"OLD ENGLISH HAS A SERIOUS IMAGE PROBLEM"

"At the same time, however, the study of Anglo-Saxon played a part in the more general cultural belief—prevalent at the time—in the superiority of northern European or “Anglo-Saxon” whiteness. In 2017, as the American neo-Nazi movement that calls itself the “alt-right” is resurrecting medievally tinged celebrations of “European heritage” as part of its racist agenda, twenty-first-century Anglo-Saxonists need to confront the racism inherent in the history of the discipline. The challenge is to communicate Anglo-Saxon history as part of a multicultural and inclusive public discourse... 

Before the war, Southerners tended to identify with the Normans and their feudalism in a historically inaccurate way that seemed to justify slavery and celebrate an idealized, implicitly white Southern womanhood, defining a distinctly Southern form of “chivalry.” After the war, Southerners switched their Norman Conquest allegiance to the Anglo-Saxons, the losers, the invaded, who still managed to hold onto their core identities and customs in the face of occupation. One odd effect of this Southern Anglo-Saxonism is the use of Anglo-Saxon names in the Deep South; as one example, the 1880s Mississippi congressman Ethelbert Barksdale was named after the first Anglo-Saxon Christian king of Kent, who ruled from 589 to 616 C.E."

https://daily.jstor.org/old-english-serious-image-problem/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

Related: classics dealing with the same thing

FB: "A number of contemporary medieval scholars have called attention to the ways that earlier nineteenth-century medievalism and racism are being rejuvenated by the American neo-Nazis, who claim to glorify the “greatness” of their “European heritage.” Crucial to the academic argument against this movement is vociferous insistence that the Middle Ages were never a celebration of white male aristocratic heroism, despite American popular perception of white knights in shining armor riding their warhorses through England and France."

"SKIN IN THE GAME: HOW ANTISEMITISM ANIMATES WHITE NATIONALISM"

"Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today... 

White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism—inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South—had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone?...

Jews function for today’s White nationalists as they often have for antisemites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils... 

White supremacism through the collapse of Jim Crow was a conservative movement centered on a state-sanctioned anti-Blackness that sought to maintain a racist status quo. The White nationalist movement that evolved from it in the 1970s was a revolutionary movement that saw itself as the vanguard of a new, whites-only state. This latter movement, then and now, positions Jews as the absolute other, the driving force of white dispossession—which means the other channels of its hatred cannot be intercepted without directly taking on antisemitism."

http://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism/#sthash.R8blKqXm.71GtgB6X.dpbs

Our society is still absolutely steeped in language about Jewish conspiracy, I've heard members of my family express (unintentional) narratives of media or real estate control. 

FB: so informative of how their logic works - "how could feminists and LGBTQ people have upended traditional gender relations, leftists mounted a challenge to global capitalism, Muslims won billions of converts to Islam? How do you explain the boundary-crossing allure of hip hop? The election of a Black president? Some secret cabal, some mythological power, must be manipulating the social order behind the scenes. This diabolical evil must control television, banking, entertainment, education, and even Washington, D.C. It must be brainwashing White people, rendering them racially unconscious... the notion that Jews long ago and uncontestably became White folks in the U.S.—became, in effect, post-racial—is a myth that we must dispel."

"Black, Jewish And Avoiding The Synagogue On Yom Kippur"

"I'm a black woman. No one ever assumes I'm Jewish. When I talk about Judaism, people look at me in a way that makes me feel like I'm breaking into my own house. Especially the people inside the house...

it's one thing when goyim don't recognize my faith. It's a different level of sadness when it comes from other Jews.

I think back to that last time I was in a synagogue, in September 2014...

As soon as we walked in, I started feeling like an accessory. This was a superprogressive synagogue, and I wasn't the only person of color in the congregation. But the way people greeted him first, always; the way someone explained to me what to expect of the service (It will be an hour long with portions in Hebrew and English);the way an usher smiled and asked me, not my boyfriend, What brings you here

Those moments made me want to scream, I'm one of you!"

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/10/12/496868502/black-jewish-and-avoiding-the-synagogue-on-yom-kippur?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social

"breaking into your own house ". 

I now have a new way to describe so, so many experiences. 

And there is something so, so exhausting about new environments and having to wait for new people to just get used to you, to accept your presence on that subconscious pattern-forming level. 

FB: "Looking out of place is one of the most consistent parts of my life.

But it's different in a synagogue. There's something about feeling like an outsider in the place where you grew up that stings. Like family members who no longer recognize you." 

"Charlottesville showed that liberalism can’t defeat white supremacy. Only direct action can."

"No matter its form, rock breaks scissors. A half-century ago, nothing less than radical anti-racism could reduce white supremacy to an outlaw religion. Paper could not do that. The contract logic of liberalism, on its own, was not built for that. On matters of racism and discrimination, capitalism can never serve as the great social fix, because in many instances, the very sectors of the economy that have historically been the most profitable in American history — for instance, slavery, real estate — have also been the most discriminatory... 

During the 1970s, we covered and concealed any historically specific grievance with a general promise of “equal opportunity,” ownership, and with law and order. Under liberalism, property rights were still king. Outcry about ongoing exclusion in employment, education, and political and cultural representation were not met with redistributive programs but rather diffuse commitments to multiculturalism. We were not allowed mandatory fair employment law, but rather voluntary affirmative action. We were not allowed historically redressive policy — dare one say reparations? — but rather mere tolerance and the assertion that our greatest problem, after nearly a century of Jim Crow, was ensuring the protection of free speech, even for hate speech."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/08/15/charlottesville-showed-that-liberalism-cant-defeat-white-supremacy-only-direct-action-can/?nid&utm_term=.d848675e814e

"WHY DO WE WORK SO HARD?"

"One reason the treadmill is so hard to walk away from is that life off it is not what it once was. When I was a child, our neighbourhood was rich with social interaction. My father played on the church softball team until his back got too bad. My mother helped with charity food-and-toy drives. They both taught classes and chaperoned youth choir trips. They socialised with neighbours who did these things too.

Those elements of life persist, of course, but they are somewhat diminished, as Robert Putnam, a social scientist, observed in 1995 in “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”. He described the shrivelling of civic institutions, which he blamed on many of the forces that coincided with, and contributed to, our changing relationship to work: the entry of women into the workforce; the rise of professional ghettoes; longer working hours...

There is a psychic value to the intertwining of life and work as well as an economic one. The society of people like us reinforces our belief in what we do. Working effectively at a good job builds up our identity and esteem in the eyes of others. We cheer each other on, we share in (and quietly regret) the successes of our friends, we lose touch with people beyond our network. Spending our leisure time with other professional strivers buttresses the notion that hard work is part of the good life and that the sacrifices it entails are those that a decent person makes. This is what a class with a strong sense of identity does: it effortlessly recasts the group’s distinguishing vices as virtues.

Life within this professional community has its impositions. It makes failure or error a more difficult, humiliating experience. Social life ceases to be a refuge from the indignities of work. The sincerity of relationships becomes questionable when people are friends of convenience. A friend – a real one – muses to me that those who become immersed in lives like this suffer from Stockholm Syndrome: they befriend their clients because they spend too much time with them to know there are other, better options available. The fact that I find it hard to pass judgment on this statement suggests that I, too, may be a victim.

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/why-do-we-work-so-hard

FB: "stepping off the treadmill does not just mean accepting a different vision of one’s prospects with a different salary trajectory. It means upending one’s life entirely: changing locations, tumbling out of the community, losing one’s identity. That is a difficult thing to survive. One must have an extremely strong, secure sense of self to negotiate it."

"Why Barack Obama Is Right to Play It Quiet for Now"

"Obama often employed the June Jordan line “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” a prebuttal of sorts to Trump’s “I alone can fix it.” It is a call for participatory democracy, nor for prayers. No one should turn away his efforts to help any resistance to Trump, certainly. But he already did his share of the work. By insisting he return to lead us, we risk missing a key lesson of his presidency: He is no savior. Rather than waiting for his political resurrection, Americans should get busy figuring out how to save one another."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-barack-obama-is-right-to-play-it-quiet-for-now

"Obama’s science diaspora prepares for a fight"

"Arguably, OSTP just wrapped up its most influential eight-year period since the science adviser’s early days under Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy. (OSTP was officially formed by statute in 1976, though other similar offices preceded it.) Phil Larson, who focused on space exploration issues at OSTP under Obama for five years before leaving for SpaceX and now the University of Colorado, said the way Obama and Holdren emphasized science and technology left a mark on those who worked there. “Their time at OSTP specifically under President Obama and Dr. Holdren galvanized a whole new kind of passion from them, because they saw it being paid attention to at the highest levels.”

After Donald Trump’s election, though, it quickly became clear that science would not have such a prominent seat at the table after the self-proclaimed nerd left office. OSTP staffers decided to form a sort of phalanx of science- and tech-friendly experts and policy wonks. The coalition is informal — they stay in touch via Facebook and Google groups and lines of communication they established before heading out the door... 

The former staffers aim to push forward on STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — education initiatives, on specific research programs, on clean energy and climate efforts, and they consider themselves on call to help where needed.

“I can check in and say, ‘Here’s a little bit of a fire drill, who is interested?’” Garg said. His focus was on technology innovation and STEM education initiatives, and that portion of the new defense team now encompasses as many as 50 people spread out across the country. “That’s a very tight-knit group where I can call somebody and they can drop what they’re doing and help.”

The fire drills may involve helping out on Capitol Hill when congressional staffers need input on science-related policy issues, connecting experts with the government office or an NGO that needs them, or, importantly in the coming weeks and months, working on responses to the president’s and congressional budget requests."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/03/24/obamas-science-diaspora-prepares-for-a-fight/

FB: "Now that these battles are taking shape, one former OSTP staffer said many in the group are in touch with agencies, politicians, NGOs and advocacy organizations, “making sure all the groups are ready for what is going to be a pretty consequential budget fight.”"

"White Women’s Tears and the Men Who Love Them"

"A colleague of color shared an example in which a white woman was offered a full-time position as the supervisor of the women of color who had trained her. When the promotion was announced, the white woman tearfully requested support from the women of color as she embarked on her new learning curve. She likely saw her tears as an expression of humility about the limits of her knowledge and expected support to follow. The women of color had to deal with the injustice of the promotion, the invalidation of their abilities, and the lack of racial awareness of the white person now in charge of their livelihoods. While trying to manage their own emotional reactions they were put on the spot; if they did not make some comforting gesture, they risked being viewed as angry and insensitive (see abagond)...

Whether intended or not, when a white woman cries over some aspect of racism, all the attention immediately goes to her, demanding time, energy and attention from everyone in the room when they should be focused on ameliorating racism. While she is attended to the people of color are yet again abandoned and/or blamed. As Stacey Patton states in her excellent critique of white women’s tears, “Then comes the waiting for us to comfort and reassure them that they’re not bad people.” That is analogous to first responders at the scene of an accident rushing to comfort the person whose car struck a pedestrian, while the pedestrian lies bleeding on the street...

White men occupy the highest positions in the race and gender hierarchy. Thus, they have the power to define their own reality and that of others. This reality includes not only whose experiences are valid, but who is fundamentally valid herself.  In the white racial frame, not all women are deemed worthy of recognition. For example, contrary to popular white mythology, white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, not people of color. I believe this is because when forced, white men could acknowledge white women’s humanity; white women were their sisters, wives and daughters. And of course through these relationships, white women’s increased access to resources benefited white men.

White men also get to authorize what constitutes pain and whose pain is legitimate. When white men come to the rescue of white women in cross-racial settings, patriarchy is reinforced as they play savior to our damsel in distress. By legitimating white women as the targets of harm, both white men and women accrue social capital. People of color are abandoned and left to bear witness as the resources meted out to white people actually increase—yet again—on their backs."

https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/white-womens-tears-and-the-men-who-love-them-twlm/

FB: "Freely expressing our immediate emotions without attention to impact demonstrates that as white people, we have not had to think about the effects of our engagement on people of color. While white women cannot cry in the white male-dominated corporate culture without penalty, in cross-racial interactions we are in the power position. Thus, we have not had to rein in or control our racial responses and can indulge in them whenever and however we want. In fact, we feel completely entitled to require people of color to adapt to us and our white fragility. Much like white women in a white male-dominated corporate environment, people of color have to manage their feelings in ways that keep white people comfortable or suffer the consequences.

"How Vector Space Mathematics Reveals the Hidden Sexism in Language"

"the relationships between words could be captured by simple vector algebra. For example, “man is to king as woman is to queen” or, using the common notation, “man : king :: woman : queen.” Other relationships quickly emerged too such as “sister : woman :: brother : man,” and so on. These relationships are known as word embeddings.

his data set is called Word2vec and is hugely powerful. Numerous researchers have begun to use it to better understand everything from machine translation to intelligent Web searching.

But today Tolga Bolukbasi at Boston University and a few pals from Microsoft Research say there is a problem with this database: it is blatantly sexist.

And they offer plenty of evidence to back up the claim. This comes from querying the vector space to find word embeddings. For example, it is possible to pose the question: “Paris : France :: Tokyo : x” and it will give you the answer x = Japan.

But ask the database “father : doctor :: mother : x” and it will say x = nurse. And the query “man : computer programmer :: woman : x” gives x = homemaker.

In other words, the word embeddings can be dreadfully sexist. This happens because any bias in the articles that make up the Word2vec corpus is inevitably captured in the geometry of the vector space. Bolukbasi and co despair at this. “One might have hoped that the Google News embedding would exhibit little gender bias because many of its authors are professional journalists,” they say."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602025/how-vector-space-mathematics-reveals-the-hidden-sexism-in-language/?utm_campaign=socialflow&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=post

FB: The cool thing is that a team at BU found a way to fix it, an anti-bias transformation of the vector space.

"That has important applications. Any bias contained in word embeddings like those from Word2vec is automatically passed on in any application that exploits it. One example is the work using embeddings to improve Web search results. If the phrase “computer programmer” is more closely associated with men than women, then a search for the term “computer programmer CVs” might rank men more highly than women. “Word embeddings not only reflect stereotypes but can also amplify them,” say Bolukbasi and co."

"The All-Male Photo Op Isn’t a Gaffe. It’s a Strategy."

"President Trump ran a campaign of aggrieved masculinity, appealing to men who felt their rightful place in society has been taken from them by a stream of immigrants stealing their jobs, women who don’t need husbands to support them, and members of minority groups who don’t work as hard but still get special treatment.

Mr. Trump oozes male entitlement, from his brash insistence that he’s the best at everything despite knowing very little about anything to his history of crass sexism. Liberal political analysts, and even some conservative ones, assumed that would hurt him in a more feminist world. With women, it did, though not as much as people might have expected. It didn’t hurt him with men, though — Mr. Trump won them with the biggest gender gap since the advent of exit polling. That he was running against Hillary Clinton, the quintessential Hermione outsmarting the boys in class, brought this white masculinity message into sharper relief: Trump supporters didn’t just oppose Mrs. Clinton, they hated her with unchecked phallic rage, wearing “Trump That Bitch” T-shirts...

The Trump team is well aware of this dynamic, which is why it doesn’t spend much time worrying about even putting forward a facade of diversity. The great America it promised has white men at the top, and that’s the image they’re projecting, figuratively and literally. It’s not an error, it’s the game plan."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/27/opinion/the-all-male-photo-op-isnt-a-gaffe-its-a-strategy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

FB: It's so much less scary to assume that they're being incompetent... "Mr. Trump promised he would make America great again, a slogan that included the implicit pledge to return white men to their place of historic supremacy. And that is precisely what these photos show."

"The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black"

"For two years, I, like many other black women who talk or write about racial justice, have tried to avoid Rachel Dolezal—but she follows us wherever we go. So if I couldn't get away from her, I was going to at least try to figure out why. I surprised myself by agreeing to the interview...

We visit Dolezal's studio. She is, in all honesty, a very talented painter. The majority of her paintings feature black people. Other than the paintings of her children, most of the black people depicted appear to be dressed as slaves or tribespeople. Breaking this pattern was a series of portraits hanging on the wall of Dolezal herself. They were done Warhol style, each painting duplicated in a different color. Dolezal explains them to me: "You know, people are always saying to me, 'Rachel, I don't care if you are red, green, blue, or purple,' so I decided to paint myself as red, green, blue, or purple."...

Stories of people of color "passing" for white have been well known since the time of slavery. Almost any person of color in the United States has a relative in the past or present who has "passed" for white. But "passing" was a ticket out of the worst injustices of racial oppression that has been open to only a select few. The history of "passing" in the United States is a story filled with pain and separation. It has never been a story of liberation in the way in which Dolezal is trying to describe it.

I point out that there is a difference between Dolezal's claim of racial liberation and the forced denial of race in order to escape oppression...

The dismissive and condescending attitude toward any black people who see blackness differently than she does is woven throughout her comments in our conversation. It is not just our pettiness, it is also our lack of education that is preventing us from getting on Dolezal's level of racial understanding. She informs me multiple times that black people have rejected her because they simply haven't learned yet that race is a social construct created by white supremacists, they simply don't know any better and don't want to...

Dolezal is simply a white woman who cannot help but center herself in all that she does—including her fight for racial justice. And if racial justice doesn't center her, she will redefine race itself in order to make that happen. It is a bit extreme, but it is in no way new for white people to take what they want from other cultures in the name of love and respect, while distorting or discarding the remainder of that culture for their comfort."

https://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/04/19/25082450/the-heart-of-whiteness-ijeoma-oluo-interviews-rachel-dolezal-the-white-woman-who-identifies-as-black

FB: "There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness... it is white supremacy that told an unhappy and outcast white woman that black identity was hers for the taking. It is white supremacy that told her that any black people who questioned her were obviously uneducated and unmotivated to rise to her level of wokeness. It is white supremacy that then elevated this display of privilege into the dominating conversation on black female identity in America. It is white supremacy that decided that it was worth a book deal, national news coverage, and yes—even this interview."

"Everybody’s Babies Are Awesome"

"Curiously enough, these two views, positivity towards high fertility and positivity towards immigration, rarely coincide... 

since 2010, population growth has been strikingly low. In 2016, it was below the lowest forecast range from forecasts made as recently as 2013. That’s genuinely alarming. You should be hearing demography-sirens in your head and looking around for population growth sources... 

because the academy is dominated by a certain ideological subset, conservatives see the gatekeepers to the middle class seeking to actively undermine the intergenerational transmission of love, longing, purpose, and place. We want education for our kids because we want them to be prosperous, productive members of society; and in turn the gatekeeper says, “Fine, but your child must also abandon the things you think are actually most important in life.” So we become hostile to universities. We come to view academics as “elites”...

the “elites” “destroying” “our culture” seem to have a vision of a new culture to replace the lost one: the culture of other countries. Nordic socialism with a Hispanic population, evidently. “Somebody else’s babies.”... 

We need a growing population by both means to ensure that the tree of liberty is constantly renewed by those bred and raised up never knowing the bitterness of tyranny, knowing only the full flower of freedom — and also those who can remind natives why freedom matters, why our prosperity is so valuable, why our institutions are worth fighting for."

https://medium.com/migration-issues/everybodys-babies-are-awesome-c25118a6dbec

There were a lot of ideas in here thst I'd never encountered, or never heard described in thst certain way. I feel like it's irrelevant whether or not I "agree" with it, I learned a lot by spending time in a slightly different perspective and having my eyes opened to a set of deeply held concerns that I was unfamiliar with. 

I realize that there are a lot of conservative policies that I can better understand with this lens. The thing I hate the most is when I look at someone's behavior and find myself saying "Why??" because I can find no reasonable explanation. And an irrational person is not someone you can really communicate with, if their behavior is causing problems for you. 

This further reminds me that the /liberal/ mindset, and the set of problems that we are aware of and concerned with, must also be very opaque from the outside. We tend to assume that big problems, and our motivation to fix them, are obvious and universal but they really, really aren't. 

FB: This was an eminently useful read, revealing a set of fears and concerns that really, really help me understand the intent of a lot of conservative policies. The quote I pulled definitely doesn't do this essay justice  "the production of America requires Americans. The first arrivals on this continent were not prepared for modern American democracy... American-ness requires immigrants for our culture of vibrant advancement to continue, but it also requires the native population to keep up a steady pace as well. The native and immigrant populations are like two runners training together, pacing each other, challenging each other, pushing each others’ limits."

"Scientists should be political but not partisan"

"Politics has become a dirty word, largely associated with partisan jockeying for power. But politics is fundamentally the “activity associated with governance of a country or other area” and science is deeply intertwined with governance. Science profoundly impacts society in terms of economics, health, and national security. Moreover, science is funded and regulated by the government. Science cannot be separate from politics.

Rather than avoiding politics, scientists should step up and participate using a non-partisan, evidence-based viewpoint. If more scientists engage with politics, we can make the scientific process more familiar to lawmakers and dispel the harmful myth that we are simply an interest group."

https://medium.com/@ahdepace/scientists-should-be-political-but-not-partisan-f7bc048774f9#.nzjrb4ghv

"The Case Against Dana Schutz"

"In her painting, Schutz has smeared Till’s face and made it unrecognizable, again. The streaks of paint crossing the canvas read like an aggressive rejoinder to Mamie Till Mobley’s insistence that he be photographed. Mobley wanted those photographs to bear witness to the racist brutality inflicted on her son; instead Schutz has disrespected that act of dignity, by defacing them with her own creative way of seeing. Where the photographs stood for a plain and universal photographic truth, Schutz has blurred the reality of Till’s death, infusing it with subjectivity. The angle of the painting’s view is directly over the body as if Schutz is looming in her imagination. The colors are pretty. Looking at it is like stepping inside a dream that Schutz had about Emmett Till in his coffin. Since this case is one so importantly defined by visual legacy and competing narratives, an artist seeking to paint him ought literally to know better."

https://newrepublic.com/article/141506/case-dana-schutz

FB: "When Hannah Black and her co-signers call for the destruction of this painting, try not to interpret them as book-burners doing the work of censorship. Instead, hear their open letter as a call for silence inside a church. How will you hear the dead boy’s voice, if you keep speaking over him?"

"The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache"

"In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value. Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted apps by name, and described them as “bypassed” or otherwise compromised by the C.I.A.’s cyberspying tools.

Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps — at least not in the sense of “bypass” that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies...

WikiLeaks seems to have a playbook for its disinformation campaigns. The first step is to dump many documents at once — rather than allowing journalists to scrutinize them and absorb their significance before publication. The second step is to sensationalize the material with misleading news releases and tweets. The third step is to sit back and watch as the news media unwittingly promotes the WikiLeaks agenda under the auspices of independent reporting."

https://nyti.ms/2mqNH2k

Related: the essay on Assange. 

FB: "Which brings us to WikiLeaks’ misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet accompanying the cache would have said something like, “If the C.I.A. goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its content.” But that, of course, wouldn’t have caused alarm and defeatism about the prospects of secure conversations."

"How the White House made me Real News"

"This reminds me of those movie trailers that manage to cite only a single word from a review (“Extreme” –LA Times) in such a way that you wonder how the word was used in context... 

The White House believes in me, and the White House is not full of careless people who skim headlines looking for the ones that sound sort of positive and then send them out in their daily briefing newsletter hoping for the best haaa ha ha nope ha ha these are the minds who control war and peace and the budget and things ha ha ha it’s fine ha ha oh god help."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2017/03/17/how-the-white-house-made-me-real-news/

I really enjoy her satire. I do not enjoy the satire that is our current presidential administration. 

"You Won’t Like Mexico When It’s Angry"

"Mexico has a long, fraught history with the United States that is evident to Mexicans, but seldom understood in Washington. For Mexicans, the United States is the country that invaded and stole half of our territory. Mexican children, to this day, are taught about the “Niños Heroes,” the young cadets who defended the Castillo de Chapultepec, the 19th-century castle in Mexico City, one even wrapping himself in the Mexican flag and jumped to his death rather than be captured by the invading yanquis. Whether or not this tale is true, Mexicans learn from an early age that it is better to die with honor than suffer humiliation from our northern neighbor... 

Fast forward to two thousand and Trump. Mexico now wakes up to his tweets and humiliations. He doesn’t even offer the usual routine condolences after an earthquake kills nearly 100 Mexicans, even though we offered that and more after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston. All our old suspicions are confirmed: The United States is not a friend. The United States is out to get us, again. We’re back to where we were before NAFTA... 

So what would happen if Mexico were to break with the U.S. on NAFTA? I leave it to the economists to tally up the economic costs and to debate which country stands to lose more, though it seems clear there would be no winner in such a scenario. What is evident to me is that cooperation with the United States would become political poison in Mexico... 

And it wouldn’t stop there. In Mexico, drug trafficking has always been seen as a U.S. problem. Ask any Mexican, and she will be quick to say that the U.S. creates the demand, supplies the guns and launders the money; we suffer the deaths. The fight against drug trafficking is unpopular in Mexico because it is seen as a fight we’re waging on another country’s behalf. Whether or not such a view is correct, it would be politically unviable for the Mexican government to be seen as cooperating with an unfriendly neighbor on such a contentious issue. This is not a threat Mexican officials are making at the moment; it is a simple political reality... 

The fight against terrorism would suffer. Since 9/11, Mexico has arguably been the biggest obstacle against terrorists trying to reach U.S. soil."

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/11/donald-trump-us-mexico-relations-215594

There is a lot of stuff in here that I never appreciated before, though it now seems obvious. 

FB: "In Washington, where I live, people tell me not to worry, not to pay attention to his tweets. “He’s just pandering to his base,” I am told. Perhaps. In Mexico, however, many believe Americans want to screw us, and Mexican politicians, like politicians everywhere, have to pander to voters if they want to win elections. No matter which of Mexico’s three main political parties they support, the demand is the same: Don’t submit us to humiliation from the United States. Not again. Not ever."

"Demand decisions based on evidence, not ideology"

"Scientists are among those severely affected by the executive order that blocked entry to the United States for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries. As the personal, professional and legal implications of the policy have emerged, the Trump administration has supposedly softened its stance, and, for example, said that US green-card holders will be exempt. Whether by accident or design, the instinctive response to this apparent concession — the mental sigh of relief — draws heavily on the contrast effect. The situation is bad, but not as bad as it could have been. The stick is less severe than the gun."

http://www.nature.com/news/demand-decisions-based-on-evidence-not-ideology-1.21392?WT.mc_id=FBK_NA_1702_FHEDEVIDENCENOTIDEOLOGY_PORTFOLIO

#resist

FB: the Nature Editorial Board reminds us to speak out and act "The tactic, if indeed it is deliberate, of taking an extreme initial position and then retreating behind a bridgehead, should not mask the likely impact of the commuted action. Normalization is not an option. Equally, it is crucial that there is no decrease in the appetite for dissent and protest over unacceptable and ill-informed decisions that are based on ideology rather than evidence — on vaccine safety and climate change, for example."

"The NASA Team That Kills Spacecraft"

"Linda Spilker, the lead scientist on Cassini, knew her team had to preserve the integrity of the potentially habitable moons. “We don’t want to go back to Enceladus and find there’s microbes that we put there,” she says. As a spacecraft runs out of fuel, as Cassini now has, each orbit increases the chance of losing control and impacting a moon. That’s why they need to be destroyed...

The death of Galileo taught the team a lot about planning the end of Cassini. Galileo was the first robotic probe to collide with a gas giant; Cassini will be the second. Cassini’s final marching orders outlined a grand finale of 22 orbits of Saturn. The final five would begin to skim the upper atmosphere, scooping the clouds with its instruments. These orbits would yield unprecedented scientific results. Spilker and her team had always wanted to fly through the planet’s rings, but it was too dangerous. Now was their chance to try something deadly...

Still, it’s extremely difficult for the team to let go of the spacecraft. Some members refer to the probes as their children. Many spend upward of 30 years on one mission. “It’s like in the death of a loved one—you look back and you think about all the good memories, the times you’ve shared together, went on vacation together, grandchildren,” says Spilker. “I think of it more like planning perhaps a wake.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-nasa-team-that-kills-spacecraft/538686/

FB: "When humans die, they release a final breath. The ancient Egyptians called this last exhale a “wind” that arrives to carry away a person’s soul to the afterlife. For Cassini, the impact from falling backward through the hydrogen-thick atmosphere will tear away its parts—first the large sections, then the instruments, until the antenna pointing toward Earth sends back one final beep. This message will breeze past Jupiter and Mars, through the solar plasma pushing toward deep space, and finally run into Earth, where it will be collected in the antennas of the Deep Space Network."

"The 1920 census broke constitutional norms—let’s not repeat that in 2020"

"The 2020 story: if the Census Bureau remains seriously underfunded into FY’18, as now expected by professionals, the 2020 census will fall below the high quality standard set in 2000 and repeated in 2010. For example, the 2020 census design is based on two never-used procedures—reliance on the internet as the primary mode of response and reliance on administrative records for an expected third or so of the population who do not initially respond. Although these design innovations look good on paper, the Census Bureau planned a thorough field test, knowing that adjustments would be required. Adequate funding for the test was not provided... 

Absent effective advertising and active partnerships, the 2020 census—already facing high levels of general public mistrust toward the government—will be handicapped. Small setbacks, unavoidable in any census, will be highlighted and probably exaggerated by intense media coverage, risking further erosion in public confidence. An underfunded Census Bureau will be blamed, however unfairly, and labeled as one more incompetent government agency."

http://parameters.ssrc.org/2017/07/the-1920-census-broke-constitutional-norms-lets-not-repeat-that-in-2020/

FB: wow, so important "Because census counts, and federal statistics more generally, are widely used and the stakes are high, an underfunded 2020 census will face charges that its “flawed counts” put at risk the statistical tools needed for intelligently governing society and managing the economy and have lessened the nation’s ability to detect and correct social injustices."

"the great liberal freakout of 2017"

"I’d also like to point out that this whole thing happened because the author of the Bell Curve came to campus on the invitation of the school’s Republican student society and that rather than laugh at the thought of having a debunked scholar speak anywhere near their campus, Middlebury assigned him a moderator and gave him an auditorium. That, I would imagine, is closer than most people have to get to hearing racist pseudo-science in their own lives. Imagine what would have happened if someone at the New York Times had invited Charles Murray to address the newsroom. It would have never happened.

But if Charles Murray did come to the New York Times to give a talk about race and IQ, I sincerely doubt the reporters there would huddle together and do what Bruni suggests in his column and “hone the most eloquent, irrefutable retort to him.” They wouldn’t do this because they, for the most part, are thinking adults who understand that Bruni’s grand theater of debate is better left to anxious high school kids at a Model UN convention...

Free speech does not have to take the form of polite debates between massively privileged media people, politicians and academics. If you really think the biggest assault to free speech is taking place at Middlebury and NOT IN THE 18 STATES ACROSS THE COUNTRY THAT ARE TAKING MEASURES TO SHUT DOWN PEACEFUL FORMS OF PROTEST, than I honestly don’t know what to tell you."

https://medium.com/kang-blog/the-great-liberal-freakout-of-2017-3c4cb93fd0c9

You are never going to logically convince someone not to be racist. It's just not how it goes. 

FB: THIS "If we want to talk about the real world and not the world of the academy where Allen comes from or Bruni’s society of pundits, the idea that the solution to racism in our daily lives would be to craft an eloquent spoken rebuff… I mean… it’s a fucking insane idea. Last month, a group of kids in a van stopped on Eastern Parkway opened the window and screamed “chink” at me . In response, I flipped them off. If only I had been able to instantly come up with a multi-layered comeback, perhaps rapped along to the strains of Hamilton (“Immigrants, we get the job done!”) that would have exposed the lies of racism and left them smoldering at their feet!"

"I'm on the Kill List. This is what it feels like to be hunted by drones"

"I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered...

Five months later, on 27 March 2011, an American missile targeted a Jirga, where local Maliks – all friends and associates of mine – were working to resolve a local dispute and bring peace. Some 40 civilians died that day, all innocent, and some of them fellow members of the NWPC. I was early to the scene of this horror.

Like others that day, I said some things I regret. I was angry, and I said we would get our revenge. But, in truth, how would we ever do such a thing? Our true frustration was that we – the elders of our villages – are now powerless to protect our people.

I have been warned that Americans and their allies had me and others from the Peace Committee on their Kill List. I cannot name my sources, as they would find themselves targeted for trying to save my life. But it leaves me in no doubt that I am one of the hunted."

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/i-am-on-the-us-kill-list-this-is-what-it-feels-like-to-be-hunted-by-drones-a6980141.html

I wanted this to be much longer, it feels like this is only the introduction to what should be a much longer piece.

Related: there are at least two on drones, on either side...

"Your Calls For Unity Are Divisive As F*ck"

"It takes a special level of fuckery, however, to misinterpret my cynicism for divisiveness. In fact, my critique of white liberals is almost always on their failure to be inclusive and intersectional with their politics. I’m attempting (foolishly) to snap folks out of their complacency and get more allies and accomplices on the same page. Myself and other Black radicals are actively combatting division(!), but liberals are too busy being self-congratulatory and hurling witticisms to notice. It’s like the Titanic is sinking, and folks in life rafts are asking those of us in the frigid water why we’re so pissed. Never mind the fact that we spent the last 400 years building the damn boat and trying to warn them about icebergs. Never mind that they waste more energy defending themselves than bothering to toss any of us a rope. So yeah, at this point I won’t be too broken up if they drown. Especially since history tells me they’ll be fine so long as I’m not...

In 1963, while sitting in a jail cell in Alabama, Martin Luther King decided not to write about his jailers, but instead opted to drag “white moderates” who deemed his outspokenness “unwise and untimely.” Sound familiar? Liberals of the day felt King was being divisive. Today, liberals quote King out of context, in order to silence Black radicals; and the circle of life continues.

When we suggest that critiques of liberal movements are problematic, what we’re really doing is telling marginalized people they need to shut up and be thankful for the hand they’ve been dealt."

https://theestablishment.co/your-calls-for-unity-are-divisive-as-f-ck-3d6584bca72f

FB: !! " As was recently noted by attorney and activist, Marbre Stahly-Butts, “Unity is not the objective; freedom is.” If progressives want to quell divisiveness within the ranks, they need to start examining themselves, not their detractors. Radicals are NOT slowing liberals down. It’s the other way around... Using energy to chastise oppressed people with minimal privilege will ALWAYS be counterproductive to liberation work."

"Germany finally apologizes for its other genocide—more than a century later"

"The genocide is widely viewed as the first of the twentieth century, perpetrated from 1904 to 1907, but is rarely recognized. Historians believe that the atrocities perpetrated by the German troops became a precursor for those perpetrated during the Holocaust. The parallels between Germany’s two genocides are chillingly similar: the extermination order for the sake of expansion, forced labor in concentration camps and scientific experiments on prisoners.

Within three years, German troops oversaw the extermination of 85% of the Herero population, expropriated their land and seized their source of wealth, their cattle. Today, the once powerful Herero make up about 10% of Namibia’s population and live in some of the country’s most underdeveloped regions, struggling with high youth unemployment."

http://qz.com/733463/germany-finally-apologizes-for-its-other-genocide-more-than-a-century-later/

Related: there was a radiolab episode about this

"Friedrich Nietzsche on Why a Fulfilling Life Requires Embracing Rather than Running from Difficulty"

"In one particularly emblematic specimen from his many aphorisms, penned in 1887 and published in the posthumous selection from his notebooks, The Will to Power (public library), Nietzsche writes under the heading “Types of my disciples”:

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

(Half a century later, Willa Cather echoed this sentiment poignantly in a troubled letter to her brother: “The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring.”...

"What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?

[…]

You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance of subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.""

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/15/nietzsche-on-difficulty/

I super agree with Nietzsche. Stigma against negative emotions is probably paralleled by a lack of uncontrollable positive emotions. Like, real joy and relief can alarm people.

Willa Cather's quote is really interesting.

Related: Stephen Colbert.

"In Connecticut, Calling for Help Carries Risks for Victims of Domestic Violence"

"Dilawar is one of hundreds of Connecticut women arrested each year along with the men who assault them under a procedure known as “dual arrests.” In theory, dual arrests are meant to hold couples accountable when both parties are combatants in episodes of domestic violence or when it is impossible to tell who was the clear aggressor... 

Advocates for victims of domestic violence and a number of state legislators have been concerned about the practice for years, but Connecticut hasn’t remedied what many see as an unjust and dangerous situation. The heart of the problem, according to legislators and advocates for women, stems from the fact that the state has a mandatory arrest law for cases of reported domestic violence, but lacks a provision that allows police to limit arrests to the person determined to have been the primary aggressor.

As a result, victims can wind up being arrested along with their abusers. In such instances, the complaining victims must find a lawyer and work to limit the lasting damage of a formal criminal record. They are often assigned a public defender and a victim’s advocate, whose offices also represent their significant others. The fear of being arrested can dissuade victims from calling the police at all...

“I have to defend defending myself and justify why it was OK as me as a woman for me to put my hands on him,” she said. “And the judge told me that it’s not self-defense if you can physically find a way out. Whether it’s locking yourself in the bathroom or running out of the door.”"

https://www.propublica.org/article/in-connecticut-calling-for-help-carries-risks-victims-of-domestic-violence?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

Our culture has a thing about the perfect victim. It's like people are supposed to just wait around to be saved, and if they aren't saved then it must be because they were not worthy. 

FB: why are we so uncomfortable with the idea of people fighting back? 

"Self-defense from a victim’s perspective, said Allison Roach of the Domestic Violence Crisis Center, can look very different from an officer’s perspective.

“If a victim reacts prior to a defendant actually assaulting them, maybe it’s so ingrained in them that, ‘If this happens and this happens, then step three is he’s going to hurt me,’” she said. “Then they could be arrested, and they acted first.”"

"Meet North Korea’s Number One Fan In The United States"

"From the outside, everything about the community, from how it emerged, to how far it is willing to carry its commitment to North Korea, is puzzling. Roh and his followers, listening intently to the gospel delivered straight from Pyongyang, offer a window into how North Korea’s ideology spreads under the radar on U.S. soil, and, ultimately, just how people decide what to believe in... 

[Roh] became a student activist against the Park dictatorship, but saw no hope for democratization in South Korea and, after a few years saving up money, decided to come to the United States. It was 1973.

“At that time I thought that United States was number one democratic country, number one social justice–oriented country,” Roh said. But during his years at the University of Texas as an urban sociology student, he changed his mind. "I started to know what is jingoism, what is the civil rights movement in the U.S.A.," he said in his somewhat stilted English, pointing to the struggle of black Americans and racist laws targeting Chinese immigrants in the 18th century. "I didn’t know before I came here. I started to open my consciousness [and] become critical," he said... 

North Korea caught Roh’s attention for the first time in 1989, when he heard news that several high-profile South Korean dissidents had taken unauthorized trips to Pyongyang as an unofficial way to promote reunification... After the rally in Panmunjom, a village north of the 2.5-mile-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) that separates the two countries and where the armistice that paused the Korean War was signed, 15 participants, including Roh and three other Korean émigrés, were unexpectedly whisked away and driven to a beautiful villa. Kim Il Sung walked out and greeted them personally; they had been chosen to share a meal with the Great Leader... 

Roh recalled the moment when he began to sympathize with Kim, as the North Korean leader described how hard it was to establish the country, counting only “seven to eight intellectuals” among his leadership's ranks. By the end of the banquet, when a symbolic course of “black, rotten potatoes” like those that were the only thing available during World War II and the Korean War were served, Kim had won Roh over.

“My feeling is [that] he’s like a grandfather,” Roh said. “My grandfather.”...

While young people in South Korea worryabout a chaotic future brought on by the potential reunification, for some second-generation Koreans in the U.S., Roh’s work on North Korea provides a happy illusion of an alternate life that they’ve never lived: simple, pure, with worry-free access to housing, education, and medical treatment."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/beimengfu/meet-north-koreas-number-one-fan-in-the-united-states?utm_term=.giqma48Z6&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%20717&utm_content=Longform%20717+CID_591b7f3dbe386b44bc4020dd695ddb0f&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters#.wf0GB25nr

The subtext of this article: the way that North Korea is constructed allows people to place their fantasies on the country. And that's a different way to think about it.