Also, it's not like they don't want to spend their money. They want to. They buy completely useless, idiotic things with their money, things they don't really want or need, but that they think will grant them status. We need to reconfigure society so that paying taxes becomes a status enhancing activity. If we can pull that off, we'll never have to worry about feeding children again.
The thing about the rich of this country is that billionaires have more money than is humanly possible to spend. So like, I really do not give any amount of a shit if increasing their taxes is “faaair” because I care more about no one starving to death or going without medical care in fucking 2015 than I do about the great grandson of the guy who invented some crappy toy being able to buy his 17th yacht. We can fucking print out organs and we have people dying of the flu because they are too poor to go to the er. Like??? Tax the shit outta the rich. Take half their money. Idgaf.
And like conservatives are so quick to say its not fair to tax the fuck out of the rich, but then they say to people struggling that “life isn’t fair” like??? If anyone is getting screwed here I want it to be the guy who owns four mc mansions not the family of four living out of their car.
This scene just gets sadder and sadder the older I get.
The thing I love ( and hate) about it is that they’re parents ignore them, but in different ways. Alison’s parents flat out ignore her like she was an accident. Andrew’s parent’s give him so much aggressive attention but still see right past him. Two completely different situations and they both feel the same. I love this movie.
Our non-binary hero travels throughout the land defeating cissexist mythical beasts and being the legal loophole in gender-specific prophecies and curses, just because they can
I can’t believe the number of notes on this!! And scrolling through all the tags and comments is a wonderful experience. If all goes according to plan Lock will be returning with more adventures this summer (and maybe some friends!) but in the meantime feel free to check out their character tag here :)
Gather round, children. Auntie Jules has a degree in psychology with a specialization in social psychology, and she doesn’t get to use it much these days, so she’s going to spread some knowledge.
We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.
The bigger part is schema.
Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.
One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.
If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”
The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”
BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.
Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.
Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.
Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans.
And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.
And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.
But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.
So you see this.
And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)
Do you see what I’m saying?
I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.
And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.
But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.
So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.
It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.
So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.
(It is also why a 24-hour news cycle with emphasis on deconstructing every. single. moment. of violent crimes is SUCH A TERRIBLE SOCIETAL INFLUENCE, but that is a rant for another post.)
I love a good lecture.
This is also what I’m talking about whenever I mention the racist influence US media has on countries where the percentage of black people is extremely low. I see more black people on tv every day than I do on the streets in a decade. If you keep showing me that they’re mostly angry, uneducated thugs…
Representation matters globally when your media has a global reach.
The novelist whose entire body of work revolves around a single unfathomably specific sexual fetish
The artist who decides to write a twenty-page fight scene into a webcomic that updates once every six weeks
The “revolutionary” tabletop game designer who’s never actually played anything other than Dungeons & Dragons
The fanfic writer who feels the need to justify their favoured ‘ships by villainising and murdering canon love interests
The video game dev who claims to be exploring themes of mental illness, but really just wants an excuse to have monster fights in an otherwise naturalistic setting
I could keep going, but I suspect you get the picture. Feel free to add your own!
Note: Unions pushing for employer-based health coverage is one of the main reasons we don't have universal health care in this country. The other main reason is, of course, racism.
If we’re going to update the pantheon of regrettable artists, can we add “white male writer who was legitimately progressive twenty years ago, but hasn’t learned or grown as an artist in any way whatsoever since then, and now exists in a state of grumpy bewilderment at the fact that he’s being critcised for doing exactly the same stuff that used to win him praise”?
We went out for dinner last night! With a $50 gift card AND a 20% off the entire order coupon, WE WERE SO HAPPY. Dinner for six at Buca de Beppo for only $70.
We tipped, in cash, on the amount BEFORE the discounts were applied. Because the coupon was for the food, not for the service, which was just as thorough as it would have been if we had paid full price.
you know what Harry that is an interesting piece of information don’t be an ass
Harry, your whole thing is playing a sport that involves flying around on gravity resistant sticks made from trees. Did you ever stop to think Neville was telling you this cause he was being considerate of your interests?
Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.
You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.
Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.
And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.
