thedirtyknapkin

my ex spent time in a woman's prison in Georgia. she used to describe pretty much exactly this. among many other horrible things. it's funny, in America there's this common perception that the other prisoners are the scary part of prison. no, it's the guards. they would find any excuse to beat people and rape was a nearly daily occurrence for some.

the majority of her time served was before her trial or sentencing or anything. there is shockingly little difference between how we treat a person arrested, but still presumed innocent, and someone found guilty and in prison.

I think the Wikipedia article answers that question: "carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords could be attached.[6] A relatively small number have survived."

they're fragile and don't last. i imagine the act of reading them probably wears them down quickly if they're read often. you read them through abrasion. books are fragile too, but it's possible to handle them carefully and still read them. can these be read by sight? I'm actually not sure now that i think about it.

this likely created survivorship bias. even in the cultures that we know to have used them surviving examples are uncommon. there could easily have been other cultures doing this or something similar, but we wouldn't know before none survived the test of time.

edit: read further and there's also this "and most quipu were identified as idolatrous and destroyed," -destroyed by the spaniards.

classic.

man i gotta finish reading first.

"Various cultures have used knotted strings unrelated to South American quipu to record information — these include Chinese knotting, and practice by Tibetans, Japanese, and Polynesians.[10][11][12][13][14]"

i bet we could get a better answer by looking at the cultures that did this but weren't fucked over by colonizers. Japan seems a good place to start. one of the few countries that looked colonizers in the face, saw through their bullshit, then had the strength of arm to tell them to fuck all the way off.

what numbers? Russia has been the aggressor in nearly every conflict they've been involved in. Russia and its puppets are attacking countries around them and no one else in the region is. that's the closest thing to an actual claim that i made. the rest was just me making assumptions about his mindset.

well, when you consider the United States to be 5 companies in a trench coat pretending to be a county to sneak into the g6, I'd say we get plenty of their attention. just none of the good kind.

i mean... that is one of the most volatile regions in the world in the 21st century and it is almost entirely putin causing that. if there's little competition then it's because he's the only major power in the region stuck in last centurie's mindset and trying to pull the rest of us back. everyone else being better now is a point against putin.

it's like the rest of the world saw WWII as a lesson on how not to be, and he saw glory.

again, easy to say, hard to do.

what does that actually look like moment to moment? what do people do differently between those that do and those that don't succeed in this? how can you teach something you don't know because no one taught you?

what does an empathy lesson look like?

it's a hard problem and we really do need to figure out some specifics if we want to make any real progress.

ok ok ok, i have a theory on where her head was at.

i think it might have been about current messaging around "stop teaching girls is their job to avoid being sexually assaulted and start teaching boys that it's not ok to do".

I think in all honestly part of the reason we ended up in this paradigm is because parents generally try to teach what they know. for the most part, in the past men weren't really aware of how common rape was, or didn't care. men probably didn't see it as a thing to talk to their girls about. it was also something they likely had no relevant experience in teaching about. so men didn't see it a important to teach anything about it to girls. and it didn't seem likely to negatively affect their son... women on the other hand clearly saw the need to prepare young girls for this reality. so they teach what they know. what little that can do from their perspective with their power. moms default to imparting the defense mechanisms they have built to survive in this terrible state of affairs.

so, my thought is that this is a mother trying to teach her son not to be a predator. but she doesn't even know what predators think to make them do that. she has no idea what to say that might make her son not do something that she doesn't understand and doesn't know if her son has or ever will feel those things. it's a hard problem. it's easy to say that we need to put the onus on men to not be predators, but how do we turn that into reality without sounding like this? what does a parent actually say to a young boy that will carry more weight than "don't do that".

oh, that was a very different thing. in fact, i think it's a shame that public reaction to that situation killed dolphin research.

there's a really really good episode of radiolab on this. the experiment was actually extremely promising and groundbreaking. they had a dolphin spending his own free time practicing in the mirror making human words with his blowhole. he used the water to try and make a sort of lip, rotating the blowhole in and out of the water to shape the sounds. this dolphin was able to understand spoken language and was observably getting frustrated at his inability to say what he clearly wanted to.

the dolphin jerking thing happened because this was a dolphin actively in the throws of puberty. dolphins are intelligent, willful, occasionally evil animals. in nature they will masturbate themselves on shellfish and do other heinous sexually deviant things by human standards. the dolphin in the study was showing tremendous progress, but started exhibiting strong sexual urges. it got to the point that he was completely uncooperative. they jerked him off because he was cooperative after. there is no reason to believe the dolphin was explicitly attracted to the researcher and the researcher has said that she wasn't attracted to the dolphin.

this story was highly sensationalized. so much so that it completely overshadowed the fact that THE DOLPHIN COULD TALK. he wasn't very good at it, but that's only because he lacked the hardware. to this day no one can get funding for dolphin research because of this. it left that much of a stink on the entire field. we have made almost no meaningful progress in this field since. THE DOLPHIN COULD FUCKING TALK AND ALL WE CARE ABOUT IS HOW GROSS IT IS THAT THEY JERKED IT OFF.

also very different from chimps raised by citizens with no real plan. this was an organized and funded academic study with many people working on it and many eyes watching it. this was not one of the things that we did to animals in labs at the time that was problematic. there were other things that actually were worth getting upset over.

alternatively, I've heard it's a good emulator.

i guess i just assumed paleness 😅. I've never looked into it properly. just read a lot of stuff in that general setting. have had a lot of context clues to build a definition around.

but yeah, it's definitely more of a status thing. just like nails. I sometimes wish people were more aware of the history and cultural implications of the trend and fashions they follow. long nails are a status symbol because the show you don't do manual labor. so i honestly get kind of annoyed when modern people with super long nails struggle to do their job because they're unknowingly trying to flex that they don't need that kind of job. but you can't very well get that context all across when trying to train someone and they get mad that they can't do a thing with their 3 inch nails. and you'd be a dickhead to try.

i hate fashion most of the time because it's like 99% all just about flexing wealth and status and creating a visual representation of hierarchy. the "experts" who follow it don't know the historical context or where these styles come from or what they actually mean until the very tippy top where it stops making sense to anyone else. those people just look at it and embrace with open arms that fashion is their way of separating themselves from the poors. the more i learn about it the more it makes me sad about the human condition.

for most cultures in most of history, sadly the common standard of beauty was largely defined by wealth. our lizard brains want a partner that can raise a child well. best advantage you can give a child is tons of money. always has been.

the horny brain will actively chemically supresses our "ick" reaction. we're literally less capable of being grossed out when having sex.

mine just attached under my toilet seat. the water line connects to the existing toilet water line. it came with the fitting i needed and was easier than Legos to set up.

think i payed like $25 on Amazon like 5 years ago. i try not to buy from Amazon anymore, but I'm sure there are many reasonable options out there elsewhere.

eh, is got a little valve and i just turn it all the way. i like the cleanness.