intuit that there's a statistical sleight of hand in play, but because they have no insight into how it works, they interpret any attempt to explain what's really going on as further trickery. It's like showing someone that the rabbit was inside a secret compartment in the hat the entire time and having them respond "haha, you won't fool me that easily!"
(And, of course, while hypotheticals like the Monty Hall problem are a relatively harmless way for this to happen, they underline a very important fact: going in against a scammer without fully understanding how the scam works can easily have you doing exactly what they want you to do while totally convinced that you're beating them at their own game.)
(This is a Great Golden Digger Wasp - Sphex ichneumoneus - doing what its name implies, digging. But you may also notice, if you turn the sound on, that sheâs making some incredible noises as she does so.)
i know it's been said on here and said again but people do so desperately need to genuinely do intentional work to build distress tolerance and start figuring out how to recognize the differences between danger, discomfort, and when a situation that is merely uncomfortable is triggering an emotional flashback in your bodies because it resembles a past situation that actually was dangerous which makes it difficult to realize/believe that this moment is merely uncomfortable.
i spoke to an allistic person who said their autistic classmate had a meltdown in class, during which the autistic classmate collapsed to the floor in the middle of the room, screaming and crying. they said it was "terrifying" and they were arguing for the autistic student to be removed permanently from the program.
when i asked whether their autistic classmate's meltdown was dangerous or merely uncomfortable, they said, "i felt like i was in danger!"
yes you should, actually. that's life. upsetting things happen. no one should have to experience any discomfort. but we do. we get stung by bees and sunburns and headaches. we live in bodies in the world.
autistic people are human beings who have the right to exist in society, including during meltdowns. having one class of your entire semester interrupted by a singular meltdown is not anymore of an infringement upon your entitlement to education than having your class interrupted by a fire alarm or cancelled for a snow storm.
one of my peers once experienced a cardiac event 10 minutes into class. it was terrifying. it was desperately upsetting. i was contacted by the school and offered counseling because i happened to be the one who managed the situation until paramedics arrived. everyone was worried about my classmate first and foremost, and then about me. no one blamed anyone, and certainly when my classmate happily recovered and returned to school, no one thought they should be removed from the program.
the difference being that people believe a disabled personal, especially with cognitive disabilities, in crisis are not experiencing something outside of our control, but instead that we are in fact making a choice to make a scene, out of malice.
people love the social cantagion/"only contagious mental disorder" model of restrictive disordered eating because it's a very clean comfortable pleasant way to ignore the fact that disordered eating is quite often just the most logical response to being inundated with the message that fatness is morally and medically repugnant, socially unacceptable, sexually repulsive, a fate worse than death -- and you can see this in the very way people express concern for the visibly anorexic, lamenting that they "weren't even that fat" and "didn't even need to lose weight." these are things you will never, ever hear if you're fat and your anorexia almost kills you, btw
like i think that "role modeling" and the glorification of dangerous thinness play a part in this, i do think it's irresponsible to model this behavior for young women, but placing the whole weight of disordered eating as a phenomenon on the shoulders of ariana grande or any similar figure falsely locates the problem within the superstructure. your average teenage girl is being put less at risk by waifish starlets than they are by constant, grinding, "well-meaning" daily fatphobic jabs about food and their weight by their parents, teachers, doctors, siblings, classmates, friends etc. and moreover by the general observation that life is actually made crueler and materially harder for fat people
of course, in many cases, copyright actually obstructs and discourages accurate credit, because credit openly given to influences can become evidence in a copyright suit
ftr, iâm sending this in good faith because i respect you and i think youâre very smart. this isnât an attempt to bait you or anything đ but i am really curious about your opinion on suicides âcausedâ by ai chatbots. iâve always been skeptical of the framing a lot of people have regarding these cases where they describe them using phrases like âchatgpt murdered this personâ and such, but i also have No idea how to logically rebuff this type of hyperbole without coming across like iâm minimizing these really tragic deaths and what that person was going through.
i mean, like. you can look at the chats released in these cases, right. it's never someone going "wow my life is going really well and i'm very happy". i think obviously the way that these chatbots are like... designed to engage with people, and indeed to engage with them in these chats, is extremely irresponsible, it's perhaps the place where the sycophancy built into these models has the absolute worst consequences. but, imo, i think it is trivializing these people, and their autonomy, and the ways in which their lives were genuienly shitty, to attribute their choice to evil robot mind control, especially if you're cynically doing it to win an unrelated argument. like, parents of suicidal teens love to blame chatgpt the way they love to blame phones/the internet/video games/dungeons and dragons/secular rock music, because it's a viewpoint that completely exonerates them, the people with the most outsized and totalizing influence on the actual quality of their kids' lives
everyone post your biggest hear me outs my friend just showed me two conventionally attractive white men in a row i need to teach him what a real hear me out is
A lot of people are ragging on the 'cable diverted to avoid Dobby's grave after Harry Potter fans raise a stink' thing and while I also love ragging on Harry Potter fans being weird, in this case it looks like the story was completely made up.
tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.
The story also broke into mainstream via the Daily Mail, who are ... rarely if ever honest or accurate.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important equity issues of our time. Yet at this rate it will be another 75 years before men do half the work.
The optimistic tale of the modern, involved dad has been greatly exaggerated. The amount of child care men performed rose throughout the 1980s and â90s, but then began to level off without ever reaching parity. Mothers still shoulder 65 percent of child-care work. In academic journals, family researchers caution that the âculture of fatherhoodâ has changed more than fathersâ actual behavior.
Sociologists attribute the discrepancy between mothersâ expectations and reality to âa largely successful male resistance.â This resistance is not being led by socially conservative men, whose like-minded wives often explicitly agree to take the lead in the home. It is happening, instead, with relatively progressive couples, and it takes many women â who thought their partners had made a prenatal commitment to equal parenting â by surprise. Why are their partners failing to pitch in more?
The answer lies, in part, in the different ways that men and women typically experience unfairness. Inequality makes everyone feel bad. Studies have found that people who feel theyâre getting away with something experience fear and self-reproach, while people who feel exploited are angry and resentful. And yet men are more comfortable than women with the first scenario and less tolerant than women of finding themselves with the short end of the stick. Parity is hard, and this discrepancy lays the groundwork for male resistance.
Though many men are in denial about it, their resistance communicates a feeling of entitlement to womenâs labor. Men resist because it is in their âinterest to do so,â write Scott Coltrane and Michele Adams, leaders in the field of family studies, in their book, âGender and Families.â By passively refusing to take an equal role, men are reinforcing âa separation of spheres that underpins masculine ideals and perpetuates a gender order privileging men over women.â
While interviewing working parents for a book on parenthood, I spoke with one dad in Vermont who said: âThe expectation among my male friends is still that they will have the life they had before having kids. My dad has never cooked a meal. Iâve strayed from that. But subconsciously, the thing that makes you motivationally step up and do something when youâre not being asked âŠâ he trailed off, and then said: âI have justifications. Itâs a cop-out.â
Take love out of the equation and focus on the workplace, and itâs clear how this plays out. Studies show that male employees sit back while their female co-workers perform the tasks that donât lead to promotion. In a series of lab studies, the economists Lise Vesterlund, Linda Babcock and Maria Recalde and the organizational behaviorist Laurie Weingart found that in coed groups, women are 50 percent more likely than men to volunteer to take on work that no one else wants to do. But in all-male groups, the men volunteer just as readily.
In an interview with NPR, Dr. Vesterlund explained that the women do the work âbecause theyâre expected to.â The men âcome into the room, they see the women, they know how we play these games.â
We play the same games at home. I interviewed couples separately and found that the women were often angry, while many men didnât seem to realize there was a problem.
The couples offered three explanations for this labor imbalance. The first was that women take over activities like bedtime, homework and laundry because men perform these tasks inadequately. But this isnât âmaternal gatekeeping,â the theory that men want to help but women disparage their capabilities and push them out. Instead these seem to be situations that necessitate the intervention of a reasonable adult.
A mother in California said: âItâs important to me that my sons are not falling asleep in class and that theyâre not late for school. My husband does not share those priorities, so I do bedtime and school drop-off.â
The dad in Vermont explained: âI do laundry when I need it. When it comes to the kidsâ laundry, I could be more proactive, but instead I operate on my time scale. So my wife does most of their laundry. Let me do it my way and Iâm happy to do it, but if youâre going to tell me how to do it, go ahead and do it yourself.â
The second explanation involved forgetting or obliviousness. A mother in Illinois said: âMy husband is a participatory and willing partner. Heâs not traditional in terms of âI donât change diapers.â But his attention is limited.â She added, âI canât trust him to do anything, to actually remember.â
A dad in San Francisco said that many of the tasks of parenting werenât important enough to remember: âI just donât think these things are worth attending to. A certain percentage of parental involvement that my wife does, I would see as valuable but unnecessary. A lot of disparity in our participation is that.â
Finally, some men blamed their wivesâ personalities. A San Diego dad said his wife did more because she was so uptight. âShe wakes up on a Saturday morning and has a list. I donât keep lists. I think thereâs a belief that if sheâs not going to do it, then it wonât get done.â (His wife agreed that this was true, but emphasized that her belief was based on experience: âWe fell into this easy pattern where he learned to be oblivious and I learned to resent him.â)
A father in Portland, Ore., confirmed that his wife takes on more but said: âIt has to do with her personality. She always has to stay busy. No matter what day of the week it is, she has a need to be engaged, to be doing something.â
Many mothers told me they had tried to change this and had aired their grievances with their partners, only to watch as nothing changed. A mother in Queens said she spent three years trying to get her husband to do more before coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was never going to happen. âHe notices the unfairness, but he just accepts it as something we have a disagreement about,â she said. âHow much convincing of the other person can you do?â
All this comes at a cost to womenâs well-being, as mothers forgo leisure time, professional ambitions and sleep. Wives who view their household responsibilities âas unjust are more likely to suffer from depression than those who do not,â one study says. When their children are young, employed women (but not men) take a hit to their health as well as to their earnings â and the latter never recovers. Child-care imbalances also tank relationship happiness, especially in the early years of parenthood.
Division of labor in the home is one of the most important gender-equity issues of our time. Yet at the current rate of change, MenCare, a group that promotes equal involvement in caregiving, estimates that it will be about 75 more years before men worldwide assume half of the unpaid work that domesticity requires.
If anything is going to change, men have to stop resisting. Gendered parenting is kept alive by the unacknowledged power bestowed upon men in a world that values their needs, comforts and desires more than womenâs. Itâs up to fathers to cop to this, rather than to cop out.
the craziest thing to me about the âalison bechdel could never ever ever be a terf or have terfy views!! sheâs lesbian culture which we all know is ontologically pure!â innocence chasing from people on here is like. she made a blog post on the dtwof blog after one of her friends passed, and what does she choose to share with her following and remember her by?
ah, right, aggrieved transmisogyny in defense of michfest, years after her comic everybody says shows her no longer supporting it. an entire lifetime and friendship, a whole person, and we select the transphobic bioessentialism to fondly remember. of course. sounds like a trans ally to me!!1!
whose definition of "graphic violence and torture" ? do we think maybe those conceptual boundaries depend on factors like the speaker's prior ideological commitments? have we ever read a censorship policy?
at what age does a child cross from innocent pre-exposed object to sullied brain adult? what is the normal age to experience or witness violence? where does that leave those who experience and witness violence at younger ages? who may never have lived a 'violence-free' existence?
do we actually think that children are ontologically incapable of being interested in violence, or are we merely so threatened by the idea they could be that we refuse to even speak the possibility?
is it the worst thing in the world to pick up a book and then decide its subject matter is unappealing, frightening, or overwhelming? is that such a foreign fucking concept? did anything scary ever happen to you as an 8 year old? did it have an instant off-switch as effective as 'close the cover and pick up something else'?
what kind of violence? is all violence the same? do all depictions of violence have the same literary merit, political meaning, or emotional effect?
everyoneâs always whining about how olric isnât romanceable and iâm over here devastated that i canât win elsieâs affections. olric isnât even interested in romance but elsie is a romantic legend. i want to be one of her many conquests. please elsie just one chance
