the facts are, GMOs are the future and the key to increasing crop production for our increasing population if your goal is to keep up food production for more people. remember, the goal right now in agriculture- the key goal that we’re throwing everything into because big yikes fam- is to produce more food off less. so like, vertical farming? good, saves space. smaller plants with bigger yield? great, saves space, can plant more and get more food. plants that are resistant to drought? to high temps? to low fertilizer? amazing, it means you have hardier plants that you can put in places that regular plants wouldn’t be able to stand.
so are they agriculturally efficient? hell yeah, because remember, it takes about 10 years for a crop in testing- GMO or not- to reach a point in development where it can be submitted for approval by the USDA for the market (something I’ve learned in my current job). imagine doing all breeding without GMOs. you would literally be able to do one cross a year, maybe two if you’re in a warmer area (this is why a lot of soybean breeding has been moved to South America, where they can do twice as much breeding). with GMOs, you can develop and test stuff faster, so by a monetary standpoint it’s awesome.
lets not forget that GMO crops can withstand more because of the pure amount of precision put into them. like, lets say your corn breaks a lot. you can spend 3-4 years meticulously cross breeding your developing strain with a break-resistant variety to get that trait in, or you can just cut and paste in the gene. and get this: it doesn’t even have to be from the break resistant variety. you can pull it from another plant that might be better at not breaking, and get an even better resulting variety.
another thing that we can’t forget about is that new GMO tech helps us keep up with pests and diseases. at work, i’ve seen experiments involving root pests; plants infected had root systems destroyed down to a single tap root. imagine that happening to a farmer’s field. like, all of it. that’s the kind of thing we’re up against here; to stop infestations and to solve new challenges quickly by developing technology quickly, while still improving the plant to commercial level.
when talking to the breeders at work, they told me that the industry as a whole recently upped its goal from creating a crop that would give each farmer a 200 bushel harvest (200 bushels has been the goal for the past 30 years; they’ve recently reached it and exceeded it) to 300 bushels per harvest. they have to do this just by modifying the plants. they have no control over how much the farmer plants and/or how many fields they have.
to give some perspective here, one bushel is 60 pounds of grain. they’re aiming to have each farmer that buys their products be able to reliably harvest and sell 18,000 pounds of grain per year.
the moral of the story is that the breeding and agri industries are under a lot of pressure here, and they have to work fast, because the population is rising.
knock knock
whos there?
dwindling nitrogen supplies in farmland and unsustainable farming practices but im gonna save that for another time
are they healthier? it depends on what you believe. like, what we’ve found so far is that GMOs don’t hurt you. some of them have added vitamins that can help you (lets not forget the famous GMO golden rice, which uses a daffodil gene coupled with a soil bacterium gene to make a rice variety produce a huuuuuge amount of vitamin A. this has been so effective in solving vitamin deficiencies and health problems in 3rd world countries since it was introduced in 2005 that its won awards and been used as a universal case study for the whole “GMO plants” thing) but most are just like. idk. kind of there? they help the health of the plant and help the farmer bring in income, so???? idk???
are they better for the environment? i have no idea. i suppose indirectly, because like. if you have a heartier plant you have to clear less land for agriculture?? (can anyone weigh in here?). But if these got out into the wild, the effects could be DEVASTATING, which is why the USDA and related government organizations (depending on where you live) make it so you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what you’re putting out into production won’t be crazy damaging if it magically gets out somehow.
ethically: i have no idea man. like im still super split on it. my scientist self says “you can literally buy everything to do it and modify plants to produce heat right in your own home right now” but then im like……………..idk man we just dont know. i dont want to hurt my plant friends. if this hurts our plant friends. idk
(hears the siren song, waddles into the fray)
Re: health – the only GMO plant bred for health so far (that I know of) has been the Golden Rice. and know that Golden Rice also faced a HUGE backlash from anti-GMO activists.
Golden Rice is just rice + beta carotene, that stuff that makes your carrots orange. Your body converts beta carotene into Vitamin A, which allows you to live and not be blind. People in developing countries with poor diets, especially children and pregnant women, can have huge difficulties getting access to enough Beta Carotene so scientists thought it would be super helpful to add it to a dietary staple – rice. Even Bill and Melinda Gates think that this is a great idea.
Wikipedia: “The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[24] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[25] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk.“
Anti-GMO activists HATE it though, so there’s currently a lot of difficulties for farmers in developing countries to get access to Golden Rice. They tend to prefer having people take supplements, which they can’t always get (they are provided – sometimes – by charities), and can’t make on their own (which leaves them dependent on others), instead of letting local farmers help solve this problem.
There are also projects to increase the amount of zinc in various cereal crops and increase the protein in sorghum and cassava. These are all called Biofortification, in case you want to research it more.
Something of a holy grail for agriculture would be to transfer the nitrogen fixing relationship/ability of Fabacea to say, corn. This means that you could enable the corn plant to do what Fabacea does – they make friends with things in the soil, are and able to use the Nitrogen which makes up 78% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen-fixing corn would be a world-changing nobel-prize winning kind of achievement. This would dramatically improve soil health and substantially decrease the amount of fertilizers needed.
Some plant scientists in the UK are working on this. It’s incredibly technically difficult.
Better for the environment: GMOs are used to do different things, so it’s hard to talk broadly. The plants that have Bt (Bacillus thurengenisis, a naturally occurring organism and is widely used in organic agriculture) with them ARE better for the environment, in that farmers use way fewer pesticides since they effectively produce their own. I read a study awhile back that certain water ways in China are cleaner thanks to Bt GMOs. There have been some concerns that this will end up with overuse of Bt, pests will evolve past it, and we’re back at the same problem of pests destroying the things we want to eat (or, more likely, animal feed… so much of what we grow is animal feed it’s pretty insane). The thing is, there’s lots of different strains of Bt, scientists keep running across new ones. But we’ll never get away from the arms race that is humans vs pests when it comes to this, it’s as old as agriculture itself.
Papaya ringspot virus – driving Papayas in Hawai’i to extinction
Ethically: People were upset that the terminator gene existed, the public threw such a shitfit that no plants were ever released with them. So now instead everyone freaks out that genes from the GMO plants could end up in the wild. Sometimes, you can’t win.
Scientists were able to save the Papaya trees in Hawai’i thanks to GMO technology. The Papaya Ringspot Virus came through that was wiping out the Papaya trees there to and destroying the livelihoods of many farmers. It was so bad that it was thought that Papaya trees might go extinct, until a few genes were inserted to make them resistant to the virus. There are still anti-GMO activists upset about this for some reason.
Cheese – cheese is made using a a coagulant called rennet. The main enzyme in rennet is chymosin. The old, traditional way of accessing chymosin was from the stomach lining of baby cows. Rennet was/is a byproduct of the veal industry. A combination of people starting to give a shit about animals, increased human population, and increased demands for cheese, meant that rennet prices were all over the place. Scientists managed to create a microbe that could produce chymosin by implanting certain bovine cells, and ended up with a purer product, at a cheaper price, with no baby cows slaughtered in the process. 90% of cheese in the US is made using GMO chymosin aka fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC). Vermont made all dairy products exempt from their non-GMO labeling. However, if you want dead baby cows (or dead unborn baby cows) as part of your cheese making process, insist on buying USDA-organic cheese.
There are tons of non-plant uses for GMOs. We have been using GMOs in healthcare since the 1980s, which has made things safer – no longer using dead animals and human cadavers to harvest certain things. The cadavers in particular were a problem, they were spreading
Creutzfelt-Jacob syndrome, which destroys your brain and takes your life, usually in the span of a year. Prions are a nasty business. Children needing human growth hormones were the ones acquiring and dying from it. Now we make hyper-specialized GMO bacteria and yeast to crank out things like insulin, human growth hormone (without prions), and antibodies to diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer, among other helpful things.
GMOs are also used extensively in science, from breeding special mice to experiment on to creating special fish that will glow in the presence of certain pollutants. There’s new developments every day.
Could there be bad things done with GMOs? Yes, as with every technology, there can be bad decisions or unforeseen consequences and ethical conundrums. These are important conversations.
I frequently find myself at a loss when I discover the mindset that the Jedi Council, the Jedi Order, and even Obi-Wan provided a particularly good environment for Anakin to learn/grow up in. By comparing Anakin in TPM to AoTC, I believe it will become quite clear by the change in Anakin that the Temple provided an inadequate place for him to grow.
In TPM Anakin is a very self-confident boy. He is aware of his capabilities and limitations, expresses his opinion firmly, and, as a rule, doesn’t allow his detractors to get him down, or put him down. To list some examples:
He has the courage to initiate a conversation with Padme
In the novelisation, he even says that he’s going to marry her.
He stands up to Sebulba and confidently imitates a conversation with Qui-Gon
He invites perfect strangers to his home.
He calls Qui-Gon out on being a Jedi
He calls Qui-Gon out on slavery
He insists that he can win a podrace, and defends himself when his abilities are questioned
He ignores the ridicule of the children in his community
He talks back to the Council, not rudely, but forcefully.
He asks Ric Olie about piloting and is told he “catches on quick.”
He says he’s going to “see them all,” when he asks about star systems
He refuses to let people destroy his dreams-hard to do when you’re a slave.
He even talks back to and defends himself to Watto-his owner.
Clearly, Anakin is a very confident, and self-possessed individual. He states his opinions firmly, and defends them with conviction. Let’s compare that to AoTC Anakin:
Is far more nervous around Padme (which can admittedly be chalked up to hormones.)
Is shot down hard by Obi-Wan when he expresses his opinions-He does not ever really try and defend himself
Obi-Wan actually seems surprised he stands up as much as he does-clearly it is a rare occurrence that Anakin states his mind like that.
Anakin looks scared of what he’s done when he backs down
He looks timid in front of the Council-Far more so than in TPM
He is told “don’t do anything without first discussing it with either” Obi-Wan or the Council.
He just accepts Padme’s harsh criticism when he points out that she should discuss security concerns with him: Despite the fact that she is in the wrong, he does nothing to defend himself.
He expresses the opinions of Obi-Wan, Yoda, and mace, far more than he does his own. He actually seems afraid to give his opinions, as a rule.
There is a vast difference then between TPM!Anakin and AoTC!Anakin. The former defended his beliefs vehemently. The latter is afraid to even express them. Anakin only rants about Obi-Wan when Padme gives a hint of listening; it’s clear this has been pent-up in him for ages, but he hasn’t been able to let it out. Clearly, no one cares what he thinks or feels. When Padme shoots him down over security, he takes it meekly, but when she expressed doubt with him in TPM over his ability to win the Boonta, he just brushed it off, and told her “he’d win this time.” Before, in TPM, he said what he thought, now he just says “Master so-and-so thinks…” He feels uncomfortable saying what he really thinks. He honestly was more comfortable speaking up as a slave, than as a Jedi. Even just the body language difference can tell you that he’s gone from sure of himself to intensely insecure.
This is Anakin in TPM sticking up to his owner:
This is Anakin in AoTC, free, ostensibly, with his teacher:
It’s like chalk and cheese. One boy is sure of himself, the other looks brow-beaten. What could have caused such a massive shift in self-esteem? Well, a classic cause would be bullying. A child who is different, for whatever reason, gets humiliated, ostracized, beat-up, talked down to, and loses their self-confidence. I don’t doubt the same thing happened to Anakin. He was from the Outer Rim. He began his training late. He was different, unnaturally gifted. I’ve no doubt that was rough, and clearly he wasn’t given any kind of support to help with that, rather he was given the opposite. Hence, he is insecure.
This is in no way his fault. He’s barely an adult by AoTC, and it is up to the adults responsible for him during his childhood to provide a safe environment, if not a safe haven, for him to grow up in. Clearly, the Jedi have failed to do this. Indeed, as shown when Obi-Wan says “don’t do anything without consulting either myself or the Council,” they clearly had no faith in him whatsoever, (after ten years), so why should he believe in himself? In RoTS, Windu actually says when Anakin tells him about Palpatine, “If what you say is true, you will have earned my trust.” In thirteen years, Anakin who has worked diligently, and loyally as a Jedi, and he’s never earned Windu’s trust or respect! That is cold. What was Anakin suppose to do anyway as a boy? Go back to Tatooine? Anakin really didn’t have much choice but to stay. At least, with the Jedi he would get a good education, and would learn how to use the Force. There was nothing for him on Tatooine. What good would he do? By staying with the Jedi, at least until he was knighted, he might be able to help when he finally goes back to Tatooine. He’ll have the Force, and an education that would serve him well. (Then, of course, the war started so that went out the air-lock…) No, the fault for Anakin’s low self-esteem lies entirely with the Jedi Order, Obi-Wan, and the Jedi Council. You cannot blame Anakin, especially since he was a child at the time. Frankly, the Council should be ashamed of themselves. If you adopt a child, and he wilts that much under your care, you need to take a good hard look at yourselves.
I would have thought that it was bad writing too. However, the theme of the apathetic inadequacy of the Jedi is carried from TPM through to RoTS. In TPM, Mace Windu tests Anakin only as a formality, because “he’s too old.” When Qui-Gon insists that Anakin be tested, Windu just waves a hand and says “bring him before us then.” He’s pretty much done with it all. Unsurprisingly, the Council then rejects Anakin, (while talking about Anakin as if he wasn’t even there.) That’s not really the worst bit though, when Qui-Gon points out that Anakin has nowhere to go, they don’t express any concern for his well-being, his education, his future, even though he’s a freed slave with few options, and no money: He’s a child at their mercy. Even when this fact is pointed out to them they just say he’s Qui-Gon’s “ward” now to do with as he pleases, just don’t train him. How callous! I mean, would you do that to a poor boy with no prospects who needed your help desperately?
By the time TPM ends, Anakin’s behaviour is already beginning to foreshadow what happens in AoTC. He’s picked up on all this and this is how he looks when he finds out Obi-Wan is going to be the one to train him:
This isn’t just grief from Qui-Gon’s death; Anakin’s expression, the above expression, comes as a direct result of Obi-Wan’s promise. Anakin’s grief is enhanced by his insecurity over his future. As I pointed out in my post The Team: Built on Weak Foundations, Anakin knew that Obi-Wan initially didn’t believe he should be trained, and was even jealous of him due to Qui-Gon’s actions in the Council room. Anakin had every reason to be afraid that things weren’t going to go well, and they didn’t. Yes, he and Obi-Wan became friends, which was nice, but he was never allowed to feel safe in his environment at the Temple, because of the Council’s apathy, even antipathy toward him which most of the other Jedi would have picked up on and followed like Lemmings. After all, why wouldn’t they do what the wise and noble Council does? Hence, we get Anakin’s low self-esteem in AoTC.
By the time RoTS comes around, Anakin is doing a bit better. He has command of his own men. He’s no longer an apprentice. He’s gained confidence now that he’s needed as a General in the GAR, and he’s been acknowledged to be a really good one which also helps: He’s the Hero With no Fear. As a result, he pushes back a bit more, but the underlying timidity he has with the Council doesn’t quite go away:
While, Anakin starts to really express a lot of his deeply rooted anger that stems from way back in his childhood, both with the Jedi and from slaver, in RoTS, and the Council takes a lot of it, (ignoring Operation Knighthood), he still doesn’t get one of the things he desperately needs, and craves: Validation and respect. Anakin honestly just needs them to tell him he did a good job, and that they’re proud of him, but the Council can’t quite seem to manage it. He might get “arrogant.” (Oh, please. He wouldn’t be so keen to prove what he can do, if you’d just say “you did well, kid!) By the time RoTS comes around, Obi-Wan is the only one who ever really tells him he’s doing a good job, and therefore he is placed in the position of fielding between Anakin and the Council, as the relationship continues to break down.
Nevertheless, despite his slowly regaining confidence, and the increasingly tense dynamic between Anakin and the Council, Anakin still doesn’t feel secure enough to just stand his ground, or even leave. This is a result of years of emotional abuse. Anakin was physically and emotionally abused as a child on Tatooine, and emotionally, and arguably, spiritually abused as a an apprentice to the Jedi. To be honest, I think this behaviour was mostly reserved for Anakin. The Jedi may not have been stellar in raising other members of their Order; they lost sight of what their Code really meant some time prior to the PT. However, they came down cruelly on Anakin, because he was different, and they were scared of what that meant. (Fear leads to the Dark Side, oh yes, but you helped him on his journey through your own fear.)
to make that funeral scene even worse: Anakin has to ASK what’s going to happen to him.
I mean, think about it. The kid is all alone on a strange planet, surrounded by people he hardly knows, and the ONE GUY who appeared to be in his corner is dead, and no one will tell him what’s going on, or what will happen to him. it’s been at LEAST two weeks – to allow for Padme to consolidate her hold on the planet well enough for the Supreme Chancellor to visit, him to be ELECTED, and to hold talks with the Gungans as to how to include their voice in Naboo’s government from now on. Likely it’s longer. And in all that time, ALL that TIME, no one says ONE single WORD about what’s going to happen to Anakin going forward.
He can’t go back to Tattooine. Padme isn’t offering him a place on Naboo, she likely thinks that he’s already part of the Jedi and wouldn’t be receptive to her offer even if she did consider it.
Obi-wan has his head up his own ass and can’t be bothered to consider any feelings other than his own. He doesn’t get that with his new teaching gig, come responsibilities toward the well being (including emotional well being) of his charge. So he’s off in his own head during the funeral, and Anakin is forced to speak up.
and Jake Loyd is perfect here. Anakin’s voice is *resigned* as he askes the question. you can tell that the anxieties have already burned themselves out, and there’s nothing left but resigned acceptance. there’s no use fighting what comes next, because there’s nothing left to fight.
It’s only THEN that Obi-wan turns. Turns and tells Anakin that he has permission to train Anakin as a Jedi. Then he promises Anakin that he WILL be a Jedi, as if that makes it all alright.
It doesn’t.
Okay, so, just up my dash I saw a post by @furiousgoldfish listing signs that your family is abusive and I was just blown away by the sheer number of indicators seen in Anakin’s relationship with Obi-Wan and the Jedi. I’ve highlighted examples from the films and TCW.
signs that your family is abusive:
you feel the urge to hide from them whenever you’re vulnerable
you cannot bear the idea of them seeing you cry
when you’re hurt or in pain, you don’t go to them because you feel
they’ll tell you that you deserved it or that it was your fault
After Obi-Wan’s terrible advice about his prophetic dreams in AotC, Anakin doesn’t got to him about them in RotS. The ‘advice’ he receives from Yoda is basically to suck it up because grief and fear are wrong.
you don’t feel like you can confide in them, either because they don’t
seem to care, or try to control how you act, or yell at you and punish you, or
use the information against you
After Obi-Wan dismisses Anakin’s concerns about his mother, allying with the Hutts, the Jedi’s role in the war, the Jedi’s behavior regarding the Chancellor, etc., Anakin stops coming to him with his problems. He also keeps his marriage a secret out of fear of Obi-Wan and the Jedi’s reaction.
you feel very self-conscious around them and keep expecting criticism
and insults
Look at the way he sits in AotC and that tiny flinch when Obi-Wan tears into him.
you can’t tell them about your struggles because you already know
they’ll side against you
See my previous comments about Anakin keeping secrets from Obi-Wan.
you keep things in your life secret from them because you have a feeling
they would ridicule, humiliate, and judge you if they knew, or take everything
away from you
Same as above
you feel scared of letting them know when they hurt you
After Obi-Wan fakes his death in the Deception Arc of TCW, Anakin is told by both Yoda and Obi-Wan that the pain he feels is his own fault.
you feel scared and guilty when you so much as think about them in a bad
way
Anakin rants against Obi-Wan repeatedly in AotC, often times while crying and immediately denying that he feels what he just said.
you feel the urge to remind yourself of all the things they did for you,
whenever something bad comes up, to be sure that you’re seeing them the way
they want to be seen by you
See previous comment.
you’re scared of being accused of being a burden to them
Obi-Wan and the Council make it clear in TPM that they don’t actually want Anakin and that his presence is a severe inconvenience to them. When Obi-Wan complains in AotC that Anakin will be the death of him, Anakin is clearly hurt.
you’re scared to hold them responsible for things they did to you,
because you know they would argue otherwise, and insist they had full right to
do what they did, or that you made it up
See previous statement
you have the inner sense of dread that nothing you ever do or say will
be taken seriously by them, and your life will always look like a joke to them
you dream of living far away from them and feel guilty for wanting to
cut them from your life
Anakin wants to leave the Jedi, he says as much to Ahsoka, but clearly feels to afraid to actually do it.
you don’t feel like you’re really important in comparison to them, it
feels like it’s better to just step aside and let them be important, your life
doesn’t matter as much anyway
In RotS, Anakin says that he wants more, but is aware that he shouldn’t. He knows his needs are wrong and selfish and he should feel ashamed.
you’re worried about how your every action might affect their life,
their reputation and social standing
you feel that they’re ashamed of you and you’re trying your best not to
bring further shame on the family
Anakin apologizes constantly in AotC.
you feel like you’ll owe them for the rest of your life and nothing you
ever do will be enough to erase the debt, and this fills you with dread and
feeling of being trapped
The Jedi freed Anakin from slavery. The Jedi took him on even when they clearly didn’t want to. Obi-Wan potentially put his career on the line to train Anakin even though he obviously didn’t like him. Anakin can never repay that debt and they make sure he knows it.
you don’t count on their help when you’re in trouble, you’re scared of them
finding out and punishing you for being in trouble in the first place
Anakin doesn’t tell Obi-Wan about what happened on Tatooine. He doesn’t tell him about Padme. He deliberately with holds information about his relationship troubles, even when asked about them.
you don’t count on them sharing their resources with you, you know you
have to be grateful for how much they’ve given you already and feel like you
have no right to ask for anything more, even if you need it
you can’t feel warmth or safety when surrounded by family, instead you
wish you didn’t have to be there, and seek a place to hide and protect yourself
holidays spent with family are just painful and something you try to
endure instead of enjoy
you can’t imagine a world where you’re free and not defined by these
people
Anakin has a wife he could easily choose to be with, but he stays because he can’t imagine not being a Jedi.
Now, I’m not saying that Obi-Wan and the Jedi set out to be abusive, but that was clearly the end result. What they set out to be was in control. Anakin was too old. He was too powerful. He was too dangerous. He needed to be contained. Obi-Wan says as much to Yoda and Mace in AotC. Yoda says as much to Anakin in TCW Deception Arc.
So what did they do? They isolated him from his family and friends. They criticized him constantly. They reminded him how unruly and disobedient and wrong he was. They taught him that he was wrong to ever want anything more. The end result is that they took a confident, happy boy and turned him into an uncertain and unstable mess. I guess that made him easier to control. Palpatine certainly thought so.
It was confirmed in Obi-Wan and Anakin that he was bullied at the temple for being different and that not only did they ignore this but they made him apologize to his bullies whenever he retaliated. As someone who had this happen to them, I can tell you it absolutely torpedos any chance you have of standing up for yourself if you need to.
Like the Jedi Council had no idea how to deal with the trauma of being a former slave. It was Anakin’s choice to turn, it always was, but they infinitely worsened the process due to their clumsiness and prioritizing Anakin the weapon over Anakin the person.
No one says it, but Beru effectively saved the galaxy when she raised Luke as Luke before the chosen one or Anakin’s son or anything else. Anakin didn’t have someone like Beru to do that for him. Obi-Wan tried, but in the end he wasn’t good enough.
This. This this this. The Jedi fucked Anakin up. They didn’t set out to do it, but they did, and they did it thoroughly.
every time I see more of the ‘ao3 is evil’ crap circulating I think, ‘well, tumblr is evil too and I don’t see you stop using it’
You know, the more I think about this, the more I think the real complaint isn’t that AO3 hosts “evil” content, it’s that it doesn’t allow harassment/dogpiling of “evil” creators as easily as Tumblr. Abuse won’t remove or even re-tag a work except in a handful of very specific cases, but they will suspend or ban users for harassment, including filing repeated unfounded Abuse reports. Authors also have at least some ability to screen/block comments on works, and there’s no direct messaging system outside of commenting on works through which to pursue harassment. You can follow a creator but you can’t block them (much less encourage others to do the same).
Tumblr, by contrast, generally ignores any abuse report that doesn’t involve the DMCA, and aggressive anons can and have driven bloggers off the site entirely. The fact that the same tactics are used by social justice bloggers and neo-Nazis (for instance) doesn’t matter – they’re the affordances of the site, by accident or design, and an entire fannish generation have gotten very used to performing their fannish (and moral) identity in this fashion.
(I thinks it’s relevant that AO3 was designed by fandom’s LJ generation and in some respect mirrors the affordances of LJ circa 2010. Tumblr is a very different site and that, moreso than age differences, seems to be at the root of this – though of course age intersect with site experience in a non-trivial way.)
ding ding ding ding.
Ao3 requires you to police your own consumption of content. Ao3 won’t let you destroy someone’s online presence simply because you don’t like it. Ao3 won’t let you impose your own morality on other without cause.
If you have issues with this, and the fact that Ao3 requires you to have responsibility and agency, then you seriously need to sit down and have a damned good long hard look at yourself.
The question I usually fail to see being answered when people bitch about the content on AO3 is – so who gets to decide?
You? Me? A committee of my friends? Of yours? Of those who have the most kudos? Of those who have no interest in fandom, but want to protect other people from dangerous content, whatever it may be? Who gets that power, and how long will they have it?
Who are you comfortable with giving the power of regulating all the content? What happens in grey areas? What happens when something you like isn’t liked by the Decider? Is there an appeal? Who gets to make the arguments for and against something?
The world is complex and there are no easy answers.
The impossibility of creating a censorship board that curates based on content is a great reason why those things don’t exist, and shouldn’t.
Certain people are screaming that AO3 is bad because it’s not a “safe space.” The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers. And it does a pretty good job of that. It was designed to be a place where writers are safe from arbitrary content rule changes, random and unwarned deletions, and abuse-report abuse (which is common on ff.net). The Four Big Warnings + CNTW system is beautiful in its fairness and simplicity.
Antis can’t take control of it. And because control-freakdom is at the heart of their “movement,” this drives them into frenzies. Good. It motivated me to dig a little deeper into my pocket to donate on the last drive. For all the pleasure AO3 has given me over the years, that’s money well spent.
The real problem they have, though, is that AO3 was created to be a safe space – for writers.
Preach it loud and hard!
I’m a member of the LJ generation, and when I first came to Tumblr (grudgingly and out of desperation, I might add, since it tragically seems to be the only place to really connect with other fandom peeps) I was horrified at how people here had established this sort of fucked up bully culture, where nobody is responsible for monitoring their own consumption, and rather they expect everyone else to custom tailor content to the whims and desires of the Shrieking Banshee Masses. And woe be to the person who doesn’t bend and break! “I’m going to bully you while accusing you and your Big Mean Poopie Content of being the actual bully, so I can hopefully distract you and others from realizing I’m being a royal intrusive asshat who failed Astronomy 101 b/c I clearly believe the world revolves around me.”
The irony here is that this in itself is an abuse tactic – victim blaming with a side of gaslighting. Pot, meet kettle.
And it’s the exact same mentality that drives right-wing lunatics to kick up a fuss about the existence of icky cootie gay people in media because we need to “protect family values”, or who take to screeching at Starbucks because their particular religious symbolism isn’t portrayed on the winter holiday cups and OMG WAR ON CHRISTMAS, STARBUCKS STOP OPPRESSING ME BY NOT CATERING TO MY PERSONAL TASTE.
The mentality is one and the same – “Cater to ME ME ME or FACE MY DIVINE WRATH even if it means taking away other people’s freedom!” while hiding behind a flimsy-ass shield of faux righteous anger.
And when these bozos find an environment or situation where they’re unable or not allowed to bully people into silence and submission, they stomp their feet and pitch a tantrum and claim that they’re the ones being oppressed. Identical shit, different pile, and it’s the exact same infantile, schoolyard rubbish no matter which side it’s coming from.
This was a really interesting read. The last poster in particular but all of it.
Okay, so I find the history behind this discussion really interesting, because there are two things that stand out to me. One is the thought AO3′s culture is equivalent to LJ circa 2010. This is almost true, except you actually have to go back further. Ao3 and Dreamwidth are both specifically trying to recreate the fan culture of Livejournal from 1999-2007, and I can say that with some authority because A) I was there (olllld) and B) both were founded in 2008/09 as a direct response to the shit happening on LiveJournal and Fanlib.
The other thing is the idea that anon-harassment culture started with Tumblr. Because, kiddos, did it ever not. Tumblr is very much Fanfiction.net circa 1998-forward. (That’s right, FF.N was basically always awful.) But how we got from there to here is actually really interesting And tangly. And long.
Up to the late 1990s, fan communities were often small and decentralized because there was a huge fear that fans would be targeted by content creators if they drew too much attention. Since several authors (Anne Rice, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffery) actually DID issue cease&desists to fan creators, it’s kind of understandable where the fear came from. It’s also why you still see fanfic floating around with disclaimers, something young!tumblr loves to mock.
Harry Potter changed *everything*. Like, I really can’t emphasize how much. Fanfiction was always there, being shared on email lists or privately hosted or literally mailed cross country. But Harry Potter hit BIG in 1997. It had a massive crossover appeal that hadn’t been seen since probably the original Star Trek, and the baby Internet was all. over. it. If you weren’t there, imagine Twilight. But bigger. And J.K. Rowling stood out from other creators by condoning fanfiction in her very early interviews. Not to mention there was a lot of down time between books and, as you might know, the fans do not do well unpoliced.
This led to, I’m not kidding, an explosion of sites like FF.N. I don’t think a lot of younger users get how revolutionary AO3 is: not just because it created a safe space, but because of how much it’s done to centralize fanfiction on the internet. We used to get our fix through webrings and e-serves, so in the late 90s/early 00s we thought nothing of having dozens of scattered fanfic sites.
At the same time, the Digital Millennium Copywrite Act was coming down. The legality of fanworks was getting more and more complex. And no one knew how to handle these questions, because they had literally never come up before. When it was just authors going after individual fans, things usually went quick and brutal. Fans had neither the money nor the legal teams to stand up to creators, even if (as we were slowly beginning to realize) we had a strong case to create and share fanworks. So, if you got hit with a takedown notice, you took your fic down and laid low, hoping to avoid any further interest.
But now the legal burden was shifting from individuals to well-funded corporations. Fanfic.net and LJ didn’t want to shut down their fan-contributors, who were creating a huge stream of free content and bringing in advertising revenue. At the same time, they didn’t want to get shut down by a lawsuit if Lucasfilm found Han/Chewie smut and decided to go after the real money. The next 10 years were basically all of us – authors, fan creators, website executives – stumbling through brand new legal territory and figuring it out by trial and error. FF.N erred on the side of caution by becoming more and more restrictive. They shut down the entire Anne McCaffrey and Anne Rice sections, and eventually banned “pornographic” fanfiction from the site in an attempt to cover their legal rears. (It backfired, unsurprisingly, because say what you will about fandom: we like our smut. Also, FF.N had other issues that we won’t get into here will discuss shortly.) A bunch of other sites folded or waned in popularity as fandom wars divided the fan population. Authors scattered to the winds, and a lot of them ended up on LJ.
LJ started out very user friendly. We’re talking an open source code, an almost entirely volunteer staff. Even after it was sold to 6Apart in 2005, LJ was pretty permissive. A lot of that had to do with the aforementioned DMCA, which protected ISPs and hosting corporations. Like I mentioned above, a lot of the migration from FF.N to LJ (as a place for fanfiction SPECIFICALLY) came when FF.N started banning explicit fanworks. Why? Because FF.N targeted these fanworks based entirely on user reports. “Tell us if you find porn,” FF.N said, “And we’ll take care of it.”
Backup real quick. LJ, in many ways, set the standard for online privacy in a way that was far ahead of its time. Friendslocked journals were the norm rather than the exception and many, many communities disallowed anonymous commenting. (I’m not saying LJ wasn’t toxic as fuck, by the way. It is 2017 and let’s all have a moment of acknowledgement for how terrible LJ culture actually could be.) But LJ, on the whole, was much, much better at self-policing than FF.N. On FF.N, all of your stuff was out in the open. It was just there. Anyone could read it, anyone could report it.
And these two sites coexisted. All BNFs had a private journal and a public FF.N page. So if I hated someone and I wanted to harass them off the internet, on LJ, I’d have to make multiple sock puppets and concoct elaborate multi-journal ruses to do it on LJ (haha, who would do THAT?). What am I to do? Simple: Head off to FF.N and anonymously flame them there!
FF.N became synonymous with anonymous hate long before the anti-smut censorship came down. But once those rules were in place, the system was rife for abuse by the Purity Police or grudgewankers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaay before it was cool to dm “kill urself” to someone on tumblr, it was happening on FF.N. All you, the early internet user, had to do was post a report link for your rival’s FF.N account on your LJ. Hate a pairing? A kink? Why not post a scathing rant, link included, to this captive audience of ALL YOUR FRIENDS.
Yeah, this system had no room for abuse.
So. FF.N opened the door and fandom came rushing through like the raging assholes we are. Certain Fandoms Alluded To Previously got so deeply divided that they split and formed their own fanfiction archives that occasionally rained hate on each other. Everyone else slowly withdrew to LJ, where locked communities offered some level of protection. Then, irony of ironies, fandom as a whole got targeted by the purity wankers. And of course, of course, it came back to Harry Potter.
It’s 2007. Things have quieted down since 2001, when certain unnamed people’s fics were targeted for plagiarism and deleted from FF.N even though, just to be clear, they actually were plagiarized and, while there was an element of mob persecution, the actual fact remains that the work in question was legitimately in violation of FF.N’s TOS.
Ahem. It’s 2007. And everyone’s fairly chill. Creators are far more comfortable with fanfiction and fan creators are confident in posting their work so long as they aren’t profiting directly from it. Hosting sites, meanwhile, are profiting from fanworks, but they’ve got the legal shield of the DMCA to hide behind, so they’re feeling A-OKAY. And then Warriors for Innocence appears. WfI existed before strikethrough, and they existed after, but they made their mark on fandom when they reported upwards of 500 journals, most of them fan journals and communities, to LJ. The theory runs as follows: 6A, the company who’d bought LJ 2 years prior, realizes that the DMCA didn’t protect them if the fan works in question are “indecent”. Compounding this, 6A is already trying to clean up the famdomier aspects of LJ. Either they’re looking for a sale, or sites like ONTD are bringing in massive amounts of hits. WfI brings 6A a perfect hit list, and 6A goes to work.
So one morning we all wake up and find that hundreds of journals, including the pornish_pixies community and several BNF’s personal journals, have been deleted. Literally gone: a lot of the media stored on these communities has been purged forever. Hope you had backups. Also gone: large swaths of the Pretty Gothic Lolita community, Lolita book discussion groups, and rape survivor communities.
In a quest to rid LJ of “pedophilia,” 6A wiped out a large swath of ethically questionable fanfic, and woke a beast. Again: We like our porn. 6A took a step back and restored some of the deleted journals, but the damage had been done. AO3 was already being discussed as a response to Fanlib, a hosting site that wanted to charge for access to fanfiction. (Yes, if you’ve been following along, that was a terrible idea. But that’s a post for another day.) But as AO3 began to change and grow, creators specifically wrote provisions into the TOS that guaranteed a strikethrough-esque event could never happen on the site. A specific kink or pairing would never be considered a violation of the TOS. The onus was on the reader, not the author, to protect themselves with the information given. Basically, AO3 took the early fandom nugget “Don’t like, don’t read” and made it policy. When peole say AO3 grew out of Livejournal, they’re specifically referencing this. One event that proved ALL OF OUR LONGSEATED FEARS WERE TRUUUUUUUUUE.
Rising from the ashes of LJ, you also had Dreamwidth. I’m actually kind of surprised DW wasn’t mentioned in the OP, since it grew out of the same ideology as AO3. Run by fans, for fans, because LJ (which at this point had been sold to SUP Media) had no idea what it was doing. Also like AO3, DW went to extreme lengths to make a safe fan culture inherent to the structure the site. Stay within the law, and DW and AO3 will back you up.
It’s worth noting that Tumblr actually predates Strikethrough. But Tumblr, unlike DW and AO3, wasn’t designed for fans. It didn’t carry the legacy of Strikethrough with it the way AO3 and DW did. So I guess– I have no evidence, but I’m surmising – that’s how it fell into the role of Natural Successor to Fanfic.net and Livejournal. It’s kind of inevitable, actually, that since neither LJ nor Tumblr was made for fans, they ended up falling into the same black hole of fandom collision. Kinkshaming people off the internet for literally as long as there’s been an internet. And then, on the other hand, you’ve got DW and AO3, who’ve watched fandom rip itself apart AT LEAST 3 times and are determined not to let it happen again. DW and AO3: We haven’t cared about the filthy shit you’re into since 2008.
That’s it, folks. Fandom mom wrote almost 2k words on early fandom and now she needs a nap.
#broken links I still haven’t deleted from my bookmarks list
THIS.
I was here for pretty much all of this. As an observer for most of it, under several layers of alternate identities. I could never articulate it as well.
Dairy industry is as evil as meat. No less harm for animals. Does it look natural that calf can’t drink milk so you can taste your piece of cheese?
GO VEGAN.
WRONG
That calf is wearing a nose tag. Nose tags are put on calves so that they are able to stay with their mothers longer, but are unable to nurse. They don’t NEED to nurse as they get older, they just get greedier and pushier and will bash up the cow’s udder and bruise it with their noses.
This nose-tag is so that calves can stay with their mothers, their mothers can remain pain-free and healthy, and nobody is stressed.
Educate yourselves you ignorant fucking tarts.
…really? You don’t think it might have anything to do with the milk being stolen for human consumption? At all? Not even a tiny bit?
Militant vegans can fuck right off
Based on fur texture and face shape, that calf is at least six months old, probably older. Calves can survive without actual cow milk even at three months, though older is better (calves weaned that early are usually fed a sort of formula for another couple months).
Also, nose tags like that one don’t go through the cow’s septum. They basically work like those fake septum rings for humans.
In addition to weaning the calves, another use for nose tags is protecting non-lactating cows. Sometimes weanlings or even adult cows will suck on themselves or other non-lactating cows; this can cause internal teat scarring bad enough to prevent that teat or teats from ever working. I’ve seen this happen, and it’s ugly, probably at least somewhat painful, and, if bad enough, would lead to the cow being slaughtered at a very young age because she can’t produce milk, has chronic mastitis, and/or can’t be milked with automatic milking equipment. So, nose tags actually prevent animal cruelty.
Also, calves will suck on anything remotely oblong (and attempt to eat literally anything), even if they are being adequately fed or overfed. Often they will suck on other calves’ ears, and, since ears are longer than teats and cows have upper as well as lower teeth in the back of their mouths, many calves get bites on their ears, which often become severely infected. I’m not sure if nose tags would work there, because physics—a non-toxic but bad-tasting ear paint would be better—but yeah, letting a calf put anything it wants in its mouth is not always a good idea.
reblogging for educational purposes.
reblogging for people being schooled
This was the funniest argument about false cruelty I have read.. Thank you.
I love this for 2 reasons: Most people don’t realize that in farming areas agriculture/horticulture/animal husbandry is part of public school education from as early on as 7th grade. (Though I remember dissecting cow eyes in 4th grade science sooo) I assure you fifteen year old farm kids know more about what constitutes animal cruelty in farms than thirty year old vegans with, or without an agenda.
Also that if you really want good quality beef/pork/eggs/milk/etc you don’t abuse your animals. Ever. That’s not the point and if you want to make any kind of money off your career choice, you are going to treat those creatures better than you treat yourself. You’ll call a vet five times for an infection in your herd before you visit the hospital for a missing foot on your own leg.
So. Yeah. Watch out, because we’re getting internet access these days. We’re on tumblr too.
P.S. The immigrant workers farming your supermarket produce have no health care or legal protection, and the Bolivians farming your 365 Organic Quinoa can’t afford to eat it. But PLEASE won’t someone think of the poor baby cows who won’t get off the tit?!
Also this is a LOT nicer than what mother cows do to calves that won’t be weaned. You know what mother cows do to calves that won’t wean? kick them in the head. Now I don’t know about vegans, but I’d rather have a nose tag that discouraged me from injuring my mother (because calves that don’t wean tend to chew on udders and make mother cows bleed) rather than being kicked in the head. Source: I grew up on a fucking cattle ranch. I have seen chickens skeletonize a mouse I KNOW SHIT.
“I have seen chickens skeletonize a mouse I KNOW SHIT.”
I’m sorry, what? What??? WHAT??? you can’t just leave it there please explain @thehornedwitch
Happy to explain! See, chickens are omnivorous. They eat bugs, plants, and meatstuffs. Y’know how crows and ravens and things eat meat? Well, chickens too. Ours had a particular fondness for ham when someone accidentally put it into the bucket of good scraps we set aside for the chickens. A bucket we tried to keep as meat-free as possible, because few things are more terrifying than a chicken looking you in the eyes as it scarfs down ham. Anyway, back to the mouse. One day i was doing Chicken Chores, like gathering eggs, putting out grain, emptying the bucket of greens, etc, when a mouse runs across the pen. All at once, eight or so chickens stop dead, look at it, and SWARM. Now I’m six at this point in time and developing a healthy fear of chickens, and so do nothing. By the time the chickens are done, all that is left of the mouse is its bones. I left the chicken pen very, very quickly. Chickens crave meat. They were dinosaurs. They did not forget that they were dinosaurs. They will also cannibalize each other with reckless abandon. Sometimes we just had to remove one chicken to its own private pen away from the others because no matter what we did, that specific one always tried to eat the other chickens. We had one that really liked other chicken’s eyes. Bear in mind, our pens ensured each chicken had about five to six square feet all its own if you managed to space every chicken out evenly, we never locked them in teensy pen things, and fed them LOTS. These chickens just really, really wanted to maim. Chickens that are not Buff Orpingtons are the devil. Buff Orpingtons are sweethearts. If you must have chickens, have that kind. And never get Guineas. Guineas are SATAN INCARNATE. THEY SMELL FEAR.
Holy shit, I dont think I’ll ever use chicken as an insult again.
Holy Shit, same here that is terrifying
Will I’m using it as a compliment
I love farm animals.
“Chickens crave meat. They were dinosaurs. They did not forget that they were dinosaurs.”
If you’ve ever looked a chicken in the eye you know that they don’t just remember; they’re patiently awaiting the day they become dinosaurs again.
I have reblogged this before because watching farmers school vegans is always hilarious, but now we’re into birds, specifically fowl, and I have got stories.
I had to give my turkey an antibiotic injection once upon a time, and she turned the needle puncture into a six inch by three inch hole in her back overnight as she attempted to eat herself because apparently turkeys find themselves to be delicious. She had to spend 3 months duct taped into a tea towel (the bandages underneath cleaned and replaced daily, mind you) until it healed because she would not stop ripping the bandages off to continue consuming herself.
Your chickens strip a mouse to the bone? Mine draw and quarter them and run around with the parts shrieking. My peacocks grab mice, beat them to death on the ground with this insanely fast back and forth head twisting motion, and then swallow them whole. You would not think an entire adult mouse would fit in their face, and you would be wrong.
I knew a guy that used to regularly post photos of the 5-6′ long Copperhead snakes his peafowl would destroy. And I don’t mean kill, I mean destroy. These venomous snakes would get into the pens and the peas would just peck them into oblivion like nbd.
Fowl didn’t just used to be dinosaurs. They are still dinosaurs.
Thankfully they are small dinosaurs
and we can just tape them into tea towels if we have to
BEGGING for a Jurassic Park reboot where farmers run the place instead of brogrammer scientists, and the raptors frequently get scolded and taped into tea towels
[goyische voice] either you’re an atheist or you think gravity is fake and live in terror of being flung off the face of the earth. one or the other
not to get serious on this post but I hate that people unfamiliar with Judaism assume that we have to underestimate god like that. Hashem is everywhere, so why on earth couldn’t Hashem be present in gravity, and evolution, and idk, cellular respiration? small minded! to respect god is to not underestimate god, and to understand that god is present in powerful and complex systems, as much as god is present in simple, mundane things.
and like, Rosalind Franklin was an observant Jewish woman.
The only possible way the original image is a valid question is if underneath it is additional text: “Check all that apply.”
there are only 2 genders
god and science
i guess the reason atheists think that it’s one or the other is because you either believe in science and, yknow, logic
or you believe there’s an all-powerful presence watching everyone and everything despite there being no evidence or literally any reason to believe that that’s the case
and it’s hard to imagine that someone could believe in all that shit and still be logical and reasonable enough to also give credit to science, especially considering this is one major area that totally proves why things exist and why they work and it has nothing to do with some omniscient being.
obviously i’m not a scientist but yknow i did go to school … AND a CATHOLIC school at that and they literally tried to teach us that science and religion could coexist and it was a bunch of nonsense because that is all religion is so? I don’t think I have to be a scientist to say that the reason things are the way they are has been explained whereas religious nuts seem to insist that ‘god created us all and He Is Responsible For Everything’
how stupid do you have to be to come on a Jewish post and explain that, since you went to Catholic school, you obviously know everything about “religion”
the reason i joked about you not being a scientist in the tags is because i am a scientist, and yet! here we are!
i literally never said i know everything about religion but i know enough to be sure it’s ridiculous and many many religious people are often too brainwashed to give credit to science so it’s not really unreasonable to assume that?
it’s really as simply as this:
there are two options
be logical and do not believe anything that doesn’t provide sufficient evidence.
OR
be an idiot and believe in a higher power
One simply cannot recognize the advancements and discoveries of science while believing in a god, because science disproves the possibility of such a being. This is an absolute violation of basic science. They truly are incompatible.
anyways lots of religious jews are atheists y’all and @the-real-persephone are laughably ignorant and embarrassing. also the fact that you claim science disproves the possibility of a Jewish g-d proves that you have zero (0) idea about how jewish people even conceive of g-d
Do you mean ethnic Jews? You completely ruined your argument when you said “lots of religious Jews are atheists”. No credibility. Do you even realize what you just said?
It’s not ignorant. Judeo-Christian religions believe in a relatively new Earth. They also don’t address the universe outside of Earth. Science proves the age of the universe to be far older than these religions claim. So to be quite honest, it seems as if not only did you make a completely idiotic statement, you managed to ignore the basic principles of science that contradict religion.
Honey I’m a Jewish woman telling you that I know atheist Jews who practice and observe the Jewish religion. They are RELIGIOUSLY practicing Jewish people! I know at least one of them is on the board of my Synagogue! I know many Rabbis who are openly agnostic! The fact that you are trying to argue with me, a Jewish person, with the OP, a Jewish person, and with a LOT OF OTHER JEWISH PEOPLE about this is NOT something that makes me look like an idiot!
You say “judeo-Christian” as if that means something reliable and quantifiable that lumps Jewishness in with Christianity. Surprise! Many Jewish people observe their religion and do not believe in God! Judaism is not a religion that relies entirely on faith in belief, and that’s why the above screenshot is laughable. Judaism is a religion of PRACTICE, so belief in God alone does not make or break a religiously Jewish person.
Like you are so completely out of your depth here!
To go over this real quick
1.) judeo-xtian BZZZT. WRONG. 2.) a tiny minority of Jewish people ascribe to young earth ideas. The VAST majority do not. 3.) biblical literalism is far less common in Judaism and many argue that literalism is bad 4.) Again majority of Jewish thought is completely in line with an extremely old universe 5.) seriously our religious philosophers have argued this for quite some time. 13th century Ramban argued that time moved differently at the beginning of the universe before there was substance to be affected by time. When you consider that we didn’t know of the theory of relativity (also from a Jewish scientist!) at the time, that certainly gives us a precedence to understand that lots of Jewish people have assumed that we a.) did not have a literalist timeline in Genesis and b.) the universe was older than we could comprehend in the 1200s and we argued as such!
It’s your ignorance that is showing here.
Why are Christians.
I think that since the definition of “higher power” is being worked through so effectively and coherently, the discussion could use a definition of “scientific laws” to work with too.
I don’t believe that most practicing scientists would even say “the universe is ruled by scientific laws.” That is simply not what laws do. That is simply not what science does. The implication of “the universe is ruled by scientific laws” is that existence is deliberately reigned over, and further, the thing in charge of the universe is our own understanding of the universe?
The question is poorly worded, yes, hinging on a bad and unclear vocabulary – but it’s also very silly. It’s an interesting example of thinking, in that there is a belief that SOME ENTITY simply MUST be the undisputed divine boss of everything, whether it is “laws” or “a god”, this idea that there MUST be a leader or governor. “Something rules the universe!” the screenshot says with airy certainty, as if existence exists to be governed, and the only question is whether personal appeals to the governor will make any difference. As if the fact that existence exists means that there has to be a hierarchy with a ruler at the top. There’s a boss somewhere, this question implies – a scientific senate, a CEO of existence, an Indisputable Answer to the question. “Deity or scientific laws!” – that’s what you get – they are complete opposites, and there can only be one! Pick your master, you have 2 (two) choices… and here’s the catch: both of them are “higher powers.” Because, one assumes, any powers that “rule” the universe are, in fact, higher powers. The entire question is so circular it’s meaningless. It’s an ouroborous, but instead of eating itself it’s crawling up its own ass.
A scientist – worth their salt – would answer – SHOULD answer – “there is no evidence that the universe is ruled by anything.”
If pressed, the scientist could suggest that we have plenty of evidence for how the universe appears to operate, and we are collecting ways to help us understand that.
But those ways, which we discovered, are not our masters. We are not running around Doing Science in the hopes of naming our secret scientific overlords. We are not building a new god out of “laws” and setting it as the ruler of all that exists. Even having a third answer that is “check all that apply” doesn’t fit our current universe, because the first answer is “higher powers – monotheistic religion flavor” and the second answer is “higher powers – fake science boys vaguely atheistic flavor.”
Anyway, the screenshot is a picture of a radio button with two choices, that some people can happily press to feel like they have a tribe. I, like many of the people above, would not pick any of those buttons because they do not describe a working model of the operation of the universe.
If you dragged me and forced me to complete the sentence “the universe is ruled by…”, I would say “itself, probably,” and to further qualify the statement, I would write in front of the question, “I believe.”
how insidious to make young girls buy hundreds of dollars worth of makeup, to force them to read up on its theory, to make them practice it for hours in order to escape mockery, to make them feel safe only when performing this hyper femininity, and then to even have the audacity to package it in feminist language so that they firmly believe it sets them free.
who called you out on your sloppy wings
I know you probably think you’re really witty, but I just want you to know that you, and all the other people who made that joke, prove my point exactly.
This is why I have an issue with feminists shouting “let women wear make-up”. Like, not only is it expected to wear make-up, but it’s encouraged and the younger the better (cute pinkish lipstick for pre-teen girls, cute and sparkly eyeshadow for pre-teens again)
Whenever I see a post about girls to “LET THEM WEAR MAKE-UP”, well… there’s nothing stopping them or you, really. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. Society pushes you to wear make up and have the most perfect make-up skills ever. And if it takes you 15 minutes for a full contour, shade, highlight, you’re praised.
Seriously, girls get more shit for not wearing make-up.
If you want to fight for the right to wear make-up, please shift to “MEN ARE ALLOWED TO WEAR MAKE-UP”. Also, please fight for the right for girls and women to not wear make-up.
Because for each post of you fighting for girls to have the right to wear make-up because it’s feminist and it will free them, there are ten companies behind your back who wrinkle their hand cause you’re doing the job for them.
I get asked at least once a week why I don’t “just try wearing makeup. It’s super simple you can even learn how on youtube!” I don’t want to.
I don’t like makeup.
I don’t want to wear it.
Or buy it.
Or have anything to do with it.
If you tell me I could use it to cover up my acne, or my red face, and it will feel empowering™ to be able to ‘choose how i look’ you’re a fucking douche and not a feminist at all.
women who wear makeup statistically make more money at the same jobs and skill level as women who don’t. women who wear makeup to interviews are more likely to be hired than women who don’t. women who perform adequate femininity in court are more likely to be acquitted or given the minimum sentence. one of the things taken into consideration by psychiatry and psychology about women seeking treatment is whether they’re wearing makeup – because women who wear makeup are seen as more likely to be sane and/or “responding appropriately.” not even getting into how much so-called “feminist” language on social media is couched in otherizing women who don’t want to, or can’t, put time and money into performing hyperfemininity “for themselves! to feel brave! to show you’re tough! :))))) be beautiful because you’re worth being objectified, girl!”
when women are literally systematically and personally punished for NOT spending time and money on makeup, you absolutely cannot pretend that makeup, as an industry and element of culture, is feminist. no one’s eyeliner is ever going to be sharp enough to slay the patriarchy. seriously.
I Was Always On Green Because My Mama Didn’t Play That Shit.
I got a Red for the first time ever cause I launched a basketball at this girls face 😭😭 it was an accident tho I swear lmao
This traumatized so many kids. I knew someone who had no memory of this until I said the phrase “go flip your card” and suddenly they remembered everything
I went from green straight to red because I gave my friend a piggyback ride for like five seconds
America are y’all okay..?
We had to move popsicle sticks into a green, yellow or red can.
I had to move mine to yellow once for “talking out of turn”.
Literally never spoke up in class again.
This is seriously some fucked up shit, jfc.
it’s funny, because it works as a very effective means of discipline/reinforcement. the concept is simple: instead of the teacher disrupting the whole class and stopping teaching to deal with one person stepping out of line and being, themselves, disruptive, they tell you to go turn your card. then they carry on with the lesson while you do it. kidspawn’s school calls it a point out system. you get three warnings, then you have to log into a book. it takes attention away from the mistake and discourages acting out for that attention.
done properly, it puts the choice in the student’s hands. you know the consequence for an infraction, and you choose whether or not that consequence is worth your action. in a perfect setting, it would only be for actual rules, you spend less time talking to school authority figures, and parents wouldn’t flip out about it unless there was a string of repeated red cards. you don’t double punish, after all.
the best way not to get a red card is not to get a yellow card. it really does benefit everyone in a classroom setting if implemented and respected by all who use it. i find it strange that people find this ‘fucked up’. it’s not corporal punishment, which IS fucked up, and it keeps infractions from taking away from instruction time, robbing other students of their education. loss of instruction time is in no one’s best interest.
and in every setting i’ve seen it used properly (both as a student and as a parent) it works exactly like it’s intended to.
I am a teacher working toward my Masters in education, and I spent my entire kindergarten education and third grade (the only two years I had to suffer through a classroom with one of these boards) entirely on red. The Flip Your Card classroom discipline system is in fact unimaginably fucked up.
At first I worked really really hard to try to keep my card on green, or at least on yellow, but no matter how hard I tried, by the end of the day, my mom was getting a phone call all about how I was a problem. I was regularly stripped of every single privilege my teacher conceivably could strip me of. My third grade teacher gave up on taking away my recess because she just didn’t want to have to deal with me for that extra time, every single day. And every single day, there was a bright red card telling everybody, telling all the other kids, telling my parents, and telling me that I was a problem.
Here’s the thing, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my card off red, so it wasn’t this behavior or that behavior that felt like the problem. It just felt like I was the problem.
I did what many kids in that situation do. I gave up. From the outside, it must have looked like I didn’t care that my card was on red, but in reality, I had given up on trying to keep it off red, because nothing worked. It wasn’t apathy. It was hopelessness and despair. In kindergarten, I just checked out and ignored the board. I flat out told my teacher that she could turn my card from then on, because I wasn’t going to. But in third grade, I hit on something worse. Instead of simply pretending the board didn’t exist, I responded to the realization that I couldn’t win by changing the perimeters of what winning was to me. If I was trouble and a problem, I was going to show everybody just how much of a problem I could be. Instead of winning because I made my teacher happy, I won by making everything into a power struggle. Yeah sure, I got sent to the principal’s office and my mom was called, but I didn’t do that thing my teacher wanted me to. Score one for me. That year, I went from difficult to hell on wheels.
This is not actually uncommon, and there are some very good sociological and psychological reasons for why I reacted the way I did. One of the most basic sociological principles is that of labeling theory. This is the idea that people go through life collecting labels, and that these labels affect how we act and how we function in society. People by and large live up to or down to the labels we are given. We can see this in the criminal justice system, where the ways in which we label and treat people, especially juveniles, who commit crimes greatly affects whether or not they will commit a crime in the future, in other words the more someone is treated as a criminal, the more they will act in criminal ways. In a similar manner, being told that you are a bad kid, a troublemaker, a problem, whether outright or through a card system, is liable to convince you of this fact and reinforce that problem behavior. This is one reason why Flip Your Card systems often worsen behavior problems in children with existing difficulties with classroom behavior.
Another failure of the Flip Your Card system is that it has no room for incremental improvement and does not promote reteaching of behavior on the part of the teachers who use it. Most kids with behavior difficulties in the age range where Flip Your Card systems are used are really struggling on learning the rules of behavior and how they should be reacting in a given situation, or learning emotional self regulation. In my case, I had a siezure disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was mid-way through third grade, that aside from being misidentified as behavioral problems also prevented me from learning appropriate behavior by damaging my ability to form memories during the period when they were untreated. I also have ADHD, which I can’t treat with medication, because all of them cause me to have siezures. I needed extensive reteaching, and a teacher who was willing to work with me in the moment to help me find better solutions to the situation I was responding to with bad behavior.
Likewise, Flip Your Card systems do not recognize incremental progress. I have a student who just last week refused to come inside when it started thundering, because he wanted to stay outside and spend time talking to his little brother through the fence between the toddler and preschool playgrounds. This is normal for him. Separation from his brother causes him a lot of stress. But I was able to get him to come inside with a little persuasion and a kiss from his brother, and as soon as we were inside, he washed his hands and went to the cozy corner to calm himself down. This is progress. This is in fact the kind of progress that I told his mother about with pride at the end of the day. Once he was calm, I also talked with him about how he should be proud of himself for using some of the skills he was working on to calm himself, and what we could have done differently together outside. Under a Flip Your Card system, his behavior was the kind where he would be required to flip his card to yellow, his progress ignored. What I did instead was to construct a label for him of a student who is working hard on behavior, and affirm for him that I can see the progress and effort he has made. I also established us as partners in helping him reach behavioral and social emotional goals.
Another problem with things like the Flip Your Card system is that much like zero tolerance systems, or any system that are supposed to make things fairer by taking out teacher judgement is that they do not in fact take out teacher judgement. One of the big discussions right now in computing is that the way in which algorithms for job searches or hiring software, or worse algorithms for software used in the criminal justice system, are biased on racial and gender lines, both because of the algorithms themselves and because of the biased information fed into them. This is another example of that. A supposedly unbiased system that becomes very biased because of its nature and because of incorrect input. I already talked a little bit about how students with disabilities that affect their behavioral and social and emotional development are penalized by this system, but another factor is that disabled students, students of color, and especially disabled students of color, are much more likely to be asked to flip their card for behavior that would go unremarked upon for a white or non-disabled student. This is also true of so-called zero tolerance policies. This means that the toxic effects I outlined previously of labeling children as bad fall especially heavily on childen who are already especially vulnerable to being funneled into the school to prison pipeline.
Flip Your Card systems and other similar systems (and throughout this essay I talk about the Flip Your Card system, but Move Your Clip, Name on the Board, behavior charts, and all such similar systems are analogous) also do not promote student choice and autonomy as ouyangdan asserts. They are a classically behavioralist model of classroom management, one that functions on a system of reward and punishments. Reward and punishment systems increase student feelings of powerlessness and decrease their feelings of control. Giving a child a choice between a punishment and doing what you want them to is not giving them a real choice. It’s the same as a bully saying “give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up, it’s your choice.” These behavioralist systems of classroom management also decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to behave, and replaces it with an extrinsic modivation. This can be seen in my case when my intrinsic modivation to try to behave for my teacher and my fellow students was overriden with the extrinsic modivation of the Flip Your Card board, which didn’t work because I gave up on avoiding the punishment. With my intrinsic motivation leached away and the extrinsic modivation proving ineffective… But this can also be seen in kids who behave well in class. Instead of learning the whys of good behavior and learning to regulate their emotions and reach consensus, and other skills of living in civil society, they learn that to be good is to be obedient and avoid punishment, to please the person In Charge. This is what happened with @thecityhorse higher up in this thread. They learned that speaking up in class brought pain, so they stopped, at a detriment to their education and their psyche.
So why are behavioralist approaches like the Flip Your Card chart so popular? One reason is that for most students they work in the short term very well. Humans like to avoid humilation and pain. This makes them convenient for teachers to implement, even if they cause other problems. Another reason is that they look fair to most adults even though they are not. Also it’s impossible to discount how thouroghly we as a society believe in certain ideas about a child’s place as obedient and subservient to adults, especially parents and teachers, and view enforcing this idea as a good in and of itself. Most people, even teachers, who absolutely should know better, and have in fact been learning better in teaching programs for decades, don’t step outside this paradigm. Behavioralist systems of reward and punishment reinforce this obedience.
Behavioralist approaches to classroom management are so normative that it can be hard to think about what the alternatives to them are, and when I talk to people about the alternatives to behavioralist methods, they express scepticism about the effectiveness of these methods. The biggest method I use is to get to the root of a behavior. Johnny screems during play, which causes Tommy to hit him. Tommy gets scared when Johnny screams in a way that seems aggressive, so we work on reading body language and what to do when we’re scared. Johnny screams because he gets wound up and overwhelmed playing chase, so we work on stopping and leaving the game before he gets that overwhelmed. I do a lot of teaching my students to recognize and name their own emotions, and recognize and name each other’s emotions, and think about what caused those emotions. I teach them ways to calm down, to get what they want and need in acceptable ways, and I build a relationship of mutual respect in which they want to do things for me and for their classmates because they care about us. This is that intrinsic motivation I talked about. And yes, many of the kids I work with have some pretty severe behavioral challenges. This was also the method that worked with me as a child. My fourth and fifth grade teachers both worked hard to develop relationships of trust and respect with me, and worked with me on processing my emotions and understanding the needs and feelings of others. This method really does work, and it promotes empathy, self-awareness, and moral self-reliance, which are important lifelong skills.
– false confidence goes a LONG way towards becoming actual confidence.
– but this doesn’t mean being cocky and arrogant. Be open to criticism. Be self-aware.
– nothing will ever come out exactly the way you wanted it to. Just making it is reason enough to be proud.
– the way you are now isn’t the way you’ll always be. You WILL grow, especially if you make the effort to do so. And by doing that, you’ll already be doing more than most people ever will.
– it’s okay to suck. A bad drawing doesn’t define your worth, as an artist or a person. A bad drawing is still a drawing, and you still learned something from doing it.
– be honest with yourself about what you did right and ways in which you can improve. Don’t compare your progress to others. Their journey is theirs – yours is yours.
– no matter how insecure you are about your own art, learn how to say something nice about it, and don’t say “I know this sucks” in the caption.
No, you don’t understand, this literally works.
It worked for me.
I realized that when I posted stuff I’d made, I would say a lot of shit like “ohhhh, I got this off-center” and “uhhh, I know that the texture is a little off” and “eh, I had trouble controlling the depth here and as a result I almost punched through the carving.”
And I realized how upset I would be if someone else pointed those things out about me in comments to my post. And I thought to myself, then why am I saying this shit to me?
So I quit. I just cold-turkey quit. I would WRITE the criticisms I had and then delete them right before posting. And I would make myself find the things about the piece that were actually good and I would point those out instead.
And at first it felt uncomfortable and raw and anxiety-inducing.
But after a while, I realized that I could acknowledge the things that I wanted to change and do not like privately, and didn’t have to air it to the world. So I focused on articulating to myself and myself only what I could have done differently, and I did it in a positive way: “I learned not to use paint that was too thick.” “I learned that yellow doesn’t cover darker colors very well.” “I learned that I need to wait longer between coats.”
I learned. I succeeded at learning.
Not “I failed.”
See, what I was doing when I audibly or in print criticized myself and said bad things was sort of softening the punch: if I said these things, then someone else couldn’t come along and make me look and feel stupid by pointing them out.
Joke’s on me. I nearly always already knew where the flaws were. All I was doing was drawing attention to the parts that were not successful. I was hurting myself just as much as anyone else could.
So I just decided that I wouldn’t accept negativity or nonconstructive criticism. Not from others, not from myself.
And I started saying good things about my own work.
And I started feeling a lot better about it.
A lot.
I still get frustrated, and I still produce work I do not like. At all.
Just, now I focus on what I learned, and if I still can’t figure out what I did wrong, I set it aside and I wait while I work on other things, and eventually I will advance enough that I realize where I took a wrong turn.
So pay equal attention to your good qualities, and to anything you can learn from your mistakes, do not draw attention to your mistakes because you will see those mean words every time you go back and look at the work you posted. Work as much as you can, and know that by doing so, you are improving all the time, even when it doesn’t feel like it.
And yes, never ever compare yourself to others. It’s okay to look at stuff and say “I like how they did X thing. I would like my things to look like X thing in that particular way. How can I go about doing that?” Do not criticize yourself for not being as good as they are.
You are your own worst critic. Try to set aside some time to be your own best cheerleader, too. Find nice things to say to yourself. Try very hard to do that every day.
And never say anything to yourself that you would not say to a very dear friend who asked for help. “I think this would have looked better with a warmer blue” is fine. “This background fucking sucks” is not okay. You would not say that to your friend.
And never treat yourself in any way that you wouldn’t treat a pet. Your Artistic Process is a shy little thing that wants you to love it. Desperately. Criticizing it and using a mean tone of voice and telling it that it’s bad and did bad and is a bad Artistic Process, so bad, bad Art, BAD, doesn’t make it grow bigger and stronger. It shrinks it down and makes it cry in the corner and that is very sad. Praising it and saying nice things to it make it better. You don’t train a puppy by beating it. You train a puppy by cleaning up its puppy mistakes and praising it when it succeeds and showing it love when it fails but was trying hard. Your inner artistic critter is the same.
And don’t tell yourself “I should be better than this, I should be BRAVE SOLDIER DOG, not puppy!” We are all, every single one of us, puppies deep down inside. Our artistic process SHOULD be like a puppy, a joyous happy thing, full of energy and potential. And it can be, if you learn to be gentle and kind to yourself.
Good luck. ❤
I am not going to claim universality here, but adopting the maxim “attempt to be as kind to yourself as you would be to someone else” vastly improved my mental health.
it didn’t solve everything magically, yes i’m on meds now, etc etc, but it really, really helped.
And yes. YES YES YES all of this. It took me a long time to learn
this, and it’s one of the most important tools I have. I have a
very loud Inner Critic – not just for my writing and my attempts to
dabble at art, but for everything (yay fucked up relationships. >_<).
One of the things that saves me is that I co-write a fuckton. If
anyone said stuff about my co-author(s) that I say about myself? I’d
punch that asshole and then block them so fast it’d leave a smoking
crater.
I’ve seen another bit of related advice floating around (can’t
find the direct link for the life of me right now, of course) that
helped me. If someone approaches you to tell you that they like a
thing, that’s no reason to tear it down. This is also true of your
own work. If you went up to your favorite author or artist, and
gushed how you love a particular work, and they sat you down and went
through all the things wrong with it
– that’s not cool. Don’t treat yourself that way either.
As folks said: it takes time, and it
feels very uncomfortable at first.
Inspired by this post, I wanted to a separate post about the destruction of the Jedi Order.
Their destruction wasn’t an event, it was a process. A long process that
started generations before Anakin was even born. Yes, Anakin made his terrible
life choices (no one is denying that) but he’s not the one thing that went wrong with Order
or why they fell apart. So I made a list of terrible things the Jedi
Order did that are not Anakin Skywalker’s fault:
The Order’s decision to take little kids from their parents.
The Order’s indoctrination of said kids;
The Order’s decision to keep Yoda in charge for 900 years;
The Order’s lack of action to end slavery;
Their turning a blind to the corruption in the Senate.
Their decision to follow the Senate even when they knew they shouldn’t.
The Order’s growing arrogance;
The Council’s nepotism;
The Council’s decision to not send extra help along with Qui-Gon and Obi-wan right after they were told the Sith was back.
Their decision to hide the truth about Qui-Gon’s death.
Their decision to personally aid the leaders of a planet but not its citizens.
Their decision to help slaver Jabba the Hutt but not his slaves.
The order’s diminishing popularity.
The Council’s decision to fight in the Clone Wars.
Turning children and teenagers into soldiers
Hiding prisoners in secret prisons (without trial).
Their plan to overthrown the Chancellor before they even knew he was a Sith.
Using a slave army.
Hiding the truth about the slave army’s creation.
The Council lying to their own members.
Turning their back on a teenager they raised (and used) to avoid “political complications”
Allowing an older man to have unrestrained access to a little boy.
Sending a little boy to an adult prison.
* Acting like they had All The Answers To Everything when they couldn’t even handle a scared kid who missed his mommy.
* Making the scared kid feel like he was a bad, dangerous person for being scared, despite the fact that he’d just helped their asses out bigtime.
* Wait, so Anakin’s Dangerous, but a fucknut like Pong Krell flies below the radar? Yeah, no.
* Giving Anakin shit about his arm when he lost it in battle against a Sith Lord…who used to be a Jedi himself and left the Order because he finally got fed up with the Jedi and their shit.
* Having a fucked up system that involved sending aspiring Jedi kids off to be farmers if they didn’t get chosen by a master. Wow, glad you guys took them away from their families and fucked up their lives so they could go grow beans for you or some shit, good job.
* Being hypocritical assholes. There is no ignorance…but only Masters can access certain parts of the archives and we’re gonna lie out our asses on a regular basis about pretty much everything we can think of. There is no fear…but we’re afraid of literally everything, including being unpopular, so let’s throw Ahsoka to the wolves so we can keep sitting at the cool kids’ table at lunch.
* Failure to have a basic fucking freshman level psychology textbook in the goddamn archives because then so much of this royal goddamn clusterfuck could have been prevented in the first place!
if you believe in transformative/restorative justice, you need to make room for rehabilitation. 100% of the time.
i’m not saying people need to be friends with, or like, or even forgive the people who’ve wronged them, but they have to get okay with those people’s reintegration into the community, they have to get okay with people having a second chance once they’ve accepted their wrongdoing and taken steps toward reparation.
like, one of the most insidious aspects of carceral logics is that they claim to value rehabilitation without ever seeking it and, if anything, they make it utterly impossible. if you really want a postcarceral concept of justice, you have to work to undo that, and it is work.
it’s not a demand for ‘accountability’ that has no specific meaning, it’s not virally isolating someone from community–in practice, almost always someone from one specific multimarginality–it’s not retribution. it’s good faith. it’s sitting down, face to face, and working through shit. if someone who’s done you wrong refuses to do that, that’s one thing, but they have to be given that chance. if you can’t be the one to give them that chance, if it’s too retraumatizing or too painful even if you’re surrounded by support, that’s okay. it’s still something that needs to happen within your community and it’s your right to have some kind of voice in that.
like, if you’re going to call yourself an anarchist, say you hate cops, say you hate prisons, say you want to commit to community self-sustainability and autonomy–this is part of how you do it. it’s hard. it sucks. it requires way more communication than we’re used to and are comfortable with, let alone proficient at. but if we’re ever going to get past carceral justice, that’s got to be how we do it.
Replies from the OP on another reblog:
do…do people realize there are things someone can do to harm the
community other than abuse? like, uh, thievery, belligerent public
intoxication, drunk driving, negligence, etc etc etc. like how much bad
faith do you have to come in with to read a post about prison abolition
and community justice and react with ‘why is the OP not using the word
abusers…this is sketchy… :/’
that, and that certain folks can’t imagine a community issue beyond interpersonal abuse probably speaks to a degree of shelteredness with respect to class. and then there’s the misreading of macroscopic community, ability to sustain a living, and access community resources as ‘you’ve got to let people who’ve wronged you into your personal life’
Also… I don’t know how I feel about prison abolition, mostly because I don’t feel like I’ve seen enough clear plans laid out for replacing it with something better.
But even for abusers or rapists or murderers… how exactly is throwing them into a tiny box, which is pretty much guaranteed to create stress, with other people who are more likely than the general public to be violent, which is also likely to create stress, supposed to make anything better?
My understanding of rehabilitative justice is EXTREMELY 101 but I understood it to be that prisons were supposed to be used as rehabilitative spaces. Like, instead of going to prison and being systematically made miserable and exploited, we understand that being in prison, even a very nice prison, is punishment enough, and we take advantage of the fact that the criminal in question is safely isolated no only from victims or toxic systems but also the sort of grind of adult responsibilities that make it really hard to break out of them and make sure they can use all that free time they suddenly have to get therapy, and make reparations, and develop good interpersonal/cogntive/educational/vocational/etc skills, so by the time they come out of prison they’re MORE able to interact with society than when they went in, not traumatized by the experience and the experience of reintegration.
There are countries which handle this kind of thing much better, with much better results. Hell, we’ve seen individual programs here that were AMAZING at preventing recidivism. My husband is a defense attorney, and he spends a hell of a lot of his time working to advocate for his clients who will not be able to avoid prison to get a sentence that maximizes their chance of succeeding in the long run, but the system makes it VERY hard.
There are a lot of things that are completely incompatible with rehabilitation models:
1. There cannot be an incentive to the system to keep people in jail. That means no prison slave labor, no forced donation of organs for capital cases (there’s a huge amount of discussion available elsewhere about this.) No for-profit privately run prisons.
2. There MUST be attention to the root problems for why people end up in prison. That means doing the hard work of making sure people have housing, food, education, health care, a sense of security and opportunities to do meaningful work. (I am not making any judgments about what constitutes meaningful work.)
3. Drug treatment and sensible, evidence-based drug policies are a MUST. Legalizing drugs but making sure that they’re being provided safely can go a long way toward stopping both addiction and the criminal activities that surround drugs when they are outlawed.
4. The justice system has to become focused on actual justice, and not the current “grind enough points to move up a level in the DA’s office” mentality. Hubby has some hair-raising tales to tell about people who were charged with serious crimes in order to persuade them to testify against people they were understandably terrified of. Of people charged for many felonies for a series of things that involved less than $1000 total worth of economic damages because it looked better on the DA’s record to have prosecuted more felonies… and because they could technically pass off 13 low grade bad checks as identity theft felonies, they did.
Anyway. There’s more but those are some of the big ones. You have to knock down all the problems at once or they just keep reinventing themselves.
There's a Mirror on the Wall 