I always have a moment of internal cringe when I see someone using the word “spastic” in a non medical sense. Like I know tumblr is US based and all, but “spastic” or “spaz” is considered to be a huge slur against disabled people in the UK, like it’s on par with r*tard, and yet I see it everywhere on here, enough to the point where I’ve just blacklisted it to avoid it.
And this isn’t a “you’re a monster for using this word” kinda post btw, I’m just realizing maybe people aren’t aware it’s an ableist term.
As are most of our derogatory words tbh. A lot of insults are based on making comparisons to disabilities. Which makes it very hard to weed them out your lexicon. I still slip up and use words like “idiot” or “dumb” from time to time, but I’m making a real effort not to since I became aware of it. It’s hard, but rewarding in that it has made my insults feel like I’m on The Good Place, so there’s that.
Hm. So, I’m often an ignorant bench – I did some googling, and I know that ‘dumb’ is slang for mute, but why is ‘idiot’ bad?
I know all derogatory words are based on comparing one person to a group that is supposedly ‘lesser’ – a la, all the ‘women’ ones, and then ‘fat, lame, dumb’, etc. But why ‘idiot’? Is labeling someone as having zero intelligence —oh.
Just got it.
Huh.
Well, goddamnit, @thebibliospherehow are we supposed to make people feel bad, then?
Wait.
…
…
…
I might be having a revelation.
#might have to just change my whole outlook on life now
That pretty much sums up how I felt when I realized it too haha. It was overwhelming at first to realize just how needlessly cruel my language was, but I’ve felt better about life in general since I’ve elected to use kinder words. “Walnut” is my favorite. I use it a lot for myself. I have a bad habit of putting myself down and tend to refer to myself as “stupid” a lot (which like “idiot” was also once a medical term for people with disabilities) so instead when I do something I call myself a walnut now instead. It’s funnier and sounds silly but without the inherent nastiness of stupid.
The single most toxic thing I was brought up believing is that being Adult and Responsible and Good starts with doing everything completely alone and without help
What it’s really about is learning where and when you need help, how much help you need, and knowing when to reach out and ask for the help you need to function at your ideal level
Cave woman would have not known about the menopause until the life expectancy increased. Maybe there is another human hormonal change that we are not aware of as we have not reached the particular age it happens.
Totally incorrect! Actually, the fact that human females live past their reproductive life span is responsible for a great deal of human evolution, especially the ways in which we differ from our close ape relatives. This is called the Grandmother hypothesis.
Let me explain.
So the idea that human life expectancy has increased due to modern advancements is a myth. The average life span has certainly increased, however this is not because humans live longer (we have always lived to around 70-90yrs), but because infant mortality has decreased. In other words, modern medicine and abundant access to resources have decreased how how many children die, therefore increasing the average years humans live past birth.
So, Humans have known about menopause since the beginning, and it’s actually a huge part of our evolutionary history. Other apes do not live past their reproductive life span, as their bodies degrade shortly after ceasing to be fertile- evolution is all about how many offspring can be produce after all. Its generally a waste of resources to continue feeding adults who cannot reproduce when fertile adults and children are competing for those same resources.
So the fact that human females live for upwards of 30yrs past fertility was considered an evolutionary paradox. The key is that humans are really smart (sort of). We require a very long time to develop our brains, and so our infants are completely useless- unable to evan walk for a year, much less feed or protect themselves until middle childhood. They require a lot of attention and caring for, constant vigilence, not to mention hours spent teaching them basic survival tasks.
As a result, humans developed cooperative childraising systems, in which members outside of the child’s immediate family are responsible for caring for the young. However, if all the adults are busy raising their own children, no one would ever care for anyone else’s, except the older, not-yet-fertile children (who do assume childrearing roles, but are still developing and therefore are not good at it.) As a result, the females who stayed alive past their reproductive life span, no longer responsible for their own children, were able to care for the children of their children, allowing for their genes to be passed down more successfully. This creates a positive feedback system in which females lifespan progressively increases, since the older the grandmother, the more children the mother is able to have, and the more successfully they will be raised to adulthood, passing on the genes for long life to their children in turn.
This effect however decreased with subsequent generations: it’s less economical to have a grandmother AND a great grandmother taking care of the young. The payoffs aren’t high enough to push our lifespans even higher.
Tldr; humans have always had unusually long lifespans BECAUSE menopause occurs, and this is an integral aspect of our evolution, causing us to be as intelligent and adaptive as we are.
Even better, one of the ways we know about the grandmother effect is because you also see it in orcas! They can live to 80, but generally stop breeding in their 30s. There are three known species that have this kind of menapause– us, orcas and the Short-Finned Pilot Whale (also another very social species).
There’s a really nice explanation on this article:
So a few years ago I was working with a nutrition project in Mali targeting child malnutrition. A lot of these kinds of programs target young mothers for nutrition education, because women are the ones who cook, mothers feed their kids, makes sense.
Actually, these folks found that it was most effective to target not mothers, but grandmothers. Because in the big extended families most Malians live in, the grandmothers have more influence, so they can negotiate a better distribution of food. Usually, everyone in the family eats out of one big bowl (or a handful of big bowls, because sometimes families are 50+ people). The men always eat first, then the women and kids, so the men get all the good bits of meat that were in the stew. Because “they’re working in the fields more so they need more food.” This is a tricky thing to change, and young women have very little influence over intra-family dynamics. Older women, though, can organize their sons, can talk to their husbands, often control meal planning and budgeting, so if you help them understand that actually, kids need more nutritionally dense foods because their stomachs are smaller, so giving them the leftovers all the time isn’t good enough… then you’re more likely to see actual change in kids’ diets and health.
In collaboration with the Quileute Tribe, this site seeks to inform Twilight fans, parents, teachers, and others about the real Quileute culture, which indeed has a wolf origin story, a historic relationship with the wolf as demonstrated in songs, stories, and various art forms, as well as a modern, multi-dimensional community with a sophisticated governance system. We also hope to offer a counter narrative to The Twilight Saga’s stereotypical representations of race, class, and gender, and offer resources for a more meaningful understanding of Native American life and cultures.
BOOSTING!
This is the most beautiful thing I’ve laid eyes on today
I think a fundamental part of online friendships that people ‘outside’ fail to understand is how comforting it is to have friends right there in your pocket who will keep you company in good times and bad, listen to your rants, let you vent, be supportive whilst offering outsider perspective…
Need to be alone but need support too? Pocket friends.
Something awful just happened and there’s nobody around for you to tell? Pocket friends.
Need to let your feelings out but don’t want people to see you ugly-cry? Pocket friends.
Keep being amazing, pocket friends. You couldn’t possibly imagine how important you are.
Y’all need to have a greater degree of 1- healthy suspicion in Alexa and corporate surveillance devices personal assistants, and 2- understanding of how dangerous this kind of algorithm is in the hands of a multinational company (and anyone for that matter.)
To begin with, that data is both available for sale and able to be subpoenaed by the government. Alexa’s records and recordings have already been used in criminal trials. In the US, a digital record of your emotional patterns can be used to deny you housing, jobs, and to rule on your ability to exercise your basic rights. Consider that psychiatric stigma and misdiagnosis can already be wielded against you in legal disputes and the notion of a listening device capable of identifying signs of distress for the purpose of marketing to you should be made more clearly concerning.
Moreover we have already seen the use of algorithms like this on Facebook and other “self-reporting” (read: user input) sites capable of identifying the onset of a manic episode [1][2][3], which have been subsequently been linked to identifying vulnerable (high-spending) periods to target ads at these users, perhaps most famously in selling tickets to Vegas (identified in a TedTalk by techno-sociological scholar Zeynep Tufekci where she more generally discusses algorithms and how they shape our online experiences to suggest and reinforce biases).
The notes on this post are super concerning- we are being marketed to under the guise of having our emotional needs attended to by the same people who inflicted that emptiness on us, and everyone is just memeing.
You say that, and it is super valid don’t get me wrong, but at the same time if a Alexa can pick up if a person is suicidal and then even attempt to direct them to help, it would be a major boon. It is a double edge sword, but it can do good, even if: again yes be HYPER skeptical
Frankenuff’s Castle 