• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


shel
@shel

I find it’s easier to imagine things when you have reference points. The Gaza Strip is almost exactly the same size as the City of Philadelphia (proper). Philadelphia County comes in at 1 square mile larger by area. The population density of the Gaza Strip is very close to Mount Vernon, NY or Milbourne, PA—inner suburbs. It’s a little under the density of Cambridge, Massachusetts and a deal denser than the City of Boston (proper). Milbourne is about the same density as most West Philly residential blocks.

From anywhere in Philadelphia you can always see the skyline, orienting you towards city hall. If someone dropped a bomb on Philadelphia City Hall, we all would see it. I remember how after 9/11 what so many people talked about was the trauma of seeing the change in the skyline of Manhattan. Gaza City is rubble, and nobody in Gaza is very far away.

When a hurricane struck Philadelphia in 2021, we all were told to shelter in place. The Schuykill River flooded, and commuting was dangerous. As photos came in, we all recognized everywhere hit by the flooding. The city isn’t really that big. We’ve all been to Logan Square.

Israel claimed they warned Gazans to flee south to Rafah before they launched missiles at Gaza City. But Gaza is about the same size as Philadelphia. This is like warning people in North Philly to hop on the broad street subway and go down to South Philly. Gaza isn’t very big.

I don’t know. It’s not a huge observation. But to me it helps me imagine things to scale. I can feel my orientation within my city and my familiarity with it. I know which way is city hall, Temple Hospital, Bartram’s Gardens, FDR Park, the Art Museum, Tacony Park, the Wissahickon. It’s all very present with me in a way a city far away is not. My brain is not oriented to where New Brunswick is besides “Idk, Northeast.” Because it’s just that much further away. But Gaza is the size of Philly. Were I a Gazan, the whole Gaza Strip would be this way to me. That way is Rafah. That way is Gaza City. That way is the ocean. That way is the militarized separation wall with Israel, guns pointing inwards, the source of rockets in the sky like the rising sun each day.

On New Years Eve, everyone in Philly can see the fireworks over the Delaware River if you’re on a roof. Gaza is about that big. Even in Rafah, surely they can see the missiles and bombs. They can feel it. It’s not that far away. Gaza is very very small. It is the same size as Philadelphia with 32% more people in it. And Israel has vowed publicly to destroy all of it.

In 2019 there was an explosion at the oil refinery in Philadelphia. The entire city was filled with smoke from this single explosion. Israel is bombing Gaza relentlessly non-stop. 141 square miles isn’t very big.



pervocracy
@pervocracy

did more reading on "culture-fair IQ tests" and the one I could find actual examples from was mostly this kind of shape-rotating type stuff. which, like, I guess it's a step up from asking "what's the first day of the week?" on an IQ test. but it still feels like a very "Moses is the Jewish version of Jesus" understanding of culture.

for starters, if you read right to left, you're going to have a weird time with this question

I think they're going for C as the unintuitive answer because the shape steps down with each row but it's reached the bottom so the lower end of it should wrap around to the top. But you could easily say "no, the bottom of the box is a solid floor, E would follow" and that seems like a fair disagreement.

Really, the nature of "which one is next" questions is that there is no objectively right answer. "It would be most artistically pleasing if the shape gave the audience a little surprise by tipping up at the end, so A is correct" isn't wrong the way that 1+1=3 is wrong.

Which means this test is judging you on whether you think the same way as the test designer, more than a simple arithmetic test would.

Which led me to look up the test designer (Raymond Cattell) and discover that he was a white supremacist. Not just in, like, the "well, he was a white academic psychologist in the 1920s" way. Like the "eugenicist who thanked Neo-Nazis in the preface to his book" way. Which led me to realize that the motivation for designing a "culture-fair" test was as a tool for race science. It's not for testing individual aptitude while removing the factor of culture. It's for testing cultures against each other.

Holy shit, man. I started this post assuming incompetence but we gotta ascribe this to malice.

(The reason this shouldn't have been a surprise is probably also the reason this test is still in use: people who are actually interested in cultural fairness are not going to want a better IQ test, they're going to want to get rid of the entire superstition that intelligence can be expressed as a number.)

Anyway, "culture-fair" IQ testing! As I suspected: not really all that fair! As I should have suspected: created by an actual eugenicist, for eugenics reasons!



eebee-cannoli
@eebee-cannoli

Please watch your op-sec and be careful! And if you're not already, now's the time to fucking fight. They won't listen to our voices and now they're punishing us for screaming.

Wear your block, don't tweet at the protest, and never, ever ID your fucking friends. Look into anon organizing tools. Don't talk to cops friends-of-cops. And keep fighting.