"Lack of sleep gives you the most notable “ah-ha!” moments. You seem to come up with your most innovative ideas when you’re most tired.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
"What It’s Like To Be Chronically Tired, But On Mental Overdrive"
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
"People are treating the DAPL protest like Burning Man"
"She added that many protestors appeared to be living off the native Americans, and were taking full advantage of the donations that people had been sending in for the cause. This was a trend noticed by another Twitter user, who witnessed one protestor turn down tap water to spend donations on “fluoride free” water.
“They are literally subsisting entirely off of the generosity of the native people... who are fighting to protect their water just because they can,” Smith wrote. “Some literally will not even prepare food but will take food that is prepared, again, having not done anything else all day.”
The situation has reportedly got so bad that an open letter detailing the camp’s ground rules has started trending on Twitter. Responding to the new influx of support, it reminds demonstrators that the camp is “not a vacation.” It also says that protestors should avoid drugs and alcohol, engage with the elders, and refrain from playing “guitar or drums” around the fires."
This is both disturbing and unsurprising. This is what happens when a group of people are only present in movies/TV shows if they are going to provide white people with a spiritual experience, and when popular ideas of their culture are appropriated so thoroughly that white people are unable to engage with it as it is.
It's also that white savior thing, where white Americans are told that they can improve a situation by showing up, that somehow their being-white-and-middle-class makes them qualified to build a house or provide medical care or build successful activism, that other communities are suffering not because of systemic oppression but because they lack go-getting individuals.
"Have We Hit Peak Whiteness?"
"Teeth-bleaching may be the peak of the Western world’s obsession with getting whites whiter. It’s the same impulse we see in our laundry detergents and sparkling consumer products. “In our society, it’s perceived that whiter and brighter is better,” Perry says.
Yet increasingly our obsession with whiteness is clashing with science and medicine, which have begun to question the idea that cleanliness and sterility—the values that give white its symbolic power—are better for our health. Hygiene is critical in certain contexts, like a hospital room, but carrying its power unconsciously into every part of our lives could hurt more than help us...
The union of white and purity in Western culture may have its first roots in religion. That’s how Kathleen Brown, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, sees it. “Historically, white is one of the ways men of the cloth signified their calling,” Brown says. Later, this association with religious purity evolved into bodily purity. (“Cleanliness is, indeed, next to godliness,” declared John Wesley in an 18th-century sermon.) Brown’s book, Foul Bodies, chronicles cleanliness in Europe beginning with its colonial expansion, and in early America up to the Civil War. Cleanliness, she says, was signified by a growing profusion of white undergarments, worn against the skin beneath the outer clothes, and then spilling forth in ruffled cuffs and collars. The undergarments were seen as having a cleansing power, the stains they collected a sign that they were drawing dirt from the body.
White became an indicator of class and wealth. The richer you were, the finer, whiter, and more intricate were your linens, and wealthy people changed them every day...
White’s powerful symbolism, of course, has darker connotations. Brown points out that as European colonists encountered other groups in America and West Africa, there was “a new interest in whiteness both as an indicator that clothes were clean, but also a racial indicator of a kind of refinement and civility.” In portraits of 17th- and 18th-century European settlers, particularly women, faces “start to glow like weird white ghosts,” Brown says, showing their purity as bearers of civilization. In later years, white’s symbolism was appropriated into ideas of racial purity, manifested in Nazi language like “racial hygiene” and Ku Klux Klan garb."
An interesting reflection. There is so, so much symbolism with white; at my friends' private girls school, they all graduated in white dresses; at my public high school, the girls wore white graduate gowns and the boys wore green (after administrators dismissed my protest, my friends and I graduated wearing toy stethoscopes in protest).
And I remember being in elementary school, watching movies and reading books and understanding that if a character was introduced in association with the color white (white knight; white fairy; a woman wearing a white dress; etc...) that character was going to be good and hard-working and part of the solution - and a character introduced in association with black or brown was an infiltrator, a threat to the perfections of the world. Typically this was a villian; at best, some skulking background figure.
These things get into you.
Monday, November 28, 2016
"Allies Who Are Not Allies"
"There was no ideological test going on here, it was purely practical. Person X could not internalize what my problem was, so all he did was work on a “solution” that was actually more harmful than if he had just walked on by. Person Y actually jumped in and helped me do what needed to be done.
And that’s what’s going on here. This isn’t about passing a purity test. This is about actions. Is someone helping? They are an Ally. Is someone complaining that their feelings are hurt because they are doing what they think I need and I am telling them it isn’t? Not an Ally.
If a hundred people had come by and all of them had not only suggested a tow truck but told me that it was the best and correct solution to my problem, even though it was a solution that I considered and rejected for perfectly rational reasons (because if I had had access to a couple hundred bucks, I would have called a tow truck myself and had it towed to my mechanics), by the hundred and first I would be saying “Can you help me push? A tow truck is out of the question” and if they stood there and argued with me about how a tow truck was indeed the best solution, I would then be saying “Help me push or f* off.”"
Sunday, November 27, 2016
"The KKK isn’t Reading The New York Times Op-Ed Pages"
"White Feminists aren’t off in their diagnosis. They’re just always off when they deliver their achingly facile prognosis. Does anyone really believe a man who is rigid in gender identity is reading Jill Filipovic in The New York Times? Does anyone really think KKK members in West Virginia are logging on to read Jessica Valenti or Lindy West? Absolutely not. These women make their brand by speaking to inclusive audiences. That’s what columnists do.
I do it all the time. Are you kidding me? I’m a radical feminist who writes a blog effectively criticizing everything from a Marxist perspective. I don’t expect to resonate outside of those already committed. And I make no apologies for it.
We’re no longer living in an age of mass media. We’re living in an age of bubble media. We’re all farting in our own echo chambers. Just admit it...
The problem with hot takes in general is that they often reduce and simplify arguments down to 800 or so words until they’re just rote performance. Empty words directed at one’s own audience not actually meant to change opinions so much as salve the cognitive biases of the already committed. These things ricochet around our social media bubbles, telling our committed friends, “LOOK, I, TOO, AM A FEMINIST.”
This is not to say they don’t serve a point. Feminists still suffer under witch hunt conditions. No feminist is wrong for taking up space. No feminist errs in declaring themselves. To declare under times like these is still in and of itself an act of resistance.
The problem is the fuckheads aren’t reading The New York Times for advice on how to accept not getting what they want. These pieces are still about them. They center on our vulnerability to them and not on what we’re going to do to make ourselves less vulnerable."
"Inside The Strange, Paranoid World Of Julian Assange"
"The questions asked about the organisation and its leader are often the wrong ones: How has WikiLeaks changed so much? Is Julian Assange the catspaw of Vladimir Putin? Is WikiLeaks endorsing a president candidate who has been described as racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and more?
These questions miss a broader truth: Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has changed...
Inside WikiLeaks, a tiny organisation with only a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, such pressure felt immense. Most of the handful of people within came from a left-wing activist background, many were young and inexperienced, and few had much trust of the US government – especially after months of reading cables of US mistakes and overreactions in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, often with tragic consequences.
How might the US react, or overreact, this time? WikiLeaks was afraid of legal or extralegal consequences against Assange or other staff. WikiLeakers were angry at US corporations creating a financial blockade against the organisation with no court ruling or judgments – just a press statement from a US senator...
Conversely, Assange often trusts strangers more than those he knows well: He dislikes taking advice, he dislikes anyone else having a power base, and he dislikes being challenged – especially by women. He runs his own show his own way, and won’t delegate. He’s happy to play on the conspiratorial urges of others, with little sign as to whether or not he believes them himself.
There are few limits to how far Assange will go to try to control those around him. Those working at WikiLeaks – a radical transparency organisation based on the idea that all power must be accountable – were asked to sign a sweeping nondisclosure agreement covering all conversations, conduct, and material, with Assange having sole power over disclosure. The penalty for noncompliance was £12 million...
Assange would not, in my view, ever knowingly be a willing tool of the Russian state: If Putin came and gave him a set of orders, they’d be ignored. But if an anonymous or pseudonymous group came offering anti-Clinton leaks, they’d have found a host happy not to ask too many awkward questions: He’s set up almost perfectly to post them and push for them to have the biggest impact they can."
Many feelings... I realize how arbitrary my feelings about Wikileaks are, but also how icky Assange is.
FB: "Neither Assange nor WikiLeaks (and the two are virtually one and the same thing) have changed – the world they operate in has. WikiLeaks is in many ways the same bold, reckless, paranoid creation that once it was, but how that manifests, and who cheers it on, has change"
"Even in Therapy, White Privilege Has a Home"
"I needed a safe space outside of my partial identity so I could better navigate through my own thoughts and outside perceptions. Therefore, I decided to see a therapist in hopes of them providing a level of objectivity that I couldn’t find in my friends and family. Unfortunately, I didn’t find a safe space in therapy.
I don’t think I was quite a warm foot into my therapist’s office before she expressed her shock and surprise over my family’s background. Having a present, loving, and contributing dad in my life was the stuff fairytales are made of judging from my therapist’s reaction. Sprinkle in my parent’s 30-plus year marriage, and you have a Disney movie. I wasn’t offended because I’ve gotten used to defending my family’s stability to people--white people. I even grew desensitized to their reactions. But I did not expect to encounter such judgments in therapy.
It took me awhile to realize what was happening because I was on autopilot. It wasn’t until a few sessions in that I concluded my therapist was not the therapist for me. I should’ve known something was up when she opened with a “I don’t know a whole lot about Black men in America, but…”-- the equivalent to saying, “Not to sound racist, but…”...
I stopped seeing my therapist because I needed a counselor who had an basic understanding of race as it applies to Black and brown bodies in the United States. So much of my existence is rooted in other people’s problems with my Blackness. I don’t care to villainize my therapist, and I certainly don’t think of her as a racist. But similar to many people, my therapist lives in a bubble of her own world. And the world doesn’t have to concern itself with genuinely understanding Black lives, which in this case, translated into my therapy, or lack their of."
Saturday, November 26, 2016
"The Election That Obliterated Euphemisms"
"Mr. Trump’s campaign has also made it difficult for opinion writers — even those disposed to give him the benefit of the doubt — to avoid describing his behavior as racist. The signal moment came when, having already characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, he declared an American-born judge of Mexican descent unfit to preside over a lawsuit against the con game known as Trump University. Even the House speaker, Paul Ryan, had to concede that this was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Instead of using phrases like “racially inflammatory” or “racially insensitive,” editorial pages were calling racism by its name. The shift was clear in the language of the endorsements Hillary Clinton received from news organizations across the political spectrum...
Black Twitter has ridiculed attempts by traditional news media and others to draw a distinction between racism and “unintentional bias.” Those who defend this distinction typically argue that deploying the charge of racism commits harm by alienating people and stopping “the conversation.”
This argument reduces the discussion of structural racism to the equivalent of dinner party chatter...
This election has made clear that racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and xenophobia still have broad constituencies in America. The first step toward keeping them at bay is to insist on calling them by their rightful names."
"We don’t need Lincoln-inspired racial ‘unity.’ We need whites to stop being racist."
"Though he’s now often seen simply as a hero of emancipation, Lincoln had a far more complicated history on race. For years, like most Americans of his time, he espoused white supremacy, and he didn’t believe until the last year of his life that blacks and whites could live on equal terms in an interracial democracy. But he would later also take positions against racism that would be radical even today, calling for reparations for former slaves and urging newly freed black Southerners to defend their rights against white racists through force of arms.
Beyond that, Clinton’s call for everyone to “do the work” to unite against hatred overlooks the fundamental fact that it’s whites — and only whites — who must work to fix the racist structures in our society...
Look at what happens in the wake of a shooting by police like the ones last week in Minnesota and Louisiana and Texas: The relatives of the victims are clearly grieving and traumatized, yet they are pushed to extend empathy and forgiveness to those who killed their loved ones, and to the system that profits from these tragedies. Routinely now, we encounter scenes of black folks hugging racists, praying with and dancing with police officers, being asked to do the additional work of teaching white folks how not to be racist and help them find solutions to a racist system we didn’t invent — while we struggle to keep ourselves and our loved ones alive.
FB: "Asking black people to participate in this reconciliation process — one that centers on Lincoln — suggests that we bear responsibility in this mess. But we didn’t invent the concept of race. We didn’t create and don’t sustain institutionalized racism. And we surely don’t benefit from it."
"Why Wikipedia + Open Access = Revolution"
"Many of the world’s highest quality and highest impact journals sit behind expensive paywalls that prevent all but the most privileged and well-resourced from gaining access. So it wouldn’t be at all surprising if Wikipedia editors tended to ignore these high quality papers in favor of articles that were easier to access.
That raises an important question. Do Wikipedia entries really reflect the best scientific evidence available?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Misha Teplitskiy and pals at the University of Chicago who have worked out what constitutes an important paper in the world of science and then checked to see whether this is reflected in the references that appear in Wikipedia entries...
The results make for interesting reading. “The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals,” say Teplitskiy and co...
But this doesn’t imply that Wikipedia editors are blindly choosing open access articles at the expense of more important papers. The team says that a journal’s high impact status also significantly increases the chances that it will be referenced, regardless of whether it is open or closed access...
“Our research suggests that open access policies have a tremendous impact on the diffusion of science to the broader general public through an intermediary like Wikipedia,” says Teplitskiy and co."
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/539001/why-wikipedia-open-access-revolution/
Related: Yahoo Answers is not Research
That raises an important question. Do Wikipedia entries really reflect the best scientific evidence available?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Misha Teplitskiy and pals at the University of Chicago who have worked out what constitutes an important paper in the world of science and then checked to see whether this is reflected in the references that appear in Wikipedia entries...
The results make for interesting reading. “The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals,” say Teplitskiy and co...
But this doesn’t imply that Wikipedia editors are blindly choosing open access articles at the expense of more important papers. The team says that a journal’s high impact status also significantly increases the chances that it will be referenced, regardless of whether it is open or closed access...
“Our research suggests that open access policies have a tremendous impact on the diffusion of science to the broader general public through an intermediary like Wikipedia,” says Teplitskiy and co."
Friday, November 25, 2016
"The National White Male Registry"
"Forget the nation of Islam, our most immediate threat to domestic security is and always has been white, straight men.
That is why I have decided to do my part as a Red Blooded Patriot by creating The White Male Registry. It is a simple google form complete with questions that will help identify just how much of a threat to American security any individual white male may pose to the general public.
Until January 20th all white men may voluntarily register themselves. Special consideration may or may not be granted to those who register before this date. After January 20th, however, I will be encouraging anyone and everyone to add to the list any non-registered white male they may personally perceive as a threat to their safety.
I will also be registering every white man in Washington one by one. I started with Donald J Trump himself and sent him a message this morning via his website"
BEST.
So much excellence, art, commentary, protest...
Read the letters too
FB: "Hi Mr President-Elect and your esteemed team of assistants,
I am writing to inform you that I’ll be adding your name to the National White Men Registry I have just created. I’m trying to keep America safe from the ethnic group that, statistically speaking, poses the largest threat to national safety: white, straight, CIS-gendered men.
I hope you’ll join me in asking other white men to register in the interest of national safety, for as you so wisely said, “We want to be very fair but too many bad things are happening and the percentage of true hatred is too great. People that are looking to destroy our country must be reported and turned in by the good people who love our country and want America to be great again.”"
"I’m Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, But You Are Wrong"
"Just because Silicon Valley has desperately wanted to believe for twenty years that communities can self-police does not make it true. Point to one example where this has worked. Twitter is a cesspool — one which you are rapidly joining. Google gave up long ago on simple “wisdom of the crowds” algorithms around its search rankings and heavily skews the algorithm against spammers, cheats and other anomalies (and God knows what else, but that’s a different story). At Tumblr, we employed real, live humans to edit. At scale. It worked. Did fake news still appear? Yes. Did it leverage our “curating” and cause us as a platform to help falsities spread? No...
The only reason scale is a problem for you is because you want to remove the humans and give personalized news at scale, which is exactly the problem when it comes to news about society as a whole. Have you ever stopped to ask if stories that effect society as a whole should be personalized at all? What possible good comes of this?
And if there is a good of personalized societal news at scale, and algorithms are the only way to achieve this (by no means a given), your algorithms have failed. They’ve failed because by all appearances they seem ridiculously rudimentary...
In short, you’ve set foot into being a player in the news media, with zero interest in actually helping the news media, or in the social responsibilities that come with it. Now sure. You share ad revenue. But only popular stories garner ad revenue. You’ve aggravated the fundamental problem with internet news: only the most sensationalist stories generate the revenue. Whether the income came from subscriptions or ad revenue, in the old days, revenue to a paper was revenue to a paper. Sure, their research departments knew that some stories were being read more than others — I admit, there are days that I’ll pick up a paper and only read the celebrity stories. But I subscribe to that paper, and I picked up that copy, because I believed in that paper. You could have helped fix this on the internet, but you didn’t. You made it worse. Because none of this explained in any way your desire to set foot in the arena of news."
^ how white techy dudes are expressing their anger rn
It's a bit of a ramble-rant, but it's the kind of unfiltered anger that asks biting and useful questions.
FB: a very solid reality check on the idea of personalized social spaces that are so valued in Silicon Valley " In the real world, sure, I like hearing the news stories that my friends read, but I don’t care what their friends read. And I would never rely only on one or two over-eager friends to feed me all of my news. Offline, historically, social was only ever a small part of our news consumption patterns and you’ve given us no reason why that should change."
"Black Friday, Black Folk and Black Guilt"
"I got so many things for my kids that several news outlets attempted to interview me in the Toys R Us in Times Square. I turned them all down because I was ashamed to be Black and proud and participating in Black Friday.
When the third reporter asked if I wanted to talk, I said no thanks. But he chatted me up anyway. There was no camera rolling so I thought I was cool. I still gave him a fake name. I kept considering the political climate and the attack on my people and how capitalism and consumerism breed racist violence in various forms across the world as I looked for Minecraft and Lalaloopsy paraphernalia. And despite all my work with students, families, youth and communities, I judged myself and fearfully awaited the judgement of others. I didn't want anyone to know I had participated in the Consumerism Olympics, and I figured the reporter would use the quotes in a general story and no one would ever know.
But lo and behold I was being photographed while we spoke, and when I looked up from adjusting my bags he was recording what I was saying in a pad. I’m not mad at him. He was doing his job. He even helped me to a car afterward. As I buckled my seatbelt in that yellow cab full of things that would bring my children immense joy, I immediately felt a sense of dread at people seeing me, the militant black girl, in the news shopping at the White Man's stores and putting money in his pocket...
We have too much to lose as a people to constantly make each other feel inadequate based on complex issues that we choose to look at independently such as hair texture, complexion, shopping habits, family traditions, online rhetoric, family structure, sexual orientation, religion and a multitude of other things...
the fact remains we were all raised differently and we all deserve to be met where we are, not shamed for not being where someone else is on their journey or celebrating and defending their blackness in the same ways."
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/11/black-friday-black-folk-and-black-guilt.html?m=1#axzz3sqsholi7
When the third reporter asked if I wanted to talk, I said no thanks. But he chatted me up anyway. There was no camera rolling so I thought I was cool. I still gave him a fake name. I kept considering the political climate and the attack on my people and how capitalism and consumerism breed racist violence in various forms across the world as I looked for Minecraft and Lalaloopsy paraphernalia. And despite all my work with students, families, youth and communities, I judged myself and fearfully awaited the judgement of others. I didn't want anyone to know I had participated in the Consumerism Olympics, and I figured the reporter would use the quotes in a general story and no one would ever know.
But lo and behold I was being photographed while we spoke, and when I looked up from adjusting my bags he was recording what I was saying in a pad. I’m not mad at him. He was doing his job. He even helped me to a car afterward. As I buckled my seatbelt in that yellow cab full of things that would bring my children immense joy, I immediately felt a sense of dread at people seeing me, the militant black girl, in the news shopping at the White Man's stores and putting money in his pocket...
We have too much to lose as a people to constantly make each other feel inadequate based on complex issues that we choose to look at independently such as hair texture, complexion, shopping habits, family traditions, online rhetoric, family structure, sexual orientation, religion and a multitude of other things...
the fact remains we were all raised differently and we all deserve to be met where we are, not shamed for not being where someone else is on their journey or celebrating and defending their blackness in the same ways."
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/11/black-friday-black-folk-and-black-guilt.html?m=1#axzz3sqsholi7
Thursday, November 24, 2016
"Empathy isn’t a favor I owe white Trump voters. It has to go both ways."
"I know I could have and can do more to listen, to be compassionate, to operate from a place of love. But more than what Icould have done is what white people themselves could do. For this election is in part about white people's relationship to whiteness and each other.
The degree to which white, liberal, urban America relied on polling reports and FiveThirtyEight and the Upshot to tell them everything was going to be all right is incredible. I derived confidence from those predictions as well. We all stuck to those websites like a driver sticks to incorrect Waze GPS directions. Instead of driving, we acted like passengers, trusting in the machine instead of our own eyes. Meanwhile, outside the vehicle, in the real world, the GOP nominee was making sweet xenophobic and job-promising love to the other white America.
There's a group of white people who left the suburbs and the Midwest for those much-maligned coastal elite cities to experience community and create new economy jobs and invent absurd artisanal mayonnaise, and while they were busy swiping on their phones through the faces of people just at the other end of the bar, they could and should have been talking to their cousins and uncles back home. White Americans, does the world have to pay for your broken family ties? Does Fiji have to drown and California burn because you got bored in Iowa? Don't you have Facebook? Didn’t you invent it?"
http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/11/17/13642864/trump-election-empathy-baratunde-thurston
FB: "many of those we are asked to empathize with are celebrating the retreat of political correctness, so they can finally say what they feel! But do you imagine, angry white American, that you are the only one who hasn’t been able to say how you feel? You think women in misogynistic workplaces have felt free to express themselves? You think black Americans have felt free to tell police how we really feel? I mean, if we’re going to take off the rhetorical gloves, then be prepared for everyone to take them off. I’m pretty sure there are things you haven’t yet heard because for us to utter them would be to shatter your world...
Life is about to get measurably worse for many who are not prioritized by the incoming administration and others who are seen as outright enemies. We need to build our own networks of support and resilience in the face of the coming storm. In this state of emergency, we should be donating to nonprofits, investing in civil society, helping our undocumented neighbors, and supporting independent media.
We resist. There is more to democracy than elections... Had Hillary Clinton won, many of us would have moved on as if all was right with the world, but the world is very wrong, and the impact of that wrongness is on display for all to see. This is an opportunity to dig deeper into our imaginations and collective intelligence for solutions, to make great art, to forge stronger human connections, to plant deeper community roots, to try to listen to each other."
"How the Obama era gave us a dangerous patriotism"
"The definition of what it means to love America will expand. The browning of America won't just change how the country looks in the future; it will change how Americans express patriotism, because racial minorities bring different histories to this notion of America as the "land of the free."
I know I do. I've long felt ambivalent when people tell me I should love America. I wonder what America are they talking about. Should I just be happy, as one white man once told me, that my ancestors were rescued from the jungles of Africa and brought to the greatest country in the world?...
Many Freedom Riders actually signed last wills and testaments before the trips because they didn't expect to return. Their fears were not unfounded. They were attacked by mobs wielding baseball bats and chains. Several were almost beaten to death. Many would carry physical and psychological scars for the rest of their lives. All were unarmed. Their only weapon: faith that their country could be better.
This was a dangerous type of patriotism, not a polite demonstration or mild civil disobedience. It was the kind that could get you fired from your job, shunned by your community, beaten or killed.
Yet it was the kind of patriotism that made progress possible in America, said Ralph Young, author of "Dissent: The History of an American Idea." He said people often forget the United States was founded by political and religious dissenters fleeing Europe. They put the right to dissent in the Constitution, he said.
"Dissent is the fuel for the engine of progress," said Young, a history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia. "Inertia is built into institutions. Things don't change unless people push for change."
FB: "The Selma speech was Obama's answer to critics who said he didn't believe in American exceptionalism. He just redefined it, and as the country gets browner, I suspect this form of patriotism will become more accepted."
"Update the Nobel Prizes"
"Dr. Paine coined a term to describe the starfish’s outsize influence: keystone species. Keystone species have since been identified in forests, in grasslands, in the ocean and even in the human gut. The concept has become one of ecology’s guiding theoretical principles, and it has had a profound impact, inspiring, among other things, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, where they help control elk that can otherwise overgraze aspen and willow trees.
If Dr. Paine, who passed away in June, had been a physicist, chemist or cell biologist, such a fundamental, broadly applicable and hugely influential paradigm would probably have put him in contention for a Nobel Prize. But Paine was an ecologist, so he had no shot at the prestige, power and wealth that the Nobels bestow. The same can be said for the world’s top geologists, oceanographers, meteorologists, climatologists, crop scientists, botanists, entomologists and practitioners of many other fields...
Some argue that the Nobel disciplines are still the “purest” sciences, and as such deserve extra recognition. But many scientists and even some Nobel laureates say that much of today’s most exciting and important science resides at the borders of traditional disciplines or in ones that don’t have a dedicated prize."
It's really true.
It's also interesting to think critically about how and why the Nobel became what it is, and the importance of these kinds of awards. It would be easy to superciliously declare that these awards are ultimately meaningless, entertaining, arbitrary - but they obviously aren't, they are obviously full of meaning and worldwide inspiration and the seeming arbitrariness reflects history and value systems.
The Nobel Prize wasn't designed to fit the role it now has, but given its role, does the Nobel Prize Committee have responsibility to be dynamic and remold it as our world changes? Or do we need to institute a ew prize system with more appropriate designs?
I would say yes to the first question, and I would encourage long-term consideration of the second.
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
"The Right Way to Resist Trump"
"Now that Mr. Trump has been elected president, the Berlusconi parallel could offer an important lesson in how to avoid transforming a razor-thin victory into a two-decade affair. If you think presidential term limits and Mr. Trump’s age could save the country from that fate, think again. His tenure could easily turn into a Trump dynasty.
Mr. Berlusconi was able to govern Italy for as long as he did mostly thanks to the incompetence of his opposition. It was so rabidly obsessed with his personality that any substantive political debate disappeared; it focused only on personal attacks, the effect of which was to increase Mr. Berlusconi’s popularity. His secret was an ability to set off a Pavlovian reaction among his leftist opponents, which engendered instantaneous sympathy in most moderate voters. Mr. Trump is no different...
The Democratic Party should learn this lesson. It should not do as the Republicans did after President Obama was elected. Their preconceived opposition to any of his initiatives poisoned the Washington well, fueling the anti-establishment reaction (even if it was a successful electoral strategy for the party). There are plenty of Trump proposals that Democrats can agree with, like new infrastructure investments. Most Democrats, including politicians like Mrs. Clinton and Bernie Sanders and economists like Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman, have pushed the idea of infrastructure as a way to increase demand and to expand employment among non-college-educated workers. Some details might be different from a Republican plan, but it will add credibility to the Democratic opposition if it tries to find the points in common, not just differences.
And an opposition focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the people’s leader of the fight against the Washington caste. It would also weaken the opposition voice on the issues, where it is important to conduct a battle of principles."
And an opposition focused on personality would crown Mr. Trump as the people’s leader of the fight against the Washington caste. It would also weaken the opposition voice on the issues, where it is important to conduct a battle of principles."
Hmmm. Good points and missing some points... maybe just a very practical perspective from someone who sees where this can go and wants it to only go half as far.
"Reassessing Airport Security"
"We don't need perfect airport security. We just need security that's good enough to dissuade someone from building a plot around evading it. If you're caught with a gun or a bomb, the TSA will detain you and call the FBI. Under those circumstances, even a medium chance of getting caught is enough to dissuade a sane terrorist. A 95% failure rate is too high, but a 20% one isn't...
The TSA is failing to defend us against the threat of terrorism. The only reason they've been able to get away with the scam for so long is that there isn't much of a threat of terrorism to defend against.
Even with all these actual and potential failures, there have been no successful terrorist attacks against airplanes since 9/11. If there were lots of terrorists just waiting for us to let our guard down to destroy American planes, we would have seen attacks -- attempted or successful -- after all these years of screening failures. No one has hijacked a plane with a knife or a gun since 9/11. Not a single plane has blown up due to terrorism.
Terrorists are much rarer than we think, and launching a terrorist plot is much more difficult than we think. I understand this conclusion is counterintuitive, and contrary to the fearmongering we hear every day from our political leaders. But it's what the data shows."
Related: Confessions of a TSA Agent, innovation at TSA
FB: "We should demand better results out of the TSA, but we should also recognize that the actual risk doesn't justify their $7 billion budget. I'd rather see that money spent on intelligence and investigation -- security that doesn't require us to guess the next terrorist tactic and target, and works regardless of what the terrorists are planning next."
Tuesday, November 22, 2016
"'Not All White People' and Derailing Conversations"
"If what someone is saying about white folks and racism doesn't apply to you, then it isn't about you, and there's no reason to make it about you. If you're feeling a driving need to make it about you anyway, ask yourself where that's coming from. If what they're saying really doesn't apply to you, then why are you feeling defensive about it?
Maybe you think you're just standing up against prejudice and generalizations, because you learned during Black History Month back in school that it's wrong to judge people by their skin color. But the thing is, racism isn't a two-way street.
As white people, we have the enormous privilege of not having the actions of other white people held against us in any meaningful way. For example, when a white guy attacks a federal building (or a post office, or a school, or a women's clinic, or a museum, or a theater, or another federal building, or another school), people don't start treating all white guys like terrorists."
FB: If you, like the white author of this post, are able to write an essay like this then the safety pin is real "when you equate generalizations about white people to generalizations about people of color, you're not just asserting your privilege to shape the discourse around racism; you're also demonstrating a staggering lack of empathy. You're acting as if your implicitly limited understanding of racism is more accurate and 'true' than the lived experiences of people who actually face racism every day."
"What black America won't miss about Obama"
""People I never thought of as racist, people who borrowed money from me -- I've seen things come out of them that I never thought of," says Coleman, who works for a nonprofit in Oklahoma that serves the elderly.
Some black people unfriended white America during Obama's presidency. They would hear a stray remark from a white coworker, argue over something that Obama was facing, and suddenly a close relationship would turn chilly.
Fenise Dunson was a career adviser at an Illinois college in 2008 when some of her white coworkers started warning her about Obama's first presidential run. "We won't let this happen," they said. Or, after he was elected: "He might be president, but you're not in control."
"You don't know where this is coming from," says Dunson, who now teaches at a college in Maryland. She wondered whether "people had been politically correct and they had really been feeling this way for a long time and now they feel like they can be vocal about how they feel?
"It's unsettling. You wonder who you can trust."...
Open displays of racism have become normal again, some say. More Americans are comfortable publicly expressing racially inflammatory rhetoric, according to some political scientists. Some blacks have noticed. They say they feel like they've been caught in a time warp. They're constantly seeing images and hearing racist language that they thought were relics.
"I thought that all of this nastiness had been litigated and fought by my parents and grandparents," says Richardson-Hall, also a food blogger. "Imagine my surprise, looking at this square in the face."
As someone who kind of came up during the Obama Presidency - I mean, this IS the presidency of my adult experience, my experience working for the Federal government, my experience reading news and developing a complex political identity and paying taxes - I have no way to divide Obama's America and the experiences of being a person out in the world.
I used to think that it was college and post-college working life that just exposed me to more people and sort of woke me up to the presence of racism; but now I wonder if it was just that these shifts were happening at the same time.
Monday, November 21, 2016
"Can Facebook Solve Its Macedonian Fake-News Problem?"
"The Macedonian millennials aren’t (necessarily) looking to influence the election or analyze U.S. politics — they want to draw in American visitors through Facebook and make money off of sales of display ads on their bootleg politics sites. “In Macedonia the economy is very weak and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money,” one 17-year-old told BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman. “I’m a musician but I can’t afford music gear.” Put another way: Post-Soviet teenagers are selling digital tabloids to gullible Americans to pay for Korg mixers. Real life always ends up being stranger than anything you can imagine...
This Facebook-news arbitrage scheme is booming this election season, thanks to this confluence of Facebook (and its ability to drive an audience), Google (and its ability to seamlessly monetize any website), and this particular election (and its ability to fill people with passionate, spitting rage). Thanks to our new media landscape, hoaxes, exaggerations, and outright lies aren’t just able to propagate but are actually incentivized. And it’s not clear that there’s an easy way to fix it."
"Finish Your Ugly-Crying. Here’s What Comes Next"
"You can become an abortion-clinic escort. You can show up to a Movement for Black Lives event. You can actually start paying attention to your local and state government. You can volunteer with an after-school tutoring program. You can become a consistent donor to an organization that’s been doing social-change work for a long time — long before you despaired about these election results and decided to reallyget serious about improving the country. Use the buddy system and recruit three despondent friends to do one or two of these things with you. And then actually do them.
You’ll know that you are taking meaningful action when you start feeling uncomfortable. When you are nervous and a little scared. When you’re working with people who don’t look like you, or who have had very different experiences in this world. When you don’t have a tangible, immediate goal like “winning an election.” Because the hard work of making change in America is very different from electing a president. Elections have endpoints. Social progress does not."
I dunno, there are better versions of this essay out there probably but do I have the energy to read through and find them? No
"The desperation of Indian housewives in the United States of America"
"“When a wife enters the United States on a dependent spouse visa, she enters at the wish of her husband. Her dependent immigration status allows her husband to control her ability to live in the United States and all rights that stem from that status,” Sabrina Balgamwalla, an assistant law professor at the University of North Dakota, writes in a paper on spousal visa holders titled Bride and Prejudice.
In other words, H4 visa holders, 90% of whom are women, are often reduced to childlike helplessness in a foreign country, completely dependent on their partners for everything, from their social to economic needs.
According to some estimates, almost 80% of the 125,000 H4 visas in 2015 were granted to Indian passport holders. I spoke to over a dozen women who are either current or former H4 wives to understand the financial and psychological toll this forced career break takes."
This actually isn't a great article, the writing style is very paternalistic, but this is a concerning issue.
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