theres a guy in my asian art hist. class who is visually the epitome of a redneck stereotype except hes an art history major and is very clearly passiomate about it
imagine a bowlegged white guy with a beard wearing flannel, a belt buckle, and cowboy boots talk about the intricacies of a hindu temple in sri lanka. this is the future liberals want
In a 1970s experiment, a Stanford
psychologist and 7 other mentally
healthy participants got themselves
admitted to 12 different psychiatric
hospitals across the US by pretending
to hear voices. Once inside, they began
acting normally, but all 12 hospitals
diagnosed each of them with disorders,
forced them to take drugs, and required
them all to admit they had a disease
before they could be released. SourceSource 2
This was the study ‘being sane in insane places’ by David Rosenhan. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the staff of asylums could truly determine a person’s sanity after being admitted.
Rosenhan ans his colleagues did not pretend to hear voices, they pretended to hear a ‘hollow thud’- something with no basis in psychology. From the get go they were offering the doctors and nurses a chance to deny them entry, but despite the fact that the thing they were faking wasn’t even a real symptom, they were all admitted.
That very day, the moment of their admission, they went back to acting normal. They went about their day as normally as possible, and waited to see if the staff of each hospital they were in would notice. They stopped reporting hearing the noise that got them admitted.
The staff never noticed.
Some of the patients did.
Despite this, all of them were eventually released, but none were declared sane on release. Some were in the hospital for 2 weeks, one remained for over 50 days.
What the study proved was that it became impossible to establish sane from insane in the setting of a mental hospital. To retest, after Rosenhan came forward with his findings, he told asylums all over the nation that they’d be doing the experiment again, but with more participants this time. After a certain period, he would ask the head doctors of the ‘targeted’ asylums which patients they believed were faking it.
All of the hospitals reported at least one person.
No one was actually sent in.
This reiterated the original claim, proving for all that the perception of sanity is reliant on location and societal standards.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!! It’s been rough but I finally managed to finish my thanksgiving comic from last year. In hindsight I’m actually glad I did it this year because I don’t think I would have been able to put as much care into it if I had done it the year prior. With that being said, I’m very thankful that I’ve been able to have so much fun in the Overwatch community and I hope you all have a wonderful thanksgiving!!!
Everything below is posted with liberty and credit to Jemima Harrison and the PDE blog, with the sole purpose for this information to spread as far as possible.
• soon to be 10 years since Pedigree Dogs Exposed
• five years since The Advisory Council on the Welfare Issues of Dog
Breeding highlighted the issues linked to head conformation in
brachycephalic breeds
• 18 months since the publication of research (funded by the kennel
club) spelling out the link between stenosis (pinched nostrils) and
respiratory issues, especially in French Bulldogs
• a year since a veterinary petition demanding urgent reform for flat-faced dogs
• almost a year since the Kennel Club set up the Brachcycephalic Breeds Working Group in response to that petition
.. and of course I have highlighted the issue of pinched nostrils endlessly here on this blog.
Endlessly.
And yet… the picture at the top is one the Kennel Club has used as the
ideal depiction of the French Bulldog in its new edition (2017) of its Illustrated Breed Standards.
And it isn’t a one-off. Here’s the one the KC has used for the Boston Terrier standard.
The Bulldog.
And the Pug.
Dogs are as near-as-damn-it obligate nose breathers. And even if they
can supplement by mouth-breathing when they are awake, they are unable
to do so when they are asleep, meaning thousands of these dogs live
lives of interrupted sleep as they have to wake up in order to not
asphyxiate.
Study after study has shown that these dogs pay the price for not being
able to pull in a decent lungful of air and that starts with the
nostrils.
These pictures are all the proof you need that the Kennel Club is not
taking this issue seriously; that at its very core the KC is paying
nothing more than lip-service to the demands for reform by the
veterinary profession and animal welfare campaigners.
At one of the first meetings of the Brachycephalic Breeds Working Group,
then KC Chairman Steve Dean expressly said that he didn’t want
“changing the breed standards” to be at the top of everyone’s list of
actions that could be taken.
And indeed, it hasn’t been.
There have been some new measures. The KC continues to fund brachy research. There is also now a brachy learning resource
available on the KC website, the promise of better education of judges
and a breed club commitment to educate better about the importance of
keeping brachycephalics slim. There are also now health schemes for the
Bulldog, French Bulldog and the Pug which do test for respiratory
issues.
All this is welcome. But, bottom line, the Kennel Club continues to bat
for the breeders who do not want the basic phenotype to change because
it’s the breeders that pay their wages.
Of course the simplest, quickest remedy is to give these dogs
back some muzzle – to help not just with breathing issues, but to help
protect their eyes from trauma and to give their teeth some room in
their overcrowded mouths (a Pug here compared to an Australian
Shepherd).
The problem is that breeders are wedded to flat faces, particularly in
Pugs and Bulldogs. They talk about the perfect “layback” – which
essentially means that the nose should not interrupt the line between
the forehead and tip of the dog’s chin.
In fact, there’s a new book out on the Pug head (yours for only $159)
which reminds everyone that the word Pug comes from the latin for
“fist” and that this is the shape the Pug’s head should be in profile –
i.e. totally flat.
Here’s a reminder from a top UK show breeder of what the Bulldog’s head should look like.
As you can see, a protruding nose or a less severe underbite is considered a fault.
There was a big review of breed standards following Pedigree Dogs Exposed
but it was mostly to add vague qualifiers such as, in the Pug standard,
"relatively" short rather than just short when describing the length
of the muzzle. This gives the breeders way too much wiggle room. We
need proper metrics – a defined minimum skull/head/muzzle ratio and we
need to find more profound ways to change their minds about what
constitutes their breed in their eyes.
Large open nostrils are a requirement in brachy breed standards, but
this is widely ignored because other points of the breed are considered
more important. There would be outrage if a Frenchie with one lop ear
or a Bulldog with a liver-coloured nose won in the show-ring, but dogs
with slits for nostrils continue to be made up to champions.
Meanwhile, on my CRUFFA group,
whenever you post a picture of more moderate examples of the breed,
current of historical, the breeders heap scorn. A few days ago, one
breeder insisted that the dog featured in this famous painting of a Pug
by Carl Reichert, dating from the late 19th century, was a crossbreed.
Same for these ones. Mongrels, the lot of them.
She admitted that the eye-white showing was undesirable but preferred the look of this Crufts dog.
Today, this was posted on a public Facebook page by one French Bulldog
breeder in response to a plea by vets for more moderate dogs.
(My bolding below)
To those who say you cannot rebuild Rome in a day I say… rubbish. There are already more moderate versions of these breeds out there being
bred by breeders more interested in health than the current fashion.
For more than 10 years, I have called for moderation and hoped it would
come from the breeders. But I now know it won’t. If we want anything
more than a wee bit of tweaking round the edges, then we need to demand
it.
It is time to get tough. These dogs suffer – not all of them all the time but too many of them too often.
Brachycephalics live a third less long than non-brachy dogs. Fifty per
cent have significant airway disease. Almost all struggle to cool
themselves. Most Bulldogs still can’t mate or give birth naturally. Pugs
have 19 times the risk of developing corneal ulcers. All suffer from
very low genetic diversity. And so on.
Today, Bulldogs, French Bulldogs and Pugs make up one in five of the
dogs registered with the Kennel Club – up from one in 50 in 2005.
Yesterday, a new petitionwas launched asking for a ban on brachycephalics. Over 20k people signed it in the first 24 hrs.
Have we reached a tipping point? With your help.
I haven’t been able to blog much recently because I am busy finishing
off a television series for BBC2. But I have taken time out to write
this because the new breed standard pictures made me so angry.
So please… Although it’s moderation I want, not a ban, sign the petition. Make your feelings known to the Kennel Club (see here). Complain if brands or media use generic pictures of brachycephalics to sell their wares.
Vets: thank you so much for all that you are now doing, but please keep the pressure on.
And, of course, to everyone out there – please don’t buy that puppy.
It is not safe to buy a Pug, Bulldog or French Bulldog. Not safe for them and not safe for your wallet.
Seriously people. This deserves 6000 notes. It’s not even my text, so it’s not like I’m attention-fishing.
This made me nearly bite a pencil in half in enraged memory.
@ THE REST OF MY ANCIENT HISTORY CLASS; Y’ALL ARE WELCOME FOR THAT FUCKIN A THE REST OF YOU DID NO GODDAMN WORK FOR
Oh man, so I know everyone hates group projects with ample good reason, but lemme just tell you something that happened to me in my final year of uni. My dad got real sick and was in and out of hospital numerous times, one time with a suspected heart attack. Which meant my mum ended up caring for my dad, and I wound up caring for my disabled brother, on top of working a part time job and going to university full time.
My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.
It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.
And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”
And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.
And I honestly wish things like this were taught in team building exercises, cause that’s what group projects in school are. They’re supposed to be teaching you how to work well with others and achieve a common goal, while at the same time totally skipping over the fundamentals of human interaction and how to engage socially with others, and it’s fucking bullshit.
If Congress does not pass legislation protecting the tribe and the legal challenge fails, the Mashpee would be stripped of their right to exercise sovereign jurisdiction over their land.
Jessie Little Doe Baird, the tribe’s vice-chairwoman, told Al Jazeera that loss of jurisdiction would prevent the tribe from running indigenous language schools, tribal courts, and housing projects, as well as its own police.
“We have our own police force, which is important because they’re tribal citizens and since we’ve had our own police force, none of our men have been beaten or shot, which we’ve had before with non-tribal police,” she said.
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 