I'm deleting this app off my phone again sayonara you superwholock shits

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@nerfherdingteleporter
I'm deleting this app off my phone again sayonara you superwholock shits
Nevertheless, each writer’s reflection on the public distancing by straight women from the objects of their desire rests on the belief that these displays reflect women’s feelings about their attachment to men as a stable category—disappointment or shame—rather than their feelings about their attachment to women as a stable category—fear that this category is becoming politically obsolete. The thing is, the popular misandrist left discourse, perpetuated by straight women, has almost nothing to do with sexuality, but everything to do with gender. Like political lesbianism, this Political Heterosexuality is not concerned with actual, felt sexual orientation or relationships—it’s concerned with the reifying of binary categories at the expense of a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition. [...] While the decrying of men by Political Heterosexuals is less overtly bio-essentialist—tending to focus on men’s emotional immaturity, commitment-phobia, poor sexual skills, lack of hygiene, or failure to own a real, off-the-ground bed—it still relies on an implicit or explicit comparison with women, and thus, a binary. What makes these men men is that they are not women; what makes these women, then, women is that they are not men. In my view, professing hatred of men online is not exclusively or even often reflective of individual disappointment or in service of individual absolution; it is in service of the desire to continue to define the political category of “women” by a clean-cut opposite, in a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so. [...] Good feminists do indeed acknowledge the impossibility of lumping women together as a discrete group with legible, united needs; over is the heyday of white second-wave feminism, claiming all women—regardless of race or wealth—as equal in their second-class citizenship. But, even as progressive women dutifully point out the failure of the universal, acknowledging that the universalizing of the category “women” nearly always reeks of white supremacy and transphobia, many of those same women continue to fervently desire a universal, whether or not they’ll say it out loud. And the loophole, championed by Political Heterosexuality, is to affirm that men constitute a political class—the silent foil being, then, that women still do, too.
from "In Defense of Men: On the failures of Political Heterosexuality and No Cis Men" by Sophia Giovannitti
By rehearsing the view that ‘men are the worst’ while continuing to pursue romantic and sexual attachments with them, we perform an othering gesture that shores up the purity or innocence of our own identities. We may love men, we declare, but we barely enjoy it, okay?; we are embarrassed; we are not contaminated by them; we are not they. In other words, we get to continue to be ‘women’. Perhaps, semi-unconsciously, we had worried that the very category of ‘women’ had become untenable. If we can only continue to reproduce the category ‘men’ loudly enough, then, we wager, the category ‘women’ might stay safe. (Note, while a majority of heterofatalist misandrists online today seem to think they are trans-affirming, their position not only requires erasing trans men altogether, but also all trace of trans women’s lived experiences as men, regardless of those women’s own self-understanding. Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.)
from "Collective Turn Off" by Sophie Lewis
I doodled this a while back when it was first announced Tim would no longer be robin and I'm happy to see hes still not relapsed good for him
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
absurdist tgirl taking Estragon
I think this might be one of the most incredible, unsettling and symbolic photos of today’s America I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop looking at it. It’s perfect.
Don't know who needs to hear this, but:
Consider following political and social justice tumblrs under a different login than the one you use to find cool art / cat pictures / fandom stuff / kink stuff / etc
Or like just in general, if you're getting most of your political news in the same apps where you do most of your fun / sexy shit,
pls give some thought to where and when those streams get crossed, esp if you haven't really thought about it before
#wh. #why #why would it matter if the streams get crossed in the first place
For some people it doesn't matter much, but for some people it does.
There's a concept in psychology called "overcoupling," which is basically when a person's trauma is super cross-wired, so to speak, with the present or with a certain topic
Overcoupling can both cause and worsen intrusive thoughts and depression, especially for people with a history of trauma
Or, more simply: If you're mentally whipping back and forth between cute animal, funny joke, porn, genocide psa, and hate crime footage at the speed of scrolling, that can really mess with your head, and sometimes it takes people quite a while to pin it down
Or, if the place you go to relax and look at fandom shit is also where you get all your news about ongoing global crises, that's gonna seriously mess with your ability to actually relax and rest
That sort of thing, if that makes sense. It's not "Don't do this or else!!" It's just kind of a "hey make sure you didn't accidentally frogboil your stress responses or something"
#craaaaaaap. #fuck. #fuuuuuuuck. #i gotta do smth about that. # thank you twin # but WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH #CHANGING ACCOUNTS IS SUPER HAAARD WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH #how do I know if this shit is even messing with me anyway #how did YOU know this shit was messing with people #what book did you get your strange eldritch knowledge from???
Oh! So funny story but I actually edit psychology books for a living lol
So, many books, but the knowledge isn't eldritch - it's evidence-based!
Also, before I go into it:
This isn't something anyone needs to stress over or especially panic over, especially if you don't really feel like it's affecting you personally.
I simply was having a thoughtful night and wanted to share a nudge/tip/data point to help people be more intentional
Best of luck!
But yes, further explanation!:
The concept of overcoupling specifically comes from Somatic Experiencing, which is a type of therapy and bodywork. It was invented by a psychologist and trauma survivor, Dr. Peter Levine, in the 1990s. The idea behind Somatic Experiencing, as well as other somatic ("body-based") healing practices, is that, as we know, trauma is stored not just in the mind, but also in the body - and therefore SE says, in order to heal after trauma, we must work with the body too. They have some really cool articles and theses on the org's Research page here
But the reason I know isn't specific to somatic experiencing itself, I just know a lot about trauma, psychology books, and "mind, body, spirit" publishing (kind of a genre tag for a lot of these books, especially for alternative and non-Western healing practices).
Sooooooo,
If you want specific book recs for the eldritch-evidence-based knowledge, I highly recommend:
What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
by Stephanie Foo
and
In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness
by Peter Levine
Also major publishers in psychology and healing that I really like and respect:
New Harbinger Publications (huge leader and force in evidence-based psychology publishing)
North Atlantic Books (Peter Levine's publisher, they have a lot of really awesome and innovative books, and are the main publisher for somatic experiencing) (Ironically, they're on the Mid-Pacific Coast tho lol)
(Note since I've been asked before: This is in no way an ad or an affiliate link. I have never used either of those on reasonsforhope/directactionforhope, and I never plan to bc I believe in eliminating perverse incentives in my activism, etc. I do trust both those publishers bc I've personally worked with them, but they're in no way paying me to say this (or paying me rn in general; I'm on medical leave / sabbatical); I chose to work with them because I really like and respect them and their books.)
--
On a different type of note, in terms of how I figured it out:
‘capitalism works’ factoid actually untrue. the 62 people who own half the world’s wealth are outliers and should be eaten.
Absolutely nuts how they made up a number for this satire post and the correction is that reality is *more absurd* than the number they chose
no it’s worse. 62 was correct in 2016 when the original post was made.
Millions are being pushed further into poverty while the wealthiest profit from a cost-of-living crisis.
81 now, apparently.
The 8 number is measuring a different thing, 8 is if you take the total wealth of the poorest 50% of people, 80-ish is if you take half the wealth of all people
The poorest half of the world has much, much less than half the world’s wealth. Still bad! Enormous wealth inequality tends to make for a shitty place to live.
this.
i was wrong.
stop reblogging the incorrect version.
i have a way to correct those stats
"While those working at private companies can at least earn a little money, they face possible punishment if they refuse, from being denied family visits to being sent to higher-security prisons, which are so dangerous that the federal government filed a lawsuit four years ago that remains pending [note: article is from 2024], calling the treatment of prisoners unconstitutional.
Though they make at least $7.25 an hour, the state siphons 40% off the top of all wages and also levies fees, including $5 a day for rides to their jobs and $15 a month for laundry.
Turning down work can jeopardize chances of early release in a state that last year granted parole to only 8% of eligible prisoners — an all-time low, and among the worst rates nationwide — though that number more than doubled this year after public outcry."
No state has a longer, more profit-driven history of contracting prisoners out to private companies than Alabama.
[Image description: Post from the ABoringDystopia subreddit, titled "In Alabama, McDonald's and other businesses can 'rent' prison inmates...". The post is a picture inside a McDonalds; a Black person, facing away from the camera, is chained by the ankle to a table. End ID.]
Not specific to McDonald's, but I recently wrote a paper on prison slavery in the US & I wanna recommend the ACLU's report from 2022 on this system for anyone looking to learn more:
Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers, an ACLU research report produced in collaboration with the Global Human Rights Clinic o
[I]ncarcerated workers typically earn little to no pay at all, with many making just pennies an hour. It is rare that a job pays more than a dollar an hour—even the incarcerated firefighters braving the flames that rage across California’s forests and hillsides year after year are compensated at $1 an hour. Even so, many consider themselves lucky to receive these low wages. That is because, in seven states, incarcerated individuals are forced to work but are paid nothing at all for most jobs. At the same time, incarcerated workers produce real value for state prisons and state governments, the system’s primary beneficiaries. Nationally, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused. Even though prison labor is not what is driving mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerated workers’ labor does partially offset the staggering costs of our country’s bloated prison system.
Also, fun fact! In 2018 Colorado actually removed the exemption for prison slavery from their state constitution, making it illegal.
In 2023, NPR published this article which revealed that was still occurring in Colorado prisons, and in fact there was apparently no change even five years after banning prison slavery:
After a few months working in his prison's hot and crowded kitchen, Richard Lilgerose noticed he was having trouble sleeping. "I was always anxious about having to go to the kitchen and work under these conditions for hours upon hours and not knowing when I was going to be able to go back to my unit to get some rest," he told NPR in a call from prison. Lilgerose, who has been in prison for 20 years, suffers from PTSD, and says the chaos of the kitchen made it hard to work there. He kept asking for breaks, and eventually the guards stopped making him work. But Lilgerose says they also punished him, moving him to a unit with less access to the outdoors and to phones. He says he also lost "good time," which can determine parole eligibility. [...]
"Unfortunately, here we are five years later, and we have not seen the change happen inside of our prisons. It's been business as usual," says Kym Ray, a community organizer with Together Colorado, a multi-faith community organization. "It was never intended to be a symbolic sort of thing, like we removed it from our constitution with no expectation of change. We actually did, in fact, expect there to be some level of change."
Imprisoned people are often subjected to solitary confinement (which is itself a form of torture that needs to be banned) for refusing to work.
In February of this year (2026), a judge ruled that the Colorado Department of Corrections was violating the state constitution by doing forced labor (by which they mean slavery but we can never just call a spade a fucking spade. if the law itself is about slavery then i'm pretty sure breaking that law should be considered slavery!) Let's look at what they said in their defense!
"We respect the judicial process and continue to evaluate the full legal and operational implications of the court's decision to determine next steps. The Department of Corrections agrees that slavery and forced labor are wrong and illegal and do not believe we have engaged in either," she wrote. "CDOC programs are designed to provide essential skills, vocational training, and rehabilitative opportunities that support successful reentry into the community. The Department remains committed to upholding the Colorado Constitution, and believes we have been despite the ruling. We are also committed to ensuring the safety and security of our facilities, staff, and the incarcerated population." Wallace said in her ruling that CDOC argued that it "merely provides incentives to work, and withholds privileges from individuals who refuse," and argued "there were no disputed material facts to support the claim CDOC subjects incarcerated persons to involuntary servitude." [...] "Governor Polis strongly agrees that slavery and forced servitude are wrong and illegal. The Department of Corrections does not engage in either and is always interested in how prison reforms can better ensure that this never occurs in Colorado. The Governor's Office is reviewing the judge's order to determine next steps."
So, they tooootaalllllyyyy didn't do slavery guys, they LOVE not doing slavery so so much, and they just always want to be making prisons even better so that all the slavery they aren't doing doesn't happen, and they are reviewing the orders given by the judge who ruled that they had broken the law about not doing slavery to ensure they will continue never having done slavery better in the future!
From that first NPR article, this professor put it pretty cleanly:
"It's not clear to me that in any state where that amendment was adopted, that the Departments of Corrections actually said, 'Oh, OK, it's our understanding that we will not force anybody to work again,'" she says.
This isn't just a "repeal the amendment" situation, we truly need some deep systemic and cultural change to actually abolish slavery once and for all (and all of the institutional civilizational forces that allow it to exist and be justified).
My latest cartoon for New Scientist
To be clear, this isn't a bit. This is what they actually did. "Its too late" is the new "Climate change isn't real"... And its still a lie!
Every serious climate scientist agrees that there is no such as thing as too late, just as there is no such thing as too early. We should have done a lot more than we have to fight climate change, and the world will suffer for our inaction, but there is no point of no return. We can always work to reduce the amount of suffering that occurs, and eventually turn things around to the point where our planet is healing once again. Do not believe anyone who says it's "too late".
studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be
u can be boiling alive in your mind for months and then on a random tuesday ur head gets so clear and life is worth living again and you're like damn what was all that about then
In your 20s, you'll feel like you're losing the race. It's important to understand that there is no race.
The really unfortunate thing about mental health progress is that sometimes you realize you've made it in the form of "wow, I haven't felt this bad in a fucking while"
On the one hand it's a bit of a pick me up in a dark place to know that this will pass because it has passed before on the other hand sometimes it isn't entirely a pleasant thought to go "wow, I used to feel like this all the time. That was pretty fucking bad. It's pretty bad right now too also."
Someday your current baseline will be the sort of thing you consider A Really Bad Day. It does get better.
proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.
Thats the context for this meme???
I feel like I've been robbed the whole time. This is magical.
I'm dying
> turns on my computer
> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default
> opens my email
> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default
> launches a software
> disables a new AI fea