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Everything I know about Prince Harry’s memoir has been against my will, but if I had to see this so do all of you

It’s been hours but I still can’t get “who the fook is Faulkner” out of my head. It’s this what expensive education gets you

woolandflax

Listening to native speakers of the language you’re trying to learn

sharkentine

I LOVE COMPLEX DATED ADVERBS. Wherein. Heretofore. Thereon. Hereunto. Whereof. Hitherward. Hereinafter. How can you look at these words and not lose your mind. They're insane. I think I'm in love.

fantastic-nonsense

Sorry to sound ignorant, but I genuinely don’t understand what Putin could stand to gain from invading Ukraine. Can you shed any light on the subject?

He doesn't. That's the super frustrating part of this mess. Everyone with an ounce of knowledge about European-Russian international relations is scratching their heads going "what is this, and why now? He gains nothing."

A lot of people will blame this on NATO expansion concerns, but the truth is that NATO expansion has been a "concern" for years and nothing like this has ever happened (even the Invasion of Crimea in 2014 wasn't near the level of what's happening right now). Putin's not afraid of NATO; NATO's largely proved to be 'all bark and no bite' in response to repeated acts of Russian aggression since 2008. He's gotten bolder and bolder and tried to assassinate an ex-FSB agent-turned British spy on UK soil less than 5 years ago, for god's sake. Also, Ukraine's not even in NATO; if he wanted to be aggressive on that front, he'd go bother the Baltic states. If people think he's scared of NATO, they're not paying attention.

There's basically two answers that I can give that might make some sense:

Ukraine has a lot of natural gas and mineral resource reserves, and he could be trying to control them. He could also be theoretically be trying to gain control of Ukraine's southern ports, since having access to those waters been an everlasting Russian NatSec and trading issue for say......the last thousand years. That doesn't really make much sense considering the circumstances, though, especially since Russia already controls Crimea.

He's an ex-KGB officer whose pride was mortally devastated by the fall of the USSR and has been longing to recreate what was lost for thirty years. He wants to reinstate the Russian Empire (or at least the USSR as he remembers it), and he's tired of waiting for these silly little democracies on his western border to give up their "teenage rebellion phase" and come home to Mother Russia. It would explain Russia's ongoing attempts to undermine democracy worldwide (including in the US in 2016) and their cyberwarfare against the US and UK too, since a Divided West is a Weak West and a Weak West is a Beatable West. It's Russian imperialism at its finest, led by a man emboldened by his hurt ego, the West's appeasement tactics re: Crimea, repeated lack of consequences for Russia's aggressiveness on the world stage, and four years of Trump sucking up to him.

That's.....unfortunately all I've got. #2 makes total sense and is absolutely what's happening, but the way he's going about it and his actions over the past few weeks are really baffling me, because it's a completely irrational and politically stupid way to actually achieve his intended purpose of re-consolidating the former Soviet Bloc (and make no mistake because that is his purpose, which anyone who's ever listened to one of his annual speeches at the Kremlin would know).

So the only answer I really have for you is "he's finally gotten impatient waiting to re-draw the map of Europe by force and thinks he can escape permanent consequences by doing so now," even if it still doesn't truly explain what the fuck he thinks he's doing by invading Ukraine now with the strategy he appears to be using.

aif0s-w

A video to help you understand what’s happening in Ukraine right now:

The video isn’t mine btw, this is xenasolo on tiktok, she is from Crimea and posts regular updates on the current situation in Ukraine

luminarai

today one of the student workers at my job told me that if she’s struggling to remember something important in her course work she’ll wait until her professor asks a question related to that topic during a lecture and then she’ll purposefully raise her hand and answer it wrong because, and I quote, ‘the combined shame and embarrassment of getting an answer wrong in front of more than a hundred of your peers will make sure that you’ll never forget what the right answer actually was’ and if that is not the most next level balls to the wall bonkers extrovert thing I’ve ever heard then I don’t know what is

the-evil-clergyman

Courtesan from Hell, from the series Sketches by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1882)

allstrangenature

I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

gaymaul-archive

i hate this

gaymaul-archive

i’m literally going to kill you dave

womprat-deactivated20170904

chaotic evil

larkstonguesinaspicpart1

IM GONNA PEE

astargatelover

I feel like there’s a scale that begins with JRR Tolkien and ends with Dave Filoni.

mad20

I had to see if this was true so I just grabbed the book and

I’m screaming

stonebutchcowboy

Listen pal, the subtitles stay ON.

haveapretzel-deactivated2020102

me

Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.

Like he will not be happy at all.

cannon-fannon

For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.

hollowedskin

This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others). Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status. And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.

lady-feral

I will always reblog this.

shinykari

I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.

roscoerackham

This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.

There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.

Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).

Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.

If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.

The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.

And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.

Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.

So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.

In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.

And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.

You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.