You Can't Really Say For All Of American Students How Much Homework They Get, I'd Also Rephrase That

Something really interesting about the worldbuilding of Harry Potter that is never outwardly discussed but I find to be extremely likely and often think about is that

Harry and his friends are likely going to see the end of the Wizarding Statute of Secrecy within their lifetimes and honestly, it’s already on its last threads while he’s at school. With everyone so busy with what Voldemort is doing, the entire Wizarding Community fails to see what the Muggles are doing.

It’s the 90′s. Our 1990′s. The internet is starting to grow and comes into nearly every UK and US household. Video cameras are becoming thinner, sleeker, more user friendly, and above all, cheaper. By the time Voldemort is dead, the first camera phone is only three years away from being made.

Yes, these things don’t work in Hogwarts, or likely in the Ministry either, and maybe even the biggest Wizard towns block electronics, too.

But Muggleborns exist. They exist and canonically are able to do uncontrolled magic, with eleven years of life before their questions about how and why are even begun to be answered.

It’s 2015 and there are more than a few eleven year olds who have their own cellphones, which now almost all come standard with cameras. Or they have older brothers and sisters who have them.

YouTube exists in the modern world and anyone with an internet connection can post to it easily.

Even if the Ministry has a new special division to monitor the internet for leaks, they don’t REALLY understand most Muggle technology and this isn’t likely going to be any different. They won’t be able to get every video and picture and post.

It starts with a video of some kid blooming a flower in their hand like little Lily Evans did in front of her sister some forty years ago. People will just think these are pranks, tricks of editing and lighting like that one guy does with his Vines. But then some other kid sees it, and recognizes it as real because they can do this same thing, too, and no one believes them, either.

Muggleborn children start finding each other on the internet long before Hogwarts finds them.

Hogwarts is still, quite literally, in the Dark Ages. They’re too slow. They’re too outdated. They can’t keep up unless they change.

The world is different and a big secret like the Wizarding Statute of Secrecy isn’t going to stay hidden for much longer.

Maybe not even “19 Years Later.”

@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.

As in his body promoted the growth of his bones? Or he made replica bones? Or what?

Stop John Susan from Making Bones 2k16

@allyfallsdownstairs @themoriarkitty

Amandla Stenberg Opens Up About Her Gender Identity

The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary. Stenberg - who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).

“The 17-year-old, Hunger Games actor Amandla Stenberg has come out as non-binary.

Stenberg – who plays Rue in the adventure film franchise – says she feels like she’s not a ‘woman’ all the time, and non-binary is a term that she feels comfortable using to describe herself. (She is using female pronouns).

Writing on Tumblr, she said she is organizing a workshop on feminism, specifically how ‘mainstream feminist movements have continuously excluded women who are not white, thin, cisgender, able-bodied and neurotypical’.

Something we are struggling with is understanding the intersection of feminism and gender identity…

We’re both people who don’t feel like “women” all the time – but we claim feminism as our movement.

Basically, we’re trying to understand the duality of being a non-binary person and a feminist. How do you claim a movement for women when you don’t always feel like one?”

Read the full piece here: 

#1: THANK YOU AMANDLA FOR YOUR CONSISTENT AWESOMENESS AS AN INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST AND ROLE MODEL FOR YOUTH & EVERYONE ELSE!

#2: YOU DON’T NEED TO BE A WOMEN OR CIS TO BE FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS. Just like white people can and should advocate for racial equality, everyone can and should advocate for gender equality. 

I give Amandla a TON of credit for having to not only grow up in public, but grow up as a non-binary POC in a white / sexist / cisnormative society! She is young and figuring herself and society out.  I’m Team Stenberg and am not looking to call her out, I just wanted to make this crucial clarification. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says, We Should All Be Feminists

reproductive rights issues:

abortion

birth control

also reproductive rights issues:

doctors performing c sections during births without informed consent

eugenics via sterilization requirements for trans people to change documentation

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of disabled people

eugenics via forced/nonconsenting sterilization of people of color

eugenics via selective abortion of disabled fetuses (fetuses with Down syndrome especially) (these are abortions sought by people who WANT to be pregnant–but only with non-disabled children, when there’s absolutely no guarantee that a non-disabled child won’t become disabled)

if your reproductive rights activism doesn’t incorporate ALL OF THE ABOVE, i want no part of it.

Odd Romeo and Juliet Tumblr Posts

“We invite [name redacted] to one party...”

Reblog with an inside joke you have with your friends.

“Yes, Captain America has LEGS!”

How come we never learned about this in History? (Probably for the same reason my Language Arts teacher tried to convince us Sappho was straight...)

Do you guys understand that when Hephaistion (the best friend and lover of Alexander the Great) died, Alexander cried for two days and gave him one of the most expensive funerals in history and had the sacred flame at the temple extinguished (which was usually only done for a king). And then he went to the oracle and asked if Hephaistion could be worshipped as a god, and the oracle said no, and Alexander said screw you we’re gonna worship him anyway. And then Alexander himself died like a month later, just as he’d said he would if he ever lost Hephaistion. Literally, you can’t write a better love story than that, so don’t tell me that kind of devotion only happens in the fictional world.

This is fascinating. I kind of wonder why these don’t tend to get as much coverage as murders by men. My first instinct is gender stereotyping, but I’m not sure if the answer is that simple.

I will note that most of these are not related to rejecting romantic advances, which was the point made by the original poster; nevertheless, that doesn’t mean they aren’t a problem.

shocking

If you are a non-Jewish person attempting to be inclusive of Jewish holidays and traditions, but your method of doing so starts from the assumption that Judaism is exactly like Christianity but with less Jesus, and/or that Hanukkah is just like Christmas but eight days long and harder to spell, you are doing it wrong.

(Hanukkah traditions: not actually Christmas traditions with a different color scheme! Including Jewish traditions: not actually talking about Hanukkah exactly like Christmas but with the name of the holiday switched around! Judaism and Christianity are different and their holidays are different. If you actually want to include Jewish people, recognizing these differences is an important step.)