gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it
which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.
which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already.
Its important to note that a lot of horse problems are because of how they are exploited by people, pushed too hard and made beasts of burden that they were never meant to be. I think this strengthens the analogy
This is good, but there’s a larger structural aspect to it that I don’t think gets talked about enough so I’m going to bring it up now. This is a simplified model that cut out some significant aspects(for instance, social investment), but it gets at the general idea:
50s kids(Boomers): Educated without any formal “Gifted” program to focus school resources on “best” students, graduated into a thriving economy, generationally over-confident.
60s kids: Educated while “Gifted” pedagogy was being developed but before it was systematized and widely implemented, graduated into a depressed economy, generationally cynical and rebellious.
70s kids: Educated with early “Gifted”&Aptitude testing regimes, graduated into booming tech-driven 80s-90s economy, generationally disaffected but confident; “got mine” libertarian strain prominent.
80s-90s kids(Millennials): Educated with fully formalized and implemented “Gifted”&Aptitude testing programs segregating school resources, graduated into worst economy since The Great Depression, generationally anxious, insecure, ironic, and self-doubting, but also community-oriented and politically-minded(Occupy, BLM, etc).
The common narrative of the Millennials is that they were coddled by an “everyone’s special”, “participation trophy” theory of parenting and teaching. But the reality is that, during the 80s and 90s when they were growing up, school divestment was at its most intense, district-level integration was being rolled back through housing resegregation, and US schools were undertaking a nation-wide experiment in internal segregation between those the schools had decided would succeed(the “Gifted and Talented” students who were given smaller class sizes, the best teachers, first-pick on textbooks and supplies, faculty attention, and who “just happened” to be overwhelmingly well-off and white) and those the schools had decided were a lost cause(the “Normal” students who found themselves in increasingly larger classes, with increasingly disinterested teachers increasingly able and willing to turn to the police to enforce “classroom discipline”, who “just happened” to be overwhelmingly precarious, and black and brown) more radical than any official action or policy seen since Brown v. Board of Education.
Those “Gifted” kids weren’t unaware of this. They might not have articulated it this way in the moment, but their position was fundamentally a precarious one: perform and you get the comfort, investment, and safety found in AP classes, don’t and you lose all that. So this generation -over-policed, over-tested, over-surveiled, raised constantly aware of the disdain adults held them in(all that “snowflake” “participation trophy” culture war talk), and the severe punishments for not pleasing them(police in their schools, the rise of trying juveniles as adults, the “Normal classes”)- then graduated into a collapsed, deunionized, off-shored, vulture-capitalized economy where they couldn’t find any jobs.
Is it any wonder that, rather than turning out more capable and prepared and individualistic as “Gifted” pedagogy predicted, they turned out more anxious and insecure and group-minded than previous generations? And is it any wonder that, as “Gifted” pedagogy and the student-policing which surrounds it has grown more developed, entrenched, and severe since then, and as the US economy has failed to pass its recovery onto workers’ standard of living, that pattern has continued with the “Gifted” student of the next generation?
Okay, I’m going to explain an injoke here, which may make it unfunny, but I feel like it needs to be shared with people who aren’t Esther or my friend C
So, you may remember that a while back I got into reading about Rescue Rangers fandom for some reason. One of the most (in)famous Rescue Rangers fanfics is something called “Gadget in Chains,” which is like 1000 pages long and consists of endless sympathy porn / softcore actual-porn about a mouse from the TV show going to prison and being subjected to various misfortunes. (I have not read more than 10 pages or so of it, but I have read this hilarious review.)
And of course, when I learned about this fic I inevitably put it on my Kindle, because the idea of having a 1000-page Rescue Rangers fanfic on your Kindle right next to Dostoevsky and stuff is too good to pass up
So then I was at a party with my friend C (previously mentioned in this space as the author of that article about winning an M:TG tournament on shrooms). C doesn’t have a Kindle. I was showing him my Kindle, and talking about how weird it was that I could just put all this heterogenous stuff on it, and it would render it all in the same font and generally make it all look identical. “For instance, I have a 1000-page Rescue Rangers fanfic on here,” I said. I opened up “Gadget in Chains.” C grabbed the Kindle and flipped to a random page somewhere in the middle, then began to read out loud. The first thing he read was:
The old hag said and then gestured to the mole beside her. “This is Molly Velvet. Don’t mind her ferocious expression – the Rescue Rangers are always harassing her nephew just because he works at a casino that’s owned by a cat they don’t like. She’ll warm up to you as soon as she’s sure you’re one of us.”
Re-read the second line of dialogue there. It’s incredible. So much exposition packed into such a little space, and it’s all so weird. This woman has a permanently “ferocious” expression just because of the perils of her nephew? Her nephew is getting repeatedly (”always”!) harassed by the supposedly-heroic Rescue Rangers? Just because they don’t like … his boss?
C and I fixated on this sentence for the rest of the evening. Especially C. He quoted it incessantly, until the very obnoxiousness of the quoting became a joke in itself. He advised party-goers not to mind the ferocious expressions of other party-goers; any talk of employment circled back inevitably to casinos owned by disliked cats. He applied his English degree to the sentence’s quick delivery of narrative information; he envisioned a thesis reading it through a number of lenses (Marxist: everything bad here is ultimately the fault of a bad capital owner; Feminist: Molly Velvet is being spoken for, having her anger excused … )
Someone arrived at the party late. “How’s C?”, he asked. “He keeps talking about this casino? Owned by a cat? I dunno, man,” someone said.
When I left the party, C was drunk, literally crawling along the floor, being videotaped for posterity on someone’s cell phone, proclaiming in drunken spurts of speech: “always harassing her nephew … just because he works at a casino … ”
The sentence is now burned into my brain. When someone makes a nasty facial expression, I tell myself not to mind it. The sight of a chipmunk brings up visions of wrongly harassed nephews. I cannot escape. (But don’t mind my ferocious expression! The Rescue Rangers are always harassing my nephew … )
In December of 1940, America still hadn’t entered the war.
There were a lot of Americans – such as the 800,000 paying members of the America First Committee – who looked at fascists massacring their way through Europe and declared “that’s not our problem.”
Captain America was created by two poor Jewish Americans, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, with the specific intent of trying to convince Americans that entering the war was the right thing to do. It wasn’t easy – Kirby went far beyond what was expected of artists at the time, penciling the entire issue with a deadline that would have been difficult for a two-man crew to pull off.
Captain America punched Hitler right on the cover, at a time when a majority of Americans just didn’t feel like doing anything decisive against the Nazis.
Kirby and Simon faced considerable resistance for their creation, including steady hate mail and outright death threats.
Once, while Jack was in the Timely office, a call came from someone in the lobby. When Kirby answered, the caller threatened Jack with bodily harm if he showed his face. Kirby told the caller he would be right down, but by the time Jack reached street level, there was no one to be found.
Both creators enlisted after America entered the war. Kirby, as an artist, was called upon to do the extremely dangerous work of scouting ahead to draw maps. He also went on to co-create Black Panther in 1966.
They didn’t create Captain America to be an accurate depiction of America-As-It-Is. The character was meant to inspire and embolden, to show America-As-It-Should-Be.
The subject of where the Vibranium for the shield came from actually never came up for decades of comics, until it was finally addressed by Black Panther’s writer, Christopher Priest, in 2001. Priest never shied away from acknowledging America’s racism, but he also understood that Captain America represented an ideal, intended to inspire Americans to be better.
The story mixed together a “present day” discussion between Cap and T’Challa with flashbacks to when Cap met the Black Panther ruling Wakanda during World War II.
FLASHBACK:
PRESENT:
PRESENT -> FLASHBACK
PRESENT:
The Vibranium was given, freely, by one good man to another good man.
It is right to rage against the injustices done by our governments. We must call them out, and we must fight for what’s right.
But if you can’t even stand to see the symbols created to inspire people to be better, and rail against those,then you’re just confusing cynicism for realism.
an inuyasha oc who also has a curse on her hand but when she uncovers it, it just shoots out whatever miroku last sucked up with his wind tunnel, in order.
she lives on like the other side of the world and nobody ever challenges her because of her apparently inexplicable and completely unpredictable but still very dangerous ability to shoot Poison Insects TM from her hand. Of course, on any given day it could just end up being like one bad guy and a tree but Who is going to take the chance?
Person: vaguely reasonable sj thing
Person b: WHAT ABOUT MT EXTREME NICHE LIFE EXPERIENCE THAT CONTRADICTS THAT HUH
person c: WHAT ABOUT MY EXTREME NICHE LIFE EXPERIENCE THAR ALLOWS ME TO TELL YOU NOT TO CONTRADICT THAT HUH
Person d: Kek this is why all social justice is bad and wrong
Person e: hang on this inspires me, 100000 word Harry Potter au
This is one of those things that I already knew was true, but seeing it so blatantly displayed makes me feel like like I am finding out about it for the first time.
CIA is getting lazy
O.o
“It’s just a script whats the problem lol” the problem is that Fox, CNN, CBS, and all the other channels repped here, despite claiming to be different companies with different viewpoints, all had the exact same script, word for word, to push the exact same viewpoint that smaller, independent news outlets are Fake News and “A Threat To Our Democracy.”
The fact that they have scripts isn’t the problem. The problem is they all, each and every one, have the exact same script down to the letter and in some cases the fucking inflection, which basically reads “small news stations are untrustworthy and a Threat to your Way Of Life, only trust Us, We Are Verified.”
Okay but no one posted yet where do these premade scripts come from:
callanswall 