"How Do You Explain the ‘Obvious?’"

"This is because the obvious is, essentially, a shortcut: It appeals to a set of values we’d formed some consensus around, a set of ideas we once agreed no serious person would question. To call something “obvious” or “common sense” is to call it settled and refuse to relitigate it or revisit all the work that went into determining it was so inarguable in the first place. In a recent book, “At War With the Obvious,” the psychoanalyst Donald Moss writes that “the obvious is adaptive. It mutates under pressure, like cells.” If you need evidence of this, he writes, consider the status of gay, queer and trans people over the past few decades. In the 1990s, the American mainstream found it obvious that gay people should have no right to marry; today, it’s regarded by many as broadly obvious that they should. An idea that was once marginal enough to require laborious defense gradually became so self-evident that it was hardly worth explaining; like the crumpled letter, its presence was taken for granted... 

Politicians and the press still invoke obviousness in the hope of summoning some conviction we all still share, some bedrock of group belief we can agree on. To see them fail, repeatedly, is unsettling; it makes our deepest values seem impotent. It had seemed obvious to some that a modern presidential administration would not defend white nationalists or that the United States government would seek to avoid taking babies from their parents’ arms — or that a man who bragged about harassing women wouldn’t be elected in the first place."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/magazine/how-do-you-explain-the-obvious.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

FB: "America is built on an appeal to the obvious. The Declaration of Independence holds its truths to be “self-evident” — axiomatic, irreducible, not needing justification because they justify themselves. (It was not obvious to the authors that those truths applied to all Americans, though this seems obvious to most of us now.))"

"How Chinese Americans won right to attend SF schools"

"By the 1920s, most Chinese Americans were attending integrated public schools in San Francisco, despite that the law requiring school segregation was still on the books. The law was not repealed until 1947." 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-Chinese-Americans-won-right-to-attend-SF-11107543.php

"Gwyneth, Ivanka, and the End of the Effortless White Woman"

"The Effortless White Woman is successful both personally and professionally. The Effortless White Woman is married, usually to a white man. The Effortless White Woman is a mother — she is not too barren or too busy with work to fulfill her feminine obligations — yet her children seem to raise themselves, to self-maintain, like potted cactuses. The EWW does not raise children—she enjoys them, is fulfilled by them. The EWW ponders her children, with great regret, as she goes off to work. The Effortless White Woman makes a kajillion dollars at work, so she must not ponder her children that much, because, unlike most women, her earning potential has not been compromised by them. The Effortless White Woman also enjoys and is fulfilled by her career. In between the time spent maintaining her children and her marriage and her job — this amounts, somehow, to endless free time — the Effortless White Woman finds ways to enjoy and fulfill herself... 

she remains stubbornly dominant, in part because she represents such a canny marriage of feminist principles with pre-feminist ideals. The EWW is still white, still wealthy, still straight and married and fertile and domestic and beautiful. But she is doing all this because she likes it. She is not trying to meet anyone else’s standards. She is doing what makes her happy, caring for herself, loving herself, except that doing so accidentally makes her beautiful and stylish in ways lesser women have to work to achieve...

Not every Effortless White Woman is equally guilty. There are important moral distinctions between serving as an apologist for the Trump regime and telling people to stick crystals up their vaginas. But the rejection of the EWW is an inevitable product of the populist moment."

https://medium.com/s/story/gwyneth-ivanka-and-the-end-of-the-effortless-white-woman-9d8c4e01a026

FB: "This seemingly leaves women stuck in the familiar, dreary bind always created by internalized misogyny: hating ourselves, and hating other women because they remind us of how much we hate ourselves, with only a few callous opportunists getting out ahead. But the anger under the Effortless White Woman has, of late, been transforming into something potentially illuminating—not deferred self-loathing, but an actual recognition of injustice."

"'Lies My Teacher Told Me,' And How American History Can Be Used As A Weapon"

"The book is called Lies My Teacher Told Me. What's the biggest lie in the book?

Usually when I'm asked, "What's the biggest lie?" I put my hand out in front of me slanting upward and to the right. And what I mean by that is the overall theme of American history is we started out great and we've been getting better ever since kind of automatically. And the trouble with that is two things. First of all, it's not always true... 

And the second part is what it does to the high school student. It says you don't need to protest; you don't need to write your congressman; you don't need to do any of the things that citizens do, because everything's getting better all the time."

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/09/634991713/lies-my-teacher-told-me-and-how-american-history-can-be-used-as-a-weapon?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180809

"Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are"

"one of the more convincing explanations comes from an anthropologist who has looked beyond narrow economic reasoning to examine the actual social or psychological functions served by many of the jobs in today’s service and knowledge economy. David Graeber of the London School of Economics argues in a recent book that the prevailing myths about the efficiency of capitalism blind us to the fact that much of economic reality is shaped by jockeying for power and status and serves no economic function at all... 

But even outside of finance, a lot of today’s business seems to aim less to produce economic value than to grab a bigger share of existing wealth. MIT economist Xavier Gabaix has shown that the wealthiest individuals in recent years really have skewed the playing field in their favor, finding ways — such as access to better information, legal or tax planning services — to capture more of the profits coming from productive work. Luigi Zingales has argued that the behavior of businesses has changed as corporations have grown so large. Large corporations now see wielding political influence through campaign donations or lobbying as a major part of securing their economic advantage... 

Of course, neither Graeber nor anyone else can be a final judge which jobs are useful or not, but the people who offer this view of their own jobs come most frequently from the service sector."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-01/too-many-jobs-feel-meaningless-because-they-are

FB: "This is a long way from true capitalism, as Graeber notes, and actually looks more like classic medieval feudalism. Much within the modern corporation is less about making things or solving problems and more about the political process of gaining control over the flows of resources. The result is a proliferation of jobs that actually serve very little if any economic function, and only make sense from the perspective of rent seeking and power relations"