“Friendship is a root of freedom”

“When peasants were ‘freed,’ during Hobbes’ time, it often meant that they had been forced from their lands and their means of subsistence, leaving them free to sell their labor for a wage, or starve. It is no coincidence that this lonely conception of freedom arose at the same time as the European witch trials, the enclosure of common lands, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade, and the colonization and genocide of the Americas. At the same time as the meaning of freedom was divorced from friendship and interdependence, the lived connections between people and places were being dismembered...

In neoliberal friendship, our everyday lives aren’t tangled up together: we don’t really need each other to live. But these insipid tendencies don’t mean that friendships are pointless; only that friendship itself is a terrain of struggle. The dominant order works to usher its subjects into flimsy relationships where nothing is at stake, and to infuse intimacy with violence and domination...

There is no individual that comes before the dense network of relations we’re enmeshed in. We are always shaping our worlds, and being shaped by them. Freedom can mean nothing other than the active participation in affect: the expansion of what we’re capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together...

Freedom is the space that opens when knee-jerk reactions and stifling habits are suspended. It is the parent learning to trust their kid, or the teen who flees a violent home with support from friends. It is the scream of refusal that elicits rage and action from others. But the key is that one never does any of this alone, whether a humble gesture causing a subtle shift, or a decisive act catalyzing dramatic change. Freedom, gentleness and ferocity always comes from—and feeds back into—the web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed. ”

https://joyfulmilitancy.com/2017/12/11/friendship-as-a-root-of-freedom/

FB: “ these enclosures carve out a void for the ‘free individual’ of modern capitalism: a sad and lonely fiction, walled-in by self-interest, and based on the ideal of a healthy, patriarchal, white, rational, property-owning man. This uprooted being sees his rootlessness—his very incapacity to make and sustain transformative connections—as a feat of excellence.”

Or

“ “Freedom” and “friend” share the same early Indo-European root: *fri, or *pri, meaning “love.”[7] This root made its way into Gothic, Norse, Celtic, Hindi, Russian and German. To be ‘free’ was not to be unrestricted, but to be a friend among loved ones.”

"The surprising history of the wolf-whistle"

"So where does it come from? The clue is in its very name.

“My theory I got from talking to an old shepherd,” says John Lucas, author of A Brief History of Whistling. “He was this very knowledgeable guy, trained sheepdogs, and he ran through a whole bunch of calls with me and did one that sounded exactly like a wolf whistle. I said, ‘Christ, that’s a bit politically incorrect!’ and he said, ‘No, it’s kosher, it’s from Albania’.”... 

But by the 1930s, that two-note whistle had started being associated with an altogether different type of wolf – the sexual predator. Lucas saw that use for himself as a boy during World War Two. He lived in rural Leicestershire and there were a lot of America GIs – soldiers – stationed near his home. Lucas and his friends would follow them around hoping to get some chewing gum. “They’d hang around outside the church hall, outside dances, and they’d whistle at women as they went in. That’s when I first heard it. Quite how it transformed from Albanian sheep farmers to GIs I couldn’t guess.”"

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180322-the-surprising-history-of-the-wolf-whistle

"On St. Patrick’s Day, Mexico remembers the Irishmen who fought for Mexico against the US"

"Many were recent immigrants, fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland, who had joined the US Army for the promise of land and an enlistment bounty.

The reasons they deserted are complicated, Paredes says. As Irishmen and Roman Catholics, these immigrants faced a lot of discrimination in the overwhelmingly Protestant United States. “When the US actually went to war, many of them — being strong Catholics — saw what they considered an unfair invasion of a foreign country," Paredes says.

The Irish deserters formed the core of the "Battalion of Foreigners," which was later renamed the "Batallón de San Patricio." Roman Catholic deserters from Germany and other European nations also joined them, as did some foreign residents of Mexico City. There were also several African Americans who had run away from slavery in the southern United States."

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-17/st-patrick-s-day-mexico-remembers-irishmen-who-fought-mexico-against-us

"Millennials Are Screwed"

"For decades, most of the job growth in America has been in low-wage, low-skilled, temporary and short-term jobs. The United States simply produces fewer and fewer of the kinds of jobs our parents had. This explains why the rates of “under-employment” among high school and college grads were rising steadily long before the recession. “The way to think about it,” says Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist and author of The Great Risk Shift, “is that there are waves in the economy, but the tide has been going out for a long time.”...

The pressure to deliver immediate returns became relentless. When stocks were long-term investments, shareholders let CEOs spend money on things like worker benefits because they contributed to the company’s long-term health. Once investors lost the ability to look beyond the next earnings report, however, any move that didn’t boost short-term profits was tantamount to treason.

The new paradigm took over corporate America...

Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies... This transformation is affecting the entire economy, but millennials are on its front lines. Where previous generations were able to amass years of solid experience and income in the old economy, many of us will spend our entire working lives intermittently employed in the new one. We’ll get less training and fewer opportunities to negotiate benefits through unions (which used to cover 1 in 3 workers and are now down to around 1 in 10). Plus, as Uber and its “gig economy” ilk perfect their algorithms, we’ll be increasingly at the mercy of companies that only want to pay us for the time we’re generating revenue and not a second more."

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

The design of this article is beautiful, amazing. Like, the article has credits at the end

Real facts, that's why I clicked, even though I didn't want to be depressed.

Like 60% of the way down there are some great animations breaking down housing

"Seven Insights to Help You Make Sense of Gun Violence"

"For these economically insecure, less-religious white men, “the gun is a ubiquitous symbol of power and independence, two things white males are worried about,” says Froese. “Guns, therefore, provide a way to regain their masculinity, which they perceive has been eroded by increasing economic impotency.”

In Froese’s view, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in the lives of these men. When read in the context of other studies, this research describes a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes... 

“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families,” she says. “For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband and a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability—very motivating emotions.”

Investing guns with this kind of moral and emotional meaning has many consequences, the researchers say. As Froese says, “Put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills. For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative which many white men long to feel a part of.”... 

Despite these worrying trends, we can take comfort in the fact that all the evidence we have indicates that the vast majority of humans do not want to hurt each other."

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/seven_insights_to_help_you_make_sense_of_gun_violence

Read to the end, it will comfort you. 

FB: "Conservatives and liberals may never agree about specific gun-control policies; those are political questions. But we might come together on one, hopefully non-political point: People who feel connected to something larger than themselves are happier, healthier, and less likely to hurt other people. By helping each other to stay connected with a diverse group of people who might help give our lives meaning, we can reduce the probability of violence."

"The Plague of ‘Whiteness’"

"But hold on. Let’s not move too quickly to sense-making; as we’ll see, it isn’t always our ally... 

There is always a point in the life of white-supremacy and imperialism where the sense-making apparatuses breakdown. There is no mystery about the fact that US bombing raids, drone attacks, invasions, assassinations and so on always exceed any plausible strategic purpose. The occupation of Iraq was conducted as though, rather like Khalid Masood’s massacre, it was designed to thwart all strategic purposes. The destruction of the Iraqi state, the defiling of cities, the training and operation of death squads. Afghanistan, still rolling on, a war which saw even higher rates of aerial bombardments than in Iraq, with a statelet rump of warlords, patriarchs and religious fundamentalists mobilised in a war against other warlords, patriarchs and religious fundamentalists... 

In her updating of Fanon’s work, systematically deploying the Lacanian categories that Fanon himself occasionally alluded to, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks argues that what we call ‘whiteness’ is rooted in unconscious signifiers. What does this mean?

Well, you’ll have noticed how invisible whiteness often seems to be. Barbara Fields points out that we only tend to see race when a non-white subject is involved: that’s why there are scholars and black scholars, women and black women... 

the decline of traditional fathers and the heteronormative sexual relations that they prop up, is creating all sorts of chaos in the Kingdom of Oedipus. The idea that boys are destined to be men, and girls are destined for men, is disappearing. It’s no longer really clear who is supposed to be fucking whom... this is a situation that would tend to select for what Lacan called a psychotic structure, based on the foreclosure of law and limits. And without the paternal law to anchor experience, to give it a coherence and continuity, psychotic experience can be one of being bombarded, blasted, assailed by bits of reality, objects, voices, numbers, “incandescent alphabets” as Annie Rogers put it. The spontaneous self-cure for this is to create a delusion that somehow pulls all this together... 

If we rush to make sense of these things, we are unconsciously relying on the signifiers of race to do so. We are making things appear to make a spurious sense, covering over the disconnects and nonsense of this terrifying, chaotic global system, with the unwitting aid of whiteness. And that’s reconciling us, in a way, to a status quo that should horrify us."

http://salvage.zone/online-exclusive/the-plague-of-whiteness/

FB: "whiteness promises an impossible fullness, an unreal plenitude of being. That’s what Seshadri-Crooks means in calling it a ‘phallic signifier’; it is the signifier that can say it all. The idea that one can have access to some maximum of enjoyment in the community of whiteness. Now, there’s something quite uncanny and frightening about the idea of absolute being, absolute enjoyment. It’s like this: if you have everything, you don’t want for anything; there’s nothing left to desire. Life becomes horrendous. Not only that, but insofar as limit is law in an anthropological sense, to be without limit is to be free to do anything: completely impossible as a basis for community. So, lack has to be restored somewhere, and it is restored in the signifier of blackness. And from within this binary, rooted in the unconscious, secretes racial fantasies, fantasies of lawless omnipotence, frontier fantasies, empire fantasies, slaveholder fantasies."

"Counting Calories Is Not the Key to Weight Loss, New Study Finds"

"The research lends strong support to the notion that diet quality, not quantity, is what helps people lose and manage their weight most easily in the long run. It also suggests that health authorities should shift away from telling the public to obsess over calories and instead encourage Americans to avoid processed foods that are made with refined starches and added sugar, like bagels, white bread, refined flour and sugary snacks and beverages, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University...

The new study stands apart from many previous weight-loss trials because it did not set extremely restrictive carbohydrate, fat or caloric limits on people and emphasized that they focus on eating whole or “real” foods — as much as they needed to avoid feeling hungry.

“The unique thing is that we didn’t ever set a number for them to follow,” Dr. Gardner said... 

Dr. Gardner said it is not that calories don’t matter. After all, both groups ultimately ended up consuming fewer calories on average by the end of the study, even though they were not conscious of it. The point is that they did this by focusing on nutritious whole foods that satisfied their hunger."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/well/eat/counting-calories-weight-loss-diet-dieting-low-carb-low-fat.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=https://m.facebook.com/

FB:" the most important message of the study was that a “high quality diet” produced substantial weight loss and that the percentage of calories from fat or carbs did not matter, which is consistent with other studies, including many that show that eating healthy fats and carbs can help prevent heart disease, diabetes and other diseases."

"The Forgotten Father of Epigenetics"

"The importance of cultural context in discovery is demonstrated by the contributions of Ernest Everett Just, an internationally recognized embryologist of the early 20th century who was African American. A graduate of Dartmouth College (1907) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 1916), Just was a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC... 

His hypothesis, which he called the “theory of genetic restriction,” clashed with the gene theory that was then becoming dominant. I believe that Just’s theory—his model of the developing cell—represents a microcosm of his vision of the perfect society, which, in turn, was strongly influenced by sociological concepts circulating within the African American intellectual community at the time... 

Whereas embryologists, including Just, believed that all components of the cell were important in inheritance and development, Morgan and the new geneticists believed that the nucleus played the dominant role and that genes controlled all events of the cell throughout the developmental process... 

In Just’s view, the nucleus is more like a passive holding pen than the seat of power that the geneticists had imagined. The important players are the cytoplasmic agents, which, with help from genes, are free to go about their vital tasks of giving the various cell types their particular properties. Genes play a secondary role of absorbing this or that factor. We know now that Just was incorrect in denying a central role for genes. His theory was too cytoplasm-centered. But Morgan was not correct, either; his theory was too nucleocentric."

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-forgotten-father-of-epigenetics?platform=hootsuite

FB: The title is a bit of an exaggeration, but the history of science here is really interesting. "Just’s theory has many redeeming qualities, and he was uniquely positioned to advance these ideas because he was able to see things differently than his peers. He held convictions that were not only rooted in his experimental work, but were also informed by his particular life experiences. These convictions gave him an intensity of purpose that his peers did not have."

"The legendary Dahomey Amazons are the real-life all-women’s army in Black Panther"

"According to a beautiful comic by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the Dahomey Warriors first appeared as part of the entourage of the King of Dahomey’s bodyguard in the seventeenth century. They were to ensure his personal protection and guard the royal palace. Soon, the women’s number and prominence grew – from a troop of 800 to 6000. They would later go to fight in battles against other kingdoms as Dahomey began to expand, lost their male soldiers in war, and were threatened and attacked by the French.

The Dahomey Warriors were known to be especially skillful, competitive, and brave. Their drills and military parades were always performed to dancing, music, and songs and their weapons were sometimes used as choreographic props. As expressed in their songs, their goal was to outshine men in every respect, and European travelers observed that they were better organized, swifter and much braver than male soldiers. As such, the King would send them to war as opposed to their male counterparts and European soldiers would also hesitate to kill them as they were often young women."

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/the-legendary-dahomey-amazons-are-the-real-life-all-womens-army-in-black-panther

There aren't citations here? But cool history if accurate 

"Ordinary Americans carried out inhumane acts for Trump"

"The men and women who reportedly handcuffed small children and the elderly, separated a child from his mother and held others without food for 20 hours, are undoubtedly "ordinary" people. What I mean by that, is that these are, in normal circumstances, people who likely treat their neighbors and co-workers with kindness and do not intentionally seek to harm others. That is chilling, as it is a reminder that authoritarians have no trouble finding the people they need to carry out their acts of cruelty. They do not need special monsters; they can issue orders to otherwise unexceptional people who will carry them out dutifully."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-airport-inhumanity-20170206-story.html

"Why do poor Americans eat so unhealthfully? Because junk food is the only indulgence they can afford"

"For parents raising their kids in poverty, having to say "no" was a part of daily life. Their financial circumstances forced them to deny their children's requests — for a new pair of Nikes, say, or a trip to Disneyland — all the time. This wasn't tough for the kids alone; it also left the poor parents feeling guilty and inadequate.

Next to all the things poor parents truly couldn't afford, junk food was something they could often say "yes" to. Poor parents told me they could almost always scrounge up a dollar to buy their kids a can of soda or a bag of chips. So when poor parents could afford to oblige such requests, they did.

Honoring requests for junk food allowed poor parents to show their children that they loved them, heard them and could meet their needs. As one low-income single mother told me: "They want it, they'll get it. One day they'll know. They'll know I love them, and that's all that matters.""

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-singh-food-deserts-nutritional-disparities-20180207-story.html

Obviously food deserts and stuff are still a thing. This article is weirdly over-simplifying about the problem of adequate nutrition. But I found it to be a compelling perspective.

Related: santa claus when you're poor

"Loneliness Is a Warning Sign to Be Social"

"“Loneliness is a warning system,” says Louise Hawkley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. It is our body telling us we’re breaking from the social bonds that nourished us as a species. “We’re failing to satisfy our fundamental drive to connect with other humans,” Hawkley says. Feeling isolated switches our bodies into self-preservation mode. “What happens with people who are lonely for a long time is their threat-defense programs get activated,” says Steve Cole, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. “The body interprets loneliness as threatening.”... 

They found that lonely brains respond less positively to pleasant images than non-lonely brains, and more strongly to images of violence and unpleasant social situations. Loneliness spurs the brain into a hyper-vigilant state, unable to relax. The lonely brain doesn’t passively take the world in, but actively interprets it as an unfriendly place.

Hawkley found that lonely individuals take longer to fall asleep, wake up more during the night, and sleep less deeply. “The lonely person’s feeling of not being safe, socially safe, could contribute to disrupted sleep,” she says... 

At any given moment, 20 to 40 percent of adults in Western countries feel lonely, and experience these physical changes in their bodies whether they are aware of it or not. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing unless it occurs chronically,” says Leah Doane, a psychologist at Arizona State University. But up to 30 percent of lonely sufferers can’t seem to kick it, and it’s the chronic loneliness that harms us. In a meta-analysis from 2010, researchers found that lonely individuals are 26 percent more likely to have an early death, twice the rate of obese individuals."

http://m.nautil.us/blog/-loneliness-is-a-warning-sign-to-be-social

"Migraine photophobia originating in cone-driven retinal pathways"

"To determine whether there is a colour preference to migraine-type photophobia, we assessed the effects of white and four different colours of light on: (i) proportion of migraine patients who reported changes in headache intensity; (ii) magnitude of change in pain rating; (iii) number of patients who report change in sensory perception other than headache intensity; and (iv) spread of headache from its original site...

At the highest intensity (100 cd·m −2 ), nearly 80% of the patients demonstrated an intensification of headache; this was true for all colours except the green, which affected half that proportion of patients. Unexpectedly, exposure to green light reduced pain intensity in ∼20% of the patients...

To explain the psychophysical findings, we sought to determine whether electrical signal generated by the retina in response to green light differed from those generated by the other colours... Collectively, these ERGs suggest that activation of cone-mediated (but not rod) retinal pathways can play a role in the weak ‘photophobic’ effects of green and strong ‘photophobic’ effects of white, blue and red."

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/139/7/1971/2464334

There is a weird point in here about excluding red light from the thalamus-stimulation experiments, so I'm not in love with the conclusions they gathered there and I didn't pull that part. 

I wonder why green light would be treated differently by the brain - or, put another way, why other wavelengths of light might be translated into pain signals.

"The Sentencing of Larry Nassar Was Not ‘Transformative Justice.’ Here’s Why."

"We decry the system and advocate for change that is long overdue. Yet when that system ensnares people we loathe, we may feel a sense of satisfaction. When we see defendants as symbols of what we most fear, and that which we most greatly despise, we are confronted with a true test of our belief that no justice can be done under this system.

Yet like all tests of faith, this moment calls on us to recommit ourselves to true transformative justice. And to do that, we must remind ourselves what transformative justice is, and why it looks nothing like the civil death that Aquilina delivered last month... 

It is a community process developed by anti-violence activists of color, in particular, who wanted to create responses to violence that do what criminal punishment systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again... 

Understanding that harm originates from situations dominated by stress, scarcity, and oppression, one way to prevent violence is to make sure that people have support to get the things they need. We must also create a culture that enables people to actually take accountability for violence and harm. The criminal punishment system promises accountability for violence, but we know that in actuality it is a form of targeted violence against poor people, people with disabilities, and people of color, and doesn’t reduce violence in our society... 

in a truly transformative model of justice, we would not allow those harms to be shielded by powerful people or institutions. We would insist on focusing not just on individuals but also the institutions and structures that perpetuate, foster, and maintain interpersonal violence. In Nassar’s case, this would include the administrators at Michigan State University and USA Gymnastics who ignored initial disclosures of sexual assault and took no actions to stop his violent behavior. Judge Aquilina’s ruling accomplished none of these aims."

https://injusticetoday.com/the-sentencing-of-larry-nassar-was-not-transformative-justice-here-s-why-a2ea323a6645

I'm definitely not mad about Judge Aquilina's ruling, but it's really compelling to think about justice systemically. 

Related: The great stink; 

FB: "A truly transformative justice would mean that a single survivor coming forward to tell their tale of harm years ago would actually have been believed (the first time). We would immediately focus on addressing the harms perpetrated, centering on the concerns and experiences of the person who was harmed. Next, we would also focus on the person responsible for the harm — but without disregarding his or her humanity. "

“A Chinese Casino Has Conquered a Piece of America”

“Per capita, there’s almost certainly more Chinese money moving through Saipan than anywhere else in the world. The unprecedented flow of capital has allowed Imperial Pacific to operate in ways that would be unthinkable within the 50 states. When laws have become inconvenient to the company, they’ve been flouted; when the requirements of its contract with the government have become onerous, they’ve been removed; when legislators have tried to interfere, they’ve been ignored. Imperial Pacific has made millions of dollars in payments to family members of the territory’s governor, Ralph Deleon Guerrero Torres. Remarkably, the company has also enjoyed the support of a gold-plated roster of American politicos. Its advisers and board of directors have included former directors of the CIA and FBI and former governors of Mississippi, New York, and Pennsylvania...

For visitors, Saipan’s chief charm is the combination of Americana and the exotic, such as Little League games with snack stations of taro and breadfruit. “Exotic” cuts both ways, of course, and several businesses offer Asian tourists access to American eccentricities, like assault rifles. “Experience the thrill of firing a real gun,” reads an advertisement for a local shooting range. “In Saipan, it’s legal and is guaranteed by the United States Constitutions 3rd Amendment.”... In the 1970s, to encourage development, Washington exempted the CNMI from minimum wage and immigration laws, and major retailers rushed into Saipan, eager to label as “Made in U.S.A.” clothing sewn by workers making $2.15 an hour. The industry eventually collapsed, taking with it Saipan’s tax base. A 2011 cash shortage was so severe that the hospital ran out of bedsheets...

The strongest desire among China’s wealthy is to get their money—ill-gotten or otherwise—out of the country, safe from the threat of government seizure. One prevalent method for magicking money across the border, in defiance of strict capital controls, begins with companies called junkets. They bring wealthy clients from the mainland, where gambling is illegal, to the VIP rooms of casinos in Macau. There, the junkets extend the clients credit to play baccarat, a game of luck at which they’re likely to win or lose a negligible amount. At the end of play, clients cash out their balance in the currency of their choice. The debt is collected in yuan, in China. Everybody wins: The clients have converted yuan into dollars or euros or sterling, and the middlemen get a cut.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-02-15/a-chinese-company-has-conquered-a-piece-of-america

FB: it’s like a real-life James Bond setting “Imperial Pacific’s overnight domination of Saipan has generated deep unease among the island’s citizens, many of whom are convinced that their home has been bought. The company, they believe, set out to take over a little piece of America, politicians and all. Given the billions of dollars at stake, it’s not surprising someone would try. What’s shocking is that, so far, it seems to be working.”

"Torah and Tampax: An Ethnography of My Ancient Jewish Menstrual Cycle"

"“Once, my mother, who you never met, told me to get her pads from the store. I was so, so angry,” she said. Grandma Bertie’s voice has that tone when someone is recalling a distant memory, something just beyond their grasp. “I didn’t want to be seen with it. In those days, pads came wrapped individually, in little brown bags. I asked my mother if boys ever had something like this to worry about, she said no. That made me mad, too.”

I realize that in no other other circumstance would I ever hear this much about my own Grandmother’s menstrual cycle. I realize that I am hearing a rather obvious fact, that my great-grandmother menstruated, that it is in fact one reason in the list of cosmic ways that I am here today. I have known my grandmother my whole life, and have never asked her about her experiences having a period and a body."

https://medium.com/@emilyrogal/torah-and-tampax-an-ethnography-of-my-ancient-jewish-menstrual-cycle-f15aec9c618d

“My six years covering neo-Nazis: 'The system is rigged to benefit white people'”

“One of the criticisms of recent reporting on white nationalism has been that too many of the stories are told through a white lens, specifically a white male lens. Jamelle Bouie at Slate argued that the overwhelming whiteness of American political reporting has been a real impediment to understanding how dangerous these groups are. What do you think of that?

I think that’s absolutely true. I see the challenges for anyone else to get that kind of access [that I got]. I have a huge leg up by being white, Norwegian, and bald. In Charlottesville, I brought my photographer friend to see Matthew [Heimbach, the white nationalist leader] and his guys at the house they were renting. As we got there, there had already started these rumors circulating that she was Jewish. When we got there, there was a level of hostility that completely took me by surprise. They gave her, as a test, a pizza with bacon on it and sort of made her eat it.

It really drove home the challenges for anyone who’s not white and male to cover these things. I’m not the traditional victim of far right nationalism. I’m not a victim of racism. This beat would benefit from having someone who is the victim of it, who feels that daily...

Is this a movement that journalists should be taking seriously or not?

Of course we should we should cover these people, because it informs so much of our current president’s way of way of thinking. But we need to put it into context. The Klan will put some flyers on some cars in a parking lot in Raleigh, North Carolina, and all of a sudden, all the journalists go there to cover the Klan and you know that’s well and good. But we need to talk about you know the bigger issue, about how what they say and what they believe has made its way into into the mainstream. We can’t just sort of fearmonger that “oh the Klan is marching again.””

FB: “You write in your book: “The far right in America, at least the incarnation I spent years covering is destined to fail …[but] white supremacy is doing just fine without the far right.” What did you mean by that?

You just have to look at the world we live in. Look at the prison system, look at the rate we’re incarcerating people of color. The system is perfectly rigged to benefit white people. So that’s why I think this very open form of nationalism and white supremacy isn’t going to work, because there is no need for it.”

"Evolution doesn’t give a damn what you think a brain region is called"

"The danger is that naming a bit of brain makes us think it is a discrete thing, a bit that just lifts right out, which we can study and marvel at in isolation. But how evolution (and development) conspire to disperse and wire together neurons pays no attention to these names.

Consider primary motor and somatosensory cortex. They sit next to each other. But they appear in different chapters in textbooks. Entirely separate fields of research have grown up around them. Work on primary somatosensory cortex looks at how the activity of its neurons represent touch. Work on motor cortex looks how the activity of its neurons represent movement. These are starkly different: work on somatosensory cortex focuses on its inputs; work on motor cortex focuses on its outputs. They are treated so separately that papers merely showing the flow of activity from one to the other end up in high-profile journals.

But these bits of cortex are next to each other. Either we believe that there are border guards who turn away the motor cortex neuron axons at the crossing with somatosensory cortex, and the same from the other direction. Or we have to assume that these two names loosely delineate a continuous network of neurons by the fact that a small set of neurons in somatosensory cortex get direct sensory input, and small set of neurons in motor cortex connect to the spinal cord. Most of the neurons in these bits of cortex neither get sensory input from the thalamus nor project to the spinal cord. They are wired to other neurons all over cortex, and very much to each other...

Our best evidence that it is not — that we can cling to our names of all the bits — come from studies where we cut a bit out or turn a bit off. When we cut out area X and we see a “deficit” in behaviour Y of an animal (like tying its shoelaces), then we think “aha! Area X is for tying shoelaces”. No. For starters, we never see a complete and permanent end to behaviour Y. We normally see that the animal is simply worse at doing or learning Y — not that it cannot do Y at all. The brain can carry on doing Y just fine, thanks, just not as well — there is massive redundancy in the brain. Like what you’d find if it was a giant bag of cells, wired together.

Moreover, seeing that behaviour Y gets worse logically tells us little about what area X is actually doing. It just tells us that damaging area X causes problems. Which on reflection isn’t surprising as you just ripped a chunk out of the brain. "

https://medium.com/the-spike/evolution-doesnt-give-a-damn-what-you-think-a-brain-region-is-called-1c9c5f80ab89

Related: amygdala doesn't do what you think

"The Weaponization of Nostalgia: How Afghan Miniskirts Became the Latest Salvo in the War on Terror"

"US national security adviser McMaster showed Donald Trump 1970s-era photos of Afghan women wearing miniskirts in order to convince him to maintain the 16-year-long US military presence in the country, the Washington Post reported this week... 

Like the Europeans who supported the “civilizing mission” of colonialism before them, this new generation of colonial feminists jumped on the bandwagon to “free” Afghanistan’s women without considering what liberation at gunpoint would deliver.

Sixteen years later, the US is still occupying Afghanistan, and women are hardly freer. Indeed, heavy-handed US tactics have isolated large segments of the population and fueled the Taliban insurgency, which is now accompanied by an ISIS insurgency as well. While there are bright spots of progress across the country, these are often in spite of the US occupation and its support for the corrupt central government... 

As Mohammad Qayoumi, who published a book of old photogaphs explained: “Remembering Afghanistan’s hopeful past only makes its present misery seem more tragic. But it is important to know that disorder, terrorism, and violence against schools that educate girls are not inevitable. I want to show Afghanistan’s youth of today how their parents and grandparents really lived.”

But for the broader English-speaking public, the point of these articles is often not reducible to dreams of a better future, nostalgia nor historical learning – especially when one considers how few other articles about Afghanistan on any other topic manage to go viral. Why is it that non-Afghans only care to learn about Afghanistan when there are pictures of women in miniskirts involved?

The point of these essays is to suggest that before 1980, Afghanistan was on its way to becoming a “westernized” society. Some even note that if the US hadn’t supported Islamist extremists, it might have remained one. This appears to be how the images were explained to Trump, essentially to suggest he shouldn’t give up on Afghanistan because Afghans could, essentially, be “civilized” again."

https://ajammc.com/2017/09/06/weaponization-nostalgia-afghan-miniskirts/

FB: imagine how shockingly insulting this would be "The idea that these photos reveal a time when “women were free” seems to equate “women’s freedom” with miniskirts. This is essentially the same standard, albeit in reverse, used by those who measure women’s freedom in terms of how covered women are.

Instead of defining women’s freedom in terms of social, political, and economic rights – like literacy, access to healthcare, and so on – both positions reduce “freedom” to how much skin is showing or not showing. A photograph becomes all it takes to decide that women are free or not free."

"PLEASE KEEP YOUR AMERICAN FLAGS OFF MY HIJAB"

"2. Know that the hijab--for *me* at least--represents a rejection of materialism, of capitalism, of euro-centric beauty standards (among other significance) and draping an American flag over it erases almost everything the hijab means to me.

3. Know the American flag represents oppression, torture, sexual violence, slavery, patriarchy, and military & cultural hegemony for people of color around the world whose homes and families have been destroyed and drone-striked by the very person/former president whose campaign images this one seeks to replicate.

4. Know that the 50 stars represent 50 states where indigenous people were forcibly removed and systematically cleansed and assimilated -- and that you cannot hold this flag in one hand and tweet #NoDAPL with the other.

5. Know that patriotism is not a form of liberation, but is inherently oppressive. Especially given the violent history of the birth of this country--and all others like it--on the backs of Black slaves (many of whom were Muslim) and indigenous genocide. Trump's presidency is the logical outcome of the racist systems and institutions of white supremacy that this country was built on and this flag represents."

http://www.joojooazad.com/2017/01/keep-your-american-flags-off-my-hijab.html?m=1

FB: "7. Know that if the only time you are comfortable uplifting Muslim woman is when her image has been crafted by a white man and is draped in the American flag, I cannot call you my ally. 

I understand the good intentions, but my liberation will not come from framing my body with a flag that has flown every time my people have fallen.

And I hope yours will not either."

"Meet the ‘data thugs’ out to expose shoddy and questionable research"

"Soon, Brown and Heathers were asking Guéguen and the French Psychological Society about the numbers. The pair says Guéguen failed to adequately address their questions, and the society agreed that their critique seemed well-grounded. So late last year, the men did something that many scientists might find out of bounds: They went public, sharing their concerns with a reporter for Ars Technica, which published a story, and posting their critiques on a blog. (Guéguen declined to discuss the matter with Science; the society says a university panel is examining the papers.) 

When it comes to correcting scientific literature, styles vary. Some scientists prefer to go through “proper channels,” such as private conversations or letters to the editor. Others leave anonymous comments on online forums, such as PubPeer, set up to discuss papers. Then there is the more public approach Brown and Heathers are taking.

The two watchdogs have been remarkably effective at uncovering problematic publications. So far, Brown estimates that the analyses he and Heathers have done, sometimes working independently and often with other collaborators, have led to corrections to dozens of papers and the full retraction of roughly 10 more. That total includes five papers retracted over the past year or so by Brian Wansink, a high-profile nutrition researcher at Cornell University... 

Despite the charged nature of their work—after all, careers can be on the line—Brown and Heathers have attracted surprisingly little criticism from their peers in science. In part, that’s likely because of their strategy of gently but methodically ratcheting up the pressure on authors and journals. For example, the Wansink analysis, like others the pair has undertaken, began with “some very polite” emails asking for data from the researcher’s department, Brown says, as well as from Cornell’s Office of Research Integrity and Assurance. “But both of those stopped replying to us once—we assume—our questions became too awkward.” (The university has said it is investigating the papers.) At about the same time, Brown and two collaborators—Jordan Anaya and Tim van der Zee, a graduate student at Leiden University in the Netherlands—were working on a preprint that they posted in PeerJ titled “Statistical heartburn: An attempt to digest four pizza publications from the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.”... 

One big obstacle, they say, is that many are reluctant to rock the boat. “Some people have a block on criticizing others, even to themselves,” Brown says. Their reaction to evident problems is to flinch, as if a scientific superego is saying: “Am I allowed to get this professor’s article and read it? And will something bad happen to me if I recalculate the mean?”

Another hurdle is an overabundance of trust. “Other people really sort of lack the mindset that this might even be necessary,” Heathers says. “There’s no guide to spotting errors. There’s no text that you can read. What we have done so far has been quite ad hoc.”"

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/meet-data-thugs-out-expose-shoddy-and-questionable-research?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=datathugs-17890

I don't know why but I'm totally charmed. 

FB: "The duo concedes that their assertive style might rub some scientists the wrong way. Heathers, who has called himself “a data thug,” notes that in academia “the squeaky wheel gets Tasered.” But other researchers laud the pair as the vanguard of a movement to make science more rigorous." it's totally possible that they are the Worst in person, but I kinda really want to hang out with them at a conference cocktail party