"The classist vilification of the Black Friday shopper"

"This was in a Walmart with a majority black staff and clientele, and it was kind of covered in a way that the LA riots were. There were helicopter shots of throngs of black bodies; there was a lot of the same kind of discourse, the fear of a black underclass coming for Beverly Hills, coming for your stuff in your gated communities.

There were similarities in the way the coverage was racialized, footage of people ransacking goods while there’s a whole host of social problems and they’re living in a veritable police state. It looked identical if you turned the sound off; it was very striking.

So from there, I started to look at the history of the crowd and the discourse around crowds. Really from the rise of historical modernity, crowds have been associated with danger, disease, race. Today, for example, we see how Trump has mobilized mobs...

After the 9/11 attacks, [George W.] Bush told people to go out and shop, that it’s your civic duty. So blaming Black Friday shoppers for shopping sends a contradictory message. I think it’s also class shaming."

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/20/18103890/black-friday-shopping-coverage-classism-racism

It's true - there is a kind of voyeurism, a kind of sick superior glee in watching the images of hordes of people swarming big box stores, images of chaos and destruction in their wake, delivered to you on your full-price television in your warm, comfortable home while you eat copious leftovers. 

It's the new Thanksgiving Day Parade - bring your children to gawk and laugh at the undignified shopping experiences of poorer people. 

FB: "in very financially troubled times, Black Friday might be people’s only chance to have access to certain things, to buy what they need.

Also, the public is consistently told that in order to participate in our culture, they should be engaging in consumerism. It makes us feel this sense of connection, a sense of belonging to something."

"APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys" 

"something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s... 

just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender-role stereotypes, it also failed to take men’s gendered experiences into account. Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach, says Levant.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors"

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner.aspx?fbclid=IwAR1sXHtCpQbkxfIfkurzXAGdwubZbYFBiNmMMLYAuNDTMryzxcHj9OpyI2o

Related: myth of individualism, harm of striving, lone gunman

FB: "Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly." 

"How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation"

"the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives... 

Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. The “greatest generation” had the Depression and the GI Bill; boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment... 

students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes... 

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t... 

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&utm_term=.kaJrp9ea6&ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR19se6rUpqcz-6s5CWliOm7pxcaMB5yfGG6ke_D00mQTqJtpRPqJQSUL5w

FB: this is how I should introduce myself "I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset."

"Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists"

"The deradicalization movement combines insights gleaned from social work, 12-step programs, psychology, neurochemistry, and the personal experiences of “formers” who have left extremist groups. It’s tricky work. Few extremists make clean breaks with their past. Many liken hate to an addiction—hard to quit and easy to relapse into. The process is slow and one-on-one; it doesn’t promise to defeat hate groups so much as chip away at a movement that includes more than 400 organizations with thousands of members, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center... 

Kruglanski found that psychological signposts were better predictors of radicalization. He called these factors “the three Ns”—need, narrative, and network. It doesn’t matter if they are skinheads or jihadis; everyone who gets involved in hate movements has a deep urge to participate in a greater cause. Yet that cause, Kruglanski argued, needn’t be destructive. To successfully deradicalize a neo-Nazi, a new, constructive set of Ns—which might stem from education, a job, a partner—would have to replace the old, hateful ones."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/reform-white-supremacists-shane-johnson-life-after-hate/

FB: "Many became hardcore racists only after they had joined white supremacist groups. Rather than preexisting anti-Semitism or xenophobia, a cocktail of experiences such as isolation, depression, anxiety, or childhood abuse typically served as the stepping stones to extremism. This suggested that the behavioral and social rewards of participating in hate groups are perhaps more fundamental to understanding—and stopping—extremist behavior than the ideology behind it."

"What Rep. Steve King Gets Wrong About The Dark Ages -- And Western Civilization"

"His comments also raised a lot of questions and concerns among historians who have pointed out that the idea of "Western Civilization" is itself a fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. For more perspective on this, I reached out to T.J. Tallie, an African historian at Washington & Lee University. As many historians have recognized, the concept of "Western Civilization" is itself rather new. It grew from debates of East versus West in late 19th century European intellectual circles, but did not gain traction in the U.S. until it was time to explain to soldiers going into World War I why they should fight for the survival of Europe...

After World War I and then World War II, there was growing interest in the narrative of our connection to western Europe. As University of North Carolina historian Lloyd Kramer said in an earlier interview on thisdevelopment, this narrative was part of the "modernization theory of history, popular in the late 1940s and ’50s, which described the world, as we came out of the horrors of World War I and World War II, as moving toward secular modernization.""

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2016/07/23/stevekingandthedarkages/#35e438155980

"We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned"

"Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says...

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

....Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct.""

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs?fbclid=IwAR3EJKTJbC5riwJJsA-C_uSoEIsJMYt_AuwxUKxqkb6Xrb9-JuUGmalDtH8

Related: "‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

FB: Seriously? Seriously?? ""The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says"

"‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

"“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”...

Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time...

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible — that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time...

Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?fbclid=IwAR161IoFjlX3d7liaHM2EPxe7idRIOqU_lF9G3RN8fopcGMiVVCoNS3VjkQ&noredirect=on&utm_term=.2b72d1537416&wpisrc=nl_mustreads&wpmm=1

"How Flight Attendants Organized Against Their Bosses to End 'Swinging Stewardesses' Stereotyping"

"The airline industry enforced the widely held idea that for middle-class women, a job was a short-term stint between college and marriage. They sold stewardessing as a way of acquiring the skills needed as wife and hostess, as well as a means to meet wealthy, white, marriageable businessmen...

The airlines’ ideas about sexually attractive women were also deeply racialized. In 1971, only about six percent of the nation’s nearly 35,000 flight attendants were racial minorities—and this small number marked a significant increase from previous decades. In 1966, a Civil Rights commissioner in New York found that, “for too long there has been an underlying ‘white esthetic’ in the evaluation of physical attractiveness by American industry.”...

According to Paula Kane, an activist and former flight attendant with American Airlines, “pinching and patting” by men passengers increased significantly in the wake of the “Fly Me” campaign. Likewise, after Continental launched its “we move our tails for you” campaign, stewardesses received requests from men to wiggle provocatively for them. When they complained to Continental about the impact of the campaign, management advised flight attendants to respond to customers’ requests that they “move their tail” with flirty one-liners like “Why, is it in the way?” Flight attendants who responded more assertively to customers risked being written up or suspended....

Members leafleted persistently, dragged friends to meetings, and held consciousness-raising sessions in airport employee parking lots. These actions sensitized flight attendants to shared workplace problems and helped individual flight attendants recognize that they were not alone in their anger. Within two years, the organization had grown to 1,000 members. Within four years, it had 3,000 members...

The impact of these legal actions was dramatic. As the EEOC and the courts struck down marriage, pregnancy, and age requirements, the average job tenure of a flight attendant increased from 15 months in 1965 to over six years a decade later. While not all lawsuits and complaints were successful and some cases, especially those surrounding weight requirements, dragged on for years, flight attendants remade the face of the airline industry and created new employment opportunities for women through their sustained struggle in the courts and in the press."

https://pictorial.jezebel.com/how-flight-attendants-organized-against-their-bosses-to-1830282960?utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR2oz8LMZgn8QPovxhQeCzKmXzccob9yxhpX9xJ02iuh8XlQNRZeZWI2Kgk

FB: "The bodies of women flight attendants have long been an integral part of the airlines’ marketing strategy. In the postwar period, government regulations ensured that fares, routes, and planes were nearly indistinguishable. To stand out, airlines marketed their flight attendants’ looks and promised an exciting or erotic in-flight experience."