FUCKING NASA

So I looked at his wiki page, and I was going to say this was Photoshopped because that phrase wasn’t on there, but then I looked at the revision history and, well,

So apparently yes, until 11:37 PM last night, the wiki page for Anthony Ramos referred to him as a “pure angel bean 10/10.”

who did it

WHO DID IT

Honestly people who use “grammar” as a cover for their transphobia and desire to invalidate nonbinary people had better not have any speech habits that don’t conform 100% to that narrow subset of academic English they claim to worship. Drop the slang, no run-on sentences, and I know I did not hear you use a sentence fragment on the phone earlier!

And if they’re opposed to neologisms they’d better be consistent with that, too. What’s the cutoff date for a new word to be old enough to be considered “real”? The word “e-mail", coined in the 80s, is newer than the pronouns “sie” and “hir”, transphobes. Don’t use “selfie” if you’re aginst nounself pronouns, which have been around longer. Xe/xem/xer pronouns are older than the word “podcast”. Oh, and the singular “they” has been in use for hundreds of years, so better avoid saying things like “antibiotics” and “lightbulb”!

tl;dr - your cries of “But grammar!” and “But made-up words!” are woefully transparent. You’re doing a truly terrible job of hiding the fact that you’re a transphobic asshole who prefers making marginalized people horribly uncomfortable and possibly dysphoric to, you know, just respectfully changing one word you use to refer to someone.

“You choose your toppings that fit you. “

..No, you don’t. That’s not how this works.

More specifically, while different autistic people can have different autistic traits, that doesn’t mean that you get to choose what traits you have. This metaphor implies that autism is a choice, that autism is just a bunch of autistic traits mixed together (in reality, like any neurotype, it is much more complicated than that), and that showing a couple of signs of autism makes you autistic (it doesn’t).

Saying that you get to choose which traits of autism you have is incredibly harmful to the autism community. That’s the same sort of argument used by ABA therapists to try to force people out of stimming. It’s also the sort of thing that makes neurotypicals think autistic people are just special snowflakes who are faking for attention.

In addition, many of the items in this sundae bar have little or nothing to do with autism, and in fact the sundae bar includes many unrelated neurotypes. While some of these may be correlated with autism, they are still different neurological differences. For instance, autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, and dyslexia are entirely separate things, and some of them are conflated often enough that this kind of misinformation is very counterproductive.

Fundamentally, you don’t get to choose in what ways you are autistic. Yes, different people will have different “toppings,” but that doesn’t make it a choice. I didn’t choose to be hypersensitive to loud noises any more than I chose to be good at math, or I chose to have green eyes.

tl;dr: Autism is not a sundae bar, and autistic people don’t choose which signs of autism we exhibit.

We need to stop seeing autism as some sort of one-dimensional sliding scale. Autism is not a thermometer. It’s not a rating that is “more” or “less”. High-functioning and Low-functioning do not exist in the real world.

Autism is a collection of symptoms and behaviours. Like a sundae bar. You choose your toppings that fit you.

Are you a bipolar extravert that loves socialising, is good at math and bad at remembering time? That’s ONE way to be autistic!

Are you a socially anxious autistic who has meltdowns when your clothes don’t feel right but a genius knowledge of music theory and is great at scheduling? That’s another way to be autistic!

Notice how both of those examples has strengths and weaknesses? Is one more “employable” or “high-functioning” than the other?

There is no one-size-fits-all category or rating for autism.

reblog if i can message you and awkwardly make conversation with you so we can become best friends

@johnhocksbur

This isn’t how statistical methodology works.

If you want to be able to generalize the results of your survey to the general population, you have to use some form of random sampling*, you can’t just ask random people on the internet. Twitter polls (etc.) have two main flaws:

1. Response is voluntary, which means that people who don’t care are less likely to answer, and (on questions where this is applicable) people with more middle-of-the-road or less-shocking answers are less likely to answer. 

2. They operate using “convenience sampling,” which is basically what it sounds like and tends to bias the results in favor of whatever opinion is held by the people in the group likely to notice the survey. A political survey on the Fox News website will tend to have more conservative responses than the general population; a sports survey on the Boston Globe website will tend to have more pro-Red Sox responses than the general population; a survey on a Twitter page will tend to have more whatever-the-twitter-users-followers think responses than the general population.

(I did a brief Google search to see if this has been surveyed reliably and didn’t find anything, although possibly I could find something in an academic database. If anyone can find a reliable survey, I would be interested in seeing what the results.)

*This is somewhat complicated by the fact that it is nearly impossible to do a perfectly random sample. Phone surveys in which callers are randomly chosen and the response rate is high are generally close enough in surveys of Americans, although they aren’t perfect.

This is so interesting to me. 65% of people would rather experience rape than be falsely accused of rape.

“Cis and straight people can do as much propaganda as they want about cisness and heterosexuality, but as soon as we try to give the choice to children, they call it ‘brainwashing’.”

Quick someone find me a picture of moldy leaves it is VERY IMPORTANT

Why would you even gender candy in the first place?

old people are literally trying to blame our generation for food allergies…….

"Should parents read their daughter's texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?"

Earlier today, I served as the “young woman’s voice” in a panel of local experts at a Girl Scouts speaking event. One question for the panel was something to the effect of, “Should parents read their daughter’s texts or monitor her online activity for bad language and inappropriate content?”

I was surprised when the first panelist answered the question as if it were about cyberbullying. The adult audience nodded sagely as she spoke about the importance of protecting children online.

I reached for the microphone next. I said, “As far as reading your child’s texts or logging into their social media profiles, I would say 99.9% of the time, do not do that.”

Looks of total shock answered me. I actually saw heads jerk back in surprise. Even some of my fellow panelists blinked.

Everyone stared as I explained that going behind a child’s back in such a way severs the bond of trust with the parent. When I said, “This is the most effective way to ensure that your child never tells you anything,” it was like I’d delivered a revelation.

It’s easy to talk about the disconnect between the old and the young, but I don’t think I’d ever been so slapped in the face by the reality of it. It was clear that for most of the parents I spoke to, the idea of such actions as a violation had never occurred to them at all.

It alarms me how quickly adults forget that children are people.

Yes, it is true that many of them involved relationships. However, there is a subtle difference between attacking someone for not dating you, attacking someone who is dating you, and attacking your ex.

Nevertheless, you’re absolutely right that all of these are terrible and that stereotyping women as less violent than men only makes things worse.

shocking