Hi

im just vibing, tired 24/7, any pronouns (also im sorry to anyone that checks out my blog and sees I dont tag anything)

[gothhabiba]

I love not playing along

[gothhabiba]

"she's gained a lot of weight lately" "oh, good for her"

"on the wrong side of 40" "huh, which side is that?"

❗️I am not playing along with you❗️

[beaft]

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.

[beaft]

actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.

[shamebats]

Imo the best type of system for children to grow up in would be one that assumes the birth parents/primary guardians won't do shit and takes care of every aspect of childcare that's essential for their wellbeing and development, collectively.

[shamebats]

But I'm just a guy who only learned how to brush his teeth properly and got glasses as a child because we had both a dentist and a doctor come to school on a regular basis. The dentist would have us all stand in a circle with our little toothbrushes and show us how to brush and correct our technique. The doctors would give us general health assessments and then have the teachers contact our patents and essentially peer pressure them into getting us any health intervention we needed. My parents only reluctantly got me glasses because they knew the teachers would judge them if they kept seeing me sit in the very front row and still squint to see the chalkboard. So I'm biased.

[shamebats]

The only times I ever remember seeing a dentist or doctor as a child was at school. I'm quite healthy physically and I'm very grateful for all the care I got from the various professionals who cared about my well-being and development more than my actual parents did.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

If I could improve anything about that system, I'd take it even further and make it so kids could see a doctor and get meds, treatments, therapy, tests, disability aids etc. without having to rely on their parents as well. I shouldn't have had to put up with being bullied and guilt-tripped about the family finances and the time investment needed to take me to the optometrist every time I needed new glasses.

[shamebats]

Some parents would not take care of their children even if they were given all the time and the resources. Mine are a great example of that — my mother stopped working and became a homemaker when I was in kindergarten, my father worked from the garage and was also always home. They had a car and our village even had a bus that would come once or twice an hour that would take you to the next two bigger cities.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

So I have to wonder: what did they actually contribute to our upbringing? Like they didn't teach us shit and mostly they just endangered our mental and physical health — but hey, at least they gave me cPTSD! That took some work too.

[anarchistmemedistro]

see also family abolition, and youth liberation .

[applefae]

A knee-jerk response to neglectful parenting I see a lot is “people should have to get licenses and take rigorous tests to PROVE that they should be ALLOWED to have kids” which is eugenics. That’s just the starting line for eugenics.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

Assume some parents will fail. Build social infrastructure that is designed to support failed kids rather than punish would-be parents.

[queer-riot-dragon]

Parents do not have to be neglectful to fail!

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

The best thing is to support the children and give them the tools they need to succeed even if the parents are already giving them those tools. Because you can never learn something too much.

[lessproblematical]

Also sometimes parents become disabled or die and family can't always be counted on, and sometimes there isn't other family

[lazer-t]

Arctic Wolf for a Ko-fi supporter (more info)

[87sukiyaki]

[wizardarchetypes]

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.

[wizardarchetypes]

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!"

i understand that. but that's not what i asked.

[wizardarchetypes]

"i shouldn't have to experience that."

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.

[depsidase]

[liberalsarecool]

Stay engaged.

[ellohcee]

Smaugust 1 - down a river of starlight

[evergreen-femme]

had to share this

[wizardshark]

In every way this is set up to be a joke like any other short video, it even uses the trope of main character in a wig to represent their mom, but it isn't funny at all. It's just sweet and nice

[lazer-t]

African Civet for a Ko-fi supporter (more info)

[unpeeled-human]

special defense

does this count as anything ???is this art

[unpeeled-human]

im capping it at 59k notes. thats it. shows over everybody

[purple--starrrs]

By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.

We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.

Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.

Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!

[kosmogrl]

[fucking-relax]

this is helpful to getting started on anything regardless of what you call it (from this post)

problem solving steps

IMPROVE distress tolerance skill

[gaslit-dipshits]

Man at City Council Meeting Makes Devastating Case Against Proposed Local Data Center

A former programmer spoke up during a city council meeting in a small town in Ohio, making a well-articulated argument against data centers.

[teaboot]

The number of times I have been delighted by witty banter only to find out later that I was “Flirting” is both unfortunate and disappointing.

[teaboot]

“haha so what about that guy, huh?”

Me: what about him

“Well you seemed super into him”

Me: what why

“…dude you were flirting all night”

Me:

Me: Whoms't™™

[trainerdelaney]

I found out several of my female coworkers were planning on trying to get our male coworker to ask me out because “You guys kept flirting” but I was like “We were literally just goofing around. Like we literally just told jokes to each other. Literally just stuff that friends do, the same stuff you and I do.” I was definitely 100% NOT flirting but everyone thought I was

[trainerdelaney]

“You were laughing at everything TJ did!”

“He paper clipped a banana to the ceiling, Isabelle. That’s fucking bonkers”

[spindletrees]

This might be a good time for Ms. Psych degree here to step in and let ye all know that People Are Unable To Identify Flirting. There are double-blind studies to support this, if you instruct participants to flirt or not flirt with another participant, neither the second participant nor onlookers are able to accurately tell which instruction the first participant was given. Even if you get the flirting participant to rate their attraction to the person they’re flirting with, and only count trials where people are either flirting with people they find attractive, or not flirting with people they don’t find attractive NO ONE CAN TELL WHO IS FLIRTING OR WHO ISN’T.

[gallantblade475-blog-deactivate]

I’ve heard that people actually have a *less than 50% chance* of guess whether someone is flirting or not.

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

Thank fuck this isn’t just me failing at humanity

[stammsternenstaub]

SagePub has one such study here, dated 2014. There might be more recent work, however.

[only-tiktoks]

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

As a European, I knew Americans have been asking for walkable cities but i had no idea it was literally this hostile

WHERE DO YOU WALK YOUR DOGS!?!

[dkpsyhog]

[brehaaorgana]

lol yeah

[what-even-is-thiss]

Its to the point where most Americans can’t conceive of a walkable community because everywhere is like this and several generations have now grown up in a world like this. There’s hardly anyone that can conceive of a world that isn’t like this. Most people either cave in and get a car or end up isolated. I live in a city that’s mostly walkable by North American standards and I still end up walking in the dirt on the edge of a stroad a lot of the time.

[phipiohsum475]

And don't forget, we can't get decent public transportation either.