This is a very plain blog with quotes from and links to articles I found interesting, thought-provoking, or relevant to the times. Linking is neither endorsement nor condemnation. Run by http://willslack.com
24 June, 2024
It was past time for Aunt Jemima’s image to go
https://andscape.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt-jemimas-image-to-go/
“They feel so adamantly about it they won’t buy the product,” Ron Bottrell, director of media relations for Quaker Oats, told me in 1991. I was writing an article for the Cleveland Plain Dealer about an Aunt Jemima pancake breakfast held at Red Oak Presbyterian Church in rural Ohio, in honor of Rosa Washington Riles, an Aunt Jemima actress. She spent about 30 years touring Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and parts of Illinois portraying Aunt Jemima and giving cooking demonstrations. She is buried at the church cemetery.
I attended the 1991 breakfast, held during Memorial Day weekend, interviewing the organizers and observing the scene. The breakfast was a fundraiser for the church cemetery, where black and white people are buried. There was a collection of Aunt Jemima memorabilia, including sheet music for the “Aunt Jemima Two-Step,” a cakewalk tune; salt-and-pepper shakers dressed like Aunt Jemima; an “Aunt Jemima Breakfast Club” pin; a penny bank; and a syrup pitcher. There was a portrait of Riles dressed like Aunt Jemima, painted by a California artist who, according to one of the organizers, used a Hershey’s chocolate bar to achieve the right shade of brown.
Fewer than 25 black people attended out of the reported 900 total, which baffled the organizers. Ruth Salisbury, a member of Friends of Red Oak, which coordinated the breakfast, told me: “We tried to get them to be a part of it.” The group received no response after repeated appeals to area black churches and individuals.
“We never asked why,” so few black people attended, she said. “I’m not sure I know why.” She said she had never heard of the negative image of Aunt Jemima. “We thought it was helping the black community as well as the white community to help the cemetery,” said another organizer, Clyde Neu.
“I get a sense sometimes that white people can do whatever they want. I think it offends people. I would never attend,” a black Brown County, Ohio, woman told me.
I had never encountered such a parallel racial divide: white people believing that they are doing a good thing by creating a fundraiser to honor a black woman, and black people who hated the image she represented refusing to attend. That is, white people doing whatever they wanted with racial imagery without asking black people how they felt about it.
23 June, 2024
Shadows of the coming Dark Age for science in the US
We build our institutions and democratic society based on two assumptions:
- First, that information should flow freely between citizens.
- Second, citizens deserve and value good information, meaning content that is factual, timely, relevant, contextual, and truthful.
However, the emergence of broadband internet, smartphones, and social media has fundamentally challenged these assumptions. Maybe they were naive in the first place. Today, the gradual commodification of our attention has transformed the role of information in society into a new type of digital product that we exchange for entertainment, services, profit, or power.
The informative merits of those new digital products, the accuracy or truthfulness of their content, became secondary.
- A viral “get rich” cat meme is more lucrative than an educational essay about poverty alleviation.
- A misleading video clip smearing a political opponent is more persuasive than an analysis of a policy plan.
- A false myth feels more emotionally satisfying than a dry scientific study.
20 June, 2024
Axios Finish Line: Most difficult media moment ever
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/21/news-media-disruption-will-lewis-washington-post
Everyone in media must understand the indisputable facts:
- Social media is dying as a reliable source of readers. First, these platforms gobbled up the attention traditional media once dominated. Then, they ate the vast majority of our revenue by micro-targeting ads to their massive audiences. Then, they seduced publishers with promises of riches to create content for them. Now, they're downplaying news. Facebook accounted for 30% of Axios traffic two years ago. It was about 1% in May!
- Speaking of traffic, almost everyone is losing it. A lot of it. At Axios, we're still growing ours, but that's an anomaly when you look across the landscape. Lewis found the Post has lost half its monthly audience since 2020. Imagine half as many people going to a car dealer or restaurant.
- Oh, it's going to get worse. Even if generative AI turns out to be wildly overhyped, which I don't think will happen, the one thing it has the potential to do amazingly well — if it solves its problem distinguishing fact from fiction — is synthesize and answer questions about the news.
- Consumer subscriptions are seen as a possible savior. It's a mirage. The people most likely to pay for news already have, to the benefit of The New York Times, the Journal and a few others who captured these readers early. The new reality: Each new subscription is harder than the last.
19 June, 2024
Nobody Knows What’s Going On
https://www.raptitude.com/2024/06/nobody-knows-whats-going-on/
Theory feels good. Pithiness and analogy feel good. A tight sentence feels good. Neat and snappy stories about what’s “true” are like candy to the sense-craving part of the human brain.
Notice how many smart people believe things like, “You can’t reason yourself out of a belief you didn’t reason yourself into.” This is a belief nobody would arrive at through reason. It doesn’t stand up to even a minute’s logical scrutiny. You certainly didn’t reason yourself into a belief that North-Pole-dwelling elves made your childhood toys, but you probably reasoned yourself out of it. Both beliefs are just mind-candy, only for different audiences.
In short, human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this — almost entirely by carefully combining and testing our respective reliable slivers — but as a species we remain supremely untalented at knowing what’s true outside the range of our senses.
I Wish I'd Known - Judge Stephen Dillard
So do yourself a favor and don’t fall into the trap of obsessively competing with your classmates or viewing them as adversaries. Grades, awards, and rankings have a way of sorting themselves out over time, and there’s no scholastic achievement that’s worth damaging your reputation or ruining a friendship.
You really are “in this” together, so don’t lose sight of the human dimension of law school. Work hard, but also take time to help your classmates be the very best they can be. If you see others struggling, check in on them. Study together. Share your outlines. Mentor students in the classes behind you as you progress through law school. Encourage each other as you go through exams, competitions, and job interviews.
Your law school experience will be a far more meaningful one as a result of the time you invest in these relationships, and you’ll graduate with a network of close friends and supporters.
And that’s worth its weight in gold.
u/brolybackshots on mortgages
Every other contemporary to America forces mortgage renewal every 3-5 years at most (Canada, UK, Australia, etc) so they could absorb a period of 0% since within a few years all those home owners will have to renew at high rates anyways (which is happening right now)
Americans now have this almost unfixable scenario of far too many mortgages locked in for 30 years at 2-3%. That causes everything to now freeze, as people with existing mortgages can now never move due to the 7% rates they'd never qualify for, and new home buyers cant ever enter the market as existing ones wont ever sell with their low locked in rates.
It creates a sharp dichotomy of haves and have-nots, where those with these tiny mortgage rates and existing home owners will feel fine and dandy with lots of extra savings and discretionary income to keep inflationary spending and demand high, while the "have nots" are now getting shafted due to the inflationary effect of the "fine and dandy" group + their inability to enter the housing market causing their cost of living to explode.
16 June, 2024
He Worked for the Nastiest People in Politics. Now He’s Airing Dirty Laundry.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/26/phil-elwood-dc-pr-operative-00154367
Still, why take the chance at all? After all, Elwood earned a decent living as a PR “arsonist” — that is, ginning up stories stage left in order to help clients achieve their goals stage right. Even after the horrors recounted in the back half of his book (his work for a shady Israeli intel firm lands him in the FBI’s crosshairs; he attempts suicide; he bounces back thanks to true-blue friends and elaborate therapeutic interventions) Elwood remains in the industry, lighting fires for paying customers.
And here’s where the anonymous publicist for scoundrels emerges as an quotable idealist about Washington. All the Worst Humans, it turns out, isn’t really meant to be for people like him. It’s meant to be for the folks they spin. “People like me outnumber the media seven to one,” he tells me. “Our numbers are growing while theirs are shrinking. All I’m doing is saying the quiet part out loud, saying all the wrong things about an industry that only says the right thing.”
Stanford’s top disinformation research group collapses under pressure
The study of misinformation has become increasingly controversial, and Stamos, DiResta and Starbird have been besieged by lawsuits, document requests and threats of physical harm. Leading the charge has been Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose House subcommittee alleges that the Observatory improperly worked with federal officials and social media companies to violate the free-speech rights of conservatives.
Jordan has demanded reams of documents from Stanford, including records of students discussing social media posts as they volunteered to help the Observatory, and Stamos testified before the House Judiciary Committee for eight hours.
“Free speech wins again!” Jordan posted on X on Friday, calling the Observatory part of a “censorship regime.”
Inside Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Unlikely Rise and Precipitous Fall at Liberty University
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/01/inside-jerry-falwell-jr-unlikely-rise-and-precipitous-fall
Looking back, Jerry said that his father’s peripatetic lifestyle provided a reprieve from an oppressive marriage. “My dad wanted to travel the world as an escape,” Jerry said. He recalled that his mother’s provincial worldview grated on his father. “She wanted to live a small-town preacher’s life. She didn’t let him mess around,” Jerry said. Divorce was out of the question. According to Jerry, his dad found ways to take the edge off at home, even though Macel never allowed alcohol in the house. “Sometimes he would drink a whole bottle of Nyquil. He called it Baptist wine,” he remembered. Jerry grew up to learn that he too could have a private life that didn’t align with his public persona. [...]
It was a confusing and lonely time for Jerry. Needing a distraction, Jerry offered to help his father do research for his forthcoming autobiography. What he found was a revelation: Jerry wasn’t the black sheep after all. His religious father was the aberration. The articles revealed that the Falwells descended from a long line of rabble-rousers, drunks, and nonbelievers. His paternal great-grandfather, Hezekiah, was an avowed atheist and dairy farmer. His paternal grandfather, Carey, was a notorious bootlegger, or as Jerry put it, “the ultimate entrepreneur.” Jerry’s great-uncle Garland was an alcoholic and drug addict. During Prohibition, Carey and Garland promoted cockfights and distributed illegal whiskey. The brothers later got rich owning bus lines, gas stations, a nightclub, and a hotel where they kept a bear chained up for drunk tourists to wrestle.
15 June, 2024
My Encounter With the Fantasy-Industrial Complex
The cinematic universe that CIA Renee inhabits is entertaining for the audience and, I presume, profitable for the writers, who get to portray themselves to their online followers and paying subscribers as heroes in a quest to defeat shadowy enemies. But the harm to the people whom the characters are based on is real. Some rapt fans come to believe that they’ve been wronged. This perception is dangerous. The people who email me death threats sincerely believe that they are fighting back against a real cabal. This fiction is their fact.
11 June, 2024
Speech Under the Shadow of Punishment
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/speech-under-the-shadow-of-punishment
At Harvard’s graduation ceremony, more than a thousand people participated in a mass walkout and marched to a “People’s Commencement” off campus. Afterward, unease rippled across the stage, when Maria Ressa, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist, stated that, for agreeing to be Harvard’s commencement speaker, she was “attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money.” The Harvard Chabad rabbi Hirschy Zarchi confronted her when she finished, and then he walked off the stage because he believed that her comments were antisemitic. Looking out at graduates in black robes, I saw that the overwhelming majority had also donned color-coded stoles for identity groups to which they belonged. Many of them had participated in separate affinity ceremonies, for students who were Black, Asian, Latinx, Arab, Indigenous, disabled, first-generation or low income, and, for the first time this year, Jewish or veterans. They looked almost like representatives of rival armies, and I winced at Ressa’s final thought for the class of 2024: “Welcome to the battlefield.” ♦
Gaza Chief’s Brutal Calculation: Civilian Bloodshed Will Help Hamas
In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.
Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis.
But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks.
The Toxic Consequences of Attending a High Achieving School
https://petergray.substack.com/p/43-the-toxic-consequences-of-attending
In the 1990s, Luthar was studying the effects of poverty on the mental health of teenagers. In research with inner-city youth from families well below the poverty level, she found high levels of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Then one of her graduate students challenged her by suggesting that these problems might not be limited to children in poverty, so she began conducting similar research with teens in wealthy suburban areas. Remarkably, she found that levels of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse (including alcohol and hard drugs) were even higher among these presumably “privileged” young people than they were among the teens from poverty (Luthar & Latendresse, 2005).
In subsequent research, Luthar and her colleagues found that the most significant variable in predicting such problems is not family wealth per se, but attendance at a high achieving school (HAS). They found that the suffering among youth at HASs is not limited to those from wealthy families (Ebbert et al., 2019). Students from families of more modest means at such schools also suffer. What matters is the degree to which the young people feel their self-worth depends on high academic achievement and success at the extracurricular activities that are promoted and valued by the school.
08 June, 2024
‘Godzilla Minus One’ Stomps Into ‘Oppenheimer’ Territory
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/movies/godzilla-oppenheimer-heron-boy.html
The characters in “Godzilla Minus One” are betrayed twice — by the Americans certainly, whose bomb tests on Bikini Atoll give Godzilla renewed power — but also by Japan itself. As a kamikaze pilot, Koichi was told that his life was worth nothing and has carried that with him. In the rousing speech before the effort to defeat Godzilla begins, a former naval weapons developer leading the charge (Hidetaka Yoshioka) explains that their goal is to avoid death rather than seek it for glory.
“This country has treated life far too cheaply,” he says, then enumerates the ways Japan has let its citizens die, via poorly armored tanks and fighter planes without ejection seats, for instance, and of course suicide missions. Then he continues, “That’s why this time I take pride in a citizen-led effort that sacrifices no lives at all. This next battle is not one waged to the death but a battle to live for the future.” It’s an optimistic rallying cry that reverberates through the final act.
What Liberals Get Wrong About ‘White Rural Rage’ — Almost Everything
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/05/white-rural-rage-myth-00150395
What seemingly set apart this book is that the authors claimed to have data backing up their assertions. “We provide the receipts,” Schaller said in the interview. What is their data, my friends and colleagues asked, and why do they get it so wrong?
Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.
I’m an academic who studies rural Americans and lives in rural Maine. My job and passion is to pore over reams of data, including some of the largest surveys of rural voters ever conducted. Sitting on my computer are detailed responses from over 25,000 rural voters that I have conducted over the last decade and used to publish a range of peer-reviewed and widely cited research. And I’ve done it all largely to make sense of why rural voters are continually drawn to the Republican Party.
[...]
Yes, such resentment is a real phenomenon in rural areas. But words matter; rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms. Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience. You may not agree that someone has been treated unfairly, but there is room to empathize.
Belief in female idiocy explains the urban/rural divide
https://progressivebeacon.substack.com/p/belief-in-female-idiocy-explains
We’ve studied how systematically losing high achievers has gone for middle America (not well). But to my knowledge we haven’t studied how losing out on female achievement in particular has impacted rural areas.
I’m guessing it’s been big. We know that increases in female achievement are responsible for a huge portion of US GPD growth over the past 50 years.
Which likely means increases in female achievement have been a huge contributor to the rise of superstar cities — places where women move and achieve thrive.
We know that places women tend to leave and don’t achieve are seeing decreasing male achievement and rising violent authoritarian misogyny.
Thus, belief in female idiocy is probably a huge contributor to, and results from, both the urban/rural divide and agglomeration effects/superstar cities.
06 June, 2024
Long Covid at 3 Years
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/long-covid-at-3-years
The new findings that we reported today demonstrate persistent risk of major adverse outcomes with Long Covid at 3-years after acute infection in patients who were hospitalized. The findings are backed up by other reports reviewed here. At this juncture, we can’t get 3-year follow up from vaccinated individuals at any scale, so a reminder the results here pertain to the infections occurring in the first year of the pandemic. In general, multiple previous studies indicate about a 40% or greater reduction of Long Covid from vaccination compared with unvaccinated controls.
Particularly concerning are the multiple new reports of Covid brain impact at longer term, as succinctly presented by the panel of neurologists. Please take the time to read the 5 points above that we’ve highlighted.
A Republican Election Clerk vs. Trump Die-Hards in a World of Lies
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/us/politics/nevada-election-clerk-trump.html
It was an outcome she’d feared for the last three and a half years, ever since former President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, and his denials and distortions spread outward from the White House to even the country’s most remote places, like Esmeralda County. It had neither a stoplight nor a high school, and Elgan knew most of the 620 voters on sight. Trump won the county with 82 percent of the vote despite losing Nevada. In the days after the election, some residents began to suspect that he should have won by even more, and they parroted Trump’s talking points and brought their complaints to the county’s monthly commissioner meetings.
They falsely claimed the election was stolen by voting software designed in Venezuela, or by election machines made in China. They accused George Soros of manipulating Nevada’s voter rolls. They blamed “undercover activists” for stealing ballots out of machines with hot dog tongs. They blamed the Dominion voting machines that the county had been using without incident for two decades, saying they could be hacked with a ballpoint pen to “flip the vote and swing an entire election in five minutes.” They demanded a future in which every vote in Esmeralda County was cast on paper and then counted by hand.
And when Elgan continued to stand up at each meeting to dispute and disprove those accusations by citing election laws and facts, they began to blame her, too — the most unlikely scapegoat of all. She had served as the clerk without controversy for two decades as an elected Republican, and she flew a flag at her own home that read: “Trump 2024 — Take America Back.” But lately some local Republicans had begun referring to her as “Luciferinda” or as the “clerk of the deep state cabal.” They accused her of being paid off by Dominion and skimming votes away from Trump, and even though their allegations came with no evidence, they wanted her recalled from office before the next presidential election in November.
04 June, 2024
Invitation to begin
https://medium.com/@karen.shipp/invitation-to-begin-38df4241c9b5
I have a story to tell. It hovers sometimes in memories just beyond my reach. The more I grasp at it, the more I discover that I do not hold the story. The story holds me.
The facts of my story are simple and easily told: In 1969, the pastor of a small Southern country church 6 miles outside of a small town refuses to yield to the pressure of the deacons to cancel his children’s party in the parsonage. The deacons and other members object not to parties in general, but to this party which includes both Black and White friends and classmates. An hour into the party, double-aught buckshot crashes through the picture window. Sixteen or seventeen large pellets spray a pattern of black holes across the living room wall. Seven of those pellets come through the wall into the room where the party is taking place. No one, by some miracle or chance, is struck by the shot. The next morning, a Sunday, the pastor is asked to resign, and when he refuses, a special business meeting is called, and he is summarily fired for being a “disruptive influence in the community.” He and his family are told to move out of the parsonage as soon as possible. A sympathetic couple in town take them in, while the pastor completes his last semester of a Master of Divinity.
Those are the bare facts of the bare beginning of the story.
The pastor of that country church was my father. I and one of my brothers were the children who threw the party. My friends, both Black and White, were the ones who risked their lives.
This is not my story alone. It is our story.
03 June, 2024
How to Make a Great Government Website
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/how-to-make-a-great-government-website
A: This relates to another thing I’ve been thinking about, which is that when you start to read about civic technology, it very, very quickly becomes clear that things that look like they are tech problems are actually about institutional culture, or about policy, or about regulatory requirements.
I’m curious why these issues so often come up in the context of tech, or are interesting to people whose background is in tech or who are drawn to technical solutions for them.
D: In Political Economy of Industrial Societies, we read all the classical theories of political economy. And we also read Hegel. So let me give you the thesis, the antithesis, and the synthesis.
There’s this starting point thesis: Tech can solve these government problems, right? There’s healthcare.gov and the call to bring techies into government, blah, blah, blah.
Then there’s the antithesis, where all these people say, well, no, it’s institutional problems. It’s legal problems. It’s political problems. I think either is sort of an extreme distortion of reality. I see a lot of more oblique levers that technology can pull in this area. For example, I mentioned measuring how many people succeeded at getting benefits. If you just had a paper application for benefits, you would never be able to actually measure how many people started versus how many people finished. Technology makes that pretty trivially measurable. It’s not a totalizing resolution of all problems, but it’s an incredible difference from paper, where we have no ability to measure this at all.
The banality of a nuclear threat
Russian expert Konstantin Sivkov on Russian state TV threatens with a nuclear strike on Poland and genocide of the Polish people.
— Денис Казанський (@den_kazansky) June 3, 2024
Unfortunately, in Europe many politicians still support these people. And many countries still trade with the Russians who dream of European genocide pic.twitter.com/yteojdWlw8