"The big myth Facebook needs everyone to believe"

"observers remain deeply skeptical of Facebook’s claims that it is somehow value-neutral or globally inclusive, or that its guiding principles are solely “respect” and “safety.” There’s no doubt, said Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New England, that the company advances a specific moral framework — one that is less of the world than of the United States, and less of the United States than of Silicon Valley.

If you study Facebook’s community standards, going back to the long-forgotten time when users voted on a version of them, the site has always erred on the side of radical free speech, corporate opaqueness and a certain American prudishness: Its values are those of the early Web, moderated by capitalist conservatism.

The values that Facebook articulates are not always the ones it enforces."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/01/28/the-big-myth-facebook-needs-everyone-to-believe/

And, honestly, I don't know if it's possible for Facebook-the-culture to see this. Having grown up in that area, and spent most of my life surrounded by people geographically of that culture or part of the culture because of their alignment to business/computer science/etc... I know the inflated sense of one's judgment that comes with being part of that world: "We are global, diverse, knowledgeable, focused on technology - which is social-neutral, right, how can metal and 1s and 0s have any kind of social baggage? If it mattered, we would have been required to take more humanities courses in undergrad, right, and our products are totally functional without that knowledge, so - everyone else is reacting wrong."

We've also been taught that the majority of the action of having a value is to declare that you have that value, and maybe spend a few minutes writing it down somewhere. It confuses me so much whenever a company has some problem with sexism or racism or whatever and then releases a statement like "We at XYZ are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workspace!". And that's taken as some sort of evidence that everything is okay...

And then, if you grow up seeing that kind of stuff, you start to think that you can be good at social stuff just by declaring that you want to be good at it; that that's it, and if anyone accuses you of not being good at it, they are saying something false and to prove them wrong you just declare again.

"Until 1950, U.S. Weathermen Were Forbidden From Talking About Tornadoes"

"During that time, Roger Edwards of the National Weather Service’s Storm PredictionCenter writes, “tornadoes were, for most, dark and mysterious menaces of unfathomable power, fast-striking monsters from the sky capable of sudden and unpredictable acts of death and devastation.”

Less than confident in their own predictive powers and fearful of the responses of a panicky public, “the use of the word 'tornado' in forecasts was at times strongly discouraged and at other times forbidden” by the Weather Bureau, Edwards writes, replaced by euphemisms like “severe local storms.”"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2016/03/15/until_1950_u_s_weathermen_were_forbidden_from_talking_about_tornados.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March%2017%2C%202016&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

When we can't explain or predict something, we don't talk about it...

"Robin Coste Lewis: "I don't accept the idea of my history as tragic.""

"I came across the eighteenth-century etching “Voyage of the Sable Venus” maybe ten years ago. It's really horrible. It's beautiful and horrible simultaneously. It's a redux of the Botticelli Venus on the half-shell, except this “Venus” is a black woman. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she's attended by all these classical figures, but then you notice something in Triton’s or Neptune’s hand. Instead of the usual trident, he's carrying a flag of the Union Jack! So it’s a pro-slavery image. And I remember two things about first seeing this. One is, I thought this is exactly what it feels like to be an American, for anyone, but more specifically for African Americans. On the one hand you have this myth of democracy and it's all beautiful, so you're compelled by the propaganda of nation—but at the same time you're repelled, because you know the history, you know the country is blood-soaked in every way...

The more research I did, the more heinous it became, the larger it became, the more I realized that the entire Western world is saturated by black female figures, everywhere. Even if it's not in the painting, it's in the frame that someone carved to house the painting. In certain frames you'll have black female figures carved in these subservient postures, or even a beautiful mahogany chair with black female figures as the legs, or holding up a basin. And that shocked me so much that I quickly realized that the project was going to have to expand...

One of the things that is intrinsic for anyone within this period, but especially for people of color, or anyone who's been repressed, people in exile, anybody that's lost the floor in some way, whether nationally or culturally, is that we learn that absence is as much a presence in our lives as anything else—if not the greatest presence of all. So I tried very deliberately to have absence be the main character in that so-called story. And it’s very important to me that fragmentation be something that's not only present, but that I also celebrate. I don't accept the idea of my history as tragic. I refuse that in every way that I possibly can. And in order to do that, I have to embrace and celebrate situations that many people quite understandably renounce...

Why would a person need to hold a black woman’s body in their hand while they shave their face? That's not a black sadness, to me. That's a white, pathological, tragic sadness that has really nothing to do with me."

http://bombmagazine.org/article/844716/robin-coste-lewis

There are so many moments I want to pull from this interview.

Like - this is beautiful and meaningful about remembering our identities - " there's a line that says, but maybe “embodiment is so bewildering, even God grows / wracked with doubt.” That occurs in Sanskrit epic over and over and over again. The gods are constantly forgetting that they are gods. The gods are constantly making a mess and acting out. Rama is one of the classic examples. In The Ramayana, when Sita is abducted by a demon, and Rama, the god, loses his woman, he completely loses it. Mind you, this is the incarnation of Vishnu, the creator of the entire universe. But he loses his shit. And his best friend, Laksmana, takes him by the shoulder and shakes him and says, “Rama, Rama! Stop losing your shit, you're a god, dude! Come on!” This scene has always stayed with me. Even God forgets that God is God."

FB: "I love it when you're traveling in London, when you get on the train there are all of these signs that say, MIND THE GAP. I always laugh to myself because I feel like that's what I do, constantly. That's where I am. My work is in the gap, that dark place that we can't see—if we fall through—where the bottom is. I like that place; that is a narrative for me... Agnosticism, I think, means that people know something's going on, they just don't know what it is. And they believe in something, they just don't know what to call it. But my bad day is this: I believe in something and what I'm calling it is “Fuck You!” I do have a very active, rageful, loving relationship with something out there. But it's not pretty."

"The Linguistic Appeal Of 'Garbage Person,' The Internet's Favorite Insult"

"“Garbage person,” like “bloodsucker” or “Neanderthal,” is the type of descriptor that pretty much defines itself. In the interest of clarity, though, the term as used here does not refer to a sanitation worker, or a person made from actual detritus. It is, instead, someone terrible beyond belief, but in an everyday sort of way.

According to recent headlines, someone who ends their texts with a period may be a garbage person. Same with someone who refuses to chase down runaway napkinswhen they blow off their table, or chooses to listen to songs from the Entouragemovie trailer...

McCulloch doesn’t remember the first time she came across the idiom, but she does have a theory about its proliferation. “I think what’s different about this one is that it’s garbage being used as a prenominal modifier,” she says. When used in the traditionally insulting way, she points out, “garbage” is a plain old noun. Utter “this person is garbage,” and you’re setting up a direct comparison between those two things, in order to illustrate said person’s badness.

When used in this new way, though, garbage comes before the noun, a place usually reserved for descriptors or adjectives. There are only a few cases where nouns double as prenominal modifiers–"shit" is an example of this, says McCulloch. “Swear words are very versatile,” she says. “You can do all sorts of things with them.” Putting “garbage” or other nouns in this privileged syntactic position gives them some of the oomph of a swear"

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-linguistic-appeal-of-garbage-person-the-internets-favorite-insult

"The Shopping Mall’s Socialist Pre-History"

"Unable to compete with online shopping, declining consumer affluence, rising oil prices, and a volatile property market, shopping malls are dropping like flies. The CEO of a major shopping mall building company recently warned that “within ten to fifteen years” the shopping mall “will be a historical anachronism — a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs."...

The inventor of the American suburban shopping mall,Victor Gruen, was a Viennese architect and socialist forced to flee to the United States after the occupation of Austria in 1938. Gruen saw the mall as having the potential to re-centralize suburban sprawl. His plans were for large state-owned indoor agoras that would literally contain the market forces that were running rampant outside their walls. It was a modernist vision for the refounding of American public life. Many of the malls built by Gruen and his company in the 1950s retained elements of this promise, with his Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn., planned around an enormous common meeting place modeled on a European piazza...

Meanwhile, the aggressive, unquestioned privatization of such spaces has led to the expulsion of the homeless and the banning of public demonstrations. After a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s following political protests in shopping malls, First Amendment rights are not applicable within shopping malls."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall/

FB: "Today’s shopping malls are worlds in themselves, removed in both time and space from the chance play and chaotic bustle of the high street. They are carnivals of artificiality where time and space are collapsed under the eternal sun of fluorescent lights. The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, has a Chinatown, a Bourbon Street, and a replica of the Santa Maria."

"A Century of Silence"

"Demirbaş had the opposite reaction: inspired by Socrates, he became a teacher of philosophy. Between 1983 and 1991, the Kurdish language was illegal, but he and his wife named their daughter Berfin, the Kurdish name for a pale-colored flower—a decision that instantly triggered prosecution. The legal battle went to Turkey’s Supreme Court, and by the time Demirbaş won, his daughter was a year old. As a teacher, he confronted the bureaucracy of Turkification with similarly mild gestures, each time eliciting a severe legal reaction. The government moved Demirbaş from school to school. In 2001, he was posted to Sivas, a deeply conservative city, where he wrote a press release stating that all people in Turkey had a right to education in their native languages. He was fired. Destitute, he returned to Diyarbakir, and was elected to lead a teachers’ union. From there, he entered politics, and in 2004 he became mayor of Diyarbakir’s old city.

At the time he lost his teaching job, he had been charged in as many as a hundred cases. Some of them, owing to changes in the law, were dropped; many others were added, and now he does not know how many there are. His lawyer told him that if he lost every case his combined prison term would be four hundred and eighty-three years. It seemed strange that Demirbaş could not keep track of his legal affairs, but as he spoke about his cases, I began to understand his confusion. Shortly after he was elected, a twelve-year-old Kurdish boy was fatally shot while police were gunning down his father, in front of their house; Demirbaş erected a sculpture to mark the tragedy, with thirteen holes carved into it, representing the boy’s gunshot wounds. He was prosecuted: misuse of municipal office and resources. (Three years.) The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it to a terrorism court, which threw it out—though now, on appeal, it has made its way back to the Supreme Court. In 2006, at a conference in Vienna, he presented a paper, “Municipal Services and Local Governments in Light of Multilingualism.” This time, the charge against him was “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.” (Five years.) When he issued a multilingual tourist brochure, in Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian, he was charged. He was charged for speaking Kurdish while officiating at a wedding.

In 2007, the government forced Demirbaş out of office, and so he phoned a friend who owned a house near the municipal headquarters and set himself up there as shadow mayor. Journalists, dignitaries, and assemblymen still sought his advice, as did his constituents, who came by the hundreds, with offerings of tea and sugar. Members of his former staff raised funds to cover a small budget and volunteered during off hours. Demirbaş’s teen-age children took jobs to support the family. In this way, he continued his term. And the state continued finding new ways to charge him."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/century-silence

"John Leguizamo Says High School History Makes Latino Students Feel 'Invisible'"

"On the topic of Latino visibility, the comedian showed particular concern for the absence of Latinos in U.S. history education -- despite research that shows Latino students exposed to ethnic studies perform better in school.

“Just imagine, you’re a white kid and all of a sudden everybody’s Latin and everything they’re teaching you is Latin and you don’t hear anything about yourself or about your contributions,” Leguizamo said. “You don’t know hear about George Washington, you don’t hear about Thomas Jefferson and you feel like you haven’t contributed anything. How would you feel? How would you think of your future? How would you think of your participation in American culture?”

“You feel like an invisible person screaming in the woods and nobody hears you,” he added. “And it’s really weird and unfair because we had huge contributions.""
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-leguizamo-high-school-history-makes-latinos-students-feel-invisible_us_55cba1e5e4b0f73b20bb950f