#stories

Asked a small child what her name was, and her mom clarified, “お名前は？” and the small child responded, “分からない。”

(“What’s your name?” “I don’t know.”)

In other news when I taught a class of first graders last week, and they were introducing their names in front of the class, one boy starting crying after accidentally calling himself by his nickname (Ya-cchan) instead of his full name… I felt bad but it was sort of cute remembering what 1st grade was like.

I’m interested in knowing what you guys are up to!!

As I enter the final term of my masters degree and begin writing my dissertation, I’m also starting to think about what my life will look like in the next couple years after graduation, and what/where I want to start planning and applying to for future experiences. Would love to hear about what you guys are up to, whether that’s in the realm of anthro/archaeology or something completely different!

Share with me your stress, accomplishments, uncertainties, and plans! Take this time to brag about what you’ve been doing, because we all deserve to feel good about our accomplishments!

Feel free to share, comment, or dm!

<3

What I’ve been up to lately:

I’m in the last term of classes for my MSc in Archaeological Information Systems, will start writing my dissertation very soon/have done a bit of research for it. Currently waiting on news from Fulbright about doing research in Cambodia for the 2019-2020 year on the site that I’m currently researching. Will be co-directing a project in Cambodia this Spring. Planning on doing a Phd, will depend on how the Fulbright turns out/ where that leads. Currently learning Japanese in hopes of living in Japan for a couple years in the future. Would love to make this relevant to what I’m doing in Digital Archaeology if I can.

Big plans & exciting things coming up!

If the answer if yes to the previous question on my blog, then go ahead and send me some prompts! Thanks guys :) 

theramblingvoid:

Why don’t I hear more about undead beings coming back to warn people? It’s always zombies wanting to drag people down to join them in the grave, ghosts seeking vengeance, spirits trying to chase people out of their domains - but if you died horribly and were left rattling around some spooky mansion for eternity, wouldn’t you want to stop people from blundering into the same death you had?

You feel a cold breath on your neck as you get in the car. It won’t leave until you fasten your seatbelt. An unseen force catches your foot as you pass the fourth step every time you walk up the stairs. During a renovation, you find out the wood is rotten. You can never find a pack of cigarettes - even ones guests bring disappear from their pockets and are found weeks later on the lawn, empty. Your daughter is giggling and laughing at something unseen, chasing after it away from the cliffside on your family hike. You don’t know why, but you feel compelled to leave a spare hairband and some stickers on a picnic table as you leave the park. Tribute? A thank you? The items are gone by next time you visit, and you swear a happy child’s hum follows you home on the breeze.

…More preventative hauntings. It just makes sense.

pretty sure this is how ghosts accidentally become gods

Hangoutsbot plugin plushastily-put-together script to add music from your chat history – done!

The Peril of Not Dying for Love by Claire Jia
I learned everything about love from movies. Love had a sexy soundtrack. Love was forever. Love almost always involved rain, stubborn parents and irrevocable passionate sacrifice.

It wasn’t heartbreak that became draining, but the lack of it.

I have been told so many times what love should look like that I am unsure what love even is anymore. If it doesn’t look like midnight kisses with my best friend, and it doesn’t look like a booty call from a Tinder match, what is it?

We’re told love isn’t love until he’s begging on his knees, and that heartbreak isn’t heartbreak until you’ve lost your mind. We think we want love, but we’ve rarely seen it, because love is a boundless unknown that no romantic stereotype can capture.

Movies promise us blissful forevers or crushing sorrow, but most of the time, love is neither. Maybe it’s just two people who tolerate each other. Maybe it’s a mutual right swipe. What would I do for love? I’ll let you know when I actually find it.

I have a thingforModern Love stories, mostly because I have no idea what love is. I grew up despising the normative romance type of love portrayed in movies, finding the notion of emotional dependence frightening. If love means feeling things that much, no thank you – so it’s interesting to me how Claire yearned for that type of feeling. One of my favorite quotes is by Douglas Coupland, from Life After God:

“When you’re young, you always feel that life hasn’t yet begun—that ‘life’ is always scheduled to begin next week, next month, next year, after the holidays—whenever. But then suddenly you’re old and the scheduled life didn’t arrive. You find yourself asking, ‘Well then, exactly what was it I was having—that interlude—the scrambly madness—all that time I had before?’”

I love it because I think it encompasses a lot of experiences. Many things in life are dramatized – love, fulfillment, success, even life itself – so when we end up experiencing whatever it is, we’re left with a sense of, “Oh…that was it? That was the thing? That right there?”

Why We Need Less Compassion In The Animal Rights Movement And Why Decreasing Cruelty And Suffering Is Not The Point Of Veganismby legacyofpythagoras
I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “I’m Vegan because I have compassion for animals,” “We should be Vegan to stop cruelty to animals,” or “I’m Vegan because it’s the right thing to do for people, animals and the planet.”

Both “compassion” and “cruelty” are concepts related to kindness. All three terms are about what kind of emotional responses we have and are related more to our own perception of our need to feel a certain way than whether we are meeting our moral obligations. Kindness is also essentially an act of charity from a position of advantage. Animal Rights and Veganism are not about being kind to someone who needs our charity. Animal Rights is about justice, which is born from a basic notion of decency, fairness, and respect. It’s a “Social Justice Movement,” not a “Social Kindness Movement.”

As most non-Vegans will tell you, anyone can feel compassion for someone and still inflict suffering and death on nonhumans merely for their own selfish interests. They will argue ’til they’re blue in the face that they don’t lack compassion, merely because they strive to give nonhumans a good life before “humanely” slaughtering them for “food.” In fact, the very notion that this is not the case is insulting to most people. This is because they irrationally see themselves as the ones who should decide whether the “inferior beings” that they exploit should get to live or die at all in the first place.

The reason it makes more sense to use the idea of justice to drive Animal Rights is because you can’t have justice and still inflict unnecessary suffering and death.It can’t be as easily argued that it’s Just to inflict suffering on nonhumans when there is no necessity.

Another aspect of this issue is that when we say we’re Vegan to decrease or avoid “cruelty” then non-Vegans will argue that it’s not cruel to exploit nonhuman animals, as long as you do it “nicely.” They will argue that breeding animals is not cruel because the animals “have a good life” and “get to have a family” and other such nonsense. It’s much harder to argue against this than arguing that we have a moral responsibility to not exploit anyone, whether human or nonhuman, because humans are not morally superior to nonhumans.

Besides the Very Odd Capitalizations and many emphases, this is a really good post. It insightfully points out that omnivores aren’t lacking in compassion, but have biases that prevent them from acting in a way that is just. I think this is one of the reasons why people get defensive about eating animals – since veganism and vegetarianism are touted as the “kind” or “compassionate” thing to do, they feel like they’re being attacked for being unkind and uncompassionate. Along with learned biases (“some animals are for food”, “milk is good”, “a meal is incomplete without meat”, etc.), they can’t imagine not eating animals, but they can’t imagine themselves as unkind, either.

This is also why the humane myth is so dangerous – by appealing to meat-eaters’ compassion, companies avoid addressing the morality of killing animals. Animals do not want to die. Giving them a “good life” before ending it doesn’t negate the wrongness of slaughter.

Ride This Out by Imaginary Cities is my new jam.

The Tyranny of Tyranny by Cathy Devine
A critical response to The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

There are (at least) two different models for building a movement, only one of which does Joreen acknowledge: a mass organisation with strong, centralised control, such as a Party. The other model, which consolidates mass support only as a coup de grace necessity, is based on small groups in voluntary association.

Joreen associates the ascendency of the small groups with the consciousness-raising phase of the women’s movement, but concludes that, with the focus shifting beyond the changing of individual consciousness towards building a mass revolutionary movement, women should begin working towards building a large organisation. It is certainly true and has been for some time that many women who have been in consciousness-raising groups for a while feel the need to expand their political activities beyond the scope of the group and are at a loss as to how to proceed. But it is equally true that other branches of the Left are at a similar loss, as to how to defeat capitalist, imperialist, quasi-fascist Amerika.

What we definitely don’t need is more structures and rules, providing us with easy answers, pre-fab alternatives and no room in which to create our own way of life. What is threatening the female Left and the other branches even more, is the ‘tyranny of tyranny’, which has prevented us from relating to individuals, or from creating organisations in ways that do not obliterate individuality with prescribed roles, or from liberating us from capitalist structure.

I read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” yesterday, so I thought it would be fitting to read a critique of it today. I like Cathy’s emphasis on cultural change and building friendships to prevent burnout and relieve “feelings of personal shittiness”, but I think those things can also exist in a structured organization. I think she missed the point Jo made about structure – not as a monolithic organization commanded by a few, but an acknowledgment of power that inevitably arises in groups.

I was completely turned off by her metaphor of sex and organization: “Men tend to organise the way they fuck - one big rush and then that ‘wham, slam, thank you maam’, as it were. Women should be building our movement the way we make love - gradually, with sustained involvement, limitless endurance - and of course, multiple orgasms.” First, that’s exceedingly stereotypical and moderately offensive. I’ve also been thinking about the gender spectrum and what it means when feminism presents a dichotomy of “man” and “woman”. Later on, Cathy says that feminist revolution “means destroying the masculine and feminine roles which make both men and women only half human”. I find it difficult to reconcile the condemnation of binary gender roles while being dependent on some sort of definition of “woman”. When we remove social constructs like gender, what does feminism mean? The more I read, the less I feel like I know; going to add a bunch of social constructionism and feminist theory articles to my reading list now.

I am not a story by Galen Strawson
Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

So say the narrativists. We story ourselves and we are our stories. There’s a remarkably robust consensus about this claim, not only in the humanities but also in psychotherapy. It’s standardly linked with the idea that self-narration is a good thing, necessary for a full human life.

I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. These are not universal human truths – even when we confine our attention to human beings who count as psychologically normal, as I will here. They’re not universal human truths even if they’re true of some people, or even many, or most. The narrativists are, at best, generalising from their own case, in an all-too-human way. At best: I doubt that what they say is an accurate description even of themselves.

But Nietzsche is more specific: ‘perhaps by what they are and by their sequence, they will yield… the fundamental law of your true self.’ Here it seems I must either disagree with Nietzsche or concede something to the narrativists: the possible importance of grasping the sequence in progressing towards self-understanding.

I concede it. Consideration of the sequence – the ‘narrative’, if you like – might be important for some people in some cases. For most of us, however, I think self-knowledge comes best in bits and pieces. Nor does this concession yield anything to the sweeping view with which I began, the view – in Sacks’s words – that all human life is life-writing, that ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”, and that ‘this narrative is us’.

This is related to the story I read a few days ago, Seeing Myself: In Search of the Inciting Incident, where the author tries to make sense of his own story, and the related article, Life’s Stories, which states quite boldly, “How you arrange the plot points of your life into a narrative can shape who you are—and is a fundamental part of being human.” This is exactly what Galen is arguing against in his article.

It’s really interesting to me because I had taken narratives as a given – one of my favorite things is to read and listen to people’s stories. On the other hand, I haven’t assembled a coherent life story for myself. The eleventh question in The 36 Questions That Lead to Love is, “Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.” When I did this, I fumbled my way through it. What’s there to say? My mother birthed me, years passed, and here I am now. I don’t have a narrative, and I suppose I always assumed I was too young or naive to assemble one yet.

Thinking on it some more, I have always felt a bit weird when people tell the story of their life; I enjoy hearing singular experiences, but stories that try to wrap up the magnitude of a life through one coherent theme have always felt too facile. They feel too one-dimensional. If I am experiencing life in so many conflicting ways that I’m unable to form a narrative, I expect others to be as multi-dimensional and unsummarizable as I.

“Born This Way” Or Not: No Justification Required by Adam Turner
The “born this way” position is very much like the “right to privacy” and “live and let live” justifications for same-sex marriage. All are largely missing the more radical goal of making human relations — sexuality, marriage, employment, etc. — more gender neutral.

Saying “I was born this way” in the context of sexual orientation still suggests that there is something about “this way” that needs to be explained, excused, or justified. Sexual orientation should require no more justification than hair or eye color, music preference, or height.

The problem is, “born this way” is complicated and hard to take a step back from. Why?

First, biology is quite convincing and difficult to get past. This is an issue the disability rights community has been dealing with perhaps even more than the gay rights community. It is very hard for us, embedded as we are in our culture, to step back and see how many of our assumptions aren’t “natural” or “obvious” — two words that often denote biological explanations.

Historian and disability rights activist Paul K. Longmore argued that “for the vast majority of people with disabilities, prejudice is a far greater problem than any impairment: discrimination is a bigger obstacle for them to ‘overcome’ than any disability.” This perspective on the border between “difference” and “disease” is similar to arguments against sexual orientation discrimination. Eve Sedgwick notes, for example, that there is almost no strong or explicit defense of being gay or lesbian as a positive good; at best it is often accepted only as a tolerable reality. Most efforts to “understand” or find the “cause” of homosexuality are often based in a desire to “fix” it. Neither sexuality nor disability is a “natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune.” The tendency to link such characteristics to particular embodiments is the result of a set of cultural processes with a long history.

Most positions depend on trying to explain, justify, or excuse a characteristic that should be value-neutral. Sexual orientation, along with race, gender, (dis)ability, and countless other identity categories, is a difference that ought to be celebrated not explained. I have faith that we can do it. Historically speaking, we’ve come quite a long way, but we still have a long way to go.

I like this. We often conflate being different as being wrong. I’ve been liking “GSM” (gender and/or sexuality minority) more and more these days because it’s more inclusive, it doesn’t specify an identity, and it emphasizes that being in the minority is absolutely okay.

I worked from home because I took two figure skating tests in the afternoon (passed both my juvenile and intermediate moves-in-the-field!) and then ran errands (grapes! peanut butter! toilet paper!).

A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing by Emma Court
“Bye,” he shouted down the stairs at my back. “See you never.”

Mass media has a fascination with hookup culture among people around my age (21) meriting in-depth investigations and contentious opining about what it all means. But they often miss a simple fact: There’s nothing particularly new about trying to avoid getting hurt.

Having the last word was once a sign of one’s wit and smarts. It meant that your comment had gravitas and staying power. But today, having the last word is the ultimate in weakness: It means being the person who doesn’t merit an answer. Better to leave them hanging than risk the same happening to you. Keep it shallow so your heart isn’t on the line.

I really liked this – not just because I usually enjoy reading Modern Love stories, but for its insights on how scared we are about being vulnerable and intimate. It’s in the same vein as Vanity Fair’s article on Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse”, but I liked this better because it’s shorter, it’s from a first-person perspective, and the intimacy that they shared wasn’t overtly sexual. It’s interesting how our generation views deep, vulnerable conversations as scarier and more intimate than sex.

Seeing Myself: In Search of the Inciting Incident by Matthew Salesses
It doesn’t matter what we talked about, because we talked about nothing and everything, because we never talked, because what are words, really, what is real and what is made up?

I was adopted when I was two. That much is true. I went back to Korea when I was 23. Whatever those first two years of my life were like does indeed always seem to be the missing link. But I had to make up some of the beginning in order to make up a middle and an end. Which has to do with inciting incidents.

That doesn’t matter, though. This story was, and is, real. The shame that I gave my imaginary birth mother is real. That shame is mine. And letting her go, I did that, I do that. Assessing all of the lacking evidence is a daily look in the mirror. Lately I worry that I missed my chance to find out one crucial incitation. Of course I have had to make up my beginnings before and will do so again. These are the things so important to the plot of who I am and to any plot of conviction and consequence — so important that they constantly draw us in: where the story starts, where the past and present meet, and what past is yet to come.

This was an interesting semi-fictional mini-autobiography. I think Matthew’s search for his “inciting incident” is relatable not only amongst adoptees, but nearly universally. We want our life to have a story, and for our stories to have a narrative arc. There was a good article on this in The Atlantic a couple weeks ago, Life’s Stories. “In telling the story of how you became who you are, and of who you’re on your way to becoming, the story itself becomes a part of who you are.”

How the Minds of the Very Rich Differ from Yours and Mine by Rachel Nuwer
A burgeoning field of research indicates that the freedom money buys comes with a psychological cost.

Money’s seemingly universal effects, Kraus says, likely stems from the fact that we tend to believe that we live in a fair world—one in which good things come to people who deserve them. A self-made person tell herself she deserves the money because of her hard work, just as a person who is born into wealth might tell himself that his family is more deserving because they are smarter or more industrious than others. And for something like winning the lottery, a person might simply think, “I’m a good person at heart, I deserve this money.”

These feelings extend beyond just those who have money, however; even poor people largely believe the system is fair. If wealthy people possess wealth because they earned and deserve it, that means that they, too, can ascend the social ladder if they work hard enough. “The alternative—to say that the American dream is a mirage and that the system is biased against people who are poor—is too painful,” Kraus says. “People believe the illusion to make themselves feel better.”

This reminds me of Toby Morris’ fantastic and perceptive comic, On A Plate. (It’s been passed around Reddit and the larger internet for a while now.) I think these studies are extremely important when looking at politics – most of America’s politicians are rich, white men.

Can technology make a hearing-centric world more accessible? by Arielle Duhaime-Ross
Motion capture technology, closed captioning, and hearing aids

On this week’s episode of Top Shelf, you’ll see how Gallaudet University researchers are using motion capture technology and interactive apps to ensure that children who are deaf are exposed to language at an early age. Then, you’ll meet the owner of Digital Media Services — a company that does closed captioning for Hulu, Netflix, and even Nicki Minaj music videos. Finally, you’ll get a glimpse at the changes taking place in the world of hearing aids.

“Normally, this is the part of the video where I tell you that things are getting better and the world’s more accessible than ever. And while that may be true, that doesn’t actually mean that we live in an accessible world. Our society was built with a very specific type of human in mind, and that means that we’ve overlooked a lot of people’s needs and preferences. A world that’s truly accessible is one that’s adaptable and inclusive. Technology is helping, but if we really want to live in a world that works for everybody, we’re gonna have to change our mindset.”

I was really, really excited to see accessibility covered by The Verge, and with such a lovely summary and conclusion to boot! Side note: did you know that Netflix has started adding audio descriptions to various movies and shows, too?

There are two story series on Reddit that I’ve been really getting into, written by the same author:

• Straylight – an adventure ducking between VR combat and real world intrigue as a washed up man finds himself caught in more than he can handle.
  
• Tik Tok – the story of a world of superhumans and one time warping anomaly.
  

Re: Asian feminism – what does it look like?

I think one reason that Asian feminism is hard to describe is because the Asian identity is hard to describe – when we talk about Black feminism, it’s usually specific to African-American women (and in turn, when people talk about “being black”, it’s usually “being black in America”). Black culture is something that’s been in public and academic discourse for a while (not implying that it’s been talked about as much as it should be in comparison to white, Eurocentric culture, though).

Asian culture, on the other hand, is complicated by questions like: are we only talking about Asian-American issues? are South Asians included? are we talking about “native” culture (e.g. Chinese culture, Indian culture, etc.) or immigrant culture? As someone who grew up in the American South, there was no AAPI community to be a part of – I struggled with what being “Asian-American” meant, as did a lot of my peers. And this fragmentation of Asian identity affects Asian feminism because I think a lot of us are still struggling with the “Asian” part. This may be the strongest thing we have in common with Black feminists, i.e. acknowledging that race is often the most complicated part of our identities (whereas in white feminism, being a woman is most obviously the biggest emergency).

I have a lot of reading on Black feminism to learn from (just found Melissa Harris-Perry’s Black Feminism Syllabus).

Re: dualism and mental health

When writing about mental health, people often distinguish between the mind and the body. I feel like my body isn’t really me when I’m experiencing body dysmorphia or anxiety. Even though I’m a physicalist and I intellectually know that my mind is my brain is my body, the dualist perspective is appealing because it’s what it feels like – I think that this feeling of dualism and the general acceptance of a separation between mind and body by most people is why mental health is viewed the way it is. Mental illness is often not taken as seriously as physical illness.

How People Treat Mental Illness Vs. How They Treat Physical Illness:

In actuality, there is no difference between mental and physical health – the difference comes from the accepted belief in dualism. No matter if it’s CBT to treat harmful thought cycles or medicine to treat chemical imbalances, mental health is physical health because the mind is the body. Writing about mental illness from a dualist perspective is so common, though; the irony is that it perpetuates the perception of mental health as different from physical health.

The Six Swans by Mallory Ortberg
A re-telling of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale.

The king’s wife had never been a king’s daughter. She was outranked by her belly.

Now the king’s wife had given birth to a king’s daughter, and he named the girl himself. Her hair and her eyes and her brows were brown-black, her voice was as clear as the waves breaking on the shore, and she was as lovely a king’s daughter as anyone could wish. She ate from a little golden dish and drank from a little golden cup that he had made specially for her and placed right next to his own seat at table.

The king’s wife again turned her plate out for the king’s dogs, but now that she was not growing a daughter, nobody minded.

[…]

“Never have I seen anyone so beautiful,” he told her. Her hand felt dead and alien in his, and she said nothing. The man tore off his cloak and swept it round her shoulders. “You are too beautiful to remain here in these woods all alone,” he declared, as if annexing her. “You will return with me, and I will see to it that you are dressed and honored as befits your station, because as surely as I am a king, you are a king’s daughter.”

Being beautiful had never prevented her from remaining in the woods alone before, but there was nothing she could do about it. Beauty was for public consumption. It was not private property. It gave him the right to talk to her as if they had been introduced, and take her hand, and make her wear his cloak, and take him from her tree and to his home.

They dismounted at the gates of a great marble building, the floors of which were covered in carpets richer and more sumptuous to the touch than her bruised feet could have hoped for. The walls, too, were hung with tapestries dazzling to the eye, but she did not see them for her tears. She could not understand how she was here, when she had never said Yes to being taken. How could a girl who could not speak agree to any of this?

She was beginning to learn the danger of silence, and that someone who wishes to hear a Yes will not go out of his way to listen for a No.

This is lovely.

The Rise of Victimhood Culture by Conor Friedersdorf
A recent scholarly paper on “microaggressions” uses them to chart the ascendance of a new moral code in American life.

Victimhood cultures emerge in settings, like today’s college campuses, “that increasingly lack the intimacy and cultural homogeneity that once characterized towns and suburbs, but in which organized authority and public opinion remain as powerful sanctions,” they argue. “Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood … the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights.”

Since third-parties are likeliest to intervene in disputes that they regard as relatively serious, and disputes where one group is perceived as dominating another are considered serious by virtue of their aggregate relevance to millions of people, victimhood culture is likeliest to arise in settings where there is some diversity and inequality, but whose members are almost equal, since “a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality.”

I really like this comment by Statetheobvious: “America is a culture based heavily on the idea of the underdog triumphing, on the guy no one counted showing up all his detractors. It’s why every politician will talk about how their grandfather was a working man even as they themselves went to exclusive private schools. Creating a narrative about how everyone is out to get you, for shallow and bigoted reasons especially, is a way of signalling that you’re the hero of the story. This microaggression culture simply takes it to its logical conclusion. It’s obnoxious and makes America a worse place to be, but everyone does it, from all sides of the political spectrum.”

Jonathan Haidt, in his evaluation, Where microaggressions really come from: A sociological account, highlights, “The key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own. At the same time that it weakens individuals, it creates a society of constant and intense moral conflict as people compete for status as victims or as defenders of victims.”

Again, the paradox: places that make the most progress toward equality and diversity can expect to have the “lowest bar” for what counts as an offense against equality and inclusivity. Some colleges have lowered the bar so far that an innocent question, motivated by curiosity, such as “where are you from” is now branded as an act of aggression.

At universities and many other environments within modern America and, increasingly, other Western nations, the clash between dignity and victimhood engenders a similar kind of moral confusion: One person’s standard provokes another’s grievance, acts of social control themselves are treated as deviant, and unintentional offenses abound. And the conflict will continue. As it does each side will make its case, attracting supporters and winning or losing various battles. But remember that the moral concepts each side invokes are not free-floating ideas; they are reflections of social organization. Microaggression complaints and other specimens of victimhood occur in atomized and diverse settings that are fairly egalitarian except for the presence of strong and stable authority. In these settings behaviors that jeopardize equality or demean minority cultures are rare and those that occur mostly minor, but in this context even minor offenses – or perceived offenses – cause much anguish. And while the authorities and others might be sympathetic, their support is not automatic. Add to this mix modern communication technologies that make it easy to publicize grievances, and the result, as we have seen, is the rise of a victimhood culture.

It’s important to realize that microaggressions aren’t superfluous, though. Megan McArdle, in How Grown-Ups Deal With ‘Microaggressions’, writes, “The debate over microaggressions often seems to focus on whether they are real. This is silly. Of course they’ve always been real; only the label is new. Microaggressions from the majority to the minority are as real as Sunday, and the effect of their accumulated weight is to make you feel always slightly a stranger in a strange land. The phenomenon is dispiriting, even more so because the offenders frequently don’t realize that their words were somewhere between awkward and offensive (once again). On the other hand, in a diverse group, the other thing you have to say about microaggressions is that they are unavoidable. And that a culture that tries to avoid them is setting up to tear itself apart.”

If you establish a positive right to be free from alienating comments, it’s hard to restrict that right only to people who have been victimized in certain ways, or to certain degrees. It’s easy to say everyone has a right not to be alienated. It’s also easy to say “you should only seek social or administrative sanction for remarks that are widely known and understood to be offensive slurs.” It is very, very hard to establish a rule that only some groups are entitled to be free from offense – because the necessary corollary is that it’s fine to worry the other groups with a low-level barrage of sneers, and those groups will not take this lying down. The result will be proliferation of groups claiming victim status, attempting to trump the victim status of others.

Complaints about microaggressions can be used to stop complaints about microaggressions. There is no logical resting place for these disputes; it’s microaggressions all the way down. And in the process, they make impossible demands on members of the ever-shrinking majority: to know everything about every possible victim group, to never inadvertently appropriate any part of any culture in ways a member doesn’t like, or misunderstand something, or make an innocent remark that reads very differently to someone with a different experience. Which will, of course, only hasten the scramble for members of the majority to gain themselves some sort of victim status that can protect them from sanction.

Love in abundance: Hana Low on the intersections between queer human and non-human animal liberation by Animal Voices
Many of us have heard of the term “trickle-down economics”, but Hana Low wants to introduce us to “trickle-up social justice”. Coined by Dean Spade, this term is the jumping off point of a talk Hana gives about the connections between fighting oppression for LGBTQ communities and non-human animals.

Hana alludes to a few common struggles that these groups might face, such as the mainstream views that the lives of LGBTQ humans or non-human animals are “cute” or “tragic”. These two judgments ignore the diversity of all human and non-human animals, while also creating hierarchies that suggest that the most relatable to the hegemonic group are the ones most deserving of freedom and justice.

Hana also offers insight into other important topics that animal advocates should be aware of. They speak about the ways in which different groups have their bodily autonomy restricted or removed. Hana also tells us about community and justice-based solutions to crime that are alternatives to the current model of that incarcerates and does harm. Finally, we discuss the importance of having an approach to animal liberation that incorporates social justice for all groups, not just non-human animals, which includes addressing and being accountable for reproducing other forms of oppression, such as racism or heterosexism. Social justice should not leave anyone behind, and we should find solidarity in our pursuit of a more compassionate world.

Hana’s insights and comments on trickle-up animal liberation, the use of intelligence as a measure of an animal’s worth, how the harm in promoting “cute” animals is related to the harm in promoting heteronormative behaviors in the context of homosexuality (i.e. coaxing empathy in terms of similarities harms those furthest from the “norm”), the harm in portraying queer and non-human animals as “tragic beings”, the legal system and restorative justice, bodily autonomy, polyamory, discrimination and oppression in the vegan community, …the conversations in this episode were great. I often struggle with extending compassion towards animals that are not mammals (e.g. insects), so their view on love and the protection of all lives is inspiring.

What’s the yams?

The First-Person Industrial Complex by Laura Bennett
The Internet prizes the harrowing personal essay. But sometimes telling your story comes with a price.

This is a key problem with the new first-person economy: the way it incentivizes knee-jerk, ideally topical self-exposure, the hot take’s more intimate sibling. The mandate at xoJane, according to Carroll, was: the more “shameless” an essay, the better. Carroll describes how “internally crushing” it became to watch her inbox get flooded every day with the darkest moments in strangers’ lives: “eating disorders, sexual assault, harassment, ‘My boyfriend’s a racist and I just realized it.’ ” After a while, Carroll said, the pitches began to sound as if they were all written in the same voice: “immature, sort of boastful.” Tolentino, who worked as an editor at the HairpinbeforeJezebel, characterizes the typical Jezebel pitch as the “microaggression personal essay” or “My bikini waxer looked at me funny and here’s what it says about women’s shame,” and the typical Hairpin pitch as “I just moved to the big city and had a beautiful coffee shop encounter, and here’s what it says about urban life.”

It’s harder than ever to weigh the ethics of publishing these pieces against the market forces that demand them, especially as new traffic analytics make it easy to write and edit with metrics in mind. “I’ve always loved unvarnished, almost performative, extemporaneous bloggy writing,” Gould says. “But now an editor will be like, can you take this trending topic and make it be about you?” Sarah Hepola, who edits Salon’s personal essays, says that the question “What am I doing to these writers?” is always in the back of her mind: “I try to warn them that their Internet trail will be ‘I was a BDSM person,’ and they did it for $150.” But editors’ best efforts aside, this is, more than anything, a labor problem—writers toiling at the whims of a system with hazardous working conditions that involve being paid next to nothing and guaranteed a lifetime of SEO infamy. The first-person boom, Tolentino says, has helped create “a situation in which writers feel like the best thing they have to offer is the worst thing that ever happened to them.”

I really enjoyed reading the reddit comments on this piece. /u/walker6168 criticized the article, writing, “I felt like the author didn’t want to go the extra mile. It doesn’t quite condemn the practice for being exploitative and taking advantage of people who have had terrible experiences. It doesn’t address the huge risk that comes with the format: verifying the story, like with the Rolling Stones UVA article. Nor does it really engage with the format’s desire to distort every tragedy into a politically correct format.” /u/smeethu countered, “I agree that the author didn’t go all the way and condemn the practice, but she still went into enough depth to make me explore its nuances. What I find is that these people are being exploited, but they are also exploiting themselves. If you are a starving freelance writer who is behind on rent, you know you need to get paid. Writing a shocking personal essay is one way to guarantee that. And it sells for the same reason people tune in to reality TV: we enjoy exploring the dark parts of our lives and it’s entertaining.” I feel like that argument is also used for other exploitive practices, like factories and sweatshops (i.e. the people who work there are happy to have found work at all). I think the way our society is structured encourages exploitation through commodification. We’re commodifying people’s experiences and are meant to feel okay about it because they’re supposed to speak to some universally relatable theme.

On a similar note, /u/DevFRus wrote, “At what point do such first-person essays stop being empowering and become a circus side-show? It seems to me like it is becoming less and less about giving people who had no voice before a voice, and more and more about exploiting those people for clicks. I wish the author engaged more critically with these aspects of the industry.” I think the question of when things stop being empowering is really important. It may feel empowering for someone to bare their heart in the moment, but does that mean true consent when the underlying system is exploitive? It may feel empowering for a woman to dress in provocative clothing, but is that truly making a statement in a culture steeped in compulsory sexuality and the sexual objectification of female bodies? When does the individual need to step back and consider the system rather than individual empowerment?

How big data is unfair by Moritz Hardt
Understanding sources of unfairness in data driven decision making

As we’re on the cusp of using machine learning for rendering basically all kinds of consequential decisions about human beings in domains such as education, employment, advertising, health care and policing, it is important to understand why machine learning is not, by default, fair or just in any meaningful way.

This runs counter to the widespread misbelief that algorithmic decisions tend to be fair, because, y’know, math is about equations and not skin color. […] I’d like to refute the claim that “machine learning is fair by default”. I don’t mean to suggest that machine learning is inevitably unfair, but rather that there are powerful forces that can render decision making that depends on learning algorithms unfair.

[…] a learning algorithm is designed to pick up statistical patterns in training data. If the training data reflect existing social biases against a minority, the algorithm is likely to incorporate these biases. This can lead to less advantageous decisions for members of these minority groups. Some might object that the classifier couldn’t possibly be biased if nothing in the feature space speaks of the protected attributed, e.g., race. This argument is invalid. After all, the whole appeal of machine learning is that we can infer absent attributes from those that are present. Race and gender, for example, are typically redundantly encoded in any sufficiently rich feature space whether they are explicitly present or not. They are latent in the observed attributes and nothing prevents the learning algorithm from discovering these encodings. In fact, when the protected attribute is correlated with a particular classification outcome, this is precisely what we should expect. There is no principled way to tell at which point such a correlation is worrisome and in what cases it is acceptable.

My knee-jerk reaction when reading the article title was, “What? How can an algorithm be unfair?” It’s interesting to have forgotten about the inherent biases in the data itself.

Verge Fiction: The Date by Emily Yoshida
The kid couldn’t have been older than 24, but there was a deep, distant fatigue to his face, and dark shadows lined his eyes. As he stared down at the tablet his face went slack, as if momentarily hypnotized by its glow. He took a sip of Red Bull Yellow Edition and handed the tablet back to me, this time with a new document labeled STUDY OUTLINE.

“So if you read through that, you’ll get the basic gist of it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Basically, you’re going to be contacted by a number of brands over the duration of the test period, and you’re to react as you normally would; you’re free to ignore them, or take advantage of whatever offers or promotions they have going on. Totally up to you. These may show up on email, Facebook, any social network you’ve provided us with — and as you’ll see in the release form in a second, you do get compensated more for every account you sign over to us. At the end of the study you’ll be asked to report how many brands contacted you, and we’ll check it against our own records. There is also a possibility that you will be a placebo subject — that no brands will contact you.”

[…] By the time I walked out the door I had had enough Pinot Grigio in me to feel sufficiently light on my feet about this whole adventure. All right, this is what you are doing now, I kept repeating in my head. You are in the world and you are letting yourself be changed by it, and that is normal and fun. The Jam Cellar was walking distance to my apartment, and as I made my way down there I listened to a playlist I had made for myself on Apple Music on my new fancy wireless headphones.

Every fifth step I felt my heart wobble a little as I remembered the picture of Marcus and that corgi. He had two other photos that I had stared at in between our chats — one of him sitting at a brunch spot drinking some kind of complicated looking cocktail out of a hammered copper mug, the other of him at the beach during sunset, in silhouette from behind as he ran toward the water. You couldn’t even see his face. He was willing to use a whole picture slot for something that didn’t even show his face. I liked that.

A terrifying, if a bit hokey, glimpse at the role of brands in our lives.

hungwy:

One of the best stories humanity ever produced was a draft of a rewrite of the Epic of Gilgamesh written by a Ecuadorian poet in 1935. It was tossed into a fireplace by an angry boy and lost forever. Another of humanity’s best was told 65,000 years ago and was overheard by a small tribe of embarked Neanderthals boating down a river in what is now northern Georgia. A short woman at the bank scrubbed a wooden idol in the water and sang an ancient tale in an unknown language. These two are eclipsed by everything produced by two brothers at the coast of what is now Cameroon between 503 BC and 490 BC, which they shared with some family and friends, and were beloved by everyone except a sour uncle.

TW: ghosts, paranormal, creepy, spooky stories

Yoooo it’s almost Halloween fam ((I understand it is May I am joking)) But does anyone have any ghost stories or paranormal encounters ???

I’d love to hear them!!! Reblog or reply or send me asks!!