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When you encounter a poll on tumblr about a topic you’ve never thought much about or that you think is obvious, what do you usually do/feel?
Do nothing/feel nothing in particular; ignore it/scroll past
Scroll, but I sincerely think people are stupid for some of these questions
Scroll, but it makes me angry when people ask unnecessary questions
I sincerely think people are stupid for some of these questions; I comment
Comment about how stupid it is just to make people mad at me (trolling)
Use my critical thinking skills to engage with the question in good faith
Other
I’ve never encountered a poll about something I thought wasn’t worth asking
Even if you haven’t yet, it’s extremely likely that you’ll come across hyperspecific subjects and people with correspondingly hyperspecific opinions that you would never come up with on your own. That’s the beauty of the internet.
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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.
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a month ago i picked up a book on stage directing in my school’s black box and opened to a random page and it was something about making shakespearean actors rehearse by adding the word fuck to their lines to turn the archaic language into something familiar for the emotional resonance (of course taking it out as rehearsals move along to fix rhythm/etc but just to start off) and the example it gave was the solid flesh speech. like. iirc it was specifically “but two fucking months dead”
and like. im obsessed with this. as a concept. not even for acting i just think it’s so fucking funny. to be or not to be, that’s the fucking question. is this a fucking dagger i see before me. this is the excellent fuckery of the world -
What fucking fire is in mine ears? Here is my fucking butt.
“Press not a falling man too fucking far!” - Lord Chamberlain, Henry VIII, Act 3 scene 2
One of my absolute favourite things in the world is a ‘fuck run’. If the energy is too low, or the intensity is dropping the director might ask you to run a scene, or sometimes even the whole play, and insert ‘fuck’ or any of its derivatives wherever you feel the urge to. I have never experienced anything so quickly and ferociously liven a scene. It’s like a defibrillator.
Once did the last half of Oedipus Rex as a ‘fuck run’ leading to such incredible double entendres as: ‘Oedipus, son, dear child, who motherfucking bore you’.
Other highlights from times I’ve either taken part or seen a fuck run:
“I would eat his heart in the fucking marketplace”
”I have, of late, though wherefore I know the fuck not, lost all my motherfucking mirth.”
“Your royal father’s fucking murdered.” “Fuckfuckfuck. O, by fucking who?”
”Gentlemen, remember that I am a fucking ass”
”Why the fuck did you bring these fucking daggers from the place? They must lie fucking there! Fuck! Go fucking carry them, and smear the sleepy grooms with fucking blood”
“Screw your courage the FUCKING sticking place and we’ll not fail”(via aswasforetold)
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One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.
It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.
Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of “how can this be stopped, and prevented” instead of “you’re going to regret this!”
Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”
How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?
Please.
OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented” instead of “you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]
Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you’re saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you’re an idiot and you should be punished, probably”
contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them
and if you don’t think you should have to worry about that: why not?
I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:
When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.
And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.
Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.
Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.
Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)
If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.
I just want to add that this is just…so obviously true. I teach 4-year-olds English. That means that at the beginning of the year I get 13 little monkeys who don’t speak English at all, and without using their mother tongue, I teach them English. Truly, it is like a magic trick, and even I am surprised at how they unbelievably fast they learn. By midyear we are fully having conversations.
When I started, I used to try to strongarm them into doing what I wanted in the classroom and had ‘consequences’ for 'misbehavior’ like time-outs and telling their parents they were naughty. But actually, you know, it was never that they were naughty, it’s that they were 4, and new to classrooms, and maybe not quite ready to be there, and 'consequences’ absolutely did not work at all, and mostly only revealed to them the limits of my authority. Punishing and cajoling them weakened my ability to manage my classroom, and it did not make them any more likely to engage with me or my planned agenda.
But here’s the thing: 4-year-olds want to please you. They want to communicate with you! They are absolutely dying for you to love and approve of them. It’s their biggest motivation in life to please and engage with you. Praising and encouraging them, laughing at their jokes and making them feel like they please you? That fucking works. That is what gets them to go along with me and engage with my plans. There are no punishments in my class, only a recognition of the fact that they are who they are, and they are fucking babies. I convince them to join me responsively, and it works. Every year my classes get better and more successful because I no longer fight or punish them.
Like, I’m not a scientist or a psychologist, but… Punishment is a tool of hierarchy and a sign of weakness.
Oh man this happened to come back across my dash at the right time, bc I just had this conversation in my class on Monday…
We were talking about motivation, and I was showing research on how much more effective meeting people’s needs is than punishment, like the effect of giving people a steady job along with their therapy on drug addiction rates or the effect of UBI on crime rates (in one study it dropped all crime by 20% and violent crime by like 27%, when three strikes laws only drop it by like 2-3%).
And one girl asked if we know all of this works, why don’t we do it? Why do we rely on prison and other ineffective and expensive punishments? And well, first I had to say that this is a very big question whose answer has to do with a lot of societal systems interacting, and not something I can give you a quick one-slide answer to in an intro-level class. But aside from that, a lot of people are just more focused on retribution and criminals “getting what they deserve” than on actually reducing crime. And the reasons for that are also complex, but in the end it often just feels good to make someone “pay” for what they’ve done, and we as a society let ourselves be distracted by that.
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friends
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i love public transit
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ALTI love this.
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The Bloggity Blog
Feminist. Leftist. I like the cute and funny and fandomy.
Age: late 20s
Hailing from: South Dakota
