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skies-diary · 3 years

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The more I think about it, the more I think we should stop sending our children to school past grade 5.

More under the cut. TW for suicide mention, mental illness, gun violence mention, and assault mention.

Of course education is important, but schools dont really educate; not anymore. At least, "higher learning" like middle / high school and college don't. I can think of only two classes in grades 6-12 that I've ever used in my day to day life, and those were sex ed (which was comprehensive for me, but which many schools in the US arent even allowed to have on the syllabus) and home economics. The rest were really just full of meaningless facts that I was forced to memorize and that I likely won't remember by ten years after graduation.

It's not that I think people should be uneducated. It's that as early as 100 years ago, people wouldn't send children to school before they were six years old, and now preschools start enrollment at six weeks old. Its that I learned very little in my teenage years that I would ever use in my adult life. Its that school contributed to my depression and anxiety that started at age 11 when I was in sixth grade, and that I'm still struggling with today.

More than anything else, though, while elementary school taught to read and write and made learning a part of life, sixth grade and up made me hate learning. It taught me that learning is a chore to finish and be done with so you can do "fun things". It taught me that if you can't get something right on the first try, you're bad at it and theres no point trying. More than trying to get me ready to choose my own path in life, school was focused on three things; fidelity to country, unconditional respect and obedience to authority, and capitalism training.

Fidelity to country: Every single day started with the pledge of allegiance. Some kids didnt stand for it, and I wish I'd been one of them. On veterans day my senior year, our first hour teacher told the class that any students that didnt stand for the pledge that day would be sent to the office for "disciplinary action". After the pledge, the whole class was escorted down the hall to the room of a teacher who was also a veteran, and we all had to stand in a line to shake his hand and thank him for his service. At age 17, I didn't think that was too strange. At age 23, having lived through Trump's presidency and seen what nationalism and extremism looks like more clearly, I find it much more off-putting than before.

Unconditional respect for authority: For me, this really started in second grade. After first grade, I was transferred to a new school which was poorly managed. The school was understaffed and overcrowded, classrooms were wildly out of ratio and teachers were overwhelmed. My brother, in kindergarten, hardly knew how to spell his name by the end of the year, and that's only because he had extra-curricular support.

The school avoided any and all accountability by having a policy of "the teacher is always right", therefore placing all responsibility on the students for any learning difficulties they encountered. The school board thankfully let my siblings and I transfer to a more competent and less crowded school after I was physically assulted by another student (a boy from another class who tried to suffocate me), and my parents threatened a lawsuit against the district.

The expectation for unfailing respect was amplified in high and middle school, from the constant police presence in schools to the draconian dress code regulations to teachers who treated their profession like a power trip. I did have a lot of good teachers, but others acted like being a teacher gave them license to act like a drill sergeant.

Capitalism training: this is very different than career training. Career training would have taught us marketable, useful skills. Rather, my school district got us ready for the workforce by having us sit at a desk for eight hours a day, delegating us tasks to be completed in a set amount of time, or we'd have life-altering repercussions. We were young adults who had little to no say in how we spent our day to day lives. I feel like these things contributed a lot to spending my teenaged years feeling like I had no direction in life; a feeling that persists in adulthood and has caused me untold distress, from difficulty in career choice to suicidal ideation.

As a teen, I didn't really understand the point of it all. However, it seems fairly obvious as an adult. School was training for corporate life. Modern American schools are turning out kids who have very few life skills, who are primed to sit at a desk for 8 hours, completing largely meaningless tasks and putting up with bullshit from authority figures whom they know better than to question.

In my personal experience, everything past grade 5 had nothing to do with education; rather, it was a nearly decade-long indoctrination ritual to prepare children to take their place as an employee and "contribute to society" under Late Stage Capitalism. It's framed as a necessary part of life, but the truth is that historically, parents, extended family and community were the forces that educated children. They taught them the life skills useful to their time and culture. Today, for example, technological literacy is needed, but a Native American child in 1500 would have learned how to hunt, how to mend, and how to build shelter. A child in 4000 BC Egypt would have likely learned to grown plants in the Nile Delta and care for farm animals.

Learning is a part of life. Human brains are supercomputers that can recognize patterns like nothing else in the world. No teacher has to sit down a typically developing child and teach them to speak; they learn through daily life. Humans didn't learn to make fire in lecture hall. We're naturally curious and eager to learn as children, but after going through school, very few adults retain this enthusiasm.

I used to be able to read three novels in an afternoon. Now I struggle to finish a chapter. This shift did not come about until age 11, the same year I entered middle school.

Children go to school now because there is rarely any other choice. In most American families, both parents work, and if a child is in a single-parent household, it's even less likely they have a stay-at-home parent. This symptom of Late Stage Capitalism (parental absense) causes children to grow into adults indoctrinated into the system, which is causatious of Late Stage Capitalism. It's a cycle that can be hard to break.

But we have to do something. Education reform, finding a way to homeschool / educate through community, or even just stop having kids. I haven't had any children yet because I dont want to raise my babies to be corporate slaves for the Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk of their generation.

Because as it stands right now, America's schoolchildren that aren't gunned down by angry white men are coming out the other side of graduation depressed, directionless, and with one of the highest suicide rates (second leading cause of death for Gen Z) in human history.

What American schools are doing isn't just not working, it's purposefully malicious. We need to change.

#tw suicice #tw gun mention #tw mental illness #tw assault #late stage capitalism #capitalism #america #american school system #school reform #american education #my posts

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letstalkaboutlanguage · 3 years

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Destroy the f*cking patriarchy

A few months ago, a video of Cardi B singing along to her song WAP, then scrambling to switch it off when her daughter enters the room, went viral. A few people took offence to this. ‘If Cardi B is aware that her songs' explicit and inappropriate content isn’t appropriate for children, she shouldn’t be releasing it and exposing young people to such vulgarity’ was the general consensus. The singer took to social media to defend herself, arguing that parents are responsible for what their children listen to and watch. She states that she is ‘a very sexual person, but not around [her] child, just like every other parent should be’.

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Personally, I think it’s surprising that female artists swearing as excessively as men in their lyrics is such a recent development. I believe Cardi B should be applauded for doing this so unapologetically. This prompted me to do some more research on the current state of public opinion towards women swearing. I stumbled upon a great podcast series, Unladylike, which explores different feminist issues in each episode. For anybody interested in the podcast, they created a ‘welcome kit’ for new listeners with links to 10 of their personal-favourite and most-listened-to episodes to start off with.

For the purpose of this post, I listened to Episode 47: ‘How to Curse Like a F*cking Lady’. (I have conveniently attached the episode to this post for ease of access).

One of the episode’s guest speakers, Mona Eltahwy, tells a story about one of her editors (24:02). “He wanted me to stop saying ‘I don’t give a flying f*ck’ on Twitter, and to cut down my usage of ‘f*ck’ on Twitter”, she explains. She was stunned by the request as she wasn’t even an employee at the company; she just wrote ‘ob-eds’ (a backronym for ‘opinions and editorials page’) for him. This inspired her to create the hashtag #WhyISayFuck, which gained responses from women worldwide sharing their unapologetic love for profanity.

The Unladylike hosts explain that after every interview they do with women for the show, they always ask, “What is your most unladylike trait?” A significant number confessed that they curse excessively.

But why the hell do we swear anyway?

The show’s first guest, Dr Kate Burridge, explains that one of the first and foremost reasons is ‘social swearing’, and the more you like someone: the greater the swear word, the stronger the obscenity. This would also refer to a situation where everybody is swearing quite a lot, and you simply ‘accommodate’ the way you’re speaking to fit in better (See: You’re not from New York, You’re from Rotherham). Another reason is the simple ‘expletive swearing’, after making a mistake or hurting yourself stepping on a plug, for example. Violating a taboo provides a sort of emotional release. Dr Burridge explains a third reason as simply to ‘spice things up’ and recounts a poorly-received tourism advert for Australia which read ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’. This demonstrates a use of swearing to give something a bit of emphasis, or what she refers to as an ‘emotional overlay’. The fourth and final function of swearing is to insult, downgrade or belittle someone. (Though, the hosts of the podcasts speak very lowly of this fourth function, so I’d like to add here that perhaps this shouldn’t be taken so literally in the north of England. I’ve been known myself to often use expletive insults in a joking manner or even as a term of endearment!).

So, what the f*ck is so unladylike about swearing?

It all stems back to gender stereotypes that have been in place for centuries. As explained in the podcast attached, any woman who wanted to maintain her marriage market worth and not be labelled a prostitute better keep her language in check. Meanwhile, men were encouraged not to avoid using profanity, simply to keep these displays away from the ears of their wives and daughters. Richard Allestree, English Royalist churchman and provost (head) of Eton College, or for reasons of clarity, a raging sexist from the 1600s, published The Lady’s Calling, “a powerfully misogynistic tract that popularised the myth of the tattling, prattling woman” concluded that “no noise on this side of Hell can be more amazingly odious (repulsing)” than a woman who swears.

In the 18th century, women were often referred to as ‘the fair sex’, intellectually inferior and thus shamefully neglected in terms of receiving a proper education. Women were essentially treated ‘rather as dolls, than as intelligent social beings’ (Buchanan, 1762). In the 19th century, Sangster (1882) claimed that ‘A lady’s accents must be pure, her tones sweet’ and, of course, there’s nothing pure and sweet about effing and blinding in every sentence. Swearing, quite simply, is just not in keeping with the perfect lady aesthetic that men have dreamt up.

Despite all this, a study at Lancaster University found that in the past 25 years, women have been dropping more ‘f-bombs’ in casual conversation than men. There had been an increase of ‘something like 500%’, according to Dr Burridge, since the 1990s. So, along with the ever-increasing confidence to swear we’re seeing from influential women in music, it looks like we’re one step closer to destroying that f*cking patriarchy.

References

Byrne, E. 2018. There’s A Swearing Double Standard - And Women Can Change It. Elle. Available at: https://www.elle.com/life-love/a19431418/swearing-double-standard/

Conger, C. & Ervin. C. 2019. Episode 47: How to Curse Like a F*cking Lady. Available at: https://unladylike.co/episodes/047/cursing

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jerumebrunneng · 7 years

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As you may be aware, there's a movement out there which is dedicated to, among other things, forcing women to become and/or remain pregnant against their will. It may sound like the sort of bizarre fringe group that's only relevant in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia or Uganda and which civilized countries make a point of keeping on their toes with the occasional drone strike. Sadly, this is not so. In fact, this group controls legislators in first-world nations such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and above all, The United States of America.

Members of this movement call themselves "pro-life". There's a long, long list of reasons why that name is completely, laughably, tragically inappropriate, which I won't be getting into today. What’s important right now is that this blatant contradiction had led many people to refer to this movement as "pro-birth" instead of their preferred moniker.

While I appreciate my colleagues’ irreverence, I cannot in good conscience join them in using that term. And here's why.

Let's imagine that this movement was motivated by a more or less sincere philosophy of Natalism (which is, after all, just the fancy word for "Pro-Birth"), and that all that pesky "depriving women of their fundamental human rights" business was just an unpleasant side effect of this core belief, rather than a primary goal. Natalism is a pretty scary philosophy on its own, and it would have a lot of very scary consequences, a few of which do line up with the anti-choice platform. At the very least, it's much better at predicting their behaviour than the "they sincerely believe that abortion is murder" theory.

But there's one issue that would be a no-brainer, one issue on which an essentially Natalist movement would do the right thing, if only for the wrong reason. Specifically, it would provide an enormous level of support towards pregnant women, to help them do the one thing (or so they believe) that women are good at, which is pumping out a continuous stream of babies.

Now, of course, these "pro-life" people don't spend all their time advocating for the death penalty or trying to murder doctors and their children. A lot of their hatred is directed at a relatively small organization known as Planned Parenthood, and attempts to criminalize it, or at the very least, to stop the government from giving it any money.

It's time for a little guessing game. Each year, how many taxpayer dollars do you think Planned Parenthood spends to provide abortions? A million? A hundred million? A billion? A billion and one? From all those protest signs covered in poorly-photoshopped pictures of "dead babies”, it has to be a lot, right? Go on, take a wild guess.

Now take the number you were thinking of, and multiply it by zero.

The number you have now is what they actually spend. Federal Legislation already requires that no taxpayer money can be used to fund them (instead, the tiny fraction of PP's budget that goes towards providing pregnancy termination services comes entirely from donations and other sources). So where does that all that Federal money actually go?

It goes towards providing education, especially in districts where the schools' idea of "Sex Ed" begins and ends at the Stork. This lowers the rate of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore lower the rate of abortions. It goes towards making contraception more available. This prevents the spread of STDs, and helps people deal with a laundry list of hormonal issues. This also lowers the rate of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore the rate of abortions. It goes towards providing crucial medical tests, which allows doctors to diagnose and treat conditions that might otherwise require a pregnancy to be terminated, which, guess what, lowers the rate of abortions. Name a service that actually helps lower abortion rates (rather than just increase abortion fatality rates), and it's a pretty safe bet that Planned Parenthood provides it.

Of course, even if no human being had ever intentionally terminated a pregnancy, ever, preventing unwanted pregnancies would STILL be unequivocal, absolute most efficient way to stop the deaths of fetuses. Because here's the thing - slightly more than half of all fertilized zygotes fail to implant in the uterine wall, and another 30% or so spontaneously abort early in the first trimester. If you're of the belief that "life begins at conception", this means that roughly three quarters of all human beings ever conceived were flushed away with their mother's next period, often before she realized she was pregnant.

And let’s not even get started on how dangerous pregnancy can get after that point - for most of human history, it was the leading cause of death, and in nations where medical care is not readily available, it still is. If there is a god, he is the most prolific abortionist in history by six or seven orders of magnitude.

In the interest of preventing all those needless deaths of mothers and children alike, much of Planned Parenthood's money goes towards providing prenatal care.

If the "pro-life" lobby succeeds beyond its wildest dreams in their rallying cry of "defunding Planned Parenthood", they will not have taken a single penny from the pockets of a single abortionist. What they will have done is deprive millions of women the resources they need to bring their pregnancy to term in as safe and healthy a way as possible.

How about the Affordable Care Act? Surely, getting rid of the dreaded "Obamacare" will stop some abortions, right? Wrong. The ACA had a similar provision to the one I mentioned above, preventing a single penny of federal money from contributing towards coverage that includes abortion services. In fact, many individual states have laws that prevent ANY health insurance plan from covering it. What the recent repeal of the ACA has done is, you guessed it, leave a whole lot of pregnant women without the coverage they need to help them survive pregnancy, to give birth, and to keep their children healthy if they manage to be born.

So, no. I won't be calling those motherfuckers "pro-birth".

That gives them WAY too much credit.

P.S. If you call yourself "pro-life", if you personally find the idea of abortions distasteful and would never want to get one yourself, even if you sincerely believe that a fetus is morally equivalent to a thinking, feeling human being, that does not necessarily make you a bad person.

In fact, so long as you don't believe in using those beliefs to take rights away from actual people, we are on the same side. Because guess what? I also want to see abortion rates go down, which is why I support sex education, contraception, and all those other wonderful things that accomplish what simple prohibition does not.

If you genuinely care about protecting those precious little fetuses, you're going to want pregnant women to receive better medical care, not worse. You’re going to want people to be educated, not ignorant. You're going to want Planned Parenthood to have more money, not less.

And you should probably think twice about whether you want the mainstream "pro life" lobby I’ve just spent the last thousand words describing to continue to publicly represent you.

If, on the other hand, you do believe in taking rights away from women, kindly go fuck yourself.

#Rant #Politics #Natalism #Pro Birth #Planned Parenthood #Lecture #Pro Choice #Abortion #Affordable Care Act

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metalshea · 7 years

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The New American Nihilism

In the wee hours of the morning on 11/9/16, I joined the entire world as I sat in shock staring at my TV: Donald Trump had just won the election for President of the United States. For someone that usually has something to say about everything, I was completely dumbfounded. I couldn’t rationalize what I saw on the TV with my worldview. I had seen the signs of disillusionment with the government. I had witnessed as people began utilizing moral licensing–the phenomenon where individuals back the inclusion of an outsider only to use it to justify behavior and ideas 180 degrees different from their support of that outsider (to put it simply, electing Barack Obama and then claiming racism is dead because we elected a black president). I KNEW that was all there. But still, the moment was surreal.

It took me hours to fall asleep afterwards because my brain simply would not shut off. I wasn’t angry as many Americans were. I felt more detached and intellectually I could not connect the pieces. In the days following the election, I tried to keep my social media posts more middle of the road by focusing instead on the disruption of Trump’s election rather than directly attacking the man. I avoided reading apocalyptic liberal news sources that predicted that destruction of the fabric of American culture; and I simply refused to read “Conservative” sources that tried to rub liberals nose in it.

I have never been one to accept the root causes of action as promulgated by the press. The news media seems to oversimplify matters or sensationalize them. I have spent enough time working alongside law enforcement, engaging with movement intellectuals, and have had enough experience in the world to know that the news media—both right and left—prefers to attach a narrative to an event to make it more digestible for consumers; narratives that often are incomplete or lack substantive analysis, even if they are more or less true.

The position of the mass media on the rise of Donald Trump has once again been caught in the trap of trying to provide such a narrative… and they are failing at being able to really construct a clear reason for his win. They have presented the notion that Trump’s election was a direct reaction to the Obama administration. That it arose out of a new wave of racism, sexism, and xenophobia among white voters. That Obama’s expansion of executive power allowed for the unchecked implementation of the liberal agenda. That Hillary Clinton was unjustly targeted and victimized because of her sex by a resurrected chauvinism long held at bay by the societal pressures of political correctness.

And all this is true. But, there’s always to me been a feeling that somehow all of this is too disjointed, or feels more like an excuse for the loss of the election than a reason for why Donald Trump won. Quite simply: for all the talk of racism, sexism, xenophobia, white disillusionment, and the rise of “fake news” there’s been little talk in the media about why these things seem to be happening all at once and why the world seems to be devolving into a period of political nihilism.

…maybe it wouldn’t sell? And that’s kind of the point.

Back in 2009, if you had asked me if the Tea Party movement in the United States was inexorably tied to white discomfort surrounding a black president, I would have answered: “Yes, but…”. While the Tea Party movement itself was certainly triggered by the election of Barack Obama in 2008, it was the manifestation of a whole host of insecurities that had been brewing for some time and would have eventually come to fruition even if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won their respective elections. A similar thing can be said about the Occupy Movement on the Left. Instead, we could probably trace back the fundamental anxieties at the root of both movements to Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s with the birth of neoliberal capitalism as an economic policy of the United States.

n full disclosure, neoliberalism is something that I’m still wrapping my head around, and it seems to be poorly defined as compared to other economic models. But the crux of the ideology seems to be that market solutions and personal freedoms are the cure to fixing society’s ills and providing economic growth. As a result, everything becomes marketable in neoliberal capitalism. However, by relying on the market to address societal issues, neoliberalism ends up relying on “market cooptation” of issues to inform our ideas of correct and ethical behavior. In other words, if an action or idea can become marketable for mass consumption, it is inherently good. Ideas that are unable to be coopted sit outside of market culture and are inherently dangerous.

Neolibralism exists beyond a simple right/left divide and instead permeates all of American society regardless of a person’s individual politics. On the left is the “Whole Foods” culture, whereby a place exists that sells the ideas of promoting local business, charity, naturopathy, and food sourcing transparency, all while arguably doing very little to accomplish any of projects. Instead we as Whole Foods shoppers are left with the impression that we have somehow contributed to a larger societal project, but in reality we are only accomplishing those goals within the carefully marketed and structured confines of a nationally-run business empire. The TV show South Park did a particularly effective job of attacking this notion in their 19th season (for a breakdown of what the show’s creators did, see Wisecrack’s excellent mini-doc, “The Philosophy of South Park” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG7y8J0DXhU). Another way to look at how neoliberal cooptation works is to go online to buy your “We Are the 99%!” or “Don’t Tread on Me!” T-shirts. Congratulations, your political statement has filled the coffers of a savvy businessperson.

When combined with the rise of globalism and free trade in the 1990’s, neoliberal capitalism really dug its claws into Western society, and particularly the United States which has always abhorred the imposition of government in society. The result was an environment where business gained freedom of movement and capital, and where the individual worker subsequently became commoditized. In my line of work, we frequently refer to the need to invest in and retain workers through benefits and corporate culture, but this is far from the norm (and I am truly and eternally grateful for that!). Many businesses, especially large manufacturing, view human capital as an expensive commodity that affects the bottom line. As people in the United States grew more expensive through a combination of market forces, government regulation, and unionization, many large companies instead either moved their manufacturing off shore or developed task automation, leaving a number of Americans out of work. A similar problem occurred in Europe through the creation of the single market, the Eurozone, and the Schengen plan: companies located in richer parts of Western Europe were able to relocate operations to cheaper locations in Eastern Europe or instead hire migrant workers willing to be paid less than local ones.

Back in the United States, the situation was complicated by divestment in public education and the rise of business-to-business sales (as opposed to direct-to-consumer sales). As companies became less invested in selling directly to individual consumers, there was less impetus to pay those workers higher wages since those workers were not the ones buying the company’s products. The famous story of Henry Ford increasing worker’s wages so they could all buy Model T’s is no longer relevant since many of the companies that sell directly to American consumers have relocated their manufacturing to outside of the United States.

The result of all this has been a perfect storm: you have a populace with less access to education and with stagnant or nonexistent wages, while the stock market had reached its highest levels of investment in history. Wealth inequality is rampant and workers who formerly had good paying, meaningful jobs with well-funded pensions and retirement have been hung out to dry; reliant on a social safety net that they see as unethical and unable to provide them the dignity of work.

But there’s more… Flash forward to the 2016 Democratic Primary and the DNC leaks:

Bernie Sanders is in the end stages of a contentious primary bout with Hillary Clinton and it appears all but done save for Hillary’s coronation at the Democratic Convention. Suddenly the news breaks: The Democratic National Committee, which was supposedly non-biased, had actively worked against Bernie’s nomination and potentially engaged in political maneuvering—that some would call fraudulent—in attempt to undermine his ability to become the Democratic nominee. The entire primary process was outed as a shameful, undemocratic exercise that seemed to solely exist to legitimize the party pick rather than reflect the will of the people.

Several months later, Hillary Clinton would lose the general election despite winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. No other candidate in history has lost the general election while commanding such a large percentage of the popular vote. Democrats were stunned as they were suddenly hit with the realization, once again, that they had little to no effect whatsoever over the political process.

Shortly after the general election, in December 2016, the State of North Carolina is ranked as one of the most undemocratic governments on the planet (http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article122593759.html), further underscoring for many the dire state of American Democracy.

While Democrats and Democracy watchdogs were stunned by political disillusionment, many Trump supporters responded by saying: “we’ve been disillusioned for years. Welcome to our hell”. Many on the right pointed to the complex economic situation wrought by globalism and neoliberalism that had devastated communities in the Rust Belt and across rural America. Despite their economic difficulties, the people hit hardest by the economic shift born in 1980’s had seen little in the way of support come from Washington. To them, the feelings of liberals in the wake of the 2016 general election were schadenfreude as they got to witness the left come to terms with its own political disenfranchisement.

Welcome, dear reader, to the age of political nihilism, where the people have realized their inability to affect real change in their governments.

There’s more to the story though. Specifically: the media and the rise of the society of spectacle.

The mass media in the United States has forever been a capitalist project. Not that this is inherently a good or a bad thing: the media remains a separate institution from the government of the United States and is granted Constitutionally-provided independence. This is a right afforded to the American people that we often take for granted. However, the media in the US is dependent on streams of outside revenue, mostly from advertisers and paid subscriptions, to remain solvent. In the digital age, media is becoming more and more dependent on ad dollars as more and more people shun paid subscriptions and instead seek out “free” cable news or internet news. This desire for readership has always pushed the media towards investing their resources in stories that will gain people’s attention. Without the reader’s or viewer’s attention, media companies failed because they were unable to attract ad dollars. However, this model has occasionally served the corporate interest more than the public interests; sometimes with disastrous results. In the Golden Age of Journalism at the turn of the 20th Century, media outlets were able to steer public policy in such a way as to significantly contribute to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Newspapers reporting on Spanish atrocities committed against the Cubans became the de jour stories of the day led to calls for military intervention by an outraged public. While the Spanish-American War was very successful, it also resulted the American colonization of Philippines: a bloody conflict that in many ways was America’s first “Vietnam”. The news media played similar back in 2003, just prior to the start of the Iraq War. Media outlets spent huge amounts of time highlighting the inhuman actions of Saddam Hussein, helping to prepare the way for war and again precipitating a military quagmire.

In the late 20th Century, the media landscape in the United States began to change dramatically in two really clear ways: (1) The rise of 24 hour cable news networks encouraged editorialism to permeate across all forms of media and (2) the desire to market to certain audiences led to a greater balkanization of the public discourse. These might require some unpacking…

The first part is a bit more cut and dry and was summed up nicely by Jon Stewart who once said, and I’m paraphrasing, that CNN and other 24 hour cable news networks didn’t lead to more analysis, they instead focus on whomever is the loudest. I remember reading a book some time ago written by a former correspondent who had worked, I believe, for NBC (or one of the major news networks). He lamented the shift away from foreign affairs in current reporting to an over-reporting of domestic affairs. I think he was half right. Instead of focusing on the multitudinous world issues that affect us and spending the time analyzing them in depth, national news outlets have instead opted for the coverage of national partisanship in order to drive viewership. Why? Its more entertaining. Talking heads such as Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow provide little in the way of true news analysis. But they are all charismatic, erudite, articulate, and entertaining. They keep you glued to the TV as they launch diatribes, some better informed than others, and resultantly increase partisanship. All while the newscreep at the bottom of the screen seemingly keeps the viewer informed of major events occurring elsewhere in the world. This is shameful and dishonest, and it has failed to effectively inform the American people of substantive facts surrounding major stories. Instead, it has allowed for political commentators to masquerade as journalists and inform public opinion in a way that is both cynical and dismissive of the other side. In short, it led to point #2: the rise of the echo chamber and the division of public discourse.

We may or may not actually be more politically divided than at any time since the American Civil War; but even if we aren’t, it certainly feels like we are. As news media outlets have stepped into editorialism and away from analysis they have helped shaped the discourse of the public at large. I remember turning on Fox and Friends one morning to see a discussion about a terrorist suicide bombing (where it was escapes me but it was somewhere in the Middle East). One of the show’s hosts at the end of the segment then made a snide remark about Islam, saying something to the effect of “some religion of peace, huh?”. That remark is a shameful one for a news outlet to make. Not only because it is disrespectful, cynical, and clearly Islamophobic, but because it injects opinion in a way that prevents the audience from developing their own informed opinion. Instead, what lasts in our mind is not the story itself or how it is relevant to the geopolitical situation of the Middle East, but the scoffing remark at the very end of the segment. Forget that the comment is a gross oversimplification of a complicated and tragic political situation; all Muslims are terrorists.

As local media dies its slow death from decreased readership, we’ve become more reliant on national media… and the national media continues to compete for our attention. I’m reminded of the words of the President of CBS regarding Donald Trump’s antics in the Republican Primary: “He’s bad for America but great for CBS”. People paid attention to Trump because he was entertaining. I admittedly watched the presidential debates with the hope of seeing a train wreck. I kind of lied to myself saying that I was hoping to be a more informed voter, but really it was secondary to my desire to see a Trumpster Fire. The media outlets for their part cultivated my desire for drama. They used imagery similar to a UFC fight or NFL promo to advertise the debates, playing off our need to see conflict; to be entertained (https://youtu.be/YlptgqP_PEA).

Place this media editorialism and the need for entertainment into the context of neoliberal capitalism, political disenfranchisement, and globalism, and a very odd thing starts to happen. A form of tribalism–fueled in part by the complex logarithms that social media sites like Facebook use determine an individual’s newsfeed–has formed in reaction to our political nihilism. The desire for humans to find like-minded individuals with which to associate has allowed for the proliferation of alternative news sites, including the now infamous tabloid journalism of “fake news” outlets as well as the seemingly inexplicable disregard of facts. A recent report on NPR stated that fact-checking articles received little attention from their intended audience and were generally viewed as buzzkills. In other words, the sense of belonging to the tribe was more important than the actual veracity of the information being presented by tribal members.

Ouch.

While the right seems to be more affected by this than the left, there are certainly more than a few left leaning outlets the engage in the same sensationalism. My only thought for why the left is so comparatively unaffected is that the message on the right has been more singular and transmitted by fewer outlets. I would guess that having only Fox News as a major national news outlet allows for a more targeted message to get pushed through to the public, and simultaneously allows for smaller outlets to piggy back off that message and go off into the weeds. The left, with its many more numerous major outlets, seems better equipped to present thought diversity in a way that stays mainstream, if not more diluted. Weep for the right, they deserve more–and better–than Fox News. In writing all this, I don’t believe that I’ve even begun to scratch the surface of how we got to where we are: Donald Trump’s America. The vitriol, the hate, the hyperbole, the distrust—in short the nihilism of our political situation—is all complex and multifactorial. While there is certainly a degree of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and moral licensing at work, there is so much more to what is happening nationally and internationally. Complex social anxieties, economic and political disenfranchisement, the failure of the mass media, and social media-fueled echo chambers have all contributed to the rise of Trumpism. There’s no simple solution to get us back to civilized discourse, in fact, if there are lessons to be learned from 2016, we should probably try to avoid using nostalgia as a guiding principle. But awareness of the moving parts can breed at least some level of understanding.

Hopefully.

#politics #neoliberalism #trump #newsmedia #globalism

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starla-nell · 7 years

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Product Placement in Sex Ed

I saw on my dash a new ‘educational’ sister website to a porn site. I thought, could be legit, could be horrid. So, since my computer is up-to-date on its shots, I checked it out.

At first it seemed like a poorly-organized encyclopedia of sex: Not comprehensive, not a source to cite in a paper (or make life decisions based on), but a place to learn what to look up next. Potentially valuable.

I quietly thought it might be an interesting step toward helping on-screen sex workers be fully accepted as people in our messed-up culture. That would be cool. You know, accepting that people who do a service other people are willing to pay for as fully-legitimate people? I’m in favor of it.

One article bothered me: clearly a product placement. I shrugged and added a heads-up to my little review. I put the review in my queue.

But this product placement continued to bother me, and eventually I figured out why.

It was an article about (a product for) having sex while on your period, if you get those. This article is dangerous, especially for people learning about sex for the first time. It implied that someone who is menstruating has 3 options:

Don’t have sex. In this case, your partner is probably sexist and/or you carry internalized sexism. (I could write an entire post about the consent issues this mentality raises.)

Use the product for vaginal-insertion sex.

Do extra laundry involving lots of cold water, soap, and scrubbing.

Why is this dangerous? Because it implies that there is only one way to achieve sexual pleasure, ignoring plenty of non-vaginal options (and shower sex). Really, this short PSA by Last Week Tonight (a comedy show!) does a better job at a basic beginning to sex ed. (Watch the full segment for more about the sex ed issue in the United States and to get the joke at the end.) Yes, there is a consent joke that is tasteless. They still do a better job of actually educating in 3 minutes than the entire website I'm talking about. The content is also more thoughtful and feminist.

Done badly, product placement is dangerous. In general, this website sacrifices content to keep articles short and simple. (The article about HIV and AIDS is frankly alarming. They miss so much.) But the product-placement article deliberately misleads to make it seem like their product is the only option worth considering. If someone were to internalize the attitudes there (as someone using the site for ‘sex ed’ might) their sex life would be stunted and they might make poor decisions based on the misinformation.

That is no substitute for a comprehensive, sex-positive sex ed program. Our kids -- that is, all kids -- deserve better.

#yes I'm aware Last Week Tonight has product placement #other people are much more qualified than me to discuss why they do it right #at the very least #their product placement doesn't skew their information #from what I've seen

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erectiledysfunc · 4 years

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varicose vein erectile dysfunction

Contents

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