Abuse, Apologies & Accountability

https://loriannethompson.com/2021/05/11/abuse-apologies-accountability/

We cannot demand accountably in verbally abusive and humiliating ways. To confront is not to condemn. To demand is not to dehumanize or demean.

On Identity

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/magazine/cherokee-native-american-andrea-smith.html

More than a decade ago, a prominent academic was exposed for having faked her Cherokee ancestry. Why has her career continued to thrive?

https://againstpoliticsofdisposability.wordpress.com/

I am not interested in entertaining silly online identity attacks that seem to consume your academic careers in order to make you feel personally more authenticated as Indigenous persons, HOWEVER, Andrea Smith is a long time dear friend of my family and your actions are beyond offensive and belittling to someone we deeply care about. Thus, I wish to lend my support to Andy by speaking truth while you all continue to act as bullies and process your own insecurities.

I want to point out that my family has long visited Cherokee ceremonial grounds (quite regularly during some seasons) to lend support in participation just as Cherokee ceremonial practitioners have long done the same during our Muscogee ceremonial dances. I have never seen any of these Andrea Smith-attackers in attendance at Cherokee ceremonies; none of them are Cherokee speakers nor are they ceremonial practitioners; most of these folks are of minimal blood quantum and look white. In fact, these very kind of identity police are who traditional ceremonial practitioners get a good laugh at.

How to Get Rich

https://nav.al/rich

Status is your rank in the social hierarchy

There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. I think people know that. They realize that, so they want to make money.

At the same time, deep down many people believe they can’t make it; so they don’t want any wealth creation to happen. They virtue signal by attacking the whole enterprise, saying, “Well, making money is evil. You shouldn’t do it.”

But they’re actually playing the other game, which is the status game. They’re trying to be high status in the eyes of others by saying, “Well, I don’t need money. We don’t want money.” 

Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. Everybody in the world can have a house. Because you have a house doesn’t take away from my ability to have a house. If anything, the more houses that are built, the easier it becomes to build houses, the more we know about building houses, and the more people can have houses.

Wealth is a very positive-sum game. We create things together. We’re starting this endeavor to create a piece of art that explains what we’re doing. At the end of it, something brand new will be created. It’s a positive-sum game.

Status is a very old game

Status, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. It’s a very old game. We’ve been playing it since monkey tribes. It’s hierarchical. Who’s number one? Who’s number two? Who’s number three? And for number three to move to number two, number two has to move out of that slot. So, status is a zero-sum game. [...]

I don’t think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It’s just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies.

u/womangirl on attention from older men

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/nexzzl/what_are_some_pieces_of_mysterious_lost_media/gyjhfou/

Back then, whether you were a famous actress or a young girl in a relatively small town, it was not only not so out of the ordinary for older people to party with and come on to younger girls (and I imagine boys as well), but also a LOT easier for them to do so without repercussions from the kind of media we have now and with the education that young kids get regarding these situations.

I know that there were not just 1 or 2, but MANY men aged 20 - 40 who willingly bought alcohol for or drank alcohol with, smoked pot with/sold pot to, sold cocaine to/offered free cocaine to me and/or my friends when we were between 12 and 16 years old.

Those things, alcohol/drugs, sometimes led to those men also flirting with, coming on to, feeling up (breasts and more), attempting to have sex with and, in some cases, succeeding in having sex with girls who were anywhere from 10 to almost 30 years younger than them.

And most of the time none of those girls told any parent or adult with the authority to do anything about it, for fear of getting in trouble themselves, social repercussions, or the fact that many times if they did, it was brushed off, blamed on themselves, or swept under the rug.

Secret Sharers: The Hidden Ties Between Private Spies and Journalists

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html

The dossier’s latest blow came last year when the identity of Mr. Steele’s collector was revealed. He turned out to be a Russian-born lawyer, Igor Danchenko, who now lived in the United States. Mr. Danchenko, like others in the private intelligence business, had stumbled into it after other pursuits failed. His contacts within Russia appeared to be not Kremlin A-listers but instead childhood friends, college buddies or drinking pals.

In 2017, Mr. Danchenko claimed to the F.B.I. during a secret interview that Mr. Steele had “misstated” the information and had “exaggerated” its reliability. But after that interview was released in 2020, Mr. Danchenko flip-flopped. He told one newspaper that he stood by the dossier; he told another newspaper that he wasn’t so sure about it.

By then, a few reporters who had written about the dossier had backed away from it. “Some people have wanted to maintain that the dossier is checking out when, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t,” said Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News. He was in the minority. When Erik Wemple of The Washington Post wrote a series of columns about the media infatuation with the dossier, most journalists he contacted either defended their work or ignored his inquiries.

In an article for Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi cast the media’s handling of the dossier as a replay of a press disaster: the reporting before the Persian Gulf war, which claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. “The W.M.D. affair showed what happened when we don’t require sources to show us evidence, when we let political actors use the press to ‘confirm’ their own assertions,” Mr. Taibbi wrote. “Are we never going to own up to this one?”

Matt Gallagher on "Cherry" and the Media's Flattening of Trauma

 

https://battleborne.substack.com/p/matt-gallagher-on-cherry-and-the

There’s a constant desire throughout the process of turning a real life event life to book to movie of wanting to have things both ways. And that's disingenuous. It's trying to blur the line between reality and entertainment for the very cynical reason that it will make money.

There was a more complicated way to do this. I think, you know, it's Walker story, his book, really. There's this point in my piece I quote from Walker’s lawyer, who in petitioning the court for a compassionate release, says, you know, “This is not a story about a bank robbery." And there's real truth to that. But “Cherry” has certainly been packaged, marketed and sold multiple times over as a story about armed bank robbery.

I wanted this to be a story about storytelling itself. And in my research I couldn’t find anyone who went on public record to acknowledge the weight of the story, except for the actor who played walker, Tom Holland. He realized that, “Hey, this was based on a real event and pointing a gun at somebody said has serious consequences.” And you can watch that. And he's not bullshitting. Maybe it's because he was the first person in all of this that actually had to physically act out what that looks like.

Forced to Choose Between Trump’s “Big Lie” and Liz Cheney, the House G.O.P. Chooses the Lie

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/forced-to-choose-between-trumps-big-lie-and-liz-cheney-the-house-gop-chooses-the-lie

Cheney’s rupture with the House Republican Conference has become all but final in recent days, but it has been months in the making. Edelman revealed that Cheney herself secretly orchestrated an unprecedented op-ed in the Washington Post by all ten living former Defense Secretaries, including her father, warning against Trump’s efforts to politicize the military. The congresswoman not only recruited her father but personally asked others, including Trump’s first Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, to participate. “She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,” Edelman said. “It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.” The Post op-ed appeared on January 3rd, just three days before the insurrection at the Capitol.

What Substack Is Really Doing to the Media

https://slate.com/business/2021/04/substack-media-new-york-times-subscriptions-poaching.html

A key to understanding Substack’s impact on the news is to recognize that the kind of journalism that tends to thrive there—so far, at least for the most part—is not actually news. It’s commentary and analysis, aimed at the chattering classes.

Leading newsletters such as Heather Cox Richardson’s Letter From an American, Roxane Gay’s the Audacity, and Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten are wildly diverse in their perspectives and subject matter. But one thing they have in common is that they’ve never covered a city council meeting or rushed out to a crime scene to get the scoop. “I haven’t seen one of these independent Substacks that comes close to replicating what most news organizations spend most of their resources doing,” said Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and former senior editor at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

Opinion: Howard University’s removal of classics is a spiritual catastrophe

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/19/cornel-west-howard-classics/

Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.

Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.

How Tech Loses Out over at Companies, Countries and Continents

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

And over time, over the past 21 years even , I have seen these telecommunication companies develop. We all remember Bell Labs, and in the Netherlands, KPN Neherlab, when telecommunications companies were innovators, and they were the first to do many things, and when they did actual research.

And over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the extremely sad decline of all these communications companies into branding and financing bureaus, and this has impacted my own business, because I used to sell software, and now I sell services, because no one can buy my software anymore, because none of these telecommunications companies are technical companies anymore.

I spend a lot of time thinking about that, why? Why is that going on? And why is it bad? And that brings me to the central question of this presentation.

In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain? How technical do we need to stay to remain viable as a company or a country or a continent? And is there a point of no return?

If you outsource too much? Is there a point where you cannot go back and relearn how actually making things work?

How A University Of Iowa Reply-all Email Became Ground Zero For The Cancel Culture Wars

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/04/how-a-reply-all-email-became-ground-zero-for-the-cancel-culture-wars

Members of the Action UIowa Task Force asked to attend the Oversight Committee hearing, but lawmakers refused. In the first hearing, Rep. Kaufmann lashed out about the task force’s protest. “Because they weren’t successful in silencing you, because they weren’t successful in punishing you for expressing your opinion, they’re going to use their First Amendment rights to trample on yours?” he asked Brase, rhetorically. “Excuse my French, but that’s total shit.” In the second hearing, he declared without any apparent sense of irony that the protest—a protected form of free speech—amounted to an “intimidation” of conservative students.

I asked Kaufmann why he hadn’t invited any members of the task force to the hearing. “It wasn’t about them,” he said. Then why had he shared misinformation about the students protesting? He hung up.

u/willingly-ignorant on light

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mw2api/what_do_you_genuinely_not_understand/gvfs41u/

[Light is neither a particle nor a wave.] It's something that we don't have a word for and that doesn't exist in a way that we can sense directly. But this unnamed thing happens to acts in a way similar to a wave in some situations and like a particle in others.

A cylinder will role like a sphere in one direction but not roll like a cube in the other. That doesn't make it a sphere and a cube at the same time. It makes it something different.

u/craftmacaro on animal testing

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/mupqgk/save_ralph_a_short_film_with_taika_waititi/gv8affy/

So, we love animals. None of us WANT to hurt them. We got INTO this field because we all want to understand them in order to help keep them around for future generations.

That said... My job requires me to do a few things that require me to basically turn off my emotions and concentrate on the research... It’s only possible to postpone though and I always question everything about why I’m doing this, how to minimize suffering, and whether there is any other way. Even when the answer is that it’s required it still keeps me up at night and one experiment from undergrad still makes me cry at least once a year and really question whether that one experiment made me a bad person. 

Damian Lewis Honors Late Wife Helen McCrory in Heartbreaking Tribute

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/muctbr/damian_lewis_honors_late_wife_helen_mccrory_in/gv6jaid/

She has been utterly heroic in her illness. Funny, of course — generous, brave, uncomplaining, constantly reminding us all of how lucky we’ve been, how blessed we are. Her generosity has extended to encouraging us three to live. Live fully, take opportunities, have adventures. Only a couple of weeks ago she said to us from her bed, “I want Daddy to have girlfriends, lots of them, you must all love again, love isn’t possessive, but you know, Damian, try at least to get though the funeral without snogging someone.”

Already I miss her. She has shone more brightly in the last months than you would imagine even the brightest star could shine. In life, too, we had to rise to meet her. But her greatest and most exquisite act of bravery and generosity has been to “normalise” her death. She’s shown no fear, no bitterness, no self-pity, only armed us with the courage to go on and insisted that no one be sad, because she is happy. I’m staggered by her. She’s been a meteor in our life.

u/alice-in-canada-land on race

https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/mtnnc6/navajo_nation_has_no_covidrelated_deaths_for_7th/gv1bm8i/?context=3

Whiteness is a social construct, not an inherent genetic trait.

One of the problems with the polarized way we talk about the history of racism is that it swallows subtleties. The reality is that no one is white. We're all human beings, and we all come in varying shades and hues of brown; from pale and pink-ish to a deep brown that looks navy blue in the shadows, and many olive and peachy and cinnamon tints in between.

"White" is an invented concept, and it the definition has varied to includes different groups over the few hundred years it's been in use. The Irish used to be very much on the outside of "white". As were Italians and Spaniards, and Poles, and others we easily assume are "white" today, when we have a broad skin-shade based understanding of the (fake) divisions between "races".

In fact, the English used many of the same tactics of colonization against the Irish and the Scots as they later did against Indigenous peoples on this land. Including pushing them off their lands and away from their traditional food sources; starving them by withholding other foods, while also extracting foods and profits from their lands; forcibly 'schooling' their children, and beating their languages and cultures out of them. Oh, and the English were aided and abetted in these efforts by a church that purported to care while sharing in the exploitation...

...does that sound familiar?

It's true that the Irish and Scots in many ways were co-opted into colonization, having moved to this land by the hundreds of thousands, fleeing English occupation, and it's true that they sort of gained 'whiteness' when they arrived on these shores. 

BidenBucks Is Beeple Is Bitcoin In a system rigged by the rich, outsiders have to make their own volatility.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/04/unified-monetary-theory-beeple-biden.html

Imagine a great little restaurant that goes out of business. You think, Well, that’s a shame. Yeah. It’s a shame for the current 50-year-old owners. But it also means that the real estate and the supplies — dishes, the stove — go down in cost, and it gives a 28-year-old, a recent graduate of a Brooklyn culinary academy, her shot at owning a restaurant. Closures mean layoffs, of course. But new ventures quickly take up the slack. And in an empathetic — or even sane — system, direct payments to anyone affected could carry them through the transition.

In the 2008 financial crisis, we did stimulus, but stocks were allowed to fall. We basically said, “All right, we’re going into a massive recession, but what we need to do is make sure it’s not a depression.” Now, with COVID, that’s not enough. We decided that not only is a depression not tolerable but recessions aren’t tolerable. We threw trillions at the problem — so much stimulus that the markets went up.

Assets have never been higher because we keep printing money and doing more stimulus. Yet as a percentage of GDP, wages have tanked. How do young people make money? Wages. And then who owns assets? Old rich people. So all we said is, “Okay, people who get the majority of their income through wages, i.e., young people, get screwed. And people who have the majority of their earnings or wealth in assets like real estate and stocks do really well.”

The US Must Help Afghans Who Helped It

https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/the-us-must-help-afghans-who-helped-it/

This is not an argument for staying militarily or for withdrawing U.S. troops. Rather, what happens to the many Afghans who helped us over the last 20 years and continue to aspire to build a freer, more pluralistic Afghanistan, if U.S. and NATO forces leave without a sustainable peace settlement?

For two decades, tens of thousands of Afghans worked directly for or supported the U.S. military and civilian presence. In 2009, Congress created a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) program to permit a narrow subset of that group to immigrate to the United States. But the process has been slow and difficult to implement. Only a little over 18,000 of these applications have been approved over the last decade. Today, there are another 18,000 SIV applications waiting to be processed.

A decade ago, a surging Silicon Valley giant was making plans to dominate the internet. Given a chance to stop it, regulators chosen by Barack Obama misread the evidence in front of their eyes.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/16/google-files-ftc-antitrust-investigation-475573

Nearly a decade ago, the documents show, the FTC’s investigators uncovered evidence of how far Google was willing to go to ensure the primacy of the search engine that is the key to its fortunes, including tactics that European regulators and the U.S. Justice Department would later label antitrust violations. But the FTC’s economists successfully argued against suing the company, and the agency’s staff experts made a series of predictions that would fail to match where the online world was headed:

— They saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web — now the backbone of Google parent company Alphabet's $182.5 billion in annual revenue.

— They expected consumers to continue relying mainly on computers to search for information. Today, about 62 percent of those queries take place on mobile phones and tablets, nearly all of which use Google’s search engine as the default.

— They thought rivals like Microsoft, Mozilla or Amazon would offer viable competition to Google in the market for the software that runs smartphones. Instead, nearly all U.S. smartphones run on Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

They Thought They Were Free The Germans, 1933-45, by Milton Mayer

https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

purrfunctory on Dachau and a great uncle

https://www.reddit.com/r/insanepeoplefacebook/comments/mn25fv/bruh/gtw163h/?context=3

My Grand Oncle Jacques (Great Uncle) was imprisoned in Dachau for three years. He was a member of the Belgian Resistance and was tasked with finding food and faking/forging ration cards to help feed the Jews in hiding. When not busy with that tremendous task, he helped with the militia that sabotaged Nazi vehicles, trains, whatever infrastructure they could damage to slow them down.

I met him several times as a young child, and with a child’s curiosity I asked him about the number on his arm. In age appropriate terms, Grand Oncle Jacques explained to me that he was in prison during a war because the bad guys caught him and punished him for it. He told me he had the tattoo because the bad guys wanted an easy way to tell prisoners apart.

The next time I saw him, I asked why his hands were bent and fingers curled. This beautiful, broken man explained, so kindly, that the bad guys tried to make him tell on his friends by hurting him. They broke his fingers and his hands, his feet and his knees. They broke his wrists and hit him with whips and did many cruel things. I was in tears and asked why he didn’t just tell on his friend.

Grand Oncle Jacques kissed my hair and dried my tears. And then he said, “My sweet child, one day you will learn about the bad men and what they did to innocent people. I wasn’t just protecting my friends. I was protecting hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people all over Belgium.”

The song I will Survive, the Gloria Gaynor classic, came on the radio. And this beautiful man, bent and broken by Nazi abuse, a man with twisted limbs, a man whose every step caused pain. This amazing, wonderful man got up and he danced. He held my hand in his and I danced with him, with the carefree spirit of a child. When the song finished, he sat down and mopped the sweat from his face. He drank some lemonade and held my hand tightly, between his gnarled and broken ones.

“Debby,” he said, “Do you know why I dance? Because I survived. And I dance to remember those who did not survive. In dancing I remember those who survived and those who did not. And each time I dance, they are remembered.”

That was the last time I saw him, as his many injuries and ailments made him far too fragile to travel internationally. I grew older but each time the song comes on, I will dance. When I was whole, I’d bust out in a full boogie no matter how ridiculous I looked.