Moss Abomination @moss-abomination - Tumblr Blog

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chillyfeetsteak

listen to jane

nn-ee-zz

The first depiction of Mary and Jesus

aqlstar

I need an anarchist to explain to me the difference between a mutual aid system and a bureaucracy functioning with no transparency and no oversight.

liliththeanarchist

here's a diagram

see the difference?

i don't see any similarities to a bureaucracy as 1. bureaucracies function on a hierarchy, and 2. bureaucracies don't actually do anything

literally what similarities are there?? cuz it just feels like ur pulling this out of ur ass

aqlstar

The diagram is lovely. Unfortunately, refusing to name any kind of formal leadership structure does not appear to prevent people from amassing power within an organization, but it does complicate the process of holding leaders accountable for their actions.

When mutual aid groups go off the rails (as so many of them seem to do), who do you hold responsible and how?

aqlstar

Shout out to the one commenter who suggested that I would understand how anarchy works to dismantle systemic power imbalances by reading The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism…

This is the Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism:

And that is the price to download it as a PDF.

Unfortunately I do not believe the commenter was engaging in satire.

frilledshark17

Palgrave books are always crazy expensive, it's nuts. I think they mostly sell to university libraries, but maybe if they were cheaper more people would purchase copies!

pagecommando

"Mutual Aid" is a book club where high school never ends and the leader/organizing committee needs to like you in order for you to get your diabetes meds/Glasses/Birth Control/Food. It does not cover day to day needs if you are not someone leadership or the community likes. Which is why I would rather trust a flawed and imperfect bureaucracy with at least... some degree of safeguards and accountability beyond 'neighborhood watch of cool kids who you can't ever disagree with' which is not the thing self-ID'd anarchists conjuring late 1990s cubicle rebellion movies think it is.

colubrina

nevereverbird

#save me 2026 #2026 pls save me

phantomrose96

Well oneof you is lying

rontology

I love asking friends, without context, "what are you really into this week?" I'll go first. this week I'm really into mouthwash and sudoku. Last week I was into peaches.

rontology

we used to be a society on here!! reblog, don't like! I want to hear what you're into!!! I'm literally looking into the nyt game Pips!!!

rontology

compiling my favourite responses

#dealing with silverfish infestation #dealing with a cold #yeah it’s been a week

animentality

ao3cassandraic

It matters that we refuse.

It matters that we resist.

It matters that we be loud about our refusal and resistance.

motherfucker-unlimited

crabussy

mesmerised by this random photo taken by the hiking club I'm part of. the soft cool tones and radiant warm tones, the composition and lighting...

crabussy

I think this is the best part of this photo. the point of that entire trip was to find and read an old storybook that they knew was at a particular hut. he genuinely is reading it out loud to the others. I can't remember what it was about, but this scene is the cozy and well deserved reward of a wild endeavour through rugged terrain. I think that's beautiful [:

cilantroodon

[ID 1: A group of three hikers sitting at a table. Two of them are resting, the other is flipping through a book. Various items are scattered across the table, and they are lit by a small candle.

ID 2: Tumblr tag that says: what is he reading that put them to sleep. End IDs.]

(ID 1 via @banquetsinger)

coffee-without-anesthetics

forgive me father for i have opened a notification and read the message within to make the red dot go away and then forgot to reply for a month . it will happen again

The later this gets posted, the funnier it gets

powerburial

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

3liza

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

bourtange

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)

bigmickswingin

earhartsease

sorry to keep bringing this up, but this won't help anyone guess which of the dozen ways of pronouncing ough in the middle of a word is the right way (and that's just in british english)

ough is the ultimate shibboleth

"though the rough, cough, hiccough, and houghmagandie ought to thoroughly plough them through the lough" showcases them, though at least two of these words have different and unique ough pronunciations depending on where you are on this wee island

ruinedchildhood

Hippo Table by Derek Pearce.

thechanelmuse

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

mysteryteacup

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

kethsposy

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

anyroads

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.