this one time my friends and i drove 2 hours on a mountain track off this tiny town in the amalfi coast THEN walked down half a hour all the way to this little secluded bay. there was no soul in sight. no trace of civilisation. not a sound in the air.
one thing I don’t think people realize is that in arguments about human rights, it’s not about trying to persuade the other party. it’s not about them at all. they’ve already made up their mind.
it’s about persuading the audience.
if I call out my teacher on being homophobic I’m not trying to change his opinion. I’m trying to convince any closeted kids in the room that they’re not the monsters he’s made them out to be.
if I argue with my aunt about how racist she’s being it’s not because I expect to change her mind. it’s because I’m hoping to god my cousin’s kids hear and learn that maybe skin color doesn’t mean what she says it means.
people will try to hush you and say “they’re not going to change their minds, don’t bother” but it’s not about them. it was never about them.
I never realized why I kept fighting, even knowing that most people won’t allow themselves to understand. That most bigots would rather be stubborn and blind than proved wrong. Yet, I just kept coming even when I knew they wouldn’t hear me.
Thank you. I feel suddenly less frustrated.
And that’s why it’s important to remember that you don’t need to convince the other party to feel like you’ve won. Just making sure that other people heard you is winning for all of us.
It works too. The first time I heard someone defend some one’s sexual orientation was my aunt yelling at my cousins for being little homophobic assholes. It was really comforting and I started to be more sure of myself and feel like maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me. maybe I wasn’t horrible because I liked girls and boys. I was 11.
This is why I reply to bigoted comments on YouTube (especially ableism, which is the one prejudice I face most directly) with statistics and citations…. at least until I start repeating myself in the same argument (because bigots love to sea lion you).
Because for every bigoted troll in the comments, there are maybe 100 people reading silently. And what I have to say will stay part of the public record as part of the comment thread for potentially years to come.
The trolls don’t know it, but they are my straight men – my rhetorical device.
Let’s say someone is looking for porn and they put “wife caught her husband cheating,” into Google. There are a lot of porn sites (and some news sites) with that title. So Google has to decide which order to show them in, because most of the time, people pick something off the first few pages of Google.
Google wants to have the very best “wife caught her husband cheating” (or whatever else you search for) sites on the first page of the search. Google has several ways to try and decide which site are the best, but one of them is that it looks at how popular it is by seeing how many other websites link to it. If a lot of other sites are linking to it, it was probably useful to them, so Google will put it on the front page.
So if I’m a sleazy pornsite owner, I could create like a thousand websites and make them all link to my “wife caught her husband cheating” site, and act like a whole bunch of different websites thought it was pretty great. They’d be like “xdfgt .com”, “xdfgy .com”, “xdfgh .com,” just nonsense addresses nobody else was using, or whatever. I’d try to make Google think my site was awesome, because all these other websites are linking to it.
But Google has already caught on to that. Google would know “xdfgt .com” was a crappy fake website, because nobody else is linking to “xdfgt .com”. Any website that is only linked to by crap websites is also crap, as far as Google is concerned. Google won’t put it on the first pages of search results.
So instead let’s imagine the sleazy pornsite owner creates a thousand fake tumblrs instead, like “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and “xdfgy.tumblr .com” and “xdfgh.tumblr .com” and just puts one or two posts on them to add links to the “wife caught her husband cheating” porn site. Google can still tell those tumblrs are crap websites, because nobody else is linking to them. But the difference is … on tumblr, the sleazy pornsite owner can make your website link to him.
Let’s say your tumblr is “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com”. If “xdfgt.tumblr .com” likes one of your posts, there’s link on your blogto “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” Somewhere on “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” it will say “xdfgt liked this” with a link from your blog to “xdfgt.tumblr .com.”
Google’s bot looks at “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” and it sees that your blog is a good website. People are linking to it (talking to you or reblogging from you), you write like an actual human being, you have nice pictures, you update sometimes, you aren’t a bot. So Google decides your blog isn’t a crappy scam website. Then it sees the link to “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it thinks “oh hey, a nice website with good stuff written by a real human linked to this “xdfgt.tumblr .com” I guess maybe “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a decent website too.”
Then it looks at “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it sees the link to the porn site with “wife caught her husband cheating”, and it says, “well, I guess that “wife caught her husband cheating” site is a good site. I know that because there’s a good site linking to it here at “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” I know “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a good site because “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” linked to it, and I know “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” is a good site because it is updated and writes like a real person and people talk to it and link to it.”
So basically the porn bots are using the fact that you have a good blog to make themselves look better and to try and trick Google’s bot into thinking they’re very popular and it should put them at the top of its list when people search Google for porn.
It’s really annoying! It would be really nice if the people running tumblr figured out a way to not be free advertising for every sleazy porn site on the internet
hey wow thats actually really useful! and its written in a way that i (a bird with no knowledge of the wizardly internal workings of a website) can understand!
FINALLY AN EXPLANATION
#block all porn bot blogs because they also steal your selfies and write captions underneath
Awesome Tumblr porn-blog SEO techniques explained
I was thinking about this post, today, and trying to remember where I’d gotten this notion – ‘twas one of the first things I’d read on Tumbr, when I first joined.
I’ve also used this as rationale for blocking more than porn sites, btw. I’ve also blocked “Health and athletic” blogs, and one blog that seemed to be linked to a wedding photographer… both areas that I, an ace/aro, disabled, bookworm, have no interest in.
Porn simply does not interest me. But fraudulent advertising pisses me off.
So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”?
You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.
Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…
Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.
WOW.. THIS IS CRUCIAL! Thank you for that!!! 👏👏
Best house rules ever.
Someone in my circles, else-web, wrote about the Landlord game just the other day, and she wrote about a variation written into the original rules:
The first is similar to the familiar version, in which players try to
gain as much money as possible to bankrupt everyone else as a means of
winning. The second does the exact opposite, collecting money into
public funds and distributing it for public good. There’s a version
where everyone wins when the person who started with the least money has doubled their holdings.
(Emphasis mine).
So it looks like @carriagelamp‘s classmate intuited Elizabeth’s Magie’s original goal.
In Afghanistan a fortune in copper ore lies buried beneath a trove of ancient Buddhist artifacts.
The play of perspective makes an eight-foot-tall stone shrine at Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, appear much larger than it is. Archaeologists have uncovered only a fraction of the sprawling Buddhist complex, which dates from the third to the eighth centuries A.D.
A three-legged cat looks on in front of prosthetic limbs at one of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) hospitals for war victims and the disabled in Kabul, on April 14, 2012. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images) #
this swedish neonazi looks like a fucking skyrim alien
he’s packed to the brim with burnt steak & protein shakes and he’s ready to burst if a brown person touches him
someone tried to compare this half orc to the high elves and honestly you couldn’t be more wrong
He actually makes videos where he plays Skyrim and talks about how glorious it is. Y’know, on the side, while the majority of his content is neonazi bullshit and why you should abstain from masturbation.
Here’s a fun video that includes him. ContraPoints is a solid channel.
So, this past weekend, I took my 11-year-old daughter to SuperCon to meet her favorite actor (and favorite Doctor), Peter Capaldi.
She wore a little blue TARDIS-decorated dress and some Doctor Who pins, and she nearly cried with joy when Capaldi greeted her for the photo op. He was a consummate gentleman and such a sweet and enthusiastic person.
An hour or so after the wonderful photo op experience, she and I were sitting at a table in the food court area.
A burly, older man plopped down nearby. He looked at my little girl’s outfit, smiled, and said, “Do you even KNOW anything about Doctor Who?”
WTF, dude?
I was too stunned for a second to even respond, so he started right in with the ‘quizzing.’
“Who are the Doctor’s biggest enemies, and what planet does he come from?” this stranger asked.
Now I had moved past shocked and right into indignant/angry/protective mode.
“I don’t want her to be quizzed on something she loves, because I don’t want her thinking she has to prove ANYthing in order to be a fan,“ I told him.
Looking at my daughter, I said “You don’t owe strangers explanations or information, ok?“ She said OK and looked relieved.
Still he pressed on, patronizing grin and all: “Oh, I just want to be sure parents are raising their kids right.” Then he turned to my daughter again and asked “Who was the first Doctor, then?”
I cut him off right there. “No. I don’t want her quizzed. At all.”
Dude blinked in disbelief, sighed, and left about a minute later.
“Thanks,” my daughter said. “He was making me feel awkward.”
I held her hand and looked into her eyes. “Some men think they can have power over you by making you prove yourself. You never have to do it. They’re just insecure and pitiful, so they want to make you feel like it, too. It’s not only about fan stuff, and it’s not always just men, but be careful not to fall into that trap, ok?”
That crap isn’t harmless fun. It sets up a pattern of approval-seeking, self-justification, self-doubt, and fear of exclusion that is very dangerous for children (particularly girls).
Fuck that.
TL;DR: Do NOT come at me, my little girl, or anyone in my vicinity with your condescending, gatekeeping bullshit.
The next time, I won’t make the mistake of even TRYING to be polite.
jesus christ what is wrong with people. the comic book guy from the simpsons is cautionary, not aspirational
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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