the amount of
social stigma abused kids have to struggle with is just unreal. I’ve been
hearing it from day one that anyone who dares to be openly hurt
is only looking for attention.
I’ve been seeing
trauma victims stereotyped as oversensitive, needy, trouble and attention
seeking, accused of imagining things, and they’re always portrayed as a burden
on society and publicly shamed for whatever they’ve gone thru. Any kind of
pain or discomfort in children no matter how high, apparently needs to be dealt
with as a personal problem and should be kept well away from society who just
doesn’t wanna deal with such nonsense.
I’ve seen children
who tried to tell the society about abuse only to be shamed, punished and
humiliated because “they should have known better” and “they
should have taken it better” and “they should just get over
themselves”. Even the notion that their life matters and their pain means
something and that trauma is devastating their life is looked upon as them
being “immature” and “self centered”.
Thanks to all
this one big part of being abused and traumatized is the added guilt for
needing attention, for needing comfort and reassurance. Survivors are forced to
feel selfish and miserable for even considering that it should matter if
they’re in pain, that their struggle is important enough to talk about it out
loud. We’re told that we’re pathetic and stupid for even thinking we matter, not only by abusers, but by counselors, therapists, media, television, our peers and society at large. How are we supposed to fight it? How are we supposed to heal? How come there’s no path for us to walk on, and the world acts like it would be better if we didn’t exist? We never asked for this. And we don’t deserve it.
All of this, all of the stigma, shaming, apathy and hatred should fall on abusers. Not. Victims.
This is why victims and survivors are afraid to talk about their abuse. And then people ask them why they kept it a secret and didn’t talk about it sooner. It’s hard to know who is safe to talk to and who won’t judge or shame you. We need to be loving, not judging.
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
I remember reading that the removal of a single word changed the initial test scores on recreations of the Stanford Experiment test pool. Of course, they weren’t full recreations, because of how unethical the original experiment was. What they did was look into the initial scores of the test population, and someone went ‘Huh, all the test subjects were technically sane, but these scores are way off the national averages for xyz’. They compared notes with other people, got some backing, and came up with a test for the test itself.
So they tried to recreate the test pool for the experiment by changing up the ad a bit and testing the psychology of people who applied. Something very interesting was discovered that could have entirely skewed the final result.
The ad itself.
By changing the ad to hide that the simulated environment would be a prison, the test pool changed entirely, even among the same age, area, and gender. People who signed up for a simulated prison environment were shown to have higher levels of aggression, quicker tempers, and to be more sadistic. People who signed up for a simulated environment were calmer, more empathetic, and less likely to react with angry outbursts.
The test was biased before it even began. Again, even people who otherwise fit the original specifications (college-aged men from the Stanford area) scored far differently than the people actually involved in the experiment. They were simply less likely to sign up for a prison-based experiment than people who were prone to aggression.
TL;DR: Sane people can be aggressive as hell and the Stanford Experiment was too biased to be a representation of the average population.
It also came out quite recently that the Stanford Prison Experiment participants, specifically the guards, did not just “naturally assume the role of guard and abuse the prisoners,” they were *coached and encouraged* by the experimenters to act like “real prison guards” and told if they didn’t act aggressively enough they weren’t helping with prison reform.
Virginia’s House of Delegates is one of the most gerrymandered bodies in the country. In 2017, Democrats won the statewide popular vote in Virginia’s legislative races by over nine percentage points. Nevertheless, Republicans still held a 51-49 majority in the House of Delegates, thanks to gerrymandering.
But Virginia Democrats may actually get to compete in something approximating free and fair elections next year, thanks to a pair of documents handed down by a federal court on Friday.
Its a bugger because it’s actually a 3rd party plugin they install at the factory to try to make software interact predictably with a wide combination of hardware.
It sucks because it isn’t actually it’s own software, it just automatically sets the preferences for a bunch of different programs. Once its set, the only way to change it is to reset it manually in each program. Some programs have good integration and will propogate the change but others have really shitty programming and will keep reverting to their original settings. An uninstall and reinstall might fix the problem.
so, unfortunately, my employment insurance has finally run out and i have to apply for welfare again, but i need to wait until my landlord gives me rent receipts and then book an appointment with the welfare office and i have no idea how long that’s going to take and i have literally $40 to my name after paying all my bills (except my phone bill bc i can theoretically live without that for now)
a little backstory abt me, i’m a 22 year old (almost 23! i’m a december baby) mentally ill trans woman of colour who also suffers from chronic leg and back pain and pretty severe fatigue issues (i sleep on average like 14-15 hours a day at this point), rendering me unable to work. i have a whole ton of appointments booked with both therapists and doctors to figure out what the fuck is wrong with me, but i have no idea how long it’ll take me to begin recovering from any of this and in the meanwhile it’s really hard for me to focus on just making it to these appointments when i don’t know when the next time i’m going to eat is or if i have money for public transportation or anything like that.
literally anything helps if you can spare anything, i know a majority of my followers are also incredibly broke, but even just sharing this post would help me so so much.
my interac and paypal are both raven.faith@outlook.com (or for paypal you can just click here)
thank you so much for reading this, i hope you’re all doing well
I met a baby the other day who taught me that kids aren’t learning the thumb-and-pinky-out gesture for “phone” anymore. She puts her flat, open palm up to her ear and babbles into it, simulating a flat and rectangular smartphone.
It’s so interesting that a lot of seemingly obsolete hand motions still exist, though
very few people wear wristwatches, but tapping one’s wrist is still a nearly universal gesture for “what time is it?” or “hurry up”
I used classic corded phones for only a very brief time in my life (before we got those more rectangular-shaped cordless ones for my parents’ landline) and first saw a car without power windows when I was in college, and yet I’ve always used the pinky-and-thumb gesture for “call me” and the circling-fist gesture for “roll down your window.” I’m 24, so my childhood was the late 90s and early 2000s, but I still use gestures that indicate technology either gone or on its way out when I began forming reliable memories
it also makes me wonder how people indicated time or hurrying before wristwatches. did they somehow pantomime a pocket watch? what gestures have we lost as technology marches on? and since video didn’t exist for most of human history, how might we learn what they were? like the contents of the third Georgian spice jar or the location of Punt, nobody would think to write any of it down
I just love history so much
The ASL sign for phone is based on the pinky-and-thumb gesture. Presumably that will continue on for a while, with future generations seeing it as an arbitrary sign.
And then there are words like “rewind” that no longer make literal sense. Filmmakers still use “cut” long after actual physical film that can be cut fell out of use. We talk about cutting and pasting on computers and use a floppy disc icon for “save”.
Fossilized metaphors are the best.
So the cool thing about
skeuomorphisms (like the floppy disc icon) is that it’s entire basis is that, originally, the skeuomorph’s form had a resemblance to the literal processes it was referencing but that now they’re not referencing literal processes, but the abstract idea of those processes.
We’re not literally rewinding a tape when we hit rewind on our DVRs or DVD’s. Instead, we understand that to “rewind” is to reverse the playback of the video/audio, often at several times its normal speed. The word has changed from meaning the literal process which resulted in the desired effect to directly meaning the desired effect. This is something that just happens in language over time. I mean, shit, the British call flashlights “Torches” and that makes perfect sense.
Thing is, the only reason it seems weird to us is because we’ve seen and used the original things that the skeuomorphs and gestures are referencing. It’s not just a representation of an abstract idea like saving a file or cutting footage or making a call. We’ve used floppy discs and razors and corded telephone handsets. They were real, commonplace things in our lives and jobs.
It’s weird to us because we’re living in the transition period. It’ll stop being weird once we die and no one is around to remember the original thing.
Interestingly, “flashlight” is similar to “torch” in preserving a vestige of old technology. The first batteries had very little capacity. As a result, when using a flashlight, you didn’t keep it on continuously, since that would kill the batteries in no time flat. Instead, you’d turn it on for just brief flashes to preserve power. Hence, “flash-light”
Wanted to build a little on @sonic‘s comment about words like “rewind” has moved from meaning the literal process. As an ESL-person, there are so many English words we learn as children to mean just the one (often very specific) action. Like the word “play” which is a verb with a wide arrange of meanings in English. You can play music, sports, theatre, games, and so on. It can even be a noun. (And you can play a play, because English sucks and hates everyone.)
In Swedish “play” means “to make any type of recorded media start”. I’m not going to bother looking up if we have fully adopted this word as a Swedish, but seeing how I learned it 30 years ago I’d say yeah. “Shuffle” is even more narrow. It means “having the music player put songs in a random order”. “Shuffle” has become a verb, but “play” often needs help from the Swedish verb for “press”.
(Also, I asked a 19 yo what she thought the figure on the save button was, she said she thought it was an old filing cabinet, which I thought was fair enough.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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