DISCUSSION TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS!
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Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.
I know Ruby. She’s a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don’t they know how lovely she is?
68 is not that old. She’s only been getting social security for three years.
Here she is.
I wonder how loudly Conservatives would scream if she were interviewed today.
(via arlyiahshay)
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Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.so I believe it was actually more complicated than that, in interesting ways. Because at first, when they did blind auditions, they were STILL hiring more men.
…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor, and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didn’t even know that’s what they were picking up on, which just goes to show how tiny of a cue it takes for misogyny to kick in.
The case of blind auditions for orchestras and how it dramatically changed the gender makeup of orchestras is a very illuminating example of gender bias, and an interesting possible way of countering it.
You can be sexist without knowing it. You can be racist without knowing it. This is not a moral failing; it is a moral imperative to remember that you are fallible, and take steps to limit the damage your squishy ape brain’s foibles can cause.
The final chapter in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) describes this in detail.
What you don’t usually hear about when discussing this blind audition process is that after the blind auditions were implemented, when women had gotten many positions in the orchestra, men no longer saw being a member as prestigious and the salaries for the entire orchestra dropped.
(via arlyiahshay)
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Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
MOON LANDING DAY IS THURSDAY!
(via dduane)
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As utopian as the franchise is I don’t actually want Star Trek to correctly predict the future cause that would mean in our time we get world war 3 with drug-addicted fascist supersoldiers. Real ones know Star Trek is post-apocalyptic actually
Me: haha the Irish unification of 2024
Also me: uh oh the bell riots, the eugenics wars, the nuclear bombs
Don’t think I’ll ever get over the fact that so much of star trek history is supposed to be a warning that “HEY THIS IS WHERE THINGS WILL GO IF YOU DO NOTHING TO STOP THEM” and then we did nothing and now the only difference between sanctuary districts and skid row in la is that the walls are made of law instead of concrete and they don’t even adopt the pretense of it being to help the people living there
Star Trek said things are gonna get worse before they get better and rn we have to live through the getting worse part
(via hiraeth-starguy)
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LAPD detonated 5000 lbs of fireworks in the middle of a residential area, injuring at least 17 people and causing $900 million in various damages in a low-income, majority-POC neighborhood.
They then continue to pursue caging the person whose fireworks they stole while news media misreports to cover for police incompetency and destruction.
It took TWO YEARS to get the names of those involved with this incident. There are people still protesting, still living in hotels, still with unfulfilled claims to the city from this shit
(via transmechanicus)
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oligopspispopd-deactivated20221:
jv:
This is akin all those hot takes about the 2k bug being an hoax:
“Remember when they told us every computer was going to crash on 1/1/01 and there would be chaos and then nothing happened?”
Yeah, I remember. And I’m sure every programmer and sysadmin that contributed the billion person/hour global effort to prevent it also remembers.
No one talks about acid rain anymore, either. And that’s a very good thing.
see also START and START II, which significantly reduced nuclear stockpiles
International cooperation is actually so effective that most people don’t even notice it happening, and then erroneously believe it can’t solve anything.
Fixing issues before they develop into actual disasters is such an underappreciated thing it hurts at all levels.
We don’t talk about acid rain because there isn’t any more acid rain because when acid rain started happening and we learned that the cause was mainly sulphur oxide and carbon monooxide from car exhausts, countries all over the world made it a law that car companies had to produce cars that produced less exhaust with better effectivenes (burning the fuel all the way to CO2 instead of the halfassed CO) and oil rafineries to remove the sulphur from the gasoline in the first place.
We don’t talk about computers crashing because of the turn of the century, because thousands of programmers worked very hard to write updates and patches for Every Single Program humanity as a whole used back in 1999 and then somehow managed to failtest, distribute, and update every single device and system, be it an online or offline one before the midnight of the 1st january of 2000.
On a much smaller scale, no one ever commenta or notices cleaners and housekeepers doing their job - be it at home or at whole buildings - because they always make sure that there’s nothing to notice. But don’t be fooled - at any point of your life you are one week of them not doing away from swimming in trash and filth with nothing to eat and nothing clean to wear. Only then you would notice.
Now it’s time to do that thing again and make sure that we don’t kill our whole planetary ecosystem within the next century.
(via prayforpiett)
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My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing
a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”
to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country
China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.
My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone]tenth century addition.”My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.”
This post keeps getting better
European problems include:
- Missing a turn and now you need to cross the border;
- Towns built 500 to 800 years ago with really small roads where cars can barely fit;
- That road/parking lot/etc they were building is gonna take twice the time to finish because they found Roman ruins AGAIN!
European problems extended:
WW2 bombs.
I love this post but also hate it because people never acknowledge the structures of native and indigenous people in America and Canada. We literally have pyramids here in Illinois that are thousands of years old.
There is stuff here from the Aztecs, but since it wasn’t made by settlers people think that America is only as old as when Europeans came over.
The population that got wiped out and displaced by Europeans is still here and needs to be acknowledged. America and Canada aren’t “young” and have more history than most ppl acknowledge.
RT only for the last post.
[Image description: headlines of WWII bombs either exploding unexpectedly in European towns and cities or being found during road works. /ID]
I went walking on some public footpaths in England and everyone was like “oh this one was a Roman roads, these are so ancient!” and I ended up cranky because there are ancient or at least hundred of year old roads in the Americas, we just don’t pay attention to them because Colonization.
To be clear - I don’t have any issue with OP’s statement (or even any of the reblogs). Im just cranky at the US educational system. And boomers, a little.
Where do you think the oldest shoes in the world are? China? Greece? Iraq?
they’re from Oregon:
Catalog #1-33612 and #1-31699
Sagebrush Sandals: Fort Rock Cave, Oregon, ca. 10,000 years old -
um excuse me? when did we all decide that the value of a degree rested on the earnings after graduation? and how can you honestly compare the skills learned in a humanities degree to those of a vocational degree like nursing or even engineering? and what happened to ummmm i dunno learning because learning is fun and good and knowledge for the sake of knowledge? and of course this is going to marginalise people who are already marginalised because why wouldn’t it. (full article)
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Say the quiet part out loud: they believe that black people could never earn their way into college legitimately, therefore all black students are affirmative action. That’s the foundation of their actual argument, not demographics. They don’t care about statistics and ratios, they care that schools aren’t segregated.
^ This part.
Not saying that having the information doesn’t help, sure it won’t change shitheels’ minds, but it’s good to have for the people they haven’t pulled over, and to help the people being harmed to know that YES the numbers DO say what you see, it’s NOT subjective.
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[ID: Tweet via Andréa Becker @andreavbecker.
Reminder before everyone gets really into “threads”: Meta actively HELPS law enforcement criminalize people seeking abortions in banned states
an 18 year old and her mom are facing prison time for an at home abortion and it’s all thanks to meta handing over facebook messages/end ID]