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Manamade

@manamade

Whatever I happen to like and want to share. I prefer funny stuff but sometimes a serious thing may catch my attention
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As someone around for 9-11 and the "NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY" response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it'd make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol

I’m physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 english teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for take your kid to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead fucking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11sona’s, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadn’t personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to give eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldn’t remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids kind of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didn’t help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years she’d have students that hadn’t even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing.

We’re Canadian.

That last sentence KILLED me. Jesus fuck.

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🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃

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you know what. i am physically sick as hell this week so i'll bite. i read the original slate article, which is free to read so i don't know why OP chose to screenshot instead of let people draw their own conclusions. i agree with MANY of the writer's points on the need for comprehensive criminal justice reform, but i also care a lot about numbers and stats and increasingly, this bullshit "democrats are the same as republicans" messaging is straight-up delivered using propaganda tactics

this is going to be an incredibly long post and i had to use GOOGLE SLIDES and GOOGLE SHEETS which i hate so so much so in the words of twitter kpop stans please don't let this flop

let's look at the numbers, claim by claim

claim #1: "the number of people held in ICE detention has increased by 70 percent since Biden took office"

  • if you click through 3 link layers from the slate you land at cbs as the source for this which tells you that mainstream media is certainly not immune to playing with stats to make the democrats look bad
  • fortunately ICE detention stats are easily publicly available thanks to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which does the lord's work of crawling through federal agency publications and submitting tedious FOIA requests to collate useful data
  • here is the data -- not only was cbs not wrong about the total number of detainees at the time of publication (25k in aug 2021), but the increase from when biden was inaugurated is actually 90%, not 70%. look:
  • well holy shit!!! that's terrible. biden is the worst and he hates immigration reform and the democrats are no different from trump, right?
  • but if you zoom out
  • actually, Jan/Feb 2021 was at the absolute low for detainees, after a full year of covid restrictions slowing down or minimizing gov't operations of all kinds AND reducing border volume
  • and if you actually want to compare the biden admin to the trump admin?
  • relative to Aug of 2019, after 18 months the biden admin has reached a 56% decrease in the number of detainees. even if you look at only the month before COVID lockdowns really hit, it's still nearly a 40% decrease
  • and to put the total numbers in perspective, at NO point before COVID did the trump admin have fewer than 30k people in ICE detention. most of the time it was well above 40k, or about 2x more than under biden
  • that's not to say that immigration reform isn't still needed, but it IS to say that myopically comparing current-state to january 2021, aka one of the WEIRDEST months statistically on record ever, is going to give you crap perspective

claim #2: "the federal prison population has grown for the first time in a decade"

  • (note i've only included data from 2005 onward so it's easier to actually see what's going on in the last 10 years. for those who like math, these are CAGRs calculated over each presidential term)
  • but there it is -- decline in populations accelerated under trump. surely both parties same. surely democrats actually worse than republicans
  • but wait, what's that?
  • that can't be ...
  • SPIDERS GEORG????
  • WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE
  • ARE YOU SAYING THAT ... THERE IS AN OUTLIER?
  • THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE BEEN COUNTED?
  • now that assumes trump wasn't successful at slowing down the momentum from the obama years
  • this is what it might have looked like had we perhaps ended up with a second trump term:
  • again this isn't to say that biden is pure and perfect on criminal justice, even if there were some agreed-upon definition of what pure and perfect legislative or policy priorities would look like
  • it's to put the context back into place around the data
  • are the democrats and republicans actually the same or are we being fed a diet of pruned stats and catchphrases to make us simultaneously angry and disempowered

last claim: "federal covid relief funds are being used to pad local police budgets"

SO all of that to say

  • we don't stop pushing for immigration or criminal justice reform
  • or any other reform that is sorely needed
  • but using data in incredibly selective ways, out of context, to promote a narrative that somehow democrats are the same or even worse than republicans
  • ESPECIALLY the republicans of today
  • is literally propaganda
  • propaganda by definition uses kernels of truth and then presents it in a biased way to attempt to push a narrative
  • pretending that the democrats are exactly the same as the republicans is propaganda, and i'm like 80% sure it's right-wing propaganda designed to discourage left-wing turnout that has somehow been accepted by an online population that doesn't understand statistics
  • so like
  • understand statistics
  • do a bit of research
  • draw conclusions that you can back up
  • and for fuck's sake, vote

God thank you so much for this detail. I knew OP was bullshit but didn't have the time or energy for this level of clap back. Bless.

The left is not immune to propaganda. If you see something that enrages you... Maybe read the article? Do your own research? Don't just believe everything you read on Tumblr?

Also OP literally just copies tweets that make it seem like Democrats Are Bad with no context. Which, in 2016, was a Russian psyop play. It's helpful to know what agenda someone has when they post things.

I love how Spiders Georg has become a standard illustrative example for why outliers matter and can lead to misleading statistics.

As my Grandma always said, “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure.”

A doctor saying "Good news! Your labs look great" is like if you were watching a cop show and the chief walked in like "Great news, everybody! The best news! The killer is still at large and we have no leads."

One time I was like pretty sure I had finally figured out that I had Symptoms Disease due to all the Symptoms and my doctor did some tests and she was like. Good news! You don't have Symptoms Disease!

And I started crying and she was like, is there something in your eye? And I said no I'm crying? And she was like, oh? Why? And I said, because we can't fix my Symptoms because we still don't know what's wrong with me? And she was like. Nothing's wrong with you! :)

Actually something similar had happened to me multiple times (and in some of those cases I did in fact get diagnosed with the relevant Symptoms Disease years later) but the one where the doctor asked if I had something in my eye because she couldn't comprehend that not having answers would be upsetting, that was definitely one of the most situations ever.

going to the punk show and everyone is mad at me for wearing pre-pissed jeans "he didn't even piss them himself" they say "he bought them that way" and they all think I am the biggest poser of the night

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Clicked on an article from the anthropology subreddit about loneliness and was immediately blasted into oblivion by this opening paragraph

reblogging SPECIFICALLY for the End Note which is widely applicable

For any trans (or really any queer) kids who are struggling through this right now, I want you to know

This is not your fault,

you are not wrong,

it wouldn’t be fixed if you were just somehow a different person

Because this guy is right, love is unconditional and this type of parent only loves you on the condition that you are exactly what they want you to be

I hate people who go "hmm, you shouldn't have been in this situation in the first place" when you've got a problem with something. Like oh damn bro, hold on? So you're telling me that I could have avoided having to deal with this problem this whole time by simply not having a problem? Holy shit. Mind fucking blown. All my problems are fixed now, vanished in the epiphany that you think they should have been avoidable. I hope both you and the driver are texting the next time you cross the street.

You’ve been sentenced to 400 years for multiple murders. It’s been 399 years and your jailers are starting to get nervous.

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I was twenty… twenty-five, I think?… when I was sentenced. Four hundred years was a length of time I couldn’t even imagine. It was a length of time I don’t think anyone could imagine, even the judge. It was just a big showy number that let everyone know I’d never see the light of day again. The mages who cast the spells were dramatic about it, practically shouting the part about ‘until death claims you, or four hundred years hath passed, forsooth, thou shalt be imprisoned here’. They don’t waste that kind of magic on most prisoners, but I was special.

The Slayer, they called me then. The Monster of Sentan. I’d killed nineteen people… I remember that number because I was so furious that they stopped me so close to my goal of twenty-one. And I didn’t just kill ordinary people, no, but the Chosen of the Gods. The Great and Good. They were terrified of me. So they locked me away, to die forgotten.

It had been a little less than a hundred years when the king died without heir, and a civil war tore the country apart. When the fighting was all over, the losers were dragged down to the deepest cells under the castle, and the new king and his soldiers stopped and stared at me. “Who… who is this?” he asked, frowning. “Some victim of the usurper?”

People like cooks and jailers and scrubbers don’t change as easily as kings. The same man who’d been bringing me my meals since there was still brown in his hair and beard shuffled forward, hunched and grey now. “No, yer majesty,” he said humbly. “That be a special prisoner, from before the old king died.”

“Special? Special how?” He frowned, moving closer to my cell. “The old king died more than ten years ago. This woman must have been a child then. What could she have done to - “

“Don’t get too close, yer majesty,” the old man said sharply. “That’s the Monster of Sentan… an’ she bites.”

That was true. I do bite.