One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.
It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.
Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”
Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”
How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?
Please.
OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]
Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"
contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them
and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?
I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:
When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.
And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.
Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.
Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.
Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)
If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.
tell me my prof didn’t upload the reading by photocopying his kindle reader page by page
bruh
ALT
Guy who has wandered through the halls and corridors of your body not with any special kind of love but with the untold intimacy of a contractor assessing the damages and potentials voice: right, so the main issue here is that the body is currently a temple, okay, and what we want is for it to be a home, cause temples are pretty and all and occasionally nice to be in if you're into that sort of thing but very few people would actually want to live in one. So what we're gonna do first is you're gonna take a look at what's here, the carrying walls and windows and all that, and you're going to come up with something you'd actually like to be alive inside of, and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to feel strange and stupid and embarrassing but you're still gonna do it, because otherwise this construction site is fucked. And maybe what you want to live in is a skatepark or an anime-themed cat cafe or an esoteric library that has a dildo section for some reason, so it might feel like it's a downgrade from a temple, but it's actually the opposite cause the main customer for a body is you and the main customer for a temple are templegoers and maybe higher powers of some kind, - i wouldn't know about those, they never hired me, - not the temple itself, which is what you are, right, cause the body/mind/soul separation doesn't actually do anything, so what you're gonna do is look at the current layout and dig out whatever hope and ability to want you have and come up with a blueprint, and then my boys can actually get to work. Oh, and you have got to change the windows, it's drafty as fuck in here.
#all profane means is ''before the temple'' (pro = 'in front of'; fanum = 'temple')#a temple is the one unique space that is carved out from the whole world. the only way to travel into the temple is via ritual#nothing was ever supposed to live there#it was the conduit. the live wire to some other place - the sacred (sacrare = 'to make holy; to set apart')#nothing can live alone and clean and pure#you have to build a life outside the temple. profane that it is (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.
Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.
And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.
Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.
On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I'm pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include "lying down with my eyes shut for an hour," even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from "exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep" to energized and refreshed
The post (?) as found on Reddit with bonus explanatory Reddit comment.
THIS! THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT!
This is absolutely me. I lie down on my lunch break for 20-30 minutes. Do I sleep? Hell no. But do I feel way better in the afternoon because of it? Absolutely.
they inventeed a new science called "dont let the balloon hit the floor" scientests are being vaery careful and bapping that thing before it can fall jumping over the couch and shit
i think maybe we could spend less time thinking about things that make us angry and more time thinking about other stuff
YEAH EXACTLY HOLY SHIT
oh my god hes perfect. replace the faces on us currency with him
GET READY FOR...TITAN TAKEDOWN! ⚡💪🏔️
Premiering April 2nd on Dropout, the ultimate 4-episode THROWDOWN is happening on Dimension 20 with Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan and WWE Superstars Xavier Woods, Bayley, Kofi Kingston, and Chelsea Green!
The pantheon is about to get SLAM-theon'd by these righteous wrestlers! (All illustrations by @justinhallcomics)
don’t repost these uncredited on r*ddit or i will fucking Get You
thanks
ALT
ALT
ALTDid a little fan art of a popular post on blue sky.
Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?
The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.
Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.
Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.
Leverage (2008) // S05xE09 // "The Frame-Up Job"
whenever people say shit like “i couldn’t be polyamorous, i’m so jealous and possessive. if my partner even LOOKS at another girl/guy i’m gonna kick them out of a window” i’m like well you should probably be working on that. like even if you don’t end up doing polyamory it’s probably good to not be like that
A gryphon inspired by the Swallow-tailed kite. They are one of my favorite birds!
