http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/06/23/nothing-jo-marchant-heal-thyself/
Thursday, June 30, 2016
"Rethinking the Placebo Effect: How Our Minds Actually Affect Our Bodies"
"Marchant brings to light a striking new dimension of the placebo effect that runs counter to how the phenomenon has been conventionally explained. She writes:
It has always been assumed that the placebo effect only works if people are conned into believing that they are getting an actual active drug. But now it seems this may not be true. Belief in the placebo effect itself — rather than a particular drug — might be enough to encourage our bodies to heal.
She cites a recent study at the Harvard Medical School, in which people with irritable bowel syndrome were given a placebo and informed that the pills were “made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.” As Marchant notes, this is absolutely true, in a meta kind of way. What the researchers found was startling in its implications for medicine, philosophy, and spirituality — despite being aware they were taking placebos, the participants rated their symptoms as “moderately improved” on average. In other words, they knew what they were taking wasn’t a drug — it was a medical “nothing” — but the very consciousness of taking something made them experience fewer symptoms...
positive beliefs don’t just work by quelling stress. They have a positive effect too — feeling safe and secure, or believing things will turn out fine, seems to help the body maintain and repair itself…"
I wonder if this is something about mindfully doing something for a problem. Like, I get random headaches and I recognize them as a problem and I am irritated by them while I'm having them. And sometimes I think "maybe I should drink more water" or "maybe it has to do with my sleep quality" or whatever, but I don't have a part of my day when I intentionally do something about them - unless I decide to take some pain meds (which apparently might be diminishing my experience of joy). But I bet if I chose something I do everyday, like washing my face, and thought "this is for my headaches", they might be better - or, at least, it might diminish some of my negative experiences of them.
"This Menopause Joke Explains Why Women May Be Staying Out of the Courtroom"
"Salas said that he was concerned about Monserrate-Peñagarícano's "medical condition," adding: "A hot room is a trigger for hot flashes in women who are going through menopause." The theory did not sway District Judge Francisco Besosa, who found that Salas had committed professional misconduct. The judge ordered him to pay $1,000 in attorneys fees to Monserrate-Peñagarícano and to take a legal education course on professionalism...
“Discriminatory comments like this undoubtedly occur on a daily basis in the legal profession and are routinely swept under the rug,” wrote Besosa.
The frequency of such comments may be keeping women out of the courtroom. An American Bar Association study (PDF) published this year found that female trial lawyers contend with "inappropriate or stereotypical comments" from judges and fellow attorneys and that they have reported "being patronized and called 'honey' or 'dear' or referred to by their first name in the courtroom." Such hostility, concluded two trial lawyers who authored the study, may well keep women from arguing cases in lead roles, if at all."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-08-26/this-menopause-joke-explains-why-women-may-be-staying-out-of-the-courtroom
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
"THE LINK BETWEEN LEAKY SENSORY FILTERS AND YOUR INNER GENIUS"
"The study, which measured brain activity while participants listened to clicking sounds, included both those who scored high on tests for divergent thinking — a fancy name for creativity — and those with real-world accomplishments, such as published papers or artwork. The common brains responded to the first noise and then ignored subsequent stimuli. But gifted achievers involuntarily paid as much attention to the follow-up clicks as the first. Annoying when you’re
trying to focus? Yes. But the tortured may get a Cracker Jack prize with their curse. “It might be the precise mechanism that helps people to come up with novel, interesting ideas,” says Darya Zabelina, lead author of the study. “It’s a double-edged sword.”"
http://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-link-between-leaky-sensory-filters-and-your-inner-genius/41729?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=R
http://www.ozy.com/acumen/the-link-between-leaky-sensory-filters-and-your-inner-genius/41729?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=R
"These Two Millennials Want To Change The Way We Die"
"She is the first to admit the word "mortician" conjures some undesirable stereotypes: creepy men who prefer the company of dead bodies; or maybe greedy ones, who prey on the families of the deceased with high prices during a fragile time. And perhaps the worst: it’s most certainly not a job for a woman. But Carvaly is a mortician and a woman — and half of a new company that could likely change those clichés for good, although that’s not their goal. They have bigger fish to fry than stereotypes...
Undertaking L.A. is an oxymoron; it's a brand-new type of funeral home that seeks to bring us back a few hundred years, before the commercialization of death. And it’s almost eerily simple. Doughty and Carvaly will come to the home of the deceased and walk the loved ones through how things were done in the past and still done all over the world: washing and dressing of the body, and an at-home wake and/or funeral. The survivors can be involved as much or as little as they’d like... There's no embalming, no calling 911, and no last visions of a loved one wearing too much makeup in a casket...
“[At the beginning of] the 20th century, you had big hospitals come in and take the dying out of the home, you had funeral homes come in and take the dead bodies, and you had slaughterhouses and food plants take away the killing of animals. So every type of death and dying is now removed from society,” she says. Of course, with change comes both negative and positive effects. The positive includes the care hospitals can administer. The negative? According to the women, the fact that death is a specialized industry makes it all the more scary, mysterious, and abrupt — which they say deeply disrupts the grieving process."
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/08/92557/undertaker-funeral-director-jobs?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post&unique_id=entry_92557#.vmtodc:1CJ4
This feels really true, and really important. And this is totally my theory about millennialism, and how it's sort of about being a fish who can see the water and be productively dissatisfied. There is so much stigma about being opposed to the status quo, about pointing out problems with systems that most people engage with, so I find this really impressive and inspiring. I can only imagine how much pointless, knee jerk negativity they have to deal with.
Related: a really fantastic, well written profile of a mortician that made me think differently about death.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
"The Last Face review – African conflict is aphrodisiac for white people in Sean Penn's crass romance"
"Black characters are ciphers at best. They suffer and they grab at the clothing of our attractive leads, but they get minimal dialogue and zero depth. By focusing on the difficulties faced by foreign aid workers rather than the local people (gory injuries and thin anecdotes do not equate to characterisation), the true agenda of the film is all too apparent. This is not a film about Penn helping people, it’s a film to show how much he wants to be seen helping people. It’s self-satisfied posturing rather than film-making and a staggering misfire for all involved."
I've been thinking a lot about the distinction here, between wanting to be the kind of person who helps and actually helping. It's something I see so often on so many scales, from the grandiose promises of presidential candidates to people who speak over you to talk about how they are great listeners. But I don't think it's because the world is full of narcissists, I think it 's because of the models we have for how to be a good person, which are mostly just these presentative people We learn about the importance of being a visibly good person before we learn what it actually looks like to have a positive impact.
Related: The opposite in Attack on the Block*
"Muslims of Reddit, how much did your life change after 9/11?"
"My friends treated my family and I differently. We stopped getting invited to events like birthday parties and such. This was a big deal because in my old neighborhood when you had a birthday the entire neighborhood was invited to celebrate with you. We were all friends. When my brothers and I walked up to a friend's party we were straight up told to leave. My parents chewed them out on their blatant racism after that.
Also some teenagers from my eldest brother's school egged our house and spray painted terrorists on our walkway. The dumbasses were caught in a week because our neighbor was a cop. Thank god he was the only neighbor to remain our friend because we felt so alone and scared after that.
Edit 2.0: thank you guys for the support. I really appreciate all of the comments and replies I've been getting. Ok so it was racism, a few redditors had corrected me saying it was anti religion so I thought, "well if a bunch of people are pointing out my mistake then shouldn't I change it?" thanks for the correction. Sorry if I haven't been able to answer your questions but in short: yes it has gotten better since I've moved. I have amazing friends who are very supportive, especially during Ramadan. My parents yelled at them for their racism and threatened to get the cop next door involved, that's when our friend's parents sped on back to the party. You guys are awesome and I pray to God that everything you ever hope for comes true."
Very worth experiencing.
Related: This beautiful, comedic, emotional 10-minute short of one man's response to an Islamaphobic message spray painted on his car. Watch it watch it watch it, I feel like it captures something important about how people process that kind of hatred and work to maintain their own dignity. And it's also such a simple video.
Monday, June 27, 2016
"A new book answers why it’s so hard for educated women to find dates"
"women have been attending college at much higher rates than men since the 1980s, in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. That has led to a big demographic mismatch for people who want to date and marry others of the same educational level. The dating pool for college-educated people in their 30s now has five women for every four men. For people in their 20s, it's four women for every three men...
Goldin attributes the change to the pill, which allowed women to delay marriage and childbirth. The expectation of spending more time in the workforce made college a better investment... high-paying working class jobs are even harder to come by for women. That’s what makes the college wage premium so much bigger for women, because there are fewer job opportunities to earn a decent wage in blue collar jobs...
men who are educated have stumbled into a particularly good dating market through no work of their own"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/08/26/a-new-book-answers-why-its-so-hard-for-educated-women-to-find-dates/
Sunday, June 26, 2016
"White women benefit most from affirmative action — and are among its fiercest opponents"
"In general, women today are more educated and make up more of the workforce than ever before, in part because of affirmative action policies. Indeed, from the tech industry topublishing, diversity has emerged as an overwhelming increase in the presence of white women, not necessarily people of color.
Incidentally, over the years, white women have become some of affirmative action's most ardent opponents...
But does race inherently undermine an admit's qualifications?
The question itself is dubious considering the fact that other forms of affirmative action, including gender, are rarely mentioned... Yet it's a widespread assumption that even Justice Antonin Scalia brought to the fore last December during oral arguments for the Fisher case. Heasserted that affirmative action hurts African-American students by putting them in elite institutions they are not prepared for. Study after studyshows there's simply no evidence for the claim.
A look at the effects of affirmative action bans also suggests the idea is based on a false dichotomy. Since California passed Prop 209 in 1996 barring racial considerations for college admissions at public universities, UC Berkeley witnessed a significant drop in the number of black students, from 8 percent pre–Prop 209 to an average of 3.6 percent of the freshman class from 2006 to 2010.
But that drop isn't necessarily tied to underqualified students of color. Rather, 58 percent of black students admitted from 2006 to 2010 rejected Berkeley's offer of admission. Alumni, administrators, and current students noted that a possible reason could be a feeling of isolation, or lack of other students of color, at UC's flagship campus — an ironic consequence of the affirmative action ban.
Asian-American applicants also challenge the colorblind meritocracy myth. According to a sociological study in 2009, white applicants were three times more likely to be admitted to selective schools than Asian applicants with the exact same academic record. And a 2013 surveyfound that white adults in California deemphasize the importance of test scores when Asian Americans, whose average test scores are higher than white students, are considered"
tl;dr - white people don't trust systems where they don't feel like they are if the highest value. When you are used to being put in a superior position, equality feels like oppression. Etc... #StandpointTheory
Related: the one about Fisher in Fisher v. Texas; response to Scalia;
"Haute Cuisine pour Vous?"
"In an age of abundance, how does the way we think about food differ from the past? This week, EconTalk host Russ Roberts welcomed historian Rachel Laudanfor a fascinating conversation about the history, culture, and economics of food."
This was an amazing interview; just every 3 minutes there was a new and fascinating anecdote - like, she re-framed the popularity of the hamburger as the outcome of hundreds of years of food politics, and explained how the Thanksgiving tradition was a lot about a reaction to elitism and French high cuisine.
And she had really important things to say about how the Food Movement has positive impacts, but is also part of a tradition of Western class structures and colonialism.
Saturday, June 25, 2016
"When Your Sex Life Doesn’t Follow the Script "
"These ideals are implicit in the habitual surveys of how often we have sex, quickly transformed through popular culture into dictates of how often we should be having sex (two to three times a week, as any regular reader of women’s magazines will tell you). They are in the portrayal of sex as a perpetually dripping tap that everyone is drinking from, and in the intimation that the sex you’re having probably isn’t interesting enough to satisfy your partner’s needs — or to secure a partner in the first place.
But the most nonnegotiable part of the new sexual orthodoxy is simply that you should be having sex. If you are in a couple, sex is a measure of the health of your relationship — an unbiased barometer of how much you desire your partner and how much he or she still desires you. If you are single, your sex life is a reflection of your market value — of how attractive and how deeply engaged with life you are. As the founding Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown famously said, “My own philosophy is if you’re not having sex, you’re finished.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/08/31/when-your-sex-life-doesnt-follow-the-script/?referrer=
Friday, June 24, 2016
"To Thrive, Many Young Female Athletes Need A Lot More Food "
"many girls aren't eating enough to satisfy the physical demands of those sports, scientists say, and that's putting them at risk for health problems that can last a lifetime.
These athletes are essentially malnourished. The danger they face is called female athlete triad syndromebecause it typically includes three symptoms: irregular menstrual cycles, low energy and low bone density...
it's not uncommon for these young athletes to need as much as 3,500 calories a day — which can seem scarily high to a teenage girl worried about body image."
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/08/31/435294539/to-thrive-many-young-female-athletes-need-a-lot-more-food?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150831
Thursday, June 23, 2016
"Will LiFi Take Big Data And The Internet Of Things To A New Level?"
"LiFi is a category of Visible Light Communication; an LED light flickers at speeds undetectable to the naked eye to transmit data — a bit like high tech morse code. In fact, scientists have demonstrated in a lab that they can transmit information at as much as 224 gigabits per second, the equivalent of 18 movies of 1.5 GB each being downloaded every single second.In an office setting, they were able to achieve speeds up to 100 times faster than average WiFi speeds...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/01/12/will-lifi-take-big-data-and-the-internet-of-things-to-a-new-level/#63f342af346f1cdb8326346f
"Inside The Persistent Boys Club Of Animation"
"exclusion is hardly a thing of the past: Women make up only 21% of working guild members in 2015, and out of the 584 members working as storyboarders, only 103 are women, according to the Animation Guild. One could point approvingly to animation schools as a harbinger of change — last fall, 71% of students in the California Institute of the Arts’ famed character animation program were female, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, that same school year in its Producers Show, which screens the “best” student work, more than two-thirds of the films shown were by male students, in a year when men made up less than one-third of students in the program...
Animation professionals interviewed for this article knew the conventional wisdom: “Boys' shows are general audience and girls' shows are niche,” parroted Sabrina Cotugno, a storyboard artist in her twenties, during a Skype interview. Following convention, when Cartoon Network announced its 14 new and returning original series for the 2015–2016 season, only three featured a female protagonist...
Gennis said the school’s administrators told her to get a job in ink and paint to get her career started, but she did not want to be pigeonholed. (CalArts did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for a comment.) Instead, she got a job at Robert Abel and Associates, where she worked her way up to commercial director. Around 1980, despite the promotion, she was still “getting the jobs no one else wanted.” She recalled asking the creative director when she would get to work on the high-end commercials; he answered, “When you grow a penis.”
In a way, Gennis appreciated his honesty; no one would say that in so many words to her today, although she feels it’s sometimes the truth. “It’s all still there, but it’s all gone underground,” she said. Still, Gennis recently posted something on Facebook about the very small number of women working as technical directors and artists in visual effects. A male Facebook friend who works in VFX “actually posted that it was because VFX had gotten so technical,” Gennis said with disgust...
“I wanted to be a director — wanted to be and want to be,” said Holliday. Most recently a storybook artist on Disney Junior’s Sofia the First, she spent years struggling to assert herself professionally. At one point, a female colleague in development asked her about her career goals, and Holliday gave a response in upspeak: “I think I want to direct?” As she explained it, “I could never get to the point of saying, ‘This is what I want,’ because it felt like I was being demanding.” Instead, she had to learn how to say what she wanted “without being strident, because I think sometimes I can be shrill.”...
in fall 2010, Chapman was unceremoniously fired from her project. The exact circumstances of her dismissal are shrouded in nondisclosure agreements — Chapman herself cites “creative differences,” vaguely singling out a disagreement between herself and Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter over the central character, Merida, as especially divisive.
“To me, she could’ve behaved exactly the way any of the male directors behaved, but it would have been taken differently,” Coats said, declining to elaborate further. “Which is frustrating. Realizing that, it made me realize, There’s nobody. Without Brenda to look up to…there’s nobody I can look up to. … Imitating the guys isn’t gonna give me the same results as it gives them.” Coats left Pixar — and animation for the most part — mainly because of what happened to Chapman...
this mentality is drilled into women studying animation. In a class at CalArts, Cotugno recalled, an instructor lectured on the difference between “feminine” and “masculine” story elements — “which is a little hard to describe, mostly because it’s fucking bullshit,” she said. Elements such as linear storytelling and big external stakes were “for men,” while relationships and emotional storylines were “for women.”
The strained understanding of female characters was thrust into the public eye in 2013, when the head of animation on Frozen claimed the faces of female characters were “really, really difficult” to animate. This statement compelled Nancy Beiman, a longtime animator who is now a professor at Sheridan College, to include a section in a new edition of her animation textbook debunking the notion that there is something inherently masculine about certain movements...
Coats said that at Pixar “a lot of times, the guys on the story team, or guys who would give feedback, would talk about female characters in terms of [their] wives or daughters” — specifically, she said, Merida, the main character of Brave. Although that was not a universal pattern of thinking, she never encountered a woman who thought about male characters only in terms of male family members. “You can’t afford to think of male [lead] characters in terms of husbands or brothers,” she said...
Beiman began teaching animation in 2000, and she said things have gotten better for women since then. “I used to have to tell the girls, ‘Find someone who isn’t afraid of you.’” It’s something she doesn’t feel the need to do anymore.
But women are still concerned about airing their grievances, despite the fact that, again and again, women interviewed for this story said the men they worked with would be appalled to learn that women felt shut out, and that the exclusion was “a matter of ignorance,” as Anastasia put it."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/creative-work-in-connection-with-preparing-the-cartoons#.hpn9d9jYDd
It's remarkable to think about - most of the media consumed by children is animated, and this is who controls that... This is who designs the worlds that we absorbed before we developed filters and when we were trying to construct all of our rules.
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
"THE RACIAL POLITICS OF DISNEY ANIMALS"
"These crows are clearly standing in for Black people. Their way of speaking, their clothes, even their names are racial stereotypes: The main bird’s name is Jim Crow, in reference to America’s racial segregation laws. Some of the crows are voiced by Black actors, but Jim Crow himself was portrayed by Cliff Edwards, a white actor and ukulele player better known for voicing Jiminy Cricket. In many films, Disney animals stand in for people of color—until the 2009 film Princess and the Frog , there were no major Black human characters in any animated Disney film since Uncle Remus in the infamously racist 1946 film Song of the South ...
Walt Disney had an incredibly conservative framework. He felt that women should be in the home, he felt that there shouldn't be queer and trans folks in the world, he felt that folks of color should keep to their menial places. He was very clear on this sort of immense, conservative world view. And that world view is infused in all of these Disney films, and I think you can see it, in some ways, most clearly in The Jungle Book...
what comes out so clearly when you watch The Jungle Book is there is a natural order of things. Things have a natural order. Everyone has their place in a hierarchy, and it is once you step out of that place that everything falls apart. And things cannot come back together, and society can't function unless everyone is in their proper place. And we see that with, especially with the differences between the original book by Kipling and the changes that Disney makes to it...
the more things change, the more they stay the same. And we absolutely see this in The Lion King because again, we have the lions being coded as the top of the hierarchy, the ruling monarchy, and so being coded as white. And we have the hyenas who are voiced by two people of color, and really the main two people of color voices that we hear in that. We see the hyenas being coded as people of color, and they are ghettoized...
The number one way that education happens in this country is not in schools, it’s through entertainment. That’s the way children are learning about themselves, the world, about how the world functions, about who they should be. If they don’t have media literacy, they fall into the trap of them accepting what’s being given to them as the way that things are, instead of saying, “No, I don’t want to accept this.”"
https://bitchmedia.org/article/racial-politics-disney-animals
Lion King :'(
Related: “Who Would Be the Worst White Mulan?” that has my reactions to The Princess and the Frog (I can't understand why they thought it would be okay to make the *black princess* movie one in which the characters are animals most of the time); buzzfeed on sexism in the animation industry
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
"UCSF Researchers Control Embryonic Stem Cells With Light"
"UC San Francisco researchers have for the first time developed a method to precisely control embryonic stem cell differentiation with beams of light, enabling them to be transformed into neurons in response to a precise external cue."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK7NpGQngfg&feature=youtu.be
That was cool
Monday, June 20, 2016
"On 🎇like🎆 animations"
"We design interfaces with bright, friendly aesthetics and casual copy to project empathy and form a relationship with our users — to delight. It’s the digital equivalent of a warm, disarming smile. But when these interfaces fail to respond to the mournful moments in our lives, staying rigidly — offensively! — happy and snarky when any human would be sensitive and understanding, this veneer of empathy is ripped away, and we do the worst thing we could to a user — betray their trust."
Yers.
I also feel like some people don't have facial expressions or language for situations outside of the happy+snarky; they should be reading this advice too...
"This Is What the TED Conference Is Actually Like"
"TED knows that any self-respecting conference of its kind has to include at least one Australian prime minister. Otherwise, you’ll get mocked by Davos. Luckily, there was an APM on hand who talked about China as a potential threat or potential ally — totally unclear which. Mostly he talked about how well he spoke Chinese...
Not only were we given food for the mind, but we were also given actual food. Food trucks from around Vancouver provided tasty exotic delights like umami hot dogs and pulled pork sticky buns. The schedule was also fueled with mid-talk snacks, mostly in the form of quinoa-based cranberry discs that I ate while pretending I didn’t wish they were chocolate-based fat discs...
As for medical breakthroughs, according to Maryn McKenna we’re totally boned when it comes to bacteria-resistant antibiotics. I’m not sure how this will end because I thought about Doritos for like five seconds and then I couldn’t follow the rest of the science, but I’m confident that McKenna will figure out a way for us all not to die."
This essay is great. I never want to go to a TED conference, but I really want fruit rollups now.
Sunday, June 19, 2016
"Why Brock Turner Believes He Isn’t a Rapist"
"We’re sociologists, and our talk about current events remains purely scientific, but as we discussed this case, our conversation turned into an exchange of stories of sexual aggression that seemed so painstakingly ordinary that we had never told each other about them before. For Nicole, there was the guy who refused to leave her apartment until she had sex with him, even after she told him at least six times that she didn’t have any interest. He used to intern for Bernie Sanders and now works at a non-profit in DC. There was also the guy who claimed he was too drunk to drive home after a second date and asked to sleep over, promising he wouldn’t try anything. He pinned her down and humped her for half an hour as he tried to get hard, and as she repeatedly told him that she wanted him to stop. That guy is a sex educator at a middle school...
Neither of us would call any of these individual encounters particularly traumatizing. It’s not because they aren’t terrifying or didn’t leave us feeling violated, but because they’re so common that the easiest response is to take a shower, grab a glass of wine, and binge Netflix while trying to summon up the courage to go on another first date...
We aren’t alone in feeling this way—and this is where we can put our sociology hats back on to understand our own experiences. Researchers have found that it’s exceedingly common for women to mislabel their sexual assaults as “bad dates” or other types of unfortunate experiences,[1] especially if they have some relationship with the perpetrator, as most victims do.[2]"
FB: "For rapists like Brock Turner to take responsibility for their actions, we need to take all sexual assault seriously, not just the sensational cases that end in a bystander chasing down the rapist. The men in our lives need to reflect on their own behaviors and recognize that they have almost certainly crossed at least one romantic partner’s boundaries in a way that could have left them feeling scared and violated."
"How ‘-Phobic’ Became a Weapon in the Identity Wars"
"As the gay rights movement exited the psychiatrist’s office and marched up the steps of the Supreme Court, Gregory Herek, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, argued in a 2004 paper published in Sexuality Research & Social Policy that the movement ought to identify a new foe — like ‘‘sexual prejudice’’ — that is more befitting its civil rights agenda. Coding anti-gay behavior as a personal problem obscures the religious and political beliefs that are spurring anti-gay attitudes, he wrote...
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/magazine/how-phobic-became-a-weapon-in-the-identity-wars.html?referer=
"Soylent might be a great weapon in the war on poor people"
"Rhinehart has mentioned in interviews that he envisions Soylent doing everything from aiding developing nations to cutting healthcare costs. He seems to have good intentions, but I’m worried about some enterprising American fascist catching wind of this product, and using it as another talking point in their crusade against poor people. This might sound a bit extreme, but really, it would be the logical extension of a popular political trend. Wisconsin Republicans, for example, have already tried to limit poor families’ ability to buy outrageous luxuries such as seasonings, ketchup, and dried beans...
Expecting a shiny new technology (even if it comes in the form of a dull beige powder) to fix a societal problem is not only naïve, it’s historically unrealistic.
(Example: the Wright Brothers thought the airplane they invented would end warfare. That didn’t work out too well.)"
https://thsppl.com/soylent-might-be-a-great-weapon-in-the-war-on-poor-people-15c015c34255
Mmmmmmm, reall.
Saturday, June 18, 2016
"Inside the G.O.P.’s Trump Dilemma"
"Trump had put countless Republican lawmakers in excruciating political predicaments. Senator John McCain, who told me last summer that Trump had “fired up the crazies,” now needs Trump’s voters to support his own reëlection in Arizona—a state that Trump won by twenty-two percentage points in the primaries—and has said that he will support him. Marco Rubio, whose last days as a Presidential candidate were spent mocking the size of Trump’s hands and the orange hue of his face, recently apologized for the personal attacks, and said that he would speak on Trump’s behalf at the Convention. Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, another of Trump’s opponents early in the campaign, has transformed himself into a sort of manservant, who is constantly with Trump at events. (One Republican told me that a friend of his on the Trump campaign used Snapchat to send him a video of Christie fetching Trump’s McDonald’s order.)...
If there was a single moment when the Party of Paul Ryan began to turn into the Party of Donald Trump, it may have been July 10, 2013, the day House Republicans held a special meeting in the basement of the Capitol to debate whether they should take up immigration reform.
Paul Ryan stood before one microphone and Tom Cotton, a thirty-six-year-old freshman congressman from Arkansas, stood before another. Ryan, who spoke first, argued for passing a version of the Senate bill, saying that reforming the immigration system would strengthen the economy, supplying U.S. companies with a steady number of immigrants to take jobs that other Americans didn’t want. Cotton, who is tall and scrawny and loves partisan combat, delivered an unexpectedly sharp rebuke. He told me that he condemned the Senate bill for giving priority to “the illegal immigrant population” over the plight of “natural-born citizens and naturalized citizens who are out of work” and warned his colleagues that Republican voters were against immigration reform. Cotton was eying a Senate seat in deep-red Arkansas, where voters were strongly opposed to it. He led the House opposition to the Senate bill, and Boehner, then the Speaker, decided not to bring the bill to the House floor...
Most Republicans could not imagine supporting a Democrat. “But, by the same token, trying to imagine supporting Donald Trump—a Donald Trump that doesn’t back away from some of the positions that he’s taken—I can’t fathom that, either,” Flake said."
The convention will be fascinating, and the aftermath in the next few years when there is the time and space to reckon with the dissatisfaction.
FB: "Many of his colleagues see Trump as “a lesser-of-two-evils choice,” Sasse said. “I think if it’s merely a lesser of two evils then the American experiment has already lost. We live in a civic republic, and you have to be recognizing that voting is also an act of signalling about the ideal, about what America should be in twenty-five years. I don’t want more candidates like Donald Trump. So I can’t vote for him just because he’s not Hillary Clinton.”"
"How Sweet Briar Came Back from Financial Ruin and Proved Women’s Colleges Are Still Relevant"
"Today there are 42 all-female holdouts—including Sweet Briar, which was saved by the heroic efforts of impassioned alumnae. How are these institutions faring in the 21st century? Is there still a point in separating girls from boys in the classroom and on campus? Do the familiar tropes of horseback riding and lesbianism still apply? How are these campuses adapting to evolving definitions of gender and womanhood? Are these schools as rigorous as coed colleges? We did fieldwork at a representative sample—the five extant Seven Sisters; the second-oldest women’s college in America, which is a practical midwesterner; two southern charmers; and the Northwest’s only women’s college...
Sarah Swope teaches biology at Mills. In coed science classrooms, she says, “there’s a feeling that women are guests. We’re welcome, but we don’t want to be wrong, because then maybe we’ve proven that we really don’t belong. But at a women’s college the conversation is so much richer; we’re supposed to be here.” She is accompanied by about eight bio students. “Look around the room. This is what a room of biologists looks like.”
Emma, one of the student biologists, says, “I think there is this common misconception that the decision to attend an all-women’s college is rooted in some antiquated belief about keeping men and women physically and sexually separated. From an outside perspective I can see how it may seem very quaint, or conservative, when in actuality the very existence of women’s colleges is quite a progressive concept. In a patriarchal society, how radical is it to create space for women and maintain it on this scale?”...
Some closing thoughts: Spending time at these campuses was not what I had imagined. The richness and intimacy of these students’ experiences are enviable and inspiring. As a college-guidebook writer and a mother of college students, I have not heard so many students talk about appreciating their educations. These young people are studying bespoke curricula—with professors and deans collaborating to make their goals more attainable."
I went to an all-girls school from 6th to 8th grade, and there are so many ways that it was wonderful and allowed me to grow in ways that I don't think I would have at a co-ed middle school. My class is still close and supportive and I feel certain kinds of confident just thinking about that environment.
People ask me about my transition to a co-ed high school, and I often surprise them when I say that my biggest surprise was that boys could learn too. My classmates and I really had this idea that boys were disruptive and loud and created drama and distractions, and that we had successful and comfortable classroom experiences because boys weren't around. The other major, major difference was in PE; in high school, suddenly it was only the boys who were really allowed to exercise and push themselves to the point of sweating, while girls were supposed to jog around the edges and avoid getting in the way (except for the exceptional female athletes, who were permitted to join in the sports where they were known to excel).
"A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows"
""The word 'capitalism' doesn't mean what it used to," said Zach Lustbader, a senior at Harvard involved in conducting the poll, which was published Monday. For those who grew up during the Cold War, capitalism meant freedom from the Soviet Union and other totalitarian regimes. For those who grew up more recently, capitalism has meant a financial crisis from which the global economy still hasn't completely recovered...
John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvard, went on to personally interview a small group of young people about their attitudes toward capitalism to try to learn more. They told him that capitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.
"They're not rejecting the concept," Della Volpe said. "The way in which capitalism is practiced today, in the minds of young people — that's what they're rejecting.""
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email
Friday, June 17, 2016
"We Should Call Brocialism What It Is — White Populism"
"While Sanders tied or won whites everywhere, he lost Blacks 75–25 overall, and lost Latinos 65–35 overall. It is telling that as diverse populations grow, they have increased say over who Democrats choose as President. It is even more telling that there have been many “leftists” this cycle who have attempted to silence these diverse voices and recenter the Democratic Party’s agenda on the white working class...
Sanders’ candidacy revealed a brocialist movement, which became notorious for attacking women and minorities who even mildly criticized Sanders online. Brocialism can be defined quite simply: self-proclaimed socialists who put class issues over race and gender issues. Brocialists believe that fighting for diversity in government and business is simply a distraction to the class struggle... Brocialist theory purports that once the class struggle is complete, issues with race and gender will simply melt away."
I think this describes the vibe I always got from the Bernie campaign. I have been trying to figure out what is turning me off, while so many of my friends across several identity-spectra are so into him. And why so many of them have a violent-distrust response to Hillary's vibe.
But there is something about the Bernie movement that feels very specific, almost naive to issues that don't impact the white working class; reactive and receptive to these issues but still a bit naive to them, like they are in outer orbit. Sometimes it looked like a festival to white angst - very legitimate class-based white angsts, but still... It's that thing where privileged white people are trying to get in with oppressed groups like fighting for your rights is fun.
If I spent more time listening to his speeches, maybe attended an event or something, hung out with groups of Bernie supporters who share my politics, maybe I would see what other people see. But I guess I never had the energy to do that around all the other stuff going on in my life this past year, because I just didn't feel like encountering the disappointment that I feared I would find there.
(And probably because my early encounters with Bernie supporters def involved white people telling me that I didn't understand that we need economic reform in order to address race. Thanks for the 'splaination...)
FB: This articulated the vibe that alienated me a bit
"When Men Are Raped"
"Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims...
the 2010 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, for which the Centers for Disease Control invented a category of sexual violence called “being made to penetrate.” This definition includes victims who were forced to penetrate someone else with their own body parts, either by physical force or coercion, or when the victim was drunk or high or otherwise unable to consent. When those cases were taken into account, the rates of nonconsensual sexual contact basically equalized, with 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men claiming to be victims of sexual violence...
We might assume, for example, that if a man has an erection he must want sex, especially because we assume men are sexually insatiable. But imagine if the same were said about women. The mere presence of physiological symptoms associated with arousal does not in fact indicate actual arousal, much less willing participation."
"As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops"
"the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
Thursday, June 16, 2016
"Donald Trump rallies are only going to get more dangerous for everyone"
"As tension around Trump rallies has shifted outside the arenas, and protesters have become more numerous and more aggressive, some of the people protesting are simply provocateurs. Others are longtime, hardcore "direct action" activists like the anarchist Black Bloc.
These are the sorts of people who turn up whenever they see an opportunity to disrupt the status quo. They were in Baltimore in 2015 and Ferguson in 2014.
But that doesn't make their presence inevitable. They aren't turning up to Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton rallies. Donald Trump's campaign has become a locus for confrontation and instability, and that attracts the sort of people who see violence as an acceptable way to get things done...
You don't have to agree with protesters beating up Trump supporters, or even sympathize with them, to understand this. There are people who feel Trump's rise puts their lives in danger. And many people make decisions about what actions are "appropriate" differently when they feel personally under threat."
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