What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’s not merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
Tag: education
Zoos prevent extinction. This is why I support zoos. This is why the world should support zoos.
Meme credit goes to the zookeepers at www.facebook.com/ZoosSavingSpecies
@zoossavingspeciesGood zoos save species!!!
This is the kind of thing I tell people when they go off on me being anti-captivity towards marine amusement parks. Zoos and “amusement” parks are totally different things.
Zoos help animals by having breeding programs like those mentioned above, marine parks harm animals by treating them like circus animals and forcing them to do tricks under incredibly stressful conditions and breeding for profit not for saving the species.
Know the difference.
countries where prostitution is legal have higher rates of human trafficking. that’s like an actual fact. not an opinion or anything. so tbh it seems a bit ‘swerfy’ to completely ignore that
speaking, uh, as a formerly-trafficked sex worker, it’s extremely difficult to come forward as a trafficking victim in countries where sex work is criminalized; you just… get criminalized under those same anti-prostitution laws. of course reported trafficking would increase when the sole fact of coming forward as a sex worker at all no longer endangers you.
This line of argument is the same one that you see with conservatives who point to the increase in divorce rates as proof that making divorce safer is endangering marriage, while ignoring the massive drops in domestic abuse, murder, and suicide.
It’s a shot argument with them, and it’s a shot argument here.
In WWI, when they introduced helmets, they saw a sudden spike in head injuries.
What the casual observer may miss was that they were seeing the increase because of a dramatic decrease in deaths from head wounds.
It really, REALLY bothers me when I hear people frame climate change and other environmental crises as something that everyday, average-ass people are responsible for, and not corporations and entire governments.
Like literally, how can a regular-ass person ~opt out~ of all damaging behaviors while still being able to function in society?
You literally can’t.
The future of our planet is not down to whether or not someone recycles their water bottle.
It’s down to whether or not governments and corporations decide to quit sucking up all our resources and poisoning the earth with reckless abandon.
I mean obviously people should still live as cleanly and as sustainably as they can manage where they are and with what they have, but like. THAT isn’t the major issue.
govts and corporations have deliberately put the onus on yr individual choices so the system can continue being as destructive/profitable
God bless this post this pisses me off so much
Also this hyper-individualist shift of responsibility is largely an American thing and consumerism is framed as a solution- e.g., buy more shit that’s sustainable! That’ll fix the problem (buy a new, green water bottle! buy a new, green car! buy a new, green whatever-the-fuck that’ll just ultimately produce more waste)!
I took a course in sustainable engineering.
The professor mentioned that even if every private individual in the world were to conserve resources and the environment the ol’ Jimmy Carter way- by turning down the thermostat, recycling your glass and plastics and metals, cut down on luxuries, take shorter showers, etc., it would only get us 10% of the way to where we need to be in order to avoid global catastrophic climate change.
The vast majority of freshwater use is from industry and agriculture. http://www.worldometers.info/water/
The vast majority of CO2 emissions is from industrial and electrical generation sites and associated vehicles. http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/gases/co2.html
Private individuals hardly make a dent, even in ideal conditions.
Thank you.
Extra important note for spoonies. Please don’t feel bad for needing disposable medical equipment, pill bottles, long showers, micro fiber blankets, packaged pre-made food, straws, paper plates etc. You’re not individually ruining the environment, you’re doing the best you can while taking care of yourself. The blame is on corporations.
This is so important!!!
So many things that people are leaping on bandwagons to ban ARE NEEDED BY DISABLED PEOPLE.
But no one cares! It’s just like the “Opioid Epidemic” and the knee jerk backlash to just cut them off. It’s ridiculous! It’s solving a problem by making another! But hey, it’ll make some people FEEL like they DID SOMETHING, so who cares who gets hurt? Who cares about the critical life threatening damage and death it causes? Because “Epidemic!” Because “straws are bad!” Because because because!
Because Disabled Lives Don’t Matter to Abled People.
That’s it. We’re already a burden to them. We’re already an annoyance. An inconvenience. We’re different, we’re weird, we don’t fit the mold. So, to hell with us! To hell with caring about us. Even thinking about us. Because it’ll save the precious turtles or birds or something. Because taking away everything that helps us survive is the only way to make people feel like they’re doing something about a huge problem like climate change, when it’s really just screwing people whose lives are hard enough.
I will forever reblog posts like this, because it’s SO fucking important.
i know making fun on erika moen is funny and all but i think there’s a real genuine problem with how liberals talk about sex. OJST is pitched as a sex ed resource, presumably for young girls and women. imagine knowing little to nothing about sex and being exposed to this weird, fucked up, often abusive, kink focused horror show. imagine being “educated” into thinking that sex is all about what bizarre shit you like to roleplay as while you’re naked.
prioritizing “inclusivity” and “tolerance” above all else leads to having no standards about who gets a say on various feminist topics. this is how we get pedos infiltrating LGBT spaces, meetings in feminist and gay spaces that are dominated by the nuances of gray-ace attraction vs demisexual attraction instead of actual issues, and exposing children to situations only serve to that put them at risk.
Did you know? It’s your RIGHT to access reproductive healthcare without being intimidated or terrorized.
People need to see this.
It is illegal to willingly harass and intimidate a person on purpose, even if you are doing it outside of an abortion clinic. Remember this, pro-lifers. You can and will be charged. ❤
women be
50 Shades of Attempting to Pass Abuse Off as Romance
I know it’s not BTS, but I think that in this fandom, there are a lot of people who need to see this. There are a lot of people who need to be reminded or told that 50 Shades of Grey isn’t a love story, and it’s not sexy or hot. It’s a story about the emotional and physical abuse of a girl. The fact that as a society we are told this abuse is sexy is dangerous. It’s dangerous because then women start romanticizing situations that are abusive, and find themselves allowing men to manipulate them and destroy them. This book and this movie are utterly intolerable. Bdsm is fine. Having dom/sub relationships is FINE (lol y’all KNOW I think that.) but 50SOG is not a depiction of healthy bdsm at all. It’s a horrendous piece of media. And I’ll happily fight with anyone who says otherwise.
Completely different fandom BUT still applies. BDSM is all about communication and consent, which severely lacks in 50SOG. Also to any writers out there, PLEASE research the topic before you write about it. Yeah being tied up is kinky and all, but only if you (and your characters) want it and explicitly communicate that at some point in the relationship.
If the people making and watching these movies actually paid attention, Christian Grey is mentally ill. He has PTSD and behavioural coping methods (not healthy ones) to deal with the fact that his prostitute mother was murdered in front of his eyes by her pimp, only to be found, with him in the room, days later. He was introduced to the BDSM scene by a much older woman and forced to be submissive himself in the same way Ana is.
It’s not erotic. It’s heartbreaking. Christian does find his way in the end. After much work Ana figures out what’s up and forces him to confront it.
The BDSM scenes in which they’re both hot and bothered and enjoying it? They’re great. The ones where Ana is scared and not being respected? Infuriating. Readers (and viewers) NEED to be able to distinguish the differences.
Yes, but Christian, regardless of his reasons, is abusive. And it isn’t actually confronted properly in the books – it’s just a part of their relationship. And that is very wrong. For Ana to stay with him despite these behaviours is a horrible lesson. It isn’t anyones ‘duty’ to fix someone who is abusive, regardless of their reasons.
Also – I’m aware he has a mental illness. Lot’s of people do. But saying what he does is fine because ‘it’s his unhealthy coping mechanism amd he gets over it eventually!’ Is wrong. Having mental issues is absolutely not an excuse for abusive or toxic behaviours, and it doesn’t change how harmful those behaviours are. Therapy exists for a reason, and people who can’t be bothered tp go/refuse to go becasue they don’t think they need it do not deserve a free pass for their behaviour. They either think they’re in the right or know they’re wrong and don’t care, and either was, it’s disgusting.
Not to mention their entire relationship is literally built on abuse.
This “preferences as a sexuality” thing needs to stop, man. People attracted to tall people aren’t “acrosexuals”, people attracted to green eyes aren’t “viridioculasexual” or some equally-butchered word. You’re… you’re allowed to just say “I like tall girls with green eyes” or whatever. That’s something you can just…do.
con artists that forge art and wine to sell to rich snobs for millions of dollars: cool, good
con artists that target marginalized groups and harass and make legal threats against people calling them on it: guillotine
…. art theft is art theft. Punish all of them the same or not at all.
man shut the fuck up
So crime is okay in some circumstances?
yes
selling $2 pins based off of characters from a wildly-known billion dollar franchise =/= selling t-shirts with characters from a small indie game and making more off of it than the developer even makes selling the game
Procrastination Station 