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terramythos · 5 years ago

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TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 20 of 26

Title: Wolf by Wolf (Wolf by Wolf #1) (2015)

Author: Ryan Graudin

Genre/Tags: Alternate History, Historical Fiction, Dystopian, Science Fiction (...ish?), Young Adult, Third Person, Female Protagonist, Duology

Rating: 8/10

Date Began: 7/12/2020

Date Finished: 7/18/2020

In an alternate 1956, the Axis powers of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan won World War II. They host an annual motorcycle competition known as the Axis Tour, in which young people from both powers race across Europe and Asia. Yael, a death camp survivor with the ability to skinshift due to Nazi medical experiments, poses as Adele Wolfe, Germany’s only female competitor. Her goal? To win the race, get a private dance with Hitler, and assassinate him for the world to see.

But years of training and preparation are thrown off balance when Adele’s past relationships come back to haunt Yael in the form of her twin brother Felix Wolfe, and the presence of Luka Lowe, a fellow competitor and former victor, both of whom have complicated, unknown histories with Adele. Now Yael must keep up the charade while still assuring her victory in a difficult and deadly inter-continental race.

Who are you? (On the inside?)

The answer to this question was something Yael had to fight for. Her self-reflection was no reflection at all. It was a shattered mirror. Something she had to piece together, over and over again. Memory by memory. Loss by loss. Wolf by wolf.

Minor spoilers under the cut.

Wolf by Wolf was a surprise; I did not expect to like it nearly as much as I did. While it has a fascinating premise, it's certainly complicated enough to mess up. Alternate history, especially World War II, can be sketchy if not done well. Add in some science fiction elements, and I was skeptical. But while Wolf by Wolf isn't perfect, Graudin does pull it off rather well, and it was thoroughly enjoyable to read. She states in her author’s note that, with the troubling rise of alt-right movements in recent years, books that examine the true horrors and implications of Nazi ideology are important, and something like this could have very well been our world. I find myself agreeing, and I think she treats the subject with both the delicacy and brutal honesty it requires.

The novel’s inherent suspense is excellent. Wolf by Wolf has all the appeal of a spy novel with an extra layer that comes with the skinshifting aspect. All of Yael's interactions with the other leads (Felix and Luka) mean they genuinely think she's Adele, and it's interesting to see how Yael struggles to play the part. There's a lot of tense moments where she says or does something that Adele wouldn't, and she has to use her wits to get through it. I like the "becoming the mask" trope and it's in play here as Yael finds herself becoming attached to the other characters. The inherently fantastical element of skinshifting does protect her, as almost no one would guess it's why Adele is acting odd, so the fact she's able to keep up the ruse despite everything does make sense. That being said, I would have loved to see someone, especially one of the two male leads, figure it out. I spent the novel wondering how a scene like that would play out, and was disappointed it doesn't happen. There are certainly multiple teasing fake-outs. Presumably this will be A Thing in the next book, but it's still something I wish had paid off here rather than consigning it to the sequel. Semi-related, I found the ending twist and callback pretty interesting, and it has some fascinating implications for said sequel. I guess we'll see what Graudin does with all this material.

Probably the strongest aspect of the novel for me, personally, is how the book balances flashbacks. I think Graudin does a fantastic job (with some exceptions) doling out information, and gradually revealing Yael's backstory and pain points. Unsurprisingly, her past is heart-wrenching in a variety of ways. The part where her mother doesn't recognize her and the scene with Vlad and the numbers hit me especially hard. It's satisfying when the full implications of a symbol or line of dialogue aren't revealed until much later in the story. For example, the wolf tattoos are introduced early (literally the second chapter) but the emotional payoff is gradual, and I think that strengthens the impact. The pacing in general is really well done-- slow when it needs to be, and action-packed at other times. This is something I struggle with even in books I adore, so I’m really impressed with how this book handles it.

YA gets a bad (often undeserved) rap, and I adore the genre when it's done right. Unfortunately many YA novels fall into trends and tropes that just get annoying after a while, so I find I have to be selective. For the most part Wolf by Wolf avoids these. Yael is a distinct, interesting character who avoids typical YA protagonist cliches. Her tragic past is all the more poignant for being something real people faced (albeit with creative liberties), and her struggles with identity are extra compelling. That being said, I didn't find the romantic subplot with Luka very interesting. I think there's supposed to be some narrative tension where he seems to be a bad guy but has Hidden Depths etc etc... but it was so painfully obvious that I guessed his entire arc based on the first scene. I think there's some potential considering the Yael/Adele dichotomy, but again, it doesn't really pay off in Wolf by Wolf, which is a disappointment. The few romance scenes just take away from the more interesting base story. From what I can tell we get more of Luka’s backstory and perspective in Blood for Blood, so... fingers crossed that I can appreciate him more in retrospect? In general I found Yael’s interactions with Felix more interesting and genuine.

As for the writing itself, I'm torn. This novel makes heavy use of symbols, and consistently incorporates them into the prose. Usually, this is done to great effect, and there are plenty of excellent poetic and introspective passages. There's also stylistic elements such as heavy repetition and an occasionally-bolded INTERNAL MONOLOGUE. I also noted a lot of dramatic irony and narrative callbacks, which always hit with a punch. When these aspects are done well, it's great. But sometimes Graudin just doesn't seem to trust her readers. There are multiple incidents where the story REALLY wants you to know that X Symbol Means Y Thing and accomplishes this by... just telling you. There's also some clumsy expository dialogue that's jarring to read (very much "as you well know, this thing is true"). These may be in the minority, but are especially noticeable because the rest of the book is subtle about it. No idea why some parts are just like that, and this might be a nitpick, but it really bothers me. Young adults aren't stupid, and it's annoying when YA novels assume they need their hand held. As I said, it only happens a few times, and I am willing to look past it considering the other strengths of the novel.

Wolf by Wolf has its faults, but overall I had a great time reading it. The ending has some fascinating implications, so I'm interested to see what happens in Blood for Blood. From the brief preview at the end, it looks like we get more backstory for Luka and Felix, which I think might smooth over some of my criticisms depending on how it’s handled. I guess we'll see!

#2020 reading challenge #8/10 #taylor reads

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theowlandthekey · 5 years ago

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We Don’t Need Covens: In This Essay I Will...

I'm a big fan of Sarah Anne Lawless. I never got the opportunity to speak with her personally, but for those of you who've been around long enough, you likely know about her blog discussing traditional witchcraft and her shop. I often found her posts to be inspirational, providing a unique clarity on subjects that most books skip over. To this day her belladonna ointment is one of the few things that can make my wife's back spasms stop.

Unfortunately both her blog and her shop have closed up. All I can find are interviews with her. In a very broad sense, Lawless came out about abuse and manipulation within the pagan community. She named names and instead of addressing the problems and having an open discussion about it, she was harassed until she backed off.

It upset me at the time in a very distant sense. As I said I never knew her, but I admired her passion and the certainty with which she practiced her craft. Though it's now long after the fact, I finally think I have the ability to put my thoughts into words.

We don't need covens. We never did.

I've been practicing off and on for about fifteen years or so. I've played around with different methods of witchcraft, wicca, and pagan worship. I've been the member of a druid grove, a loose coven association, and even a few on-line groups that claim to do all their spell casting via chat. In the end, I've found them all to be much the same. They promise a great deal and frankly fall short of everything from education to community.

I'm likely going to upset quite a few people with this statement. That's fine. You shouldn't trust anybody who thinks they can tell you your business. But for what it's worth, take a moment to read this over. If something here strikes you as familiar, it might be time to consider another path.

IQuick Note: I know there is a lot of grey area as to what could be considered a witch. You have pagans, heathens, wiccans and the like. Some are comfortable being called witches while others are not. But the connotation changes depending upon each individuals definition. So let's look at witches as people who, for whatever reason, have decided to intentionally avoid Christianity in favor of practicing a personal path of self-realization and independence involving magic, spells, enchantments and the like.

Cult Mentality

First thing you ought to consider is the potential for manipulation and control that exists in any group. This is especially true whenever matters of religion and faith are concerned. It's a touchy subject, no doubt. People are particular about religious practices. For my part, I maintain that witchcraft isn't a religion or a faith. It's a craft. But that doesn't change the fact that people will use religion as a method for controlling others. Especially others who are hungry to fit in with a group that they feel represents them. For this very reason, I firmly believe that witches should avoid becoming a congregation of any kind. Too many of us think of witchcraft as a religion, and while you can play pretend all you like most of us were raised Christian and still have difficulty shaking off the mimicry of organized religion. Our power is in our independence and our ability to think for ourselves, and it becomes much more difficult to do this when you form yourselves into a coven.

Respect My Authority

On that note, you can't form a group without some kind of a hierarchy making itself apparent. I have a strong distaste for covens who create arbitrary titles. They're largely meaningless. You don't really need a high priestess or an archdruid to go around wearing robes with more trim than everybody else. It's just an excuse for someone to hold themselves higher and make decisions without consulting anyone. You'll often find that people who hold these kinds of titles become very upset when someone disagrees with them and find ways to flex their authority in a 'funny' or 'joking' way. Basically telling others that if you disagree with them then you don't need to be there. This comes off especially hard on people who may be new to the craft and are still seeking approval.

Calling Ourselves Out

As sexual abuse allegations are on the rise, we have a duty to be aware of people within our community who put others in danger. We have heard it said that 'while not all priests are abusers, abusers tend to gravitate towards positions of authority'. This is no less true just because those leaders are witches and not priests. You don't get a Free Pass. Covens and groves all seem to want that central authority figure to which they can turn to. We tend to protect them because these people act as a spokesperson for us as a whole. But this does not mean they should be protected if they behave reprehensibly! They are not above the law and if we really want to present ourselves as being different from Christians, we should take a stance of pushing out people who are abusers and manipulators.

But here's the thing. We seem to have this self-righteous indignation that comes with being witches and pagans. Any questioning or perceived threats, especially ones that come from outside the community, are deemed as being biased because of Christian society. While this isn't entirely untrue, it also has a problematic effect on us wearing a permanent set of rose-tinted glasses whenever we look at the pagan community and it's 'stars'. Instead of seeing them as human beings with flaws, we view them as celebrities. We avoid using critical thinking skills when someone in the community comes up against criticism and it can end up damaging our reputation as a whole.

Witch n’ Bitch

While this is one of the most obvious issues with modern witchcraft groups, it is far from the bottom of the cauldron. While many groups come together promising to provide resources for education, help learning rituals and practices, and open discussions, I find that very few of them ever deliver on these promises. I've joined more than a few witchcraft 'study groups' only to have them disband after a few sessions for one reason or another. Others have sessions which quickly get derailed from methods and history into a bitching session about over covens, daily drama, or the like. Instead of helping interested parties by providing resources and discussion, it basically becomes a witches tea party. Brooms are snatched.

Exclusion By Design

Something else I want to bring up is the exclusion by design if not by intention concept that plagues covens. I have seen this manifest in more ways then I can count. Most typically it crops up in the form of “you're not experienced enough in our particular tradition”. However, I've noticed a lot of problems with most pagan groups being painfully white. The excuse is that this makes sense because most witchcraft traditions are European. However, that doesn't seem to stop most witches from liberally grabbing whatever non-European cultural paraphernalia they feel fits their witchy aesthetic. The most notable victims being the American Indians, the Voodoo/Santeria practitioners, and Mexican folk beliefs. I've been told by several people that this isn't on purpose. It's just how it ended up. But when you have to triple check everybody on a Norse Heathen group chat to be sure none of them have any racist ideology there is an inherent problem with the community which is long overdue for exposure.

Queer Craft

I’d like to bring up the patriarchal and hetero-normative slant that is heavily enforced in modern witchcraft and neopaganism. I want to preface this by saying that when I think of a witch, I think of a woman who lives apart from societal norms. She is autonomous. She is self-aware. She is unruffled by others perceptions of her. This is what makes her a force to be reckoned with. Yet much of wicca and neopaganism strives to enforce a very heteronormative perception of a woman's role in society by establishing the narrative of the Maiden/Mother/Crone archetype. While there is beauty in each of these phases of life and there is nothing wrong with a woman finding power in them for herself, enforcing them as a role model for what a woman should be has dangerous implications. A woman must be a virgin, reproductive, or too old to bother with. And it should come as no surprise that concepts have no real male counterpart.

This becomes an even bigger problem as we look forward to a more inclusive world where we are learning to recognize a larger spectrum of gender and sexuality. Where does the Queer witch fit in with these very narrow perceptions of the divine within the self? The pagan community loves to talk about itself as an accepting and open community that embraces all sexualities openly. But that isn't very well reflected in its liturgy and conception. I don't think this gets discussed much because people have heralded the God/Goddess, Horned God/Earth Goddess format for so long that we take it for granted despite these perceptions being relatively modern ones. While there are some traditions which put emphasis on the Queer spectrum and embracing it as a source of power and self-realization, they are few and far between.

Psudo Ethics

The final thing I want to bring up is the irritating moral high-ground that people in the pagan community are so willing to put forth any time we are questioned about our beliefs. It is just as irritating if not more so than listening to Christians proselytize. The Wiccan Rede has held a position for a long time as a general set of standards for what witches and wiccans should consider before acting or casting spells. However, I'm pleasantly surprised to see more of a discussion happening on morality in witchcraft. We don't exist to turn the other cheek. While I'm not a believer in the 'strike first' policy, I am a believer in defending myself when attacked.

I see a lot of judgment happening in the wiccan community, especially now that witchery is in the forefront of social media. People poking their noses into how others practice and deciding to take it upon themselves to 'correct' how another practitioner does their work. I understand why some people want to pursue a more positive and affirming lifestyle through wiccan practices. There is nothing wrong with that. But I confess myself irritated when I'm chided by other witches for casting a curse or have a discussion with a demon. My prerogatives are not your moral imperative, nor are any other witches. So long as my actions are not directed against you, it isn't any of your business what I get up to.

In Conclusion

Ironically, one of the biggest issue with discussing if not resolving many of these issues is that we, as witches/pagans and the like, are NOT a unified group. We are a loose collective. We don't have one central figure who decides doctrine. We don't have any of those things that make for dogma. The fact that we can choose to act independently of one another is a big part of our power. It emboldens us to think for ourselves, question tradition, and seek out new methods and practices which are better suited to our needs. Witchcraft does not begin and end with the anathema and the chalice. We can choose to both acknowledge the gods without permitting them too much influence over our lives. We can dance naked under the full moon while enticing a demon or just make a hot cup of tea while we listen to the rain and meditate. All of this is within our grasp.

But before we can practice together, we have to learn how to function together. And right now I don't' see a great deal of that happening. I believe that by learning how to be ourselves first, by practicing as solitary and independent witches before seeing out a group, we can be more confident overall. After fifteen years of practicing, I can tell you truthfully that I haven't learned anything in a group that I couldn't have learned by studying and practicing on my own. Mostly because 90% of the groups out there read the same damned books I do and are more into repetitive ritual than anything else. I would have loved to work with someone like Sarah Anne Lawless, even just to attend a few workshops led by her. Until we can learn to be better individuals as witches first, I don't know if our community can be better together.

#witchcraft #wicca #pagan #witch #wiccan #paganism #anit-coven #covens #critique #rant #problems within the community #pagan community #wiccan community #editorial #solitary witch

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speedofcattle · 6 years ago

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Ad Nauseam: Advertising, Data Collection, And Literacy In The Age Of Big Data And Social Media

When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of Spongebob Squarepants. One scene in particular from the show has haunted me into adulthood, taking place on a “spooky” night in which Spongebob is trying to walk home in the dark. Along the road, he continually stops, and, feeling increasingly paranoid, calls out things like “Who’s there?”. Finally he begins to panic and walks faster and faster, eventually screaming “I feel like someone...is trying to sell me something!” At this point, the camera angle shifts to focus on the backside of a rock near the road, which two fish dressed in business suits are hidden behind. One of the fish turns to the other and whispers something to the effect of “I told you Larry, he’s on to us!”

I mention this scene because it is to me a perfect representation of what it feels like to exist on the internet at this current moment in history. We are all in the position of Spongebob, just trying to go about his business, but all the while secretly followed by advertisers whose clumsy attempts to make their presence “subtle” only lead to increasing feelings of paranoia. All of this is made possible through infrastructures of mass-scale data collection facilitated by the organizations of online communities and policies that (fail to) protect them. But one of the things that concerns me the most right now is that few people seem to care about this, or if they do, they are uncertain as to exactly why it is a concerning issue. In the following, I’m going to try and sketch an argument for why you should be bothered by this collection of data, specifically as it relates to advertising purposes; I’m of the opinion that this must be accomplished through a fundamental change in our personal ideological relations to the systems we understand ourselves to exist under, and I will address this as well.

When I hear many people talk about the recent “open secret” of the fact that large corporations and governments are potentially monitoring our every online interaction via the mass-scale collection of “big data”, I worry that they don’t fully understand the implications of the issue. The most common concerns I tend to hear discussed relate to a lot of “worst-case-scenario” fears: what if someone uses your information for criminal activity and effectively steals your identity to shift the blame to you, making their crime untraceable and putting you in a position of apparently obvious guilt? What if the government is spying on your online activity and suspects you of some kind of espionage, or even just happens to notice something slightly less than legal you might have been able to do unnoticed before? There seem to be endless variations on the same basic fears of “What if information about me was misinterpreted?” or “What if my information fell into the wrong hands?”

What’s interesting about these fears is that they always come back to the issue as it is imagined to impact us as individuals. This is well-exemplified by a recent much-mocked court session in which an official tried to grill a Google representative by asking something to the effect of “Can Google track this [holding up a phone] phone’s location? If I walk across the room, does Google know I’m there now?” This kind of fear is discouragingly small-scale. It comes up over and over again, this question of “What does X corporation/government know about me on a personal level? Do they know what I’m doing right now?” The answers, thankfully, are most often “nothing” and “no”. The data about these things might exist somewhere in the amassed “big data” collection, but it’s extremely unlikely it’s being examined on any individual level. So the feelings of paranoia surrounding this particular classical form of surveillance, the one-to-one ratio of a spy watching your every move, can hopefully be dissipated. Unfortunately, it should probably be replaced with a whole new type of paranoia given what all that data is actually being used for.

What is this data being used for? Well, for the most part, it’s largely for advertising purposes. I can’t claim to know the exact mechanisms by which this works, but I have the general gist: mass data collection allows for the facilitation of algorithmic processes that use statistics (and increasingly, “machine learning” capabilities) to organize and index profiles of users, grouping them by shared interests, locations, age - virtually any demographic you can think of*. In other words, you’re not being examined as an individual at all here - you only count to the data insofar as you exist as part of a group that can be advertised to. And the perceptions of these groups change and adapt increasingly in real-time, as facilitated by this ubiquitous mass-scale data collection. Facebook doesn’t care that you, as an individual, are a Francophone who formerly lived in Montreal but have recently moved to Toronto and started speaking English in an effort to learn it better; they will, however, use the data about your location and language to shift your marketing demographic categories from “Montreal resident” to “Toronto resident” and from “Francophone” to “Anglophone” or “bilingual”, and depending on how you’ve set your privacy settings, they could make that change as soon as you make the move.

Theoretically, this is how advertising is made more “efficient” and “effective”. And unfortunately, it’s also where some people start to become apathetic about the collection of their personal data. “If it’s just advertising,” they ask, “why should I care? Advertising is annoying, but it’s nowhere near as bad as, say, government surveillance** or identity theft. I don’t even pay attention to the ads anyway, so why would they affect me?” Or sometimes “But isn’t it good that the advertising is made more efficient? Now I can see ads for things that I actually care about instead of the mass-marketed advertising that dominated the TV/pre-big-data-internet eras of the past!” I can sympathise with these views; I even hold them to a certain degree myself. I am certainly thankful for a lot of the “adfrastructure” that allowed some very useful (and in many cases, truly life-improving) apps to enter the market as “free” products. But I think it is a mistake to believe that advertising is necessarily harmless; its negative effects might not be as immediately apparent as those that exist in individual “worst-case-scenario” fears, but they are very much present in our society and affect us as a whole.

To examine these effects, let’s start by splitting them into two main categories: the physical effects (which happen on the scale of environmental impact and the impacts on, say, working conditions) and social effects (which occur first within the way people think about things and are then manifest in their behaviours that result from these ways of thinking). I’ll start with some physical effects of advertising. It’s sometimes said that ads aren’t really selling a “product”, they’re selling a “lifestyle”. This has always struck me as a bit too simplistic; ads can very easily be selling both, and they often are. The companies that buy ads are certainly hoping that the ads will result in consumers buying their product specifically, and even if the ad ends up selling a more abstract idea of the product, its net result will still be “more product sold” (even, ironically, if it’s not the product the company that paid for the ad was selling), as part of that idea involves the very buying of products in the first place. So ads are there to both shift around and amplify the process of consumption, the raw numbers of products sold.

What are the physical implications of increased product consumption? This barely needs to be acknowledged as it is something of another “open secret”, but it has some obviously detrimental environmental effects. Buying more stuff means more resources are consumed for further production, and it is the goal of industries to keep this flow of production as constant and as maximized as possible. As a result, the resources will be consumed at a rate that can fall within a window of “the basics of what consumers need to survive” and “the maximum of what consumers can consume without dying”. The goal of advertising is to stimulate consumption to make the consumption rate as close to the latter end of this window as possible, thus also increasing resource extraction to the maximum in the process. Furthermore, the shipping of products involved in these consumptive processes creates additional stress on the environment’s resource supplies, as the greater the consumption rate, the more fuel resources will be required to move these products. In short, the more people are allowed to be advertised to (and the more effective that advertising is), the closer they will consume to the upper end of the consumption window and the faster resources will be extracted to meet their demand, resulting in an increased rate of resource depletion. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of the myriad negative environmental impacts this resource depletion incurs.

What about labour conditions? After all, you can’t have increased consumption without someone putting in the labour to drive the necessary production that accompanies this. On a surface level, this is what politicians and corporations talk about when they (dubiously) speak of “job creation”: if we let industries sell us more stuff, they’ll presumably have to hire more people in order to meet their new production goals. Only this would cost the corporations more money for the workers’ wages, which is something they want to avoid in order to stay ahead of their competition. So instead of actually creating more jobs, they’ll first do one or both of two things: 1) move the current production jobs to a zone of another country where they can hire more workers for a cheaper rate (and often under less regulated working conditions), or 2) simply not hire more workers and put more of the burden of increased production on the workers who already work in the industry while simultaneously failing to compensate them for their increased share of the labour***. I’m not trying to suggest that no new jobs are ever created through a surge of consumption, because they certainly are. But absorbing costs through one of the two aforementioned methods is an ever-popular method among corporations, and it’s notable that both will result in less safe working conditions and less compensation for the workers. Thus we see physical effects of increased advertising in terms of both environment and labour conditions.

Much of what I just claimed in terms of the physical effects might be debatable, as it was highly speculative on my part; I made a lot of these claims based on hearsay and a touch of my basic understanding of Marxist philosophy. If someone wants to hit me with some hard data to prove me wrong about the aforementioned effects, I will be forced to accept it. But I think my next claims regarding the social impact of advertising will be harder to refute, and not just because they’re less quantifiable by definition - in some cases, we are already seeing the direct results of this impact.

My first claim is, in fact, an old one regarding advertising, though I will relate it to more recent concerns in following claims. But the first social effect of advertising that critics focus on is often the way it creates and shapes the “consumer mindset”, a measure of personal worth in society. Some might immediately recoil from my bringing up this particular point, as it has been much maligned in recent times through its misuse by a seemingly never-ending stream of “activist” speakers who fail to bring their analyses beyond the level of the individual. I can understand this - it’s very much true that, despite what many of these speakers seem to claim, we will not, as a society, simply be able to “consciously consume” our way out of the consumer mindset, nor will we all simply be happier if we “consume less”; these are gross over-simplifications of larger systemic problems.

This being said, I think it is worth exploring just what real negative impacts a “consumer mindset” might possibly have on a social level. This mindset might involve a measure of one’s self-worth in terms of the “things” or “experiences” one has purchased for one’s self; wealth becomes valuable not in terms of the possibilities it affords one to give to others, or in terms of its guarantee of social safety within a capitalist society, or even in terms of its sheer size as a demonstration of power - in a consumer mindset, one’s wealth is meant for one thing, which is to buy more for one’s self. This might be linked loosely to the “self-care” industry, which uses advertising messages of pseudo-empowerment to sell more products; the implicit message is in fact that you are only worth anything based on what you are willing to spend on yourself as an individual. Indeed, on one level, this whole (predatory, I should add) industry has sprouted up around the consumer mindset and, through the continuous and ubiquitous use of “progressive” political rhetoric regarding “self-care”, is now even considered “controversial” to criticize in some circles. This only serves to highlight the extent to which the consumer mindset is serving to reproduce some very psychologically unhealthy discourses.

A more recent development in the consumer mindset leads us into another social effect of advertising. This development concerns the valorization and even fetishization of “custom” or “personalized” products for consumers. This is an idea pushed increasingly by ads in recent times, particularly with the rise in use of words like “artisanal” that invoke a relationship between the worker and consumer in which the worker produces a “special” product for each specific consumer because “they really care” about the work they do. The personalized product is now almost universally regarded as “better”, and it does, in fact, tend to provide a superior consumer experience on the individual level in most cases. If this is the case, why am I considering it a negative effect of advertising? I would argue that this fetishization of such products ends up reinforcing a particular mindset which is diametrically opposed to the kind of mass-production that is necessary for the creation of public goods and services. It’s the difference between, say, a custom car and a subway system; a custom car is probably going to feel nice as a consumer experience, as you navigate transport on your own terms and project the aesthetic that you chose for yourself, while a subway system provides none of those advantages.

It does, however, provide the advantage of being easily reproducible and accessible to larger numbers of people. It goes without saying that it is easier to provide mass transport to several million people. Likewise, it is almost always easier (not to mention more efficient) to provide several million people with a mass-produced generic product than a personalized product for each individual. What, then, are the potential implications of a development in the consumer mindset which fetishizes the personalized over the mass-produced? The logical result is a sudden class-based divide created by the negative perception of public goods and services, many of which are necessarily mass-produced.

We can see this in the strange valorization of companies-as-heros, a narrative in which corporations that hone in your personalized tastes (often by means of the marketing achieved through big data collection) are now implicitly viewed as “the ones who really care” about you as an individual. The government, meanwhile, comes to be seen as a faceless bureaucracy which sees the individual as a “mere statistic” and accordingly provides only “mass-produced” goods and services. The resulting ideological shift this could create has tangible impact in politics; as consumers (who are also voters) trust corporations more than governments to “provide” for them (even when the corporations are charging higher fees, or, in some cases, any cost at all for a service that was previously free), they vote in favour of lower taxes and unbounded industrial expansion, seeing the corporations’ interests as aligning with their own. This initiates a vicious feedback cycle in which governments then often have less tax bases to draw from to provide public goods and services, forcing them to either cut production or lower its quality, which only serves to reinforce the perception of public goods as “inferior”. Overall, the whole process does indescribable damage to public infrastructure. I frequently joke about this, but truly do dread the day when people begin to believe that they are better off buying a book from Amazon in most cases than simply checking it out from their local public library for free and hope it never comes.

Further social effects of advertising can be observed through the values advertisers sell to would-be “producers”. This reveals itself in the form of what might be described as “entrepreneurship”. This is definitively a “lifestyle” and not a product that many ads have been selling recently, and it is a particularly dangerous one. It effectively targets those who either want to have some kind of positive social impact on the world or who want to find a way to “rise above the rat race” (both of which I believe are natural reactions of people who have some vague awareness of the aforementioned consumer mindset) and tells them that the best way to achieve their goals is to “be their own boss” and “start their own business”.

Why are such values being pushed so aggressively by ads at this moment in time? I don’t know if I can answer that question definitively, but I can give a few possible answers which might help to explain this phenomenon. The first is that this is a mindset that does, in fact, still drive product sales; the products tend to be things like special softwares, or business schools, or self-help books - any number of things seen as “entrepreneurial aids”. The second is that the “entrepreneurial mindset” (probably deserving of its own separate investigation) can best be summarized as one that rarely challenges the status quo or the established economic conditions of the market - anyone who rises to the top of the market with this mindset comes with a pre-wired code that ensures there will be no radical reforms or disruptions of business as usual, no matter what the latest tech mogul preaches about “innovation”.

But the most promising explanation here might be that “mass entrepreneurship” is potentially profitable for large corporations in another way: it effectively establishes a risk-free infrastructure for them on a large scale that they can then pick and choose from. To understand how this works, we must first recognize that if everyone is encouraged to start their own business, even if only, say, 30% of the population does, most of those businesses will fail. They might fail for any number of reasons, but the key thing to recognize here is that these small businesses have now served as a kind of “canary” for larger corporations. Those corporations can now see which smaller businesses have survived the initial “test round” and look to be profitable; their next step is to buy out the most promising-looking ones, establishing their own business on top of whatever capital and infrastructure was accumulated by the entrepreneur. This seems especially ironic given that part of the whole appeal of being an “entrepreneur” to many is the sense of “independence” that they are promised, the potential to actually challenge the major corporations of the world. Nevertheless, it seems like a plausible explanation for why there is such an excess of “entrepreneurial spirit” advertising.

Interestingly, this particular aspect of advertising plays into another of its negative social effects in an interesting way. Ads have (and have always had) the potential to end up reinforcing oppressive social hierarchies for the purposes of maintaining clear demographics, and this is something which many seem to have forgotten about. Big data collection in the service of advertising will often serve to reinforce this. The more advertisers (or whatever algorithms they’ve employed) know about your personal identity “markers” (your race, gender, sexuality, location, etc.), the more they can “target” their ads to what they think will most appeal to your demographic. I feel I hardly need to elaborate on the ways in which this can quickly spiral into offensive stereotyping and pandering, upholding racist/misogynistic/etc. lines and divides already present in society.

A final point in the potential negative effects of advertising is its recently-revealed susceptibility to hijacking by politically manipulative parties. If organizations like Cambridge Analytica are any indication, ad spots are fair game for anything a particular political organization thinks will sway the social media public in their favour. And these types of political publicity will only be more effective if they can be targeted along demographic lines made available by the collection of big data. If none of the other points I’ve made so far seem like a big deal, this, at least, should present some kind of argument for the importance of being “ad literate” in an online setting, as well as being aware of the extent of data collection that happens over social media.

So just what does it mean to be “ad literate” in this age? Forgive my roundabout answer, but I’d first like to take a brief detour to discuss the fiction of author Thomas Pynchon. Pynchon’s books frequently involve conspiracy-like plots that seem to be ever-expanding, never fully revealing concrete answers to what is “true” in the central characters’ quests to unravel the conspiracies. They often invoke a feeling of paranoia, usually self-consciously up-front as the characters even discuss paranoia and surveillance of their activities. It is for this reason that I bring up Pynchon’s work here: I would argue that to exercise true “ad literacy” at this moment, we must become characters in a Pynchon novel - confused, but ever-vigilant, paranoid, but never abandoning the quest for the origins of the cryptic information that surrounds us.

I argue this because ads themselves have, in some ways, become increasingly cryptic and amorphous in terms of what can be constituted as such. Government regulations have recently sought to change this as some public awareness of this has risen, but there are still a myriad of “fuzzy borders” surrounding ads, particularly on social media. One of the more obvious examples involves the use of celebrity “influencers” on social media effectively engaging in secretive practices of endorsement or even forms of “product placement”; if a particular Youtube personality with a large social media “reach” is paid to review a kind of makeup, or wear a certain clothing brand’s hat in a video, this is effectively a new configuration of an old form of advertising. Until recently, there were no regulations forcing these personalities to actually disclose that they had been paid, and their content resulting from such practices could exist alongside their more “legitimate” content unlabelled. An important takeaway from this practice is that we should always be aware of product placement-like schemes when they occur; thought frequent studies claim that this awareness makes no difference in the method’s actual effectiveness, it could at the very least drive public demand for government regulation on these types of advertising operations.

But an ad need not have a product present in it for it to be functioning as such; it doesn’t even have to have a set of values or a company name attached to it. The primary thing an ad needs to exist as such is the command of attention, and online parties are finding new ways to exploit this. Consider acts of “sharing” content on social media like Facebook. Certain branded pages (that, in most cases, are not actually representing a “real” company selling any products - the brand exists at this point purely as a content-producing/-sharing platform) will effectively make a business of attention by watching social media trends and following them, sharing, posting and sometimes outright stealing content that looks to be the most likely to go “viral”, or at least get the most social media attention in “likes” and “shares”. Make no mistake: this is not just “jokes between friends” - the memes and pictures shared and circulated by these pages are not for your benefit; they are instead a kind of “content/attention farming”. If a page has enough “likes” or even enough people regularly engaging with its posts, it is now suddenly a viable public space for advertising and can be sold as such, making it a hot commodity. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “attention economy” - this is it.

What’s really intriguing are some of the strategies these pages will use to go about this business in the first place. Just sharing already-trending or popular content isn’t always enough - often there are attempts to “gamify” posts by turning them into social interactions with pre-established rules guaranteed to perpetuate their proliferation (just as BuzzFeed has “gamified” its data collection for marketing through quizzes). Examples of such posts can easily be found wherever you see an image with text instructing users to “tag a friend who ___” or anything else along those lines. Maybe you find this fun; if the popularity is any indication, some people must. But it’s not done for your entertainment, it’s done for the attention, for the “reach” that can then be sold. If there’s one piece of coherent advice I will give here, it’s that we should be taking note of pages that do this and monitoring their command of attention very carefully - but we should not, under any circumstances, interact with their content or their page; that means not tagging friends, not “liking” posts or pages and not sharing them.

Finally, it should be noted that ads don’t even need to begin life as ads; in the social media landscape, anything can potentially become an ad if it a) acts in the interest of a business and b) gains enough traction/attention/”reach”. One way that content on social media can act in the interests of a business - particularly if it’s a startup introducing an “innovative” new idea or product - is by normalizing a kind of lifestyle shift or behaviour associated with that product. The product might be mentioned in the content, or it might not be; the important part is that either the product or behaviour becomes normalized. One of the most effective ways of normalizing is through widely-shared memes. I can think of three off the top of my head that have likely helped to normalize products that became ubiquitous in a matter of months-to-years:

“Netflix and chill”****

“Hey, it’s me, your Uber driver, I’m outside”

“This is so sad, Alexa, play Wonderwall”

Can you think of any others?

What’s really interesting about these memes is that they may not have been paid for or even started by the companies behind these products. Someone may very well have started these as a “joke between friends”, completely “organically”; but their online proliferation and public presence has effectively turned them into advertisements. Forget branded social media pages’ cringe-inducing attempts to “appeal to teens” through their own half-assed takes on memes - this is the future of meme-advertising, the public that advertises to itself, the ad that is self-reproducing through its normalizing actions. As previously stated, anything on social media could be an ad - even if it was not intended to be. And consequently, anything can be read as such. This, then, is the state we must exist in online moving forward: we must all be Thomas Pynchon characters, seeking to unravel a conspiracy with our self-consciously futile attempts; we must all be Spongebob, chased through the darkness by salesmen hidden behind the proverbial rocks of social media.

*Anyone interested in this aspect of the “indexing” of users for “big data” should check out a couple chapters from Ronald E. Day’s book “Indexing It All” on this very subject.

**Government surveillance through data collection is actually probably less likely to be used for advertising purposes, though it serves a different role which I know less about, so I will avoid discussion of it for the rest of the article, save for a smaller discussion regarding a particular case near the end.

***There is, of course, a third option, which is to automate the labour force through mechanical replacement of human labourers, likely saving the company enormous amounts of money in the long-run. But this is less pertinent to my current discussion, and is in fact another extremely pressing issue due to its own consequences deserving of its own separate studies - of which, I believe, you can already find many.

****This one honestly deserves a short essay in its own right because of the ever-present association made by this meme between the product and sexuality.

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randomshoes · 8 years ago

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I asked @evilelitist2 this question, and we both wondered what your thoughts were: How does one deal with the "practice what you preach" dilemma I seem to run into regarding socially responsible media consumption, the idea that if you want to talk about sexism or racism or any other -ism on the internet, consuming media that contains those elements is hypocritical and undermines your own personal integrity and the argument you're attempting to make?

Ohno no no no no no.

Much disagree.

That’s actually one of those ideas that deeply offends me onmultiple levels: as a fan, as an activist, as a critic, and as anartist.

I have a LOT of problems with this idea, so I will attempt toorganize them in a hopefully coherent manner.

From a fan perspective:

If you attempt this you will fail, and also you will be sad.

There is no such thing as a perfectly inoffensive piece of media(okay, maybe Undertale, but you can’t spend your life playingUndertale and doing nothing else). These ideas are tooprevalent in our society for it to be possible to ignore anythingthat even passively contains them. You will not be “allowed” toconsume any art at all, and you will end up a very bored human.

You will miss out on otherwise good pieces of art.

I love 1940s Hollywood and Eminem. Both contain ideas that I ammore than a little ideologically opposed to, yet I firmly believe mylife would be less happy and less rich if I had failed to experienceeither. Just because something, say, supports antiquated gender rolesdoesn’t mean that it is without any value. Anything involving Katharine Hepburn has inherent value.

From an activist perspective:

You will not understand the thingyou are fighting.

If Ipurposefully avoid sexist media, how will I be able to speak with anyauthority on the subject? How will I know what specific tropes orstereotypes are the biggest problem? How will I even know what I’masking creators to change? You can’t beat something you don’tunderstand.

How can you know for sure thatsomething is problematic until you experience it?

Thisreduces the “socially responsible media consumer” to making alltheir decisions based on rumor, second-hand information, and thegeneral consensus of people who havewatched it (also, those people had to watch it to tell you thatinformation, so are they hypocrites now?).

Let’s talk about The Social Network.

I knew someone in college who refused to watch this film because she had determined, on the basis of the trailer, that it wassexist. She cited the fact that there were scantily-clad women doing drugs insome shots and not much else. However, I suspect the fact that themain character is sexist was a contributing factor. (I think the bitwhere he spews sexist shit about his ex and then makes a programbased on rating the women on campus for their attractiveness was inthe trailer.) Except, I’ve seen TheSocial Network,and the entire film is about critiquing that guy’s worldview. Thosescenes of scantily-clad women doing drugs etc. exist to demonstratethat this is the only way these men know how to interact with women.The movie opens and closes with a very smart women telling Mark thathe needs to learn how to interact with humans in general and women inspecific. The film goes out of its way to make sure we understand howmessed up this is. Overall, I would call it a feminist film.

Theone scene I did find sexist (as well as unnecessary) was this one:

Still,I highly recommend that everyone see this film. It’s a great primeron the MRA and Nice Guy mindset. And also it’s just a really goodmovie.

Tosum up: first impressions can be wrong, and things are always morecomplicated than simply being sexist or not sexist. Ipersonally refuse to give over control of what I watch and what Ithink about it to people who aren’t me.

This mindset will lead people to reject social justicecriticism, and do it aggressively.

Think about it. If I’m either a sexistor a hypocrite for liking (or even watching) something with anysexist ideas, than I am now emotionally invested in loudly denyingthat there are any problems with a piece of media (or a media genre)at all. And then you get what is basically media nationalism.

Sound familiar? It should. This is themindset that Gamergaters and the Anita Sarkeesian haters have. Ifwe’re saying video games have some sexist ideas, then we are sayingthat they, personally, are sexist, and that they are not allowedto play video games anymore.This is one of the ideas I’ve been trying to fight.

How can we possibly convince anyone tothink critically about media if doing so means they have to give upthe things they love or feel guilty for loving them?

That’s not what we were “preaching” to begin with.

The purpose of social justicecriticism is not to tell people not to consume art; it’s to askpeople to think about art and about the ideas it contains. We’reasking the audience to think critically about what they’re watching(reading, playing) and the creators to think critically about whatthey’re producing. That’s it. So, as long as we’re all doing thefirst thing, and those of us who are artists are doing the secondthing, we are in fact practicing what we preach.

For the record: I’m not opposedto things like boycotting the Ghostin the Shellmovie, but that’s not actually about the content of the art so muchas the casting practices of Hollywood. It’s a tactic that attempts togive Hollywood a monetary incentive to actuallycast some fucking Asian actors in movies what the hell?

youtube

Also, it’s important to remember that choosing to see the movie is not a moral transgression or a sinagainst anybody.

From a critical perspective:

You are not required to be pure to criticize a piece of media,that’s just weird.

I know most of the world hasinternalized the whole “let he who is without sin cast the firststone” thing, but criticizing media isn’t really equivalent tostoning someone to death, and also I’m not a Christian so bite me. Tobe a critic you are not required to be a saint. To be a critic youare required to be good at analyzing media. That’s it.

How can you criticize something you haven’t experienced?

The very first thing anyone arguingwith you is going to say is “what the hell do you know?” and theywill be right.

Reading, watching, or playing something does not mean you agreewith it.

I’ve read Ender’s Game. @evilelitest2 has attempted to read Atlas Shrugged.Basically every film student in the universe has seen Birth of aNation. Professional filmcritics watch as many movies as possible. You’resupposed to have perspective and understand the entire industry.

You are not a hypocrite forengaging with something you disagree with.

Howelse do you develop critical thinking skills? If you’re never exposedto ideas you disagree with, your ideas will be simplistic and youwon’t be used to defending them.

From an artistic perspective:

We would be ignoring the entire history of art.

For most of human history people havebeen racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc. If we study art wewill see these things. We can and should address them, but we can’tdiscount an entire piece of art based on the fact that it expressesthese ideas. As artists, we need to learn from these things, and asart historians we need to learn about these things.

For example, I’ve heard people saythat Birth of a Nation shouldnot be taught in film classes.

Now, aside from the fact that ignoringhorrible aspects of history doesn’t make them go away, removing DWGriffith from a film curriculum would be like removing Shakespearefrom an English curriculum. He invented a huge part of the languagefilm uses to convey ideas. He was also a shitbag, and we should talkabout that, but we also have to talk about the form and content ofhis art, because it’s part of understanding how film works.

Experiencing problematic media helpsteach artists what NOT to do.

Ioften read badly written things on purpose, because it helps meclarify in my head what I don’t want to be. This can be quite easilyapplied to morally questionable things as well. We can tell youngartists not to make sexist art, but how do they know what that means?They may just say, “well, I’M not sexist, so it’s not a problem.”But if we show them an example of how unthinkingly reproducing tropesor not thinking through situations can lead to unfortunateimplications, they have a better chance of understanding us.

You will disincentivizeartists from creating sexist/racist/homophobic characters.

If I decide to write a sexistPOV character, even if the purpose of my book is to critique theirworldview, I will risk people deciding my book is sexist and shouldbe boycotted. This could be based on something as small as an out ofcontext quote. Here, I’ll do it right now. This is a quote from TheSocial Network:

“EricaAlbright’s a bitch. Do you think that’s because her family changedtheir name from Albrecht or do you think it’s because all B.U. Girlsare bitches? For the record, she may look like a 34C but she’sgetting all kinds of help from our friends at Victoria’s Secret.She’s a 34B, as in barely anything there. False advertising.”

See?This movie is totally sexist. Also it’s anti-German and hates BostonUniversity. No one should watch this movie ever.

Now,people can and will do this no matter what, because not everyonerealizes that the writer does not necessarily agree with theircharacters (argh), but if we start telling people that their moralfiber depends on preemptively writing off anything with the potentialto be offensive, then this will happen more frequently and with thesort of people who might otherwise read my theoretical book andunderstand it, or even come out of it with a better understanding ofwhy sexism is bad.

Art is not something you “consume” in the way you consumefood.

Watching Birthof a Nationdoes not raise my moral cholesterol. Thinking of it like that reducesthe piece of art to a one idea delivery service and you to anunthinking maw that accepts all ideas it’s fed. Art is complex andfull of possible interpretations, and you have a brain.

tl:dr

How do you deal with problematic media? You watch/read/play it, and then you talk about it.

Note: if we’re purely talking from acapitalistic, “vote with your money” perspective, then avoiding(recent) media whose existence you find morally abhorrent is a validtactic to try to change what art a corporation produces, but alwaysremember that it’s just that: a tactic. It is not a moral imperative.

PSSorry it took me so long to get to this one. It was such aninteresting question and I had so much to say and my asks kept pilingup with stupid MRA stuff that I thought I’d get that out of the wayfirst. Also it took forever to articulate and organize my ideas.

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

Text

We Need to Talk About a Planned Retreat from Climate Disaster Zones Now

Long before she became an expert on the destabilizing effects of climate change, Idowu Ajibade lived them. As a young girl growing up in a marshy lowland neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria, she recalls her family frequently leaving home when water levels got too high.

“At the time, I didn’t even know about climate change,” said Ajibade, who is now an assistant professor of geography at Portland State University. “But what I remember very clearly is that we would often get flooded and we would have to go to higher ground.”

Today, Lagos is among the countless communities around the world that is responding to climate change by moving people to higher ground—permanently. This strategy, known as “managed retreat,” involves removing populations from areas with high disaster risks and ideally assisting their relocation to a safer place. In a practical sense, this often means literally fleeing coastal towns, villages, and cities as sea levels rise and storms become worse.

The term “managed retreat” has been in use for more than two decades, and originally applied mostly to ecological conservation projects on rural shorelines facing erosion. But because the climate crisis amplifies flooding, wildfires, extreme weather events, and other climate-linked disasters, a growing number of experts and planners believe that managed retreat will be a necessary outcome for many densely populated communities as well, and one that will not be limited to the coasts.

The implications of moving entire populations of people away from escalating climate hazards are dizzyingly complex on practically every level. Families who have lived in an area for generations will lose their homes, jobs and livelihoods will be interrupted, and Indigenous communities will have to part with ancestral lands. All these scenarios are already happening in many areas.

Without careful consideration and inclusive dialogue, the move to save ourselves from climate disaster could also fuel the rise of eco-fascism, a far-right ideology that fixates on potential fascist actions in the name of environmentalism. Eco-fascist views are shaped by anti-immigrant sentiment, and climate-related retreats across the world will result in more migrants, so planners should be prepared to mitigate political tensions that might stem from managed retreat.

Because of these looming nightmares, experts on managed retreat have been sounding the alarm and pressing politicians and the public to anticipate all the intricacies of this climate adaptation strategy.

“Not everywhere in the world is going to retreat, but not everywhere in the world is going to build a seawall,” said A.R. Siders, an assistant professor at the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center, in a phone call. “Like anything else in life, if you have a limited amount of resources, time, and energy, where do you want to invest it?”

“That’s a really difficult answer,” she acknowledged. “But it will be a better conversation if we have it purposefully instead of letting things happen without really thinking about how they add up to the larger picture.”

Retreat is not defeat

In the family of climate adaptation options, managed retreat remains the black sheep. It is often framed as a last resort, an admission of defeat, or worst of all, a return to the forced relocation policies that have disproportionately harmed Indigenous and marginalized communities.

“When we see depictions of retreat or hear about it as this kind of last resort, the sense is that it will be forced,” said Liz Koslov, an assistant professor of urban planning, environment, and sustainability at UCLA, in a call. The popular perception of retreat, she said, either involves the government mandating the removal of a population, or people ending up displaced in the wake of a major disaster and barred from returning to their homes.

Painful historical legacies have made the option of retreat literally unspeakable in some cases, according to Robin Bronen, executive director of the Alaska Institute for Justice, who works with Alaska Native communities undergoing climate-induced retreat.

“When I first started doing this work 15 years ago, government agencies wouldn’t even use the word ‘relocation’ to talk about what needed to happen,” Bronen said in a call. She cited the government internment of Alaska’s Unangan people during World War II—which resulted in the deaths of 10 percent of the population—as an example of why there is, justifiably, “tremendous resistance” to the idea of government-led retreat in some communities.

Managed retreat is a politically charged topic with the potential to intensify feelings of dread or despair about the future and impart misery. Such reactions are entirely understandable, given the daunting logistical challenges of retreat and the social, cultural, and moral dimensions of the problem. Given recent exposés of inhumane conditions in ICE detention centers in the US, or the callous disregard for Indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon shown by the Bolsonaro regime, it’s unfortunately feasible to imagine top-down retreats going very wrong.

There will be no easy answers on this issue, and the outcomes will be shaped by the unique pressures of each local community. That said, experts do agree on one overarching takeaway from past efforts at managed retreat: Give communities as many options as possible, and let them lead the way to avoid a catastrophic scenario.

“Not only does retreat not have to be forced, or a top-down process,” Koslov said, “it really shouldn’t be in order to be a viable adaptation strategy.”

Buyout, or kick-out?

Koslov has observed this kind of community-led retreat first-hand in her ethnographic research of Staten Island neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy. When she first delved into the fallout of the devastating floods in 2012, she expected to find homeowners defending their properties or supporting protective infrastructure measures, like sea walls.

But the Staten Island neighborhoods most affected by Sandy—such as Ocean Breeze and Oakwood Beach—had experienced repeated floods for decades. Many residents were already on board with managed retreat. In fact, they were actually impatient for state buyouts of their properties.

“These are some of the most politically conservative parts of New York City, so I was really struck by watching older people who prided themselves on being individual homeowners—many of whom had longstanding, multigenerational ties to these neighborhoods—come together to organize essentially to disperse themselves,” Koslov said.

There are many explanations for this relatively open attitude to retreat in Staten Island, according to Koslov, who is writing a book on the topic. For example, the affected communities were predominantly white, so there was no historical spectre of forced relocation, though there was still plenty of distrust in government.

The tight-knit and multigenerational character of the communities also instilled a sense of collective memory about what the area was like before it was developed. At community events, senior women recalled details of their childhood homes, where they’d catch eels out of creeks that ran through their neighborhoods.

“They told the story of what retreat meant in a very different way than we often see it told,” Koslov said. “It was much more about giving land back to Mother Nature and repairing the kinds of bad development decisions that had been made in the city’s history in these local areas.”

This attitude helped the buyout process gain traction in Staten Island, and more than 500 properties in the borough have been purchased by New York state as of 2017. Though the ultimate success of the retreat will take more time to assess, the example challenges assumptions about how some communities will react to resettlement plans. It also demonstrates that managed retreat can offer opportunities as well as setbacks, including potentially enabling more people to enjoy what was once privately owned land.

“Think about the amount of coastline, especially in developed nations like the United States, that is private or blocked off,” Siders pointed out. “Historically, the coast was all public access so could we, by moving people away from the coast, actually increase publicly accessible coastline?”

While buyouts are a helpful means to facilitate managed retreat for property owners, and open up coastal areas for public benefit, they are not an effective strategy for communities that wish to remain intact, or for renters, homeless populations, and people living in poverty or in vulnerable public housing.

In a paper published this month in Climatic Change, Ajibade outlines the many ways in which existing wealth inequities in the Global South can, in fact, be exacerbated by managed retreat projects. She has seen this problem up close during her field work in cities such as Lagos, Manila, and Bangkok. One of the most common patterns she has observed is the removal of poor people from waterfront areas without sufficiently anticipating their needs at new resettlement locations.

“Historically, almost all around the world, the coast is really an economic base, whether you think about it as the wealthy people who live there, or for poorer people who make money there,” she said. “When you move people from that economic base, it is a complete shift for most of them.”

Even if the government does the basic work of establishing new homes for people at a safe location, it cannot ensure that they will stay there without an adequate livelihood. Ajibade has seen this “retreat and return” cycle play out in both Lagos and Manila.

In 2017, for instance, the Nigerian government forcibly evicted thousands of people in Lagos’ Otodo Gbame fishing community on the grounds that they posed an environmental risk. Since there was no plan to relocate the population, many returned to live on canoes, or ended up in other crowded waterfront areas.

“Here in the West, it’s a buyout,” Ajibade said, “but in the Global South, it’s like a kick-out.”

Managed retreat requires equal treatment

These growing inequities aggravate the existing “trust deficit” between marginalized peoples and governments who prioritize more privileged classes. Not only does this produce environmental and social injustices, it is simply not practical or sustainable over the long term.

“Until we think about managed retreat in the sense that there’s no special treatment for anyone, we cannot really address that trust deficit,” Ajibade said. “Retreat is retreat.”

Fortunately, there are some positive examples of managed retreat in Global South cities. Ajibade cited the relocation of more than 18,000 families living on the banks of Pasig River, which runs through the heart of Manila. The river became too polluted for people to safely remain proximate to it, so a retreat plan was put into place to move them to other parts of the metro area.

The Asian Development Bank offered a $176 million loan to the Philippines government to carry out the plan, on the condition that the riverside communities would be centrally involved in decisions about the move. This mandate to empower the communities in the relocation process has facilitated the transition and changed the outlook of the villagers toward the river, according to Ajibade. “They have become custodians of the river because they were part of the process and they understood why it was important to leave,” she said.

One of the biggest considerations for retreat plans is whether a community wishes to remain fully intact at a new location. Managed retreat plans in Staten Island, Lagos, and Manila have not typically prioritized this option. But for Alaska Natives, some of whom have already begun relocating, it is a core goal.

“I don’t think Alaska is alone, having traveled to many different places in the United States where people are really connected to their neighbors or their family members,” Bronen said. “The buyout program is not designed to facilitate that type of a process.”

Because of the limitations of buyouts in this scenario, Bronen and her colleagues have been developing new models to support Indigenous communities like Newtok, Kivalina, and Shishmaref. Some of these Arctic places have been inhabited for more than 4,000 years, but climate change has made them unlivable due to permafrost melt, flooding, erosion, and devastating storms.

It has been a hard journey, but about a third of Newtok’s population is now relocating to a site nine miles away called Mertarvik, with the rest planning to follow. The new location was selected in part because it enables the community to continue its subsistence lifestyle and cultural traditions. Housing and access roads have already been constructed at Mertarvik, and development of the new town will continue as the Newtok community resettles there.

”I wish it was completely figured out, but there are no roadmaps,” Bronen said. “We need a federal institutional framework to deal with relocation, because we have no government agency that has the funding or mandate to do this.”

It is also imperative that managed retreat is not regarded only as a burden to affected communities, but a call to all humanity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The severity of this problem will be directly linked to our collective willingness to reduce our global carbon footprint.

Even in the best case scenarios, managed retreat will still be the only option for some people. To stave off the most extreme consequences of that sacrifice, we need to get ahead of the problem.

“We’ve often tried, especially people of this century, to idealize human freedom,” Ajibade said. “But climate change is telling us: ‘No, there is now liberty with a caveat.’ Some of us will have to move from where we’ve always lived. Some of us will have to move from where we love.”

“It’s the reality of living in an era where climate change is just here.”

We Need to Talk About a Planned Retreat from Climate Disaster Zones Now syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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thegloober · 6 years ago

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A way to handle trigger warnings is to develop a one-time-only one (opinion)

The trigger-warning debate presents faculty members and administrators with a difficult decision: Should they prioritize defending free speech or helping students feel emotionally safe?

The impetus for trigger warnings is a series of communications from the U.S. Department of Education advocating for protective learning environments. But to many people, pushback against trigger warnings and safe spaces is important because institutions should not shield students from uncomfortable messages, especially those challenging students’ own ideas. Parties concerned with trigger warnings include faculty groups such as the American Association of University Professors, which see warnings as interfering with core goals of education and infringing on free speech and academic freedom.

Buried amid the federal communiqués is the occasional acknowledgment — which some might dismiss as lip service — of traditional liberal ideals of open and free expression: “To be very clear, working to maintain safe learning communities does not, and must not, mean chilling free expression about the issues of the day … Protecting free speech means protecting the ability of your students, faculty, staff and members of the public to hold and express views that may be at odds with your institution’s strongly held values.”

Advocates of trigger warnings, however, claim challenges to them belittle the sincerity of the people who call for warnings and ignore the distress suffered by students faced with upsetting content. “It is easy to make a stink about political correctness,” writes Michael Bugeja, who teaches media ethics and technology and social change at Iowa State University. “It is also easy to expound on it without including the perspectives of underrepresented groups.”

Advocates also reject the implication that those calling for warnings are intellectually lazy or oversensitive, or are manufacturing a problem for personal or political reasons. Grace Arnpriester, executive director of health and wellness for the undergraduate student government at American University, writes that “survivors of trauma deal with ‘hypervigilance’ that can lead to panic, anxiety, flashbacks or more — all of which can be triggered by sensitive content.” Similarly, Bugeja, when writing about the cumulative impact of microaggressions, notes that “ … a cup of water weighs about eight ounces, until you hold it for an hour or longer. Then it weighs a ton. Weight doesn’t count; time does.”

Such analogies are contestable. For example, in her TED talk, psychologist Kelly McGonigal describes research following 30,000 adults for eight years. It shows that stress is not associated with premature death in the absence of the belief that stress is injurious to health: among adults who experienced the highest stress, but who did not believe it was inherently dangerous, mortality was actually lower than among those with the lowest stress. By convincing people that stress is their enemy, we may, paradoxically, be hurting them. Might there be a lesson here for advocates who argue for students’ need to seek safety whenever a painful topic is covered? Would it not be healthier to confront the stressor, process it and learn coping skills? Would not an eight-ounce cup feel lighter after practice lifting it?

Proponents of trigger warnings point out that most policies recommend rather than mandate warnings before sensitive material is introduced and provide a psychologically safe way for students to process it. Thus, they argue, the push for safe spaces and warnings is not inimical to freedom of speech or academic freedom. In fact, supporters claim such interventions are consistent with such freedoms because they allow students to participate in the discussion of sensitive material when they otherwise might not be able to do so.

Some potentially upsetting topics seem de rigueur for any informed student: a history class that involves reading about the Dred Scott decision in which the word “property” is used; a class on the Japanese invasion of China that includes information about the Rape of Nanking; a description of historical violence against innocents and animals in Steven Pinker’s Our Better Angels in a course on the role of central government; a reading about assisted suicide in a course on elder law; a course on rape law. Warned or not, students must be expected to understand that material, notwithstanding — and in some cases because of — its potentially disturbing nature. Such examples complicate the task of instructors, who must forecast which events warrant warnings.

Given the substantial differences among students in their personality, attitudes and experiences, such predictions are inevitably fraught with guesswork. For example, one professor’s discussions of climate change and the age of the Earth were deeply upsetting to some students. Another described a course on sex differences that included arguments of nature over nurture, which dismayed some students and led to an administrative suggestion to modify the content. Another described her lecture on animal rights that disturbed some students.

Given the ubiquity in the media of rapes, suicide bombings and violence, how can students navigate their occupational and social lives outside the protective bubble? Putting aside whether one supports trigger warnings, how do fragile individuals — whom some online commenters have derisively referred to as “snowflakes”– cope outside the classroom, in their places of work, in social settings, in following world events? Warnings do not prepare students for this reality outside the classroom where warnings are not given to brace oneself; instead, warnings may inadvertently make it more challenging for students to cope with this reality by shielding them from anxiety-provoking information. Compared with media representations, the classroom lecture would seem to offer an opportunity to learn coping skills that will prove useful in confronting the inevitable stressors of life.

A colleague recently received a complaint because the course textbook presented a list of factors statistically associated with sexual abuse of women. One factor was wearing sexually provocative clothing. The list was derived from controlled research. Even supposing that one of our colleague’s students was the victim of sexual violence, reading that list ought not induce a flare-up of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Good teachers can often anticipate and ward off such objections by helping students understand the distinction between association and blame. The only warning broad enough to cover such unanticipated alleged trauma-inducing readings would be along the lines of: “Something in this course may upset someone; some content may be disturbing to some listeners/viewers/readers.” In fact, perhaps letters of admission to entering students ought to be accompanied by a general caution that “if you have PTSD you might wish to obtain treatment from a trauma specialist in how to cope, and make your professor aware of this so she or he can let you know when content may be uncomfortable.”

But Are Warnings Effective?

We know of no systematic evidence that students’ mental health and academic success are impeded by the lack of safe spaces and trigger warnings. In fact, recent clinical science provides grounds for thinking that warnings may be counterproductive because they may inadvertently encourage avoidance behavior, which can fuel pre-existing anxiety (here). Many of us do not object to optional trigger warnings.

Our worry, however, is that once warnings become mandatory, they can become political tools. We have seen unfortunate examples of professors investigated because their syllabus neglected to warn students about some wording that one student found offensive, and who then pursued it for political reasons unrelated to PTSD. It is not obvious that any a priori rubric can distinguish legitimate content to be warned about from content that some students oppose for sociopolitical or personal reasons (e.g., anger at perceived “victim shaming”).

Some academics fear that because PTSD and the allied acute stress disorder (a DSM-5 diagnosis) are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, failure to take into consideration potential triggers is a violation of the law. If true, that could lead to mandatory safe spaces and trigger warnings and possibly pressure to amend course content that some find disturbing. As one commentator on Inside Higher Ed argued, “Once trigger warnings are established, it is easy to put more and more topics in the restricted category, and then an easy step to say that these topics cannot be addressed at all.” Instructors teaching evolution have been assailed by students when the real issue is not PTSD but providing equal time for teaching variants of creationism. Another person commented, “When a small group of Christian fundamentalists in my anthropology class objected to my teaching ‘evolution’ on the ground that some students ‘don’t believe in it,’ I treated them as gently as possible; but, I also steadfastly refused to alter the curriculum on the basis of their peculiar mythology.”

As illustrated by this example, an ideological rift frequently exists between proponents and opponents of trigger warnings. One does not hear much about the need for greater empathy or safe spaces for students holding conservative viewpoints. For example, few openly advocate that professors give Southern students trigger warnings or safe spaces before assigning readings that depict their ancestors as pro-slavery or pro-Jim Crow, or that depict social conservatives as racist or homophobic. Numerous topics are regarded as upsetting hate speech when viewed from one side of the political aisle (e.g., Black Lives Matter) but not from the other side (e.g., Blue Lives Matter).

Potential Solutions

We can envision several ways of approaching these contentious issues, some of which can be undertaken by students and others by professors. Online Rate My Professor evaluations could include comments about sensitive content to inform future students. That might partially obviate the need for trigger warnings, as prospective students could read previous students’ comments, although the risk of false positives cannot be ignored. Professors cannot anticipate every student’s sensitivities. At least in the case of nonrequired courses, students could be told it is their responsibility to read the course comments and the syllabus and skim the reading list before enrolling.

Are campuses moving toward a scheme in which administrators must keep a continually updated list of topics that might require warnings, and maintain a hearing board for professors who violate them? Will nonconforming faculty be required to enroll in formal sensitivity training or worse, risk administrative censure or even termination? And what about fairness to all positions: Will colleges and universities require sensitivity training for professors who exhibit insensitivity toward conservative or fundamentalist religious beliefs, for example?

Some in higher education argue that providing students with trigger warnings means taking students seriously. Others, however, contend that trigger warnings are a means of pandering to those harboring a broader agenda that encroaches on academic freedom and leads to administrative initiatives that add to the already burdensome academic bureaucracy. Students can use warnings not to prepare for a discussion of sensitive material but rather to pre-empt a reading or a presenter whom they argue is somehow trauma inducing.

In November 2015, for example, Yale University students took great offense at a statement by Erika Christakis that administrators should not tell students what types of Halloween costume are racist or culturally insensitive. Many Yale students were not interested in open discussion of her view, demanding she be fired because she rendered their residence hall an unsafe space.

Large-scale national studies show that stress, coupled with the belief that stress negatively affects health, contributes to poor health outcomes. Educational institutions should make students aware of the linkages among stress, the perception that stress is inherently negative, and their health; coping strategies should include confronting stressors, not ducking them. This insight should begin early, starting with campus tours and college acceptance letters.

The One-Time-Only Trigger Warning

With these considerations in mind, we propose that the following trigger warning be given to students on their first day of college. We provisionally suggest that it be termed the One-Time-Only Trigger Warning:

“Over the course of the next four years you will be encountering a number of topics that you may find emotionally challenging, even difficult. If some of this stuff makes you feel uncomfortable, that’s perfectly normal, and we encourage you to talk to us and your friends about it. But bear in mind that a liberal arts education is designed to confront you with things that challenge and at times even threaten your worldviews. So if you feel intellectually or emotionally disturbed by what you learn in class, don’t assume that you should be concerned. It may only mean that you are engaging with novel perspectives, which is what college is all about.”

Source: https://bloghyped.com/a-way-to-handle-trigger-warnings-is-to-develop-a-one-time-only-one-opinion/

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millennialeconomist · 8 years ago

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“We Hear You: Obamacare and ‘Progress in Wrong Direction’” - My Response to The Daily Signal open letter.

Dear Daily Signal: This is regarding your reporting on Obamacare versus the American Health Care Act (RINOcare). I am, unfortunately, a conservative adjunct professor in the bowels of the progressive, neocommunist academe in the city of Philadelphia–a liberal, Democrat bastion. The level of student naiveté and faculty propagandizing for the neocommunist agenda is debilitating.

It is an acknowledged problem that college is a liberal echo chamber. However, to open with the above paragraph, then trot out the same tired conservative talking points is almost as funny as it is sad. Talk about an echo chamber.

I also worked 40 years for the Department of Defense, paying taxes from both jobs as part of my polity contribution. I have been subsidizing the government waste factory, the politically well connected who can avoid taxes, and the “low income” people who believe they are entitled to half of what I earned in those 40 years. (Federal, state, local taxes, surcharges on utilities for nonpayers, etc., add up to about 50 percent.)

So do the poor feel like they are entitled to your money, or do they just want some help because many of them were dealt a bad hand? And why “low income” in quotes? What are you trying to say? Also, while the government will never run as efficiently as a private company, I would hardly call it a waste factory. It provides essential services; without which the country could not properly function. Or at least be a lot worse off.

The one striking issue I have observed over the years is this construct that we should have equality of “outcomes” and not equality of “opportunity.” The scenario goes that if you are in the U.S., legally or illegally, you are entitled to what everybody else has, i.e. house, car, cell phone, free tuition, free health care, guaranteed income (welfare) and so on.

As a professor he should be well aware that both the equality of outcomes and equality of opportunities is at its lowest point since the 1930s. Do you really think a minority female born to a poor family has the same opportunities as a white male born to an upper middle class family? I would say no. In order to capitalize on opportunities one needs their health, a quality education, stable housing and a stable domestic life. The cost of all of those is rising exponentially and progressively out of reach for a large swath of Americans each year.

The focus is totally on “entitlements” with no consideration for the other side of the equation–contribution.

Students believe that the only contribution people have to make is carbon dioxide (breathe) and offspring (breed). So if you breathe and breed, you are entitled to a subsidized lifestyle. We have developed a culture that Aesop warned of with the ant and grasshopper: a nation of nihilistic, free-rider, social loafers who believe they are entitled to cradle-to-grave government (taxpayer) care while having only to contribute their occasional vote to the party that promises them free stuff.

While we are both using anecdotal arguments here, I believe the opposite. I believe people inherently want to work and contribute to society. However it is very difficult to dig oneself out of poverty and assistance is needed. I believe we need to do more to assist children born into poverty, as there is a still a chance they will grow to be productive members of society. Taking away any assistance because of a few bad apples only reinforces the cycle of poverty.

This “progressive” cultural rot affects all aspects of our political, economic, and social fabric. It was rejected during this past election by middle-class Americans who work for a living to fund this progressive cancer.

The narrative I often heard post election was the working middle class and working poor rejected the “elites”. That’s why Trump was the Republican nominee rather than the career politicians that ran against him. Taking away social assistance would make these Republican voters worse off, not better.

Even the immigration debate has its roots in this cultural degradation, since we have to import unskilled, uneducated labor to take jobs “Americans won’t take,” as the liberals claim. They won’t take the jobs because they don’t have to work. The social safety net funded by taxes and debt allow them to have decent, subsistence living while contributing nothing.

If you think subsistence living is decent I would love to see you spend a year living off of government subsistence only. Report back on how decent the experience was. In terms of immigration, even Trump imports immigrant workers at his hotels. Where is the outrage there? I think the immigration situation is more a reflection on the failure of capitalism to provide for the working poor. When the jobs are so bad and pay so little that living off of government subsidies is a better option, then something is wrong.

Hence the discussion on Obamacare and a new entitlement by expanding “free health care” (Medicaid) for “the poor.” At some point, we have to stop the “free stuff” nanny-state drug of choice for progressivism and balance the equation with some form of contribution to offset the ever-increasing scope of government entitlements.

Again the quotes. Because you put “the poor” in quotes are you saying they are not really poor? Again, spend a year living their lifestyle and report back to me. And this is just a sophisticated way for this guy to say if you don’t have money then you deserve to die if get sick. Mr. Professor should read a few books about luck and randomness. Hard times can hit anyone, that’s why the social safety net is there.

This version of RINOcare does nothing either to stop or reverse this progressive cancer.

I ask my students to define progressivism. Of course they characterize it as “progress” toward all the value-laden, sociological fluff terms like social justice, economic equality, equal pay, open borders that, when challenged, they can’t define or conceptualize the implications.

Conservative ideology has similar buzzwords. Individualism, free markets, liberty... Taking any fluff term and conceptualizing it to an extreme leads to bad outcomes. Whether its conservative or liberal.

I tell them about the skin mole I had that “progressed” to cancer. It was progress, but in the wrong direction. Progress in the wrong direction can be deadly.

So what is your version of progress? Going back to the 19th century when there was a depression every 15 years or so?

I am now 65 and at the tail end of this journey, but I fear for the viability of this experiment we call the United States. This election may have been the last chance to reverse that “progress” in the wrong direction.—Anthony Cosenza

You tipped your hand! You are 65, so of course you don’t care about anyone but yourself at this point.

#Daily Signal #Fire Joe Morgan #FJM

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