psa: u can block sponsored accounts like primevideo the same way you would block a real blog – it doesn’t stop most ads but you can at least thin the herd a little bit!
As a Scottish person living in England I feel this on a personal level, when people say shit like “well it’s not the genuine asylum seekers I’m bothered by, it’s the people who just move here to get a better job and take advantage of our welfare system” and I’m like “Mate, I literally moved 500 miles south to a different country just to get a better job and better weather, if you’re going to hate on anyone for that hate on me.”
Then they try to back-track and say things like “Well you already speak perfect English so it’s fine” and I’m like “My grandma didn’t speak very good English when my grandparents settled in the UK from Finland, what are you trying to say?”
And they’re like “Well I’m sure you’re grandparents had useful jobs and weren’t just sponging off the system.” like… nah, my grandma mended clothes and my grandad sold garden sheds, they weren’t exactly brain surgeons
“But they…” just admit it, it’s not white immigrants that bother you, I doubt Americans go on marches protesting the Canadian undergrad students who overstay their visas or all the germans and scandinavians who just rocked up in the Midwest one day and decided to call it their own.
This was how I finally started to understand white privilege.
So. 10th grade English class. We all come in one morning to find a balloon and a perfectly sharpened pencil on each of our desks. No instructions, no explanation, which is strange, because our teacher is meticulous about that sort of thing. A couple of people try to ask her and she says we’ll get to it. She takes role and then announces that she needs to go to the copy room and she’ll be back in a couple of minutes
Kinda unorthodox, but no one is complaining because this is advanced English and the teacher usually goes kinda hard. So, y’know. Brief respite. We all sit and chat; one of the boys teasingly steals a girl’s balloon, but gives it back to her easily enough; it’s quiet and kind of a nice break. Then the teacher comes back, stops in the doorway, and just stares at us
After a long moment, she says, confused, “You didn’t pop the balloons.”
To which one of the guys about two rows over exclaims, “We’re allowed to pop them?” and immediately turns around and stabs his friend’s balloon with the pencil
There is a vicious revenge balloon-stabbing, and a few more people pop seatmates’ balloons or their own, and the whole time the teacher is just shaking her head. “I can’t believe you didn’t pop your balloons.”
Apparently we were starting Lord of the Flies that day and she wanted to demonstrate the basic concept of kids turning on each other when there are no authority figures present and it was basically my favorite failed social experiment ever
Back in my 10th grade we did a similar things around Lord of the Flies, where we had a test scheduled for that day, and when we walked in, the teacher took role by looking through the window of the door and never entered the classroom. On the board were three tasks written and the teacher had brought in donuts. At first we all sat around and waited for the teacher to come in, but eventually we just started tackling the list of tasks. Task 1- the test. Everybody took it silently, no one cheated, everyone turned it in and we went on to Task Two: tidy up the room. So we did, we split into a couple groups and each one cleaned an area of the room. Task Three: Hand out the donuts. There were 12 donuts, and 30 of us. So we split the donuts into thirds, each took a third, and left the extras for the teacher. After this, the teacher came in absolutely FUMING. She was so upset we had followed all the rules and completed the tasks. Apparently she had been texting kids telling them to start some chaos but they all ignored it because they were too nice. She tried to dock our grades for not going absolutely wild because it meant her class didn’t get the point across
That’s because lord of the flies isn’t representative of humanity it’s representative of rich white male shitheads
And it takes those shit heads a lot longer than one 50 minute class period to go wild.
“Sans teacher supervision, a group of peers will immediately begin breaking down rules and norms regardless of previous behavior patterns” is a weirdly authoritarian take on Lord of the Flies and frankly any English teacher worth their salt ought to be embarrassed if that’s the analysis they took from it
[id: tweet by buffalocialism reading “if you have so many prisoners that you have to deny them the right to vote because they would significantly impact election results, the main substantive problem is that you live in a police state”]
Okay which one of y’all had that post about Catholic/Christian vampires and what it would be like??? Because my search engine does not work and y’all need to reblog it please
Anonymous: