Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

NOTE: IAM appears to be getting hit with a DOS attack right now, so it may be a little slow.

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I've just posted a bit over a thousand new pictures to BME, with about half in the public galleries and the other half in BME/extreme. Tomorrow will be another similar split update but with a large pile in BME/HARD. Thank you to all the contributors, and to Patrick for the cover photo of his implants by Lukas Zpira.

LAME.

So in Florida some dipship kid wore a shirt to school with the above picture on the front, and on the back a picture of a “just married” car with KKK members in it dragging a couple black guys with nooses around their necks. As is no surprise he pretty much immediately got punched out by a black kid.

The white kid tried to justify the shirt, saying “I'm not racist or anything. It's just, some people I hate, some people I don't get along with. And black people just happen to be the ones because they think they're better than everyone else.“

I wanted to comment on the last statement. Black people don't actually think they're better than everyone else — they think they're worse than everyone else in fact. I was reading a study a few days ago in which black students were given academic aptitude tests. The control group took only the test, and a second group took the same test, but along with their name were asked to fill out their race at the top of the test as well. The group that was asked their race — black — scored dramatically lower on the tests.

From Blink:

Imagine for moment, that I'm a professor, and I have asked you to come see me in an office. You walk down a corrodor, come thru doorway, and sit down at a table. In front of you is a sheet of paper with a list of five words sets. I want you to make a grammatical 4 word sentence, as quickly as possible out of each set. It's called a scrambled sentence test.

4 word sentence out of 5 possible words.

Ready?

  him was worried she always
  from are Florida oranges temperature
  ball the throw toss silently
  he observes occasionally people watches
  be will sweat lonely they
  sky the seamless gray is
  should now withdraw forgetful we
  us bingo sing play let
  sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins

That seemed pretty straight forward right?

Actually it wasn't. After you finish doing that test, believe it or not, you would have walked out of my office, and back down the hall, more slowly than you walked in. With that test, I affect the way you behave. How? Well look back at the list. Scattered throughout it are certain words such as worried, Florida, old, lonely, gray, bingo, and wrinkle. You thought that I was just making you take a language test. But in fact I was also making the big computer in your brain, your adaptive unconscious, think about the state of being old. It didn't inform the rest of your brain about its sudden obsession. But it took, all this talk, of old age so seriously, that by the time you finished and walked down the corridor, you acted old.

This test was devised by a very clever psychologist named John Bargh. Is an example of what is called a priming experiment, and Bargh and others have done numerous and even more fascinating variations of it, all of which show just how much is going on beneath the surface of your conscious mind.

For example, two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer 42 fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. The students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The "professor group" didn't know any more than the "soccer hooligans" group. They werent smarter, or more focused, or more serious, they were simply in a "smart" frame of mind, and clearly associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier. In this situation the difference between 55.6 percent and 42.6 percent is enormous. That can be the difference between passing in failing.

The psychologists Claude Steel and Joshua Aronson created and even more extreme version of this test, using black college students and 20 questions taken from the graduate record examination. The G. R. E. is a standardized test used for entry into graduate school. When the students were asked to identify their race on a pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African-Americans, and academic achievement, and the number of items they got right was cut in half!

As a society would place enormous faith in tests because we think that they are a reliable indicator of the test takers ability and knowledge. But are they really?

If a white student from a prestigious private school gets a higher SAT score than a black student from an inner city school, is it because she's truly a better student, or is it because to be white and to attend a prestigious school, is to be constantly primed, with the idea of "smart"?

The results of these experiments are, obviously quite disturbing, and quite exciting. They suggest that what we think of as freewill is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act, and how well we think and act, on the spur the moment, are a lot more susceptible to outside influence than we realize.

That is, all it takes to make a black person fail is reminding them they're black, due to the power of the subconscious mind and the prejudices most of us — all of us perhaps — carry. I'm mentioning this not just because of racial issues, but because it's something that people with tattoos and piercings need to think about as well since the same negative stereotypes affect us — you need to believe in yourself, really, truly believe that your tattoos and piercings in some way “improve” you and make you “better” than everyone else (whether that's true or not)… Because the strange fact is that if you believe it, your mind will make it reality.

Oh, and a few people have made “big deal, so what” comments about the previous entry on Bush's “bathroom break” note. It's not so much that he had to go to the bathroom, but more that he had no concept of the rules of procedure on even the most basic things. Maybe I'm out of my mind, but I kind of expect world leaders to be well educated, well informed, and highly competent.

At least able to, say, handle a wardrobe malfunction zipper.

But he's a good Christocrat at least… Well, three more years of the Bush era to go, right? That's not bad, right? I mean, how much of a difference can three years of a deeply misguided political movement with a deranged and unstable führer leader make?

At least Hitler was a fundamentally brilliant man that cared about Germany, even if he eventually went to the dark side and things went terribly, terribly wrong. Bush really feels more like the less-funny dimwitted half brother of Kim Jong-il, armed with a lot more nukes — and he just granted himself the right to use nuclear first strikes on states he believes are about to launch an imminent WMD strike on America. I remind you that the reason the Iraq war was launched was because the US made the claim that Saddam could institute a WMD strike on US targets within a forty-five minute window.

Well, at least if Bush had nuked Iraq there would have been a plausible explanation as to why no WMDs were actually found.