say what you will about the 90s but there were so so many women on TV with beautiful curly hair. we used to be a proper society
90s curls really were so special and breathtaking
Misplaced Lens Cap
Keni
Monterey Bay Aquarium
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Not today Justin
todays bird

izzy's playlists!
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Stranger Things

@theartofmadeline

ellievsbear
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Kaledo Art
NASA
Game of Thrones Daily

roma★
Show & Tell

seen from South Africa
seen from South Africa

seen from India

seen from South Africa

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from France
seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States

seen from Vietnam
@muppet-stage-manager
say what you will about the 90s but there were so so many women on TV with beautiful curly hair. we used to be a proper society
90s curls really were so special and breathtaking

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see unfortunately I have this condition where if I am not explicitly told that I am a part of the ingroup then I will assume I must be part of the outgroup
I've survived my first day on Tumblr
Achievements:
Don't shoot! I'm friendly!: Prove you're not a bot
AI dismemberment: Disable algorithm settings
Friends?: Gained a mutual
I recognize you: Follow someone you know from r/Tumblr
MY EYES!: Change the site palette
Great Idea: Reblog a post
They love me: Have a post reblogged
Oh boy oh boy you're gonna get a Rare achievement for this one
Containment Breach
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
torrents work like this
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
please learn to torrent
An expert guide to get started using torrentsTorrents are one of the most popular forms of file sharing on the internet, accounting for over
always use qbittorrent, do not use bitorrent or utorrent.
Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system
(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy
One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable
To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit
"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."
I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.
everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing
Local Metropolis Reporter Publically Recognized For Contributions To The City; Awarded Medal Of Distinction
They tried to get superman to present the medal but he was offended at being called "overrated" in comparison to Clark so he declined
Counter offer: Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman
beating this dead horse with memes
Hey this was a real fun little read. It's so great to find these treasures on this site
We’re happy to have you!

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yeah that’s exactly what happened
the next bit is even better:
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
Edited down a long tweet. (x)
Visiting family for the weekend, including my seven year old niece, who is obviously the most special and incredible child on the planet
Anyway, she really, really loves it when I tell her stories. She loves stories anyway, and at first this manifested as "stories about Tad-Cu Bryn", aka my father (her grandfather) who died before she was born. This has been a lovely way to keep his memory alive, and she adores every story - she has her favourites, which she will request.
Then it became apparent that she specifically loves me telling her stories. She'll happily ask others for them too, but from me she just wants any anecdote at all; which of course is wonderful and demonstrates that she is a child of impeccable taste and wisdom and brilliance, but also she has ADHD and the energy reserves of a seven year old and so this gets Tiring very quickly
Yesterday, in the car on the way back from the wildlife centre, she asked for one of my longer stories, and I was like hey, how about we try something different?
And she was like, no, tell me a story about Tad-Cu Bryn
And I was like, this will be a brand new story and you get to play it and help me tell it
And she was like, explain
So I gave her three characters to choose from. The first was a warrior with a sword she could name, who was nonetheless dyspraxic. The second was a gymnastic elf who could commune with trees but was afraid of heights. The third was a dyslexic witch whose spells sometimes go wrong when she spells the words wrong.
She picked the witch. I pulled up an online d20 on my phone. I went to start, and she insisted my mother had to play as the elf.
So I told them that the new queen of the kingdom had called for them, because their palace treasury had been robbed - specifically, a single enchanted coin that brings luck and wealth to a ruler's reign had been stolen. And tales of enchanted coins were suddenly emanating from across the land, so each one needed investigating until the right coin was found.
It turns out kids who like stories will absolutely lap this shit up. She was enthralled. It was the simplest story - they had to get into a bank, revive some unconscious gnomes, then enter the vault, find the coin that had been deposited into it, then get back to the queen. Enough to fill a half hour car ride, basically, but she managed to fill it with all the wacky hijinks you get from a ttrpg, particularly when she tried to smash a door down with a hammer but rolled a 1.
We finished with the queen saying it wasn't the right coin, and then my niece demanded we go again, this time with her playing as a sapient reticulated python. That time we made it all the way to the final boss fight, which was a sorcerer who created a big coin monster out of loads of coins; I asked my niece what she wanted to do, and she described graphically how she wanted to constrict and eat the sorcerer and immediately rolled a 19. So, sure! Okay. The sorcerer is now very dead. The coin monster, though, was still there, and as my niece tried to say she would do the same thing, I was like, no, you're a snake and you just ate. You're now immobile.
At this point, my sister advised her to regurgitate the sorcerer.
Great! said my niece. I'm going to do it at the coin monster.
And rolled a 20.
So she projectile vomited a dead sorcerer into the coin monster, and won the day.
Anyway, today she immediately demanded we play "the game with the story where we choose", and my brother in law is now asking me how he can do this with her ("Are you making it all up as you go along??"). But yeah, turns out, this is a fantastic way to entertain a seven year old. Vague ongoing quest, then three steps: get into (place), resolve (minor puzzle), boss fight to finish. Boom. Easy.
So far I've done a bank, a tavern, and an art gallery (it featured an exhibit that was just a room full of slippery banana skins). I'm going to do a pirate ship next
A few people have asked so. The best bits:
The aforementioned snake regurgitation bit. What I didn't mention was that at first, when I said she now needed to lie down and digest, her attempt to resolve it was "Nana, you need to find me a heat lamp" and I had to be like, "Nana has bigger problems right now because she is fighting the coin monster, and also you're both trapped down here." Why were they both trapped? Because rather than finding the stairs down to the basement, they chose to hack a hole in the floor and drop through
When they found their first enchanted coin, Niece picked it up with her bare hand. This made her hand swell up to five times the size and turn blue with orange polka dots. Her response? To immediately pick up the coin with the other hand so they could match
Niece decided very suddenly and randomly that slipping on banana skins was funny, and periodically she would competently enter a new room and she'd interrupt me to say "And then I stand on a banana skin!" This is why I made the banana skin modern art installation. Purely for her to enjoy getting through the room
At one point as the witch they decided to jointly fly on the broom to a new location. "You don't need to roll for that," I said, but Niece was enjoying rolling by then, and so did anyway, and somehow rolled a 20. It was the world's greatest broom ride. They had in-flight entertainment, free snacks each, they napped, and they landed 20 seconds before they took off
The morning I left, she saw me and asked if we could play "Dungeons and Dragons", so her father has definitely been discussing playing with her because I never used that name. Delighted to have offered this new past time into their lives, and next time I'll try and write a little detective campaign, I think
Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
"Why do you buy books when the library is right there?"
Because publishing houses will not continue printing paper books if libraries are their only customers.
Also, I like being able to read at my leisure and generally have books at hand.
#public libraries are good because they let people access books they might never otherwise read#private book ownership is good because it's Yours#physical books are good because they last a long time and again it's Yours#ebooks are good because you can fit a whole library into the physical space of a single book and they're cheaper to produce#audiobooks are good because they're accessible to people with eyesight or visual reading issues and leave your hands free#in conclusion: all books are good and people should enjoy them however and whenever they can#(lest it be misunderstood I agree with you completely OP I just also really like books in general and it got away from me)
YES. all books. every kind

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Realizing that I am not employing enough of my free will to become a nuisance at work
Me watching this:
I’m not letting this rot in the tags
"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with
Hey op thanks for fundamentally rearranging my molecules in some helpful way this fine evening
insane some people don't use ad blockers? babe why r u rawdogging the internet
it's a CESSPIT out there. wrap it before ya tap it babes!!!
the notes are insane
"im on mobile" adblocking exists for mobile
"im broke :(" ADBLOCKING IS FREE
"im lazy" i truly sympathize with executive dysfunction, but this is one of those quality-of-life things you need to prioritize. 3 minutes of research/installation will save you a thousandfold in time and energy. it can even help with brain fog (most people don't realize how much mental energy ads actually steal)
"i like ads" my jaw is on the fucking floor. you chose to live in a sewer, yet you will never be a ninja nor a turtle. you do not have a warrior's heart.
"adblock exists for mobile"
"Adblock is free"
That doesn't sound real but okay.
*inhaling deeply and reminding myself that Shaking The Baby only endangers the baby, and does not assist it to learn or grow* in spite of everything there are beautiful and important truths within this world that you must learn, and i must help you to learn
Adblock DNS is easy to install! Works for all phones! It works on most ads, but not video or tumblr.
Settings → Network → Private DNS, paste in dns.adguard.com
⬆️⬆️⬆️ Can confirm, I use this method (alongside others) on android. for iOS the steps are different (and it may be easier to install the AdGuard DNS app instead)
the above will decrease the amount of ads you see system-wide. however: hands down the BEST ANDROID ADBLOCKING feature is the ability to install Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled.
Install Firefox -> Settings -> Extensions -> uBlock Origin
this only blocks browser ads, but HOLY SHIT does that matter if you try browsing websites over apps when possible. which you should bc it's awesome and gives you SO much more control. E.g. blocks youtube.com ads and you can play videos in the background. works with spotify.com too
Pro tip: toggle on 'Desktop site' to avoid mobile sites that are purposely designed to bully you into using the app. Desktop mode fixes a surprising number of problems
Note: for iOS users this isn't possible bc Apple hates your guts, but there are other browser options with built-in adblocking.
I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"
this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file
I take it back whatever you have going on is way worse than what I was dealing with holy shit
@thesummoningdark hello?????
yeah no this is a real thing an actual human being said to me
Good afternoon to everyone in the notes having a horrible time! Y'all are fighting demons I never knew existed!! I think every person that makes you do stupid time wasting shit like this because they refuse to learn basic computer literacy should be fired!!
i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to
unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem
what common file types are
some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private
how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)
what a cookie actually is
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)
common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
how to not get a virus while pirating something
what a temporary email is and when to use one
red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)
what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous
a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps
a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)
some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself

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having a process for people who have done morally horrific things to make amends, rejoin community, and do right going forward is actually fundamentally crucial for the left. having a clear and accessible pathway for people to be socially (if not interpersonally) forgiven is how you get people radicalized against capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy. its how you turn "these people think i am a bad person" into "these people think something and someone coerced or forced me into doing bad things, and these people want to help me do something about that."
if you want more revolutionaries, you must have a system to turn guilty, traumatized, angry bystanders and collaborators into revolutionaries. and I say a system and process because its not "oh the drone operator said they were sorry and felt bad so its all good now :)" there is no shortcut here. but it is absolutely necessary. no revolution is comprised of morally pure people. in many cases, the most devoted revolutionaries are the ones who know exactly what it is like on the other side.
#'coerced or forced' is a little too unnuanced for me you are accountable for your actions#but yes everyone needs to have an opportunity to get better#even if that person wasn't coerced or forced in any way actually. yes even then.
to explain what i mean by "coerced":
i think doing things that are morally bad is also bad for the individual. people shouldn't be forced to do things in general, but its especially bad to force someone to do something morally bad. its also bad to coerce them into doing that. and its quite horrific for a system to embed within someone a worldview which habitually leads them to do bad things, and a social system which incentivizes people to do bad things.
this post is in part inspired by reading the book Dirty Work which talks about moral injury & people (largely marginalized people) who do work that is seen as morally "dirty" in society. and specifically the chapter on people who work with drones for the US military (in a variety of ways). one of the major figures was a woman who grew up in poverty and was terrified of dying that way, went to join the military to get to see the world, and ended up working a job requiring her to watch hours and hours of drone footage, including hours of people living their lives, their gruesome deaths, and their families trying to collect their body parts in the aftermath. she recounts how much this weighed on her psychologically and morally, but not only her fear of poverty but also being court-martialed or otherwise subject to punishment if she spoke out or did anything, and her anger at protestors who seemed to be largely middle-class women who directed their protests at individual workers like her. she eventually did become a whistle-blower and says she experienced backlash from the left as well as the right because of her job.
now, this was a difficult read for me. it can be frustrating to read a whole chapter on the suffering of drone operators when so many people in the US don't give the beginning of a fuck about the people who have been getting bombed for years. the trauma of entire countries doesn't outweigh the trauma of a single US soldier. how can we talk about her anger at women protesting drone warfare because it hurts her feelings when we are still having to protest drone warfare that destroys entire families?
and yet. i think that reaction is partially an attempt to avoid the discomfort of how fucked the situation is holistically. the woman clearly had internalized plenty of dehumanizing, imperialistic, racist, and likely Orientalist beliefs and values. but this was hardly something she consciously chose. its easy to say "never join the US military" when you are someone who 1. already had the time and chance to develop a sense of how evil the US military is (not everyone necessarily does) 2. was not and is not in the position of being 17 and worried you'll die of a fentanyl overdose in the next five years like multiple of your classmates and desperate for any opportunity out.
does it make her decision better morally? i don't think so. but why was it a decision she had to make? why did she have so few options? why did things feel so desperate? why did a certain decision seem better and more accessible than others? if we are going up the line of responsibility here, the reason this harmful, morally bad action took place at all is because of the system of US imperialism and capitalism.
the problem is, that answer does not give us A Person To Punish. which we, as people socialized into a worldview of punitive justice, have been taught to want. transformative justice isn't just switching to A Person To Fix, its directing our energy towards social change and collective thinking and acting. that doesn't ignore the individual, but it always sees the individual through a social lens. the ultimate goal is a system which incentivizes the morals we want to see just as much as the current one incentives individualism and authoritarianism and puritanism and imperialism.
i think the perspective that we are coerced, by social systems like imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, etc. into acting immorally and harming others and ourselves, more naturally invites people to see their own racism, sexism, orientalism, classism, etc. as both morally bad and yet not a sign they are bad. it directly counters the idea that saying "the thing you did is racist" means "YOU are racist and EVIL and CONSCIOUSLY DESPISE PEOPLE OF COLOR"*; the point is that the thing you did is racist, and if you don't want to do racist things, then you have to unlearn the shit you were socialized into believing. "coerced" keeps in mind that there are people who benefit from keeping this status quo. if racism is evil, and white supremacist culture means everyone has internalized racist beliefs, that doesn't mean everyone is evil. it means we have all been coerced into participating in evil, and we are demanding an end to that coercion; that is (one form of) accountability.
this perspective can't exist alone, either. it must be paired with a devotion to the victims of these systems. this is why it is a process. the back-and-forth has to be put into action to get a balanced solution. what is best is what practically creates system change, and having process for (again, social) forgiveness is a practical necessity.
*to be clear, this is what people often feel when they are told they did smth racist; that is itself a racist reaction, but one that people do have & i try to think about how practically to get people to get over that reaction & focus on the actual issue at hand
i 100% agree with all of this. to be clear, my tags weren't meant to deny anything about how society is coercive and systematically pushes people into doing bad things. only that i still think the choice to get better needs to be accessible even to people who could have chosen better, for one reason or another. (whether someone is allowed to be accepted should not be predicated on whether they were 'enough of a victim,' whatever that means.) and we shouldn't conclude that no one is responsible for their actions--they are. but society as a whole is responsible for the coercion and violence done against them, and the solution to that responsibility is not punishment, but restoration.
#prison abolition#the problem is that over and over we are saying we need rehabilitation we need transformative alternatives to prison#but I have yet to see any thorough ideas on what that looks like!#part of the point of Angela y davis's book “are prisons obsolete” is that we cannot imagine a system without punitive justice#she spends 9 chapters explaining why prison is bad#and I'm on board!#and then one paragraph on what we could do instead???#girl YOURE the expert you gotta have some ideas about this because I'm coming up blank!!#yeah we need transformative justice. how do we change what we have into that. or even just What does that look like when we get there???#seriously if anyone has a genuine proposal on this I want to read it
(gonna add what i wrote in another reblog here):
i want to highlight something important: societies where sexual violence was essentially unthinkable and extremely rare have existed (one example here). societies where restorative justice was the status quo have existed. these are not just new speculative theories on how we could live, it is based on how human beings have lived already. we are not starting from scratch here. we have lived like this before and we can live like this again.
from Histories of Kanatha: Seen and Told by Georges Sioui, a historian from the Wendat Nation of what is currently Canada:
Two of Achiganaga’s sons readily admitted that they, along with the Menominee, had killed the Frenchmen and barely covered the bodies with branches, then left the broken canoe at a distance to create the appearance of an accident. Although Dulhut tried to implicate Achiganaga, all others agreed that the father himself had no part in the incident. When Dulhut announced at the end of the council that the three guilty men should be executed, the assembled Indians refused to approve the verdict. For the next three days, the Indians took counsel among themselves. To the Indian people gathered at Sault Ste. Marie, the punitive methods of European law seemed wrong: two murders are not settled by committing three more. In their view, the initial injury to society—to all the people—should be healed and not compounded; the rip in the social fabric should be mended and not enlarged. To restore balance to society, Indian people in northeastern North America have two basic strategies: first, to provide gifts and services to compensate for the loss, and, second, to turn over actual human beings to the person who has suffered the loss: that is, to give lives to take the place of the lives lost. In Indian figures of speech, action is taken, either to ‘cover the dead’ with gifts as a form of restitution, or ‘raise up the dead’ by replacing a life lost with another human life. Everyone has a stake in restoring harmony, in making the social order whole again.
& this comes from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, quoting a French Jesuit missionary's observation of the Wendat people & conceding that their non-punitive justice system worked better at creating social harmony than the French justice system:
"I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger …" Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’. Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.
i am not going to sit here and say that i can explain exactly how sex offenders would be treated in some hypothetical version of society, and i'm not sure of how this worked across the many societies throughout history that have practiced restorative justice. but society and culture truly shapes so much of what we think of as real, possible, how we interpret our experiences, how we relate to others. it's not that everyone will magically become pacifistic and docile and we'll never have any problems - but again, human beings have already lived like this!
in fact, many people are still actively trying to! in spite of its struggles under constant attack and de-legitimization, the restorative justice system of DAANES / Rojava has been afaik quite successful, given the circumstances they are forced to deal with. the system of community arbitration helps prevent a lot of issues from getting to the courts in the first place, it is explicitly designed to protect women's autonomy and the right of women to have a say in topics that impact them, and the focus is overall on doing what is necessary to keep people safe but also believing in the ability of people to change. before the influx of ISIS detainees which caused massive strain on their justice system, they had the second lowest rate of imprisonment for any self-governing region in the world (from here, which goes into detail on how they handled rehabilitation of ISIS affiliates before, well, the Syrian transitional government allowed the escape of many such ISIS affiliates and sympathizers during their violent attack on DAANES recently). If curious, check out this article as well:
Rojava’s restorative legal system offers a different model of community care, seeking to minimize police involvement. Original article publi
(also, from this reblog, which focuses more on how restorative justice frameworks can be weaponized & how Rojava & the Wendat framework try to counteract this):
Notably, both the Wendat and Rojava systems of justice take into account gender in a way that I think is very important for not just gender but how restorative justice needs to deal with marginalization as a whole. In Rojava, any issue regarding women (especially issues of marriage or sexual violence) must have women involved in the justice process from start to finish. On an institutional level, there must be gender parity across systems, including the justice system, and women can seek recourse on the most basic level by going to their local Mala Jin (women's house) to get support from their community. The Mala Jin are required to be consulted in any legal issue concerning women. Similarly, in the Wendat nation and many other nations, women had their own independent councils which had authority over their own issues.
Obviously, gender and race are different issues. But one can easily imagine how "restorative justice" could be used to excuse gendered violence by having a bunch of men demand a woman who was abused by her husband forgive him and prevent divorce. This is why Rojava is modeled the way it is, on every level; ethnic minorities are treated similarly, having their own democratic organizations and positions in councils to ensure they have a collective voice. The (Kurdish, Assyrian, Yazidi, Arab) women of Rojava have meaningful power over their lives and social organization, and they make sure that restorative justice is built to work for marginalized groups, rather than simply assuming the system itself is just so inherently good and moral in theory that everything will work out if its kept gender/race/class neutral.
It's not just a matter of implementing a system and then expecting everyone's mindset to change. Both the Wendat and Rojava systems involve a certain culture that facilitates people engaging in these systems, and the Rojava Revolution has involved dedicated work to spread the political and philosophical framework that underlies its justice system and allow it to function. In cases where restorative justice utterly fails, its a lot of times the result of either a poorly-made framework, people lacking the theoretical/cultural understanding to use that framework properly, or both.
The models of the Wendat and Rojava come from cultures that were/are both communalist and anti-authoritarian. For many Indigenous nations, the idea that someone could be forced to obey a political leader, or even that a child should be forced to obey a parent, was ridiculous and unjust. Leaders had to be constantly generous and persuasive to get people to follow them, and people had the inherent right to refuse orders. That is a very different way of relating to people than in more authoritarian cultures, like most European cultures. So trying to just cut + paste that kind of justice system without adopting any other part of the culture or political framework is obviously going to fail. It is a very European-Enlightenment way of thinking to imagine that if you just build a system that sounds really good and moral in theory, then in practice you can act and think however you want and the system will always spit out good results because it just looks so good on paper (this video from The Alt-Right Playbook isn't really relevant to restorative justice, but it is where I first heard this cultural idea of "the system will Just Work, no matter how many bad ideas are in it!" & I think it explains why a lot of white leftist attempts at various things are shitty. People don't want to put in the effort to do good, they just want a system that lets them act however they want and still feel good).
Any restorative justice system worth its salt should preempt situations like the above. No victim who is marginalized should be in a position where they, alone, have to defend themselves against a group of people who do not share their marginalization, even if those people (claim to) have good intentions. The system should be built specifically with that situation in mind, in order to ensure that no group is able to hoard the power and control what justice looks like. It should be a ground rule that if an incident involves people of a marginalized group, that the system has a way to ensure that group has authority over the proceedings. If the victim is a Black person, step one should be bringing in other Black people to support the victim and ensure that the victim as an individual, and the community as a whole, has not just a perfunctory voice but the power to dictate what restorative justice looks like in that situation.
If an attempt at restorative justice is not foundationally anti-racist and built to force white people to deal with discomfort and distress and social consequences for engaging in racism, it does not deserve respect. When cis/male/white/upper-class people are never made, in a justice system, to do any restorative acts that challenge the privileges they gain from those positions, the only clear end-goal of the process is the victim's forgiveness. And rather than that forgiveness being the natural result of a process that amends the harm done to them, the whole process collapses into "how fast can we get this person to shut up about what they went through?" because the process has been built for the comfort of the offenders, not for restoring harmony in the community to ensure the well-being of all its members. Good restorative justice sees the reform of offenders as a practical way of establishing that safety and harmony for everyone; if it didn't demand anything from the offenders, it would be completely inept. In one of those quotes in that post I linked, the restorative justice process is explicitly meant as an alternative for the victim('s family) demanding violent retribution, with the idea being "if they are not satisfied through restoration, they will demand blood and probably take matters into their own hands, so our restoration system needs to be genuinely effective to keep the peace." There was no assumption that the victim would just have to get whatever the community decides they get and have to deal with it (which ties back to the cultural anti-authoritarianism).
(I hope this helps a bit to give you a sense of what such a framework could look like when lived out!)
I think more people would benefit from my dad’s go to advice: “show up, and pay attention”
Work, friendships, relationships, etc. — all of them will be improved if you just show up and pay attention.
Show up: follow through on commitments, be present rather than distracted, keep your word
Pay attention: take notes, listen when people talk, do what you need to do to remember tasks you’ve been given, READ YOUR DAMN EMAILS
And before tumblr tumblrs, I also have undiagnosed ADHD and probably autism and “just” showing up and paying attention often takes a bit of extra effort for me. But I’m also the most recent addition to my team at work and also somehow the only one who is both on top of my shit and still only giving like 60%-70%.
I do have one warning though: once you start showing up and paying attention, you will be frustrated by how many people aren’t doing that. But hey, your boss will love you and you might even get a raise out of it.
Be careful with this advice. This is how my mom became president of her League of Women Voters chapter.
This is also how you survive college. Show up to class, pay attention, maybe take a few notes, and read your damn emails. You might not get an A but you’ll be okay.