“White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness”

“So long as we aren’t hanging out with white nationalists, marrying into a family of color or chuckling over jokes about our dancing, we have endless opportunities to avoid thinking much about our own race. We generally prefer to frame identity in ethnic terms instead: Identifying as Italian or Irish or Jewish seems to come with zest, pathos and a chance to take pride in some shared history. Plain undifferentiated whiteness, on the other hand, is a “toggle between nothingness and awfulness,” writes Nell Irvin Painter, an emeritus professor of history at Princeton and author of the 2010 book “The History of White People.”...

Since handing Trump 58 percent of the white vote, we have been the subject of newspaper and magazine analyses about our race-based resentment, fear of declining status and supposed economic anxiety. The satire “Dear White People” was picked up by Netflix, and the film “Get Out,” which turned self-proclaimed Obama-supporting white people into figures of horror, became the think-piece blockbuster of 2017. Suddenly it is less tenable than ever for white people to write our whiteness out of the story of race in America or define ourselves only in terms of what we are not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/white-people-are-noticing-something-new-their-own-whiteness.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

FB: “In each of these cases, as well as a string of others, white people didn’t get the usual benefit of assumed normalcy. They were portrayed, instead, as a distinct subculture with bizarre and threatening habits. “White people” were suddenly identified as the subgroup of Americans most likely to call the police on black people over a barbecue or to complain about whether every single football player stands for the anthem — stereotypes that rang true even to other white people.”

"Suicide in a Culture of Mandated Happiness – Who’s to Blame?"

"As Noel Hunter said, “When 45,000 people a year would rather die than live in this world any longer, it might behoove us all to consider what is happening in the world to cause this.” What is happening in the world. One of the main stories we repeat to ourselves is that mental illness causes suicide. We perpetuate this idea that people who take their own lives are sick, perhaps as an unconscious way of attempting to avoid feelings of guilt or regret about what we could have done or who we could have been for the people we’re losing to this public health crisis. It’s almost like neuroscience hasn’t shown us how harmful isolation is for human beings. We then turn right around and express shock that Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, etc., were feeling so awful — “they were always so happy” say the people “closest” to them... 

This is an increasingly terrifying and painful world for an increasing number of people — in large part because of metastatic capitalism as I’ve discussed in the past. If psychotherapy is less effective for poor people, maybe poverty and runaway inequality, which are not incidental but direct results of the unbridled capitalism we have all accepted as part of “the way things are,” are the problems rather than the individual seeking therapy. Maybe it’s legitimately painful and despair-inducing to live poor in a world where the few self-appointed elites flaunt their wealth and power and show no concern for life that cannot enrich their empires. If you care about depression, organize an eviction blockade; stand up to the corporate giants willing to pollute our air, water, soil and food; learn who has political power in your community and relentlessly petition, picket, protest them until they practice justice."

https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/06/suicide-culture-mandated-happiness/

FB: "The combination of capitalism, individualism and the ruthlessly propagated conception of human beings as competitive by nature have demonized weakness and made it into a bogeyman rather than a fact about the human condition that, if embraced, could lead to healing relationships and more resilient communities, two bulwarks against suicide. Isolation — that is, the felt sense that you are alone and without meaningful connections or people who care about you — kills. Directing people toward professionals rather than learning how to have real, lasting friendships deepens isolation."

"Hereditary"

"Belief in the devil (and all his works) is, I believe, an attempt to grapple with the same fear that drives and sustains Pizzagate and The Storm, the same fear that drove the Satanic Panic and the Salem trials, and the blood libel, and all of the other expressions of that same fear that are re-emerging now “in 2010s clothing.”

That fear is something like the question posed in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Are we the baddies?” It’s the fear, the ever-present suspicion, that we’re not good.

We’re not afraid that there might be monsters out there in the dark, we’re afraid that there might not be. We need those monsters. We want them to be there because without them, without their superlative, extravagant, ridiculous-on-its-face evil to contrast ourselves favorably against, we would be forced to reckon with ourselves as we are. As long as there are Satanic baby-killers, we can think of ourselves as relatively good.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/06/14/hereditary/

FB: Ach this is so wise "I think these folks cannot be receptive to reality until they’re persuaded that reality might somehow, someday allow them to think of themselves as good. That, in turn, requires convincing them to reconceive of goodness as a pursuit rather than as an identity — to start understanding goodness as something they might do instead of something they can possess, to start thinking in terms of better than I was before rather than in terms of better than those people over there."

"Innocence Abroad"

"to explain everything through the lens of American power is to explain less. One ends up reflecting back the mirage of American omnipotence instead of the reality of U.S. blundering, blindness and internal dissent, of our inability to address the most basic needs of our own society (gun control, health care, an end to police brutality, economic inequality), let alone to confront global challenges such as climate change. One also risks turning all non-Americans into pawns, vassals and victims. Conspiracy theories that ascribe everything to American power diminish the responsibility of local regimes and elites, and the autonomy of people who have staked their own claim to the United States’ proclaimed principles, challenging it to live up to its rhetoric... 

For all his hard-bitten clarity, Baldwin expressed hope that America could see itself and could change “in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world.” He argued for what I think of as a sort of useful idealism, one that acknowledges reality as it is but does not accept that it has to remain so. He wagered that people could be better than they are: “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”"

https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/innocence-abroad

FB: "Hansen argues that American prosperity and identity are based on imperialism abroad as much as on racism at home. I agree, yet I have trouble seeing how most Americans prospered from the invasion of Iraq. Instead, I wonder at how much the fraudulent freedom we export abroad resembles the version we extol at home—a freedom that is undercut by economic bondage, by a barely concealed determination to disenfranchise so many."

"Are Google and Facebook Responsible for the Medical Quackery They Host?"

"More worrying, though, is that the digital platforms that host such material and conversations aren’t always passive participants in the recruitment process. Their algorithms, after all, are trained to give visitors more of the kind of content that they like — whatever that might be. While researching this column, for example, I started watching a lot of AIDS denialism videos on YouTube. Immediately, the site began suggesting other denialist videos that I might want to watch, essentially serving up content to keep me on the site longer. Had I been an HIV-positive YouTube user looking for answers about a troubling diagnosis, the effect, perhaps, would have been powerful. (Google did not respond to repeated requests for comment and chose not to answer a list of questions submitted by Undark)."... 

Lidsky advocates for more education to help citizens become savvier consumers of media, while recognizing the limits of oversight policies. “Respect for individual autonomy says that individuals get to make choices,” she said, “which includes them having a right to make bad choices that cause them harm.”... 

Facebook isn’t just offering a space for people to meet; its algorithms and search functions are helping them find each other. And YouTube isn’t just a neutral platform for incendiary content: It actively organizes it, and then algorithmically nudges people to view more of it. If a city government actually helped fringe groups put together mailing lists and distribute leaflets, citizens might, understandably, grow more suspicious."

https://undark.org/article/aids-denialism-quackery-facebook-youtube/

I don't know what the solution is here, exacrly, but it is a worthy observation that these platforms are active and not passive. It would be reasonable to have a committee of health workers identify topics of public health concern and ask these platforms to include some disclaimer on those videos. If only as a thing to try, to see what would happen. 

"Fuck civility"

"Puzzlingly, columnists in mainstream newspapers — who are typically the first group to raise alarm whenever Trump violates a norm or deviates from standards of decency set by George Washington — are also fond of the idea that the president and his cohorts are holding back their worst impulses as part of an unspoken non-aggression pact with Democrats. If liberals decide to yell at Sarah Huckabee Sanders in public, it will give Trump and his notoriously demure supporters the excuse they were waiting for to act like assholes. This is absurd on its face, as are the hypotheticals it begets: “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” It is not, in fact, very hard to imagine that. Abortion providers and patients are routinely hassled by protesters all over the country, and as recently as 2015 a right-wing zealot killed three and injured nine at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado. The Post editorial board is either completely unfamiliar with the history of anti-abortion violence, or believes that conservatives are a few bad restaurant experiences away from launching a violent insurrection."

https://theoutline.com/post/5070/fuck-civility?utm_source=FB&zr=vxyk5uwn&zd=6&zi=iipfegrb

FB: "Again, the idea that shouting “shame” at a Trump cabinet member in public will violate an unspoken truce between liberals and conservatives is completely ahistorical; the best evidence for this is that Trump, a hugely stupid man, believes this truce to exist"

"I am now an alarmist"

"When he says “I was not a Communist,” he was understating the case. He was anti-Communist. He had no sympathy for them and was inclined to excuse and minimize what he was seeing because, in his view, they brought it on themselves. They broke the law, or what he thought maybe should have been the law. They were them, not us, not me or mine. So it wasn’t alarming... 

Hitler’s “Aryan paragraph” is what finally roused Niemöller to shift from vague concern to something more like alarm. But even still he wavered and faltered. His alarm had to do with the fact that some of his fellow Lutherans might be affected by that. If “they came for the Jews,” that might include some of his fellow Christians who were of Jewish background. So even as he became alarmed and joined with others sounding the alarm, his resistance wavered with something like qualification... 

We’re still more alarmed about the possibility of alarmism than about what we’re seeing — what we are undeniably, actually seeing unfold. They are coming for the immigrants. First for the illegal immigrants, because most Americans will respond to that the same way Niemöller responded to coming for the Communists.

But they are also coming for the refugees, for those lawfully seeking asylum, for legal immigrants who have committed any misdemeanors in their lifetime, for naturalized citizens."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/06/28/i-am-now-an-alarmist/

Fb: "that’s where we differ from Niemöller, and why we respect the sentiments of his poem only in the abstract. Because we are far more concerned about the potential danger and shame of speaking out too soon. We do not wish to be seen by others as alarmists. Chicken Little. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Etc. We are hyper-vigilant about never being perceived by others as hyper-vigilant."