#friedersdorf

[benkaden]

Ansichtskarte

Friedersdorf (Kr. Bitterfeld) Polytechnische Oberschule

Reichenbach (Vogtl): VEB #BILDundHEIMAT Reichenbach i.V. (V 11 50 A 1/B 95/73 01 08 04 112)

Foto: [Erich] Kühn, Leipzig

1973

[mmh-dk]

NEU auf unserem "Portal der Königin": Die Orgel der Ev. Kirche in Rückersdorf-Friedersdorf https://www.orgel-information.de/Orgeln/r/ru-rz/rueckersdorf_ev_r-friedersdorf.html Herzlichen Dank an die Kirchengemeinde für die Daten und Fotos und die Genehmigung, sie zu verwenden. #orgel #pfeifenorgel #dasportalderkönigin #orgelinformation #rückersdorf #friedersdorf #dorfkirche #voigt (hier: Friedersdorf, Brandenburg, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpNX3MTIIat/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[queenlua]

I think I missed the drunk window but: you can send two columnists (using that term very broadly) to the thunderdome to fight it out. Who do you send?

can i throw richard hanania & conor friedersdorf in there together and then pray they kill each other

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Conor Friedersdorf

Published: May 31, 2023

The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.

The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.

Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.

However, the worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive. And even people who highly value diversity and inclusion should feel queasy about the DEI gold rush that began in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations, as if billions in outlays, mostly among relatively privileged corporate workers, was an apt and equitable response. A radical course correction is warranted––but first, let’s reflect on how we got here.

On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.

In what, exactly?

It is often hard to say. What has one been trained to do after hearing Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author and social-justice educator, lecture on what she calls “white fragility,” or after pondering a slide deck with cartoons meant to illustrate the difference between equality and equity as critical theorists understand it?

[ Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty / Interaction Institute for Social Change ]

Or after absorbing the racial-equity consultant Tema Okun’s widely circulated claims that attributes including “sense of urgency” and beliefs including “individualism” are traits of “white supremacy culture”? (Okun made these claims in a 1999 article that even she regards as widely misused. She once told an interviewer about the article, “It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me.” She has launched a website that explains her views in far more detail and with more nuance.)

Consider a specific PR pitch from a DEI consultant in 2021, chosen for how typical it is. It leads by invoking Floyd’s death as the impetus to “take bolder actions.” It promises expertise in “best practices” to corporate leaders. Then it pivots to naming a specific training on offer, “Microaggressions in the Workplace,” which, along with other offerings, will help “create a culture where employees feel valued and are encouraged to be their true selves, celebrating each individual’s uniqueness.” The pitch claims that this training “enables talent acquisition, retention, and career advancement.” Is it not inappropriate to use an unemployed Black man’s murder by police to justify expenditures on reducing unintentional micro-slights at work so the bosses can retain more talent?

Conor Friedersdorf: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?

Of course, setting aside unseemly invocations of Floyd’s name, an initiative needn’t be a coherent response to his death to be defensible or worthwhile. All companies should invest in being equal-opportunity employers, including affirmative steps to ensure, for example, that managers haven’t unwittingly introduced unjust pay disparities or culturally biased dress codes. Beyond that, if DEI consultants made life better for marginalized groups or people of color or any other identifiable cohort within a given corporation or organization, or boosted corporate profits so that their fees paid for themselves, the industry could be justified on different terms.

But most DEI consulting fails those tests.

Harvard Business Review published an article in 2012 called “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” which drew heavily on research published in 2007 by  the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly. “A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace,’” the article reported. “Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing.” In 2018, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”

Portending the 2020 explosion of DEI, they continued, “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors.”

And no wonder that DEI consultants struggle to be effective: In a 2021 article in the Annual Review of Psychology, a team of scholars concluded that the underlying research on how to intervene to reduce prejudice is itself flawed and underwhelming while regularly oversold.

A paper published in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology concluded, “In examining hundreds of articles on the topic, we discovered that the literature is amorphous and complex and does not allow us to reach decisive conclusions regarding best practices in diversity training.” The authors continued, “We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.”

Those outside the industry are hardly alone in levying harsh critiques. Many industry insiders are scathing as well. Last year in Harvard Business Review, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker, posited that the DEI industrial complex has a “big, poorly kept secret”: “The actual efficacy” of most trainings and interventions is “lower than many practitioners make it out to be.” In Zheng’s telling, the industry’s problems flow in large part from “the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.”

Zheng was even more blunt in comments to New York in 2021:

When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.

And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.

What if instead of burning the money, we simply redirected it to the poor?

Yes, I understand that it isn’t as if that money would have gone to the neediest among us but for the DEI initiatives of the past few years. Still, I am being serious when I propose that alternative. (I should note that The Atlantic, like many media companies, holds DEI trainings for new hires. These trainings include discussions of Okun’s critique of “sense of urgency” and an updated version of the equity/equality cartoon.)

The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.

In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.

It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.

But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

[cynicalclassicist]

Fuck Trump and fuck those who try to normalise him.

A classic case of these pieces trying to sound clever and downplay the threat. It speaks with authority as it is in a paper.

But no, he lost the right to that long ago. When he attempted a coup that became clear.

This is pretty much how fascism happens.

[thatstormygeek]

It’s always the fringe, supremacy, never the mainstream. We never want to talk about the currents that move in deeper channels, there in the center of the river, the ones that push everything else along that isn’t actively working to swim against it. It’s always them, and them is always whatever is more cartoonish than the most cartoonish real example. It’s never you. It’s never me. It’s never all of us, just floating along.

All around amazing piece. Zero punches pulled.

[reichsbahnfan]

Bahnstrecke Königs Wusterhausen - Friedersdorf (16.05.1998)

[richardnixonlibrary]

#Nixon50 #OTD 10/18/1973 President Nixon met with Senator Pete V. Domenici (R-New Mexico), Congressman Manuel Lujan, Jr. (R-New Mexico), Congressman Harold L. Runnels (D-New Mexico), and Max L. Friedersdorf, Deputy Assistant. Senator Domenici and Congressmen Lujan and Runnels presented the President with a wood carving from the New Mexico American Revolution Bicentennial Commission - a bicentennial logo carved by an inmate at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. (Image: WHPO-E1671-03A)

[gayfranzkafka]

The Atlantic fucking published what is essentially a pro-conversion-therapy argument in their "Up For Debate" column today. I just wrote a letter to the editor, but if anyone wants to join me in that, that would be great. I'm copy + pasting the full text of the article below the cut because it's behind a paywall/that way we don't give it more views. I'd read it for yourself before writing in--the context is that this guy choses one topic a week & then publishes a variety of reader responses without commentary. But I think it's a) reprehensible to choose the "transgender issue" as a topic of debate and b) to include the "question" from James that is essentially a pro-conversion-therapy argument. Obviously CW for transphobia below. You can write a letter either by emailing letters@theatlantic.com or by going to this page & selecting "Letter to the Editor" from the dropdown menu at the bottom of the page.

"What Readers Really Think About Gender"

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies.

I recently asked readers for their thoughts and questions on transgender issues. What follows is a first batch of responses; more are to come.

Kate favors trans rights but has two concerns:

Any American should agree with your quotation “Trans people have rights to liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and equality under the law, same as anyone else, and ought to be treated with respect and dignity.” And despite social-media storms, most of them do.

I do.

My only problems with the current push, if you will, are twofold. First, as an older woman who has lived both sides of before and after Title IX, to have biological men competing in women’s sports is the very definition of unfair. Second, I am concerned that a female child who is a “tomboy” is perhaps being told by activists (in schools or online) that she is probably a boy. I am concerned that a boy who enjoys ballet might be told, in the same way, that he is probably a girl. Will we lose the Mikhail Baryshnikovs of the world? Will we lose the Billie Jean Kings of the world? The list of such people could go on and on. It’s okay to be a boyish kind of girl or a girlish kind of boy. But with the very loud voices that the activists of today’s world have, my biggest concern is that we are not letting men and women, boys and girls, just BE, just be who they are. It’s all okay. It’s okay to just be who you are; you probably are not born the wrong gender.

That is very rare.

Sally describes her experiences in early-childhood education:

I work with young children at a preschool that works very hard at being inclusive of all genders. I’m a nascent senior. I’m often known to use the term guys in mixed-gender settings, and I think that guys (in the plural sense only) is morphing into something useful and inclusive. I’m working on switching to using folks as a sign of solidarity, though.

Sometimes our gender-sensitivity training does make me want to roll my eyes. Explaining to a toddler working at toileting that some boys have vaginas and some girls have penises is not something they are focused on––learning how to manage one’s own plumbing to avoid making a mess is challenging enough. The struggles of a transgender boy to access the appropriate bathroom don’t yet resonate for those who are still sitting side by side in an all-gender bathroom. That said, the parents who are using they/them pronouns for their young child might be giving them a respite from conforming to gender rules. And having kind and attentive teachers who aren’t cis gives them additional positive role models to look up to. All toddlers I’ve been privileged to teach have loved sequins, sparkles, tutus, and firefighter hats, and all those young humans ought to be able to explore every aspect of themselves without judgment.

. . .Can humans learn to value the diversity that is probably our greatest strength as a social species before we create our own demise? I hope so!

Lois is confused:

If gender is only true if it is self-defined, and societal norms are constraining, why should anyone aspire to transition from one undefinable and nonexistent gender category to a different one? How do they know the identity they are wanting to take on is real? Doesn’t transitioning simply affirm the male-female binary from the other direction?

Dave asks that you believe his account of his child:

I figured it was just a matter of time before this topic came up, so I have kept my trans dad hat ready. I am the father of a 10-year-old transgender son. He has identified as a boy since he was 4 or 5. In many ways, he’s the prototypical example of a gender-incongruent kid. To quote from some in the medical community, he has been “persistent, insistent, and consistent” in this identification. Before he even knew what the word transgender was, he would describe himself in one way or another as having “a boy brain and girl body.” In no time in the past five to six years has this wavered in even the slightest.

I think there is a feeling in some circles that parents of trans kids see their biologically female child play with a truck three times and rush to change pronouns, throw away dresses, and cover all pink paint with blue. For us, this was not even remotely the case. As our son’s identity began to express itself, we were confused, uncertain, and, to be perfectly honest, a little frightened. Our son began refusing anything remotely “girly” about the time he was 4-and-a-half. He began demanding short haircuts, boyish clothes, and mostly boyish toys.

Of course, my wife and I rushed to change his name and pronouns, began wearing we’re proud of our trans boy! T-shirts, secured spots for him on Pride parade floats, and booked his medical-intervention appointments––at least that’s what many people in America seem to think, as if we’re all quick to fast-track our gender-curious kids to trans identities. How do people who believe such things operate in the world being so divorced from reality? We had no idea what to do. Somewhat guiltily, I will admit that we didn’t fully accept (or maybe want to accept) the reality of our son. We weren’t cruel or entirely unsupportive. But we clung to the idea that it was merely a phase. That he was just playing with roles.

In pre-K, he was starting to ask for male pronouns. We nodded and brushed it off. In parent-teacher conferences during the autumn of kindergarten, his teachers again told us this, as well as about him asking to use the boys’ restroom. We replied that we were fine with that in school if that’s what he preferred but we still used she/her at home and planned to continue doing so. “We just want to see where it goes,” we said.

At the request for short haircuts, we avoided “boy” cuts, trying first a bob, and then a shorter bob. Our son would come home from those appointments sullen and sometimes angry, because he had been pretty clear on his desire (a short, boy-style cut) and we had opted for a short, girl-style cut. We were hoping it might be enough, and frankly hoping he would get over it and everything would go back to “normal.” We did roughly the same thing with clothes. He’d want to shop in the boys’ section at Target; we would keep trying to steer him to the girls’. Books too; we were always sneaking in empowered-girl books, thinking maybe he just had developed some weird, bad impressions of women and girls. He would dutifully put them on his shelf and never take them out.

We persisted in using female pronouns at home and referring to him as our daughter and our other son’s sister … even when he was referring to himself as a brother. In short, we did loads of non-gender-affirming things. If you would have asked us then if we thought it was a phase and that he’d “change back,” we would have dutifully done what liberals in a progressive city do: assured you that wasn’t true and that we loved and supported our child. And we would have been lying; while we of course loved and supported our child, we hoped this whole “I’m a boy in a girl’s body” thing would fade away.

We feared telling our families and potentially facing their rejection and judgment, their possible assumptions that our time in “liberal Madison” had something to do with our child being transgender. We feared we would cause harm by labeling our child too soon. We let our fears hinder us from being the parents our child needed. We were wrong.

I share this to underscore how complex this process is. Because there does seem to be the idea that parents of trans kids aren’t making an effort to “make” their kid conform their gender to their biological sex, that we are just rushing headlong into embracing our child’s trans identity. That there aren’t transgender kids, just over-indulgent progressive parents using their child as a political totem. Or, from the other political extreme, that if we have any doubts or fears or missteps, that we are anti-trans bigots pushing our children toward certain suicide. None of those ideas are true. That this is a deeply difficult thing to process doesn’t seem to occur to some people.

My wife and I finally came to terms with our son's gender identity three years ago when he was seven-and-a-half. Our son was getting increasingly sullen, angry, and defiant. He was unhappy in general, but also angry with us. Even through that winter, we still danced around his gender identity as the cause, as we didn’t want to accept that it was true. We still wanted to believe we had a daughter, not another son. To let go of that idea felt like the equivalent of losing a child. But by that spring it was simply impossible to ignore. We had a conversation and made an appointment with his pediatrician, telling her all we had seen and heard. She confirmed what we had tried to avoid accepting: Our son exhibited all the signs of being transgender.

That was the day we changed our perspective. We went home and told him we were going to start using his preferred pronouns. We compromised on a nickname. He had been named after my wife’s grandmother, and we explained that it was important to carry that on in some capacity, and he accepted a shortened, gender-neutral (and pretty coolly unique) name to go by that used his birth name as a jumping off point. His brother struggled a little with the change, but quickly adapted. And what happened? The sullenness, defiance, and anger disappeared. Our beautiful, buoyant, zany child sprang back out, bigger and better than ever. He switched from Girl to Boy Scouts and thrived.

In the three years since, he has given us not even a tiny glimpse of any of this not being utterly and totally true. He has thrived at his public school—kids are incredibly accepting of things when allowed to be—and at home. His extended family has embraced his identity (some more easily than others). He is as great a kid as anyone could ask for.

I know that there will be people who, were they to read this, would say or think Yeah, sure … he’s only that way because you indulged it and his teachers and school indoctrinated him. To which I’d reply, it could possibly look that way from the outside, if all the evidence you have is one dad’s personal account. But what the people who say those sorts of things don’t see is the daily, lived experience of my kid. A lived experience that reaffirms constantly the truth of who he is. My son is a boy with a girl’s body. I don't understand how that happened, I don’t know how that works, but I know it’s true.

This acceptance doesn’t make the coming years any easier or less terrifying. We can see puberty on the horizon, getting closer every day. We know the huge, terrifying decisions that are coming. We are terrified of making the wrong decision, of doing something that might irreversibly alter or hurt our child. We know that the science, while not as in doubt as opponents want people to believe, has areas of uncertainty. But we need the ability to make the best choices for our kid based on the best medical understanding that exists. And to have the ability to do that suddenly cast into doubt, alongside the possibility of being accused of abuse on top of things, is terrifying and infuriating.

The idea of medical intervention is frightening. But it’s not simply thrown around, at least not in our case. We’ve already had a preliminary meeting with a pediatrician specializing in gender care. Did we leave with a bag of puberty blockers and testosterone vials? Of course not. There is a process we will have to go through to get our insurance company to even cover puberty blockers. As for hormones, that can’t happen until he’s at least 15. And it’s important to remember something else: None of these interventions are required. Many trans kids and adults opt for a range of options, from no medical interventions at all to a full package of interventions. Some start, then stop. It’s all a choice, one parents and kids and doctors need to have the freedom to make.

You may have noticed that earlier I referred to my son as gender incongruent rather than gender dysphoric. That’s not just me being cute with language. I didn’t refer to him as dysphoric, because he isn’t. He’s a super-happy, well-adjusted kid. Why? Because of the support he receives from his family, his friends, and others in his life. There is no dissonance for him because he’s allowed to be who he is. But dysphoria is always lurking out there, whether in the creeping specter of puberty or just the often-unaccepting outside world, and with it the potential for crippling anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

Are there risks to medical interventions? Of course. But the health risks of dysphoria are real too. Given that, it’s still in our best interests as parents to trust the opinions of major medical organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the AMA, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the various doctors and therapists our child has seen. We don’t have the luxury of latching on to individual critical voices. The stakes for us are just too high. That doesn’t mean research shouldn’t continue and that critical voices shouldn’t provide a dose of healthy skepticism; that is a critical part of the scientific process. But until it becomes clear that the consensus on gender-affirming care has changed, we will trust the current consensus.

A lot of people struggle with accepting that being transgender is real. It’s counterintuitive. I really do get that. As I said, I don’t understand why my son is who he is. But it’s true. Be skeptical and ask questions. But also know that this is not a fantasy. It is not something made up. Not a phase. It’s real, and the kids and adults experiencing it are real too. They are not making it up. They are not deluded. They are not freaks.

They are human beings. And so are their families.

James has a question:

If there is a recognized incongruity between what a trans person’s brain feels and what sex their body is, there would seem to be at least two logical responses: Either modify the person’s brain to accept the body that they have or modify the body to conform to what the person’s brain thinks they are. Why, then, is there opposition to any suggestion that you can treat the brain to “correct” gender dysphoria?

A reader with the initials P.S. worries that educators will become gender enforcers, and wishes that schools would focus on collective rather than individual identity:

Creating new gender categories, with divergent lists of characteristics and atomized response requirements, is onerous. I don’t think schools should be enforcing strict gender stereotypes or that they should be guiding kids to identify with new categories, and certainly not secretly or against the desires of the parents. Especially at the lower grades, kids need to be learning about what makes us a collective and the rules that make us a cohesive and functioning society. Focusing on gender conformity/expression elevates and centralizes it—it reinforces “me” over “us,” prioritizes adopting an identity group over belonging to a society, and suggests forcing society to conform to individual preferences over conforming one’s behavior to societal mores.

[mariacallous]

Around the time Donald Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I said to colleagues in the newsroom where I worked at the time that we shouldn’t cover everything he said or tweeted. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Trump, on the other hand, clearly said many things purely to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. “He’s the president,” he said, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Eventually, many (if not all) news outlets kicked (if not entirely) the habit of amplifying every wild tweet and got back to doing their real job, which was to report on what Trump’s administration was actually doing—much of which he himself may have been, at best, only dimly aware of. Over the past few weeks, though, news habits from the early Trump years have resurfaced around Elon Musk.

Here, for instance, we saw a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig at the government’s former chief infectious disease expert, as well as at gender diversity. Here’s another bunch about the picture of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

News coverage of what Musk is doing at Twitter betrays another trope of the Trump years. There’s a large category of stories that report with a kind of ghoulish delight on moves that will surely—surely!—sink the platform in short order, like alienating advertisers and influential users. Meanwhile, there’s a drumbeat of pieces from right-wing outlets that just as willfully ignore Musk’s worst behaviors to argue that his slash-and-burn tactics are literally the only way to rid Twitter of excess bureaucracy and make it profitable, as if it were such a pit of vipers as has never been seen in the annals of corporate management. 

This is precisely the way coverage of Trump worked. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was plenty of good reporting going on at the same time, but these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the conversation. The losers were the public, whose understanding of what was actually happening across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one unhinged man in the White House.

This is what’s happening with Musk and Twitter. Conor Friedersdorf in the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.” 

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.

The point isn’t that Musk may not be as terrible as you think. He is definitely terrible. Just as Trump was unequivocally unfit to be president, Musk is unequivocally cruel, vindictive, a heartless manager, and a troll who amplifies extremists. (Over the weekend he sicced his followers onto Yoel Roth, Twitter's former head of trust and safety, who fled his home with his family after getting threats.) He is also a chaotic leader who, far from having a plan, is—in the words of Chris Sacca, a venture capitalist and self-confessed admirer of Musk—“winging this.” It’s entirely possible that he will either destroy Twitter outright or turn it into what right-wing platforms like Gab and Parler only dreamed of becoming.

The point is that the focus on Musk is a mistake. Arguably not as much of a mistake as it was with Trump; an owner-CEO has more power over their company than a president does over their country. But trying to report on what’s happening by expecting either his abject failure or resounding success and then using his most attention-grabbing tactics as evidence for that thesis is not doing anyone a service. 

As with Trump, the real story is often what’s going on below the level of newsmaker in chief. It’s about the actual numbers around Twitter’s advertising, not Musk’s claims that advertisers are coming back. It’s about who’s actually joining and leaving Twitter, not about who’s threatening to leave. It’s about Twitter’s role in the world—its importance to natural-disaster management or to any number of communities for whom it’s a store of social wealth—rather than just how much money it will lose. Musk and Trump subvert the ability to focus on such nuances by making the story all about themselves. The very same tactic that draws their fans ensnares their critics. And we, by which I mean everybody, but especially the media, fall for it every time.

Just before Musk bought Twitter, I tweeted a prediction that “not much [will] change. Trump et al will come back, trolling will increase somewhat, rest of us will block and mute more and engage less but still use it for publishing—more web 1.0, less 2.0.” As foolish as it is to make predictions, and as crazy as the past six weeks have been, I still think this is as plausible a long-term outcome as any other. It’s neither the destruction of Twitter nor a turnaround, but a bet that the platform is too important to too many people to disappear altogether and will hobble along, however dysfunctionally, in some form. This prediction could be utterly wrong, but its chief quality is that it’s boring. People should make boring predictions more often. Like boring opinions, they are more common and more likely to be accurate, but they get short shrift because they don’t fit the easy narratives of success or failure.

Both the Trump and Musk sagas show that we are still in the thrall of the great-man theory of history. The desire so many have to see people like these either soar or burn produces an attendant bias in evaluating them—a feeling that their actions are the only ones that really matter. That’s what produces this breathless obsession with their every move and blinds us to more complex information that might paint a clearer picture of the messier reality—and whatever future we’re barreling toward.

[blsm-m]

Professor Lawrence Bobo, Dean of the Department of Social Sciences at Harvard University and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Social Science at the university, Article Harvard Crimson Appropriate restrictions on teacher speech You have to read it to believe it. He writes: Would a faculty member who harshly criticizes a university leader, faculty member, staff member, or student with the intent of provoking outside interference in the university's affairs exceed the bounds of acceptable professional conduct, and would publicizing such opinions be a punishable breach of professional conduct? Yes, that is true. And that is correct. Vigorous debate is expected and encouraged in a university interested in promoting freedom of expression. But here's the problem: as events over the last year have demonstrated, harsh and critical comments, especially from prominent faculty, can attract outside attention that directly interferes with the functioning of the university. Faculty members' right to free speech does not condone explicit incitement to interference in Harvard's affairs by outside parties, including the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, and the government. Freedom of expression and the protection of tenure carry with it a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to knowingly refrain from actions that could seriously harm the University and its independence. In support of this position, he even points out that "you cannot shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater with impunity." Connor Friedersdorf has a fitting response to the Dean Bobo controversy. Tweet"Harvard President Lawrence D. Bobo's op-ed prompted me, an outsider, to publicly lament the part of Harvard's leadership that neither understands nor supports free speech. By his logic, I believe he should be sanctioned." https://x.com/conor64/status/1802280647563661516 One suggestion made in the article that is worth considering is that faculty should be punished for encouraging students to engage in civil disobedience that violates university policy and puts the students at risk of punishment. While I agree that it is cowardly for faculty to stand by and encourage students to take the risk of punishment, I disagree that encouraging others to engage in civil disobedience is itself civil disobedience that is or should be punished. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have heard university officials suggest that faculty or other members of the university community should refrain from making statements that could be controversial, repercussions, or damage the university's reputation. (And I speak from personal experience: had my university taken such a position, I would have been targeted.) It is sobering and depressing that some university officials, let alone a prominent professor like Dean Bobo, do not recognize that such a position poses a serious threat to academic freedom and the university's truth-seeking function.

[percygermany]

Friedersdorf, Ilm-Kreis, Thüringen Katzhütte, Landkreis Saalfeld-Rudolstadt, Thüringen Masserhammer, Landkreis Saalfeld-Rudolstadt, Thüringen

[art-of-manliness]

Odds & Ends: August 9, 2024

Lawerence of Arabia. I recently watched the classic 1962 film Lawerence of Arabia during my Zone 2 cardio sessions. It had been on my to-watch list for a while since it’s my father-in-law’s favorite movie. It did not disappoint! The movie chronicles the life of T.E. Lawrence (played brilliantly by Peter O’Toole), a British officer who unites and leads Arab tribes during World War I in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The film does a great job exploring the nature of power, ambition, and idealism, as well as the complex geopolitics of the British empire. Amazing acting and amazing cinematography. Highly recommend.  “No Name” by Jack White. Jack White released a new album a few weeks ago, and it’s been getting a lot of rotation during my weightlifting sessions. This is a good, old-fashioned rock album full of electrifying guitar riffs and songs with a nice mixture of rock and blues. “That’s How I’m Feeling,” “Old Scratch Blues,” and “Bless Myself” are three of my favorites on the album.  Abercombie & Fitch Woods. The other day, Gus asked me what my go-to cologne was in high school. Answer: Abercrombie & Fitch Woods. Which is funny because I generally loathed A&F clothing (too preppy!) and opted for wearing vintage bowling shirts or 1970s golf shirts I found in thrift stores (punk rock!). For some reason, I made an exception for my antipathy towards A&F when it came to fragrance. Anyways, Gus’ inquiry got me curious about whether they still make Woods, and lo and behold, they do! So I bought a bottle and have been wearing it the past few weeks. I’m enjoying it, and it reminds Kate of when we first dated. Whether from its legitimately nice citrusy/woodsy smell or from the nostalgia factor (even if you didn’t know someone who wore Woods, the A&F stores smelled of it), I bet this is a cologne that makes a lot of Millennial women swoon.  Why I Hate Instagram Now We’ve been on Instagram since 2010, and it’s been interesting to see how the platform has changed in the past 14 years. Conor Friedersdorf articulates the lamentable shift Instagram has undergone from a fun, organic platform that allowed you to share life’s goings-ons with friends and family to a platform that’s dedicated to entertaining you with algorithmically-driven, revenue-generating content created by influencers and brands. I’ve noticed that I’ve been using IG less and less because the content that shows up in my feed is mostly reels (do not like!) from accounts I don’t follow and ads. Bring back personal blogs for sharing life’s ephemera with friends and family! Quote of the Week Decide! There is nothing in the world so pitiable as an undecided man, who wavers between two feelings, hoping to reconcile them, and does not understand that nothing can unite them. —Goethe Help support independent publishing. Make a donation to The Art of Manliness! Thanks for the support! http://dlvr.it/TBk8PL

[fabiankiss]

Great! Here's the final version for your blog post about the second scene focusing on the destroyed building:

Creating a Destroyed Concrete Building: Inspiration and Process

For my second scene in the post-apocalyptic theme, I focused on recreating a destroyed building made of concrete. My inspiration came from a Ninety Days creation project at Quixel that a team, with the lead Jakob Keudel, worked on, which involved building a voxel-based model from various pieces. This project demonstrated how individual concrete pieces could be assembled to create a highly detailed and varied environment.

The goal for this scene was to capture the same sense of destruction and variation. I wanted to recreate a destroyed environment of concrete, with each piece contributing to the overall look and feel of the scene. This approach allowed for a wide range of assets and silhouettes, enhancing the realism and depth of the environment.

Keudel, J. (no date) Artstation - explore, UE5 | Ninety Days | Rubble Street. Available at: https://www.artstation.com (Accessed: 01 August 2024).

Pin on there was an idea: Urban decay photography, landscape concept, ruins (2024) Pinterest. Available at: https://nl.pinterest.com/pin/667166132328509619/ (Accessed: 01 August 2024).

Friedersdorf, C. (2015) The Washington Post’s frivolous call for war in Syria, The Atlantic. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-em-washington-posts-em-frivolous-call-for-war-in-syria/278939/ (Accessed: 01 August 2024).

London (2020) Updated: Mapped - A world at war, The New Humanitarian. Available at: https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/maps-and-graphics/2017/04/04/updated-mapped-world-war (Accessed: 01 August 2024).

[bennettmarko]

The right is many things, some wonderful, some awful, and everywhere in between. What I wish everyone would internalize is this: when the right is authoritarian, illiberal, or racially essentialist, it is not morally superior – it is morally inferior. Opposing it is patriotic.

The left is many things, some wonderful, some awful, and everywhere in between. What I wish everyone would internalize is this: when the left is authoritarian, illiberal, or racially essentialist, it is not morally superior – it is morally inferior. Opposing it is social justice.

- Conor Friedersdorf