#my self concept has changed so radically over the past several months???

[rottenlittlefink]

I had an “I’m A Church!” moment this year on the brink of literal actual irl death /srs

[arcticdementor]

Kayfabe is a treasured part of pro wrestling culture. Kayfabe refers to the commitment of everyone involved (the wrestlers, the refs, the announcers, and to a certain degree the fans) to maintaining the shared fiction that pro wrestling matches are unscripted. (Wrestling is real, in the sense that the athletes are taking real punishment and risk really getting hurt, and there is a degree of improvisation, but the outcomes are predetermined.) Kayfabe has had a kind of mythical importance to many in the pro wrestling community: you keep kayfabe no matter what, even in the event of serious injury, out of a sense of sacred commitment. Crucial to understanding kayfabe is that it is not an attempt to deceive the audience. Modern wrestling is in some ways perfectly open about the scripted nature of the matches. Fooling people is not the point. If every fan signed an affidavit saying they knew the outcomes were predetermined the wrestlers would still keep kayfabe, out of commitment to the culture. Kayfabe is a mutually-approved illusion. It is artifice, but it is mutually agreed upon artifice, a consensual fantasy.

Our current political culture is kayfabe.

The illusion that we pretend to believe is that we are in some sort of uniquely politically fertile moment for progressivism and social justice, that we are experiencing a social revolution or “Great Awokening.” Further, we keep kayfabe by acting as if we believe that certain policies like police abolition or abolishing border enforcement (or if you prefer utterly meaningless sloganeering, “abolishing ICE”) are tangibly viable in anything like the near future. I say that these are kayfabe to emphasize my belief that most people who endorse these beliefs are well aware that they are not true, and to underline the sense in which the commitment to unreality is mutual, an expression of a strange kind of social contract. Most thinking adults comprehend the current moment and understand that the hand of establishment power and the influence of social inertia are as strong as ever. (Why would you feel otherwise?) But because people have understandably been moved by recent righteous calls for justice, they feel they must accept the fiction of a new awakening to show solidarity with the victims of injustice. This is emotionally understandable, but strategically counterproductive. And indeed one thing that has defined these new social movements is their relentless commitment to the emotional over the strategic.

…

Living in a culture of political kayfabe is a strange experience. It feels the way that, I imagine, it feels to live under a truly authoritarian government, where you’re constantly having exchanges where everyone involved knows that what they’re saying is bogus but you push right through the cognitive dissonance with a smile on your face. Only you’re not compelled by the fear of torture or imprisonment but of vague-but-intense social dictates, of the crucial priority of appearing to be the right kind of person. So often political conversations today have this dual quality where you feel forced to constantly evaluate what your interlocutor actually believes even as propriety compels you to take seriously what’s coming out of their mouth.

A major negative consequence of our commitment to kayfabe lies in our acceptance of behaviors we would ordinarily never accept, under the theory that this is such a special time, we need to shut up and go along with it. Take our broken discourse, as frequently discussed in “cancel culture” debates. My experience and my intuition tell me that almost everyone in the progressive/left/socialist world knows that our discourse norms and culture are totally fucked up. Trust me: most people in liberal spaces, Black and white, male and female, trans and cis, most certainly including people in academia and media, are well aware that we’ve entered into a bizarre never-ending production of The Crucible we can’t get out of. They’re probably just as sick of Woko Haram as I am.

But they’re either empowered and enriched by this state of affairs, and don’t want the party to end, or they’re holding on for dear life trying not to get their lives ruined for speaking out of turn. Look past self-interest and self-preservation and you’ll find that everybody knows that the way left spaces work now is horribly broken and dysfunctional. The problem is that thinking people who would ordinarily object don’t because they’ve been convinced that this is some sort of special moment pregnant with progressive potential, and that is more important than rights, compassion, or fairness. So we maintain a shared pretense that things are cool the way you go through the motions on an awful date where you’re both aware you’ll never see each other again.

If I say “cancel culture,” normies indeed don’t know what I’m talking about, because they are healthy, adjusted people with a decent set of priorities who value their own time and lives too much to get caught up in all of this horseshit. But if I say “cancel culture” in front of a bunch of politics-obsessed professional-class shitlibs they will pretend to not know what I’m talking about. They’ll put on a rich fucking show. They do an impression of Cletus from The Simpsons and go “cancel culture?!? Hyuck hyuck what’re that? I’m not knowing cancel culture, I’m just a simple country lad!” These are people who have read more about cancel culture in thinkpieces than I read about any topic in a year. But pretending you don’t know what cancel culture is happens to be a key part of the performance, a naked in-group signifier, so they pretend. The “I don’t know what cancel culture is” bullshit performance is kayfabe at its most infuriating. I know you know what cancel culture is because you’re currently using it to demonstrate your culture positioning by pretending you don’t know what it is. You fucking simpleton.

People say and do weird shit and it’s all wrong but you just pretend like it isn’t. Who wants to be the one caught making waves? When you’re in a group of people and someone engages in something patently ridiculous - when, for example, someone says “AAVE” in an ordinary social situation with no academic or political reason to use jargon, even though everyone there knows the phrase “the way Black people talk” is more elegant, useful, and true - and the moment passes and there’s this inability to look each other in the eye, when everybody starts studying their drink and clearing their throat, that’s life under kayfabe.

Getting to this is not normal. It’s not a healthy state of affairs. It can only happen when people come to believe that self-preservation requires pretending things are OK.

…

It is at this point that people say that “defund” does not mean “abolish,” which is true, and Defund the Police indeed does not mean “abolish the police.” Defund the police means nothing, now, though I’m sure that the people who started using it had noble intentions. At this point it’s a floating signifier, an empty slogan that people rallied around with zero understanding of what semantic content it could possibly contain. If it’s meant to be a radical demand, why use the vocabulary of an actuary? If it’s meant to mean a meaningful but strategic drawdown of resources, why use it interchangeably with “abolish”? I cannot imagine a more comprehensive failure of basic political messaging than Defund the Police. Amateur hour from beginning to end.

I take the political concept of alternatives to policing seriously, in the same way I take many political ideas seriously that are not likely achievable in my lifetime. I know there are deeply serious people who are profoundly committed to these principles and who have thought them through responsibly. I appreciate their work and become better informed from what they say. But their ideas did not reign last year. A faddish embrace of a thoughtless caricature of police abolition reigned, pushed with maximum aggression and minimal introspection by the shock troops of contemporary progressive ideas, overeducated white people with more sarcasm than sense.

Policing will not end tomorrow or next month or next year. And whoever you are, reading this, you are well aware of that fact. The odds of police abolition in any substantial portion of this country are nil. Indeed, I would say that the likelihood of meaningful reduction in policing in any large region of this country, whether measured by patrolling or funding or manpower, is small. Individual cities may reduce their police forces by a substantial fraction, and I suspect that they will not suddenly devolve into Mega-City One as a result. (Though I can’t say initial data in this regard is encouraging.) I hope we learn important lessons about intelligent and effective police reform and more sensible resource allocation from those places. But the vast majority of cities will not meaningfully change their policing budgets, due to both the legitimate lack of political will for such a thing - including in communities of color - and broken municipal politics with bad incentives.

…

Living under kayfabe makes you yearn for plainspoken communication, for letting the mask fall. The professed inability of progressives to understand why woke-skeptical publications like this one keep succeeding financially is itself a slice of kayfabe. They know people are paying for Substacks and podcasts and subscribing to YouTubes and Patreons because it’s exhausting to constantly spend all of your time pretending things that don’t make sense make sense, pretending that you believe things you don’t to avoid the social consequences of telling the truth.

When you’re someone who spent the past several decades arguing that the American university system is not hostile to conservative students, that it doesn’t try to force extremely contentious leftist views onto students, and then you watch this video, how do you react? I think many people, most people, even most people committed to the BLM cause, see that video and wince. That is not how we get there. Browbeating 20 year olds for not parroting your politics back at you is not how racial justice gets advanced. But if you’re caught in this moment, how do you object? Acknowledge that, yes, in fact, it is now plainly the case that many professors see it as their job to forcefully insist on the truth of deeply controversial claims to their students, berating them until they acquiesce? Well that would be an unpleasant conversation with the other parents when you pick up your kid from Montessori school. So you just choose not to see, or keep you mouth shut, or speak in a way that maintains the illusion.

I mean there is the absurdity of what she’s saying to contend with - the now fairly common view that policing was literally invented in the antebellum South purely to enforce slavery, because in ancient Rome if someone came in your house and stole your stuff you’d just be like “oh damn, that sucks.” Is there a relationship between modern policing and slavery? Of course. Does the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow infect modern policing at every point? Sure. Should we make political and policy decisions that recognize that historical influence on policing, especially given the racist reality of policing right now? Yes. But what good does it do anyone to pretend that the concept of “the police” is 250 years old? Why on earth would we get the correct shit we do believe tangled up with this bizarre shit we don’t believe? (The professor in that video does not herself honestly believe the police were invented to support African slavery in 18th and 19th century America.) Because this utterly ahistorical idea is being promulgated by people who claim to speak from a position of justice, we are forced to assign seriousness to it that it hasn’t earned, seriousness that it could never deserve. Because we live in a world of mutual delusion. Because of kayfabe.

…

And the fact that some will wrinkle their noses about this piece and its arguments, go about their days of progressive performance art, and pretend they don’t believe every word they just read? That’s kayfabe, my friend. That’s kayfabe. And we’re trapped in it, all of us, you and I. You know it’s all bullshit. Will you keep the code anyway? I’m willing to bet that the answer is yes.

[ladyblackwood]

How to introduce you to a journey I’ve already kind of started?

     I have always had an affinity for experimentation and documentation. When I was too young to even understand the concept, I applied some variant of the scientific method to even the most abstract and emotional aspects of life. In short, I have a need for concrete information.      This especially applies to myself. I am constantly learning more about myself, and lately, this has led me to some weighty conclusions and discoveries. A lot has changed for me in the last few years in a way that’s completely reformed every aspect of how I view the world and myself (physical, mental, spiritual, etc.)      My self esteem has drastically improved, my religion has radically changed, I have a much better understanding and control of my health, my gender, my sexuality, my needs. Just in the past two months I found out my PTSD is in remission, I have severe sleep apnea, and last week I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. A lot of desperately needed information and change has come to me through some very difficult circumstances, which seems to be the story of my life thus far.      So, why am I starting this blog? I have a drastically improved understanding of what I need, how I can get what I need, and how to better myself. I’m going to make such an effort, and I want to document it. Mostly for myself, but also for whoever needs to see this.      I know a lot of people that don’t know what such a journey looks like, or how to start, or whether they’re worthy of it. I want those people to see me make mistakes, and stumble my way through this, and make slow incremental progress. I want them to use this as an example and see that it’s hard. To see that it’s worth it. To see that it’s something they can be capable of.

      I will inevitably fuck up. I likely already have in some way. That’s a large part of the point. I want to be more okay with my shortcomings and try to help others see that theirs are okay. None of us are perfect, and we try way to hard to look like we are and I want to normalize the idea that we are all already worthy and good, but we can also always be better than we are.      How I’ll be doing that is something I’ll figure out as I go. That’s sort of how it’s worked in the past anyway. At first it’ll be small steps that won’t seem to mean a lot, but over time and with context, I really hope the big picture of what I’m trying to get across will become clear.      To start, I’m gonna be working on my handwriting. I’ve always had trouble with it, my small motor skills have had some significant obstacles. I’ll post a lot of my exercises. I’ll do some stream of consciousness writing. It’s just gonna be a lot of practice and some kind of visual curation of a skill coupled with some random philosophy that I try to organize into something coherent.      I’d like this to be more than just shouting into the void that is tumblr, if at all possible on this hellsite that I’ve grown to love. I want to engage with people more. If you have questions, need advice, want to give criticism, or whatever, I want to be open to it and even encourage it where I can. I’m also gonna try to reach out more and be a little less distant, this doesn’t work if it isn’t a two way street.

TLDR: I’m trying to be better at things for myself, I want to show you how that process can be messy, I hope we can interact a little more and that this will be good for both me and you, whoever you are.

[mideastsoccer]

A bird’s eye view of Asia: A continental landscape of minorities in peril

By James M. Dorsey

A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr, Patreon, Podbean and Castbox.

Many in Asia look at the Middle East with a mixture of expectation of stable energy supplies, hope for economic opportunity and concern about a potential fallout of the region’s multiple violent conflicts that are often cloaked in ethnic, religious and sectarian terms.

Yet, a host of Asian nations led by men and women, who redefine identity as concepts of exclusionary civilization, ethnicity, and religious primacy rather than inclusive pluralism and multiculturalism, risk sowing the seeds of radicalization rooted in the despair of population groups that are increasingly persecuted, disenfranchised and marginalized.

Leaders like China’s Xi Jingping, India’s Narendra Modi, and Myanmar’s Win Myint and Aung San Suu Kyi, alongside nationalist and supremacist religious figures ignore the fact that crisis in the Middle East is rooted in autocratic and authoritarian survival strategies that rely on debilitating manipulation of national identity on the basis of sectarianism, ethnicity and faith-based nationalism.

A bird’s eye view of Asia produces a picture of a continental landscape strewn with minorities on the defensive whose positioning as full-fledged members of society with equal rights and opportunities is either being eroded or severely curtailed.

It also highlights a pattern of responses by governments and regional associations that opt for a focus on pre-emptive security, kicking the can down the road and/or silent acquiescence rather than addressing a wound head-on that can only fester, making cures ever more difficult.

To be sure, multiple Asian states, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh and India have at various times opened their doors to refugees.

Similarly, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) disaster management unit has focused on facilitating and streamlining repatriation of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

But a leaked report by the unit, AHA Centre, in advance of last June’s ASEAN summit was criticized for evading a discussion on creating an environment in which Rohingya would be willing to return.

The criticism went to the core of the problem: Civilizationalist policies, including cultural genocide, isolating communities from the outside world, and discrimination will at best produce simmering anger, frustration and despair and at worst mass migration, militancy and/or political violence.

A Uyghur member of the Communist Party for 30 years who did not practice his religion, Ainiwa Niyazi, would seem to be the picture-perfect model of a Chinese citizen hailing from the north-western province of Xinjiang.

Yet, Mr Niyazi was targeted in April of last year for re-education, one of at least a million Turkic Muslims interned in detention facilities where they are forced to internalize Xi Jinping thought and repudiate religious norms and practices in what constitutes the most frontal assault on a faith in recent history.

If past efforts, including an attempt to turn Kurds into Turks by banning use of Kurdish as a language that sparked a still ongoing low level insurgency, is anything to go by, China’s ability to achieve a similar goal with greater brutality is questionable.

“Most Uyghur young men my age are psychologically damaged. When I was in elementary school surrounded by other Uyghurs, I was very outgoing and active. Now I feel like I have been broken… Quality of life is now about feeling safe,” said Alim, a young Uyghur, describing to Adam Hunerven, a writer who focuses on the Uyghurs, arrests of his friends and people trekking south to evade the repression in Xinjiang cities.

Travelling in the region in 2014, an era in which China was cracking down on Uyghurs but that predated the institutionalization of the re-education camps, Mr. Hunerven saw that “the trauma people experienced in the rural Uyghur homeland was acute. It followed them into the city, hung over their heads and affected the comportment of their bodies. It made people tentative, looking over their shoulders, keeping their heads down. It made them tremble and cry.”

There is little reason to assume that anything has since changed for the better. On the contrary, not only has the crackdown intensified, fear and uncertainty has spread to those lucky enough to live beyond the borders of China. Increasingly, they risk being targeted by the long arm of the Chinese state that has pressured their host countries to repatriate them.

Born and raised in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, Rahima Akter, one of the few women to get an education among the hundreds of thousands who fled what the United Nations described as ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, saw her dreams and potential as a role model smashed when she was this month expelled from university after recounting her story publicly.

Ms. Akter gained admission to Cox’s Bazar International University (CBIU) on the strength of graduating from a Bangladeshi high school, a feat she could only achieve by sneaking past the camp's checkpoints, hiding her Rohingya identity, speaking only Bengali, dressing like a Bangladeshi, and bribing Bangladeshi public school officials for a placement.

Ms Akter was determined to escape the dire warnings of UNICEF, the United Nations’ children agency, that Rohingya refugee children risked becoming “a lost generation.”

Ms. Akter’s case is not an isolated incident but part of a refugee policy in an environment of mounting anti-refugee sentiment that threatens to deprive Rohingya refugees who refuse to return to Myanmar unless they are guaranteed full citizenship of any prospects.

In a move that is likely to deepen a widespread sense of abandonment and despair, Bangladeshi authorities, citing security reasons, this month ordered the shutting down of mobile services and a halt to the sale of SIM cards in Rohingya refugee camps and restricted Internet access. The measures significantly add to the isolation of a population that is barred from travelling outside the camps.

Not without reason, Bangladeshi foreign minister Abul Kalam Abdul Momen, has blamed the international community for not putting enough pressure on Myanmar to take the Rohingyas back.

The UN “should go to Myanmar, especially to Rakhine state, to create conditions that could help these refugees to go back to their country. The UN is not doing the job that we expect them to do,” Mr. Abdul Momen said.

The harsh measures are unlikely to quell increased violence in the camps and continuous attempts by refugees to flee in search of better pastures.

Suspected Rohingya gunmen last month killed a youth wing official of Bangladesh’s ruling Awami League party. Two refugees were killed in a subsequent shootout with police.

The plight of the Uyghurs and the Rohingya repeats itself in countries like India with its stepped up number of mob killings that particularly target Muslims, threatened stripping of citizenship of close to two million people in the state of Assam, and unilateral cancellation of self-rule in Kashmir.

Shiite Muslims bear the brunt of violent sectarian attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Malaysia, Shiites, who are a miniscule minority, face continued religious discrimination.

The Islamic Religious Department in Selangor, Malaysia’s richest state, this week issued a sermon that amounts to a mandatory guideline for sermons in mosques warning against “the spread of Shia deviant teachings in this nation… The Muslim ummah (community of the faithful) must become the eyes and the ears for the religious authorities when stumbling upon activities that are suspicious, disguising under the pretext of Islam,” the sermon said.

Malaysia, one state where discriminatory policies are unlikely to spark turmoil and political violence, may be the exception that confirms the rule.

Ethnic and religious supremacism in major Asian states threatens to create breeding grounds for violence and extremism. The absence of effective attempts to lessen victims’ suffering by ensuring that they can rebuild their lives and safeguard their identities in a safe and secure environment, allows wounds to fester.

Permitting Ms. Akter, the Rohingya university student, to pursue her dream, would have been a low-cost, low risk way of offering Rohingya youth an alternative prospect and at the very least a reason to look for constructive ways of reversing what is a future with little hope.

Bangladeshi efforts to cut off opportunities in the hope that Rohingya will opt for repatriation have so far backfired. And repatriation under circumstances that do not safeguard their rights is little else than kicking the can down the road.

Said human rights advocate Ewelina U. Ochab: “It is easy to turn a blind eye when the atrocities do not happen under our nose. However, we cannot forget that religious persecution anywhere in the world is a security threat to everyone, everywhere.”

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, an adjunct senior research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute of Fan Culture

[tyrus-time]

my perspective on TJ’s story (as of 3.13)

Over the past few days, I’ve gone back and forth several times about whether to post my response to, yknow, the Gay Angst. OBVIOUSLY I’m heartbroken, as a Tyrus shipper and someone who is deeply invested in their characters as individuals, to see the two of them hurting. But I know this drama is a plot device and that Tyrus, one way or another, will be endgame. 

Currently, I am feeling anxious about how much development we will actually get to see for them... but that’s in the future, and I’m trying to focus on the now.

No, there’s some other stuff that made me feel angry and disappointed and honestly, foolish when I first watched the episode.... I wrote out a rant on my phone, and then I added to it later, and now I’m trying to make some sense out of it... now that I’m calmer (but still sad) about it. 

This is a pretty long, critical post, so feel free to keep scrollin! 

(I reallyjust need to get this out of my system so I can move on.)

I know some people are actually glad that TJ’s storyline is addressing homophobia, but I gotta be honest with yall: I, personally, am not. I’m honestly devastated that this is the route they took, especially since it still seems the gay themes are mostly subtextual. 

As of now, there is a LOT of room for interpretation regarding what is going through TJ’s mind and what Kira’s implied threat was actually implying. I don’t interact with children, like, at all... so I really have no idea how much they’d be picking up on.

And I feel kinda uncomfortable with the show using themes of homophobia/the threat of being outed/etc... just to create drama and conflict between characters? Using homophobia as a plot device in this way, without even beginning to deconstruct homophobia, comes off as semi-exploitative to me?? Which is probably because I’m just so tired of Gayngst, which is really my main issue with this storyline...

I am exhausted of the pattern of gay characters struggling with homophobia (internalized or otherwise) and this then causing them to hurt/betray their (gay) love interests. 

Being gay and having relationship angst is one thing. But always having angst related to being gay? It is a well-worn trope that I am do not like.

It’s “realistic,” yes, but it’s frequently been done before — hence the TV tropes page on it.

While it is important to portray the affects of homophobia upon LGBT+ and questioning individuals, there must be a balance! 

When Gayngst-y representation is the main representation you see, it feels like that’s the ONLY narrative. You are left with the idea that being LGBT+ means you WILL suffer, that you NEED to struggle with your sexuality/gender because that’s how the identity development process is ‘supposed’ to go. And it shouldn’t have to be that way.

(I speak from personal experience)

This is why I’m so passionate about studying LGBT+ media representation. Media informs us of social norms, scripts, expectations; what is acceptable and what is appropriate; how we’re supposed to think and feel and behave. It’s often very subtle, but all of those images and narratives become internalized and affect how you understand yourself, the world around you, and how you fit in to that world.

Media images shouldn’t just reflect society as it is today; it should offer images of a brighter future.

There’s this resonant quote from the musical Hadestown:

“He could make you see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is.”

And that’s what I so dearly want to see in LGBT+ representation. 

It breaks my heart whenever people say things like, “it’s unrealistic for a young gay teen to be comfortable with their identity.” It truly breaks my heart and makes me want to change the narrative.

We should have stories that should how the world CAN be, not just how it often ‘realistically’ is. 

I want to see worlds that AREN’T heteronormative, because I’m hopeful for a future in which we truly do dismantle heterosexism. 

I want to see queer relationships that go through the “normal” difficulties of dating someone, such as dealing with typical awkwardness and learning to communicate better... instead of dealing with external and internalized homophobia. 

Perhaps I’m asking too much, and shouldn’t be this hopeful in 2019, but I will continue to assert the need for joyful, celebratory queer stories that diverge from the trend of queer tragedy.

And I really was hoping that Andi Mack could show this radical possibility that gay people can just be HAPPY sometimes, but.... this is Disney channel.... So I guess I’m not really surprised, but I am still disappointed.

Disappointed not just because I was hoping for an unashamedly gay character, but also because I could see TJ realistically having little conflict over his gayness. (I made a post about this months ago, and I’ll probably be repeating those points now.)

TJ’s concern about how people perceive him has been well-established, re: the dyscalculia storyline. However, I’ve always had an affinity for the concept that because he cares about Cyrus so deeply, he is able to come to terms with his gayness without as much turmoil as one might expect. I think this concept is even more valid after the gun incident, with TJ standing up to his previous friends in order to do the right thing, and admitting that Cyrus is the best thing in his life.

“But ash, this is just you being a hopeless romantic!” you might say. But wait! I have more evidence!

I now realize just how much I was projecting myself onto TJ in regards to his insecurities, and it really had nothing to do with romance:

I have always had this complex duality of “I don’t care what people think!! I gotta be true to myself” and “Oh my god, I care so much and I’m so socially anxious.” (I bet some of you can relate.) 

The thing is... while I feel self-conscious about my transness on a near-daily basis... I’ve been pretty unapologetically queer since I realized that I actually had a gay crush. 

Granted, I was already a big ‘ally’ with several LGB friends in a fairly liberal area, and this gay awakening was in high school (not middle school). So TJ wouldn’t have all of that going for him.

But my thought processes (regarding my insecurities) has always been: 

If people don’t like me for who I am, then they’re not worth my time... 

But if people negatively judge me for my abilities? Game over, I’m an insecure mess. THAT’S what I’m most insecure about: seeming dumb or weak or incapable. 

And again, maybe this is just self-indulgent projection, but I think this fits TJ, too.

In S2, TJ clearly is so insecure because he thinks he’s stupid since he struggles with math. And since he’s a jock, perhaps at first he can play off his bad grades with the whole “Oh, I’m a athlete, and getting good grades is for nerds, and I’m cooool” (or whatever rhetoric is used nowadays but middle school boys). BUT having a learning disability is far scarier, because it solidifies (in HIS mind) that there is something inherently wrong with his brain.

I could go on and on, analyzing TJ’s inner psyche, but the point is: 

I could see him being insecure about his physical and mental skills such as basketball and math, yet being self-assured of his sexuality. 

This would also be a realistic option for his character — in my opinion at least, because my own life experiences align well with this interpretation, and well, that’s gotta count for something because I’m pretty sure I’m a real person, even if my experiences aren’t widely shared?

TLDR; The way that they ended taking TJ’s character is a “realistic” option, but it’s not the option that I would’ve chose — both for personal reasons (personally relating to TJ, and wanting to see Tyrus be happy) AND social reasons (believing that children should be able to see a character who isn’t show to struggle with self-acceptance, especially since we already saw Cyrus be scared of himself for being gay).

This isn’t to take away the validity of anyone who DOES relate to/support TJ’s current arc! This is me just sharing my own perspective (and trying to get the sad feelings out of my system). 

My whole approach to media representation is challenging the “good representation” vs “bad representation” binary, because doing so is incredibly counterproductive and oversimplified. Instead, we should be constantly asking “What is the context for this representation? What is valuable about it? What are it’s flaws? How could be possibly do better in the future?” So I can see advantages of this particular storyline, but I also have some criticisms that I believe to be substantiated.

[davidmann95]

The Current Superman History

So Superman: that guy’s had a wonky time of things in the last few years. He was rebooted, he was rebooted within the reboot by a five-dimensional bureaucrat with a grudge, he died, he was replaced by his own past continuity self, they merged...dude lives a hectic life. And now he’s got a whole new one, as outlined in Action Comics #977 and the new #978.

I’m putting this under a spoiler cut, since some will want to just read the books; I know my dad for instance doesn’t want to know anything until he can get his hands on the comics themselves. But Twitter-pal Kyle Pinion mentioned he was hoping someone would put together a timeline/overview, and I figure that could be useful, especially since there’ve been some important details only shared so far in interviews and minor online statements, or in other Superman Family titles rather than Action or Superman. If you’re perhaps not reading the Superman books right now, but you’re curious what the background of this new-ish version of the character is for whenever you hop back in, here’s the newest edition of Superman 101.

(Ultimately pretty minor) SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

(Note: I’ll be keeping this up-to-date with relevant information post-Reborn via flashback stories and such.)

The New History

* Krypton is still where he comes from - no bold new revelations on that front. Aesthetically it’s a blend of the Silver Age, New 52 and Byrne takes, with maybe a touch of Birthright thrown in; several Silver Age elements like the Vrang occupation of the planet, green comets as bad omens, and the Day of Truth have been restored, and Zod and Xa-Du are known to have been prisoners of the Phantom Zone (the former may or may not have been Jor-El's friend this time around, given in the flashback Jor-El didn’t seem to react to the news of his imprisonment). Bar-El and Lilo went off-planet ala All-Star Superman, but spaceflight was generally forbidden; Jor-El attempted to convince the Science Council to build arks to escape Krypton's destruction, but as "they'd rather count their riches" they ignored his warnings both out of disbelief and the thought that even if it was true they had years to spare. Kal-El and Kara Zor-El were launched into space right before Krypton blew up, as it’s wont to do; Argo City lived on in space for awhile before succumbing to Red Kryptonite poisoning. In all this, Rogol Zaar, who claims to have been responsible for Krypton’s destruction, seems to have been involved to some extent along with the group of powerful galactic figures known as The Circle, and it seems Jor-El survived to become ‘Mr. Oz”.

* Additionally, as far as Superman’s pre-birth background goes, the existence of Superman in the current continuum is also owed to Ahl, the God of Superheroes. Descending from Final Heaven, he touched down on Earth in prehistoric times (in the spot that would eventually become Mount Justice) and imprinted the Earth with the concept of justice, and the platonic concepts that would become Batman, Wonder Woman, and most directly descended from himself, Superman, who would then go on to give rise to all other superheroes. On an additional metaphysical note, Doomsday Clock specifies that the current Superman is indeed the Kal-El of the Golden Age, old-school Earth One, and post-Crisis, who has simply shifted over the years in response to cosmic upheaval rather than being a full-fledged new individual.

* The Kents found Clark in the field, and like in Byrne’s Man of Steel, they decided to pass him off as their own biological child to avoid legal complications. He pretty much lived the childhood we saw in Secret Origin; there are panels from that homaged showing him hanging out with Pete Ross and Lana Lang (Pete’s arm broken from the one time Clark tried playing football), and a red-haired Lex Luthor living there back then with a jar full of Kryptonite he was studying. Also as in Secret Origin he first realized he could fly when saving Lana Lang from a tornado. His life takes a turn though when his parents die the night of his senior prom, same as they did in Grant Morrison’s Action Comics.

* After travelling the world for awhile he settled down in Metropolis, where after revealing himself to the world in the classic costume, Lois named him Superman. His debut essentially went like this:

There’s a couple differences bringing it closer to how it happened in Secret Origin, but overall this is closer to the movie than that, at least in tone. And while he did not appear in this comic, presumably that dude was still yelling that that was a bad out-fit just off-panel.

* He met Batman at some point, and together they met with Wonder Woman shortly after her public debut (oddly in his Reborn suit, but that can be checked up to some timeline discrepancies given the current history shifts for both him and Diana, or more likely a simple continuity error). All prior to the formation of the Justice League, meaning that however that went, it was probably pretty different from Johns and Lee’s Justice League: Origins given he already knew at least a couple people there.

* He had a whole dang bunch of adventures. It’s clear vast swaths of Silver and Bronze Age continuity are back in play (though many must have happened in radically different forms, such as those involving Supergirl or his own now-nonexistent time as Superboy): the Supermobile - yes, that Supermobile, the flying Superman car with fists he used to fight Amazo that one time - made a cameo in Supergirl #8, a Superman Robot that looked exactly like him drove him, Nightwing, and Batman to the latter’s bachelor party, numerous Kryptonians native to Earth-One with very specific adventures attached to them were citizens of Kandor, and assorted Silver/Bronze Age Superman-associated folks are members of the space team Superwatch. It’s made clear he went through pretty much all the major 80s/90s stories, culminating in him getting engaged to Lois, telling her who he is (though he figures she already knew), his death by Doomsday and return (which is where Eradicator, Cyborg Superman, and apparently Steel showed up), and him getting married to Lois.  We also got a look at the Justice League trophy room in the second chapter of The Button, which include artifacts such as the Worlogog and Prometheus’ suit indicating a lot of Grant Morrison’s years on JLA are canon (as emphasized by the appearance of White Martians in the current Justice League), as well as the armor he wore as Darkseid’s brainwashed servant in the finale of Superman: The Animated Series, and elements from DC One Million have been repeatedly referenced. All three major Crisis events have been referenced as occurring in some form. Additionally, it has been confirmed that at some point Luthor served as President of the United States.

* At some point, he switched over to the New 52 armor costume, presumably going through many of those adventures with the caveat of being married to Lois rather than single or dating Wonder Woman (though he changed costumes prior to those adventures, as he was wearing that suit by the time of Batman: Hush). Lois learned she was pregnant and managed to surprise him with the news; nine months into the pregnancy their apartment was bombed by arms smugglers Lois had pissed off, and it was decided it would be safest to conduct the delivery at the Fortress with Batman and Wonder Woman on-hand to insure there would be no intrusions. While Batman waited grumpily standing guard outside, Diana ended up helping with the delivery since she was close with both Lois and Clark by this point (though she and Clark were never a couple).

*  Afterwards Lois and Clark took a sabbatical to California, living under the Lois and Clark comics’ status quo for a little while to keep Jon safe, with Superman ducking out of the public eye and League membership, working quietly in the black costume with the beard from that series; he also established a secondary Fortress in the Himalayas, while Lois wrote several famous books exposing corruption as "Author X". Once things calmed down after something like a few months to a year-ish, Lois and Clark returned to work (though they apparently didn’t move back to Metropolis, raising Jon somewhere else before recently moving to Hamilton, commuting by bullet train) and Superman to active duty, where he went through more New 52 adventures; Perry White was named Jon’s godfather. At some point after this, the current post-Reborn suit was permanently adopted until recently returning to his classic look (he also apparently wore the original Rebirth suit, since a version of Bizarro is still wearing it).

* No more than a year or two ago, Kara arrived on Earth. The events of her New 52 series are still to be read as canon, including for instance her time as a Red Lantern, with the exception of her involvement in the events of Final Days since there’s only been one Superman.

* While it’s not spelled out yet (assuming it ever will be), many of the events of the last year of the New 52 seem to have happened to him in some form, with both Truth and Final Days of Superman being cited editorially in New Super-Man in an issue featuring him post-Reborn; he has the Super-Flare, Supergirl says in her book that he was gone for a time, he mentions having power troubles to New Super-Man and fought a villain from Truth during the encounter, Dick Grayson recalls teaming up with him in his t-shirt and jeans look to fight Blockbuster, solar energy was extracted from him to create New Super-Man, Superwoman existed in some form, and Mxyzptlk pretended to be Clark Kent.

* From the “pre-Flashpoint Superman in the New 52 universe” period: most of the events from Dan Jurgens' Action Comics are canon; Doomsday was still a prisoner of Mr. Oz, and Luthor until recently continued to act as the Superman of Metropolis under a truce with his counterpart. Virtually all of the events of Tomasi/Gleason's Superman are canon, specifically the fight with the Eradicator, the excursion to Dinosaur Island on Earth 21, the run-in with Frankenstein and Bride, and the events of Multiplicity. His guest appearance in Deathstroke, his roles in Justice League and Trinity, and Zod’s role in Suicide Squad remain intact. The events of Reborn still happened, though his memory of it is blurred; as of Supergirl #8, he’s aware he was split into two Supermen for an extended period and was recently reformed.

Fine, Great, So What’s Actually His Deal Now?

In spirit, we’re back to the Pre-Flashpoint Superman, specifically I’d say the one before that but after Infinite Crisis: Secret Origin is clearly dominant (though not exclusive) as the narrative of his childhood and early days as Superman, a lot of Silver/Bronze ideas are back in play, and while most of Byrne and Triangle Years happened, he probably didn’t kill anybody in a pocket universe, and he didn’t come out of a birthing matrix. The change - along with Ma and Pa passing earlier - is that after a certain point (apparently before the period equivalent to his mid-2000s adventures) he changed his costume and eventually had some New 52-inspired adventures, and he and Lois ended up having a son who’s now ten and setting out on his own adventures as Superboy. He and the family have moved from a farm in Hamilton County back into Metropolis. Over the years, he’s fought Luthor, Brainiac, Darkseid, Metallo, Parasite, Bizarro, Mxyzptlk, Zod, Toyman, Eradicator, Cyborg Superman, Manchester Black, Mongul, Conduit, Imperiex, Blanque, Silver Banshee, Ulysses, and Xa-Du, among others, so pretty much all the greatest hits. The Fortress is back to having a lot of fun tchotchkes in it again too; the Supermobile’s there, crystal computers that let him Matrix-jack into hologram archives of his life and Krypton’s, Kelex is there, according to a recent Batman arc he’s using the dwarf star key from All-Star, there’s even a full-size train he and the family sometimes have dinner in. In the present though, Lois is currently in Chicago pursuing a story on her own (though she and Clark continue their relationship as normal given his ability to divide his time) and Jon has aged several years due to a time travel mishap on a space trip with Jor-El, and as the original Fortress was destroyed by Rogol Zaar, Superman moved everything to a new location in the Bermuda Triangle.

In terms of the larger world, Supergirl landed on Earth about a year ago, and for awhile lived a teen version of her TV show status quo, but is now in space with Krypto attempting to ascertain the truth of Rogol Zaar’s claims. Lex Luthor, recently semi-reformed though rapidly backsliding, went through events on a recent adventure with the Justice League that convinced him that his more savage and selfish instincts are in fact in accordance with a higher order and destiny for humanity over the supposed folly of Superman’s altruism, forming the Legion of Doom to realize this philosophical ‘breakthrough’ and destroy the League. The New Super-Man of China, Kenan Kong, remains in operation. And Conner Kent has returned with a new incarnation of Young Justice, though even he is unaware at this time how he fits into the current history of Prime Earth.

Which Stories Count?

Stories that definitely happened, whether near-identically to the original telling, or in very different forms to fit the new continuity framework

Secret Origin, And Then There Were Three... in Wonder Woman, The Case of the Second Superman, The Power-Boy from Earth, Superman’s Big Brother!, some of the old Silver Age Superman Robot stories given their presence, The Kents’ Second Super-Son!, The War Between Jimmy Olsen and Superman!, The Super-Family of Steel!, The Lois Lane Doll!, The Superman from Outer Space!, The Second Supergirl!/The Supergirl of Two Worlds!, The Conquest of Superman!, Supergirl’s Secret Enemy!, The Mystery of the Alien Super-Boy, Superman’s Super-Courtship!, The Super-Suitor of Soomar!, Duel of the Super-Duo!, Superboy’s Lost Identity!, Have I Ever Told You the Story About When I Saved Superman? in Cave Carson Has A Cybernetic Eye, Mystery Mission To Metropolis!, It’s A Bird...It’s A Plane...It’s A Supermobile!, For The Man Who Has Everything, Crisis on Infinite Earths, To Laugh and Die in Metropolis, Exile, The Day of the Krypton Man, Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite, The Death of Superman, Reign of the Supermen, The Death of Clark Kent, The Wedding Album, Strange Visitor (from Cursed Comics Cavalcade), Superman Red/Superman Blue, Grant Morrison’s JLA, DC One Million, Legacy (of Superman: The Animated Series), Driver’s Seat and Suprema Est Lex from Action Comics Special, Luthor’s time as President, Our Worlds At War, Batman: Hush, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, The Return of Bruce Wayne, The Curse of Superman, The Ghost in the Fortress of Solitude, Lois and Clark, the New 52 Supergirl series, Men of Tomorrow, Justice League of America: Power and Glory, Truth, Darkseid War, Final Days of Superman, DC Comics: Rebirth, most if not all Rebirth-era appearances and Superman-family titles, Superman Reborn and forward.

Stories that while maybe not directly referenced are implied or are exceedingly likely to be canon

The Mysterious Mr. Mxyztplk!, The Name Game, and the covers of Superman Unchained (images from these are used to illustrate stories Clark told Jon, and given Jon still refers to Mxyzptlk as ‘Ruppletat’ in accordance with that, these would seem to still be canon by implication), Dominus Effect (Sharon Vance, aka Strange Visitor, is back in canon, her origin beginning here), Of Thee I Sing and JLA/Hitman (Hacken exists and is missing a hand in accordance with Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium), What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way? (while Manchester Black had other stories and a New 52 revamp, this is of course his most significant story), Superman at the End of Days (the death of Ma and Pa Kent is identical to how Vyndktvx organized it in this arc, and as lead-in stories The Curse of Superman and The Ghost In The Fortress of Solitude are both some degree of canon, as is the native Earth 45 of major villain Superdoomsday, it’s likely this happened), H’El on Earth and Krypton Returns (Shay Veritas’s presence, the confirmed existence of the Oracle, and the assured canonicity of Supergirl’s New 52 run imply H’El was likely around).

Stories that definitely didn’t happen any way we would recognize them

Last Son (the current version of Lor-Zod bears no resemblance to Christopher Kent and was never adopted by Lois and Clark), all Conner Kent Superboy stories for now (his debut in Reign of the Supermen has been omitted), Superman and the Men of Steel/The Boy Who Stole Superman’s Cape (of all modern origins, this take is most explicitly no longer any form of canon), Byrne’s Man of Steel (numerous details contradicting the major elements of this between Krypton, Luthor, Superman’s debut, etc.), New Krypton (Zor-El was still recently alive and a version of Cyborg Superman, with the fate of Argo City being significantly different), all Legion of Superheroes stories, Return To Krypton and any stories of a similar concept (Superman’s holographic ‘trip’ to Krypton in The New World is clearly framed as the first time he has seen his homeworld or biological parents), Identity Crisis (this has been repeatedly clarified as having not happened), Superman/Wonder Woman.

[gaijinginger]

Day 12 & Final Thoughts

Before I begin my “final night in Japan” rant, an update on my last 24 hours:

Today I went to the Tsukiji Fish Market and had the best sushi of my life. I couldn’t move for about 15 minutes afterwards. No big deal. Before that I had hoped to visit the Tokyo Museum of Advertising, although it’s apparently closed until December 2017. Another thing to do on my next trip. After wandering around the market for an hour or two and consuming more sushi in a single sitting than I have in several months, I went back to my hotel and took a quick power nap. Two weeks of travel is starting to catch up with me. Tonight, I got dinner with my waitress friend again, where we discussed the logistics of Dwayne Johnson’s impending presidential run (for the record: she’s for it, I’m against it) and why so many Americans hate Woody Allen (we both concede he’s a weird dude, but agree he’s made some great movies), among other things. Always cool to have friends in different places, especially a place as cool as Tokyo.

And now, the “final night in Japan” rambling:

As I sit here in my capsule hotel room, eating green tea Kit Kats and taking mental inventory of my possessions and bags, I am overwhelmed by feelings of great privilege and fortune. How incredibly lucky am I to have even been able to entertain the idea of a trip like this in the first place.

I was very nervous about this trip before I got here. This was not only my first trip to Japan, but my first solo trip. Between those two factors, I had significant hesitation before pulling the trigger. In retrospect, pulling said trigger was one of the best, if not the best decision I’ve ever personally made.

The first few days were a little nerve-wracking. Between the culture shock, jet lag, and sudden absolute autonomy, it was a LOT to take in. But I did it, to the fullest and best extent I could have hoped to. I did probably 80% of the things I came to Japan to do, and the rest will no doubt be taken on in subsequent trips (or full-blown stints here). I’m glad I didn’t come here for a long period of time right off the bat, but I’m seriously considering it in the future. This was admittedly a bit of a fact-finding trip: getting a feel for the place before diving right into my childhood dream of actually living here. Two weeks was dipping my toes. The water is fine. More than fine, it’s incredible. I loved every second of this trip.

Japan is a crazy place. The people are antisocial and politely racist, the scenery ranges from urban cyberpunk sprawls to rural mountainous wonderscapes, the public transit is amazing, there’s beer and canned coffee in vending machines on most every corner, and the toilets spray little automated jets of water on your bits at the touch of a button (the last point will be admittedly the thing I’ll miss most; I’m buying a bidet kit for my toilet at home as soon as possible).

Before I came on this trip, especially in the weeks leading up to it, I entertained the idea of what my perception would be like afterwards several times a day. Making oatmeal in my Allston kitchen, walking to Dunkin’ Donuts, brushing my teeth- what will these things feel like once I’ve gone to Japan and come back? I’m about to find out, but for the most part, I’m sure they’ll feel the same. I’ll go back to America, and I’ll probably feel more comfortable than I have in years. More in my element.

In America, I’m at the apex of the “privilege” hierarchy- a straight white blue-eyed light-haired 20something guy from a comfortable background. In Japan, I’m a gaijin. To be such a radical outsider was something I had never personally experienced prior to coming here, and the experience was nothing short of perception-shattering. But again, I’m sure that for the most part, my life will remain the same when I get home. The experiences and perspective I’ve gained from this trip will significantly enhance my life going forward, though. Making oatmeal will still be making oatmeal, and walking to Dunkin’ will still be walking to Dunkin’. But to be able to think back to this trip- “oh, right, I went to Japan by myself for two weeks. I can do this.” The feeling of self-assurance I’m filled with now will be an invaluable tool in my life going forward.

Of course, there are lots of things in life harder than going to Japan alone as a 20something white guy with a comfortable budget. But for me, it was a lot. It recalls a diagram I once saw about self-improvement: three concentric circles. The innermost circle is the comfort zone, where nothing changes. The middle circle is the growth zone, where positive change and personal growth occur. The outer circle is the danger zone, which shouldn’t require further explanation. This trip was at the bleeding edge of the growth zone for me. I don’t think I could have taken it on even a year ago.

I’ve always loved the idea of solo travel, but prior to this trip, it always carried a certain fear with it- “what if it’s too much? What if I mess up? What if something goes wrong?” I don’t have those thoughts anywhere near as much anymore. Taking this trip has helped me shed about 90% of that mindset.

The Japanese have a saying “shogunai,” which translates roughly as “it can’t be helped.” Train running late? Shogunai. Flat tire? Shogunai. Forgot your umbrella on a rainy day? Shogunai. As a kind of greater cultural ethos, it’s why Japanese people generally reserve being stressed for things that they have direct control over, like work. Things that can’t be helped don’t deserve undue worry. At the risk of sounding “namaste,” this trip has helped me adopt a significantly more “shogunai” way of approaching life and its many complications.

Before taking this trip I heard a story about a man who goes around the world looking for his “treasure,” only to return home and find that it was right where he started. The moral of this story is supposed to be that life shouldn’t require grand narratives and self-imposed “adventures” to be fulfilling; true enlightenment and happy living is an inner thing. I saw a pretty funny t-shirt online yesterday that echoed a similar concept: a picture of Mt. Fuji and some traditional Japanese shrines overlaid with the caption “I don’t need therapy, I need to go to Japan.” I tried my best not to approach this trip with that mindset, and for that reason, it was a completely fantastic experience. I didn’t arrive in Japan expecting to leave with some fundamental truth about life that I was lacking beforehand, and I certainly won’t be leaving with any… otherwise this blog would evolve into the web store for the next tacky self-help/self-love book written by a white guy who goes to Asia and appropriates eastern mysticism (working title “The Secret 2: Buy This Book So I Can Come Eat More Sushi Here Next Year”).

For me, Japan was never a hypothetical. Rather, it was an inevitability (that line has been rattling around in my head for as long as I’ve been thinking of coming here, so now seems as good a time as any to put it to print). For as long as I’ve been familiar with the concept of travel, I’ve wanted to come here. I never expected to find the key to happiness here. I expected Japan, and what I found was absolutely, positively, 1000% Japan. Wacky, glorious Japan. It’s a country unlike any other place on earth, and I simply can’t wait for my next opportunity to return. When I do, it won’t be for some second shot at tacky “namaste” enlightenment. It will be for sushi, ramen, the Shinkansen, Toto toilets, capsule hotels, Onsens, weird English signs, and more history and culture than you can shake a katana at. It’ll be for sitting in a quiet mountain valley sipping a beer and eating a pork cutlet over rice, then hopping on the train for an hour and stepping off into a neon-studded scene from “Blade Runner” to grab some coffee flavored jello cubes and take in a VR show. And yes, it will be for the rare and uncomfortable joy of being the only white guy in a communal shower filled with confused Japanese men.

This trip has been indescribably amazing for me and to reiterate, I can’t underscore exactly how fortunate I feel to have been able to get even a glimpse into Japan’s inarticulable majesty through it. Looking back at my experiences over the past two weeks, I am humbled and awed beyond measure. Thank you all so much for sharing this journey with me. I’ll probably make another post in the next few days as a retrospective when I’m back in the U.S., but until then, peace.

[chorusfm]

Back on AbsolutePunk.net we would run a feature each year called the “Absolute 100.” The basic idea was to put together a list of bands and artists that we thought needed to get a little more attention. This would range from unsigned, to under-the-radar, to underrated acts that we wanted to highlight. Over the years it ended up being one of my favorite features we compiled (I personally discovered quite a few new bands from it). And, I’ve heard from a lot for readers that you loved it as well.

Today I’m excited to bring this feature back under a new name. We’re calling it “In the Spotlight” and we’ve got the same goal: highlight a bunch of artists we think you should check out. This year we’ve got 50 for you. Over the past month our contributors have been putting together blurbs and pulling out song recommendations, and today we’ve got the first group of 25. We’ll be releasing the next set tomorrow.

The Wild Reeds

by Craig Manning

The Wild Reeds make music that isn’t quite rock, isn’t quite country, isn’t quite folk, and isn’t quite pop, but that has clear traces of all of them. That’s the charm of the trio’s sophomore LP, The World We Built, which dropped at the beginning of March. Tight three-part female harmonies, a crackling rhythm section, and big shout-to-the-rafters choruses are the ingredients that make up the songs on World—particularly “Only Songs,” the set’s opening track and lead single. On that song, a distorted electric guitar swings through the proceedings like a wrecking ball, the three band members bellowing their vocal parts like their lives depend on it. And they just might: “Cause the only thing that saves me/Are the songs I sing, baby/You can’t save me from anything,” goes the infectious chorus. The rest of the record hums with a similar life-or-death energy—a thrilling quality that makes it one of the year’s surest breakout LPs.

Recommended Track: “Only Songs”

RIYL: First Aid Kit, Haim, The Staves

Culprit

by Deanna Chapman

Despite being in the Southern California area, I’m probably not as familiar with the local scene as I should be. However, in the abundance of bands, I was introduced to Culprit. Even with some minor line up changes over the years, they keep things moving forward. Sonder is their latest release and it’s a solid rock album. They have their sound down and Travis’ vocals are constantly great. The songwriting is a huge plus, too. They still blow me away with their big sound and emotion inducing lyrics.

Recommended Track: “Anything”

RIYL: From Indian Lakes, Thrice, Emarosa

Animal Flag

by Aj LaGambina

MA-based band, Animal Flag, released their debut LP last year, the aptly named LP. The record is actually a remaster and resequenced version of the two EP’s the band released before it, and boy does it sound great. These guys write loud, distinctive alternative rock that draws equal influence from Brand New’s midtempo songs, the Run For Cover records catalog, and “emo revival” bands, though their ability to write a hook coupled with a mastery of dynamic songwriting is what really sets them apart. The best example of their sound is the song “Sensation,” who’s layered instrumental and massive chorus gives a decent idea of what the band is capable of.

Recommended Track: “Sensation”

RIYL: Turnover, Brand New, Manchester Orchestra

Allie X

by Jason Tate

Alexandra Ashley Hughes, under the moniker Allie X, mixes a cocktail of quirky, catchy, and heartfelt into her music. While the music usually winds between upbeat and frenetic, there’s an undeniable darkness to much of the lyrical content. With an EP of music already under her belt, this June will see the release of her debut full-length. If the first few songs released are any indication, we have another round of perfectly produced pop-goodness coming our way.

Recommended Track: “That’s So Us”

RIYL: Charli XCX, Foxes, Betty Who

Susto

by Greg Robson

Let this be known: Charleston, SC quintet Susto are on the precipice of breaking out. Their latest album & I’m Fine Today blends hazy folk-pop meanderings with sublime and near-perfect alt-country. Drawing on the likes of Wilco and Neil Young and drawing on the age-old themes of love lost, love won, late-night partying and indifference, the band’s expansive sound reinvents Southern rock in a way that needs to be heard to be realized. Contemplative, self-assured and deeply rewarding, & I’m Fine Today is a monster of a record from a band that’s well on their way to breaking out. With a summer full of festivals and a bookshelf full of critical praise, 2017 might just be the year SUSTO becomes a household name.

Recommended Track: “Waves”

RIYL: Wilco, The Head and the Heart, The Lumineers, Shovels and Rope

Muncie Girls

by Zac Djamoos

On the first song on Muncie Girls’ From Caplan to Belsize, frontwoman Lande Hekt implores the listener to “try and leave your own little mark on this earth.” It seems like she’s taking her own advice – her band’s debut is ten tracks of the most energetic powerpop I’ve heard in a long time. The lyrics might be the biggest draw here, as Hekt delivers wise-beyond-her-years musings on misogyny, family, and developing radical politics, while never sounding like a textbook. From Caplan to Belsize would be legacy enough for most bands – I can’t wait to see where Muncie Girls want to take us next.

Recommended Track: “Balloon”

RIYL: Cartel, Moose Blood, Fall Out Boy

The Magic Gang

by Kyle Huntington

Brighton, England based The Magic Gang have been going from strength-to-strength for the past few years, releasing a total of three EPs to date. Each EP documents the band’s considered progression but also highlights the excitement that the jangly indie-pop group can evoke in listeners. From the more recent and angular single “How Can I Compete?” which recalls The Strokes in their early days or “Only Waiting” which is a must for any Mac DeMarco fans – The Magic Gang create the infectious, melodic and enriching breed of indie music that is near enough impossible to dislike.

Recommended Track: “How Can I Compete”

RIYL: Mac DeMarco, Weezer, The Strokes

Gold Steps

by Becky Kovach

Gold Steps has only been around about a year, but with an EP and performances at SXSW and So What?! Music Festival under their belt, the band is already making waves in the local Austin scene. But it shouldn’t be long before the buzz starts to spread. With bold choruses and explosive energy that demands attention, I think they’re exactly what the pop punk world needs right now. There’s also the added bonus of a kick ass female vocalist who, with a little time and practice, could be the next powerhouse of the genre.

Recommended Track: “Louder Than Words”

RIYL: Nominee, Sleep On It, We Are The In Crowd

Lindi Ortega

by Eric Wilson

Hailing from Toronto, Ontario, and currently residing in Nashville, Lindi Ortega is a country singer/songwriter with amazing talent and a soulful voice. She has released several albums and EPs since 2001, and her latest EP ’Til the Goin’ Gets Gone continues to showcase her depth and talent when it comes to music and songwriting. Whether you’re in the mood for some mellow folk music, or something a bit more on the country side, Ortega’s discography will give you plenty of options to choose from. I’m excited to hear how her style will continue to evolve over time.

Recommended Track: “Til the Goin’ Gets Gone”

RIYL: Kacey Musgraves, Sarah Jarosz

Natalie Hemby

by Craig Manning

You might not know Natalie Hemby’s name, but if you’ve ever listened to country radio, you’ve probably heard one of her songs. An ultra-prolific gun-for-hire, Hemby has credits on records by everyone from Miranda Lambert to Maren Morris to Nelly Furtado. In her “day job,” Hemby knows how to spin a turn of phrase or a catchy chorus to build a surefire radio earworm. On her debut record, though, Hemby dials back her own mainstream country leanings for something far more personal and understated. The record in question, this year’s splendid Puxico, is an album about home, family, youth, young love, summer, and life itself. Remarkably, given Hemby’s resume, there isn’t an obvious single. Instead, Puxico is a capital-A Album, built around concept (Hemby wrote it about her grandfather’s hometown) and sturdy, mood-setting tracks (swoon-worthy summer night gems like “Lovers on Display” and “Worn”). The resulting record is destined to land plenty of “Best of the Year” notices come to December—and perhaps maybe even a Grammy nod or two.

Recommended Track: “Lovers on Display”

RIYL: Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, Miranda Lambert

Feeny

by Craig Ismaili

After years of grinding out explosive live sets in support of their first EP Winter Of Our Disconnect, Feeny found themselves at a crossroads in late 2015, as they went into the studio to record with Jesse Cannon. Would they continue to hone the pop-punk sound of their early material, despite the growing sense within the band that pop-punk was not what interested them most musically anymore? Or would they take a leap forward sonically, potentially distancing themselves from their peers and bands they had played with in the past. The New Jersey quartet Feeny chose correctly, reinventing their sound for their 2016 EP No Beauty In Routine. While there are still moments where Feeny break into the bar chord blitzkrieg of pop-punk, they let songs breathe so much more on the EP than they ever have in the past, breaking into moments that border on post-rock. The results show in moments like the end of the featured song, “Patience in Paranoia” where, after vocalist Matthew Koerner howls the song’s final line, “These memories are never enough,” the music breaks down to a softly strummed guitar, and the sounds of a wistful chord progression, as if the song is flicking through the carousel of memories. No Beauty in Routine is a moody, introspective record, with songs like the brooding “Spoliation (Uncomfortable),” exploring insecurities and irreconcilable differences which can tear relationships apart. It’s honest, heartfelt music from a band that trades on this sort of heart-on-sleeve troubadorism.

Recommended Track: “Patience and Paranoia”

RIYL: Microwave, Saves The Day, Taking Back Sunday

Super American

by Deanna Chapman

Take This To Heart Records continues to impress with the band’s they sign. Super American polished up their sound and recently released Disposable. The album is solid top to bottom. The album mixes upbeat songs with a couple that slow things down and give you time to realize just how good the band is. Their personality shines with their songs and they’re a band you’ll want to check out. It would be a shame to miss out on their recent release. It’s a stand out for me in 2017 so far.

Recommended Track: “Sloppy Jazz”

RIYL: Weezer, Superdrag, State Champs

Rosie Carney

by Greg Robson

Irish singer-songwriter Rosie Carney sings her songs with such conviction and sincerity you’ll find it near impossible to turn away. The thought-provoking and melancholic ballad “Awake Me” recounts her battles with both anorexia and depression and calls to mind both Joni Mitchell and Bon Iver. At only 19, Carney possesses a triple threat: deft piano playing, poetic verses and soaring melodies. Her songs are meticulously crafted, achingly tender, wise beyond their years and utterly timeless. A veteran of SXSW, Carney is poised for a big 2017 and should make waves on American soil in the very near future.

Recommended Track: “Awake Me”

RIYL: Joni Mitchell, Bon Iver, Joanna Newsom, Carole King

Daydream

by Aj LaGambina

California’s Daydream just released their debut full length Enjoy Nothing on April 4th, a more-than-worthy follow-up to their two 2016 EP’s. The entire record is stacked with hooks, big guitars, and the kind of instantly relatable lyrics found on some of the best emo/pop/rock records of the early 2000’s. Slow opener “Seeking Human Kindness” marks a strong start for the record and it keeps getting better from there. Though closer “Goodbye in Downtown” and second track “Bored” are the best examples of Daydream’s overall sound. The whole LP begs to be played while speeding down the highway, and that’s exactly how I’ll listen to it.

Recommended Track: “Bored”

RIYL: Jimmy Eat World, The Menzingers

Rick Brantley

by Craig Manning

Rick Brantley wrote the best song I heard in 2016. The tune in question, an understated ballad called “Hurt People,” doesn’t sound like much when you first hit play: just a simple piano line and Brantley’s spoken-word delivery. But focus on the lyrics, and “Hurt People” will crack your heart in half like a walnut, seal it back together, and give you the inspiration to be better. I won’t spoil too much: the song deserves to stand on its own, and reading about it can’t possibly compare to hearing it. But suffice to say that Brantley’s tales—about an abused kid who bullies his classmates, about a girl who has never felt love in her life, and about the scars we all have that we can never erase—carry lessons that everyone needs to learn right now. The rest of Brantley’s output—including two recent EPs, the largely acoustic Lo-Fi and the more rock-oriented Hi-Fi—display his dynamic songwriting talents, his big voice, and his Springsteen-circa-Lucky Town sound. But “Hurt People” alone would merit Brantley a spot on this list, if only because it’s one of those rare songs that I think every person in the world should hear.

Recommended Track: “Hurt People”

RIYL: Bruce Springsteen, John Moreland, Butch Walker

Pale Waves

by Jason Tate

Dirty Hit Records have been on a roll with their signings and the latest, Pale Waves, is no exception. Breathy pop-music with a groove, helped by Matt and George of The 1975’s unmistakable crystalline production, propels the lead single “There’s a Honey” to ear-candy status. Hopefully we’ll be getting more music from this group in the near future, yet one song’s enough to have turned my head and put this band smack dab in the middle of my radar.

Recommended Track: “There’s A Honey”

RIYL: The Japanese House, The 1975

Save Ends

by Zac Djamoos

Black Numbers has been one of the best and most under-appreciated labels around for a few years now, and last year they signed one of the best and most under-appreciated bands around. Save Ends’ effortlessly catchy brand of emo-influenced pop-punk feels like the kind of stuff that could’ve come out on Vagrant Records in ’01 just as easily as on Black Numbers in ’16. With the weather getting warmer and the band in the studio, there’s no better time than now to check out (or revisit) their full-length debut Warm Hearts, Cold Hands.

Recommended Track: “I Fell Asleep”

RIYL: Saves the Day, Tigers Jaw, Turnover

Many Rooms

by Craig Ismaili

Many Rooms is the brainchild of Brianna Hunt, and thus far they have released just six songs with the project. Those six came in the form of an EP called Hollow Body which was released back at the end of 2015. The first time I heard “Hollow Body” it shook me down to my very core. If you, like I did, fell in love with the stark intimacy of Julien Baker’s “Sprained Ankle,” I full-heartedly believe you will fall in love with Many Rooms. You see, “Sprained Ankle” feels like you are in the room with Baker as she pours her heart out on the track. Many Rooms feels like you are in the room with Hunt, except it’s pitch black and she is singing off into the void of the darkness. There is such a soul-bearing honesty to the songs on Hollow Body. Hunt’s lyrics, ethereal though her voice may be, seem to cut down to the very core of humanity. “Promises”, the second track on Hollow Body, has some of my favorite lyrics of the decade: “oh, how beautiful a lie / when it makes you feel like you can fly / and your wings are made of paper dreams and paper futures.” I can’t wait until Hunt releases more music with this project.

Recommended Track: Promises

RIYL: Julien Baker, Conor Oberst, Elliot Smith

Sainte

by Anna Acosta

Sainte is the long-anticipated solo project of former We Are the In Crowd vocalist Tay Jardine, and it delivers in spades. Although the project has only released two singles to date, the tracks are explosive, dance-y pop numbers that bode incredibly well for what’s to come. Jardine’s expressive songwriting and vocals are finally the focal point of the music she’s making, and the result is a refreshingly authentic sound that manages to feel both joyful and completely authentic. Jardine is all grown up, and she’s not pulling any punches.

Recommended Track: “With Or Without Me”

RIYL: We Are The In Crowd, Tonight Alive, The Gospel Youth

Mom Jeans.

by Becky Kovach

I went into my first Mom Jeans. show having never seen them before and with very little knowledge of their music. I was sold the minute their guitarist took a between-song break as an opportunity to showcase his repertoire of dad jokes. It also helps that the band’s lyrics are endearing in a pour-out-your-heart kind of way, and their music blends emo, punk, and acoustic into a cathartic rush of passion. Oh and did I mention that their single “edward 40hands” samples Bob’s Burgers? Yeah.

Recommended Track: “Edward 40hands”

RIYL: Sorority Noise, Oso Oso, The Front Bottoms

Oso Oso

by Jason Tate

There’s something perfectly nostalgic about Oso Oso’s The Yunahon Mixtape. It’s a little like opening a time capsule from the early 00’s and finding an album inside from a band you’ve never heard but could almost swear you used to love. I’m pulled back to my early college days filled with sharing mixtapes with dorm room friends, laying in the sun with one album on repeat, and getting wrapped in every note. This gem of an album was released in January. If you’re looking for something that sounds a little like yesteryear while being a welcome jolt during a time that seems too fucked-up to be real, you should make this the next album you spin.

Recommended Track: “The Cool”

RIYL: State Lines, Sorority Noise, You Blew It!

Striking Matches

by Craig Manning

Striking Matches is a band with one of the all-time great origin stories. A duo featuring singer/songwriter/guitarists Sarah Zimmerman and Justin Davis, the band got its start in the classroom ten years ago, when the two freshman guitar majors got paired up by a professor. As you could probably already gather from the band name, there was a spark. Since then, Striking Matches have opened for everyone from Train to Ashley Monroe to Vince Gill, written songs for the country music soap opera Nashville, and made their debut album under the tutelage of none other than T Bone Burnett. That’s quite the whirlwind start for any act, but one gets the sense that Zimmerman and Davis can handle it. On their debut album, 2015’s Nothing but the Silence, Zimmerman and Davis forged a true two-person identity. They both sang, they both wrote songs, and they both had plenty of room to show off their shit-kicking guitar skills. The songs themselves were incredibly refined, from the tender Civil Wars-esque ballads (“Nothing but the Silence,” “When the Right One Comes Along”) to the livewire rockers (turbulent opener “Trouble Is as Trouble Does”). And then there’s the outro to “Make a Liar Out of Me,” where Zimmerman shreds one of the most badass guitar solos of the 21st century.

Recommended Track: “Make a Liar Out of Me”

RIYL: The Civil Wars, melody-driven country-folk songs with incredible guitarwork

Crows

by Kyle Huntington

If there was ever a new band to ignite the primal connection to music – it’s Crows from London, England. Drawing influence in sound from the any of the post-punk greats with a splattering of shoegaze elements, garage rawness and hardcore tendencies – they’re a band who create the sense of walking a tightrope, a balancing act between unsettling chaos and energised melody – undeniable in its intense excitement. Whether on record with buzzsaw guitars and sweet darkness or in a live setting where they thrive and are one of the most captivating bands performing today – to the point where frontman James Cox commands, antagonises, includes and hypnotises the crowd in only the best ways – Crows are the exhilarating new punk band people have been waiting for. Check out “The Itch” and its explosion for an insight as well as “Whisper”.

Recommended Track: “Whisper”

RIYL: Joy Division, Fugazi, METZ

Donna Missal

by Craig Ismaili

You know a song is special when Zane Lowe uses his massive platform on Beats Radio 1 to premiere the debut single from an unsigned artist. That single was the sultry, incendiary “Keep Lying” from Donna Missal. The song has echoes of Nina Simone all over it, plus more than a bit of resemblance to Amy Winehouse’s “Back To Black.” To put it more simply, “Keep Lying” has some heeeaaat. But the New Jersey singer didn’t stop there. She has since released a string of singles over the past few years, including, most recently, the spacious, breathy “Holiday.” She has a chance to be a special musician in an era with a distinct lack of voices like her. In times where people with voices like hers are often pushed to alternative rock (Elle King), Donna Missal has a chance to lead the charge for the return of the seductress to pop radio. She’s finishing up her debut full-length album now, and I have hope it will be released later this year.

Recommended Track: “Keep Lying”

RIYL: Elle King, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse

Cold Climb It

by Becky Kovach

If the vocalist of Cold Climb It sounds familiar, maybe take a closer listen to the backing vocals in some of your favorite The Wonder Years tracks. Yup, that’s Matt Brasch. Cold Climb It is an additional endeavor of Brasch’s, started a little less than a year ago. Since then the band has played a smattering of shows in the Philly area and released their debut EP Fade. Brasch steps into the spotlight on these songs, and seems at home in the position; he tackles the role of lead singer/songwriter with grace and ease. His voice has long reminded me of Smoking Popes’ Josh Caterer – melancholy in a soothing way – and the band’s brooding tones darker lyrics are a perfect fit. While The Wonder Years will always have my heart, Cold Climb It has become a new favorite for me and I look forward to seeing what Brasch does with the band in the future.

Recommended Track: “Looking Hard For Inspiration”

RIYL: Smoking Popes, Microwave, Alkaline Trio

Check back tomorrow for our second round of 25.

Please consider supporting us so we can keep bringing you stories like this one.

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[thelmasirby32]

How to Read Google Algorithm Updates

Links = Rank

Old Google (pre-Panda) was to some degree largely the following: links = rank.

Once you had enough links to a site you could literally pour content into a site like water and have the domain's aggregate link authority help anything on that site rank well quickly.

As much as PageRank was hyped & important, having a diverse range of linking domains and keyword-focused anchor text were important.

Brand = Rank

After Vince then Panda a site's brand awareness (or, rather, ranking signals that might best simulate it) were folded into the ability to rank well.

Panda considered factors beyond links & when it first rolled out it would clip anything on a particular domain or subdomain. Some sites like HubPages shifted their content into subdomains by users. And some aggressive spammers would rotate their entire site onto different subdomains repeatedly each time a Panda update happened. That allowed those sites to immediately recover from the first couple Panda updates, but eventually Google closed off that loophole.

Any signal which gets relied on eventually gets abused intentionally or unintentionally. And over time it leads to a "sameness" of the result set unless other signals are used:

Google is absolute garbage for searching anything related to a product. If I'm trying to learn something invariably I am required to search another source like Reddit through Google. For example, I became introduced to the concept of weighted blankets and was intrigued. So I Google "why use a weighted blanket" and "weighted blanket benefits". Just by virtue of the word "weighted blanket" being in the search I got pages and pages of nothing but ads trying to sell them, and zero meaningful discourse on why I would use one

Getting More Granular

Over time as Google got more refined with Panda broad-based sites outside of the news vertical often fell on tough times unless they were dedicated to some specific media format or had a lot of user engagement metrics like a strong social network site. That is a big part of why the New York Times sold About.com for less than they paid for it & after IAC bought it they broke it down into a variety of sites like: Verywell (health), the Spruce (home decor), the Balance (personal finance), Lifewire (technology), Tripsavvy (travel) and ThoughtCo (education & self-improvement).

Penguin further clipped aggressive anchor text built on low quality links. When the Penguin update rolled out Google also rolled out an on-page spam classifier to further obfuscate the update. And the Penguin update was sandwiched by Panda updates on either side, making it hard for people to reverse engineer any signal out of weekly winners and losers lists from services that aggregate massive amounts of keyword rank tracking data.

So much of the link graph has been decimated that Google reversed their stance on nofollow to where in March 1st of this year they started treating it as a hint versus a directive for ranking purposes. Many mainstream media websites were overusing nofollow or not citing sources at all, so this additional layer of obfuscation on Google's part will allow them to find more signal in that noise.

March 4, 2020 Algo Update

On May 4th Google rolled out another major core update.

Later today, we are releasing a broad core algorithm update, as we do several times per year. It is called the May 2020 Core Update. Our guidance about such updates remains as we’ve covered before. Please see this blog post for more about that:https://t.co/e5ZQUAlt0G— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 4, 2020

I saw some sites which had their rankings suppressed for years see a big jump. But many things changed at once.

Wedge Issues

On some political search queries which were primarily classified as being news related Google is trying to limit political blowback by showing official sites and data scraped from official sites instead of putting news front & center.

"Google’s pretty much made it explicit that they’re not going to propagate news sites when it comes to election related queries and you scroll and you get a giant election widget in your phone and it shows you all the different data on the primary results and then you go down, you find Wikipedia, you find other like historical references, and before you even get to a single news article, it’s pretty crazy how Google’s changed the way that the SERP is intended."

That change reflects the permanent change to the news media ecosystem brought on by the web.

The Internet commoditized the distribution of facts. The "news" media responded by pivoting wholesale into opinions and entertainment.— Naval (@naval) May 26, 2016

YMYL

A blog post by Lily Ray from Path Interactive used Sistrix data to show many of the sites which saw high volatility were in the healthcare vertical & other your money, your life (YMYL) categories.

Aggressive Monetization

One of the more interesting pieces of feedback on the update was from Rank Ranger, where they looked at particular pages that jumped or fell hard on the update. They noticed sites that put ads or ad-like content front and center may have seen sharp falls on some of those big money pages which were aggressively monetized:

Seeing this all but cements the notion (in my mind at least) that Google did not want content unrelated to the main purpose of the page to appear above the fold to the exclusion of the page's main content! Now for the second wrinkle in my theory.... A lot of the pages being swapped out for new ones did not use the above-indicated format where a series of "navigation boxes" dominated the page above the fold.

The above shift had a big impact on some sites which are worth serious money. Intuit paid over $7 billion to acquire Credit Karma, but their credit card affiliate pages recently slid hard.

Credit Karma lost 40% traffic from May core update. That’s insane, they do major TV ads and likely pay millions in SEO expenses. Think about that folks. Your site isn’t safe. Google changes what they want radically with every update, while telling us nothing!— SEOwner (@tehseowner) May 14, 2020

The above sort of shift reflects Google getting more granular with their algorithms. Early Panda was all or nothing. Then it started to have different levels of impact throughout different portions of a site.

Brand was sort of a band aid or a rising tide that lifted all (branded) boats. Now we are seeing Google get more granular with their algorithms where a strong brand might not be enough if they view the monetization as being excessive. That same focus on page layout can have a more adverse impact on small niche websites.

One of my old legacy clients had a site which was primarily monetized by the Amazon affiliate program. About a month ago Amazon chopped affiliate commissions in half & then the aggressive ad placement caused search traffic to the site to get chopped in half when rankings slid on this update.

Their site has been trending down over the past couple years largely due to neglect as it was always a small side project. They recently improved some of the content about a month or so ago and that ended up leading to a bit of a boost, but then this update came. As long as that ad placement doesn't change the declines are likely to continue.

They just recently removed that ad unit, but that meant another drop in income as until there is another big algo update they're likely to stay at around half search traffic. So now they have a half of a half of a half. Good thing the site did not have any full time employees or they'd be among the millions of newly unemployed. That experience though really reflects how websites can be almost like debt levered companies in terms of going under virtually overnight. Who can have revenue slide around 88% and then take increase investment in the property using the remaining 12% while they wait for the site to be rescored for a quarter year or more?

"If you have been negatively impacted by a core update, you (mostly) cannot see recovery from that until another core update. In addition, you will only see recovery if you significantly improve the site over the long-term. If you haven’t done enough to improve the site overall, you might have to wait several updates to see an increase as you keep improving the site. And since core updates are typically separated by 3-4 months, that means you might need to wait a while."

Almost nobody can afford to do that unless the site is just a side project.

Google could choose to run major updates more frequently, allowing sites to recover more quickly, but they gain economic benefit in defunding SEO investments & adding opportunity cost to aggressive SEO strategies by ensuring ranking declines on major updates last a season or more.

Choosing a Strategy vs Letting Things Come at You

They probably should have lowered their ad density when they did those other upgrades. If they had they likely would have seen rankings at worst flat or likely up as some other competing sites fell. Instead they are rolling with a half of a half of a half on the revenue front. Glenn Gabe preaches the importance of fixing all the problems you can find rather than just fixing one or two things and hoping it is enough. If you have a site which is on the edge you sort of have to consider the trade offs between various approaches to monetization.

monetize it lightly and hope the site does well for many years

monetize it slightly aggressively while using the extra income to further improve the site elsewhere and ensure you have enough to get by any lean months

aggressively monetize the shortly after a major ranking update if it was previously lightly monetized & then hope to sell it off a month or two later before the next major algorithm update clips it again

Outcomes will depend partly on timing and luck, but consciously choosing a strategy is likely to yield better returns than doing a bit of mix-n-match while having your head buried in the sand.

Reading the Algo Updates

You can spend 50 or 100 hours reading blog posts about the update and learn precisely nothing in the process if you do not know which authors are bullshitting and which authors are writing about the correct signals.

But how do you know who knows what they are talking about?

It is more than a bit tricky as the people who know the most often do not have any economic advantage in writing specifics about the update. If you primarily monetize your own websites, then the ignorance of the broader market is a big part of your competitive advantage.

Making things even trickier, the less you know the more likely Google would be to trust you with sending official messaging through you. If you syndicate their messaging without questioning it, you get a treat - more exclusives. If you question their messaging in a way that undermines their goals, you'd quickly become persona non grata - something cNet learned many years ago when they published Eric Schmidt's address.

It would be unlikely you'd see the following sort of Tweet from say Blue Hat SEO or Fantomaster or such.

I asked Gary about E-A-T. He said it's largely based on links and mentions on authoritative sites. i.e. if the Washington post mentions you, that's good. He recommended reading the sections in the QRG on E-A-T as it outlines things well.@methode #Pubcon— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) February 21, 2018

To be able to read the algorithms well you have to have some market sectors and keyword groups you know well. Passively collecting an archive of historical data makes the big changes stand out quickly. Everyone who depends on SEO to make a living should subscribe to an online rank tracking service or run something like Serposcope locally to track at least a dozen or two dozen keywords. If you track rankings locally it makes sense to use a set of web proxies and run the queries slowly through each so you don't get blocked.

Once you see outliers most people miss that align with what you see in a data set, your level of confidence increases and you can spend more time trying to unravel what signals changed.

I've read influential industry writers mention that links were heavily discounted on this update. I have also read Tweets like this one which could potentially indicate the opposite.

Check out https://t.co/1GhD2U01ch . Up even more than Pinterest and ranking for some real freaky shit.— Paul Macnamara (@TheRealpmac) May 12, 2020

If I had little to no data, I wouldn't be able to get any signal out of that range of opinions. I'd sort of be stuck at "who knows."

By having my own data I track I can quickly figure out which message is more inline with what I saw in my subset of data & form a more solid hypothesis.

No Single Smoking Gun

As Glenn Gabe is fond of saying, sites that tank usually have multiple major issues.

Google rolls out major updates infrequently enough that they can sandwich a couple different aspects into major updates at the same time in order to make it harder to reverse engineer updates. So it does help to read widely with an open mind and imagine what signal shifts could cause the sorts of ranking shifts you are seeing.

Sometimes site level data is more than enough to figure out what changed, but as the above Credit Karma example showed sometimes you need to get far more granular and look at page-level data to form a solid hypothesis.

As the World Changes, the Web Also Changes

About 15 years ago online dating was seen as a weird niche for recluses who perhaps typically repulsed real people in person. Now there are all sorts of niche specialty dating sites including a variety of DTF type apps. What was once weird & absurd had over time become normal.

The COVID-19 scare is going to cause lasting shifts in consumer behavior that accelerate the movement of commerce online. A decade of change will happen in a year or two across many markets.

Telemedicine will grow quickly. Facebook is adding commerce featured directly onto their platform through partnering with Shopify. Spotify is spending big money to buy exclusives rights to distribute widely followed podcasters like Joe Rogan. Uber recently offered to acquire GrubHub. Google and Apple will continue adding financing features to their mobile devices. Movie theaters have lost much of their appeal.

Tons of offline "value" businesses ended up having no value after months of revenue disappearing while large outstanding debts accumulated interest. There is a belief that some of those brands will have strong latent brand value that carries over online, but if they were weak even when the offline stores acting like interactive billboards subsidized consumer awareness of their brands then as those stores close the consumer awareness & loyalty from in-person interactions will also dry up. A shell of a company rebuilt around the Toys R' Us brand is unlikely to beat out Amazon's parallel offering or a company which still runs stores offline.

Big box retailers like Target & Walmart are growing their online sales at hundreds of percent year over year.

There will be waves of bankruptcies, shifts in commercial real estate prices, more people working remotely (shifting residential real estate demand from the urban core back out into suburbs).

More and more activities will become normal online activities.

The University of California has about a half-million students & in the fall semester they are going to try to have most of those classes happen online. How much usage data does Google gain as thousands of institutions put more and more of their infrastructure and service online?

Colleges have to convince students for the next year that a remote education is worth every bit as much as an in-person one, and then pivot back before students actually start believing it. It’s like only being able to sell your competitor’s product for a year.— Naval (@naval) May 6, 2020

A lot of B & C level schools are going to go under as the like-vs-like comparison gets easier. Back when I ran a membership site here a college paid us to have students gain access to our membership area of the site. As online education gets normalized many unofficial trade-related sites will look more economically attractive on a relative basis.

Categories: 

google

from Digital Marketing News http://www.seobook.com/reading-google-algorithm-updates

[mathematicianadda]

Routines for Reasoning: A Journey of Bravery and Mathematical Thinking

Posted on: 

Sunday, December 22, 2019 - 5:53am

Written by: Elizabeth Azinheira, 7th Grade Teacher at Forest Park Middle School in Springfield.

In this blog, Elizabeth Azinheira describes how reading the book "Routines for Reasoning" and implementing the ideas has changed her teaching. In her intervention classroom, Liz carefully designs lessons that allow all her students to work at their learning edges. This may include working on language skills as well as working on mathematical ideas from lower grade levels. Liz was supported in making these changes by Dr. Christine von Renesse in a graduate course by special arrangement which included weekly video meetings and several classroom observations. After telling her personal story, Liz provides an overview of the routines and makes some of her lesson plans available for others to use.

The Journey...

Upon being given their own classroom, every teacher quickly learns that the reality of teaching is very unlike the experience they imagined. After all, the image conjured in the imagination of an unsuspecting would-be teacher is likely that of a classroom filled with obedient children who are ready to receive information from the wise and knowledgeable teacher, who stands at the front of the classroom and tells them what to do. “What could be more gratifying than dispensing valuable information to young hearts and minds?” one might think. “How could any child refuse the gifts of knowledge and wisdom I so obviously have to bestow upon them? Surely they would recognize the value of what I have to say.” I’m pretty sure we’ve all had some version of this daydream.

Cue the sound of a scratched record. (Do my fellow millennials even get this reference? To the Gen-Zers entering the workforce, you should know that, before MP3s and streaming there was this thing called a CD, before which there were tapes, and before those there were records and those records created a dramatic ripping sound when scratched and – alas, I digress. Let me get back to the topic on hand).

No, no, lovely would-be teacher. The reality of teaching today is that you will be simultaneously (take a deep breath now): (1) assessing student’s prior knowledge while teaching them the current standard but also considering how your instruction will affect students’ understanding and subsequent mastery of the next standard; (2) meeting the (often conflicting) demands of administration while (3) managing the unimaginably creative array of conflicts between students whose social skills are -ahem – developing; (4) communicating with parents of varying interest, expectations, and influence; (5) planning instruction for the average student, the advanced student, the student with learning difficulties, the student with major gaps in prior knowledge, the student with limited English proficiency, and –lest we forget—the student, who, for some reason (and unbeknownst to you, despite your infinite attempts to understand) does not like you and makes your job very difficult. Then, after making roughly 1,500 in-the-moment, on-the-fly, and gosh-I-really-hope-I-just-made-the-right-choice decisions of just one single day, you have the pleasure of doing it all over again the next day. (Whew!)

And yet, here’s the thing: It. Is. Awesome. The best ride you’ll ever be on. Worth every moment of struggle, every extra sip of coffee and every minute of post-work napping. Because here’s the thing: you are being and modeling the change that you wanted to see in the world.

You are an essential part of the journey for each one of those sweet (and sour) little buggars –those future business owners and leaders and decision-makers who will run the world while we slowly age and eventually retire (scary thought, I know, I know, so, let’s just bring this story back to the present tense). But in all seriousness, think about the self-improvement one inevitably makes throughout a normal lifetime. And now imagine that x10. That’s the experience of being a teacher. Indeed, as long as you are willing to reflect on how you can do better tomorrow, maintain a growth mindset and remain committed to practicing self-care, you will thrive. And you will have the journey of a lifetime.

I am currently on that journey. Although my teaching has transformed in the 6 years since I started teaching, I have only just begun the process of becoming the teacher that my students truly need me to be. In fact, it took me until this past fall to understand –to really understand—that teachers, including me, must move beyond lecture-style lessons. And yes, it still counts as lecturing if you have kids work with you in a small group to do their work. (I think of it this way: If I am the one explaining what should be done and why it makes sense, then I am teaching a lecture-style lesson). Now, why do we have to abandon our good-ol’ “sit 'n git” style of teaching, since it’s ostensibly worked for so long?

I think you already know the answer to that question. Students learn by tinkering, by exploring, by finding their words and sharing ideas. Even as adults, that is how we learn. And yet, in the name of efficiency and despite our own experiences to the contrary, so much of teaching takes place in the form of “you sit and copy my notes, listen to my rules, practice problems on your own, and then, hopefully, when you encounter a complex word problem, you will figure out how to do it right.”

In the name of full transparency, that was (more or less) the process of teaching that I used to follow. Sure, I tried to get students thinking by modeling my own thinking via “think-alouds” and prescriptive problem-solving strategy lists. But unsurprisingly, my students still just “didn’t get it.” They didn’t internalize any of my teaching! “Why aren’t they getting it?!” I would ask myself while pulling out my hair and blaming myself for being such an ineffective teacher; blaming them for being unable to make sense of it all in a meaningful or enduring way.

Upon reflection, it becomes so obvious to see: I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand that learning can only take place when students have multiple and varied opportunities to explore math on their own terms and in their own words. That means that my job, as the teacher, is to facilitate the intersection between what students can do, what they want to do, and what I can convince them to do!

I only just started to understand this distinction recently. What is amazing is that, since modifying my approach, my students have grown tremendously in their ability to communicate their mathematical thinking to me and to each other. This is because, for the last 4 months, I am been studying and practicing the art of mathematical reasoning with my students based on the book Routines for Reasoning by Grace Kelemanik, Amy Lucenta, and Susan Janssen Creighton. I have also been working with Dr. von Renesse on establishing a culture of bravery and peer-to-peer communication within the classroom.

Don’t the ideas of mathematical reasoning, bravery, and communication, sound so simple, so foundational, so…. implicitly interwoven into everything we do, anyway? And yet, If you are like me, you believe you incorporate these ideas into your classroom culture more than you actually do. After all, I’d thought I’d been doing mathematical reasoning for my previous 5 years of teaching. But as I explored Routines for Reasoning and examined ideas with Dr. Renesse, I came to understand that I needed to improve the way I modeled ideas of mathematical thinking and bravery in front of my students. I needed to explicitly point out examples of courage in the classroom and draw attention to metacognitive strategies.

Put another way, I had to be brave and take the risk of trying new strategies that felt, at first, like a waste of precious time. I had to be courageous by overcoming the fear that my reluctant learners would refuse to engage in the new routines, that they might revolt or start throwing rotten fruit at me –never mind where they would have gotten rotten fruit.

Just as I would later teach my students to say, I first had to tell myself: “It’s okay to be wrong and to make mistakes along the way, because the process of being wrong teaches us more than if we had first been right.” It sounds kind of obvious. And yet, saying this phrase - repeating it over and over every chance I got, until my kids actually started believing it to have a sliver of truth– it felt radical. What I now understand, however, is that this radical little phrase has the power to change hearts and minds well beyond the boundaries of math. It is with this very phrase that I have fortified my students against math anxiety and promoted a culture of mathematical exploration. By celebrating mistakes and, yes, the inefficient process of growth, I saw even my most reluctant of students develop a better understanding of mathematical concepts. Thus, I can honestly report that what I really learned this semester was more than just some routines out of a book – it was the art of reasoning.

And now I want to support you in being brave and taking the risk of transforming your own classroom into a laboratory of mathematical thinking. To support you, I leave you a brief guide to implementing the 4 Routines for Reasoning along with teacher-ready lesson plans and tasks. While the routines can be modified for any grade level, I have left you tasks for major learning strands in grades 4 through 7.

Let me close by saying that I am so glad you are on this journey. I wish you, and the students whose lives you will touch throughout your career, the many joys of mathematical reasoning.

Routines for Reasoning Resources:

On this page, Liz provides an overview of the routines and makes some of her lesson plans available for others to use.

from Discovering the Art of Mathematics blogs from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Mfjm3d

[maxihealth]

Health @ Retail – Prelude to GMDC SelfCare Summit with Updates from Hims & Hers, GoodRx, Sam’s Club and Amazon Care

“We knew millions of people weren’t getting the care they needed — they were either too embarrassed to seek help or felt stuck in a system that was confusing and intimidating. Digital health has the potential to radically change the way people approach their wellness and, since launching in 2017, we’ve outpaced even our own expectations, delivering more than 1 million Hims & Hers products to our customers. In collaboration with highly-qualified doctors and healthcare providers, we’ve built a digital health platform that is changing the way people talk about and receive the care they need.”

That’s  a verbatim paragraph from a blog on the Hims & Hers’ Medium channel. published on 30 September 2019.

As we approach this coming weekend’s SelfCare Summit sponsored by GMDC, I continue to update my retail health ecosystem graphics and landscape. This post will be my latest read on the issue which I’ll discuss on Friday afternoon 5th October in a session titled, “The New Health/Care: Patient-Led, Retail-Enabled.”

Over the past sixty days, the business rationale for “getting people the care they need” could have been written into press releases from Sam’s Club and Walmart, Amazon, Best Buy and GoodRx, all of which announced plans in the past few weeks to extend health/care services in the U.S. beyond hospitals and bricks-and-mortar doctors’ offices.

Start with Hims and Hers, moving in the opposite direction from telehealth care focused on men’s and women’s health, morphing into a physical pharmacy distribution model. Hims and Hers will invest in a Columbus, Ohio-based mail order pharmacy to be operational in 2020, featuring customer support and fulfillment centers. Up to now, the companies have been working with third-party pharmacies to pick-and-pack medicines for consumers looking to support their gender-specific wellness needs.

 Now consider GoodRx, linking up with HeyDoctor to help the prescription drug discounting platform expand telehealth services. The organization will be known as GoodRx Care.

The press release announcing the acquisition of HeyDoctor on 26th September noted that, “This new service comes at a time when Americans find that getting access to primary care physicians to be increasingly difficult….As healthcare costs continue to rise and many insurance plans cover fewer services than they did a year ago, consumers need affordable options for their routine health needs. With the introduction of GoodRx Care, Americans now have easy access to a network of qualified medical professionals so they can get the treatment they need, when they need it….GoodRx Care aims to help fill in the gaps in care to improve access, adherence, and affordability of medical care for all Americans.”

HeyDoctor branded itself as an online urgent care provider with an app that’s generated good word-of-mouth among users. Among its most-used services are help for urinary tract infections, birth control, acne and cold sores, giving you an idea of the organization’s key (young) demographic.

Addressing the access and affordability pillars, Sam’s Club launched a collaboration with Humana called Care Accelerator. As the third graphic illustrates, consumers can opt into one of four health care “bundles,” including components such as generic medications, primary care, vision and dental care, hearing and alternative medicine services. This isn’t meant to be a fully-loaded insurance plan, but a product that “curates” selected medical services consumers want to access at relatively low-cost to care for basic health care needs.

As I often say, “collaboration is the new black” in health care, and the Care Accelerator program brings together different partners to deliver components of care to the packages: in addition to Humana, Sam’s Club is working with Quest Diagnosis for lab testing and 98point6, an on-demand text-based app for primary care consultations. The 98pointsix primary care virtual visits cost $1 per visit and are included in the lowest-priced program at $50 per year, which also includes free select generic drugs sourced at Sam’s Club pharmacies, and discounted eye exams and eyewear.

The program is being piloted in Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina and if it’s found viable and consumer-loved, Sam’s Club will expand it to club members across the U.S.

Programs range from $50 to $240 a year for the most complete plan. That $240 plan covers up to six family members and includes a preventive health screening looking at diabetes and heart disease.

Note that Sam’s Club is part of the Walmart business family, which has been fast-expanding its footprint in health care and wellness in the past several months. I’ve addressed the company’s growing health/care ethos here in Health Populi in these posts written this year —

Walmart’s Growing Footprint in Health/Care, from Guns to Mental Health and Gardens

FANGs & MAGA – Meet WaWa for Health, Walgreens and Walmart

How Walmart Could Bolster Healthcare in the Community

And for historical perspective, this post published over a decade ago in 2008!

Drugstore Dominance, and the Walmart Wild Card.

Finally, Amazon announced Amazon Care, its first clinic for employees in the headquarters Seattle area. This is not so much Amazon hanging up a brick-and-mortal medical center-shingle (like Walmart’s recent launch of a freestanding clinic model)  but a hybrid of virtual care and in-person services.

The Los Angeles Times analogized Amazon Care‘s disruptive to health care providers to Amazon Prime up-ending the retail shopping landscape.

It’s important to call out the technology media’s interest in this development: here’s Computerworld‘s take on the project, titled Why Amazon Care May be the New Model for Corporate Healthcare. Beyond the obvious link between Amazon as a tech company and the Haven alliance between AMZ, Berkshire-Hathaway and JPMorganChase, Computerworld mentions Apple’s AC Wellness concept for employee health clinics and smart businesses’ tighter focus on healthcare spending as, “a wake-up call for providers, payers and employers…(ushering in) a new operating system for health, and big technology companies are not going to wait for everyone else to figure it out.”

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  Stay tuned to my tweets @HealthyThinker and posts here on Health Populi between Thursday 3rd through Saturday 5th October as I listen to and learn from fellow speakers at the GMDC SelfCare Summit. We’ll cover a wide range of topics, from the future of retail health channels and trends, health plans’ approaches to inspiring members in self-care, new pharmacy formats, food-as-medicine, and consumer self-care forecasts.

I’ll be focusing on the patient-as-payor with high expectations for service and support for self-care health care for ourselves, our families, and in our communities.

Immediately following the SelfCare Summit, I’ll fly from Indianapolis to Kansas City where I’m delighted to meet with the Cerner user conference to brainstorm health consumers and healthcare costs in the context of health IT, revenue cycle management, and the patient-as-payor. Stay tuned to my tweets and posts there on Monday and Tuesday, 7th and 8th October.

The post Health @ Retail – Prelude to GMDC SelfCare Summit with Updates from Hims & Hers, GoodRx, Sam’s Club and Amazon Care appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Health @ Retail – Prelude to GMDC SelfCare Summit with Updates from Hims & Hers, GoodRx, Sam’s Club and Amazon Care posted first on https://carilloncitydental.blogspot.com

[whatsgodgottodowithreligion-blog]

Behind Blue Eyes

As anyone who has read my book, What’s GOD Got To Do With It? knows, I am an abuse survivor. While I don’t go into specific detail about that inside those pages, I have dealt with and struggled with the ramifications of this abuse (physical, verbal, sexual) for the majority of my adult life. In fact, one of the more painful sidebars that came with my decision to not self-medicate with alcohol in 1995 was that I had to address the post-traumatic stress this abuse was plaguing me with, even after years of therapy which allowed me to see clearly the emotional and psychological impact this had on me as an adult.

For years, I wondered (or rather, looked for a logical explanation) as to why, out of seven offspring, my Dad was particularly mean and cruel to me - why he seemed to single me out for a lot of his rage and anger from as early on as I can remember. One day, during my teens, a seemingly innocent trip down memory lane served to provide that missing piece of the puzzle. My brothers, sister and me were looking at photos in the family album, taken during our younger years. I remember looking at a picture of me taken in kindergarten, all happy and smiles (thanks to the photographer telling me corny jokes while he shot the images) in my houndstooth blazer, white dress shirt and tie, when my sister remarked “You think that’s a cute picture of you - you should’ve seen yourself as a baby.......you had the cutest blue eyes!”

Now I know, there’s a common belief that all kids are born with blue eyes (and most eye color changes in the weeks after birth), but apparently, that blue eye gene did not show up in the six siblings which preceded me, nor in my kid brother who was born a year later. What’s more, it was several months before my eye color did indeed change from blue to brown. This would seem like a minuscule and trivial detail, except for one thing: my Dad, who was a simple Southern man with less than a fifth grade education (he had to drop out of school to tend chores on his grandmother’s farm after his birth mother abandoned him) was not educated enough to understand the dynamics of recessive gene traits. Put another way - if you were a country bumpkin, and five of your kids had your eye color, but the sixth child came out with blue eyes, what would you likely conclude?

Unlike anyone else in my family, I realized the conclusion that my Dad had to have drawn was completely logical, in absence of any evidence refuting it - that is, that I was not his biological son. Worse, it meant that he was staring into the eyes of his wife’s adulterous behavior. Nevermind the fact that my Dad wasn’t exactly faithful to my mom, he had to be worried that if anyone noticed the discrepancy in eye color, they too, would draw the conclusion that ‘his woman’ was a two-timing whore. To this day, I’m not entirely sure he ever believed that I was ‘of his loins’, a fact reinforced by the multiple times he said “You’re no son of mine!” to me, and only to me, even as a brown-eyed teenager and adult.

This meant that even within the family dynamic I was born into, I was left with the feeling that I was different - that I was not like my other siblings. Indeed, not only that, but that I did not belong, that I was an intruder, or in the eyes of my father, I represented a significant threat to his manhood, and by extension, his self concept. So before I ever learned that my skin color would be looked upon with the same level of distrust and suspicion, I was subjected to unjust ostracizing in an environment where I should have felt loved, appreciated and protected.

In elementary school,  I always looked forward to “career day” - when adults of various professions would come in and talk to us about the jobs they did, why they did them, and what they enjoyed about them. This included, without fail, a visit from both a fireman and a policeman. At least in my day, kids (especially boys) looked up to both cops and firemen as heroes - brave guys who risked their lives to save others, keep the communities they served safe and protected, and got to wear cool uniforms that elicited both admiration, awe and respect. The message (or should I say slogan) that we were told repeatedly was “Remember kids - the policeman is your friend. So always be polite and respectful, and always obey what an officer tells you to do.”

And so, while I had my sights set on riding a red fire engine and having a cute Dalmatian by my side, I did believe what I was told, and learned to respect the police, and had the mindset that the policeman was indeed a friend I could trust and turn to. But something happened along the way between the ages of sixteen and onward that sent a very distinct counter-message that while I may believe the policeman was my friend, he had an entirely different view of me.

The first significant episode happened to me when I was in my twenties: I was hanging out in the lobby of a movie theatre, talking with my friend Howard, when suddenly, three cops burst in with steadfast intent. While standing there with my friend, the three cops suddenly advanced on us (or more accurately, advanced upon me), and proceeded to throw me up against the wall dividing the lobby seats, with two of the officers frisking me while the other stood by. No advance warnings were given, nor was there any explanation as to why I was being ‘singled out’ over my white companion beside me. I calmly and respectfully asked (repeatedly) what I did wrong, and why I was being searched - the one answer I got was “Be quiet” as they continued patting me down, in search of what I had no idea. A few minutes into this episode, an elderly woman entered the theatre - she noticed what was going on, and noticed me being frisked. It was only until the woman remarked to the cops “No.....that’s not him” that the cops stopped their frisking/detaining of me and let me go. They then proceeded to exit the theatre with the old lady in tow.

Without explaining why they did what they did. Without so much as an apology for frisking “the wrong man.” I was humiliated in front of my friend, and had my dignity stripped from me, but I did not deserve any apology in their eyes. When I have recalled this episode in the past, many folks responded (or should I say rationalized) this intrusion with, “Well, they were just doing their job.” An unidentified black man likely snatched an old white lady’s purse, so the police went into the first place they surmised he would likely hide, and decided to frisk whatever black males they encountered inside the premises. Seems perfectly logical to me. What doesn’t seem logical is the fact that we, as a society act as if the police can never be wrong, never make a mistake, or ever have anything to be apologetic for. That demoralizing episode became a rude awakening to me that 1. The policeman is not my friend - he considers me an adversary/suspect guilty until proven innocent, and 2. I can be as respectful and compliant as I was taught to be in school, but I would still be treated as a second-class citizen, and should expect as much whenever I am in the presence of law enforcement.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about racial bias, police brutality and excessive, deadly force. Those who protest the disparity in how blacks and whites are treated by police are all too often met with derision and criticism. When the Black Lives Matter movement began as a response to unexplained instances of why unarmed black men were being shot to death by policemen who suffered no outside investigations or repercussions, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was rebutted with “Blue Lives Matter” - as if the two were somehow in conflict with each other. Whatever I may think about the radicalization within BLM, or how their message has become distorted by the extremist voices coming from inside that protest group, the fact is it’s hard to believe that black lives really do matter in the eyes of many, though not all in law enforcement.

But even more disturbing than that is the emergence of black conservative voices who seek to justify racial profiling and excessive force as being necessary elements in the ever-increasing dangerousness of being a cop these days. To rationalize the death of an unarmed black man being shot in the back and killed by a policeman with “Well, he shouldn’t have been running away” or “If he wasn’t guilty of something, he would have listened and obeyed orders” is sad and distorted enough coming from the mouths of clueless Caucasians, but to have black conservatives echo the same sentiments is chilling. When San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided to “take a knee” during the National Anthem as a sign of silent protest, the blowback was disproportionately hostile: hearing people like CRTV’s Dineen Borelli and The Blacksphere’s Kevin Jackson (above) attack Kaepernick for his righteous anger over racism and police brutality I find particularly disturbing. Jackson has gone one step further: producing a documentary entitled Bleeding Blue: Behind The Badge, Under The Gun, whose objective is to shed light on both how dangerous it is for cops out there on the street, and how the “leftist media” continues to fan the flames of racial discord, instead of holding the black community accountable for the lawless criminals that are being coddled as “victims of their environment.”

No one would argue that the police have it tough out there, and that being a policeman is one of the most dangerous occupations one could have, but it was tough being a cop when I was in grade school - so what exactly has changed? More criminals with guns? Stronger narcotics on the streets and in the veins of those committing crimes? Public apathy? I’m not sure that things have changed in terms of danger to policemen as much as our 24/7, as-it-happens news cycle has been feeding us a daily diet of crime and punishment. When the average white person watches the news, and sees the majority of crimes being committed by blacks - specifically black men, what underlying message is implanted inside their minds? If racial bias exists within society (which it does), it must certainly manifest itself among police officers - but officers are (or should be) trained to discern what is reasonable suspicion and what is a knee-jerk reaction to the presence of black men on their beat.

And when excessive force is used, there needs to be accountability, period. Every time a cop is caught on camera using excessive, unnecessary force (which results in the death of a black man), and an internal review exonerates the policeman of any wrongdoing, you are reinforcing the idea that black lives do not matter. Black conservatives want to cloak themselves in the misguided belief that only “thugs” have deadly encounters with police, and so whatever fate befalls them is justified and of their own making. This conveniently ignores the fact that there are countless incidents where armed white men brandishing deadly weapons manage to be peacefully apprehended by law enforcement, and do not result in the use of excessive force or the death of a suspect. So why is it okay for an unarmed man to be shot in the back and killed? How can one watch videos on the news or Youtube of unarmed black men being shot like wild dogs and not feel a tinge of horror? Why do we hold the police to a higher standard, even when that trust is betrayed by their actions? Why no outrage over the increased militarization (and combat mindset) of law enforcement, which perpetuates an “us versus them” mentality, presuming all suspects guilty without benefit of due process?

Finally, how did we get to a place where respect for law enforcement means looking the other way when rouge cops act more like vigilantes than peace officers? Frank Serpico was more than the subject of a 1973 Sidney Lumet film starring Al Pacino: he was a living, breathing embodiment of a “good cop.’ When Serpico witnessed corruption and law breaking among his fellow officers, he did not look the other way - he spoke up. You would think all good cops would have his back and support his efforts to expose the bad apples inside the NYPD, but you’d be dead wrong. The “blue wall of silence” was erected almost immediately, and Serpico was subjected to retaliatory behavior, both from his superiors and from fellow cops on the force. During his testimony before the Mayor Lindsay-appointed Knapp Commission in 1971, Serpico said:

“The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist, in which an honest police officer can act... without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. Police corruption cannot exist unless it is at least tolerated. Therefore, the most important result that can come from these hearings... is a conviction by police officers that the department will change.”

Serpico retired from the force a month after receiving The Medal Of Honor in June of 1972, and has been an outspoken advocate for police accountability to this day. Serpico’s bravery is, unfortunately, eclipsed by the fact that such courage is rarely acknowledged or validated by the world in which we live - indeed, the “blue wall of silence” continues to infect police departments across America, where good cops look the other way, when they should be speaking out. Even when a fellow officer uses excessive force; even when an officer taunts or harasses a suspect, barely containing their racially-motivated contempt. Even when an officer ramps up a situation to a deadly conclusion, that should have been de-escalated to a peaceful apprehension of the suspect. Even when a shooting is not justified, under any circumstances, given the particular circumstances of that incident.

When my Dad would beat me, he’d often yell, “You need to respect me, boy!” Sometimes, I would have the temerity to respond, “That respect has to be earned”, either internally or out loud. Blind respect to authority serves no one, especially if such authority is misapplied, abused or otherwise diminished by a lack of compassion, fairness or justice. Black conservatives and self-righteous white folk can look upon all suspects as “guilty as charged” (as the majority of comment threads on social media platforms would suggest), and psychologically distance themselves from  the criminal ‘other’, but the presumption of innocence and the tenets of due process are vital parts of a civilized society. In his book, The Divide, investigative journalist Matt Tiabbi exposed the fact that cops in New York City were arresting young black males for “jaywalking” as a way to preemptively instill them into the criminal justice system - the presumption being that sooner or later they’d end up breaking some significant law, and that this tactic was an effective way of streamlining that process. Were all males, regardless of race being arrested in this manner? No. 

Sometimes, I think about how different the world would be if I could view it from a ‘lighter perspective’ - alas, such daydreaming is futile. Like it or not, God brought me into the world as a brown-skinned black man, and this world has separate and unequal guidelines on how I should be perceived and treated. Black conservatives can delude themselves into thinking such prejudice or brutality only comes to those “who deserve it”, but from personal experience. I know better. “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man” better than I.

[uniteordie-usa]

It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 2 (Unschooling)

http://uniteordie-usa.com/its-time-to-rethink-education-part-2-unschooling/ https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screen-Shot-2017-12-14-at-12.04.46-PM.jpg It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 2 (Unschooling) Michael Krieger | Posted Thursday Dec 14, 2017 at 12:57 pm There are several components, but the real shocker is that more of us aren’t embracing the current age of access to mastery of any topic. But that may not be so surprising—most of us were taught to be passive learners, to just “get throu...

Michael Krieger | Posted Thursday Dec 14, 2017 at 12:57 pm

There are several components, but the real shocker is that more of us aren’t embracing the current age of access to mastery of any topic. But that may not be so surprising—most of us were taught to be passive learners, to just “get through” school. It’s easy to be lazy. The rewards of becoming an autodidact, though, include igniting inner fires, making new connections to knowledge atnd skills you already have, advancing in your career, meeting kindred spirits, and cultivating an overall zest for life and its riches.

One good reason to dive head first into self-initiated learning is that much of what you were taught is already obsolete. “Knowledge workers succeed not based on what they know, but rather how they learn,” writes James Marcus Bach in his book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. He dropped out of school when he was 14 and, in the early days of home computing, taught himself enough to become a software tester for Apple. He’s now an independent consultant.

Bach’s philosophy is rebellious yet inclusive: “Intellectual buccaneering is about self-education, but schools are OK, too. I’ve learned in schools, and I’ve learned from people who were trained in schools. I happily plunder knowledge wherever I find it. I don’t seek the destruction of schools. I am out to dismantle something else—the popular belief that schooling is the only route to a great education and that the best students are those who passively accept the education their schools offer.”

– From the Psychology Today article: The Golden Age of Teaching Yourself Anything

While some of you will be familiar with the educational concept of unschooling, it’ll probably be new to most of you. Personally, I never looked into the concept until I became a parent a couple of years ago, and it was my wife who first became fascinated with the idea and bought a bunch of books on the topic. I’m really glad she did.

The book we’re currently reading is by a fascinating individual named Ben Hewitt, titled Home Grown. Back in 2014, Ben wrote an excellent article for Outside Magazine in which he provided a concise description of what unschooling is. It’s quite distinct from home-schooling, which most people are already familiar with.

In the piece, We Don’t Need No Education, he explains:

There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.

It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.

If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.

Even to someone like me, an individual who finds the concept of authority and involuntary activity revolting, unschooling seemed a bit radical for our family when I first read about it. Nevertheless, as I’ve considered it in more over the past few months, it’s become more and more appealing. To get an even better sense of what it’s all about, let’s read some more excerpts from the Outside article referenced above:

The boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.

Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?…

The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.

It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was John Holt, a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in How Children Fail in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.

Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”

In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website JohnHoltGWS.com. “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”

I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.

Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.

Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like Waldorf, the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.

Still, perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify. Diabetes rates among school-age children are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese has nearly tripled since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly.

They sit.

So what prompted me to shift from, “this seems interesting, but it’s probably not for us,,” to “this might work for our family,” in just a matter of months? For one thing, I have a fundamental issue with forcing kids to sit in a classroom all day with other kids of the exact same age, while being forced to learn in the same way and at the same pace. Second, with all the information currently available online, the resources for thoughtful parents and curious kids is simply extraordinary and unprecedented. Typical schooling seems very outdated in this reality, and I’m not the sort of person who just does things because it’s what everybody else does. Finally, I started to ponder some less obvious downsides to traditional schooling. What if we want to go on an adventure as a family. Whether desert camping in Morocco, or a drive up to Montana, our ability to do such trips would be confined by school schedules. We’d have to take trips at the same time as all the other kids, which just rubs me the wrong way.

Ultimately, my wife and I haven’t decided on exactly what we’re going to do, and we plan on keeping an open mind about all options and taking cues from our kids themselves as they are each unique individuals with their own desires and needs. This post isn’t about making the case for a particular type of educational path, but to get people aware of the various options out there and inspire everyone to think outside of the box.

From a societal perspective, the reality is unschooling necessitates at least one person to be a stay at home parent. In the case of Ben Hewitt, he works from home and his wife is also there. That’s the ideal situation in my opinion, and it’s simply not an option for the overwhelming majority of U.S. families. In fact, most households consist of two parents working full-time just to make ends meet. This is a tragedy since it stifles household creativity and forces everybody into a stressed out box where family becomes an afterthought.

My wife and I are in a fortunate position which gives us options, and we will explore them all. That said, the choice to potentially unschool is not something I take lightly. If we decided to go down that route, I’d have to change a lot about how I do things. At the moment I spend most of my day reading and writing for the purposes of this website. If we accepted the enormous responsibility that comes with having kids at home, I’d want to dedicate far more time during the day to interacting with our children. My everyday life would be affected in a very significant way.

Parenthood is a tremendous honor and responsibility, and it saddens me that so many parents don’t have the opportunity we do to be so engaged with our children on daily basis. Given this reality, it’s important that those of you fortunate enough to be home with your kids think deeply about the options available before doing something just because everybody else does. The world’s changing fast and it’s crucial we raise as many children as possible who can think independently and ensure the future looks very different in a positive way from the one we’re living in. Humanity depends on it.

Finally, here are a few resources readers pointed me to on the subject of unschooling. If you have any other good ones, please share in the comment section.

Lazy Mill Farm

John Taylor Gatto

Living Joyfully

Dayna Martin