The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…
My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”
“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.”
So, because people writing inaccurate kid!fic bothers me, a quick reference to kids (Disclaimer: I have no professional background in child development, and no offspring of my own – this is all based on other people’s kids.):
Newborn: Person-larva. Cannot do much but eat, sleep, cuddle, cry, poop. Cannot hold their own head up. May pick up on the mood of the person holding them, but response to it is going to consists of either contentment or complaining. Those are pretty much the two states of a newborn: happily cuddly or expressing displeasure.
2 – 6 months: Somewhat more aware of surroundings, own appendages, etc. Will recognize people, like some better than others. Smiles, laughs, babbles. Somewhere in here rolling over commences, and possibly crawling. Starts teething.
6 -12 months: Lots of babbling, but no actual talking. Crawls, pulls self up to standing while holding onto things, may start wobbly independent walking. Some kids are climbers (may heaven help their parents). Eating some solid food (as in, mashed up stuff), but still nursing / drinking formula too. This is the beginning of the exploratory, everything-goes-in-the-mouth stage. Still teething.
1 year old: Has teeth, eats solid food. Many parents wean at this age, but it’s not unusual to continue breastfeeding. Talks, but probably not very clearly – pronunciation will be interesting, and vocabulary very limited. May repeat a new word incessantly. Points at things they want. Physical coordination and verbal skills increase as child gets older. Maybe develop utterly random phobias, usually of things that are new or unpredictable. Interested in other children, may mimic older children. Still sticks everything in their mouth.
2 years old: Speaks well enough to be understood by those who know them, but not necessarily strangers. Uses simple phrases. May mash words together to express a concept for which they don’t yet know the word, or make a word up. Is learning labels for things, though they may not be accurate (i.e. all old men are grandpa, all round objects are a ball, etc.) Knows colors, parts of the body, types of animals, etc. Walks, runs, dances, etc – basically the full range of physical stuff, just all of it is kinda awkward. Can roll a ball or throw it in a clumsy way. May have a favorite toy, security blanket, etc. May play pretend games or make up stories, but they’re likely to be fair inscrutable to adults. Wants to do things independently, but is likely to be easily frustrated. Has tantrums. Plays with other children, but not terribly good at sharing or being nice. Asks questions; the ‘why?’ stage has begun. Toilet training begins around this age; girls tend to get the hang of it quicker than boys.
3 years old – pretty much the same as 2, only a bit better at all of it. Asks a LOT of questions. Has friends. Plays pretend. Understands rules (though is unlikely to obey them very well). Can count, though not very far. Speaks well enough to be understood by strangers; you know that so-cute-you-could-die kid-speak people love to write? This is the appropriate age for it (up through about age 5).
4 to 5 – cutesy kid-speak is age appropriate. May still have tantrums, still not the best at sharing, but should be starting to get socially functional. Can throw or kick a ball, jump, stand on one foot, all that. Can count, recite alphabet. Some kids start learning to read and write arond this age, though it wouldn’t yet be abnormal for them not to be able to. Lots of pretend play. Emotionally intense; everything is dire. Learning to be self-maintaining, i.e. may bathe independently but needs an adult to wash their hair.
6 – 10 – speaks like an emotionally immature adult; the things they have to say are still kid-like, but they should be easing out of kid-speak. Reads, writes, can do math – these skills increase with age. Understands and (usually) obeys rules, has a concept of fairness, kindness vs. cruelty, etc. Forms tight friendships, keeps secrets, wants to fit in and be liked; having a best friend or a group of friends is the most important thing in their world. Wants to be good at things; has definite interests and academic strengths and weaknesses. May bully or be bullied; kids this age can be mean. As in horrifyingly so. Has crushes (though probably still finds it acutely embarrassing). Understands death. Kids this age will curse, though hilariously badly. Still wants parental affection, but probably not in public.
11 – 12 – mini-teen, which is to say emotionally vulnerable, short-sighted mini-adult. Naive still, but not terribly so – has a basic understanding of human nature, events around them, etc. Begins to form political / ideological / religious opinions. May begin reciprocal romantic attachments. Strongly focused on collective identity, what ‘niche’ or ‘crowd’ they identify with. Some girls start puberty. This is also the age of things going badly wrong; kids know which other kids are the sociopaths at this stage. While everybody else is learning how to not be a mean little shit to everybody unlike themselves (or a bitter perpetual victim), those few who aren’t developing in a good direction become downright terrifying.
13 – 15 – somewhere in here, kids will start either facing major adult-scale decisions and problems themselves, or seeing peers doing so. Shit gets real. This is why teenagers think they know everything; the rose-colored glasses of childhood fall off, and they are suddenly So Very Jaded and cannot imagine there being more to the world than what they can suddenly perceive now, because it is overwhelming. Likely to be angry at the world, likely to gravitate toward ideological extremes. Takes risks. Forms romantic attachments; may experiment sexually, may not, maturity levels here very A LOT.
16 – 21 – moody adult with far more curiosity than common sense. Does thing in grand and dramatic fashion. Experiments with different identities. Wants total independence. Many develop greater social maturity around this time; stop seeing others in terms of cliques, develop greater empathy and ability to see things from multiple perspectives. Forms romantic attachments that may be serious or even life-long.
This is pretty accurate IME, and if you want more detail for the first few years, try Touchpoints.
You gotta decide for yourselves whether people in the year of our lord 2017 should be judged entirely by the words and thoughts and ideas they put out into the world years ago in different life stages. Like. This isn’t a problem that’s going to go away. Increasingly now the history of people’s entire life journey is accessible via some social media snap shot in the wayback machine or some ancient chat log sitting on someone’s hard drive out there. We don’t all start from the same place. A lot of us start from positions of privilege, from systems learned from parents or other family or institutions with power over us that influence our way of thinking when our brains are first developing the capacity for empathy and understanding.
And we grow. And we create. And we experience things. And we talk with people. We make friends. We read feedback. We listen to some and we disregard others, and years later, some (but by no means all) of what we disregarded we might think about again and realize was good feedback and helpful advice.
Our opinions change. Our understanding of our own privilege changes. Our understanding of media and propaganda and narrative and power structures and justice change. Our biases shift. Our politics change. Our worldviews are shaped by our conversations and our experiences and the things we take to heart and the things we lock outside.
Hussie used to interact heavily with the fandom. There is so much text from him out there saved in archives that has been pored over again and again and again by people with axes to grind, people with their own agendas, people who feel wronged and hurt and ignored by someone they maybe once respected and looked up to.
Anyone with that much text over that long a period of time has something fucking problematic out there waiting to hang them, I guarantee it. Back in 2012 the r-slur and the a-slur were common slang used by elementary school kids, let alone ppl frequenting the various rancid asscracks of the internet. Then awareness campaigns took root and opinions and language shifted for the better and suddenly a lot of text written without that mindfulness started looking really nasty, didn’t it?
We as a society are going to have to make some hard decisions in the very near future about how much rope we need when we’re eyeing those gallows for people we feel wronged by. How much someone’s opinion now means when their opinion five years ago might have been the exact opposite. How much good faith to extend to people who grow and change and understand their younger selves had some Bad Opinions about the world, but can’t erase the words they said, and have to live with them for the rest of their lives because people looking for ammunition can find it in ample supply. How much someone’s actions now count for weighed against their words in another fucking life.
There are quotes out there where Hussie said some stupid shit. There are a million words of Hussie quotes out there. I don’t know how old you are, but if you’re an adult, I can almost guarantee you that you can go back some number of years and remember a version of you that you’d be terrified of the internet finding today.
The dude gave us one of the most queer-positive, transformative and engaging pieces of media of all time. It wasn’t perfect and he wasn’t perfect because nothing and no one is. The queer community is always so goddamn hypercritical of its prolific creators, in part because we’re desperate for the things we want and never get and it’s so frustrating to find people who *almost* give you what you want – and god knows the mainstream media isn’t listening, so where else do we have to turn but inward? We’re a stymied, frustrated group desperate for representation on all sorts of underrepresented axes of oppression and no one story is ever going to satisfy everyone. But Homestuck was so big, so expansive and meant so much to so many – of course there’s a lot of bitter disappointment out there.
How much rope do we need to hang someone? How much history do we need to build a gallows out of plank by fucking plank to feel morally justified?
A reminder that turning in assignments for partial credit is better than not turning them in at all. It is. Even if you think you’ve done a bad job and are ashamed of your work, or it’s way overdue, you take whatever you can get. Partial credit dramatically improves your grade over a zero, and I’m always astounded by how often even the smartest kids don’t really comprehend that. 60% is worlds better than 0%. Even 10% is going to help you. Letter grades are misleading and are not created equal. “F"s are valuable. Turn that late assignment in.
just moving along like everyone else 