“In My Chronic Illness, I Found a Deeper Meaning”

“I went from doctor to doctor looking for answers, but overnight I had gone from being a trusted rabbi and chaplain (who works with seriously ill and dying people on hospital medical teams) to a “hysterical” chronically ill person. Though I had seen it happen to my clients, I now understood firsthand that being disbelieved is nearly universal for people with chronic illnesses, especially those that are largely invisible or hard to diagnose or both. I had believed that as a health care professional, equipped with skills and advocates to navigate the system, I would be treated differently. I soon learned how hubristic that was...

We are born needing care and die needing care, and I am no exception. At brief moments in the middle of life, we hold the illusion of independence, but we are always driving on roads we did not build, eating foods we did not pick or raise. Allowing the illusion of my own independence to drop away unmasked a fundamental truth of being human.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/in-my-chronic-illness-i-found-a-deeper-meaning.html

FB: “In a political moment where health care is treated as a luxury and hurricane victims are blamed for their own disasters, an ethic of personal responsibility reigns. But sometimes, sick people just stay sick. And there’s no meditation, medication, positive outlook, exercise or smoothie that can fix it.”

"AM I ONE OF THE GOOD ONES?"

"I know I am one of the good ones because I have (selectively) radical politics (even though I sometimes misgender* my trans and gender-nonconforming* students). I know I’m one of the good ones because I often say the words “queer” “cis” and “trans-antagonism” in casual conversation.

I know I am one of the good ones because I keep it so real (but only about stuff I am really comfortable keeping it so real about, and I have no idea what to do with the thin terrifying line between publicly reckoning with the ways I’ve emotionally abused Black women, and the possible re-traumatizing of harmed Black women that often come with these “GoodBlackMen” public reckonings).

I know I am one of the good ones because when Jamilah Lemieux asked me to write 1000 words exploring toxic masculinity, I said yes, even though I should have said, “I do not think I am one of the good ones. I am one of the old ones who should know and do better. I am one of the scared ones, the harmful ones, the cowardly ones often taught by other scared ones, the harmful ones, and the cowardly ones to say and believe things like: “I don’t regret anything because if I hadn’t made those mistakes back in the day, I wouldn’t be the Black man I am today” completely neglecting the fact that much of the “Black man I am today” harmed Black women who would do everything possible not to harm me."

https://cassiuslife.com/41871/am-i-one-of-the-good-ones/

FB:"There ain’t no deliverance when it comes to responsibly loving vulnerable folk who insist on responsibly loving us. There is only work."

“Disney’s oddball movie about child labor unions, and the anarchic fandom it inspired”

“Newsies acknowledges that it needs a plot of some kind, but the story, I started to feel on first viewing, can seem like an excuse for boy-watching: boys in big groups running around, doing flips and pelvic thrusts, and singing about how they are an unstoppable force if they can only stick together. The only thing they might love more than unionization is dancing and singing and touching each other constantly. What Newsies knows is that a herd of boys, and the chemistry between them, is all the energy you need to drive a movie. The rest you can make up as you go along...

When I look back at stories like this, I feel as if I didn’t know this side of myself unless I was up late, dreaming, writing, telling the truth of what I imagined and desired to a few dozen girls I trusted not to judge me. This was a corner of the internet snug as a table made into a blanket fort: we reviewed the new chapters of each other’s ongoing sagas with unstinting faithfulness, lovingly critiqued each other’s drafts, and credited each other for the innovations and ideas we traded. (The Snitch/Skittery pairing was invented by a girl from Arizona who wrote under the pen name Lute and was our fandom’s Stephen King, in terms of sheer output and popularity; to write a Snitch/Skittery story without crediting her somewhere was simply Not Done.) We wrote fictionalized versions of each other, as adoring tributes, into our own stories. And when we weren’t writing, we were instant messaging each other for hours, collaborating on stories via email, and sometimes scraping together the courage to talk to each other on the phone (“It’s your real voice!”), incurring long-distance bills we sometimes couldn’t explain to our parents, because they knew to fear the internet as a place where grown men could prey on their daughters, but hadn’t yet thought to worry that it might be a place where their daughters would come together to share their fantasies...

There was something, at least to me, that felt particularly liberating about a world of boys, and the idea of not just watching that world but being within it: a world you could walk fearfully and joyfully within, freed from a life in which your body was a dangerous object that could, at any moment, cause someone to suddenly wish to dominate or destroy you.”

https://thebaffler.com/latest/newsies-marshall

"THE STATEMENT: MASCULINITY. A TIGHT ASS GRIP"

"Our January 2018 digital conversation is an invitation to join us in this probing for answers as we delve deeper. We are asking men the questions that might allow us to get to the root of the thirst for control and power that is at the heart of sexual harassment and rape.

We are eager for honesty. We want to know what it means to be “a man” in a moment when manhood is rightly under fire. We want to know WTF manhood even means, if anything, and if it needs to be reimagined or abolished altogether.

Because enough is enough. Because it’s time for acts of calling in and accountability that end in transformation. Because it’s time to reflect on the ways our collective love for “masculinity” is like a tight ass grip choking brothers’ freedom, whether they have learned to breathe with hands around their necks or not."

https://cassiuslife.com/41626/the-statement-masculinity-a-tight-ass-grip/

"Woman World"

"A group of women gab and hang out in a post apocalyptic future where men are extinct and the survival of humanity is at stake."

http://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/woman-world/list?title_no=100912

It's pretty great. The face in #38.

There will be a book - https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/woman-world

"Snoozers Are, in Fact, Losers"

“One of the consequences of waking up suddenly, and too early, is a phenomenon called sleep inertia. First given a name in 1976, sleep inertia refers to that period between waking and being fully awake when you feel groggy. The more abruptly you are awakened, the more severe the sleep inertia. While we may feel that we wake up quickly enough, transitioning easily between sleep mode and awake mode, the process is in reality far more gradual. Our brain-stem arousal systems (the parts of the brain responsible for basic physiological functioning) are activated almost instantly. But our cortical regions, especially the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain involved in decision-making and self-control), take longer to come on board.

In those early waking minutes, our memory, reaction time, ability to perform basic mathematical tasks, and alertness and attentionall suffer. Even simple tasks, like finding and turning on the light switch, become far more complicated. As a result, our decisions are neither rational nor optimal. In fact, according to Kenneth Wright, a neuroscientist and chronobiology expert, “Cognition is best several hours prior to habitual sleep time, and worst near habitual wake time.” In the grip of sleep inertia, we may well do something we know we shouldn’t. Whether or not to hit the snooze button is just about the first decision we make. Little wonder that it’s not always the optimal one...

The difference between one’s actual, socially mandated wake-up time and one’s natural, biologically optimal wake-up time is something that Till Roenneberg, a professor of chronobiology at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich, calls “social jetlag.” It’s a measurement not of sleep duration but of sleep timing: Are we sleeping in the windows of time that are best for our bodies? According to Roenneberg’s most recent estimates, based on a database of more than sixty-five thousand people, approximately a third of the population suffers from extreme social jetlag—an average difference of over two hours between their natural waking time and their socially obligated one. Sixty-nine per cent suffer from a milder form, of at least one hour.”

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/snoozers-are-in-fact-losers

Ya. When I have to wake up too early for my sleep schedule, there is a Moment at around 11 AM when I feel myself finally, like, ‘activating’ for the day. My body stops hurting, my brain works faster, I start to actually like the people around me, I start planning what I want to do that day.

I’m very stupid in the mornings.

FB: “While the participants said they felt awake after two-thirds of an hour, their cognitive faculties didn’t entirely catch up for several hours. Eating breakfast, showering, or turning on all the lights for maximum morning brightness didn’t mitigate the results. No matter what, our brains take far longer than we might expect to get up to speed.”

"Unlearning the myth of American innocence"

"We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I don’t remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us...

Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside Wall, anything outside the tiny white world in which we lived. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns such as Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good – this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young...

I was a child of the 90s, the decade when, according to America’s foremost intellectuals, “history” had ended, the US was triumphant, the cold war won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz has written that, by that time, the idea that America won because of “its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy” was dominating “op-ed pages, popular magazines and the bestseller lists”. These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music of my most formative years...

I picked up the books of James Baldwin, who gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself...

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-the-myth-of-american-innocence?CMP=fb_gu

FB: we all need to be in the process of unlearning this "American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it."

"The Perils of Mixing Masculinity and Missiles"

"I started thinking about this over three decades ago, when I was working among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists and arms controllers. What struck me was how removed they were from the human realities behind the weapons they discussed. This distancing occurred in part through a professional discourse characterized by stunningly abstract and euphemistic language — and in part through a set of lively sexual metaphors.

The human bodies evoked were not those of the victims; instead, there were conversations about vertical erector launchers, thrust-to-weight ratios, soft lay downs, deep penetration and the comparative advantages of protracted versus spasm attacks — or what one military adviser to the National Security Council called “releasing 70 to 80 percent of our megatonnage in one orgasmic whump.”...

They work in deeper, more subtle ways too. The culturally pervasive associations of masculinity with dispassion, distance, abstraction, toughness and risk-taking, and of femininity with emotion, empathy, bodily vulnerability, fear and caution, are embedded within the professional discourse...

embedded ideas about gender in nuclear strategic discourse go beyond questions of whether a button is more than just a button. They act as a deterrent to more holistic, and therefore truly realistic, thinking about nuclear weapons and the holocaust that would result from their use."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/05/opinion/security-masculinity-nuclear-weapons.html

FB: "Even more disturbing was how [gender] shaped what could be said, or even thought, within the confines of these male-dominated spaces. “What are you, some kind of wimp?” was an insult readily lobbed at anyone who urged restraint in responding to a provocation or attack. Discussion of whether political leaders “had the stones for war” suggested that the desire to solve a conflict through nonmilitary measures would mean you were less than fully manly."

"Most Personality Quizzes Are Junk Science. I Found One That Isn’t."

"This is one of the big problems with pop culture ideas of personality, from a scientific standpoint. They try to fit us all into a set of immutable types. “That’s why we don’t like Myers-Briggs,” Vazire said. “We shouldn’t be talking about types of people.” That’s because, like most things with humans, personality traits fall on a bell curve and most of us will be near the middle of that distribution. When you try to categorize people by type, you end up with a lot of people who are placed in boxes that seem far apart, but whose distribution of personality is actually pretty close to each other. “Types create more artificial boundaries, where most people are really close to the boundary line,” Vazire said. “That’s the nature of human difference.”...

That’s something Soto and his team have been working on — creating a Harry Potter version. Of course, because it’s the Big Five, Soto’s test doesn’t tell you an absolute personality “type.” Instead, it tells you how compatible you’d be with each of the four Hogwarts Houses."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-personality-quizzes-are-junk-science-i-found-one-that-isnt/?ex_cid=538fb

"There’s a reason using a period in a text message makes you sound angry"

"Because text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that—a definitive stop that signals, as linguistics professor Mark Liberman has explained, “This is final, this is the end of the discussion.”

For some, this can appear angry or standoffish.

In 2016, psychologist Danielle Gunraj testedhow people perceived one-sentence text messages that used a period at the end of the sentence. Participants thought these text messages were more insincere than those that didn’t have a period. But when the researchers then tested the same messages in handwritten notes, they found that the use of a period didn’t influence how the messages were perceived... 

past research into situational code-switching in spoken language has shown that a person’s ability to code-switch can signal social competency, can affirm one’s sense of identity or membership in a community, and may be an indicator of high intellectual ability in children."

https://qz.com/1169792/theres-a-reason-using-a-period-in-a-text-message-makes-you-sound-angry/

"The true story of the fake US embassy in Ghana"

“Sewornu was stumped. He knew nothing about any investigations into a fake embassy. He tried to find out which officers had been involved, but the police unit credited by the Americans, the Ghana Detectives Bureau, didn’t exist. Ghana’s national Swat unit, the CID and the Bureau of National Investigation all told Sewornu that they weren’t involved either.

It didn’t make any sense. The entire story seemed to be based on one source: the US state department website. And their source was the US embassy in Accra. “So I called the American embassy to find out, and my contact said: ‘I don’t know anything about it,’” said Sewornu. “It was like they were tightlipped over the matter.”...

Even with legitimate, professional help, filling out the application form for a US tourist visa is a maddeningly difficult and unforgiving process. Applicants have to provide their parents’ dates of birth, but Ghana had no complete register of births until 1965, so a lot of people just don’t know. Then there’s the fee: around $160, which amounts to about 75% of Ghana’s average monthly wage. That fee is non-refundable. If you are rejected, and you want to apply again, you will have to pay another $160.

Once you have done the paperwork and paid, you still don’t get your visa. You just get to book a visa interview at the US embassy. Well before dawn on most weekdays, there is a sizable crowd of people outside the embassy in Accra waiting to go in. “Applicants often waited outside the embassy compound for extended periods, presenting a poor image of the US government and causing a security issue,” according to a 2017 US state department report...

People in countries such as Ghana are faced with a simple choice: apply over and over again and spend huge sums of money each time, or pay someone who promises to get you that visa. Each time a new con is discovered, the embassies panic and add another layer of scrutiny to their visa application processes. Each layer of scrutiny gives the fraudsters an extra hurdle – but also creates extra business."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/28/the-true-story-of-the-fake-us-embassy-in-ghana

This was such a clear, relatable story about immigration. 

FB: “When the Americans announced that her house was a fake US embassy, Lamptey was one of the last to hear about it. A friend called to say it was all over the internet, she said. “I was really annoyed. Because how? And from where?”

Lamptey said there had never been a police raid. Instead, after the story broke, she and the family marched down to the local police station to find out whether they were really under investigation. The cops told them there was nothing to worry about.”

“The Gift of Presence, The Perils of Advice”

“Here’s the deal. The human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed — to be seen, heard and companioned exactly as it is. When we make that kind of deep bow to the soul of a suffering person, our respect reinforces the soul’s healing resources, the only resources that can help the sufferer make it through.

Aye, there’s the rub. Many of us “helper” types are as much or more concerned with being seen as good helpers as we are with serving the soul-deep needs of the person who needs help. Witnessing and companioning take time and patience, which we often lack — especially when we’re in the presence of suffering so painful we can barely stand to be there, as if we were in danger of catching a contagious disease. We want to apply our “fix,” then cut and run, figuring we’ve done the best we can to “save” the other person.”

https://onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/

FB: these are real truths

“Shawn Vestal: The problem with men who harass, and the men who enable them, is not a lack of training”

“It’s not about what men don’t know.

It’s about what men have known too well: That we can get away with it. That it will be excused, hidden, justified and rationalized, and no one will be called to account. This is as true for the unwanted advance as it is for forced physical assault, and the fact that this is changing has nothing whatsoever to do with training.

So much of the sexual harassment tsunami that’s been unleashed shows very well what this is about: Men knowing exactly where the line is drawn and relishing the authority to step over – and other men sustaining that authority by looking the other way. Recall the illustrative example of the moment: the Access Hollywood tape. A serial groper brags about getting away with it, while another man chuckles along.

Not one bit of it was because we didn’t know better. None of it was because we didn’t have the proper information. None of it came from a lack of training...

It’s as though men need a sexual harassment GPS system rather than a simple human conscience, and it’s just more of the same old shedding of responsibility.”

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/dec/22/shawn-vestal-the-problem-with-men-who-harass-and-t/#/0

FB: “ineffectiveness is not the biggest problem with the call for training narrative. Worse is that it arises from attitudes that let men off the hook.

If we need to be trained not to do it, after all, it’s not really our fault.”

"How to internet"

"what people got excited about with the internet originally was relatively unmediated access to regular people. In his talk at Internet! Retrospective, “free-range archivist” Jason Scott described the disbelief and excitement he felt early on to see words appearing on his screen that weren’t his. Someone else was typing. We got excited about talking to other people, especially people far away; now Target is talking to us, via a 16 year old girl in her living room...

Even now, in 2016, it still seems like all anyone has ever wanted from the internet was the same thing they’ve wanted all along: a connection to other people. Crucially, “people” here means actual people, acting and expressing themselves according to their own volition — not an actor, not Lonelygirl15, not a spokesperson, not an aspiring internet celebrity. What I’m trying to describe is some kind of ur-human urge, outside of follower count or personal branding, to throw a “hello” out into the void and maybe hear one back...

In the context of my talk, the story was supposed to be an illustration of the importance and difficulty of talking to strangers. I was arguing for more dining cars on the internet... My suggestion leaves out misogynist trolls (who, more than anyone, *love* talking to strangers) and racist subreddits (which gymnast Kerri Strug most definitely would not have enjoyed). It makes a lot of assumptions about the types of connections you can make, and the shared reality those connections would necessarily be based in."

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-internet-6c379e75c8e0

This is making me think about assumptions we make about the internet, based on how it was marketed in the 90s. There was and is this assumption that the internet is supposed to "bring us together", "bridge divides"; give us infinite opportunities for human connection. But... I guess, yeah, but it can also do a lot of other things. It's a tool that humans use to communicate and gather information. We're probably going to communicate and gather information about basically the same things we'd want to without the internet. It shouldn't be that surprising that it didn't solve all of our problems. Why are we feeling so betrayed?

Related: This author also wrote a beautiful essay called "how to do nothing"; at least one other on the internet and what it's for... I should make a section for these essays

"how to do nothing"

"A public, non-commercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there. Consider an actual city park in contrast to a faux-public space like Universal CityWalk, which one passes through upon leaving the Universal Studios theme park.

Because it interfaces between the theme park and the actual city, CityWalk exists somewhere in between, almost like a movie set, where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity. In an essay about such spaces, Eric Chaplin and Sarah Holding call City Walk “a ‘scripted space’ par excellence, that is, a space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs, and orchestrates use.” Anyone who has ever tried any funny business in a faux public space knows that such spaces do not just script actions, they police them...

One [Crow] started coming every day around the time that I eat breakfast, and sometimes it would caw to make me come out on the balcony with a peanut. Then one day it brought its kid, which I knew was its kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. I named them Crow and Crowson...

When I realized this, I grabbed onto it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. This is real. The living, breathing bodies in this room are real. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force. I’m lumpy, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, I see, and I smell things that hear, see, and smell me. And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are."

https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb

This was one of those essays that is an experience in the reading. When I clicked on it at first it was one of those clicks where you are like "I bet I know what this is, I bet I know exactly what kind of annoying thing it is, let me click on it to confirm that for myself and smirk as I then close the tab".

But then it pulled me out of myself and now I really need her to release a book because I love how she writes. 

FB: I clicked on this in the assumption that it was probably going to be really annoying, but I was curious about what it was about, so I would spend 5 minutes on it then move on but it totally sucked me in and calmed my busy brain

"What is missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality is any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual groundedness, in the ground."

"Bussed out: How America moves its homeless"

"until now there has never been a systematic, nationwide assessment of the consequences. Where are these people being moved to? What impact are these programs having on the cities that send and the cities that receive them? And what happens to these homeless people after they reach their destination?...

Homeless people hear about bus schemes through word of mouth or are offered a free ticket by a caseworker. To qualify, they must provide a contact for a friend or relative who will receive them at their chosen destination. The shelter then calls that person to check the homeless traveler will have somewhere suitable to stay...

Miller said around one in 10 homeless people who take a free ticket off the island boomerang back, only to discover that they have no access to the few services that were previously available to them...

New York appears to have been the first major city to begin a relocation program for homeless people, back in 1987. After the current iteration of the program was relaunched during the tenure of mayor Michael Bloomberg, it ballooned, and its relocation scheme is now far larger than any other in the nation. The city homelessness department budgets $500,000 for it annually.

Almost half the approximately 34,000 journeys analyzed by the Guardian originate from New York. In contrast with other relocation initiatives, New York is notable for moving large numbers of families, like the Ortizes...

It is a stark example of a pattern that is replicated through most of the journeys, which, analysis shows, have the overall effect of moving homeless people from rich places to poorer places."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/20/bussed-out-america-moves-homeless-people-country-study

FB: "People are routinely sent thousands of miles away after only a cursory check by authorities to establish they have a suitable place to stay once they get there. Some said they feel pressured into taking tickets, and others described ending up on the streets within weeks of their arrival."

"Millions Are Hounded for Debt They Don’t Owe. One Victim Fought Back, With a Vengeance"

"Therrien had been caught up in a fraud known as phantom debt, where millions of Americans are hassled to pay back money they don’t owe. The concept is centuries old: Inmates of a New York debtors’ prison joked about it as early as 1800, in a newspaper they published called Forlorn Hope. But systematic schemes to collect on fake debts started only about five years ago. It begins when someone scoops up troves of personal information that are available cheaply online—old loan applications, long-expired obligations, data from hacked accounts—and reformats it to look like a list of debts. Then they make deals with unscrupulous collectors who will demand repayment of the fictitious bills. Their targets are often poor and likely to already be getting confusing calls about other loans. The harassment usually doesn’t work, but some marks are convinced that because the collectors know so much, the debt must be real...

On his laptop, Therrien started digging. He found a securities filing saying Vista had merged with a company called That Marketing Solution Inc. After paying a few dollars to an online people-search service, he got its president on the line. “You sold my personal information to a bunch of thugs,” Therrien recalls telling the man. “I want to know why, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.” Within hours, the company provided a letter saying that Therrien had never borrowed from Vista.

Armed with proof the debt was invalid, Therrien turned back to Lakefront. More searches yielded a corporate parent, owned by two Buffalo men. Therrien called them, then their lawyer...

Portfolios are combined and doctored until they contain thousands of entries. One collector told Therrien that he’d paid cash at a diner for a thumb drive with a database containing Therrien’s name. Some collectors told him they thought the files were partially legitimate; others knew their paper was completely falsified. Yet they continued to trade it, referring to the people they pursued as deadbeats and losers. The more Therrien learned, the more disgusted he grew with everyone involved."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-06/millions-are-hounded-for-debt-they-don-t-owe-one-victim-fought-back-with-a-vengeance

FB: "The targets were shocked by Therrien’s doggedness. In their world, complaints are common, but most victims give up after being promised they won’t be called again. One shady-debt player tells me he suspected Therrien was an undercover federal investigator because he’d gathered so much information on his business. “It’s an obsession, it’s unbelievable, an outright vigilante crusade,” another says. “It doesn’t seem to equal the harm that was done to him.”

Therrien knew his fixation seemed odd. He didn’t tell his friends and family much about his nighttime activity. But the collectors’ threats brought back feelings of rage and fear that he’d struggled to suppress since childhood."

"What makes some men sexual harassers? Science tries to explain the creeps of the world."

"Over the years, Pryor — a psychologist at Illinois State University — and others have used socially engineered situations in laboratories to study how well the test predicts people's behavior. And over time, they’ve identified these factors as the most distinctive in harassers: a lack of empathy, a belief in traditional gender sex roles and a tendency toward dominance/authoritarianism.

They also found in studies that the environment surrounding such harassers has a huge effect, Pryor said in a phone interview.

“If you take men who score high on the scale and put them in situations where the system suggests they can get away with it, they will do it,” he said. “Impunity plays a large role.”...

In recent years, psychologists trying to understand the relationship between power and sex have found that, for many men who score high on the harassment scale, the two ideas are often intertwined.

“They are two sides of the same coin and so strongly fused that it's impossible to cleave them apart,” Pryor said. “If these men have power over someone, they find it difficult not to have those sexual ideas come to mind. And more they think about it, the more that association is reinforced.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/12/20/what-makes-some-men-sexual-harassers-science-tries-to-explain-the-harvey-weinsteins-of-the-world/?utm_term=.0cd0ac29c079

FB: "Other experiments have shown that powerful people become more focused on themselves, more likely to objectify others and more likely to overestimate how much others like them.

“It becomes a kind of solipsism. You think what’s inside your head is true about the world around you,” Keltner said. “Someone like Harvey Weinstein may think 'I’m so horny right now, so the whole world must feel that way.' ”"

"Glass Beads Made in Czech Village Adorn Bodies of the World’s Tribes"

"Preciosa sells directly to 70 countries and, through regional distributors, to 40 more. In Africa, the company sells to the Masai and Samburu tribes in Kenya and Tanzania, and to the Zulus, Xhosas, Ndebele and other tribes of southern Africa.

“You go to the Masai Mara and a lot of the beads you will see in the tourist markets are cheap Chinese products,” Mr. Adler said. “But the Masai themselves will only use our beads for their personal use.”

In North America, the largest market is for home hobbyists, but several Native American tribes also purchase the beads for higher-end pieces aimed at collectors and flush tourists."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/world/europe/glass-beads-made-in-czech-village-adorn-bodies-of-the-worlds-tribes.html?_r=0

I want to know a lot more about the history of these tribes buying from the factory.

“Why Teens Find The End Of The World So Appealing”

“Teenagers are cynical, adds Aaron Yost, 16. And they should be: "To be fair, they were born into a world that their parents kind of really messed up."

Everyone here agrees: The plots in dystopia feel super familiar. That's kind of what makes the books scary — and really good. 

Think of it like this: Teen readers themselves are characters in a strange land. Rules don't make sense. School doesn't always make sense. And they don't have a ton of power.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/12/18/536007249/why-teens-find-the-end-of-the-world-so-appealing

And it’s social media that’s supposed to be making teens depressed.

“5 Signs Your Organization Might Be Headed for an Ethics Scandal”

“we see a “tone at the top” underpinned by widespread willful blindness, toxic incentives, and mechanisms that deflect scrutiny. These conditions seem to persist and metastasize. They replicate despite changes in leadership and in management systems.

Groups are more than the sum of their parts; we know we act differently when we’re on a team (or in a mob). And our explanations for ethical scandals are incomplete without a focus on group dynamics.

Although corruption, fraud, and other integrity scandals differ enormously in cause and trajectory, they correlate with particular group conditions with remarkable consistency...

In-group language: Humans need both to hide and rationalize unethical behavior, leading to the widespread use of in-group jokes and euphemisms. A rich terminology springs forth to describe bribes, from “gifts” and “commissions” to SNC Lavalin’s “project consultancy costs,” TSKJ’s “cultural arrangements,” and the funds Enron put aside to “educate Indians.” Metaphors of war and sport, common in this context, help to shift the frame away from that of individual choice...

Although leaders often complain that company culture is hard to measure, it is far easier to seek employees’ input on team culture and norms than to ask them to report fraudulent practices or call out powerful wrongdoers. Employee surveys, conversations, and focus groups can help us understand what actually happens in organizations, how seriously stated values and formal processes are taken, and which units or departments may pose the most ethical risk.“

https://hbr.org/2017/12/5-signs-your-organization-might-be-headed-for-an-ethics-scandal

FB: these are really interesting “Urgency and fear: Following corruption scandals, leaders tend to describe events in terms of pressure, necessity, and what the company needed to do to ”survive.” This perception of existential competitive threats can be used to justify the creation and maintenance of toxic incentives, and it will undermine any efforts to raise concerns.”

"How Syria's White Helmets became victims of an online propaganda machine"

"The White Helmets, officially known as the Syria Civil Defence, is a humanitarian organisation made up of 3,400 volunteers – former teachers, engineers, tailors and firefighters – who rush to pull people from the rubble when bombs rain down on Syrian civilians. They’ve been credited with saving thousands of civilians during the country’s continuing civil war.

They have also exposed, through first-hand video footage, war crimes including a chemical attack in April. Their work was the subject of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary and the recipient of two Nobel peace prize nominations.

In spite of this positive international recognition, there’s a counter-narrative pushed by a vocal network of individuals who write for alternative news sites countering the “MSM agenda”. Their views align with the positions of Syria and Russia and attract an enormous online audience, amplified by high-profile alt-right personalities, appearances on Russian state TV and an army of Twitter bots...

The Russian strategy has been very successful at shaping the online conversation about the White Helmets. By gaming the social media algorithms with a flood of content, boosted by bots, sock puppet accounts and a network of agitators, propagandists are able to create a “manufactured consensus” that gives legitimacy to fringe views. Even Russia’s official channels, such as its UK embassy Twitter accounts, post memes discrediting the organisation."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/18/syria-white-helmets-conspiracy-theories

FB: well this is despicable "Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik started falsely claiming that Isis was the only target and throwing doubt on the bombings of infrastructure and civilian sites.

The same propaganda machine scooped up fringe anti-American activists, bloggers and researchers who believe the White Helmets are terrorists, giving them a platform on state TV and amplifying their articles through social media.

There is no evidence to suggest that these activists and bloggers are knowingly spreading disinformation, although the stories are often thinly sourced."

“What a Cross-Dressing Lady Knight Taught Me About Gender and Sexuality”

“My freshman year at Saint Francis began in the fall of 1999, a time when there were very few YA novels about gay teens. But even if more had existed, I would have been too afraid to read them: afraid both to be seen with these books, and afraid to identify with their main characters. The Song of the Lioness series let me think about the experience of being closeted in a way that was safely distanced from my real life. In Alanna, I found a heroine who thrives despite her inability to come out, and despite the psychological costs of remaining in the closet.

The novels also held another truth, one I wouldn’t be able to fully register for another few years: how important it is to fight back against all those voices — both outward and inward — that claim that being either female or effeminate is disgusting and shameful.”

https://electricliterature.com/what-a-cross-dressing-lady-knight-taught-me-about-gender-and-sexuality-bbb64a678d07?source=linkShare-7f7e96203de2-1513611865

FB: If you read Tamora Pierce as a kid, this will give you the warm-fuzzies. “At school I wanted to be forgotten, to erase myself like an Etch-a-Sketch when you shook it hard enough. But in front of the new computer, chatting with all my new friends, I wanted so much more. I wanted to burn with a light that you wouldn’t soon forget.”

"Are Heroes and Psychopaths Cut from the Same Cloth?"

"Comparing the profiles of first responders with the community sample, seemed to suggest, at least on the surface, that there is a connection between psychopathic traits and heroic behaviour. Unsurprisingly, first responders reported greater off-duty heroism, stranger altruism, and charity giving than the community sample. More interestingly, they scored higher on all measures of psychopathy and its components... 

even though first responders generally were more likely to engage in off-duty heroism than civilians, and to be higher in all psychopathic traits, those first responders who were higher than average in the more socially aversive traits (i.e. psychopathic traits other than boldness), were less likely to engage in such behaviour compared to their colleagues with less aversive personalities."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/unique-everybody-else/201712/are-heroes-and-psychopaths-cut-the-same-cloth?amp

I guess this is supports all the 2000s shows about anti-heros

"The Sad Saps of Neoliberal Reddit Trying to Make Globalism Cool Again"

“Ocean, who asked to be quoted as his Reddit moniker, explains that he had a distinct vision for r/neoliberal’s rebirth. The term was thrown around so much after the election, why not lean into the momentum? “The goals were multifaceted,” he says. “First, to have a place to joke around and have fun, but also to have a place for serious discussion of politics, policy, and empirical research.”

By the spring of this year, the subreddit had emerged as the de facto online water-cooler for young people who still put their trust in the dominant 20th-century economic policies. When Ocean and his posse took over, r/neoliberal had less than 100 subscribers. Today, that number has spiked to 25,000. The moderators keep the community lively and well-stocked, with a curated schedule of discussion topics and an online book club. (At the moment they’re reading The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford.) To a certain extent, Ocean’s approximation of the subculture he’s fostered is correct. His forum is an environment where defused, collegiate economic dialogue can take place—like this thread in support of the Labour Party’s land value tax...

It’s only natural that a neoliberal take on online dada-ism would come off a tad hollow and borrowed. And Ocean himself regards the memes as little more than a strategic gateway to welcome newcomers to the more serious economic threads. It’s a typical neoliberal gambit, really: finding a niche and exploiting the market.”

https://splinternews.com/the-sad-saps-of-neoliberal-reddit-trying-to-make-global-1821123536

I did not realize. that people actively referred to themselves as neoliberals. 

FB: “It’s fascinating that as the American political spectrum feels more volatile than ever before, with a newly impassioned base organizing around a federal living wage and single-payer health insurance, there is still a population of 20-somethings among us who feel compelled to fight for corporate capitalism. This is a cause Ocean takes very, very seriously. Beyond the memes, beyond the boneheaded economic debates, and beyond any lingering shreds of irony, he tells me his collective maintains an unshakable faith in neoliberalism.”