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- Let’s try and get 100k notes
A review by one of the folks sums it up perfectly:
“What worries me about Yahoo! buying Tumblr is how it would choose to incorporate the website into its email and homepage features. One of the reasons why Tumblr is so unique is because it’s a niche market. By adding more users who don’t fit into this niche, it would make it more difficult for communities to develop within Tumblr, and Tumblr would have to change to accommodate these new users. Tumblr as a website is not the kind that you can sign up for in a day and be on your way. It is a website crafted so that you can immediately post but must spend several weeks, sometimes even months, to build a community. With new users who would not be willing to spend time growing a community, Tumblr would have to be changed, which would alienate its current users. Those users have spent time and effort to make Tumblr what it is today, and they are the ones who spend time on the website daily. A user who is checking onto Tumblr because it’s attached to their homepage is not going to be as strong of a user nor as dedicated. By changing the website to suit this new user, you would lose the strong users while building an undedicated usership.
To any website that would think of buying Tumblr, they must understand that it is a website that cannot be changed to make it more user friendly to a casual blogger. I think that many Tumblr users would be less worried about a buy-out if they were promised that their communities and ways of using Tumblr would not be changed. No one is going to mind Yahoo! buying the website and gaining a few extra million dollars per year from the minimal advertising; what we will be upset with is if a company like Yahoo! then changes the website to increase casual users and decrease dedicated users. Yahoo! would gain nothing by losing this “cool” group of bloggers in an age group they so desperately want to reach, so they must cater to these individuals by leaving the website exactly as is.” - houseoftombombadil
As much as is does sound like a load of bullshit for someone to buy Tumblr, it’s a possibility. I Personally think it should stay independent and I hope David Karp keeps a hold of it like his own child. Or we make enough noise to where such major changes (if bought) will not happen. I would hate to see Tumblr turned into an advertising dump.We’re not a ‘hip fad group’ to be marketed to. I hate the fact that’s all we look like to businesses in the end.reblogging again for this ^
(Source: my--teen--quote)
117,341 notes (via analogbrain & my--teen--quote)
(Source: native-detroiter)
486 notes (via glitterlion & native-detroiter)
Do you know how many of my students can’t even say the word white? You all will talk about African-Americans, Latinos, and Asian-Americans all day long but at soon as it comes time to say white peoples’ voices drop. You ain’t have seen that? Come on man, people come up with crazy terms you have never seen before, they would be like: “And that Caucasoid…” You can always tell, you could always tell where the supreme power rests in the society because of the reluctance people have in naming that power.
Part of what privilege requires, guys privilege cannot operate without silence. It cannot operate without silence, and this tremendous silence around whiteness, if you are foolish enough to post a blog on your Facebook that mentions whiteness the amount of attacks that you will get, because privilege defends itself viciously, to maintain the silence that is required for its operation.
So, given this I would argue that the other thing that we need to do is coming off of James Scott’s idea of “anarchist calisthenics,” we need to practice racial anarchist calisthenics. What he, what Scott meant by anarchist calisthenics is that this society has ton of little rules that we all practice without thinking. And he argues that we need to practice breaking little rules consistently because one day this society is going to ask you to prosecute a horrifying rule, that I think we will long live to regret, and the muscles of resistance needs to be exercised, they need to be prepared for the time we need to make that big, big, big, big stand.
And so racial anarchist calisthenics, I would say, begins with all of us getting that tongue muscle back in to place and saying Saurons name. I challenge people; I challenge people every time you say African-American, Asian-American, whatever the group count it and say white just as much. And say white just as much. We don’t do it you guys, we don’t do it, we don’t do it. And yet if we were ever going to confront in a real way white supremacy, which is not only linked to white folks you guys. White supremacy is the racial order in all of us, but if we are not able to discuss whiteness as a category, as a critical way of looking at the world and even simply as just the racial group, we are in some serious trouble. The reality is even if we took every white person on Earth and put them on a space ship and sent them to outer space white supremacy wouldn’t miss a beat.
”Junot Díaz - Facing Race (2012)
I once posted a link on my fb about white privilege, explaining what it is. And I got responses from white people about how natives are the ones who have privilege and take away from them. The link never even mentioned Natives!
(via pipud)
(Source: msleahhbic)
3,406 notes (via lostintrafficlights & msleahhbic)
In other news, Dr. Tobias Hübinette is now following this tumblr.
Yep, THAT Tobias Hübinette.
the adoptee-cum-activist Class Bastard scholar par excellence and bona fide Nazi hunter (srsly f’ing google it), who —despite astronomical intellectual cred & insanely prolific academic publication in nigh exclusively Ivory Tower contexts— seems incapable of composing a boring/fatuous sentence ever (if you know svenska you’ll know how holy peas that is)
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As a cracker, I love your blog. Everything you post is amazing, thought provoking, and spot on. You've 100% changed my mind on the adoption industry, and help give me talking points to my white friend who work in the industry. If I lose them as friends whatever, Its better to speak up than let another child get injured to make some white family feel special. PLUS X-men? You fucking rock forever. Thank you.
X-Men INDEED.
And as ambivalent I am about this whole sh’bang… thanks.
The effects of severe abuse and neglect on children during critical learning stages of life. Therapy to resolve this attachment disorder involves the construction of empathy - the building of a conscience and soul.
[…]with any therapeutic technique there’s risk of harm to the patient, true? Be it physical or emotional, from death and injury to breaks with reality - and the more extreme the method, the greater risks you take.
Giving someone with no moral standing a morally intensive place to grow is not bad, and these kids are attempted murders who’d be treated so much harsher under the penal system - a place where many other socially deficient youths find themselves.
This is Nancy Thomas and her daughter (now business partner) Beth in HBO’s program Child of Rage, subsequently spun into a network drama of the same title.
Thomas is one of the most famous and well-paid figures in North American adoption industry & foster care systems, despite having no professional training in therapy and no academic credentials. A former dog trainer and foster parent, she claims her AT/P (Attachment Therapy/Parenting) methods as effective for treating “Attachment Disordered” adoptees, children with Asperger’s, Tourette’s Syndrome, and children from “satanic cults.”
The American Psychological Association (APA) and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s (APSAC) task force in Child Maltreatment repeatedly cites Nancy Thomas in their condemnation of Attachment Therapy, its parenting techniques, and the “Attachment Disorder” diagnosis as abusive pseudoscience.
Selected Child Victims of AT/P from 1989 - 2011 [TRIGGER WARNING: torture, sadism, murder]
(Re-uploaded gifset as I refuse to reblog Retro-therapy directly or anyone who shares his views. If this ableist propaganda’s gonna circulate, it’d better originate from a source that provides context.)
Hi, again! I don’t think your understanding is heavy enough for you to digest all the moving parts present within this discussion. Call it an argument, call it a discussion, call it a debate, but what we’re talking about pulls inference from not only psychology, but biology, ethics, sociology, history, and common sense, all in equal parts.
These attempts at disdain for —as was awkwardly phrased— “internet understanding” are pretty funny, given that you’re a Wal-mart cog with no experience/credentials in any of the aforementioned fields and your pitiable education hails from a negligible school (even by American standards) in your shitty local backwater. (To be fair, my clinical, hyperlinked sources must have honestly confused you, clearly you aren’t used to reading or providing citations). Your need to project the sad limitations of your own circumstances is painfully obvious as Internet is the only means by which you can access this level of information.
I was going to spin this into an intro post for new followers, a fun show of sorts of what happens to bio spawn cruel and stupid enough to pathologize us while peddling the snake oil of Nancy Thomas and Connell Watkins, a child murderer convicted in one of the most notorious cases of torture in modern history — but eh, when we found out everything we needed to know about you, I got so bored I decided to cut it relatively short.
Your real name is Robin DeNelson Usher and you are an ableist, child torture apologist nobody.You’re not in a position to question anyone’s understanding of this subject matter, much less anyone who can curtail your professional prospects with a few phone calls and e-mails. I can see why you chose to move to Colorado. That U.S. state has boasted practically nonexistent regulations regarding clinical practice and child welfare, which accounts for why so many sadistic quacks (like Watkins) set up shop there. Unfortunately for you, it’s also home to equally powerful contingents of child rights advocacy that have drafted landmark legislation against such lethal bullshit. The only time people like these will ever remember the name of a person like you will be thanks to me, so really, you’re welcome. I may not have enough time to disabuse of you of your horrifying beliefs and oppressive ignorance (not to mention the ridiculous factual errors in all of your statements), but I can ensure that your ass is never allowed near a traumatized child.
Oh, but do feel free to keep shooting yourself in the proverbial foot. The more fodder for us, the better.
You were saying? X
And you’re focus is strong semantically, but don’t press the issue of correlation and signs too heavily. Credentials are good, but they don’t qualify a man to be a healer, per se; Doctorates are no match for a strong mind - ask Socrates, ask Bill Gates. Oh, and realize that most thoughts or techniques which are controversial are often times dismissed or neglected come first appearances - ask Galileo, ask Copernicus.
I say all that to paint a picture of how Nancy and Beth’s worth isn’t drawn from the credentials they lack. I say all that to illustrate how something beneficial to understanding the human experience can also be found as ethically questionable by some (see Milgram study for other examples.)
And there are three other issues with the rational behind your position. You seem to think Nancy Thomas’ Attachment Parenting is synonymous with all of Attachment Therapy. You seem to have an internet and superficial understanding of what she did, reportedly, in treating Beth. There weren’t any rebirth sessions, there wasn’t any abuse - what we saw in the treatment of Beth Thomas where themes no different from what you’d find in strict parenting. There was discipline, preventative measure, and exercises in ethics - nothing more. You should also research Connell Watkins’s role in her treatment, because it may give insight as to how straight edge everything was.
The second problem I see with your understanding is that you seem to have something against the use of animal training techniques in the treatments of human beings. But we’re animals, right? And as I mentioned earlier, attachment parenting is really no different from applied behavioral analysis - the only method approved by the Surgeon General and Psychological Association researching the treatment of Autism and behavioral deficiencies. A method based on Skinner’s Operant Conditioning, one of two respected training techniques.
And the last issue resonates back to you having an internet understanding of this issue. Websites won’t make it clear that Attachment Parenting is not completely synonymous with what we now know as Attachment Therapy. A lot of websites also won’t make it clear that Attachment Therapy refers to a number of techniques - some being more far ended than others. In recent years, Nancy has fallen in with the negative connotations of AT, and those are the years wherein my approval of her ideologies wane, but again, she practiced the respectable system of attachment parenting with Beth.
14 notes (via retro-therapy & brandx)
Children subjected to coercive techniques often have histories of severe abuse, neglect, multiple out-of-home placements, and adoption. Practitioners of coercive therapy often tell [adoptive] parents these methods are the only ones that will work to keep their child from becoming a serial murderer or sociopath.
We know that people with a history of abuse and traumatic losses are more sensitized to traumatic experiences and retraumatization when exposed to stimuli or physical coercion that is likely to remind them of the original abusive situation. Coercive therapy is terroristic and abusive as well as dangerous. Literature confirms that similar techniques are used in brainwashing: The subject is degraded, belittled, may be physically abused, is told it is for his benefit, and is thus coerced to consent. Hacker (1976), an acknowledged expert in terrorism, writes, “Coercion, having obscured its brutal origins, is then at its most triumphant when the victims are compelled to experience submission as a voluntary decision.”
Coercive techniques are antithetical to all we know about helping survivors of trauma. Trauma treatment is intended to empower survivors—not to frighten them, have them give up control, and make them assume a submissive posture. Coercive techniques foster the development of trauma bonds based in terror; they do not facilitate healthy attachment.
We would not be permitted to use these methods on prisoners of war or convicted felons, but we permit it for our children—children who have no voice.
”6 notes
[TRIGGER WARNING: child abuse & humiliation, sensory & food deprivation, torture, ableism]
“By taking away control, I mean taking away the right to decide anything: what to do, what to eat, when to go to bed, what to wear — everything!”
“Only when the child gives in to the idea that control belongs to the adult, can healing begin. If you cannot take away the control, you might as well give up. One of the foster mothers I recently worked with established the number-one rule in her home as, “I am the boss and your job is to learn to love it.”
”[…]When a new set of foster caregivers took [the boy] in, I had them take everything away right down to the bare mattress on the floor and a bucket to sit on. His caregivers picked out what he would eat, what he could do and what he could wear. He had to ask permission to talk or to use the bathroom.”
— Catherine S. Cain, Attachment Disorders: Treatment Strategies for Traumatized Children (2006)
“The rule of thumb when dealing with an unattached child in the classroom or elsewhere, is Believe the parents, not the child.”
“The adoptive mother often becomes the target of rage that would be more appropriately directed at the birth mother.”
“One parent purposely allowed a child to become lost in a mall, but kept an eye on her as her distress level increased before being ‘found’… a recreation of the early distress/relief bonding cycle.”
— Foster Cline, Can This Child Be Saved? Solutions for Adoptive and Foster Families (1999)
“These children need a different kind of love — the type that forces them to love others.”
“Intrusive therapy involves physical holding and sometimes verbally provocative techniques that bring on expressions and feelings of loss, pain, rage, helplessness, and finally hopelessness — the process through which a person must go to form attachment.”
“God used intrusive techniques himself.”
“This six-hour session [of a 150-lb. mother sitting on her prone 8-year-old son, as described by therapist Milton Erickson] would be illegal in some states.”
— Foster Cline, Conscienceless Acts (1995)
“Not only do many religions emphasize that accepting suffering is beneficial, many prescribe specific ordeals such as fasting, rigorous prayer rituals and ‘turning the other cheek’ to create both an intellectual acceptance as well as emotional and behavioral acceptance of the belief system.”
“The child needs to be confronted, ‘manipulated’ if necessary through paradoxical and other interventions, some of which may have the appearance of ‘ordeals,’ in order to achieve the greater good of maintaining the placement by quickly bringing about change.”
“‘Ordeals’ are stressful, trying, troubling, difficult and make people miserable and uncomfortable. Using paradoxical techniques can often be perceived then as undesirable and torturous, with no rationale.”
Deborah Hage, “Paradoxical Techniques” Foster Care & Adoptive Community Training Program (2005 - 2013)
“Many therapeutic philosophies argue that when children have been physically or sexually abused they have a heightened need for boundaries to be respected. These theories maintain that to touch an abused child is to re-traumatize the child. Holding therapists would be philosophically opposed to that line of reasoning. Rather, they would argue that child who have been touched in abusive ways need to be touched and have the touch followed by a loving, positive, resolution. They need to be held close through a high state of arousal, thus duplicating the high state of arousal which occurs during the height of the abuse.”“Generally, the best course of action is to let the adoptive parents decide which child/children they have been able to achieve some sort of attachment with and then remove from the home the child/children they consider to be less functional.”
— Deborah Hage, For What It’s Worth: Philosophical and Theological Musings (1999)
“Parents must take complete control[…] Often, this also requires therapeutic holds. There are Sequence One and Sequence Two holds which may seem scary and even barbaric at first.”
“More often than not, the child will resist. At this point, one parent applies gentle but firm pressure on the shoulder in a small “pinch” manner. (Remember Mr. Spock’s famous Vulcan shoulder grip from Star Trek? Think of this.) […] Next, you instruct the child to go to his or her knees and ultimately lie face down on the floor.”
“If a pillow, jacket, or towel is available, place it under the child’s face because it is very important for the child to lie face down during the therapeutic hold to prevent spitting, biting or direct eye contact. It is often overwhelming and guilt-inducing for the parents when direct eye contact occurs with the child. In order to avoid the tendency to abandon the holding time technique, make sure the child is lying face down.“While one of you jockeys your weight over the child’s buttocks and lower legs (thus straddling the child), the other parent lies across the child’s upper torso and pins the child’s arms down by the sides of the body[…]”
“Total Adults Only. Isolation from any type of activity, friend or other sibling. Early bedtime, no talking to others, no television, play or any type of recreational activity. No hiding out in their room which is often preferred. Must stay in immediate sight and close proximity of parents or responsible adult at all times. Hard labor activities occupying any and all free time.”
— Ronald Federici, Help for the Hopeless Child: A Guide for Families, With Special Discussion for Assessing and Treating the Post-Institutionalized Child (2003)
Programs founded and/or propagated by Cain, Cline, Hage, Federici & co. have collectively received millions in taxpayer subsidies, with their published works often promoted as “bibles” in adoptive and foster parent circles. Some states have officially required the recommended treatments as a condition of adoption.
Excepts posted per request.
23 notes
Making this rebloggable and divvying up the “recommendations” of sorts among my responses to this ask and your subsequent one.
As I stated earlier, one cannot get a sense of the adoption industry’s inner workings and consequences via text without including the books and manuals officially issued by federal and state organizations that set the standards for treatment of both international adoptees and domestic foster children.
The tricky part is that these documents happen to be ones that any literate, humane, and scientifically-minded person will eschew.
My next post will contain selections of direct quotes from figures commonly cited as experts on international adoption and/or foster care.
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