The Other Side of Wonderland

Here is the link to needanabortion.org.

The silence of the Supreme Court has just effectively allowed Texas to overturn Roe vs Wade.

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.  

1. It’s overused and supports the current status quote of typical vampire supremacy:worshiping rich folk.

2. Vampires prey upon humans and therefore symbolize capitalists preying on the working class.

Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like... actually doing so? Used to be harder?

And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.

So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.

But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.

And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.

And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?

And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!

And I was like, and how do you do that?

And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!

And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.

Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.

Well then he should have searched harder!

How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?

He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.

(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)

And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.

Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.

But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.

Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.

(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)

If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.

But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.

Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.

I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.

If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.

I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.

So far I’ve got

ladder letters: A, E, F, H, T

humpback B’s and P’s get as many bumps as you think they need

circle O’s, you just keep spiraling in til you feel like you’ve made your point

tree letters branch into smaller versions of themselves ad nauseum: X, Y

spider Q’s, so many legs

New alphabet dropped!

But I think i’ve taken a real shine to it! 

I worked as a dishwasher at a dorm kitchen when I was in college. Dishwashing is usually called an “unskilled” job, but someone had to train me to load the machine, how to run it, and what to do with the plates and things when they were clean, and I needed to learn how to do this efficiently so that the kitchen didn’t run out of plates during mealtimes. All of those things were skills I had to learn.

I worked on a sandwich line for a summer when I was in college. Food service is usually called an “unskilled” job, but someone had to train me how to make the sandwiches, how to prepare the salads, and how to prepare the desserts. I had to learn how to work with the folks in the prep kitchen, with the wait staff, and with the other people on my line. I had to be trained how to open and close, because sometimes I would get those shifts. I had to learn how to work quickly and efficiently so that our customers would get their meals in a timely manner, and so that everything was prepped and clean for the next shift. All of those things were skills I had to learn.

That whole “special skills” thing? It’s classist and probably racist.

Unskilled jobs are poorly paid because the employers can get away with it, and that’s pretty much the whole reason. They are permitted by our capitalist society to exploit workers, especially those workers who are most disadvantaged.

“Unskilled” workers make our food, take care of our kids and our elders, stock our grocery store shelves, clean the spaces we use, and do hundreds of other things that make our lives easier. “Unskilled” jobs require a fuckton of physical labor. Don’t those things merit good compensation?

When I sorted bills for my university, I got paid really well cause while I was only part-time, the job itself is not deemed “unskilled”. Despite me literally just sorting stuff by numbers. Look at a number, put it between other numbers. All day every day. I even was allowed to have as much coffee and tea as I liked from the office kitchen for free.

When I worked for Subway for a month, I had to learn within 2 hours:

exactly where and how to cut the bread to make both sides equal

what sauce to recommend with what topping

how much topping to scoop per half

what all the breads, toppings and stuff are called and being able to rattle them down on command

how to use three different vegetable cutters

how to use their oven (that thing has like 9 buttons that all do different shit and none of the buttons got ANY symbol or word on it, all are just black)

what the day’s special was for every day

what the price for stuff was without looking at the sign or being at the cash register

when to change the gloves (all the time, for every little shit)

I also had to go to a 2 hour food sanitary training before hand to give me a certificate so I was even allowed to work at Subways.

Meanwhile, working in a Starbucks (“unskilled” labor) took me months of practice to perfect. I had to learn to make every drink on the menu, but also how to use the register, how to keep different areas of the store clean, how to prepare and date ingredients and brew hot and cold coffee, how to explain the menu to customers (knowing all the major ingredients of every item), how to promote different products, how to communicate with the team, how to use the ovens, and how to do all of it quickly while still being friendly, pleasant, and fast at all times. It took about a year to become reasonably good at every part of the job.

When I became a supervisor I also had to learn to handle cash responsibilities, inventory, management, working with vendors and partners, being aware of and improving measurements like sales and customer ratings, and coaching other baristas.

1. I put in an Annual Leave request form almost 3 weeks ago and my boss has not approved it yet

2. I went into my office today and replaced every single writing utensil with crayons in preparation for April Fools Day on Monday

3. Whilst searching for pens to remove, I found my unsigned Annual Leave form in my boss’s drawer

4. I placed my unsigned Annual Leave form in a photo frame and put in on his desk

5. The frame I used was from a photo of his kids that I deemed less important than my Leave form

6. My boss sometimes goes into the office on Saturdays to work

7.

@serialreblogger​ here you go:

This excellent home security camera that picks up every movement

“Back in my day we didn’t have any of these childhood protective things, we were smart enough not to do stupid shit on our own!” Except your little neighbour, who got the funniest idea at the age of seven, and got his skull pierced when he slipped?

“Back in my day nobody got divorced, we stuck together and fixed our problems!” What about your cousin, who was slowly killed by her husband because she had nowhere to escape him?

“Back in my day nobody had ‘mental problems’, we didn’t whine, we just toughed it out and endured life!” Hey remember that guy you used to work with, who seemed really friendly and normal, and then suddenly hanged himself ‘for no reason’?

“Back in my day we didn’t have any of this ‘gay’ or ‘transgender’ thing.” You did, but your family cut all ties with her before you were born.