nihilist-strider:

finalgrrl:

i loooooove personality quizzes and astrology and alignments and personality types because i’m completely obsessed with myself

The truth is most of us do it to get a grasp on what the fuck is a personality

weavemama:

a system that demonizes brown immigrants and ignores the 50,000 undocumented irish immigrants is proof that the ICE raids are rooted in blatant racism

fahdes:

“For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

roscoerackham:

shinykari:

lady-feral:

hollowedskin:

cannon-fannon:

boneyardchamp:

Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.

Like he will not be happy at all.

For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.

This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).

Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.

And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.

I will always reblog this.

I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.

This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.

There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.

1. Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
   
2. Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
3. If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.

The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.

And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.

Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.

So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done. 

In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier. 

And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.

 You can read an article about it here.  But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize. 

sheisrecovering:

White beauty standards DO NOT define beauty.

climatemovement:

History doesn’t acknowledge it but women have always been at the forefront of justice-based movements around the world. The Arpillera Movement, Chipko Movement, Gulabi Gang, October March, Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, to name some just off the top of my head. I talked to an activist once who said she doesn’t use the term ‘Mother Earth’ because “hell, look at how we treat women in our society.”

Good to remember we have—and have always had—fierce, powerful, unrelenting women fighting for justice and a better future.

Meant to post this on International Women’s Day but today’s as good as any other.

Photos from Huffington Post.