Currently Unavailable @uncharacteristically-articulate - Tumblr Blog

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (eds.), Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

Elizabeth Hinton, America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice

Colin Kaepernick (ed.), Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing and Prisons

Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Victoria Law, "Prisons Make Us Safer" and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Zena Sharman, The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation

pachelbelsheadcanon

ID: A reading recommendation flowchart where each branch ends at one or more of the above listed books.

I wanna read about abolition but I:

Am worried I don't know enuf to be an abolitionist: "We Do This Till We Free Us" by Mariame Kaba

Am a nerd for academia: "Abolition Geography" by Ruth WIlson Gilmore

Wanna feel hopeful about the future: "Freedom Dreams" by Robin DG Kelly

Need something concise & easy: "Prisons Make Us Safer" by Law, "Are Prisons Obsolete?" by Angela Davis

Wanna understand how we got here: "America on Fire" by Hinton, "Assata" by Assata Shakur, "Blood in the Water" by Thompson

Want to hear from a lot of different voices: "Abolition" edited by Kaepernick

Don't understand what comes after we get rid of the cops?: "Beyond Survival" edited by Dixon, "Mutual Aid" by Dean Spade, "The Care We Dream Of" edited by Sharman

End ID

dankmemeuniversity

fulgurite-and-petrichor

And cancer. They very much also had skin cancer.

punk-jaskier

Also yes they did wear sunscreen. Just not in the way most people think of it today. But people in extremely sunny areas have been wearing light fabric but long sleeved and full pants, or smearing mud on their skin for millennia.

Yes, your ancestors had more ozone layer, and yes, your ancestors did have skin cancer, but ALSO they did wear "sunscreen" just not the kind in a bottle from Walmart.

marzipanandminutiae

some 18th and 19th century beauty/home apothecary guides recommend wearing cold cream (sometimes set with powder) when you go outside to prevent sunburn

some 18th and 19th cold cream and powder recipes contained zinc oxide, to give a white makeup effect due to the racist/classist belief that Pale Skin Was Better

do you see where I'm going with this

akallabeth-joie

Also: Hats. Every society and time period I'm familiar with prior to the mid 20th century really leaned into wearing something on your head outdoors, which does help keep sun, wind, rain, snow, dust, etc. off your scalp (and potentially face/neck/shoulders).

derinthescarletpescatarian

There was at least one very long and fiddly labour strike in ancient Egypt where the workers refused to build a pyramid until conditions improved, and among their demands was a demand for more "cosmetics" to be supplied to the workers. Egyptian 'cosmetics' were, of course, used as sunscreen.

liesmyth

muoio malissimo

crillina

What a funny story...

liesmyth

postmodernmulticoloredcloak

okay context for the non-italians. long story short: it's pretty much impossible from an engineering perspective. there are very strong and swirly currents that make it not feasible to just build a bridge where the coasts are the closest - it would have to be built in a spot where the distance between the coasts is wider, a little too much for a bridge possibly, but also, like, outside of the cities, which means it would still be quicker for people to step on the ferry than drive all the way to the bridge. the ferry is quick, cheap, also they've introduced sustainable non-polluting boats, so, literally no one in either sicily or calabria wants a useless bridge, even if it could be built safely.

on top of that... it's a seismic area. you really don't want to make engineering experiments there.

governments have tried to figure out a way to build that bridge at least from the 60s, afaik, but engineers have just come to the conclusion that nope.

also: people in sicily and calabria have reason to believe that if a project like that gets given the green light, it will end up fattening the pockets of corrupted politicians and mafia groups.

pretty straightforward right? yeah... NOPE!

the italian right has been waving the proposal of building that bridge for decades. every once in a while, when you think you're free, BAM the right-wing politician genius of the moment comes up with the law proposal to build the bridge. it used to be berlusconi, now berlusconi is dead, recently it's been salvini. they propose to build the bridge, the left says "what the fuck", and the right goes see!! the left doesn't want progress and development for the country!! they want the country to languish and die!!

(in the meanwhile taxpayers' euros go into paying commissions that need to figure out how to build the bridge, ignoring that there's been a billion commissions over almost a century that have all come to the conclusion that nope.)

(also remember what i said about corrupted politicians and mafia groups? well try to guess the reason it's the right-wing parties that keep insisting on building this fucking bridge.)

it's become a total national joke. mention the bridge on the strait to an italian, they'll laugh as they go through the 5 stages of italian political grief.

sepdet

and here I was thinking it was just Scylla and Charybdis

conniejoworld

... me, too,

thecheatinghomunculus

new reaction image

rural-panoptes

saintjosie

damnpharos

captain-price-unofficially

alexanderwales

I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.

The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.

The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.

And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.

modern-politics111

I can never tell which of my posts are going to explode (it is never ones I put work in) but I pray to God this one does

The past few weeks I have seen an explosion in doomerism and defeatism about Trump. Some people seem to have just decided to call the election for him for reasons that don't even make much sense

(He was almost shot and that always helps! Look at Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt! Reagan was already president and incredibly popular, and the shooting happened 2 months into his first term; Roosevelt was shot when he was campaigning in 1912....in an election he lost)

Trump has never been popular, he has never won the popular vote, and he has never had popular support. For the past 3 years, especially post Roe V. Wade, Democrats have increasingly overperformed especially in special elections. There were so many polls predicting 2022 would be a Red Wave, that turned out to be false due to faulty and biased polling. I'm not saying a Dem loss is impossible, but it is a lot less of a sure thing than the doomsayers are making it out to be

How does Trump win? Apathy. Despair. Low Turn Out. While many of the "Trump is guaranteed to win" posters I'm sure are real people who are justifiably scared, I think we underestimate just how many are people at home and abroad, who want a lower turnout, who want Trump to win.

I used to hear a joke growing up that "If voting did anything, they would make it illegal" Well considering how hard Republicans are trying to discourage voting and making it hard to do, it must do something.

Don't despair. Don't panic. Don't retreat. ACT

So what can you do?

Are you registered to vote? 🗳

You can register to vote here! ☑️

Do you know what/ who will be on your ballot? 📄

Do you know your state voting requirements? 📥

Do you know your polling location? 📍

Can you vote early? 🖊

Can you vote by mail? 📬

Do you need disability services for voting? ♿️

Do you need to know your voter’s rights? 🧑🏽‍⚖️

Do you need a ride to register/ vote?

Spread this far and wide. Tell your friends and your family. Make clear to them what is at stake if Trump wins.

Additionally, here are two volunteer organizations that I help out with

Vote Forward - write letters to encourage turnout

Working Family's Party - an organization working to help progressives win in primaries and general elections. I particularly like working in their text bank program. Want to help in a phone bank but don't like talking on the phone? this is perfect as you send texts to encourage support and voting

Spread this far and wide. Tell your friends and your family. Make clear to them what is at stake if Trump wins. Feel free to add other resources and organizations that

jomiddlemarch

Postcards to Swing States (now includes Swing Districts!) https://www.turnoutpac.org/postcards/

Activate America (lots of actions to take, including postcards, phonebooks, canvassing): https://www.activateamerica.vote/

Pizza to the Polls: all about donations but their efforts are fantastic! https://polls.pizza

Blue Wave Postcards: https://shop.bluewavepostcards.org

figuring-421

The answer to election despair is always action & community!

Create change in your community. Find events, petitions, volunteer opportunities, and fundraisers in your local area, organized by charities

seymour-butz-stuff

Even if you're too young to vote, you can still convince someone old enough to vote to actually vote

bogleech

This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

luxflora

pfaugh

xeansicemane

Remember folks, the two types of conspiracy theory are "Things the CIA or FBI has admitted to doing" and "Antisemitism"

left-reminders

opinions-about-tiaras

It's worth noting that every once in awhile, some journalist decides to do something like "okay, well, I'm going to abandon all my ID and start with just a set of clothes, twenty bucks, and see how far I get."

And usually they get pretty far; the result of this is usually "hey, a year later I had an apartment and a job and documentation. They were both sort of shitty but I was making my way! And I helped out some of the friends I made along the way!"

But then you dig a little deeper and read the whole thing and what you realize is "this person may have abandoned all their physical capital but they leveraged a LOAD of social and mental capital that most homeless people do not have."

They come from a place where they are used to asserting their rights, and are competent enough to do things like "use a library to do research while appearing respectable enough to not be thrown out" and "use that to find the proper questions to ask to get ID and a new SSN and and everything even as an unhoused person." They know precisely how to zero in on charities and social services and evaluate them for trustworthiness. Some of them have even copped to have done that research beforehand from the comfort of their middle-class existence, which means they approached their stint being homeless and broke the same way someone would approach a wilderness survival expedition.

It's very easy to formulate a plan of attack on being unhoused from the position of NOT being unhoused. It is less easy when it wasn't a deliberately entered-into plan.

bigmouthlass

It's called Down And Out In Paris And London and is the last word on a journalist's insider view of poverty.

People doing the same thing these days have one thing the truly impovrished don't have-- a way out. Succeed or fail one day they'll resume their lives, in which they're fed and clean and safe and respected.

That, in and of itself, is an unimaginable luxury. For most people lacking assets or means, there is no escape.

whydidisavethistomyphone

relevant-wikipedia-articles

librarychair

The amount of safety features incorporated into modern cars is unreal. I've seen crashes where the car flipped over and the occupant only had minor injuries. My dad was t-boned by someone speeding off the highway and walked away with a broken arm. The car was completely smashed except for the passenger compartment, which was curtained on all sides with airbags. That one manufacturer has decided they are exempt from implementing all these advancements disgusting and terrifying

When I was going through driver's ed I was taught that the steering column would stab through your chest if you crashed head on and that was just the way it was. We do not want to go back, not even a little

foone

The point of car safety features is that the car is supposed to die in an accident so you don't have to. Your car should be a pile of smoking rubble after an accident, and you should be fine.

anarchistmemedistro

everybody say thank you ralph nader

onlytwitterpics

catoverlord

iamonlykidding-deactivated20210

ouchmyworm-deactivated20190708

verdeinvolumes-deactivated20190

braetsch

star-cocks-deactivated20181217

pastelburrito

jojomangaedits

rainbowgazes-archive

gamerphobic-deactivated20200727

thewomenandthechildren

It’s time to activate it…

Bites The Dust! now this entire post will be reversed!

aliiiiiiice

avocadosfromfigaro

averruncusho

Am I having a fucking stroke

british-catgirl

yes

malinastharlock

politijohn

Source

justheretobreakthings

So, I kinda wanted to hop in and subject this tumblr post to Peer Review, because while I definitely agree that there is a big problem in the US regarding poor media literacy, the study featured here is... not a good measurement, and these bullet points make the results seem worse than they are.

Another person in the notes linked an additional article that contained the full study, and these are the questions that were included in the study:

A couple of problems right off the bat. The first one that jumps out is #6: "The Earth is between 5,000 and 10,000 years old." In this study, the correct answer would be that this is a statement of fact, because it is, well, stated as a fact. And according to the paper in question:

A fact is a statement that can be verified. It can be proven to be true or false through objective evidence.

That's lovely and all, but nowhere in this study does it say that the participants were informed that this is definition of "statement of fact" that the study was using. It's not exactly common knowledge that "statement of fact" and "fact" do not actually mean the same thing. A statement of fact is when someone says something that they believe is true. A fact is something that is true.

So, anyone who participated in this study who interpreted "statement of fact" to mean "fact" (and also wasn't a young-Earth conspiracy theorist) would have gotten this question wrong, because they know that Earth is much older than 10,000 years.

Another somewhat less obvious problem is in question 2, which the authors of the study address as such:

First, as noted by Firey (2018), item 2 perhaps could be categorized as a statement of opinion because the phrase “a significant portion” is subjective. We repeated Pew’s coding on our survey, and solid majorities on both surveys rated the item as a statement of fact. In retrospect, we would categorize the statement as borderline (see note 4 above). By the end of 2017, ISIS had lost 95% of its territory (Wilson Center, 2019). Because such an overwhelming loss would be difficult to deem insignificant, we retain the item as a statement of fact for present purposes.

Yes, I agree that nobody could reasonably argue that a 95% loss isn't significant. However, unless the study specifically recruited participants who were extremely knowledgable about statistics relating to ISIS activity, the participants have no way of knowing that 95% is the amount in question. That "significant portion" could be anything!

Like, let's say that ISIS had lost 25% of its territory. That's a lot! That's over 10,000 square kilometers that were no longer under ISIS control. So one could argue that this is a significant portion. But also, that's only a fraction of their territory. ISIS still has control over the majority of the territory they'd had previously - three times as much as the amount they'd lost. So one could also argue that this is an insignifant portion.

If I had been a participant in this study, I would have marked this as a statement of opinion. And thus I would have become part of the 95% who apparently can't differentiate between fact and opinion.

But, I was not a study participant. So, who was? What does this study say about its participants?

Well, here's what the study says about it:

Data are from a national online survey we designed. The survey was fielded by YouGov from March 9 to March 14, 2019. There are 2,500 respondents.

That's it. No information about how participants were recruited or invited to take the survey. Nothing about what quality assurance methods were used to make sure that participants were following instructions, or that computer error didn't interfere with the data.

Nothing about incentives given for the completion of the survey.

Oh, yes, that's something very important to note. You see, YouGov is not an academic research firm. It's a marketing research firm. It functions similarly to sites like Swagbucks or Survey Junkies. And this is how it markets itself to participants when you search for YouGov in Google:

That's exact marketing used by Swagbucks. I use Swagbucks. I'm a pretty active user, in fact. I answer surveys and play mobile games to collect points, then redeem them, usually for Wal-Mart gift cards so I can save on groceries. I know how sites like these work.

And I also know that when I just want to get a survey completed, I bullshit. I just click whichever multiple choice option is closest to my cursor until I'm done and can get the points.

Guess what else I do: I lie. Sometimes a survey is listed on the site that's worth a lot of points but is only looking for people of a certain demographic. And I take it anyway. I give them whatever info is needed to get my points and get those gift cards. I have had a grand total of one cup of coffee in my life and hated it. But whenever a survey asks me if I have ever bought a certain brand of coffee, I say yes, and I review it.

Oh yeah, that's another point: there is no demographic information given about this study's participants. We know that participants were at least asked for their age and political affiliation ("Multivariate models include controls for age and partisanship") but we, the readers, are never told what that spread turned out to be. We just have to take their word for it that YouGov's sampling methodology was sound.

If I had turned in this research paper for review, with this Methods section and this survey, my advisor would have slapped me.

So, what is my point? Why did I spend an hour writing this response to a tumblr post? Well, because the findings of this study may be bullshit, but this whole post brings to light another big problem in the world of media and journalism.

The University of Illinois published this sloppy-ass study that I would have been embarassed to hand in as a 10-point assignment. This survey made it through the internal review board, a process that I know from experience can take months and dozens of rounds of review. It was then peer reviewed by Harvard, the school that people point to as the epitome of academic prestige full of super geniuses, and added to their library. Then it was picked up by a Washington DC online newspaper and tweeted about by a member of the House of Representatives.

And finally, it was posted here on Tumblr, uncritically.

I don't know what percentage of Americans can't tell fact from opinion. And reading this study is not going to give me an accurate answer, because the study's design and conclusions the authors reached are a mess.

All I can tell you is that academic and journalistic instutions alike need to do a better job of reviewing and thinking critically about information they receive before they publish it to the world.

mockiatoh

There’s something too on the nose about this… very often, if you’re presented with something that makes the vast majority of people seem incredibly, shockingly ignorant and stupid, there’s more going on with the “study”.

fiemdblunt

When the anti "LGBT propaganda" law passed in Russia, all of you were going insane and cared. Give Georgia the same energy. If you can have sympathy for our oppressors on the basis of them being queer, you should keep the same energy for us, if not more.

If this law passes, every Georgian queer person I know is so severely fucked, myself included. If you make jokes about "being illegal in several countries" you better fucking care about the countries you're apparently illegal in, or going to be illegal in.

Make sure to spread this around. This is important.

notvv0ltz-deactivated20250112

Also worth mentioning

notvv0ltz-deactivated20250112

No but seriously reblog this. If you actively reblog about LGBT rights you can also reblog this post you know. Also look through notes. Unless I see more activity on posts from Georgians I'm going to be aggressive about this

mysharona1987

okiitos

Rescue professional here:

If you need rescuing or help, DON’T FUCKING MOVE. You are so much easier to find when you stay put.

thegreenpea

Credits: @foxes-in-love

Your most important survival skill is asking for help

existential-dread-in-the-am

Goddamn preach this

rogue-cyberman

"Your most important survival skill is asking for help." THIS, it makes me so damn pissed off when parents try and normalize that asking for help is a taboo thing!

isthescavengervideocute

This feels important to reblog

ruby-white-rabbit

I was told as a child, if I get lost: STAY PUT. Unless I saw a first responder who I would definitely be safe with and call my parents, stay put.

I'm much easier to find if I'm where I was last seen. If I go wandering, we could circle each other and miss each other. If one stays still, the other can find them easier.

Even as an adult, I do this. If I get lost, I stop and stay still while I get my gps going or call the person I lost sight of. I stay where I was last known to be or where I realized I was lost.

bearforbreakfast

my glorious hippie mother telling me from babyhood to "hug a tree" if I ever got lost or separated from them

saywhat-politics

States where Republicans imposed total abortion bans:

AL, AR, ID, IN, KY, LA, MS, MO, ND, OK, SD, TN, TX, WV

In every one of these states, adults can legally marry minors.

Leaving statutory rape legal, while outlawing a young girl's right to bodily autonomy was a choice.

socio-logic

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

crazy-pages

Here, have a study (x) showing that mothers underestimate their daughter’s physical capacity from as young as 11 months old (though in reality it’s identical to that of their son’s at the same age). And if you think that parents acting on those expectations won’t alter their children’s development, then I have a sloped bridge to sell you.

approximateknowledge

#people always massively underestimate just how good even very young children are at reading social expectations#long before any kind of intellectual understanding has the chance to develop#and so a lot of “oh but you were so normal as a child”-nonsense is like#yeah i was “normal” because i could tell what you expected of me even if i didn’t know why#even small children learn what’s “taboo” for them really fucking early on#but people keep pretending like it’s all nature#but it’s not#there’s so many things i wanted to do as child i never did because i knew on some basal level *weren’t allowed for me*#i never even asked#i knew it wasn’t allowed#something something “playing seal” for those who get the reference#expectations have real physical effects#bias has its own gravity#and most people have a choice between orbiting or crashing#because it’s very hard to leave it altogether

screw it im not leaving this as tags after all

hammercarexplosion

I hate the historical revisionism that "everyone hated Hitler's ethnonationalism" as if Hitler wasn't literally copy/pasting from how the US was treating native people and how Britian operated in India. There were antifascists. They were treated like terrorists just like they are today. Quit acting like antifascism was more popular than a fascist-accepting status quo.

newsfromstolenland

he based his concentration camps in part on residential schools in "canada" as well. none of these countries are innocent of similar if not the same crimes as nazi germany

snoopyisbisexual

hey, let's not say other countries commit(ted) the same crimes Hitler did when that's objectively false! you can draw conclusions based on similarities (which do exist) without light holocaust denial.

newsfromstolenland

I'm not denying a damn thing. the nazis wanted to eradicate Jewish people. the colonists wanted to eradicate Indigenous people.

they used many of the same strategies and had the same mindsets. "kill the lesser beings". Hitler took inspiration from canada's treatment of Indigenous people.

it's not offensive to liken one genocide to another.

newsfromstolenland

and you know what, as an Indian person and since our treatment by the brits was mentioned, I'm allowed to call what the brits did to my people a genocide. they called us savages, slaughtered us, enslaved us. don't tell me what to call it or compare it to.

the nazis saw what the brits did to my people and saw a model to follow. how can you not compare the two?

2spirit-1spoon

To craft legal discrimination, the Third Reich studied the United States.

“One of the most striking Nazi views was that Jim Crow was a suitable racist program in the United States because American Blacks were already oppressed and poor,” he says. “But then in Germany, by contrast, where the Jews (as the Nazis imagined it) were rich and powerful, it was necessary to take more severe measures.” Because of this, Nazis were more interested in how the U.S. had designated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the citizenship portion of the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as “nationals.”

[...]The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents. Which means, as Whitman notes, “that American racial classification law was much harsher than anything the Nazis themselves were willing to introduce in Germany.”