when the subject of “why do people believe things that are seriously wrong and harmful” comes up it feels like you kinda hear one of two perspectives:
“oh, that’s easy! it’s because they’re fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps”
or
“they just don’t have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don’t you feel sorry for her?”
and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they’ve figured everything out (you also do this)
they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)
they form conclusions before they’ve processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)
they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)
they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)
they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)
they listen to people who talk like ‘one of them’ and ignore others (you also do this)
they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)
they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)
the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge’ and 'wisdom’ and 'belief’ and 'understanding’ are biased so that what they don’t want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)
you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you’ve ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who’s wrong about important stuff doesn’t look like “well they’re inherently evil and i’m not”, it probably looks like a combination of:
natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)
being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)
random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn’t, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)
you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up
and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i’ve ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.
i know you’re doing your best. we’re all doing our best.
I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.
– https://search.marginalia.nu/ Search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and promotes websites that aren’t usually at the top of the list.
– https://www.worldcat.org/ Search engine for items in libraries (books, but also maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, etc.)
– https://scholar.google.com/ Search engine for scientific papers, reviews, etc. It’s still google, but a lot better than the normal search engine counterpart.
– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines A list of search engines sorted by subject, area, and more. If you’re searching on a specific area, it might be worth checking if there is one focused on that area.
Also, P.S.: Please stop using Google, and start using more privacy focused search engines, like DuckDuckGo or SearchX (opensource; personally haven’t used it yet, but it looks promising for privacy-focused users)
this is gonna sound dumb as hell but it NEVER OCCURRED TO ME that there could be folks are there maintaining open source search engines. i love open source software and i use a lot of it but it just! never crossed my mind! thank you SO MUCH @cea-tide i can’t WAIT to browse those links
alright so during into the spider-verse’s introduction to peter b. parker, we see his wedding, and he stomps on the wine glass right? this is a jewish wedding tradition, which makes this version of peter parker jewish (further confirmed in interviews – however, i believe this is enough by itself). it’s a nice nod to the jewish roots of the character.
we get to see a bunch of peter parkers throughout the spider-verse films, and none of them have any explicit religious associations like peter b. parker. except for one!
here we have gwen stacy’s peter parker and aunt may, from earth-65, saying grace over a meal. from my understanding, this is generally a christian practice – in judaism, we prefer to say short prayers before eating, and save the long, in-depth ones for afterwards. so to me, this was a clear example of the character being coded as christian. i was a little disappointed that they didn’t make peter parker jewish here too, but since across the spider-verse discusses variants and the differences between instances of the same person between different universes, i interpreted this as a continued commentary on peter parker’s ethnicity – although he was initially jewish-coded and one of his two creators, stan lee, is jewish, this is often erased, especially in more modern interpretations of the character.
and then i remembered that this peter parker also literally turns into the lizard.
“If it’s so hard to be homeless, how come they all have nicer phones than I do?”
If you work with the homeless, you hear this sentiment a lot. A lot.
Everyone who hates seeing their tax dollars go to the needy seems to think that this is the ultimate “gotcha”. How can that person possibly be homeless if they have a nice cell phone? How can homelessness really be so bad if you have an Android? How can social programs be underfunded when their clients have iPhones?
You want to know why the homeless have smartphones? There’s a couple of good reasons:
It’s leftover from a previous, more stable life. Homeless people aren’t video game characters, they don’t just spawn on street corners, fully formed.
Most people do not experience long-term homelessness - the average homeless person is on the streets for less than a month. These are people who used to have jobs, apartments, cars, etc, until some sort of catastrophe put them on the street. You might lose your apartment or car, but most people own their cellphone outright, and can hang onto it when something bad happens.
It was given to them by a concerned family member or friend. Most homeless people do actually have non-homeless family members and friends who care about them. Their family might not be able to let that person live with them at the moment, due to addiction or mental health problems, but they still need a way to get in touch with that person and check in on them. Giving them a cellphone is the easiest way to do that.
It was picked up second-hand. People upgrade to the newest device all the time, and when they do that, many of them will sell their old phones. It’s easy to find cheap, secondhand cellphones on the internet or in pawn shops, and they’re a valuable tool worth having.
It was given out by a social services agency or charity. When you work with the homeless, getting in touch with them is one of the biggest challenges you face. You need to be able to get hold of them at a moment’s notice to let them know about appointments, openings in important programs, updates on applications, and all sorts of other crucial information. Instead of wasting hours and gas driving around looking for people the old-fashioned way, many social agencies just give out cheap phones to their clients, to make sure that they can always contact them.
It doesn’t have a plan. Many people who see a homeless person on a cell phone assume that that person is also paying for a costly phone and data plan. That’s usually not the case. Many homeless people use pay-as-you-go phone minutes that they can top up whenever they happen to have the money. Even without any minutes, phones are valuable - free public wifi can be used to make phone calls, look up information and stay in contact with friends.
It’s for emergencies. By federal law, even old, deactivated cell phones are able to place calls to 911. Sleeping rough is dangerous, and it never hurts to have a phone nearby, even if its only use is to call for help.
Cell phones are probably the single most useful tool any homeless person can have - you can use them to look for shelter openings, hunt for jobs, navigate transit, stay connected to friends, find resources and information, remember appointments, wake yourself up on time, call for help, and entertain yourself through long and boring days. They are an essential tool, not a luxury item, and it’s unfair to suggest that homeless people somehow aren’t suffering just because they have one.
Instead of asking why that homeless person has a phone, ask yourself why they don’t have a safe place to sleep tonight.
This goes for poor or financially unstable people with nice things. They deserve nice things.
Had a slightly blazing row with my family about this when they said that no real refugee would have a mobile and they were all fake, trying to get into the country illegally. There were… words had.
I had this conversation with a fourth-grade class one time. I said, “Do you know what costs more than a phone?” and they said, “A house,” and that was the end of that.
just cos a friend hadn’t seen it - here’s marxist art critic john berger, discussing caravaggio with some school kids. it’s really interesting both as an example of pedagogy and as illustrative of how gender can work in art and how kids can relate to that almost intuitively
this is from Ways of Seeing, which is a documentary he made on demystifying art and capitalist culture more broadly, it’s all available for free on YouTube and i’d highly recommend you check it out. it’s truly incredible to me that he managed to get something so genuinely radical and accessible shown on the bbc in 1972!
Gender and AGAB are such integral parts of so many forms of oppression and I wish people would stop ignoring that.
For example, gay men. Why are they oppressed? Because they are men who love men. Their manhood is an integral part of why they suffer from homophobia. If they were women who loved men, it would not be an issue. A major part of why they are oppressed is because they are men, and if you remove manhood from the equation, the oppression no longer exists.
Like. This is not hard to grasp. Men can be oppressed for being men, and in many cases, their manhood is an integral part of their oppression, and their oppression wouldn’t exist without their gender playing a role in it.
“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”
— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)
i’m not gonna @ them or anything bc i kinda just want to muse abt this anonymously, but a political tumblr i really admire made a post like ‘life is the easiest it’s ever been now, we shouldn’t be looking at the past bc life was significantly harder back then, the idea that things were better for workers in the past is myth, you’re watching too much little house’
which. okay i see their point, and i’ve definitely been guilty of romanticizing the past (or even the present) in this regard.
on youtube there’s a video of an anthropologist who travelled to…gosh. the himalayas? to study a very remote society of subsistence farmers. and the video, while presented through the eyes of this fascinated white woman, was very interesting, it was also shockingly bleak. it was clear watching her speak the language of these people with them, having lived with them for years, that they did not want her to leave. not that they would keep her there! but it was very clear to me that her impending return to her own country was a trauma for them. one of the women even said, “you must pity us here. being where you are from. i am sad to be here. i wish you would take me with you.” she was smiling and seemed to be half-joking but her eyes said she kinda meant it too.
this same woman lost a son by suicide; he went to go to school in a city and must have faced hardship and abuse for being so different. she found his body hanged in the barn.
most of the people in the community were missing teeth, and most of them were eating a very limited diet. not much grew on the mountain, and hardly anything could be brought in because they were so treacherous to climb. yet they saw planes fly over them always. they knew, at least a bit, about what was out there. there was a little girl in particular that had all sorts of questions for the anthropologist. clearly very smart.
the women did all the backbreaking farming work in the summer, while the men left the village for industrial jobs and would return in the winter.
obviously this is an extreme example, and i want to make it clear that don’t agree with the idea that any way of life should be 'pitied’ as that is just colonialism with rose tinted glasses. they are a group of people with a lot of very specific knowledge if how to survive in one of the harshest environments in the world, which i respect the hell out of them for. but it was clear from the interviews, from how their life was structured, that it was not some beautiful cottagecore fantasy.
however. on the other hand. the more i read abt native american and first nation cultures, how they lived 200 years ago (post contact), the way that they were initially able to blend european technology with their own ways of life where it made sense for them to (steel knives instead of obsidian, bullets instead of arrows)- the more i read abt life before electricity, and how there are a number of well-designed, easy-to-repair mechanical inventions that seem to do as good of a job as or even better than electrical or computerized machines at certain tasks (thinking very specifically of the sewing machine and even the mechanical cash register)- the more i read about trains and bicycles and how much better they are for the environment than cars (electric trains powered by renewables even more so)-
i can’t help but feel like making life unnecessarily complicated for the sake of profit being “easier” is short-sighted.
i’m not saying throw out all computers. computers keep some people alive, and certainly better informed than any other invention in human history. and do i know as much abt this as the above two paragraphs imply? i do not. there should be scientific studies to determine the best way of completing certain tasks in terms of time and labor as well as resources required, to hit that sweet spot of maximum efficiency and sustainability without diminishing returns.
all i will definitively say is, we were wrong before about other things. we didn’t listen to indigenous knowledge about the environment and it’s biting us in the ass. we didn’t listen to the luddites and why they were actually against mechanized mills and it’s biting us in the ass. i just think that including other ways of thinking and being into our politics and trying to find a sustainable balance is key to facing the challenges ahead and building a better world not only for the next generation, but for generations after.
