Category: Uncategorized

libertariancrusader:

generalchelseamayhem:

davidessman:

His restaurant was robbed at gun point, and he was shot in the arm…

The person in this cartoon is intentionally pitting two separate demographics of people with similar grievances against each other.

Implicitly, the veteran thinks that the fast food worker does not deserve $15 per hour because he does not work hard enough for it, whereas veterans have been shot at for a living and still do not receive enough care. The fast food worker’s obvious reaction is to be indignant and provide the veteran with a blow-by-blow account of how he has to deal with the foulest dregs of humanity on a daily basis.

This puts the veteran and the fast food worker on opposing sides: each thinks that the other is in some way holding them back and distracting from their own issues.

This creates a villain for each side to focus on, which distracts them from what should obviously be the primary target, that both sets of people should be teaming up against: a system which can’t even pretend to care about the issues that either of them face.

Divide and conquer.

Politicians do this all the time, and it’s amazing how we as voters keep falling for it. All you have to do is show up in front of a crowd of angry people, and tell those people that an Acceptable Target is to blame. Could be White People, could be The Jews, The Illegals, The Godless Heathens, whatever works. Then all of the disparate groups which should be united against you are instead warring against each other. And at least one of those groups is looking to you to stop the Other Group Menace. Voila, you have a voter base that you can exploit and screw over for as long as the Other Group remains a credible threat.

Of course, sometimes the ploy is not as obvious as that. Sometimes it’s as subtle as this cartoon.

Guess this was my political rant for today.

Very well said!

bookthrower:

sindri42:

whitepeopletwitter:

Gotta make room for the smart shit

Fun fact as you go through college all the people majoring in any kind of math or engineering gradually forget how to do basic fucking arithmetic because their brain is full of the parts of math that you can’t do on a calculator in less than a second. Eventually if they’re cut off from their tech they pretty much have to ask an art major how long division works.

That’s actually something that psychology has confirmed before. The brain retains things better when they can’t be easily looked up.

momo-de-avis:

aloneindarknes7:

calystarose:

Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.

This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.

I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.

After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.” 

If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity. 

I remember reading somewhere once “we should be speaking of equity instead of equality” and that is a principle that applies here me thinks