Where the dead men left their bones

Trainer: [annoyed] Can you… teach me how to play the rest of the game?

And then this is just fucked up

And apparently anarchism is super right wing and fascism is leftist

Local Masons Petition Grand Lodge to Add Wheaton’s Law to Masonic Ritual 

This just made my day.

We love saying representation matters. And we love pointing to people who belong to social minorities being encouraged by positive representation as the reason why it matters. And I’m here to tell you that they are only a part of why it matters.

The bigger part is schema.

Now a schema is just a fancy term for your brain’s autocomplete function. Basically, you’ve seen a certain pattern enough times that your brain completes the equation even when you have incomplete information.

One of the ways we learned about this was professional chess players vs. people who had no experience with chess.

If you take a chess board and you set it up according to a pattern that is common in chess playing (I’m one of those people who knows jack shit about chess), and you show it to both groups of people, and then you knock all the pieces off the board, the pro chess players will be able to return it to its prior state almost perfectly with no trouble, because they looked at it and they said, “Oh, this is the fifth move of XYZ Strategy, so these pieces would be here.”

The people who don’t know about chess are like, “Uh, I think one of the horses was over here, and maybe there was a castle over there?”

BUT, if you just put the pieces randomly on the board before you showed it to them, then the amateurs were more likely to have a higher rate of accuracy in returning the pieces to the board, because the pros are SO entrenched in their knowledge of strategy patterns that it impairs their ability to see what is actually there if it doesn’t match a pattern they already know.

Now some of y’all are smart enough to see where this is going already but hang on because I’m never gonna get to be a college professor so let me get my lecture on for a second.

Let’s say for a second that every movie and TV show on television ever shows black men who dress in loose white T-shirts and baggy pants as carrying guns 90% of the time, and when they get mad, they pull that gun out and wave it in some poor white woman’s face. I mean, sounds fake, right? But go with it.

Now let’s say that you’re out walking around in real life, and you see a black man wearing a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. 

And let’s say he reaches for something in his pocket.

And let’s say you can’t see what he’s reaching for. Maybe it’s his wallet. Maybe it’s his cell phone or car keys. Maybe it’s a bag of Skittles.

But on TV and movies, every single time a black man in comfortable, casual clothes reaches for something you can’t see, it turns out to be a gun.

So you see this.

And your brain screams “GUN!!!” before he even comes up with anything. And chances are even if you SEE the cell phone, your brain will still think “GUN!!!” until he does something like put it up to his ear. (Unless you see the pattern of non-threatening black men more often than you see the narrative of them as a threat, in which case, the pattern you see more often will more likely take precedence in this situation.)

Do you see what I’m saying?

I’m saying that your brain is Google’s autocomplete for forms, and that if you type something into it enough, that is going to be what the function suggests to you as soon as you even click anywhere near a box in a form.

And our brains functioning this way has been a GREAT advantage for us as a species, because it means we learn. It means that we don’t have to think about things all the way through all the time. It saves us time in deciding how to react to something because the cues are already coded into our subconscious and we don’t have to process them consciously before we decide how to act.

But it also gets us into trouble. Did you know that people are more likely to take someone seriously if they’re wearing a white coat, like the kind medical doctors wear, or if they’re carrying a clipboard? Seriously, just those two visual cues, and someone is already on their way to believing what you tell them unless you break the script entirely and tell them something that goes against an even more deeply ingrained schema.

So what I’m saying is, representation is important, visibility is important, because it will eventually change the dominant schemas. It takes consistency, and it takes time, but eventually, the dominant narrative will change the dominant schema in people’s minds.

It’s why when everyone was complaining that same-sex marriage being legal wouldn’t really change anything for LGB people who weren’t in relationships, some people kept yelling that it was going to make a huge difference, over time, because it would contribute to the visibility of a narrative in which our relationships were normalized, not stigmatized. It would contribute to changing people’s schemas, and that would go a long way toward changing what they see as acceptable, as normal, and as a foregone conclusion.

So in conclusion: Representation is hugely important, because it’s probably one of the single biggest ways to change people’s behavior, by changing their subconscious perception.

They decriminalized ALL drugs. Every single one. Yes, even that one. If you get caught w. more than a 10 days supply (what ever that means) of any drug you meet in front of a Doctor, Lawyer and Social worker about drug addiction. They may or may not give you a fine but essentially there’s no penalty.

AND IT WORKED! ADDICTION RATES DROPPED. HIV RATES IN INJECTION USERS DROPPED. DEATH BY DRUG OD PLUMMETED.

So. Figuring that the Americans were all shitting their collective knickers about the huge show of force, the Howe brothers were like, “I bet we can take care of this without even fighting. Let’s offer them a chance to just back out of this whole independence thing.” Offering a parley, the Howe brothers sent a letter to George Washington on July 14, 1776.

Three of Washington’s officers met with the messenger but refused to touch the letter until they were told who it was addressed to. The messenger was like, “uh, George Washington, Esq. etc. etc.” Oh the 18th century shade. Esquire was used when no other titles were appropriate and the etc, etc was hella dismissive. Basically it was the equivalent of addressing the letter “George Washington, Whatever the Fuck.”

So Washington’s officers were like, “Sorry, bro, no one here by that name.”

And the messenger, who was pretty sure that George Washington was a real person, was like, “um, okay who should I tell them the letter should be addressed to then?”

The Americans’ answer: “General Washington. Punk.”

And the messenger was like, “oh hey come on, this is just a nice letter between bros, it’s not, like, a military letter,” but the Americans weren’t having any of it. So the messenger had to go back to the Howe brothers and tell them that their peace offering was rejected because they failed to pay the proper respect. The proper respect to a rebel general committing actual treason. The British weren’t having it.

So they tried it again on July 16 and Washington still refused to accept the letter and the British were privately all, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is? That backwater country bumpkin who STARTED AN ENTIRE WORLD WAR by accidentally allowing a French diplomat to get murdered on his watch sure thinks he’s something now, huh?”

But the next day they sent another letter and this time it said, “Your Excellency, General Washington.” Point, Washington.

(hey Chris Jackson, looking good)

And that would have been plenty hilarious, but when the British sent their emissary to go and try to broker a peace with him, George Washington showed up dressed to SLAY in the fly uniform he’d designed for himself. And he rolled up with the whole crew of hand picked hotties he’d selected as his personal guard. Washington, six foot two (or six feet, whatever, I’m sure he was in his boots) in full battle regalia was so impressive that the British emissary was totally overwhelmed and basically was like, “Your excellency, this” “Your excellency, that” but he still tried to give Washington the original letter addressed “George Washington, Esq. etc. etc.” and Washington STILL WOULDN’T TOUCH IT.

The emissary was like, “Okay, okay sorry. Listen we’re just trying to get out of this without killing anybody. And we could definitely kill everybody. I mean, that’s just facts, okay. So if you just say you’re sorry, the Howe brothers can pardon everyone and we all just pretend this never happened.” 

And Washington – and he knew full well at this point that they probably weren’t going to be able really defend New York City at this point – shoots back, “Can’t say sorry if we’re not sorry, can’t be pardoned if we’ve done nothing wrong. Want a snack before you go?”

And both parties went home and wrote letters to their friends basically saying, “WHAT A BUNCH OF DICKS, AMIRITE” about each other.