It is essential, however, that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one’s own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our Western concept of discipline (as of every virtue) that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if it is painful can it be ‘good.’

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

(via molibdenita)

odinsblog:

brutereason:

I was thinking about Jon Ronson’s book about public shaming and about recent debates about political tactics and something came together:

When making arguments about ethics, white men consistently ignore power as a lens of analysis. For many of them, actions are either right or wrong regardless of power differentials between the people involved, the stakes for those with less power, and the options they have available to them.

Protesting to have Milo disinvited from your campus therefore becomes *just as bad* as Milo’s own actions towards marginalized people, despite the vast disparities in harm done and options available. (This is not a strawman. When y’all say, “This makes you just as bad as them,” that’s literally what you’re saying.) That Milo’s talk, as planned, would’ve caused serious, measurable, and irreparable harm to specific students, and that protesters had exhausted all “proper” channels for months beforehand, doesn’t seem to matter in this analysis.

All that matters is the specific action taken. “Preventing a person from speaking.” “Destroying property.” “Public shaming.” These actions are seen as unethical regardless of who did them and why, what consequences they face if they do not take these actions, and what other options–if any–they have available.

I keep coming back to MLK’s quote about riots being the language of the unheard. For the most part, people resort to tactics that fall into ethical grey areas because other tactics are unavailable or have already failed. I’m sure that there are people who do so despite having better options, just as there are always people who act unethically in other ways.

But unfortunately, for an outside observer with no skin in the game, it’s very hard to tell whether or not that’s the case. I saw so many posts patronizingly chiding Berkeley students for not trying other tactics before protesting and/or destroying property (although most did not destroy property, and the oft-used phrase “violent protest” implies much more than that). They had no idea of the lengths to which the protesters went to utilize “appropriate” means to keep themselves and their community safe. It didn’t work. They remained unheard.

Any ethics that ignores the role of power will privilege the powerful. Our Republican members of Congress don’t need to riot, set fires, and block the streets in order to get what they want. They do appropriate, ethical things like draft policies and have debates and vote. Because they have the power to. The specific actions they take–drafting policies, debating, voting–are not seen as inherently unethical things to do. Yet they’ve destroyed lives, families, and communities. They’ve achieved a level of destruction that even the rowdiest masked protesters never could, not that they’d want to.

“Any ethics that ignores the role of power will privilege the powerful.”

roachpatrol:

thescyfychannel:

roachpatrol:

explain-like-i-am-five:

best-shower-thoughts:

I can physically type a sentence really quick without looking at the keyboard but I cannot mentally remember the order of the keyboard. / cr

Does someone have any explanation for this? Happens to me too. For instance: I can write anything I want without looking at keyboard, but if the room is dark, I can’t write good, lots of mistakes… I am not even looking at the keyboard no matter if lights are on or off but can’t really write correctly when off.

it’s because the layout of your keyboard is stored in your procedural memory, which is what you physically know how to do, not in your explicit or declarative memory, which is facts and events you can consciously recall.

basically, you know how to type because you know how to move your fingers, the way you know how to talk the way you know how to move your mouth. it’s not stored as facts, it’s stored as movement. you probably can’t sit there and consciously recall the exact position of your tongue, lips, and throat to say each letter, either, unless you check by doing it or carefully imagine doing it.

Is that why the row/column shift thing happens sometimes? Like I’ll just be typing along trying to make a sentence and it’ll come out as “yjr fph od dp viyr” when I REALLY meant “the dog is so cute”??

yes, that’s precisely why. if your hand shifts just a little— or way too much— and your finger hits between keys, or a control key instead of a letter, or the edge of the keyboard, that feels wrong and you know you need to adjust. but if you shift just the right amount to the next row over, your fingers hit the center of the keys and the motion feels right, even though you’re now tapping the wrong keys, so you keep going on automatic until you consciously notice the wrong letters are appearing on screen.

this isn’t a problem for people classically taught to keep their hands resting on the home row, because they keep their index fingers aligned with the raised nubs on f and j. but most of us have our own individual hodgepodge way we learned on our own just from using the internet. that’s also why our typing speed goes WAY down for most of us if we go from our own personal ‘incorrect’ way of typing to the hands-on-home-row ‘correct’ way— suddenly we’re moving way differently, and have to draw on our declarative memory to figure out what goes where, instead of our years and years of procedural memory.

as another interesting note, things like opening files, moving files, and starting programs can be part of our procedural memory— just try explaining to someone who’s no good with computers what stuff you need to click, what stuff you need to double click, and what stuff you need to drag, and you’ll really notice how fluid and instinctive your handling of digital objects has become.

cephiedvariable:

roachpatrol:

piccolina-mina:

rememberwhenyoutried:

I get making fun of America for its flag worship and stuff but Brexit should be all the reminder you need that you don’t need flags in every classroom and a pledge of allegiance every morning for the people of a country to turn out absurdly xenophobic.

LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

i used to feel like america’s flag worship thing was really creepy and fucked up, but now i think that america is so big, it’s actually a necessary. america has a ton of different states, environments, and cultures, plus the stated values of independence and individuality. state governments clash with the federal government and different chunks of the country absolutely don’t understand—or like—each other. so maybe the constant reminder that we all wave the same flag around and are part of the same nation is important to keep everyone from just breaking apart. we’re signaling to each other that we’re all, ultimately, on the same side.

These are two of the most misguided comments I have seen on tumblr in a long time.

1) The UK most certainly does have a flag-waving, poem reciting masturbatory sense of xenophobic nationalistic pride that is more than just comparable to the US’s. “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire”, “God Save the Queen/King”, the whole myth about how the Brits ~held the line in Europe all alone against the Nazis and saved the world~. This is the nation that literally created the idea of ‘White Man’s Burden’. They slap the fucking Union Jack on everything.

2) The US was founded during the rise of Nation-State Identity and thus was allowed to nurture its propagandist idea of what made it “unique” within its borders from the early days of its inception. The whole “oh, American states are all just sooOOoooOOoooo different from each other” is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism. US culture is not actually that diverse when compared to, like… almost anywhere else in the world (just think for a second about places like: India, China, Indonesia, Spain, Nigeria, etc.) Most of the US’s diversity comes from immigration and subsets of oppressed minorities that the US government has traditionally tried to silence, sideline or snuff out (the same as in my country or any other predominantly-white ex-colony). These are the kind of people who feel disunity with the flag, for good reason.

3) Nationalist ideology in general seeks to erase diversity. The American flag, for many, is a symbol of oppression and cultural (or literal) genocide. I understand that you, nowhere in your post, said that this is how people should feel, but it’s an incredibly naive call for unity with a cultural idea that is especially hostile to those who don’t fit its parametres; an unconscious reinforcement of Nationalist Exceptionalism in a time when such ideologies should be dismantled. The people who feel disunity with the flag are not the people breaking the USA apart, and the people who worship it absolutely will not respond to any call to unity with those who don’t fit what they feel the flag represents. It is not a necessity – its a symbol of the ideology that caused those divides in the first place.

I get that these posts came from a good place, however when I saw this cross my dash I actually had to double-take because what this one-two-punch says – entirely due to thoughtlessness and not malice – is: “Hey, the UK doesn’t have exactly the same kind of xenophobic nationalism and the US does, so I guess that maybe aspects of the US’s xenophobic nationalism aren’t that bad and flag worship can be a good thing!”

Flag worship is still creepy and bad. More nationalism is not the solution to nationalism.

orestian:

like setting aside the grotesque human rights violations, if you have to use physical force to conduct an interrogation … you’ve failed as an interrogator and you shouldn’t have a job. like – that’s what salts me about the cia. they’re not just evil, they’re incompetent. they are such a posse of hideously incompetent goons it embarrasses me to be the same species. “this guy wont tell me secrets so i guess ill punch him” ohhhhhhh my god you fiasco

caffeinewitchcraft:

thebibliosphere:

stimmymage:

pervocracy:

fandommember:

benaddictedcumberbabe:

cameronfryesgirlfriend:

cause of death: too shy to call ambulance

Didn’t want to inconvenience anyone

Someone else might have needed it more

This happens. 😦

Bear in mind that ambulance companies aren’t diverting EMTs away from a heart attack or traumatic amputation to answer your call. They’re much more likely to be diverting EMTs from:

Sitting in an ambulance station or a random parking lot playing Words With Friends and/or developing elaborate company-wide romantic intrigues

Sitting in a hospital EMS room doing giant stacks of paperwork no one will ever read while trying to make dinner entirely out of saltines and condiments

Routine transports of people who have to travel by stretcher, who maybe are not happy to be late, but are hardly going to die from it

Transports which are technically emergencies, but are stuff like vomiting or a sprained ankle where the urgency factor is more like “yeah, you should get that seen” than like “STAT CODE RED CODE BLUE CODE POLKA DOT STAT STAT STAT.”

So if you think you might need an ambulance, call one. You are not going to single-handedly take down the EMS system by daring to use it.

I’m reblogging it but I would be that person wondering “Do I need this enough” until I died.

I have legitimately done this. Please, take care of yourselves.

Furthermore, guys, we have dispatch. Dispatch makes sure that we’re all where we need to be, so you’re not taking an ambulance away from someone who “needs it more.”

Let dispatch worry if an ambulance needs to be somewhere else. You just worry about taking care of yourself.

newt-skamander:

silverybeing:

I’ve been thinking about liminal spaces a bit tonight. And truck/rest stops are often considered to be liminal spaces. Having family a few states over, I’m no stranger to family road trips and, by extension rest stops. There is one thing about them that I’ve thought about for years.

People work there.

There are people who are not just passing through, but show up day after day, clock in, work for hours, and then go home. Where do they live? What are they like? Are these liminal spaces no longer liminal for them? Its a set destination for them now.

What sort of weird shit do they see every day that they just sigh and return to mopping the floor? The unusual that is just another day on the job. That weird otherworldiness at 3am but whatever I’m on a break.

Perhaps they are immune to the effects of the passing spirits mixing with the mundane, cause how can you be in a liminal space if its your job? Maybe they are special caretakers that keeps the spirits moving on their way, giving directions to things no one else is supposed to see.

Either way they aren’t paid enough to deal with this shit.

so i work at a highway servo in a small rural town and i’ve done so for about a year. and 100% the creepy shit doesn’t stop, but you do sort of become resigned to it. like in the beginning i once screamed because saw myself in the mirror behind the milk and thought it was not me. but here’s some stuff i guess:

we keep the doors locked because crime exists so they make a beep sound when someone’s waiting to enter, but the amount of times i have checked the monitor and there has been nothing and no one there is not enough to say ‘general sensory problem’ but just enough for my anxious personality to be wary of the ghosts.

occasionally i discover large strange bugs i have never seen before that apparently only exist in the dead of a hot summer night. i also watch a lot of spiders crawl across the outside cameras.

once a man came in around 2am – no car, just wandered off the highway – and took every sausage roll and walked out without paying. which okay, theft happens. but he did it, looking into my eyes, and did not say a word as i called after him. he just walked in calmly, looked into my soul, remained entirely silent, and casually robbed the place. i was shook.

a cousin of mine who had been missing for three months once showed up.

and there’s this totally dead period between 3 and 5 where i usually mop the floors. which is why its weird when i find footsteps in my clean floors after ive finished.

plus, time passes differently in the freezer room . i fill up four full fridges worth of coke and red bull and other assorted soft drinks in fifteen minutes – like i’m not trying that hard its really not possible. and i know that because when i do the three fridges that cant be filled from behind, it takes me more like forty minutes or more.

i get strange customers who come in asking for directions with out-dated melways who don’t own phones and seem misplaced in time somehow but are always so very thankful. sometimes they ask for directions to places ive never heard even tho i’ve lived in the area my entire life.

or i get the same person at the same time to get the same thing every day. they have the same greeting and we have the same conversation like we’re stuck in a time loop. these pod people always come between 4 and 5am.

and i can safely say, you will never know fear until there is a 3am power outage in a storm and you are blanketed in absolute darkness so suddenly your heart stops beating. and then you have been outside in said storm taking out the rubbish and become soaked through like a drowned rat with only the weird glow of ur phone light with a painful 3% battery life to guide you.

overall its just a strange environment: deathly silent, with flickering fluorescent lights and grime in the back store that no matter how hard i try to clean never comes away and footsteps in the newly moped floor even tho there hasn’t been a customer and this room at the back entirely empty save only for ancient promotional material for products i’ve never heard of that makes me feel uneasy.

The significance of plot without conflict

stilleatingoranges:

In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures–which permeate Western media–have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.

The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general–arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.

Keep reading

sapphicscience:

i’ve been thinking about all those posts about “we need female heroes who do girly things”/”why is the female hero always such a tomboy” and then the response posts that are like “uhhh actually we don’t really have any really masculine female heroes either” so i was trying to figure it out—what do we have, exactly?

and really what we get is women who eschew “girly” things while still managing to look like society’s ideal woman. they would never touch eyeliner (they’re too busy with Important Things), but their eyeliner is immaculate. they have a huge, varied wardrobe, but wouldn’t be caught dead actually shopping for clothes. and it reminds me of the expectation that women must be effortlessly beautiful. don’t wear makeup or you’ll seem self-absorbed—but god forbid you look like you’re not wearing makeup. it’s interesting to me, that the impossibilities imposed on female characters are the same ones imposed on real women.

A New Theory of Gravity Could Explain Away Dark Matter and Energy

jumpingjacktrash:

kedreeva:

kedreeva:

This is actually really exciting??

#science #i don’t remotely understand this (via @ambientcrows)

Okay, that’s fine! You are actually not alone, I just fumbled through explaining this to some friends! I only just found this today so I may not be 100% accurate, if anyone knows better they can correct as needed!

Basically what the current theory of gravity (the theory of relativity) says is that gravity is a fundamental reaction. Gravity is what happens when spacetime curves around mass/energy- that curving causes two objects to move toward one another in space.

The problem is that the general theory of relativity doesn’t explain quantum physics. It cannot explain why the outside edges of galaxies goes zoom in ways they should not, unless there is an unknown factor. Until now, Science was like okay, what if Dark Matter and Dark Energy are a thing, where Dark Energy is what causes the universe to expand and Dark Matter is matter we can’t see, and actually haven’t even proved exists yet. Like, we’re literally making that shit up because nothing else we had made sense, and assuming that Dark Matter exists and is affected by gravity in ways which would explain the zoom allowed us to move on with theorizing things. Which was fine.

But then this guy, Erik Verlinde, comes along and is like okay but what if we go back and assume that our understanding of gravity is what’s wrong?

What if instead of gravity happening (spacetime moves and that movement causes gravity to happen), gravity emerges (the fabric of the universe has gravity stored inside its structure and spacetime and gravity emerge together from that structure). As its own thing, alongside spacetime (which is also a product of the structure of the universe), with its own behaviors and stuff.

And emergent gravity CAN explain why the edges of galaxies go zoom (I do not understand the math behind it I’m sorry!), without needing to rely on “idk let’s say Dark Matter and move on.” Already it’s allowed Verlinde to accurately predict the movement of stars on the edges of galaxies on its own. (of course, bear in mind that it does not explain EVERYTHING. yet. but it does bring physics and quantum physics closer to being able to work together).

Which makes all of this actually really cool, because it means that this huge assumption we humans have made and based a lot of stuff on for a while (dark matter existing) may be wrong, BUT we may have figured out WHY it was wrong, and that means we may be able to start doing things right, and that always leads to even more fascinating discoveries and advancements in science.

scientists have known all along that dark matter and dark energy were placeholder concepts, so this theory is a huge relief. it is MUCH easier to revise our understanding of gravity – which we never properly grokked in the first place – than to work around A Lot Of Stuff Which Is Totally Undetectable Except It Fucks Up Our Math.

A New Theory of Gravity Could Explain Away Dark Matter and Energy