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blackswaneuroparedux · 5 years ago

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Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

#ask #question #feminism #personal #third wave feminism #society #culture

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mediaeval-muse · 4 years ago

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Book Review

The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. By Benjamin Ginsberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

Genre: nonfiction

Part of a Series? No.

Summary: The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty.

***Full review under the cut.***

Content/Trigger Warnings: references to sexism and racism

Since this book is non-fiction (and thus, has no plot or characters), this review will be structured a little differently than usual.

I first became aware of this book when I saw it quoted in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and being an ex-academic myself, I had a personal interest in the subject matter. Despite being published in 2011, The Fall of the Faculty is shockingly still relevant, mainly because the trends in higher education that have led to increased administrative positions and fewer teaching jobs have continued to the present day. But while I found this book valuable, there were some drawbacks that led to me giving it 3 stars instead of 4 or 5.

For one, Ginsberg writes with a tone that I think damages his credibility. Part of me relished in his anger - I loved seeing him call administrators unqualified or incompetent or all sorts of things that reflected my personal feelings and experiences with university administrators. However, I worry that this tone can come across as biased to readers who may not have as much of a stake. Ginsberg seems to be preaching to the choir, speaking primarily to other teachers who feel the same way as he does. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, but I do wish he had given the impression of being more objective.

Second, I wish Ginsberg had relied more on anecdotes outside the realm of his own experience. This book doesn’t lack for data; it cites useful studies and includes horror stories to support Ginsberg’s main points, but it also contains a lot of generalizations or basic descriptions. That’s not always bad, as sometimes, peoples’ jobs are at risk or a more detailed picture isn’t required, but I personally wanted to see more detailed evidence and analysis to support his conclusions. When Ginsberg needed more detail, it seems like he relied almost exclusively on his own experience, and while I don’t doubt that Ginsberg has valuable insight, I do wish his personal experience was less the star of the show and more of a voice among many. I would have liked to see something more in the style of Graeber’s methodology: gathering anonymous stories and tracing patterns across multiple first-hand accounts, making caveats when appropriate and using more formal studies to explain the trends. I understand that such a process would be difficult, given that many may be reluctant to talk, but I think quoting more from other educators (and even administrative staff) would have gone a long way.

Third, there are some parts of this book that are a little cringey, to say the least, and may put some progressive readers off. For example, Ginsberg complains about “multicultural” or “diversity” programs receiving lots of administrative support despite having fewer students. Buried in this complaint is the point that some of these smaller “diversity” programs are used as a shield against administrative criticism - a point that is absolutely worth exploring. However, I do think that complaining too much about African American or gender studies receiving unfair support comes across as dismissive or discrediting, regardless of intent. Ginsberg also states that administrative pressure for departments to hire more diverse faculty is useless because either A.) there just aren’t (m)any women or POC in some fields to hire, or B.) some fields, such as the humanities, are already doing so successfully. While there’s a kernel of truth in those statements, Ginsberg doesn’t address the fact that A.) less women and POC earn advanced degrees because of institutional discrimination, hostile learning or work environments, etc., and B.) just because his own department was “diverse,” that doesn’t mean other departments are (many English programs are overwhelmingly white). Instead of just complaining that administration is meddling where it doesn’t belong, I would have liked to see an argument for more aggressive reforms of the education system as a whole and what role admin plays in helping or hindering this process. Ginsberg could have even kept his point that admin only shows interest in diversity for appearances - that point just could have been made without suggesting that it’s just a fact that women/POC aren’t available or, if they are, it’s because departments are already doing what they need to be doing.

Despite these drawbacks, this book isn’t without merit. I particularly thought that the chapter overviewing the history of tenure was well-written, with interesting tidbits of information that I think makes the history of higher education accessible to a casual reader. I also think Ginsberg had a good defense of the liberal arts and closed his book with concrete advice regarding what can be done about administrative bloat. But as it stands, The Fall of the Faculty is not necessarily a book I’d recommend if someone wanted to learn more about current trends in academia, especially if that person is an administrator themselves.

#book reviews

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leverage88 · 5 years ago

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Opinion Series

To my fellow young adults, with much frustration, it appears that we have inherited a world on fire. Our generations from the Millennials to the Generations Z, we all are faced with the unjustified burden of cleaning up the messes made by the generations before us. The student debt crisis is a primary example of one of many very difficult situations forced on to us because of our parents and their parents' parents made poor decisions. The U.S, as we know, is currently $1,5 trillion in student debt and it all started with the "Space Race." After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the U.S. government passed the Defense Education Act of 1958 to encourage students to attend university by mainly offering federal loans since they thought that too many scholarships were considered “free rides” and having the students focus on learning science, math, and foreign languages with the hopes of beating our opponents and it did work, The number of students attending colleges nearly doubled within the next decade When we fast forward nearly 70 years, we see that student debts have only increased and the Department of Education has become one of the largest banks in America in regards to loans. How disgusting is it that our government, let alone, the Department of Education, was never meant to be a bank so we have to instead, outsource management to Loan Servicers. The comedian, Hasan Minhaj, best describes these companies as part of a “multi-billion dollar predatory industry that ruins lives” and Navient is one of the largest and worst debt collection companies in the nation. They have been accused of abusing military members, double-charging borrowers, and in 2017 they were sued and accused of systematically misdirecting borrowers into types of forbearance, which disqualified them from a Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which is a program that offers public servants (think around the lines of firefighters and crossing guards) to have their outstanding federal student loans forgiven if they meet the requirements. Navient's web-page literally states that "We help our clients and millions of Americans achieve financial success through our services and support." but they are like any business and they only care about making a profit and our government has done very little to regulate these companies. So many lives have been ruined by this issue that it can feel like there is nothing we can do. Well, I say enough is enough! For too long we have been criticized for making the nation worst, for being too focused on comfort, and the media and the government have constantly berated us for having socialistic views, that are “un-American” but the reality is that the previous generations have failed us. Their way of handling the student debt crisis is not working. So many of our peers no longer cares about continuing education. For some, going to college is like getting a pool in your backyard. It is definitely something nice, but it is not really worth it. Thee thing about that concept is that the pursuit of knowledge obviously holds more value than a freaking pool. The student debt crisis is much more like a dam is holding back so much water that it is going to burst soon and if we don't do anything about this issue, we are going to drown.

As a parent, it is only natural to want your child to be happy. You make constant sacrifices for them only because you want your children to have a better life than what you, yourself had. For many years parents have thought that in order for their children to succeed in life, they need to get a good education so they can get a good-paying job and then they can live a happy, healthy, and meaningful life. There is nothing wrong with thinking that way, as a Pennsylvania mother, June, felt as well, while she encouraged her daughter’s ambition to study out of state at New York University. (Hsu, Student Debt Is Transforming the American Family.) Her daughter studied diligently with the financial support of her mother June and her father as well as assistance from a couple of loans. By then end of her daughter's education, her daughter was looking forward to chipping away at loans while starting a career dedicated to bettering the life street vendors as she chose to study the effects of globalization on an urban space at NYU. You can imagine how proud June was of her daughter. However, when her daughter got a job offer that could actually pay off her now outstanding debts, her daughter, unfortunately, found that the job went against the very principles she held and studied in college. Now June’s daughter is faced with a difficult scenario as she has to pay off her loans but the only job she found that paid well enough was immoral, and her mother June cannot do anything about it. Right now, numerous families in our nation are in this situation. The student debt crisis is endangering the well-meaning efforts of families and it is only rising. College tuition has only been rising for years and the economist, David Klein, wrote an article where he briefly explains the challenge our children can face when they graduated college, where he states “Some students are able to land jobs after graduation with salaries that justify the monthly student loan payments, but others are not able to do so, rendering their student loans a particularly heavy burden.” Countless parents and students are faced with this harsh reality, as more and more graduates move back home with their parents since it is too expensive to move out on their own, get married, or even start a family. (ONeil, Overcoming the Student Loan Crisis) Student loans work well when the students are able to get high enough paying jobs that can eventually pay back the loan and still support themselves and their future families, otherwise their lives may be placed on hold. Now imagine if that was your own child who could not move forward with their lives just because they chose to get a proper education and there is not much you can do. It is in situations like this where people can feel hopeless, but that is not the case, as there are many dedicated politicians that are trying to pass legislation to change this situation, and it is all up to us to be active fight for reforms not just for our sakes, but for our children and their children.

My fellow Americans, I am in awe of our wondrous nation. In such a short amount of time, we have grown exponentially, especially whenever we have been faced with a challenge. As we look back to the past and remember when the world was fundamentally changed on October 4th, 1957, the Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik, which was the first artificial Earth satellite the world has ever seen. While this was a momentous occasion for mankind and spoke well of our ingenuity as a species, our nation, the United States of America, was in a panic. Compared to our Cold War rivals, we were lacking in science, technology, languages, and all other aspects of education. It seemed impossible for us to catch up with the Soviets. In a way, we were at the bottom of the ninth, and it looked like the Soviet Union was going to come out victorious. In retaliation, our congress came together and passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958 or also known as the "NDEA," which was the first time our nation offered federal loans and scholarships to encourage enrollment in colleges, which not only shaped our government’s role in education as college enrollment increased fifteen-fold. This act also lead to us landing the first man on the moon. (National Defense Education Act of 1958, 85th Cong.) In the face of adversity, our nation has stood tall and withheld its value. Today, we are once again faced with an enormous challenge. After passing the NDEA, the U.S continued to give loans to college students, and while it did lead to increased enrollment, the Department of Education is more or less the largest bank in terms of loans, and the national student debt is at an all-time high standing at $1.5 trillion and rising. There are hundreds of thousands of borrowers that are being rejected from debt forgiveness programs due to being misled by third-party loan servicers or a general lack of education for these programs. (Friedman, Zack. “Why 100,000 Borrowers Were Rejected For Student Loan Forgiveness.") Our nation is also separated as many politicians and their constituents are stuck idly arguing over reforms. This debt crisis is also affecting us on a global scale. This is better explained as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) did an article on the top ten most educated countries in the world with Canada being ranked first as more than fifty-five percent of the population being college-educated and the U.S. is ranked sixth with not even having forty-six percent of the nation being considered educated. Basically, we are no longer the top nation in the world. We are not leading the world in innovation as we once were and we are still being crushed by student debt. While many us feel hopeless in this situation, now is not the time to give up. Just as we pushed ourselves in the Space Race, we need to actively push ourselves once again to make long-lasting policy changes so that we can continue to encourage secondary education and make sure that our fair nation and that we can once again rise up and remind, not just the world, but ourselves that we are capable of overcoming any trial in our way, because this is America.

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tlatollotl · 7 years ago

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There's no other way to put it: Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgos is a supermom.

She's raising five children, does housework and chores — we're talking about fresh tortillas every day made from stone-ground corn — and she helps with the family's business in their small village about 2 1/2 hours west of Cancun on the Yucatan.

Sitting on a rainbow-colored hammock inside her home, Burgos, 41, is cool as a cucumber. It's morning, after breakfast. Her youngest daughter, 4-year-old Alexa, sits on her knee, clearly trying to get her attention by hitting a teddy bear on her mom's leg. The middle daughter, 9-year-old Gelmy, is running around with neighborhood kids — climbing trees, chasing chickens — and her oldest daughter, 12-year-old Angela, has just woken up and started doing the dishes, without being asked. The older kids aren't in school because it's spring break.

Burgos is constantly on parental duty. She often tosses off little warnings about safety: "Watch out for the fire" or "Don't play around the construction area." But her tone is calm. Her body is relaxed. There's no sense of urgency or anxiety.

In return, the children offer minimal resistance to their mother's advice. There's little whining, little crying and basically no yelling or bickering.

In general, Burgos makes the whole parenting thing look — dare, I say it — easy. So I ask her: "Do you think that being a mom is stressful?"

Burgos looks at me as if I'm from Mars. "Stressful? What do you mean by stressful?" she responds through a Mayan translator.

A five-minute conversation ensues between Burgos and the translator, trying to convey the idea of "stressful." There doesn't seem to be a straight-up Mayan term, at least not pertaining to motherhood.

But finally, after much debate, the translator seems to have found a way to explain what I mean, and Burgos answers.

"There are times that I worry about my children, like when my son was 12 and only wanted to be with his friends and not study," Burgos says. "I was worried about his future." But once she guided him back on track, the worry went away.

In general, she shows no sense of chronic worry or stress.

"I know that raising kids is slow," she says. "Little by little they will learn."

Breast, formula or goat?

Burgos learned how to be a mom by watching — and helping — her own mom, her aunts and her neighbors raise many children. Throughout her childhood, she was training to be a mom.

Here in the U.S., many parents don't have this firsthand experience before having children themselves. Instead, we often learn about burping, potty training and tantrum control through parenting books, Google searches and YouTube videos. But this information comes with two big caveats, which aren't always divulged.

For starters, parenting advice can give the impression that the recommendations are based on science. But a deep look at some studies reveals that the science is more like smoke and mirrors. Sometimes the studies don't even test what the parenting expert is purporting they do.

Take for instance a study often cited as evidence that the "cry-it-out" method of sleep training is effective. The method claims that if babies are left to cry themselves to sleep, eventually they will learn to fall asleep on their own without crying, and sleep through the night.

But what the study actually tests is a gentler regime, in which babies were left to cry for only a short amount of time before being comforted. And the parents were supported by a hefty amount of personalized counseling on their babies' sleep and eating habits. The babies who made progress also did not retain the ability to put themselves to sleep and stay asleep over the long term.

As psychologist Ben Bradley argues in his book Vision of Infancy, a Critical Introduction to Psychology: "Scientific observations about babies are more like mirrors which reflect back the preoccupations and visions of those who study them than like windows opening directly on the foundations of the mind."

And sometimes the data supporting the recommendation are so flimsy that another study in a few years will come along and not only overturn the first study but completely flip the advice 180 degrees.

This is exactly what happened last year with peanuts. Back in 2000, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents not to give babies peanut butter because one study suggested early exposure would increase the risk of developing an allergy. But last year, the medical community made a complete about-face on the advice and now says "Let them eat peanuts!" Early peanut exposure actually prevents allergies, follow up studies have found.

So if science isn't the secret sauce to parenting books, what is? To answer that, we have to go back in time.

In the early 1980s, the British writer Christina Hardyment began reviewing more than 650 parenting books and manuals, dating all the way back to the mid-1700s when advice publications started appearing in hospitals. The result is an illuminating book, called Dream Babies, which traces the history of parenting advice from 17th-century English physician and philosopher John Locke to the modern-day medical couple Bill and Martha Sears.

The conclusions from the book are as clear as your baby's tears: Advice in parenting books is typically based not on rigorous scientific studies as is at times claimed but on the opinions and experiences of the authors and on theories from past parenting manuals — sometimes as long as the 18th century.

Then there's the matter of consistency — or lack thereof. Since the late 1700s, "experts" have flip-flopped recommendations over and over, from advising strict routines and discipline to a more permissive, laissez-faire approach and back again.

"While babies and parents remain constants, advice on the former to the latter veers with the winds of social, philosophical and psychological change," Hardyment writes. "There is no such thing as a generally applicable blueprint for perfect parenting."

Take, for instance, the idea that babies need to feed on a particular schedule. According to Hardyment's research, that advice first appears in a London hospital pamphlet in 1748. Sleep schedules for babies start coming into fashion in the early 1900s. And sleep training? That idea was proposed by a British surgeon-turned-sports writer in 1873. If babies "are left to go to sleep in their cots, and allowed to find out that they do not get their way by crying, they at once become reconciled, and after a short time will go to bed even more readily in the cot than on the lap," John Henry Walsh wrote in his Manual of Domestic Economy.

Even the heated debate about breastfeeding has been simmering, and flaring up, for at least 250 years, Hardyment shows. In the 18th century, mothers didn't have high-tech formula but had many recommendations about what was best for the baby and the family. Should a mother send the baby off to a wet nurse's home, so her husband won't be offended by the sight of a baby suckling? And if the family couldn't afford a wet nurse, there was specially treated cow's milk available or even better, the baby could be nursed by a goat, 18th-century parenting books advised. (If you're wondering how moms accomplished such a feat, Hardyment includes an 18th-century drawing of a young mom pushing a swaddled newborn underneath a goat's udder.)

Goat udders aside, perhaps the bigger issue with parenting books and advice on the Web is what they aren't telling you. And boy, is there a large hole.

These sources ignore most of the world and come almost entirely from the experience of Western culture. But when it comes to understanding what a baby needs, how kids work and what to do when your toddler is lying on the sidewalk (just asking for a friend), Western society might not be the best place to focus.

"WEIRD," stressed-out parents equal anxious kids?

In 2010, three scientists at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, rocked the psychology world.

They published a 23-page paper titled "The weirdest people in the world?" And in it, uncovered a major limitation with many psychological studies, especially those claiming to address questions of "human nature."

First, the team noted that the vast majority of studies in psychology, cognitive science and economics — about 96 percent — have been performed on people with European backgrounds. And yet, when scientists perform some of these experiments in other cultures the results often don't match up. Westerners stick out as outliers on the spectrum of behavior, while people from indigenous cultures tend to clump together, more in the middle.

Even in experiments that appear to test basic brain function, like visual perception, Westerners can act strangely. Take one of the most famous optical illusions — the Muller-Lyer illusion, from 1889.

The Müller-Lyer illusion, devised in 1889.

Americans often believe the second line is about 20 percent longer than the first, even though the two lines are exactly the same length. But when scientists gave the test to 14 indigenous cultures, none of them were tricked to the same degree as Westerners. Some cultures, such as the San foragers in southern Africa's Kalahari desert, knew the two lines were equal length.

The conclusion from these analyses was startling: People from Western society, "including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans," Joseph Heinrich and his colleagues wrote. The researchers even came up with a catchy acronym to describe the phenomenon. They called our culture WEIRD, for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies.

With that paper, the ethnocentric view of psychology cracked. It wasn't so much that the emperor of psychology had no clothes. It was more that he was dancing around in Western garb pretending to represent all humanity.

A few years later, an anthropologist from Utah State University, David Lancy, performed a similar analysis on parenting. The conclusion was just as clear-cut: When you look around the world and throughout human history, the Western style of parenting is WEIRD. We are outliers.

In many instances, what we think is "necessary" or "critical" for childhood is actually not present in any other cultures around the world or throughout time.

"The list of differences is really, really long," says David Lancy, who summarizes them in the second edition of his landmark book The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. "There may be 40 to 50 things that we do that you don't see in indigenous cultures."

Perhaps most striking is how Western society segregates children from adults. We have created two worlds: the kid world and the adult world. And we go through great pains to keep them apart. Kids have their own special foods, their own times to go to sleep, their own activities on the weekends. Kids go to school. Parents go to work. "Much of the adult culture ... is restricted [for kids]," Lancy writes. "Children are perceived as too young, uneducated, or burdensome to be readily admitted to the adult sphere."

But in many indigenous cultures, children are immersed in the adult world early on, and they acquire great skills from the experience. They learn to socialize, to do household chores, cook food and master a family's business, Lancy writes.

Western culture is also a relative newcomer to parenting. Hunter-gatherers and other indigenous cultures have had tens of thousands of years to hone their strategies, not to mention that the parent-child relationship actually evolved in these contexts.

Of course, just because a practice is ancient, "natural" or universal doesn't mean it's necessarily better, especially given that Western kids eventually have to live — and hopefully succeed — in a WEIRD society. But widening the parenting lens, even just a smidgen, has a practical purpose: It gives parents options.

"When you look at the whole world and see the diversity out there, parents can start to imagine other ways of doing things," says Suzanne Gaskins, a developmental psychologist at Northeastern Illinois University, who for 40 years has been studying how Maya moms in the Yucatan raise helpful kids.

"Some of the approaches families use in other cultures might fit an American child's needs better than the advice they are given in books or from the pediatricians," she adds.

Who's in charge?

So what kind of different philosophies are out there?

When I spent time with Maya families that Gaskins has studied, I saw a very different approach to control.

In Western culture, parenting is often about control.

"We think of obedience from a control angle. Somebody is in charge and the other one is doing what they are told because they have to," says Barbara Rogoff, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has studied the Maya culture for 30 years.

Gelmy, one of the five kids in Maria de los Angeles Tun Burgosa's family, rakes the backyard of their home in Yucatan, Mexico.

And if you pay attention to the way parents interact with children in our society, the idea is blazingly obvious. We tend to boss them around. "Put your shoes on!" or "Eat your sandwich!"

"People think either the adult is in control or the child is in control," Rogoff says.

But what if there is another way to interact with kids that removes control from the equation, almost altogether?

That's exactly what the Mayas — and several other indigenous cultures — do. Instead of trying to control children, Rogoff says, parents aim to collaborate with them.

"It's kids and adults together accomplishing a common goal," Rogoff says. "It's not letting the kids do whatever they want. It's a matter of children — and parents — being willing to be guided."

In the Maya culture, even the littlest of children are treated with this respect. "It's collaborative from the get-go."

The idea is so strong that some Mayan languages don't even have a word for "control" when talking about children, Rogoff says.

After visiting the Maya village this spring, I've been trying this approach with my 2 1/2-year-old daughter. For instance, I often struggle to get Rosemary to put her clothes on the morning. In the past, I would nag and yell: "Put your shoes on! Get your jacket!"

But now I try a more collaborative approach. "Rosemary, mom, dad and Mango [our dog] are all going to the beach," I explain. "If you want to go to the beach, you have to put your shoes on. Do you want to go to the beach?" So far it's working.

And if Rosemary says she doesn't want to go to the beach? What would a Maya mom do? She would drop her off at an aunt's or neighbor's house and spend an afternoon without her. Because Maya families also have a different idea about who is supposed to care for the kids. One way to think of it: They don't keep mom in a box.

Get mom out of the box

In our culture there's a lingering belief that the ideal family structure for kids is a stay-at-home mom who devotes her full attention to the kids. That may sound like a relic from the past. But even just 10 years ago, 41 percent of people thought moms working outside was harmful to society, PEW research found. The result is a mom stuck in an apartment or a single-family home — which are both essentially boxes — raising children, alone.

But if you look around the world and throughout human history, this parenting approach is arguably one of the most nontraditional out there. The notion that the mom is responsible for raising the children, alone, is even strange within Western culture. Up until about 150 years ago, households were much larger and included extended family members and sometimes paid help, historian Stephanie Coontz documents in The Way We Never Were. And women were expected to earn some income for the family. "Women not only brought home half the bacon, they often raised and butchered the pig," Coontz says.

Anthropologist David Lancy compares the "mom in the box" approach to parenting to what happens with an Inuit family in the Arctic, when inclement weather isolates a mom and her child in an igloo and forces the mom to be the only playmate for the children. Most of the burden of parenting is placed on the mom. "There is every reason to believe that modern living conditions in which infants and toddlers are isolated from peers in single-parent or nuclear households produce a parallel effect," Lancy writes: a mom left to a perform a role typically performed by children — that is, siblings, cousins, neighborhood kids and whoever else is hanging around a home.

Human children didn't evolve in a nuclear family. Instead, for hundreds of thousands of years, kids have been brought up with a slew of people — grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, the neighbors, Lancy writes. It's not that you need a whole village, as the saying goes, but rather an extended family — which could include biological relatives but also neighbors, close friends or paid help.

Throughout human history, motherhood has been seen as a set of tasks that can be accomplished by many types of people, like relatives and neighbors, the historian John R. Gillis writes in The World Of Their Own Making. Anthropologists call them "alloparents" — "allo" simply means "other."

Across the globe, cultures consider alloparents key to raising children, Lancy writes.

The Maya moms value and embrace alloparents. Their homes are porous structures and all sorts of "allomoms" flow in and out. When a woman has a baby, other moms work together to make sure she can take a break each day to take a shower and eat meals, without having to hold the baby. (How civilized is that!)

In one household with four kids that I visited, the aunt dropped off food, the grandma stopped by to help with a neighbor's baby and, all the while, the oldest daughter looked after the toddler — while the mom fed the livestock and started to make lunch. But in Western culture, over the past few centuries, we have pushed alloparents to the periphery of the parenting landscape, Gillis writes. They aren't as valued and sometimes even denigrated as a means for working moms to outsource parenting duties.

In the past few generations, fathers have stepped up and started helping with a big chunk of parenting duties. Since 1965, American dads have more than doubled the number of hours they spend each week on child care, PEW research found. But moms still carry most of the load. They spend, on average, 14 hours each week on child care while fathers spend about 7.

The result is something unique in human history: A mom stuck in a box, often alone, doing the job typically performed by a handful of people. As Gillis writes, "Never have mothers been so burdened by motherhood."

#maya #yucatan #mexico #mother's day #mother #motherhood #children #psychology #anthropology #sociology #parenting #babies #kids #family

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divergent-one-1984 · 3 years ago

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Organized Crime Ring in Astoria, NY. I have been the victim of TARGETED COMMUNITY HARASSMENT SINCE SUMMER 2016 because of my race and gender first, making this ongoing abuse DISCRIMINATORY HATE CRIME. I am an African American female.

This ongoing abuse since Summer 2016 is going on in a neighborhood under the jurisdiction of the 114th Precinct, in apartment buildings managed by Central Astoria, LLC.

In addition to me being stalked and harassed because I am an African American female, I am being harassed for who I am and my life views, based on personal, private, confidential information illegally accessed and leaked while I was employed at NYC Department of Education where the abuse started in the form of WORKPLACE MOBBING, forcing me to quit in 2016 because I could not take the abuse anymore.

Confidential medical information (HPV, ABORTION) illegally accessed and leaked, was also used to justify the abuse.

I am being abused also because of my life views, which are more liberal, individual, critical thinking, free thinking, and open-minded, including my atheism. Basically, I don't fit into boxes people try to put me in, I am being targeted and abused for who I am and how I think, on multiple levels.

Also, to be quite candid, these people appear to highly subscribe to a group think mentality, don't seem to think for themselves of to think critically and let their religion overrule common sense, intellectual, and emotional intelligence so much so that I don't even think most of them have the ability to even fully understand who I am, the complexities, and the importance of individualism, choice, free will, dignity, privacy, anonymity as basic human rights simply based on the fact that they are closed off in their thinking, operate at a low vibrational level, and probably lack education and knowledge about history and culture of this country because they chose to siloe by their religion and ethnic origins and have the nerve to flip things when they are the ones filled with so much hate, they can even see it, its natural to them and seems to be an extension of their religious beliefs and their own bigotry, they are projecting their hate onto me even though I have never done anything to them.

They are operating off of some lies, half truths someone(s) told almost a decade ago, simply because they have hate and intolerance inherently in their spirit and opposed to anyone who does not subscribe to the life views they have, instead of living and let live they condemn people for being themselves and try to exert coercive control (an actual crime in some European countries) to try to change them as a person as if they have a right to do this.

They also make ridiculous assumptions because of close mindedness, which does not take into account details, context, and nuance, pretty much a reflection of the way society operates today.

We live very much in a society where if people don't think like the labels / boxes they "are supposed to" think then they should be condemned and cast out and the assumptions / perceptions about them are true and make them entirely who they are. Instead of leaving people alone we have to get them to agree with us or see things our way, that is ridiculous.

There are many reasons why people don't see eye to eye on things and there is nothing wrong with that, it should be expected based on the sheer volume of people in the world and the diversity of people, this is healthy intellectual debate, as long as boundaries and beliefs are respected, noone should be trying to force their way of life or way of thinking onto another just because you dont agree, especially if you resorting to emotional violence to punish / change someone (especially when your point of reference is based on lies someone with mental health issues and an unhealthy interest im me started seemingly because I would not give them attention they expected), that's morally and ethically wrong.

Since this hate, abuse, and coercive control is mostly coming from religious people I find it quite ridiculous and hypocritical, and they say Atheists have no morals, that's a joke.

I probably have more of a moral and ethical compass and understanding of right and wrong than any of these people put together, obviously, or they would not be harassing, stalking, and abusing me everyday for going into 8 years now.

These people hide behind religion to justify hate and hateful actions against another human being.

Live and Let live and Agree to Disagree are my mottos, this is an adult, intellectually healthy way to be and live. Mind your own business and don't bother me if I don't bother you.

Many people are not just not one thing, we are multifaceted, if your intellectual abilities are diminished in some way you will probably never even be able to grasp that concept, but at the end of day regardless of all this, no one has a right to harm or abuse another human being for any reason, it does not take a high IQ to know this, it's basic right and wrong, but religious zealotry, fundamentalism, extremism, racism, sexism, etc. can make people do nonsensical, stupid cruel things just because.

I have been part of this particular community since 1976, I have never had problems with individuals or groups of individuals and have never done anything to anyone here or in the workplace so obviously the abuse is entirely NOT instigated by me. Someone(s) with severe mental health issues and an unhealthy interest in me started this purely based on something made up in their head and unwarranted hate.

Everyday in this neighborhood, the majority of people I am being harassed by are Muslims and Latinos, 2 of the most religious groups of people on the planet. I do not believe this to be a coincidence, its by design because what is being done to me comes from a place of pure hate, discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, misogyny and religious zealotry, along with straight up lies, truths, and half truths from a gossip and a rumor mill started as part of WORKPLACE MOBBING HARASSMENT while I was employed at the NYC Department of Education simply because someone did not like me and wanted to exert control over me for some reason, not because I did something to them.

Btw, I was awakened this morning around 430ish AM due to the ongoing, daily NOISE HARASSMENT in my apartment building and in the neighborhood, which is why I am up so early. Ongoing NOISE HARASSMENT and SLEEP DEPRIVATION especially this morning to agitate me because I have an appt to leave the house today for bed ridden relative. These stalkers / harassers / abusers want to not only harm me but exert coercive control over me and agitate me to try to get me to "act out" in public so that they can get police involved, this has been happening since the WORKPLACE MOBBING I experienced while I was employed at NYC Department of Education.

The last straw that made me quit was because I realized they were trying to not only fabricate a firing for cause they were trying to get me to lash out and put hands on someone so that I would be arrested and get entangled with the legal system, even though I have been a law abiding citizen and am not even a violent person. I suppose they wanted to fabricate situations repetitively in hopes I would act and fall into stereotypes of the angry black woman and violent black person. I knew it was time to go after a specific interaction with a staff member where she tried to block my egress from elevator upon my arrival to work. She was obviously trying to get me to lash out and put hands on her on camera even though she is the one in the wrong by physically blocking my egress. Multiple people in the woekplace had been harassing me for months at that point so I think they thought I was agitated enough that it could potentially cause me to act of violently but it did not and still hasn't after about 8 years now of daily stalking, abuse, and harassment.

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sncs2021 · 4 years ago

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1) finding data mindmap

im thinking of finding individual experiences from social media using my own personal instagram because i already have followers who fit my demographic of genz people of colour, especially in south auckland. using their experiences i could produce specific mediums from that when it comes to the summative part. for now i think i will use general ones i can find in my research

2)visual meanings

colours i want to use should be vibrant and distinctive because i think it gives off a conversational and welcoming tone. so im thinking the rainbows colours, going a bit basic but direct enough. the illustrations i want to use should be colourful so im thinking towards artist inspirations that produce artwork like that. someone i have in mind on the top of my head is tess-smith roberts.

3) what should i even target for a topic within casual racism?

from doing my visual meaning mindmap i kinda just froze and thought "what even is my meaning for this campaign?" so i just wrote up some impacts of casual racism i could think of from the top of my head. one significant one is mental health/self esteem. when people say certain things, especially racist, it puts poc down, giving them a mindset that have to cater to a mostly White work/lifestyle environment, pushing away their own cultural backgrounds and appreciation. eventually overall mental health can be affected. in many ways, this boosts up/caters to capitalism, by contributing to making products that people really don’t need but they’ll find any way to convince you that your life depends on it. an example i have in mind and have personally seen and experienced is internalised hate for my own race and skin tone. i would see white people being treated better and basically glorified and wondered "why wasnt i born like them"/ "i want to be white", etc. things like that was unhealthily encouraged a lot in the indian communities here, fiji, and especially india. like i mentioned earlier, mindsets and low self esteem created by the media and general white privileges, capitalism takes advantage of that. in india theres a product called "Fair & Lovely", which is targeted to young girls and women that have darker skin tones. this product is a body cream that is meant to "lighten" and "enhance" your skin, hence making you "prettier" and more appealing to the beauty standard that we unconsciously follow, to be a white passing person. it is so messed up that even to this day, women are taught to hate their skin tone. something i saw the other day was when a POC bleaches her skin it is considered self hate, but when a white woman tans her skin, its just a normal “sElf CaRe” kind of thing you do during summer. notice, that whenever a POC does something it always follows up with criticism and backlash, but if a white person does the same thing or similar its “liberating” or “the best thing ever”. it really bothers me that we’ve all basically given into “white is right” in so many ways.

4) "NZ isn't racist?!l

when it comes to the demographic, in regards to nz, there's often arguments about whether our country is racist. as a poc i know for sure, that there is. there has been many Loudly shown racism, that is often pushed as side by the ignorants but there's so many subtle acts of racism, which brings us to casual racism. lack of education on poc, especially the indigenous people, the maori, leads to racist whites thinking they own the land they have stolen and have unnecessary amounts of disrespect for POC. the education system is a significant 'culprit' for this, because from personal experience, we barely touched on history of Maori and moreso on American history, which thinking now, why does it matter so much? we hardly know about the land we are in and we're just given work on a president who has nothing to do with nz. i remember learning about the treaty of waitangi, and thinking it was a happy agreement between the settlers and the indigenous people. i recently found that some of the maori, didnt want to sign and some were even forced. so it wasnt as pretty and happy as it seemed. things like this makes me question how some people don't understand the importance of the voices of POC and systemic racism, in all its forms.

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ooxiebooxie · 7 years ago

Photo

“ 'Twas a long time ago, longer now than it seems in a place perhaps you've seen in your dreams. For the story you're about to be told began with the holiday worlds of auld. Now you've probably wondered where [ nightmares ] come from. If you haven't I'd say it's time you begun. “

BASIC INFORMATION.

What is your character’s full name?

Tim Page

How is it pronounced?

TIM PAYJ

Is there a meaning behind it?

Tim is derived from the Greek Τιμοθεος ( Timotheos ) which translates into “ honouring God “. His parents chose the name for their son, naming him after his great grandfather who was known for his compassion heart. Page is also derived from a Greek word παιδιον ( paidion ) with the meaning “ little boy “. The name is an occupational name meaning " servant / page " — and thus we do not need to ask question why Oogie chose to change his name.

Does your character have any nicknames?

Oogie Boogie. Oogie. Mr Oogie Boogie Man. Meanest Guy.

When and where were they born?

Tim Page was born on the nineteenth of april in nineteen-seventytwo in the town of Carthay.

What’s their zodiac sign and what traits do they most relate to?

Aries rules the head and leads with the head, often literally walking head first, leaning forwards for speed and focus. Its representatives are naturally brave and rarely afraid of trial and risk. They possess youthful strength and energy, regardless of their age and quickly perform any given tasks. Aries is one of the most active zodiac signs. It is in their nature to take action, sometimes before they think about it well. Their challenges show when they get impatient, aggressive and vent anger pointing it to other people.

What’s their nationality?

American – but that depends entirely on which paper he chooses to show authority to identify himself. He has several. Sometimes you just need to be a different person, when your name and the stories strung to it travel faster than you.

What’s their occupation?

Being a winning gambler.

What gender do they identify themselves as?

Male.

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE.

What’s their eye color?

Dark brown, appearing to be black.

Do they wear glasses or contacts?

Neither.

Hair color?

Black, although depending on the light it can appear to have a hint of dark brown in them.

Have they ever dyed their hair or wanted to?

In the young age of seven Tim has been obsessed with the colour green and wanted to dye his hair a bright neon colour ( maybe add some purple streaks for additional fun ) but fortunately, it was one of the things his parents did not allow their son to do.

Height?

179cm ( back at it again, being European and this time lazy )

Body build?

Surprisingly slim considering his messed up lifestyle.

Do they have any birthmarks?

No.

Do they have any piercings or tattoos?

It is no secret Oogie is as much a gambler at heart as a person could be, and thus it should not come as a surprise that his obsession has gone under his skin too. He has a tattoo ( that keeps getting added onto ) which proudly display his undying love for games, gambling and most importantly, winning. His tattoos tell a story and if you understand the language, you might just learn what ( or who? ) he has won too.

If not, do they want to get some?

Now let me tell you something about Oogie Boogie: He’ll never stop playing, and as long as there’s the chance to win he will take it, and thus more tattoos are to come.

Do they have a healthy life style?

No. His life is about as healthy as his shack is clean — his nights are too long, gambling always combined with alcohol and cigars, his days survived on coffee and cigarettes, his kitchen is used but only to stock the take-out containers in and literally lives among bugs — but honestly what do you expect? Oogie doesn’t have the time to have a healthy life. He is a busy man.

How easy do they get sick?

Let’s just say Oogie is lucky that he spends most of his time at the casino, because if he was to spend it in his shack between all the filth and his beloved bug collection he sure would get sick a lot more often.

Any marks on their body ( injuries, … )?

If you mess with the wrong people, you are bound to have some nasty scars. Oogie has several faint ones scattered across his knuckles though they are barely visible. The worst ones are those who needed stitches — if he takes off his jacket you can still see the messily stitched ( because there were times he just hadn’t been able to go to the hospital, knowing they would ask tooo man question ) scars on his arms especially, but his back and chest too.

What’s their personal style/how do they like to dress?

Comfortable but fitting clothing. His trusted black leather jacket is something he basically does not leave the house without, and the rest of his clothing is too rather dark in colour ( the only bit of colour he owns is in form of plaids ). Important to notice is that every piece of clothing is ridiculously expensive — that white t-shirt you see him wearing? Yeah, that was about 400 bucks. Now, you might wonder why Oogie of all people would waste so much money on ordinary looking clothing, but what can I say other than that he just really hates loose threads.

What is their favorite and least favorite feature about themselves?

His skills, and though this might not be a physical feature, it’s the one answer you will get from Oogie about his favourite thing about himself: He is proud to call himself a winner, one who does not need to rely on ‘ luck ‘ but can rely entirely on himself. His least favourite is a weakness and thus shall never be revealed — after all, a gambler never lets his pokerface slip.

PERSONALITY.

Positive traits?

Ambitious, Analytical, Attantive, Bold, Brilliant, Cautious, Confident, Determined, Devote, Efficient, Eloquent, Hard-Working, Intelligent, Inventive, Logical, Mature, Observant, Persistent, Proud, Punctual, Reliable, Strategic, Strong, Succesful, Tough

Negative traits?

Angr, Annoyed, Argumentative, Bad, Bossy, Cold-Hearted, Critical, Cruel, Cunning, Dangerous, Dark, Devious, Dishonest, Facetious, Greedy, Harssh, Hot-Tempered, Ignorant, Impatient, Lackadaisical, Lazy, Manipulative, Sadistic, Scheming, Self-Centered, Unforgiving, Violent

What do they consider to be the best and the worst part of their personality?

The best part is hands down his determination. For all the ‘ evil ‘ character traits Oogie’s determination is actually the most dangerous one, because the moment he sets his mind onto something, he doesn’t let go off it until it is his. He strongly believes there’s always a way — it has been proven to him nurmerous time by himself, and if that’s not trustworthy, what is? — to get what he want; you just have to set the stakes straight. His worst trait is the inconsideration, or rather, it has the worst impact on others ( which needless to say, makes Oogie fine with this trait too. Why would he care about others, right? ) but while he thinks everything through on a logical level, the lack of considering he does of the effect on others can get him into trouble.

Are they more extroverted or introverted?

Extroverted.

Any talents?

Winning, and if you say that it is no talent, ( Oogie would first of all like you to know you are wrong, but fine ) it’s knowing how not to take chances when gambling. He can read other people’s face, can figure out if they are bluffing, can make the maths in his head to know what his, his opponent’s and the cards still remaining in the deck say — and if he can’t, he always knows how to turn the game so he’s the one to win with a little cheat or two.

What are their fears?

Unravelling — not his clothes, of course, but the web of lies and cheats and crimes he’s built over the years of gambling with the worst of people. They are all secret, and though he is known to be a gambler across town and there are horror stories being shared at night in the darkest of alleys, they are all just that: stories. There’s no proof, his slate is still clean — unless, of course, the carefully crafted web starts to unravel and truth begins to spill.

Do they have any phobias?

No.

What is their soft spot?

Hidden behind a pokerface.

List 3 pet-peeves they can’t stand?

People believing in luck, talkativeness and optimism.

EDUCATION.

How far did they go in school? Are they still studying?

Tim successfully graduated from college with one hell of a good degree, always having given his best at any sort of school. He could’ve easily gone further and he’d already scored a solid and high-paying job, but unfortunately, he won a game in the casino then and everything changed.

Did they like school?

Tim was thrilled about school, glad to have the opportunity to learn new things ( admittedly, some of them were boring, but you have to do what you have to do, right? ) and even on the most annoying days, he had his group of long time friends to make any situation a billion times better.

What type of student are/were they?

In every school there are these type of students who somehow manage to get good grades no matter what, and Tim Page was one of them. One might call it luck ( even Tim did back then ), but the truth is that in his case anyway, Tim was just attentive. He listened in class, worked on the tasks which were given to him and though he did not sit down with a book and learn after school, he was focused enough inside of class to understand and remember what he’d been taught later during an exam.

What was their favorite subject?

Math. It was the one class which made the most sense to Tim, which made sense everywhere around the world too. For that reason alone it came easy to him, and thank god that it did, because card counting is a lot easier if you know what the fuck you’re doing.

And their least favorite?

English, because he always found writing interpretation was stupid, because how would anyone ever know what the author of some long-outdated literature piece tried to say when they were long dead? It’s not like lying on paper is hard. The only way Tim survived the endless hours he wasted on writing essays was by making his interpretations as ridiculous as one could get.

What were they/would they have been voted as “ most likely to… ” in the yearbook?

Most likely to suceed.

FAMILY.

Who are your character’s parents?

Belinda and Dunstan Page.

How would your character describe them?

Oogie Boogie would not waste a single breath on them, but they had always been kind and in the time Oogie was still their son, when he was still Tim Page they were the best parents he could’ve ever wished for, supportive and kind, loving him with all of their heart and without any conditions.

Do they have any siblings?

No.

Are they close with their family?

Tim has always been close to his family, his heart staying close at home wherever he went and if he ever left them for long he made sure give them a call and check up on them. However, time changes everything and when Tim changed into Oogie Boogie so did his relationship with his parents. He didn’t give a shit about them anymore, too distracted by the constant need to win, and when they moved away he barely noticed and did not hear of them again until he found the invitation to their funeral in his letter boy. Needless to say, he did not go.

ROMANCE & SEXUALITY.

What’s their romantic and sexual orientation?

Bisexual with a preference towards females, and he’s Oogie Boogie, he doesn’t have romantic emotions ( that we know of, anyway ).

Are they seeing anyone right now?

No.

Have they ever been in an relationship?

Yes, there have been several relationships in the course of his life, but none of them were particularly seriouss.

Have they ever been in love?

Yes. He was seventeen when he met her, and it took him not more than a few spoken words until he was head over heels in love with her. There just was something special about her, something that no one had ever had. After going on a couple of dates, their relationship began and their love has been growing ever since — until it ended, of course, like all of his connections did when Tim turned into Oogie.

How easy do they fall for someone?

It’s the toughest task in the world to get through to him and have him even notice you as a potential love interest, therefore not easy at all.

What do they look for in someone?

He doesn’t look for anyone. However, if he did he’d want someone who supports him, who joins his gambling and who he can rely on when they learn what exactly he has been gambling with.

Do they believe in love at first sight? or fate?

Definitely not. Neither exists. You’ve got to take matters into your own hands.

What’s their views on romance? Do they go after it or avoid it?

Oogie doesn’t care. In fact, he’s convinced romance in that sense doesn’t even exist.

Did they have their first time already? How was it in their point of view?

Yes, and truth be told, it’s been so long Oogie hardly remembers it, but it was with the girl he was in love with... so probably awkward and sweet? who cares?

What is their view on sex?

It's the best part of any relationship he ever had and the only reason why he pities not having a significant other, because it means he can’t just come home to someone and share the joy and enthusiasm that comes with winning with someone... in his bed.

What are their turn ons and turn offs?

Power is the biggest turn on. One might say winners like the companies of winners, and it could not be truer for Oogie. There’s just something about a person being able to meet you on a similiar level that makes them attractive. On the other side, he hates stuidity and he finds it comes in the most various of traits, making most people nothing but exhausting to him.

Were they ever cheated on or have they cheated on someone?

He has never been cheated on, but he has definitely cheated. He is Oogie Boogie. The real question is who he hasn’t cheated on.

Do they want to get married in the future?

Hell to the no.

Have kids?

The greatest joy in the world is to have children, and let me tell you a little secret about Oogie: He absolutely does not agree. He has three little minions and they are already enough to handle, plus he can actually hate them and mistreat them without having to feel upset about ruining his own flesh and blood. The real joy in life is winning.

QUIRKS.

Are they right or left handed?

Right Handed.

What’s a word that’s always on their lips?

The name Lock, Shock or Barrel angrily being yelled.

Is there a saying they keep on repeating?

Not a phrase, but he does hum his ‘ Oogie Boogie Song ‘ all the time — that being said, make sure he never sings the lyrics around you for it’s never a good omen if he gets to the line ‘ this may be the last time you hear the oogie boogie song ‘.

Do they curse?

He definitely does. There are times which just need a little bit ( or a lot ) of cursing.

What’s their worst habit?

Spending his money. No matter how often you see him walk out of the casino with a thousand of dollars in his bags, you’ll never see him keep it for longer than a day. Either he pays his debts to the Fates, he spends it on his beloved bugs or he walks right back into the casino to wager it all again.

Do they drink or smoke? How frequently?

He drinks and he smokes cigarettes and cigars at least every week, if not every day.

Are they an early bird or a night owl?

Night owl, because the unfortunate thing about casinos is that they are rarely opened in the normal day to day hours. Oogie wastes his night completely in there, spends his early mornings in a coffee shop of his choice and sleeps the rest of the day away until he can finally go gambling again.

How tidy is their room?

His entire shack is a complete mess and though Oogie recnogises it as one, he does not give a care in the world about it. His belongings are piling all over the floor, his kitchen is filled with the containers of the many take-outs he’s ordered in and is that... a bone? Honestly, at this point you can find almost anything in there.

How long do they usually take getting ready in the morning?

Fifteen minutes tops. His mornings usually include him going into the shower, brushing his teeth and leaving the house a moment later. That being said, his mornings are rarely happening in the morning and more so in the late evenings.

FAVORITES.

What’s their favorite color?

Now, you might think his favourite colour is black because everything he owns and loves seems to be black, but while everything about Tim Page changed when he became Oogie Boogie one thing didn’t: His favourite colour is green, always has and always will be.

Favorite movie?

' Fight Club ‘ because it’s kind of a fucked up movie, isn’t it? and at the same time it is really interesting, allowing a look into the minds of others and how a group ( a colony, one might say ) can work together and create something purely brutal. Oogie always thought in a way they are gambling too.

Music Genre?

Rock’n’Roll.

Food?

Anything that comes per delivery.

Book?

' It ‘ by Stephen King.

Favorite non-alcoholic drink?

Ground black Coffee.

Ice Cream Flavor?

Dark Chocolate.

Indoors or outdoors?

Indoors.

#carthaytask #carthaytask001 #{ i’m a gambling boogie man although i don’t play fair; about }#( it almost lines up perfectly with the blog theme i cry )

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encephalonfatigue · 5 years ago

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hybrid warfare and leftist alliances

this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.

I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.

This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.

As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.

I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:

“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”

I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.

I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.

I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:

“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”

In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.

So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:

“Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”

Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:

"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"

This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?

Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel. But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:

“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. In their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”

Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral ‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.

I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).

Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:

“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”

This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:

“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”

Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:

“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”

I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:

“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.

One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”

He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):

“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented. The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage. The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism. From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War. Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles. It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.

This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”

I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:

“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”

The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:

“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”

One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:

“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”

The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.

So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.

They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC) is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.

Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:

“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”

Hoffman later writes:

“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”

I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.

The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:

“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”

One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”

U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):

“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.

This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”

And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:

“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”

So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?

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And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough.

Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:

““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”

Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.

In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his ‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):

One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:

“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.

Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”

While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.

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exploringsocialinformatics · 5 years ago

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Post #1: A One-to-One Utopia

I am basing this post off the article “One Laptop Per Child: Vision vs. Reality” by Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick, and Prakul Sharma, which I chose both because the timeline of the issue was very interesting and also due to my background in a Secondary Education program where I took courses related specifically to education and technology.

I am wary of anybody who says that they’re going to change the world, but the transition from reading about the Utopian vision of One Laptop, Per Child (creator Nicholas Negroponte once said that they were “invent[ing] the future” [“The Hundred Dollar Laptop: Computing for Developing Nations”]) to the slow but seemingly inevitable downfall was still somewhat surprising. The program is one that had been within my peripheral vision as someone who studied education in my undergrad program and I can understand how people got swept up in the concept, especially when the technology available was less accessible. On first glance, it does seem revolutionary and, in ways, it is. Revolution requires follow-through and support, though, and it inspired doubts even before its initial roll-out, with supporters expressing hesitant skepticism like, “We were excited about the prospects, but kind of scared by the over-simplistic plan, or lack of plan” (Robertson, 2018).

As Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma note, the issues behind OLPC’s original downfall were based in seemingly more consideration for the creation of the hardware than the people they were creating the hardware for (66 – 68). There are plenty of these issues to talk about—the entirely reasonable argument that basic needs like water and physical school structures should be met before the government spends money on untested technology, the notion that OLPC is just a “one size-fits-all American solution to complex global problems” that functions more as a “marketing ploy” (Robertson 2018) than any type of organized program—when it comes to observing why OLPC struggled to the point where they shuttered their organization until it was relatively recently revived. I would argue, though, that one of its fundamental flaws and potentially the most immediately debilitating was their lack of consideration for teachers and, in particular, their lack of follow-through when it comes to measuring their success.

In The Effect of One Laptop per Child on Teachers’ Pedagogical Practices and Students’ Use of Time At Home, a very thorough study that had to be thorough due to a lack of substantive data from OLPC’s program, the researchers found that there was no significant impact on school performance when the laptops were introduced in Peru (Yamada, Lavado, Montenegro 2016). Additionally, Morgan G. Ames—who I will reference several times due to her excellent research in Uruguay—found that the laptop use was largely focused on media consumption: music, TV, video games (Ames 2015). While media consumption absolutely has a place within education, it’s clear that this usage isn’t falling within the realm of what Negroponte was envisioning: namely, programming (Ames 2015) and creation. Essentially, the laptops are often a tool to consume and not create.

In a presentation titled the same as her recent book, The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop per Child, Ames explains in-depth the fundamental issues that marred the program from its inception—extremely worth watching if this topic interests you and a fantastic introduction—and tells the story of how Nicholas Negroponte’s main goal was to get laptops in the hands of children and trust that they would make the most of it on their own (Ames 2019). Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma emphasize this, saying in 2009 that “it appears to some that the educational mission has given way to just getting laptops out the door” (66), which implies even more explicitly that the intentions skew a bit more towards business than ever stated by the organization—or, at the very least, attempting to save face when it became apparent they would not make their now obviously over-ambitious goal of getting 150 million laptops into the hands of kids in two years.

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It’s important to note that OLPC has consistently stated that their program is about more than the laptops and is also focused on education. On their website, they emphasize, “OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the world. OLPC is a nonprofit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap in to their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community” (“OLPC: Mission”). Considering that Kraemer, Dedrick and Sharma reference this quote in their article (68), which means it hasn’t changed since at least 2009 and likely since the first launch in 2005, this is an idea that they’re attempting to embrace without necessarily having the means to do so.

There is an explicit education philosophy—constructionism, which encourages kid to “think about thinking” and have tangible experiences (Robertson 2018)—behind OLPC. I see issues with the implementation of it but don’t want to be overly harsh about it as a concept—after all, I absolutely believe it has a place in classrooms and Seymour Papert, the original mind behind it, studied with Piaget and was openly praised by him (“Seymour Papert”), which is pretty amazing. The main issues with constructionism from my perspective, especially as it applies to the distribution of the OLPC laptops, are twofold: 1. Many teachers in a variety of different educational systems are highly limited in how they’re able to teach and 2. As an educational philosophy, it arguably requires the students involved to have some. . .instruction. Very few, if any, educational practices are studied without being properly implemented by an educator.

This isn’t to say that OLPC doesn’t involve educators in implementing their programs. This is to say that they didn’t do enough in their implementation to properly prepare teachers for how to use the technology in their classroom, including, for example, not even providing teacher training when they rolled out the program in Libya or contacting the teacher’s union in Peru before they were already starting the program there (Robertson 71). In her presentation, Morgan G. Ames describes the decline of use in Paraguay where she studied for several years due to the fact that OLPC didn’t provide any service or repairs to laptops that were imminently more breakable than they advertised (Ames 2019). OLPC’s ultimate plan was to get laptops to kids. I would argue that this does not function as an education plan or even do more than offer a potential tool without guidance to introduce a constructionist philosophy.

We can see a hint of how OLPC values teachers by looking back to their charter, which states “building schools, hiring teachers, buying books and equipment [. . .] is a laudable but insufficient response to the problem of bringing true learning possibilities to the vast numbers of children in the developing world” (“OLPC: The Mission”). That really speaks to most of the major issues: if there isn’t basic infrastructure in place—physical schools with working water—and teachers to guide their learning, can students who haven’t been exposed to this kind of technology (or even those who have) truly benefit from it? How do we measure those true learning possibilities? Can we measure them? It might seem overly technical to try to apply statistics to some big, expansive dream but the dreaminess is, in and of itself, the problem.

Just because these issues exist doesn’t mean that we must write OLPC off entirely, though. The bones of the idea are genuinely well-intentioned and they’ve still managed to get a significant amount of technology to kids even if they didn’t meet their stated goals as their original incarnation. As of this October, they’ve given out 3 million laptops (Cameron 2019) and that certainly matters. Regardless of the outcome, sharing those laptops made opportunities that could help kids in developing nations change their lives and open up more possibilities in the future.

While there is plenty to criticize about the program, many of the fundamentals are worthy of praise: constructivism is an important educational practice that can unlock critical thinking skills and creativity in a way that many kids don’t have the opportunity to explore. Just the ability to own and hold and use a laptop is empowering and prepares kids for using other technology. And, overall, Negroponte’s philosophies and reasoning are absolutely inspiring.

He talks about kids becoming “change agents” and allowing them to “connect with the world, think critically and challenge indoctrinations of intolerance” (Ashling 2010). He wants kids to have the whole world open up to them and has a singular vision for doing so which, for better or worse, is a vision worth exploring.

Also, in a vein I hadn’t considered, Jason Johnson argues in his 2010 article “Can a Laptop Change How the World Teaches?” that he observed sixth graders in his one-to-one laptop program educationally benefiting from their laptops outside of the classroom through things like tracking sports statistics, recording skits, and creating address books (72). While he also invokes the need for a teacher to guide students toward productivity, this is another important factor to consider: OLPC laptops have gone to all kinds of kids in all kinds of places and other one-to-one programs have also been gaining popularity throughout the years. Broadly looking at how kids in general use laptops could bring new significance and meaning to these programs.

From articles titled The Laptop That Will Change The World to articles titled OLPC’s $100 Laptop Was Going to Change the World—Then It All Went Wrong, it’s both fascinating and discouraging to watch OLPC’s struggle. As people, we want to believe that we can change the world—that good people stepping up can change the world—but this is an overly simplistic concept in a complicated world. One good idea constructed within one cultural framework and one philosophy of education that by no means represents both the majority of teacher’s experiences or their capabilities within struggling, flawed educational systems isn’t enough.

One laptop can’t change the world.

With a sustainable plan, though—it’s not a bad start.

Ames, M. G. (2016). Learning consumption: Media, literacy, and the legacy of One Laptop per Child. The Information Society, 32(2), 85–97

Ashling, Jim. (2010). Laptops bridge gap in structured learning. Information Today, 27(5), 22 - 23

Johnson, Jason. (2008). Can a laptop change how the world teaches?. Knowledge Quest. 36(3), 72 - 73

Kraemer, K. L., Dedrick, J., & Sharma, P. (2009). One laptop per child. Communications of the ACM, 52(6)

Lavado, P., Montenegro, G. & Yamada, G. (2016). The effect of one laptop per child on teachers’ pedagogical practices and students’ use of time at home. IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Robertson, A. (2018, April 16). OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world - then it all went wrong. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now

Seymour Papert. (2007, March). Retrieved January 29, 2020, from https://web.archive.org/web/20150308021353/http://web.media.mit.edu/~papert/

The Hundred Dollar Laptop: Computing for Developing Nations. (2005). Retrieved from https://techtv.mit.edu/videos/16067-the-hundred-dollar-laptop-computing-for-developing-nations

The Life, Death and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child. (2019, March 5). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH13bVUfNuk&t=2s

#this might be what the kids call TLDR

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employsophiejackson · 8 years ago

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19 Reasons Buzzfeed Should Employ Sophie Jackson (#13 is questionable)

1. I write every day of my life. Yes, even when I’m not being paid for it.

My whole life is basically just an endless series of things I become passionate about. How do I express these passions? I write about them - at great lengths, and with a lot of enthusiasm.

2. I’m your target market.

To attract a Buzzfeed key demographic, one most think like a Buzzfeed key demographic.

Obviously the appeal of pop culture bulletins and informative listicles is fairly universal. Your typical reader, however, is the Western millennial spending their coffee break glued to a smartphone, and I fit in there quite comfortably.

3. There is not a meme that eludes me.

In most job applications, this wouldn’t really be the kind of quality one boasts about. Spending every spare moment browsing Reddit, Tumblr and Twitter might not be the coolest of hobbies, but it does mean the I see practically every meme that comes into existence - however short-lived, however nonsensical.

And I’m not just talking about viral memes. Those alternative memes one only discovers when browsing the dark corners of Tumblr at 3am? I see them. I know them. I know them all. If anyone’s gonna earn a job at Buzzfeed solely for their meme expertise...

4. I’m extremely flexible.

No - I’m not just talking about my enviable yoga postures. I adapt to new environments like a Victoria Secret model adapts to the latest fad diet. Whether you need me to travel, stay put, work weekends or switch between tasks - it’s all fine by me.

5. I’m as familiar with past pop culture as I am with contemporary pop culture.

From The Bell Jar to The Fault in Our Stars, from Pissaro to Koons, from Blackadder to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia - I spend as much time obsessing over past icons as I do over today’s hottest releases. Good pop culture tends to remain relevant, so for every American Idol episode I've seen, I’ve watched just as many Top of the Pops re-runs. Whether you want me to cover David Bowie or Beyonce, I’m just as happy either way.

6. I have live reporting and interviewing experience.

I’ve professionally and confidently conducted interviews with a number of high profile figures including representatives of global charities, industry leaders, social media influencers and world league professional poker players. In the past two years I’ve also gained experience reporting at live sports events watched by thousands.

7. I know a thing or two about SEO.

Just kidding, I know like twenty things about SEO. Whether it’s in relation to social media marketing campaigns or the optimization of home page navigation, this is the field I’ve known from the earliest days of my career.

I could tell you, for example, the most competitive keywords for whatever you’re promoting. I can point you to the latest Google updates and explain what they mean for content strategy and link acquisition. My SEO crush is Rand Fishkin, and I know what Matt Cutt’s dinosaur impression looks like.

8. I’m a meticulous editor and fact-checker.

Living in what is becoming known as a ‘post-truth’ society of misinformation and fake news, impartial and factual journalism is as essential as ever.

Even if written with a light-hearted tone or for entertainment purposes, I believe there’s rarely a publication that is justified in foregoing thorough fact-checks.

As such, it has become second nature for me to cross-reference, double-check, triple-source and provide ample citations for anything I write. In short, I do not take lightly the responsibility that comes with producing content for an internationally respected brand.

9. I’m not one to shy from politics.

And in this current political climate, one doesn’t really have the luxury of staying quiet. I appreciate the importance of delivering criticism and drawing attention to issues in a respectful manner that helps create productive debate and engagement.

With an education in UK politics, US politics, modern political history and Western political theory - I write about political matters with confidence and passion. If there’s one thing Buzzfeed does well (and Buzzfeed does several things well), it’s presenting a light-hearted and accessible examination of complex issues at a time when such media is especially needed.

10. I’m totally comfortable writing in whatever style a piece of content calls for.

My experience in writing has been varied and far-spanning. I believe this to be useful, in that appropriately repurposing content for different platforms while maintaining consistency in tone is now a necessity for any online brand marketing.

My thorough grasp of the English language is one of many reasons I am highly qualified to undertake this task. Whether you want a blog post, informative review, promotional copy, argumentative op-ed or journalistic analysis - I can adapt my editorial style accordingly. One moment I can be writing a political take for The Hill, the next moment I’m focused on comparing Jeff Goldblum to pasta for The Reductress.

11. I’ve spent the last three years writing articles on every subject under the sun.

From beauty guides to morbid crimes to album releases to terrifying advancements of artificial intelligence - there’s not a subject I won’t or can’t write about.

‘Research’ is my middle name. I didn’t always know a lot about Bitcoins, Bill Clinton’s diet or Niagara Falls - but when my job calls for me to research something, I’m going to be an expert by the time I put pen to paper...or fingers to keyboard.

That being said - there are some subjects on which I am especially well-versed, and therefore love writing about the most. These subjects include, but are not limited to, intersectional feminism, contemporary art, modern history, animal welfare, mental health, science fiction, alternative fashion and classic rock.

12. I’m on the lookout.

I have an eye for interesting stories and upcoming trends. My mornings are defined by two activities in particular; 1) drinking coffee with obscene amounts of sugar, and 2) checking the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, ThinkProgress, Buzzfeed, ATTN:, Vox, The Washington Post and a bunch of other cutting-edge news publications. Not only do I stay-up-to-date, but I know how to translate news into clickable, shareable and relatable content that gets people commenting.

13. I bake the most divine Victoria Sponge cake and would bring it into the office.

“Feast upon my creation, colleagues” is something I would not say because that is weird.

14. I’ve done a fair bit of travelling.

Globetrotting is an interest that has taken me from the coffee shops of Amsterdam and cathedrals of Rome to the forests of Sweden and beaches of California. A global perspective is important when writing for a global platform, and I believe my travel experiences will enrich what I can contribute to Buzzfeed.

15. I’m a quick learner.

There’s no doubt I’ve still got a lot to learn. Fortunately, I pick up most things quickly and have no problem putting aside extra time for studying should I lack any particular experience or know-how when it comes to my career. I would like to improve my GIF making game, Photoshop abilities and a couple of other mostly self-taught skills. Buzzfeed seems like the kind of environment to facilitate that growth and development.

16. I’m a closeted Yankophile.

Yes, I may devour crumpets and Earl Grey tea for breakfast, but deep down there’s a part of me that just wants to live my life like an American hipster in an innocuous coming-of-age comedy. I grew up on a diet of American TV and literature, so writing for an American audience comes as naturally to me as writing for British readers.

17. I pride myself on being a good colleague.

Respect, positivity and open-mindedness - those are the principles I believe underline a healthy work environment.

I perform equally well in a team as I do independently. My management experience has taught me how to recognize and encourage my colleagues’ strongest traits, while giving them a space in which they can feel heard and supported.

18. London is one of my favourite places in the whole world.

Why does that make me an ideal candidate? Well, in a way my love for London is irrelevant - except that my excitement over living in the coolest city on earth will probably manifest itself in the form of a big smile each morning. I’d be over the moon if I could relocate to that rainy hub of art galleries, innovative music scenes, cultural merging, vintage street markets and lush city parks.

19. I aim for excellence.

If there’s a sentence you’ll never hear me say, it’s “that’s not in my job description”. I genuinely enjoy pushing myself and always aim to impress. No matter what project is at hand - I won’t stop until I’ve put my 100% into the job. If I work for you, you can rest assured you have a driven, reliable and problem-solving employee at force.

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mulgerehircum · 6 years ago

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Left and Right in Politics – Part 3 of 5

What the Right lacks

When I was growing into political consciousness it was the time of the Cold War in which everything, including the survival of civilization, seemed to be at stake and there were these two massive accumulations of power, confronting each other across the no-man’s land of Central Europe and both armed to the teeth: one of them being the so-called socialist states united by force under the Soviet Union; the other being what was then called the Free World. That confrontation gave sense to everything, there was a way of justifying being armed, the rule of law, the economy, all as parts of us contributing to this steady need for self-defence. Now that is all gone, as well as a real and still resonant memory of what socialism means in practice not only economically, but politically and morally too. There were two kinds of socialism in those days: the practised by the Soviet Union, which nobody had much to say for; and the periodically been ascending in Western Europe about which many people had quite a lot positive to say. In both cases there were certain salient features: economic stagnation, the shortages of elementary fundamental needed things, and the basic inability of the industry to cope with sudden global changes. In Britain, for example, during the time of Harold Wilson, those downsides of socialism coexisted with real democratic procedures and civil freedoms; there was a sense that the State was not just in charge of the economy, but also in charge of society too, and its goal should be impose upon society some kind of recipe for social justice which would replace the traditional hierarchies and forms of domination with a more equal distribution of goods and advantages, particularly in the realm of education – there was no move to abolish private education, but there was a move which was eventually successful to abolish the choice of schools for people who sent their children to state schools, leading to a greater class distinction than existed before (those can afford private education and those who can’t). Nevertheless, criticism of the government was permitted and the BBC was astonishingly impartial in the days of English socialism – something that it ceased to be. Things have moved in a different direction since then.

One of the things that the Right lacks is the immediate and remembered experience of what socialism was like. Those who have been through it, especially those from the Eastern European, will take a lot of persuading for them to want to do it again. The younger generation(s) who have not been through it, we can’t rely upon telling them what it was like because they will always recognize that we have an interest in persuading them and they will just not believe it.

The other thing that the Right lacks is a full and articulated belief in itself and its values. It is part of the nature of conservative people to muddle along: at their homes/places thinking “it is not that bad”, wanting to keep it like as it is, recognizing – as all rational beings recognize – that it is much easier to destroy things than to create them and also there are people wanting to destroy all those good things. Existing compromises on this view ought not to be disturbed. That is very respectable, but in times of tension, doubt and dispute, people do want something more than that: they want a statement of what it is all about, what they are in favour of, what is it that unites them under the pressure.

When Mrs Thatcher suddenly came to eminence in the late 70s and retained that eminence for a decade, she latched on to the idea of freedom, saying that what we (conservatives) are about is freedom, extending freedom to the individual in all the areas of his/her endeavour – not just freedom to undertake enterprises in the economic sphere but freedom of education, of opinion, of association, freedom just to be the thing that fulfils one – and conservatives, by supporting that, are in conflict automatically with socialists who want to control things in the interest of greater equality, of a state-controlled economy and so on… The Cold War, which was still in existence, gave some kind of credibility to what Mrs Thatcher said; she was united with Reagan and other American politicians in endorsing this idea that the Western Alliance was an alliance around the idea of freedom, freedom of the individual as embodied in the American Constitution – the primary document on which Americans always depend – and all that freedom could be taken away, so we must combine in order to defend it.

We have lost the situation which makes that piece of propaganda as plausible as it was to my generation; it doesn’t hold anymore a great deal of appeal, especially for young people, because most young people today will say: we have freedom, that is fine, we accept that; what we want to do is to reconcile that freedom with certain other and more or equally important goals such as equality, a just economy, a society in which people are not at loggerheads with each other, and so on… It is quite possible for a socialist or socialist-minded person to use the idea of freedom in that way – many conservatives feel that they no longer got the kind of slogan that Mrs Thatcher provided them with; all they have is what they have: country and its traditions and customs, and its way of being at peace with itself. That should be enough and appreciating that is what politics of the Right ought to be about, though it is not something that you can easily transcribe into an activist political doctrine.

#left and right #politics #reflection

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drjtrkj-blog · 8 years ago

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i have recently been accepted as a law student. it’s probably the biggest turning point in my life so far. i just finished all the admissions-related work today, and orientation hasn’t even started yet, but it feels good to be here.

under the cut is the essay i submitted for universitas indonesia’s talent scouting admission. i’m posting it because there aren’t a lot of examples out there, and speaking from experience, lots of people don’t know what to write when they are asked why they want to study a certain field of expertise. i had fun writing this & i hope it’s a good reference, especially if you’re here because you’re also applying for the program in the coming years. (btw, here’s another talent scouting essay i found)

i have posted several drafts of the essay (here and here) but i’ve never posted the final product until now. click read more to, well, read more. (talk about being redundant)

If one were to ask of the roots of my interest in the field of law, I would attribute it partly to the sense of ‘I-want-to-make-the-world-a-better-place’ in me that I believe all humans have, however small the percentage and however idealistic one might think it sounds; and the other half to Harper Lee’s American classic To Kill a Mockingbird. What Atticus Finch said in his closing statement in the Ewell v. Robinson trial, a trial stained with racial hate and prejudice, moved me so deeply that I read the quote over and over again to the point that I could recite it by heart; “Our courts have their faults, as does any human constitution, but in this country our court are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.” In a world where some men thrive with ease, having born into the world with innate wealth while some are not so fortunate to afford even the littlest scraps of food; where some are equipped with inborn intelligence and some are outfitted with a drive to work hard to compensate for their lack of aptitude; where some are destined to belong in the dominating majority and some belong to the dominated minority; an institution where all men are seen as equal is not only proper but also necessary. In a way, not only did To Kill a Mockingbird instill in me the desire to work to defend the rights of the Tom Robinsons of our world, but it, too, changed the way I viewed the world indefinitely.

To Kill a Mockingbird was set in 20th century post-Depression southern America, a setting lost to most people nowadays, but the relevance of its message has never withered—a court of law is an institution in which all men are equal. Centuries may change and years may come and go, but these basic principles have remained and must remain the same. Preserving them is necessary to maintain order in society. The more “potentials of inequality” a nation has, the more necessary it is for a court of law to uphold its duty as a just judge in adjudicating matters of dispute. This is unquestionably important for all nations to recognize, but in a country as ethnically diverse as Indonesia, the need to ensure that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law becomes especially vital. With the recent surge of both ethnically and religiously sensitive issues, I feel the need to not only educate the people around me but also to put my thoughts into real action.

I have a profound interest in analyzing and engaging in debates concerning various issues. I do not limit myself to a certain topic, but I find myself drawn to international law and politics. When the answer to a question is unclear, I resort to discussing it with other people, or if I’m alone, I try to take the question apart to its smallest, most miniscule-seeming details, the way a mechanic disassembles a machine to fix any malfunctions. I strive to understand how things work so that a solution may be presented. If, in the end, no consensus is reached, at least the matter has been discussed. Though I enjoy presenting arguments in order to defend my stances, most of my peers, many of whom I’ve engaged in debates with, make note of my openness to criticism, whether it be about a logical fallacy in my argument or the way in which the argument itself is presented.

In the future, I would like to achieve tangible results to my efforts in studying law. The law is very intimately connected to our lives; therefore, it is important that we constantly work to improve and uphold it.

#essay #school stuff #to kill a mockingbird #references to to kill a mockingbird

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random-notes-and-jottings · 5 years ago

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The Flaws in White Fragility Theory: A Primer

Helen Pluckrose

As social unrest spreads throughout America after the death of George Floyd, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has recently made its way back on the bestseller lists. What is the theory of white fragility? How does it apparently explain, as its subtitle says, why it is so hard to talk to white people about racism, especially given how so many white progressives have joined nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd, even kneeling in unison in a Houston event, asking for forgiveness?

According to DiAngelo, white people have been raised in a society anchored entirely on the ideologies and discourses of racism and white supremacy. Not the racism of slavery and Jim Crow, or even the so-called “back-stage” racism where white people say bad things about nonwhite people behind their backs. It is a much more insidious and largely invisible thing known simply as “Whiteness.” According to Whiteness scholars like DiAngelo, to be white is to be raised in a culture of Whiteness and thus to be a racist. Especially if you are a white progressive. As DiAngelo says (see at 13:00), white progressives “land the most harshly on people of color day in and day out.”

Because these ideas are so deeply rooted in the theoretical academic literature about racism, it is difficult to understand them without understanding some of their basis. In the case of white fragility, we have to understand “Whiteness” as a person like Robin DiAngelo understands it in particular.

What is Whiteness?

Whiteness is understood to be a central belief system that supports and upholds white supremacy. The dismantling of Whiteness is thus the key objective in the critical evaluation of social norms and institutions. But what is it? Whiteness is vaguely defined as a “constellation of processes and practices” consisting of “basic rights, values, beliefs, perspectives and experiences purported to be commonly shared by all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people.” These processes and practices are “dynamic, relational, and operating at all times and on myriad levels.” Whiteness is everywhere white people are and in everything they do. White people have been “socialized” into “racialized” roles in which they perpetuate “white” norms of speech, acts, beliefs, and practices which unwittingly but ruthlessly reinstate and reinforce Whiteness.

Despite being so vaguely defined and unmeasurable, Whiteness is treated by the scholars who study it and the activists who demand social change as a real, material thing having real material impact upon the world. How? Through discourse—what we talk about and how we talk about it. For example, as DiAngelo explains in her dissertation (p. 94), if a white person relies on personal experience in inter-racial dialogue, she fails to understand how she remains complicit in the reign of Whiteness, and is also unwittingly working to reinstate and reinforce Whiteness by positioning herself as an individual rather than as a member of the dominant “white” group. White people use this discourse to “protect their positions and preclude attempts to problematize or deconstruct their claims.” They are able to do so because the “discourse of individualism” is a “move” of Whiteness that puts the white person “outside of socialization factors, rather than as the product of multidimensional social interaction.”

The idea is that white people are not merely unaware of how they think and talk about race. They are socially constructed to be unaware by a society which systematically “socializes” white people into a frame of mind in which they see themselves, however unwittingly, as superior. It is inescapable. To be white is to be a racist. That does not mean white people are “bad” people. It means that “being white” effectively reifies Whiteness every time white people participate in society. One that way white people do this is by thinking of themselves as individuals rather than as “white” people (i.e. racists).

DiAngelo and Whiteness scholars draw numerous conclusions about racial inequality from the idea that Whiteness is reified in society. Reification, which mistakes an abstract idea, i.e. Whiteness, for a concrete reality, is a fallacy because abstractions are not real things. But the real problem is that the scope and scope of what Whiteness entails has expanded so widely that it has become virtually meaningless. As the labor historian Eric Arsenen writes, “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings.”

The reification fallacy thus effectively becomes a fallacy of ambiguity, which refers to “[w]hen an unclear phrase with multiple definitions is used within the argument; therefore, does not support the conclusion.” In this case, the unclear phrase is Whiteness. Drawing numerous conclusions about racial inequality from a premise in which the meaning of Whiteness is value is a fallacy of ambiguity.

Implicit Bias: Is there any evidence for ideological Whiteness?

Not really.

The theory of white fragility relies on the flawed premise of implicit bias, which is now known to be a form of pseudoscience. Implicit bias is supposed to refer to when people have unacknowledged biases which affect their behavior. DiAngelo takes for granted that implicit biases are pervasive, that implicit biases predict behavior, and that most people are unaware that they have implicit biases. Her understanding, however, is based on studies from the first generation of implicit bias research, which arose after publication of a paper describing the “Implicit Association Test.” In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tom Bartlett writes, “[a]bout 70 percent of people who take the race version of the Implicit Association Test show the same tendency — that is, they prefer faces with typically European-American features over those with African-American features.” It does not take much imagination to see how these apparent findings led to a popular narrative that racism is a system built on implicit bias.

Imagination, however, would be wrong. A second generation of research in the psychology literature has raised serious doubts about implicit bias. It is not clear what exactly implicit bias measures. Implicit bias is not the same thing as unconscious bias. Several studies, including this meta-study, find that implicit bias does not predict how people will act in real life. Finally, the validity of the test is also cast into doubt by a lack of any evidence that results are consistent even for the same person on the same day. In sum, psychologists do not know exactly what implicit bias is or how to define it. Implicit bias is almost certainly not a measure of unconscious prejudice. It does not reliably predict behavior. It does not seem to explain much about racial inequality.

What is White Fragility?

Unsurprisingly, DiAngelo has encountered a lot of resistance in attempting to persuade white people that they are irredeemably racist, and they have been coded since they were born to be so. In her position as a diversity trainer, she writes, “I have observed countless enactments of white fragility.”

Formally, DiAngelo defines “white fragility” as “a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” including the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”

If you have felt any hint that you disagree with the claims about Whiteness above, you are exhibiting white fragility. Do you doubt that too? More white fragility. Getting frustrated now? More white fragility. Until you see that the system of Whiteness has led to white people being insulated from having to acknowledge their racism, you are exhibiting white fragility (and even then, you might be feeling uncomfortable about it, in which case, more white fragility). Any response to being told by DiAngelo that one is complicit in racism, apart from agreeing with her, is evidence of white fragility. If white fragility sounds like a Kafka trap, congratulations, you are right. It is.

A Kafka trap, named for the story “The Trial” written by Franz Kafka, is when any denial of the truth of an accusation is taken as evidence of guilt.

In the case of white fragility, it looks like this:

“You are white, therefore, you are a racist.”

“No, I’m not.”

“That’s precisely what a fragile white person would say.”

In sum, the theory of white fragility says: any disagreement that you are racist because you are white in a “white” society built on the ideologies and discourses of Whiteness, whether that takes the form of arguing, staying silent, or going away, is evidence of white fragility which, in turn, reinstates white supremacy.

The house of cards tumbles.

To recap, we have no clear definition of Whiteness. Although every speech and act of white people are interpreted as a “moves” of Whiteness, which perpetuates racism because racism is based on Whiteness, the meaning of Whiteness and racism remain ambiguous. Whiteness studies therefore fall prey to the fallacy of ambiguity which refers to “[w]hen an unclear phrase with multiple definitions is used within the argument [and] therefore, does not support the conclusion.”

Despite this ambiguity, Whiteness is nevertheless presented in a reified form as a materially real system in which white people are socialized into ideologies and discourses that begin infecting them with implicit biases from the day they are born. As the literature increasingly makes clear, psychologists are not clear on what, in fact, implicit bias is, or what it measures. If psychologists are not clear on what implicit bias is, then we have reason to doubt whether Whiteness scholars are clear about what Whiteness is. If Whiteness has no convincing claim to validity, then the concept of white fragility as an evasive response to being held complicit in whiteness has none either.

The theory of white fragility purports to offer us a way forward with an explanation of how racism works and why it is so hard to talk to white people about it. This is appealing because we all have an interest in the pursuit of racial justice and the eradication of racism. Unfortunately, the theory of white fragility does not help. It is so riddled with conceptual, empirical, and logical errors that it is useless.

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