Albert Dubout - A Cat

blake kathryn
Keni

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

#extradirty
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Mike Driver

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@untimelytimelord
Albert Dubout - A Cat
I Do Know Some Things Richard Siken
erin lecount, sweet fruit
Because we don't teach history right.
We teach history like it's a work of fiction where the characters act the way they do because they were written that way. And not like the real world with real people who were just as human as us and had reasons to act the way they do. And that the same mistakes and foibles they had could happen to us too.
And even this history is woefully undertaught. People learn it to memorize the events of the story and then forget about it. They don't learn to comprehend it, they don't learn to learn from it.
This will be a long story, but settle in, because this is important.
I was fortunate enough to have some great teachers growing up, in a small, fairly well-funded school system (and during times when everyone still agreed that fascism was bad). In 8th grade, our school had an interdisciplinary unit for about a month focusing solely on the Holocaust. Every class taught something related to it, even math. For a month, we read horrifying stories and watched documentaries and did research assignments on the Holocaust. By the end, any one of us would have said we were experts on the subject.
And at the very end, our entire grade (about 100 kids) was broken into four groups, and we were told that as a reward for all our hard work on the Holocaust unit, we were going to compete for a trip to Disney World. Only one team could go, but the entire team would get to travel there and spend a few days in the park, all expenses paid.
The competition was simple: the group with the most team spirit would win. We were instructed to come up with a team name, a catchy slogan, and a logo (something simple and easy to draw). We were allowed to prove our team spirit however we wanted. That was it. That was all of the instructions. The competition would last a week, and short of stopping physical violence, the teachers stepped back and let us have at it.
It was terrifying.
At first, everyone just hung up posters in the halls and cheerfully recited their slogan whenever the teachers were watching. Within a few days, posters were being torn down and shredded. Verbal fights were breaking out in the hallways. It wasn't enough to say your team was the best, everyone had somehow decided. You also had to prove that everyone else's team was inferior. People started making up lies and gossip, saying that everyone in a particular group was lazy or ugly or smelly or what have you (we were 13). Slurs were thrown around. (Again, we were 13.)
By the final day, the groups were marching down the halls in formation, shouting their slogan in unison. Shouting slander against the other groups. The floor was covered in tattered paper.
I was shy and introverted and weird and unpopular and mostly stayed out of it. But those images are burned into my memory. These kids had turned into vicious monsters, all for a stupid school project.
The teachers had us march down the hallway to the auditorium to announce the results of the competition. The groups were little armies now. Most students marched in lockstep, shouting their slogans. We were seated together in our groups. The teachers dimmed the lights, quieted us down, and the teacher in charge of this whole project said that before he announced the winners, he had something to share with us about the person who was responsible for this entire competition. He turned on the projector and displayed a portrait of Hitler.
Everyone lost their minds. Kids were booing and throwing things. We knew that Hitler was a Bad Guy.
The teacher calmed us back down, and then explained that there was no trip to Disney World, and the fact that not one student questioned for a moment that such a massively expensive and complicated prize would be granted for such a silly competition was honestly kind of disappointing. This entire week, he said, was our final exam. The final exam for the Holocaust unit.
We had spent a month learning about this. About how this "bad guy" inspired a whole hell of a lot of people to march in lockstep shouting slogans and plastering their symbol all over everything. That one bad guy had told them that they were special, and other groups were trying to take away what was rightfully theirs for being the best, and they ultimately got extremely violent. We had learned all about the Hitler Youth and the SS and book burnings and, of course, the concentration camps. We'd all read the Diary of Anne Frank. We'd been marinating in this information for a month, in all of our classes.
But we hadn't learned. We hadn't really understood what they were trying to teach us. Not that this happened. But that this happens. It can happen very easily, especially if people aren't watching out for it.
The kids were furious. They shouted that this wasn't fair, that we were only following instructions. The teachers had lied to us. They had told us to do this, and now they were mad at us for following directions?
He was ready for this, of course. Calming us back down again, he pointed out that all they'd done is tell us to give ourselves a name, a slogan, a symbol, and demonstrate "team spirit." That was literally it. No one told us to rip posters down. No one told us to march in the hallways. No one told us to spread rumors and shout insults. No one told us to fight each other.
They didn't have to.
All it takes to get people to behave this way is to tell them that their group is special, they deserve good things, but the good things aren't there because those other people are taking them from you.
The Nazis were not uniquely evil people. They were just encouraged to demonstrate their team spirit. And there were no teachers to stop it from getting violent. Because the person encouraging them wanted things to get violent.
The Holocaust was not the story of Hitler the Bad Guy. He was there, and he was responsible for a lot, but that wasn't the point. Germany during the Holocaust wasn't suddenly, by total accident, full of evil people.
It was just full of people like us.
This time, it just was a lie about Disney World and a week of chaos. But if we didn't watch out, the next time fascism started to rise, we would get swept up on the wrong side of it. We had just proven that we would. We'd be too swept up in making sure that our special group got the prize they deserved to notice that we were being lied to about the prize in the first place.
That could happen. If we weren't careful. If we forgot the lesson we'd just learned.
After he'd let the horror and shame and embarrassment and indignation of that week sink in properly, he reassured us that it wasn't our fault. The point wasn't for us to prove that we understood the lesson of the Holocaust. It wasn't actually a test after all, it was our final lesson. The most important lesson.
He'd known that this test would go this way, because it always did. He did this every year. He said in all his years of teaching, only one student, one student, had ever questioned it. Pulled him aside in the hallway and said straightforwardly that whatever was going on was messed up and he wanted no part of it.
And you know what? That is how you teach history. You give students the facts of what happened. And then you show them how easily it can happen again.
Sadly, most schools don't have the resources for this sort of thing, and these days they'd probably not be allowed to run this little experiment. But I'm extremely grateful to that teacher, grateful that I was part of that experience. It was harrowing, and it made me and a lot of other people vigilant for the rest of my life in a way I know I would not have been otherwise.
It was over 35 years ago now and it still makes me emotional to think about.
Most people never got to have that experience, to properly learn that lesson. But at least I can pass the story on to you. And you can pass it on to others. Because if you think you would have acted differently, that you would have seen through the ruse, think again.
Maria Gray, from âBad Nostalgiaâ
Anthem, Leonard Cohen
The Ides of March, coming soon to a coliseum near you. Knives not included.
đȘđȘđȘ
Free knives!!! Take one on your way down the dash!
Han Kang | The Vegetarian | tr. Deborah Smith
Leila Chatti, from "Postcard from Gone"
This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
"Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?"
Yeah, I remember. And I'm sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that's a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people donât even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it canât solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don't talk about acid rain because there isn't any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don't talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there's nothing to notice. But don't be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it's time to do that thing again and make sure that we don't kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
genuinely one of the worst things thatâs happened to television in the last few years (exacerbated by streaming services) is death of Filler. going from 20 episodes to 8 because âwe didnât really need that episode where the main characters went to the beach right? it had no long lasting effectâ but we DID!!! we needed to see how they act without the Big Bad Plot and to establish the dynamics between the characters and lay in the sun (do they forget sunscreen? how do they react to a thieving seagull? do they get buried in the sand or do they do the burying?). the plot isnât everything. the action doesnât hit as hard without the quiet moments. give us character development and our little scenes back
modern dating is embarrassing i want to meet someone the old fashioned way (heâs the local hot priest who will question god because of me)
Count Frollo
The Sins of Father Black by @stjohnstarling
The world's oldest story? Astronomers say global myths about 'seven sisters' stars may reach back 100,000 years https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-oldest-story-astronomers-global.html
In the northern sky in December is a beautiful cluster of stars known as the Pleiades, or the "seven sisters." Look carefully and you will p
Holy shit, this is cool!
So many cultures call the Pleiades some variation of the "seven sisters" despite only having six visible stars. There only appear to be six because two of the stars are so close together as to appear as one.
The myths also mention one sister leaving or hiding to explain why there's only six. And based off observations and measurements, those two that are so close together used to be visibly separate. One literally has moved to hide.
And based off the similarities between the more commonly known Greek myth and the Aboriginal Australian myth, plus some other stuff, this myth could possibly even date back to when humanity still all resided in Africa!
Fuck you
worst post ive ever seen anywhere ever
yes and
andÂ
james longenbach / wendy cope / jon kabat-zinn
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leila chatti