"Star Lords: ‘Star Wars’ and the monomyth of Silicon Valley"

"The correspondence between Campbell’s “monomyth” and the plot details of the originalStar Wars trilogy are now well known: “A hero [Luke Skywalker] ventures forth from the world of common day [humdrum desert planet Tatooine] into a region of supernatural wonder [a galaxy far, far away]: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power [the Force] to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The “boon,” in Campbell’s analysis, typically involves some sort of radical renewal in the social order. This “Hero’s Journey” narrative, post Star Wars, is, increasingly, the means by which tech titan biographies are received and structured.

The high water mark of this tendency is the sanctification of Steve Jobs in the wake of his death in 2011, when the Apple CEO was memorialized in grandly heroic terms by no less than George Lucas himself, who explicitly reconstituted the details of Jobs’ biography into the monomyth in a sidebar in a Wired magazine remembrance of Jobs’ life, “The Hero’s Journey.” The crucial stages are the expulsion from Apple in the eighties, and the subsequent failure of the NeXT computer (“a sort of purgatory”), before Jobs’ triumphant return: “That’s when his story really became the hero’s journey,” Lucas wrote. Ed Catmull, current president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios (and former employee of both Jobs and Lucas) has a similar view of Jobs’ life, in which his exile from Apple also constitutes a trial in “the wilderness.”

This heroic-CEO narrative is not simply a descriptive move—a fantasy told by and to capitalists in order to bolster their self-image or reputation—it’s also a prescriptive formula: something expected of new generations of tech aspirants...

Thiel’s own ambitions as a venture capitalist have a decidedly heroic bent. In a 2009 essay for the libertarian publication Cato Unbound, he claimed that purveyors of technology have a mythic responsibility to guard against political encroachments on freedom (constituted largely as the free market). “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism,” he wrote, in an unmistakably Campbellian narrative sketch."
http://www.theawl.com/2015/12/star-lords

Hmmmmm. There is so much here. It makes me want to read a longer analysis of the American idea of the 'hero', and figure out on what basis we apply the term. And figure out who thinks of themselves as heros or potential heros. And who gets praise and grand narratives for "heroic" behavior.

Because "hero" sort of seems to be involved in capitalism and maintaining status quo, and it's a certain kind of hard-working white man. And heroes also hold this function of proving that human beings are capable of things, that we might be capable of those things, that we can count on someone in our society to do those things. Someone we look up to and trust and give power to. It's a model that pretends that individuals can be turned to to to do what needs to be done, that ignores the need for systems and communities and accountability.

And it ignores the 'why'. There is always some kind of deus-ex-machina that comes in to create the 'why', because otherwise their behavior tends to be ridiculous.

Related: The woman who follows Donald Trump + why

"Picture This? Some Just Can’t"

"The scientists showed names to MX and asked him to picture their faces. In normal brains, some of those face-recognition regions again become active. In MX’s brain, none of them did.
Paradoxically, though, MX could answer questions that would seem to require a working mind’s eye. He could tell the scientists the color of Tony Blair’s eyes, for example, and name the letters of the alphabet that have low-hanging tails, like g and j. These tests suggested his brain used some alternate strategy to solve visual problems.

All in all, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues were struck by how similar the results of the survey were. “These people seemed to be describing something consistent,” Dr. Zeman said. Rather than being a unique case, MX may belong to an unrecognized group of people."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/science/aphantasia-minds-eye-blind.html?referrer&_r=5

I found this because a friend posted it as validation that she was telling the truth when she said she couldn't form mental images. #neurodiversity

I really want to hear the rest of the story as they do more research.
(Credit to LS)

"Dispossessed in the Land of Dreams"

"Their rent was actually a couple of hundred dollars more than James’s monthly Social Security benefits, but he made up the rest by piecing together odd jobs. They looked for a new apartment for two months and didn’t find anything close to their price range. Their landlord gave them a six-week extension, but it yielded nothing. When mid-October came, Suzan and James had no choice but to leave. With hurried help from neighbors, they packed most of their belongings into two storage units and a ramshackle 1994 Ford Explorer which they called “the van.” They didn’t know where they were going.

A majority of the homeless population in Palo Alto—93 percent—ends up sleeping outside or in their cars. In part, that’s because Palo Alto, a technology boomtown that boasts a per capita income well over twice the average for California, has almost no shelter space: For the city’s homeless population, estimated to be at least 157, there are just 15 beds that rotate among city churches through a shelter program calledHotel de Zink; a charity organizes a loose network of 130 spare rooms, regular people motivated to offer up their homes only by neighborly goodwill. The lack of shelter space in Palo Alto—and more broadly in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which comprise the peninsula south of San Francisco and around San Jose—is unusual for an area of its size and population.

A 2013 census showed Santa Clara County having more than 7,000 homeless people, the fifth-highest homeless population per capita in the country and among the highest populations sleeping outside or in unsuitable shelters like vehicles...

A few months in, a nice man in a 7-Eleven parking lot told them about a former high school turned community center on the eastern side of town called Cubberley...

Cubberley was a psychic relief because it solved so many basic needs: It had a place to bathe in the morning, a place to charge your phone. The parking lot had also formed its own etiquette and sense of community. People tended to park in the same places, a spot or two next to their neighbors, and they recognized one another and nodded at night. They weren’t exactly friends, but they were people who trusted each other, an impromptu neighborhood no one wanted to lose after losing so much. It was safe, a good place to spend the night. But it was next door to a segment of homeowners who were fighting hard to move the car dwellers out...

Most people told me if they had to sell their homes today they wouldn’t be able to buy again anywhere in the area, which means many Palo Altans have all of their wealth tied up in expensive homes that they can’t access without upending their lives. It makes everyone anxious...

The outcry from the neighbors over Cubberley was so fierce that it reshaped Palo Alto’s city government. The city council is nonpartisan, but a faction emerged that revived an old, slow-growth movement in town, known as the “residentialists.” Their concerns are varied (among them, the perennial suburban concerns of property values and traffic), but their influence has been to block any new development of affordable housing and shoo people like Suzan and James away from Palo Alto."

https://newrepublic.com/article/124476/dispossessed-land-dreams?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I'm excited to see this article, to see the negatives of Palo Alto being talked about - my mom has been involved with a lot of the stuff talked about in here; her church runs part of Hotel de Zinc in addition to big, open door meals and she's gotten to know a lot of people in Palo Alto who don't have homes. She kept me updated on the Cubberly thing and I don't think either of us is going to forgive Palo Alto for making these absurd and unnecessary "slow growth" policies.

Like, there was also a fight to maintain a trailer park, an established community where lots of people live including students at a bunch of the schools. The owner wanted to sell the land, so he was kicking everyone out. Palo Alto had just made a commitment (with funding) to have more affordable housing. So, there was an obvious moment here to use that funding to save this community. And when the city council did it, we acted in celebration, but really... [add pictures]

To me, this also has a very direct link to the mental health problems here. The pressure to succeed has an unspoken rational tinge: in order to continue to live in the community we grew up in and might still love, we need to be phenomenally economically successful.

FB: A longread from the New Republic about the opposition to affordable housing in Palo Alto

"Darwin’s Battle with Anxiety"

"That affliction of afflictions, Stossel argues, was Darwin’s overpowering anxiety — something that might explain why his influential studies of human emotion were of such intense interest to him. Stossel points to a “Diary of Health” that the scientist kept for six years between the ages of 40 and 46 at the urging of his physician. He filled dozens of pages with complaints like “chronic fatigue, severe stomach pain and flatulence, frequent vomiting, dizziness (‘swimming head,’ as Darwin described it), trembling, insomnia, rashes, eczema, boils, heart palpitations and pain, and melancholy.”"
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/08/28/darwin-anxiety/

"Being Black In The Zombie Apocalypse"

"would upwardly mobile, bougie black folks make it in the Zombie Apocalypse (ZA)? As much as I’d like to say “yes,” there is compelling evidence that ‘nary a tenth of us would be running around Michonne-style. So, in the spirit of lists, psuedo-maths, and pontification, let’s dive into why your friends, favorite bloggers, podcasters, social media mavens, Instagram philosophers, and some of your brunch-buddies won’t make it...

Sadly, I doubt your local Pan-African store will survive the initial throes of the Apocalypse. Because black folks always die first in horror scenarios, so expect mass casualties in our business sectors too. Brother Muhammed Muhammed, Jr. is not gonna have that black soap and shea butter for you when the zombies start Cupid Shuffling through our cities...

This tension — the one between wanting the coolness of blackness without our pesky humanity — is a defining trait of the American experience at large. In addition, it’s one that is always exacerbated by dire circumstances. Thus black folks are at a very particular disadvantage when it comes to the ZA. You’re already not gonna be able to trust muhfuckas out in the wilderness. Shoot — microagressions are bad enough in the workplace. Imagine dealing with them when there’s no HR department or Twitter timeline to vent your frustrations to"

https://thsppl.com/being-black-in-the-zombie-apocalypse-459f4aa191f2?gi=c8acff6eac5c

"A Medievalist Schools Dan on Medieval Attitudes Toward Sex"

"I'm not saying that the Middle Ages was a great period of freedom (sexual or otherwise), but the sexual culture of 12th-century France, Iraq, Jerusalem, or Minsk did not involve the degree of self-loathing brought about by modern approaches to sexuality. Modern sexual purity has become a marker of faith, which it wasn't in the Middle Ages...

The Middle Eastern boyfriend wasn't taught a medieval version of his faith, and radical religion in the West isn't a retreat into the past—it is a very modern way of conceiving identity. Even something like ISIS is really just interested in the medieval borders of their caliphate; their ideology developed out of 18th- and 19th-century anticolonial sentiment, and much ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Judaism and evangelical Christianity developed at the same time...
The reason why this matters (beyond medievalists just being like, OMG no one gets us) is that the common response in the West to religious radicalism is to urge enlightenment, and to believe that enlightenment is a progressive narrative that is ever more inclusive. But these religions are responses to enlightenment...
Radical religion is doing something similar: It offers a social identity to those excluded (or who feel excluded) from the dominant system of Western enlightenment capitalism. It is a modern response to a modern problem, and by making it seem like some medieval holdover, we cover up the way in which our social power produces the conditions for this kind of identity, and make violence appear as the only response for these recalcitrant "holdouts.""
http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/04/22/22094056/savage-love-letter-of-the-day-a-medievalist-schools-dan-on-medieval-attitudes-toward-sex

Oh, this was so interesting.

"How Different Cultures Understand Time

"In Western Europe, the Swiss attitude to time bears little relation to that of neighboring Italy. Thais do not evaluate the passing of time in the same way that the Japanese do. In Britain the future stretches out in front of you. In Madagascar it flows into the back of your head from behind...

Southern Europeans are multi-active, rather than linear-active... Multi-active peoples are not very interested in schedules or punctuality. They pretend to observe them, especially if a linear-active partner or colleague insists on it, but they consider the present reality to be more important than appointments... completing a human transaction is the best way they can invest their time. For an Italian, time considerations will usually be subjected to human feelings...

Americans see time passing without decisions being made or actions performed as having been “wasted.” Asians do not see time as racing away unutilized in a linear future, but coming around again in a circle, where the same opportunities, risks and dangers will re- present themselves when people are so many days, weeks or months wiser. As proof of the veracity of the cyclical nature of time, how often do we (in the West) say, “If I had known then what I know now, I would never have done what I did?”...

By contrast, the Malagasy consider the future unknowable. It is behind their head where they do not have eyes. Their plans for this unknown area will be far from meticulous, for what can they be based on? Buses in Madagascar leave, not according to a predetermined timetable, but when the bus is full. The situation triggers the event. Not only does this make economic sense, but it is also the time that most passengers have chosen to leave. Consequently, in Madagascar stocks are not replenished until shelves are empty, filling stations order gas only when they run dry, and hordes of would-be passengers at the airport find that, in spite of their tickets, in reality everybody is wait-listed."

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-understand-time-2014-5

Obviously, rank generalizations from a somewhat un-self-aware American perspective - but it's so useful to think about time and how we perceive our lives. I enjoyed seeing these models described and diagrammed, although I did not enjoy seeing them labeled. Actually, probably best to read the labels as made up countries.

"Africa For Norway - New charity single out now!"

https://youtu.be/oJLqyuxm96k

There is also a wider NPR article about charity videos that is super great.
"Many cliched images — like the common ones of Africa, showing children with flies buzzing in their eyes and helpless women balancing bundles on their heads — were created with good intentions, says SAIH Vice President Martine Jahre.

And they've had some positive effects. She notes that studies have shown people will give more when faced with a caricature of a charity case rather than a human being. "We feel good when it's us and them, and we can help them," she says.

But there's a danger in trying to raise money at the expense of someone's dignity, Jahre adds, "and if we see these images over and over again, our expectation becomes that."
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/11/20/456781579/radiator-awards-salute-manpons-freezing-norwegians-sad-babies?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2047

"How Kindness Became Our Forbidden Pleasure"

"although kindness is the foundation of all spiritual traditions and was even a central credo for the father of modern economics, at some point in recent history, kindness became little more than an abstract aspiration, its concrete practical applications a hazardous and vulnerable-making behavior to be avoided — we need only look to the internet’s “outrage culture” for evidence, or to the rise of cynicism as our flawed self-defense mechanism against the perceived perils of kindness...

Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves... All compassion is self-pity, D. H. Lawrence remarked, and this usefully formulates the widespread modern suspicion of kindness: that it is either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative) or the lowest form of weakness...

Embedded in our ambivalence about kindness is a special sort of psychological self-sabotage — by denying our own kind impulses, we also deny ourselves the powerful pleasure our acts of kindness produce... Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/13/on-kindness-adam-phillips-barbara-taylor/

Noms

"Hello From the Same Side"

"Trump creates an environment where his fans feel affirmed and unchallenged in their intuitive sense of the world. Having the world reflect your intuitive sense with dissonance-free immediacy is the height of privilege. This is what Trump’s white (able-bodied, English-speaking…) fans are accustomed to, and one way his performances reaffirm both their whiteness and white supremacy. As a political figure, he appears completely uninterested in facts or evidence. As Dylan Matthews suggests on Vox, whereas most politicians massage facts into the form they find most appealing, Trump just makes stuff up, stuff that’s easy to disprove with empirical evidence. For him, the point isn’t to be correct or make a rational argument (he’s no Habermasian) to get people to agree with his ideas, but to perform feelings that (some, mostly white) people identify with. He’s not interested in getting people to agree with the propositional content of his claims, but with the implicit knowledges, emotions, habits, and intuitions—what philosophers call an “interpretive horizon”—that make factually incoherent claims appear coherent. And in Trump’s case, it’s white supremacy that makes his empirically false claims feel true.

“Hello” also eschews appeals to knowledge in favor of immediate, friction-less emotional and intuitive identification. Its production and performance is so musically conservative that you don’t have to know a lot about recent trends in pop music to connect to the song and feel like part of its interpretive universe. Its closest chart competition, Bieber’s “Sorry,” is a hit because it synthesizes current trends, like a trap “skrrrrrt!” or tropical house-inspired melodies and beats. But these ideas might alienate listeners who don’t keep up with pop’s rabid assimilation of new sounds from (generally black, queer) subcultures. Over the last 40 years, as hip hop, disco, house, drum & bass, dubstep, and plenty of other black genres were appropriated by the white mainstream, their rhythmic innovations have been incorporated into pop percussion styles: we hear this in Bieber’s three new singles. “Hello”‘s composition avoids using any ideas or techniques that entered pop’s toolkit since the invention of punk, hip hop, and disco in the late 70s (its one musical reference is to “California Dreaming,” from 1965). It would have made as much sense to US and UK pop audiences in 1975 as it does in 2015...

In both Trump’s and “Hello”’s case, fans experience an apparently immediate emotional identification with a performance, and assume that everyone does, or at least should, do the same, because everyone ought to share this white interpretive horizon."

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/hello-from-the-same-side/

Um, I so enjoyed these interpretations and connections and the way the author is writing about culture and society using lots of lenses and tools. I love learning this idea the "interpretive horizon". That's so useful.

Maybe part of millenialism is seeing no border between pop culture and politics; being able to step into the crash of "high" and "low" culture.

(Credit to JR, I think)

Related: Whiteness is proxy for being American

FB: sorrynotsorry this is amazing "

I’m not arguing anything about Adele herself, nor about all possible interpretations of “Hello,” but about a liberal one that dominates media coverage of the song. This particular strain of “Hello” fandom is about the pleasure in sharing a common interpretive horizon, a common underlying set of habits, intuitions, and bodily orientations to the world. This is also the crux of Trump fandom."

"The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb"

"Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America. Over time, this morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” that must be laughed at — an Other Side that just doesn’t “get it,” and is clearly not as intelligent as “us.” But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this...

This is not a “political correctness” issue. It’s a fundamental rejection of the possibility to consider that the people who don’t feel the same way you do might be right. It’s a preference to see the Other Side as a cardboard cut out, and not the complicated individual human beings that they actually are.

What happens instead of genuine intellectual curiosity is the sharing ofSlate or Onion or Fox News or Red Statelinks. Sites that exist almost solely to produce content to be shared so friends can pat each other on the back and mock the Other Side. Look at the Other Side! So dumb and unable to see this the way I do!...

the next time you feel compelled to share a link on social media about current events, ask yourself why you are doing it. Is it because that link brings to light information you hadn’t considered? Or does it confirm your world view, reminding your circle of intellectual teammates that you’re not on the Other Side?"

https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/the-other-side-is-not-dumb-2670c1294063#.95zye6rab

Dialogue instead of argue! Recognize one anothers' humanity.

I have spent the past few years really trying to ask myself "why" when I click on things or feel like posting them.

FB: "As any debate club veteran knows, if you can’t make your opponent’s point for them, you don’t truly grasp the issue. We can bemoan political gridlock and a divisive media all we want. But we won’t truly progress as individuals until we make an honest effort to understand those that are not like us. And you won’t convince anyone to feel the way you do if you don’t respect their position and opinions."

"One Percenters Control Online Reviews"

"recent social research into how these sites work reveals that they may fall short of providing a representative sample of broad opinion. This is due to how the sites display comments or choose not to, how businesses influence what’s written about them, and the fact that only a small fraction of customers write reviews. Says Duncan Simester, a professor of management science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has studied the impact of online feedback, “We worry that to the extent that customers are using these reviews, they’re not making good decisions.”...

while getting instant access to unlimited opinions can be a valuable asset, its drawbacks are becoming exposed. For one thing, the sheer volume of reviews can transform a simple purchase into a research project. Buying something as basic as a water bottle online now involves surveying a dozen brands, winnowing them down based on star rankings or popularity statistics, and reading a handful of reviews about the attributes of each model (leakiness? ease of cleaning?), and weighing the conflicting opinions (“Best water bottle ever!” “Do not under any circumstances buy this piece of garbage!”)."

http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/one-percenters-control-online-reviews

(The title is a little deceiving, it just means that only 1% of consumers writ reviews)


Hm. I wonder if there is going to start to be a trend of rejecting this maximizing-mindset and practices and just choosing whatever is the first thing you encounter. Like, yeah, it is totally exhausting to decide to buy something; I am planning to buy a humidifier and I know that's going to be hours - when, really, it's just a thing that makes steam and it's hard for that to go wrong.

"Bernie Sanders and the Liberal Imagination"

"When a candidate points to high unemployment among black youth, as well as high incarceration rates, and then dubs himself a radical, it seems prudent to ask what radical anti-racist policies that candidate actually embraces. Hillary Clinton has no interest in being labeled radical, left-wing, or even liberal. Thus announcing that Clinton doesn’t support reparations is akin to announcing that Ted Cruz doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose. The position is certainly wrong. But it is hardly a surprise, and doesn't run counter to the candidate’s chosen name...

I thought #FeelTheBern meant something more than this. I thought that Bernie Sanders, the candidate of single-payer health insurance, of the dissolution of big banks, of free higher education, was interested both in being elected and in advancing the debate beyond his own candidacy. I thought the importance of Sanders’s call for free tuition at public universities lay not just in telling citizens that which is actually workable, but in showing them that which we must struggle to make workable. I thought Sanders’s campaign might remind Americans that what is imminently doable and what is morally correct are not always the same things, and while actualizing the former we can’t lose sight of the latter."
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/

Essentially.

I heard this described as the most depressing election campaign of recent memory (Democrats, Republicans, Independents...). And not because of the issues or the negativity between candidates or whatever, just because everyone is sort of incompletely standing for something. Because we aren't ignoring our cynicisms.

"Wrong"

"Yesterday Jeffrey Siminoff announced that he was joining Twitter as their new head of Diversity and Inclusion. It’s not getting better.

Jeffrey Siminoff is a white man, replacing a white woman in the role. Not just any white man, Jeffrey Siminoff is the white man who ran diversity and inclusion at Apple. Friends of mine (who will remain nameless) have left Apple because they were facing the same struggles surrounding working at there that I felt at Google, that boil down to this: they didn’t feel included and didn’t feel like Apple really gave a damn about that. Prior to his time leading Apple’s less than stellar diversity efforts, he lead diversity and inclusion at Morgan Stanley: the Morgan Stanley that had a racial discrimination suit brought against it during his tenure. So now the man who cultivated those environments is bringing his act to Twitter. Let’s just say I would be very surprised to learn that any of the ERG’s at Twitter were involved in his hiring. I would be completely unsurprised to learn that he was hired by a team of white men (and maybe a white woman, because #FFFFFF Diversity), who didn’t at all see the problem with that."

https://medium.com/this-is-hard/wrong-acacd043229b

"The white man pathology: inside the fandom of Sanders and Trump"

"For people who love to dwell in contradictions, the US is the greatest country in the world: the land of the free built on slavery, the country of law and order where everyone is entitled to a gun, a place of unimpeded progress where they cling to backwardness out of sheer stubbornness. And into this glorious morass, a new contradiction has recently announced itself: the white people, the privileged Americans, the ones who had the least to fear from the powers that be, the ones with the surest paths to brighter futures, the ones who are by every metric one of the most fortunate groups in the history of the world, were starting to die off in shocking numbers.

The Case and Deaton report, Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century, describes an increased death rate for middle-aged American whites “comparable to lives lost in the US Aids epidemic”. This spike in mortality is unique to white Americans – not to be found among other ethnic groups in the United States or any other white population in the developed world, a mysterious plague of despair.

In one way, it was easy to account for all this white American death – “drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis”, according to the report. It was not so easy to account for the accounting. Why were middle-aged white Americans drinking and drugging and shooting themselves to death? The explanations on offer were pre-prepared, fully plugged into confirmation bias: it was the economy or it was demography or it was godlessness or it was religion or it was the breakdown of the family or it was the persistence of antique values or it was the lack of social programs or it was the dependence on social programs...

What white people crave – more, they require it, they require it to live – is an alibi from their whiteness, an escape from the injustice of their existence. There are various alibis available depending on how much stupidity you can tolerate. You can say to yourself or to others that black people are stupid and lazy; you can say that you don’t see color; you can call your uncle a racist so everybody knows you’re not; you can share the latest critique of brutality on Twitter with the word THIS; and now you can tell a friend that she really has to read Between the World and Me.

Because that Dream of Whiteness, the dream of treehouses and cub scouts that tastes like peppermint and smells like strawberry shortcake, is a perfect alibi. Who lives that dream? Somebody else may live it but not me, not anyone I know, no one I could see in Burlington. That’s a dream that belongs to somebody else. Always to somebody else...

The ultimate alibi is ignorance – it lies closest to innocence – but if you can’t manage ignorance, craziness does nearly as well...

The same specter of angry white people haunts Saunders’s rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away. The Bernie crowd brought homemade signs instead of manufactured ones, because I guess they’re organic. They waved them just the same. They were going to a show. They wanted to be a good audience.

The fundamental difference between the Trump and Sanders crowd was that the Sanders crowd has more money, the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich white people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger...

In medieval monarchies, the state required the existence of a double body, one for the real world and one for the symbolic. There was the flawed and mortal body of the king, which wept and shat and screwed and died, and then there was the Body of the King, sacred, pure, indestructible.

Race gives us all double bodies, “double consciousness” in WEB Du Bois’s phrase, whatever you want to call having to live mortally through the judgment of others. The new white distortion, the sickness at heart, the pathology, may simply be the arrival of the awareness of two bodies: the dizziness and nausea that arrive with the onset of double vision."

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/10/white-man-pathology-bernie-sanders-donald-trump

This was interesting for me to read - a Canadian man's thoughts on his whiteness while experiencing the current intensity of American populism as organized around two older white men.

In many ways, this was exactly in my politics and exactly some stuff I wanted to read, so there is that skepticism and that reason to avoid absorbing it fully. But I am so curious about how white people understand their own racial identities, and this was so delightfully well written. Like this passage -

"The view of American politics in Fun City is snug despair. It is despair not just at who happens to be in power but at whoever could ever be in power. It is despair not simply that the system is broken but that any system, imaginable in the current iteration of the United States, would turn out to be just as broken. The choice is a choice between impotence and coercion. The response was not revolution but a shrug."

FB: "Sanders’s exasperation was the principal fact to be communicated, more than any political content. Trump was about winning again. Sanders was about having lost. The vagueness of American politics is what astonished the outsider. It’s all about feelings and God and bullshit. Sanders actually uttered the following sentence out loud: “What we’re saying is when millions of people come together to restore their government we can do extraordinary things.” Nobody asked what he meant. Nobody asked for numbers. They applauded. Better to take it in the spirit in which it’s given, like a Catskills resort comedian."

"Where is the Rest of the Sanders Revolution?"

"the thing Sanders has failed to do is create down-ballot candidates. So you want to invade the Democratic Party and move it left? Where is Congress in this vision? One problem is that a good number of Sander’s supporters simply overestimate the Presidency. A good way to imagine the President is as someone who can only say “yes” or “no”. (The rule-making process matters a good deal, as the recent kerfuffle about executive orders reminds us, so this is very simplified.) A good question to ask when you hear a presidential candidate make a promise is whether or not Congress will pass something close.

And so I picture Bernie Sanders, probably the most principled person who attended the State of Union, up in front of it. Would that Congress pass single-payer? Pass super-high tax rates on the rich? Increase the safety net significantly? The answer is very decidedly no. And getting a Democratic House and Senate, no small feat, won’t be enough for exactly the reason Sanders has gotten a raw deal from the DNC. These are not Democratic proposals"

https://proofofburden.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/where-is-the-rest-of-the-sanders-revolution/

"Can a Trip Ever Be ‘Authentic’?"

"Our notion of places — which is to say the romances and images we project onto them — are always less current and subtle than the places themselves. That’s why we work to screen out the many shopping malls and signs for McAloo Tikki in Varanasi as we search for dead bodies near the ghats; it’s why my Kyoto-born wife, visiting the U.S., looks aghast when I take her to an authentic-seeming Vietnamese restaurant in Orange County or that Ethiopian market my friends in D.C. have been raving about.

She longs instead for Universal Studios, a ghost town that evokes the ‘‘macaroni Westerns’’ she grew up on, the ‘‘real America’’ as devoured by the world on ‘‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.’’ Cosmopolitan and refined as she is, she knows that travel is, deep down, about the real confirmation of very unreal dreams...

Yet these days that disconnect is even more acute because so many travelers have been everywhere (if only on-screen), which in turn means that reality — all that is unmediated and nonvirtual — holds a greater premium than ever. Today, we crave ‘‘realness’’ as never before, and in response, the travel industry is trying even harder to provide it. Expert guides take ever more pains to lead us to artisanal secrets in the local marketplace, and fancy restaurants claim to use only what has been grown in the fields nearby. Six-star hotels aspire to resemble the villages around them — though their guests may be comfortable only in proportion to the degree in which they fail...

To wish that it were otherwise — to hope that the Chinese everywoman you meet wants to live the same ‘‘unspoiled,’’ often imprisoning existence as her father, without the iPhones and Audis and frappuccinos that we find so indispensable — is to practice a kind of imaginative colonialism. Let the rest of the world remain picturesque and quaint — ‘‘authentically’’ undeveloped — so that we can come away with some killer selfies!"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/t-magazine/authentic-travel-experiences-quest.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1


This is still Western-gazey but it has useful thoughts and snark. I think there is a degree to which Americans feel that they are promised the world, and all the people and cultures within it, and that's so weird and it's such a good question: What are we looking for when we travel?

“Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?”

"One of the underlying assumptions in the discussing the ethics of the self-driving car is that there is a knowable outcome and, working backwards, a right answer...

Equally at fault for the failure of making such a car an attractive product for consumers is our inability to objectively asses risk. The probability of dying in a terrorist attack are infinitesimal compared to a lightning strike or in a plane compared to a car crash [7], [8]. It comes down to how we perceive risk vs. the actual likelihood of the risk [9]. Even though autonomous cars would dramatically reduce overall accidents, injuries, and car-related fatalities, because the risks are beyond our control, are in the future, and unknown, they loom large."

https://medium.com/@scweiss1/who-would-buy-a-car-programmed-to-sacrifice-the-owner-28b93db822a3

I really enjoyed how Stephen lays out all the issues here.

It makes me think about the difference between our idea of machines/computers and our idea of tools - cars were originally tools, that we operated in order to move me quickly. More and more, they are machines that we input information into and expect certain outputs from. And while, right now, that relationship is pretty clear (I apply a certain amount of pressure to the brakes, turn the wheel a certain way, turn the knob for the volume, choose a certain gear...) we are adding more and more black boxes (with GPS, we trust it to find the best route with the least traffic, ask it to find the cheapest nearby gas or nearest parking lot; with proximity sensors, we ask the car to beep before we back into our neighbor's bushes and so we've stopped looking out ourselves).

On the one hand, there seems to be a desire for a world where we don't have so much decision fatigue and can avoid uninteresting and frustrating quotidian tasks like figuring out how directions to unknown locations or remembering when our next dental appointment is. (or maybe this is what the tech world wants, and where capitalists see potential for economic growth). It's the Jetsons, a 1950s ideal of the future that still shapes our imagination.

But... Sometimes these tasks can be part of how we feel connection to our lives and our days, and when we cede them to machines built by strangers we lose a personal touch to our own decisions
There is a danger of mindlessness if we can't replace those moments of connection, if we are convinced that these machines let us avoid focusing on the current moment.

My solution to this has been to connect to my machines as though they are tools, whose black boxes I can wield if I try to maintain self awareness and think about what I NEED instead of what some unknown designers and builders imagine that I "could do".

I think about the conveyor belt that pulled the Jetsons through their morning, and I feel no joy or life in that. But I love that my needs are met, and my capabilities augmented, by tools.

"Militants bulldoze through Native American archeological site, share video rifling through artifacts"

"Amanda Peacher from Oregon Public Broadcasting shared photos of what appeared to be a new road in the refuge and got confirmation that not only is the road new, it goes through a vitally important area...

Meanwhile, in the video below, LaVoy Finicum and other armed militants show themselves rifling through boxes of artifacts and offering to return them to the Burns Paiute Tribe. Some of the artifacts at the refuge date back 6,000 years. Tribal representatives have repeatedly said they want the militants to leave immediately"
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/21/1472882/-Militants-bulldoze-through-Native-American-archeological-site-share-video-rifling-through-artifacts

Things that are happening in our country right now. Colonialism is this never-ending trauma.

"The Inheritance of Disaffection"

"For America’s black and brown citizens – the nation’s great historical puzzle, burden and now creditor, for we are owed a very great deal — holding on to the hope of a bright future requires an act of imagination, a vision that refuses to acknowledge internal shackles and manacles, one that slips their knots and evades their chains. It is a vision that refuses to mortgage its own sense of humanity in the name of political correctness or proper public manners. It is a vision that says your freedom of speech to ridicule my burdened history is now forfeit. It is a vision that insists that no disingenuously justified failure of justice can be accepted as part of a decent democracy. It is a vision that rejects the idea that my struggle for liberation should be slowed down to accommodate your privileged preferences."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/the-inheritance-of-disaffection/?smid=fb-share


!

"The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá"

"Jorge moved to his desktop computer so he could see the images more closely. He clicked once more on the photo of William and the friend holding shot glasses. Now that the image was large, he could examine what he had failed, incredibly, to notice when he looked at the photo on his phone. He leaned in close, his nose practically touching the screen. The man’s hair was slicked up like a rooster’s crown, and the shirt was all wrong. But there was the full lower lip and thick brown hair that Jorge knew well. The buttons on the man’s shirt were straining slightly at the hint of a potbelly, in a way that was intimately familiar. Jorge felt a rush of confusion, and then his stomach dropped. The friend sitting next to his double had a face that Jorge knew better than his own: It was the face of his fraternal twin brother, Carlos...

Immediately, Wilber saw, with total clarity, what it took everyone else hours to grasp.

‘‘So we were swapped,’’ Wilber said, shrugging, annoyed by the sense of momentousness William seemed to want to attach to the photo. ‘‘I don’t care who they are. You’re my brother, and you’ll be my brother until the day I die."...

The meta-­analysis published this spring in Nature Genetics, which examined 50 years of studies of twins, arrived at a conclusion about the impact of heredity and environment on human beings’ lives. On average, the researchers found, any particular trait or disease in an individual is about 50 percent influenced by environment and 50 percent influenced by genes. But that simple ratio does not capture our complicated systems of genetic circuitry, the way our genes steadily interact with the environment, switching on, switching off, depending on the stimulus, sometimes with lasting results that will continue on in our genome, passed to the next generation...

Segal and Craig were eager to see the epigenetic results for the Colombian twins. Whose epigenetic profile, they wondered, would look more alike? The biologically unrelated twins who shared an environment — Segal calls them virtual twins — or the ones whose DNA was the same?

A sample of four subjects could only raise questions, not answer them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/magazine/the-mixed-up-brothers-of-bogota.html?_r=0

This was a really interesting read, an exploration not only of the unusual circumstances of these brothers, but of variation in human personalities and emotional needs, and great writing about genetics.

"President Obama has a theory about why people support Donald Trump. But he's wrong."

"A more plausible theory is to apply Occam's razor: A substantial minority of white Americans are rallying behind Trump's white ethnocentric agenda because they are — reasonably — concerned that ongoing demographic changes are threatening white people's political power in the United States...

More broadly, whatever economic troubles middle-class white Americans have suffered over the past generation pale in comparison to the struggles of black and Latino Americans, who have lower incomes and far less wealth. A political movement that primarily resonated with people seized by economic anxiety would have a very different look than Trump's...

2015 marks the first time in American history that white Christians are no longer a majority of the population.

America has a black president, and he has presided over the most diverse set of executive branch appointments in history and the most diverse federal judiciary in American history. The share of the population that was born in a foreign country has reached a level not seen in generations, and even many liberals (including Barack Obama!) are expressing profound anxiety that the youngest cohort of Americans are using their clout to impose a freedom-ravishing regime of "political correctness" on the country...

In his classic study of the politics of the Jim Crow South, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V.O. Key observed that the politics of white supremacy was strongest and most salient precisely in the states and counties that had the fewest white people. In a state like Arkansas or Texas or Tennessee that has relatively few African Americans, there was little need for an explicit white supremacy politics to ensure that white people would, in fact, be supreme. These states, not coincidentally, generated some white politicians who were racially moderate by the standards of the time and place."

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/22/10636538/obama-trump-theory

The only person who I personally know who has talked about supporting Donald Trump is an upper-middle class, white, male techie who explained that he was concerned about how many Asian people (who he assumes are immigrants) he sees in his company's cafeteria. His said he was worried about job opportunities for his children.

So, this all really, really, from the beginning, has looked to me like a majority fearing some kind of minority-takeover. There are actually so, so many things going on right now that just feel like an aggressive, fearful over-reaction to seeing other people have some power and privilege. It's like, wealthy white men are used to everyone being 10 steps behind and now some people are only 9 steps behind and a lot of these WWM are behaving as though this means that next week everyone else will be 10 steps ahead of them and treating them as poorly as they have been treating us for the last 500 years. 

"This Is My First Gun: A Glock 19 9mm Semi-Automatic Pistol"

"The exam for the Firearm Safety Certificate is about as hard as the written part of the test for a driver’s license—that is, not at all. There are fewer numbers to remember, and unless you have some strange ideas about how guns work, where to keep them, and who you’re allowed to shoot (basically no one), you’d pass the test if you walked into a gun store and took it...

The most astounding loophole in the NICS process is the default proceed: If a background check cannot be completed within 3 days, the gun dealer is authorized to complete the transaction anyway. This is how Dylann Roof, who shot up a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, qualified to buy his gun...

California has provisions (although not the budget) to confiscate the guns of people who become ineligible to possess handguns because they commit disqualifying crimes or their mental health history changes to indicate they might be a danger to themselves or others...

I’m one of the 5.7 million adult Americans who live with bipolar disorder, and who manage it like you do other chronic medical conditions like diabetes or asthma. If I lived in New Jersey, I’d have to sign a release letting the state look at my mental health records, and they’d find out that I have been hospitalized for my illness—twice, in fact, but both voluntarily and both over ten years ago...

Hatred is not a mental illness, nor is alienation. Shooting strangers is certainly an act of insanity, but the legal definition of insanity—that you can’t function in the world as other people do because your relationship to consensus reality is tenuous, or that you don’t know right from wrong—doesn’t apply to people who carefully organize an attack, plotting logistics, purchasing equipment, making plans, getting access...

How many intruders am I expecting? None. I won’t be keeping ammo in my home. The odds of my gun being used against me are greater than my gun being useful in a break-in. And this question is from the test: Is it legal in California to shoot someone for trespassing? No! Only if they’re physically threatening you. Anecdotally, that’s the question people miss the most on the FSC test. Don't go into their houses."

http://ratter.com/ratter/all/ratter/213974-my-first-gun-glock-19?mod=e2this

I appreciated this.

"We Cannot Have Honest Discussions About Racism if We Refuse to Confront Whiteness"

"Whiteness is described by Marilyn Frye, as “a socially and politically structured ideology that results in the unequal distribution of power and privilege based on skin color.” bell hooks adds that it is “a state of unconsciousness, often invisible to white people, which perpetuates a lack of knowledge or understanding of difference, which is a root cause of oppression.” 

We continuously examine racism by its effects on black people, instead of its roots in whiteness. As convenient as this is for white people, especially those who pride themselves on being “color-blind,” it continuously lays the burden of resolving racial issues at the foot of the very people it devastates. The result is a conversation where both black and white never create a solution to the root cause of systemic racism: Whiteness...

The choice to avoid discussing whiteness is a matter of life and death. The reasons we avoid conversations about whiteness are: One, conversations about whiteness makes white people feel uncomfortable; and two, most black people are not comfortable with making white people feel uncomfortable."
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/06/we-cannot-have-honest-discussions-about.html?m=1#axzz3eUPu6wxq

"Facebook and the Tyranny of the “Like” in a Difficult World"

"Not everything in life is “like”able.

We cannot like refugee kids wading among dead bodies. And we cannot directly tell Facebook’s algorithm that we still care about this, or find it important.
The reverse of this is my inability to signal “like” to my friends weddings and babies, without the algorithm interpreting this to mean “show me more.” As a result, my feed is overflowing with babies and weddings (And really, I do want to congratulate and support my friends but I don’t want to see nothing but their babies for the next two weeks).
I’ve documented this issue before, on how Facebook’s algorithm structures visibility for positive, networked posts (like ice-bucket challenge) while downplaying significant, but less pleasant events, like the Ferguson protests.
Your post says you are open to feedback. So here’s mine: The choice of “like” as a primary signal in the world’s biggest social network has substantive political consequences."

https://medium.com/message/how-facebook-s-tyranny-of-the-like-and-engagement-can-be-an-obstacle-to-an-open-and-connected-dddc03a0d39b

"America’s ‘Postracial’ Fantasy"

"While 76 percent of all mixed-­race Americans claim that their backgrounds have made ‘‘no difference’’ in their lives, the data and anecdotes included in the study nevertheless underscore how, for a fair number of us, words like ‘‘multiracial’’ and ‘‘biracial’’ are awkward and inadequate, denoting identities that are fluid for some and fixed for others.

 This is especially true, I think, for the progeny of mixed-­race black-white relationships: As the daughter of an African-­American father and a white mother, born with olive skin, light eyes and thick, curly hair, I have been aware of a tension between the way the outside world sees me, the way the government sees me (I was already 27 when the census changed its options so Americans could check off two or more races) and the ways in which I see myself. Sometimes identifying as black feels like a choice; other times, it is a choice made for me...

I was a curiosity, and a comfort: a black girl who was just white enough to seem familiar, not foreign, someone who could serve as an emissary or a bridge between blackness and whiteness. It’s true that I can move about the world in ways that many other black people cannot; for one thing, I am rarely racially profiled. My choice, if you can call it that, to identify as black is much different from that of, say, my father or even my own sister, whose skin is at least three shades darker than mine. The eagerness with which people gravitate toward me is not shown to many of the other black people I know. These ex­peri­ences led me to suspect that the breathless ‘‘post­racial’’ commentary that attached itself to our current president had as much to do with the fact that he is ­biracial as with the fact that he is black."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/05/magazine/americas-postracial-fantasy.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0&referrer=

There was a brief period of time (like a month) where I was playing with calling myself multiracial. I'm the descendent of generations of multiracial people, most of whom would probably be considered Black if they lived in today's America. But there is this thing where my skin color vascillates over the course of the year, and I get really pale around February and apparently racially ambiguous? Because that's when people start getting curious about my racial background and I remember again how confusing brown people can be in the privileged, mostly-white spaces that I spend most of my time in. Our stories and histories are barely told in this country, so the circumstances that led to the combination of my skin tone and hair type remain mysterious.

(and also, most black people who are not African are part white because of the harsh sexual realities of centuries of slavery - and then most white people at various times would have been considered multiracial because only some people were considered white) (what would the world look like if we all thought of ourselves in checkboxes?)