link roundup

Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

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An e-reader with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of reading glasses.
Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash

For a long time I’ve used Tumblr primarily to share quotes from my favorite articles that I read online (and sometimes books, too). Since I’m no longer using Tumblr due to their atrocious, sex-negative decision about adult content, I haven’t been able to find a better way to do this. Most so-called Tumblr “replacements” are pretty barebones and/or nonfunctional.

So, clunky as it is, I’ll be doing it here! Every so often I’ll post some quotes and links to stuff you might like.

Starting off with a very topical one:

Tumblr made sex a community experience.

—Vex Ashley, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter”

Now that the full scope of this administration*’s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified byThursday’s New York Times podcast, the headline of which—“The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”—got dragged like Hector’s corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to “…and How Law Enforcement Ignored It,” which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women’s health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian’s kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

—Charles P. Piece, “‘We’ Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.”

Inspired by online recipe sites, he’d sit down to dinner and then let me know what rating I earned. “If I give you five out of five, you’ll quit,” he joked. And I laughed because when I was in my 20s, I believed that you were supposed to laugh when someone hurt your feelings. I thought you were constantly supposed to be trying harder.

—Lyz Lenz, “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Cooking for a Man Again”

“As you become more acclimated to the cold, your body becomes more effective at delivering warm blood to the extremities, your core temperature goes up, and all that contributes to being more resistant to the cold,” Leonard told me.

That means the only cure for hating winter, unfortunately, is just more winter.

—Olga Kazan, “Why So Many People Hate Winter” (ugh.)

Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?

—David Frum, “No More Excuses”

It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.

We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.

—Emily Asher-Perrin, “Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death”

It’s no longer socially acceptable to believe that women are somehow less than — especially not during a time when feminism is wielding so much cultural power. But arguing that women are just naturally better at caretaking or domestic work has become a clever way to shirk living up to progressive values while claiming you are simply complimenting women on their stellar ironing skills.

One way to combat this line of thinking is to highlight how fully capable men are in the private sphere. It is true that American culture relishes in portraying men as dolts when it comes to parenting and cleaning, and it’s an unfair stereotype.

But for women to make real progress in and out of their homes, men must give something up: the backwards dream of holding onto their feminist bona fides while seeking out female partners willing to limit their own aspirations to the home.

—Jessica Valenti, “The ‘Woke’ Men Who Still Want Housewives”

So yes, forced birthers and [Status Quo Warriors], if you’re going to play it like that, I am OK with the idea of a world into which you, personally, were never born. I am equally as OK with the idea of a world where I don’t exist, either. Neither you nor I personally matters that much in a universe so vast and a sea of human experiences so rich. You and I both are accidents in our existence, possibly unhappy ones.

I would’ve rather your mother not have been forced to carry a pregnancy she didn’t want to term. I would’ve rather your father had approached your mother respectfully in an appropriate setting, or not at all. I dare to love your mother as a fellow human being more than you do and to dream of a better world for people like her. It’s rank misogyny and not very humanist at all to think otherwise.

—Heina Dadabhoy, “Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed”

It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

At best, these “rules” are reflective of employers’ woefully incomplete approach to sexual harassment. Employers have long done the absolute minimum to comply with the law, relying on trite videos focused on what you can and cannot say or do in the workplace (“don’t give back rubs” or “don’t offer promotions in exchange for sex”) and sexual harassment policies designed primarily to protect them from lawsuits. The sweeping scale of the Me Too movement makes it clear that no mere set of rules is sufficient to prevent workplace harassment, especially when those rules fail to speak to all of the various power imbalances that make the critical distinctions between genuinely consensual workplace romances and harassment.

—Tahir Duckett, “Avoiding Women At Work Is A Childish, Cowardly Response To #MeToo”

When you are terribly afraid of being held responsible for the emotional well-being of others, it feels very mature and responsible to decide that you should “work on yourself.” It becomes both a way of retroactively absolving yourself (wow, can you believe all of the ways my issues manifested before I decided to work on them) and a rather elegant little trick to exonerate ongoing bad behavior (dang, those pesky issues again! I guess I must keep working on them). This is especially true for those too-clever-by-half motherfuckers who think that nobly warning someone in advance they “are working on their issues” mitigates any way in which they might disappoint or harm. And even with the best of intentions, it obviates the fact that relationships themselves are a process of being made ready, not something you come to static and fully formed.

[…] We need each other desperately, in ways none of us can be ready for.

—Brandy Jensen, “Ask A Fuck-Up: I’m still in therapy. Should I be dating?”

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Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1
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Occasional Link Roundup

Miri1 Comment

Oh finally, we’ve made it to February. Maybe one of these days I can start voluntarily going outside again!

Did you know I have a Google+ page? Now you do. If you’re one of those rare people who actually follow posts on there, now you can follow mine.

1. Stephanie and others are organizing a new conference: Secular Women Work. It’s being funded through Kickstarter. If you can, please help them out. I’m really excited about it and have already bought my ticket.

The Secular Women Work conference is a celebration of the work of female activists who create and run projects and communities in the secular movement. And there is no better way to honor their work than by using their expertise to help us all become better activists.

At Secular Women Work, you will find workshops: both hands-on exercises to develop your skills and facilitated group discussions where you can share challenges and solutions with other activists. You will find panels on specialist topics, with panelists who can help you broaden the horizons of your activism. And when you’re ready for a rest, you’ll find speakers who will entertain and inspire you with stories and lessons from their own work. In between it all, you’ll find a conference full of other activists who want to make a difference in the world.

2. An absolutely fucking brilliant post about “overdiagnosis,” as it applies to autism (and, in my opinion, to many mental illnesses):

Adopting labels to get help isn’t “overdiagnosis”; it’s an understandable and rational response to inflexible institutions and their refusal to deal in subtlety or individuality. The word “overdiagnosis” implies that there’s something more at stake than nonsensical hoop-jumping. It blames the wrong people for the wrong problem.

[…]Getting outraged about “misdiagnosis” misses the point; it blames clinicians and parents and autistics. But our current knowledge does not support the idea of drawing a bright line. It supports the idea of measuring individuals along many dimensions and providing them the individual supports they likely need based on what we know. The need for a bright line comes from politicians and bureaucrats, and those are the people who should catch flak. Why are we complaining about clinicians and parents for “drawing the line in the wrong place” when many people aren’t interested in this stupid line-drawing exercise in the first place?

3. Franklin explains why rules are not necessarily in polyamory:

If a person loves you and cherishes you, and wants to do right by you, then it’s not necessary to say “I forbid you to do thus-and-such” or “I require you to do thus-and-such.” All you really need to do is communicate what you need to feel taken care of, and your partner will choose to do things that take care of you, without being compelled to.

On the other hand, if your partner doesn’t love and cherish you, and doesn’t want to do right by you…well, no rule will save you. The rules might give you an illusion of safety, but they won’t really protect you.

4. Lis discusses talking about racism in therapy:

The course I hated most in grad school was taught by a professor who said, “If your clients talk about the outside circumstances that keep them down and make their lives horrible, about how they’re so hard done by, they can’t ever take responsibility for their own lives.” It was supposed to be a course on marriage and family therapy, which is a topic I love a lot on its own; but most of what I learned was about the use of institutional power, from a rich moderate liberal white guy who thought that talking about inequality of any kind was actively harmful to therapy.

I try to remember him even now because he was respected in his field and by his colleagues. He’d run programs in schools and military bases, taught therapists-to-be, received all the marks of approval from his profession, and thought that if a therapist let their client talk about experiencing racism or sexism, they were sabotaging the therapy. I try to remember him because I have to remember that when I meet a new client, that client has no outside indicators that I’m not exactly like him.

5. Why you don’t need to feel bad about yourself when you’ve acted immorally:

Feeling bad about oneself does not make one a better person. Sometimes we seem to think that it would be worse to do something wrong and not feel guilty, than to do something equally wrong but feel guilty about it, as if guilt makes us morally superior, as if it could purify us or redeem us in some way. It is unclear to me how guilt could have such effects. How bad one feels about oneself does not seem to be very relevant; what is important, instead, is repentance or regret: the desire to have acted differently, the intention to repair the damage done, and the determination that in the future one will not act similarly. While regret focuses on action (e.g., I did something wrong), guilt focuses on oneself (e.g., I am a bad person). Repentance is useful: it motivates one to remedy wrongs and not fall into the same mistake again. Guilt is impractical: by keeping the focus on oneself, it contributes to the reification of our negative qualities (e.g., I am selfish), and becomes an obstacle for imagining oneself differently, and for changing one’s behaviour, since we seem to adapt our behaviour to the idea that we have formed about ourselves.

6. Eve Rickert asks: Can you really negotiate your rights away?

There’s a reason domestic violence prevention websites have lists of your rights in relationships. It’s because the places you tend to see rights violations tend to be abusive relationships. It’s because rights violations tend to lead to abuse. Do abuse victims “consent” to be in their relationships? On the surface, perhaps it looks that way, but that is rooted in a victim-blaming, “why doesn’t she (he) just leave?” mentality and a serious oversimplification of the psychological dynamics of abuse. Abuse relies on tearing down your partner’s sense of self and personal agency to the point where consent is really no longer valid. And it doesn’t take physical violence to make a relationship abusive.*

I believe that if you’ve come to a place in your relationship where someone has negotiated any one of their rights away, that relationship includes coercion, and that invalidates consent. Staying doesn’t mean your partner’s not hurting you. The fact that your partner submits to you doesn’t mean you’re not being an abusive asshole.

7. Jonathan Chait has blown up the blogosphere; Anne Therault responds:

Rather than understand how trauma works, or recognize that trigger warnings are, in fact, about giving people the choice when and where to engage with potentially upsetting content, Chait prefers to patronizingly pooh-pooh the whole idea. Instead of recognizing that most people use trigger warnings as a way to facilitate the “controlled exposure” to trauma experts recommend – because, again, trigger warnings give readers the choice to make sure that they are in a safe space and a healthy mindset before engaging with potentially triggering content – he prefers to believe that anyone who asks for a content warning is a mewling infant who should just get over it already.

How nice that Chait has never found any content upsetting enough to require a trigger warning; one supposes that makes him an expert on the subject.

8. Kate critiques that research study about ‘foods containing DNA‘:

Tricking study participants is a time-honored tradition of psych methodology, but you have to trick them effectively, and I’m not convinced this is anything but a gotcha question. If you ask people to support or oppose a governmental policy and then bury one non-policy question in a bunch of actual policies they might have heard of, you are not actually doing excellent science. You are creating a popular Facebook graphic.

9. On Tumblr, The Unit of Caring has another good response to Jonathan Chait:

Basically every problem Chait identifies can be reframed in a competing-needs framework. Some people don’t want to be exposed to conversations about whether police officers can tell if a rape victim is lying, as came up in my Psych seminar last week. That conversation could cause them to relive one of the worst experiences of their lives. They want to not take part in it. On the other hand, intellectual inquiry really does demand we conduct studies on whether police can tell that sort of thing, and debate how to inform juries about the results of those studies, and debate which advice for improvement at detecting liars really works. Both these needs are valid. Both are legitimate. And both can be met.

Chait thinks he’s found people who want to shut the discussion down entirely, or at least people whose discursive tactics are causing the discussions not to happen because others don’t understand which comments will make them into targets and so they don’t talk at all. He’s calling this ‘political correctness’. What I’m seeing is a community that used to only meet one need – intellectual inquiry – now frightened that it has to choose between that need and the needs of its vulnerable members.

10. Homa Mojtabai at McSweeney’s lists ‘Reasons You Were Not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender‘:

I’m not sexist and this organization is not sexist and I have to say you’re developing a little bit of a reputation as a troublemaker. Five years ago we promoted a woman who happens to be black –- I mean, African-American… or maybe just African, I can’t remember –- and that proves that we are tolerant and committed to diversity.

11. Lindy West was amazing on This American Life:

Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place. That’s what I learned from my troll.

If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

12. It is okay and understandable not to want to hear a lot of details about someone’s sex life:

In summary, dear Letter Writer, I don’t think there is anything wrong with you for being leery when “Friend Who Was A Lot To Take At Times” becomes “Friend Who Brings Up Sex In Every Conversation” with you. That’s a volatile combination. It’s okay to create some distance – redirect him, change the subject, say “Hey did you see where I changed the subject back there?” and see how he reacts. Your comfort matters here, as does your consent. A good friend is not going to want to make you squirm about this.

13. Julian Sanchez makes the point Jonathan Chait should’ve made instead:

It doesn’t take any very fearsome campaign of intimidation for a group’s self-correcting mechanisms to break down. Imagine an argument where someone invokes a spurious or unfair accusation of (let’s say) racism or sexism as a cudgel to close down a conversation. Maybe many other members of the accuser’s ideological in-group (“allies”) themselves perceive it as unfair, but life is short and people are busy—what’s the incentive to chime in and say “hey, wait a minute”? Pretty weak even in the absence of negative feedback. And as anyone who’s watched these arguments play out is well aware, questioning whether such a claim is fair or reasonable in a particular instance is going to be read by some observers as denying that sexism or racism are problems at all.  (I recently, rather gently, questioned whether one specific document from the Snowden cache should have been published, then had to expend a whole lot more words insisting that I am not, in fact, a shill for the surveillance state.  Anyone who knows my privacy writing understands why this was slightly surreal.) You end up having to explain and justify yourself to all these folks whose good opinion you care about, and who needs the hassle?

Iterated over time, though, that means the people who do object in particular cases are increasingly from out-groups: People who really don’t care about racism or sexism or think they’re serious problems.  Now the incentives are even worse for in-group members. Because now being the one to say “hey, wait a minute” in a particular instance doesn’t just mean conflict with an ally, it means associating yourself with those assholes.  Increasingly the objections are coming from people who just don’t care about the good opinion of the in-group, many of whom are expressing those objections in actively racist or sexist terms.  So now anyone voicing reservations has to do all sorts of throat clearing (I did it instinctively at the start of this post) to avoid the ever more statistically reasonable heuristic inference that any pushback is coming from those repulsive quarters. If you’re the only ally pushing back, hey, maybe you’re not an ally at all, but secretly one of those assholes.

You end up with team “x is the problem” and team “x is not a problem,” and ever fewer people prepared to say “x is a problem, but maybe not the most useful lens through which to view this particular disagreement.” When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

14. xkcd has a perspective on today’s events:

What have you read/written lately?

Occasional Link Roundup

MASSIVE Occasional Link Roundup

Miri2 Comments

I have been so bad at link roundups. That’s why this one is MASSIVE.

First of all, thank you to Secular Woman for choosing me for their Blog of the Year award. It’s quite an honor! Check out all their other 2014 award recipients here. They’re all great people doing great work.

Second, I’ll be presenting my consent workshop at the American Atheists National Convention in Memphis, Tennessee on April 2-5. I’ve presented it twice already (at the previous two Skepticons) and am really excited to make it even better this year.

Finally, here is a reminder that FtBCon 3 is in just a few weeks, January 23-25.

Here’s the MASSIVE list of awesome articles spanning basically the entire second half of 2014.

1. s.e. smith explains that having depression doesn’t necessarily mean being sad all the time:

I feel like I need to engage in a sort of relentless performative sadness to be taken seriously, for people to understand that I really am depressed and that each day — each moment of each day — is a struggle for me, that even when I am happy, I am still fighting the monster. I feel like I need to darken everything around me, to stop communicating with the world, to stop publishing anything, to just stop. Because that way I will appear suitably, certifiably sad, and thus, depressed — and then maybe people will recognise that I’m depressed and perhaps they’ll even offer support and assistance. The jokes die in my throat, the smile never reaches my lips, I don’t share that moment of happiness on the beach by turning to my friend and expressing joy.

2. Libby Anne writes about atheists who take up women’s rights only when it’s convenient:

Frankly, I feel used. These atheist activists are the sort of people who want to use my story as proof that religion is horrible to women but aren’t willing to listen to what I have to say about sexism in our culture at large. They are the sort of people who are eager to use the shooting of young education activist Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban to prove how horrible religion is for women but somehow fail to mention that Malala is a Muslim who speaks of drawing her inspiration to fight for gender equality from the Koran. This is not standing up for women. This is exploiting women as merely a tool in a fight against religion.

3. Olivia Cole on the complicity of white women in anti-Black racism and slavery:

It’s true, white women lacked the agency of their husbands, fathers and brothers, so their hand in slavery did not extend to the buying and selling of human chattel, the laws being made that called black people only a fraction of a human being. But white women whipped black bodies. They burned them. They posed next to the murdered bodies of black people who were lynched. They called people niggers. They scratched faces. They separated families. While wearing their pretty dresses, they ruined lives.

4. Crommunist writes about the friend zone:

As someone who absolutely used to believe in and complain about the Friend Zone, it took a lot of listening and self-examination to accept that it was entirely possible that not only was there nothing wrong with me, but that there was nothing wrong with her either (whoever ‘she’ happened to be at the time). People do things for reasons. Sometimes those reasons are malicious and exploitative and cruel. But at least as often (and I’d say far more often), they’re entirely reasonable and defensible. Part of this problem, to be sure, is that we have adopted a completely bizarre model of relationships that denies both men and women full agency – men as mindless sexual automatons, women as miserly guardians of sexual activity. A more mature understanding of relationships as two people who find ways to enhance each other’s lives allows for the possibility that people could have meaningful interaction that may or may not include sexual intimacy.

5. Brit Bennett writes about racism and good intentions:

Darren Wilson has been unrepentant about taking Mike Brown’s life. He insists he could not have done anything differently. Daniel Pantaleo has offered condolences to the Garner family, admitting that he “feels very bad” about Garner’s death.

“It is never my intention to harm anyone,” he said.

I don’t know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well.

6. Julian Sanchez writes about harassment and “harmless torturers”:

One reason public discourse about racism and sexism tends to be so acrimonious—though certainly not the only one—may be that we don’t explicitly enough distinguish “harmless torturers” cases from the “bad old days” variety.  Sophisticated critics, of course, routinely stress that misogyny and racism are fundamentally structural problems that can be perpetuated by actions that don’tnecessarily require the individuals perpetuating them to harbor any malicious intentions or vulgar attitudes.  But that’s still what we most automatically associate with the claim that something is “racist” or “sexist”—leading people to take umbrage (often in bad faith, but presumably at least sometimes sincerely) when a particular utterance or action is called out.

7. Eric Meyer writes about Facebook’s “Your Year in Review” feature:

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong.  Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.  These are hard, hard problems.  It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Algorithms are essentially thoughtless.  They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs.  To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.

8. Dana Bolger writes about the harmful discourse surrounding “victims” versus “survivors”:

In elevating those who “move forward,” the victim/survivor dichotomy implicitly condemns those who do not, reaffirming myths about what constitutes a good versus bad survivor, and legitimizing certain forms of survivorship over others. To be a (strong) survivor is to carry that weight — figuratively, and literally. To be a (weak) victim is to crumble, “stay” silent, engage in self-harm.

9. Britni writes about men (hi Richard Dawkins) who try to “rank” forms of sexual assault:

The only reason forcible kissing would not be “life-changing” for me would be because I experience so many forms of sexual violence on a constant basis that my life is alreadychanged. My life looks inherently different than a man’s does. It also looks inherently different than it would if I were not subjected to sexual violence in the form of catcalling, groping, online harassment, and rape threats on the reg, or if I’d never experienced other forms of sexual assault and rape. My life is a reflection of the fact that I’m constantly on guard or on edge, constantly on the defense when I’m around men that I do not know and wary of men that I do know. My entire LIFE is a “life-changing” event, and most women that I know would tell you the same thing. It’s exhausting to have to worry about being assaulted every damn day, but we do it. And yeah, we have to look at the world through the lens of Schrodinger’s rapist because our experience tells us that we must. That is a result of cumulative, constant, pervasive incidents of sexual assault and violence over a lifetime.

10. Dean Roth wrote a beautiful piece about loving someone who is depressed:

Sometimes, your depressed friend wants to hang out with you so they can scream about how awful they feel. It’s not because we need attention, but because we know you value our wellbeing and want to help us affirm our struggles. But I am a depression vampire; to talk about myself, I need to be invited in. If you simply ask how I’ve been doing, I’ll just say “oh you know, fine.” Please be so explicitly clear that you want us to open up.Logically, those suffering from depression probably know that our loved ones won’t mind if we just start talking about our problems. Nonetheless, depression loves to tell us that our friends are not actually our friends. If you reassure us that we have a place in your life, we can begin to rebuild our trust in the world and our own self-esteem.

11. This article by Shea Emma Fett is about abuse in polyamorous relationships, but a lot of it is applicable to monogamous relationships as well:

If you are being abused, there is a very high chance that you will be accused of being abusive or of otherwise causing the abuse. That’s because this accusation is devastatingly effective at shutting you down and obtaining control in a dispute. However, I also believe this accusation is often sincere. People often engage in abusive behaviors because they feel deeply powerless and that powerlessness hurts. But not everything that hurts in a relationship is abuse, and not everything that hurts your partner is your responsibility. It’s important to be able to distinguish abuse from other things that may happen in relationships that are hurtful, or may even be toxic or unhealthy, but are not fundamentally about entitlement and control.

12. Paul Fidalgo writes about the brutalization of women in video games:

In modern civilization there is simply no excuse for manufacturing entertainment that holds up the brutalization of women as virtuous and worthy of reward. None. It’s not necessary even if the aim is to create the most suspensful, pulse-quickening adventure game. The only reason to do it is to titillate a certain demographic, and make them feel more powerful than the automata women placed in the games.

13. Lis Coburn has a fantastic take on the idea that children receive “too much” praise:

Validating someone means recognizing that a person’s own perceptions are worth listening to. It is recognizing them as real human things that real humans think. When they say, “I hate myself,” or “I’m worthless,” or “I wish my mother would die,” validation is saying, “Yeah. I can see you really do. You feel this way really strongly.”

Most of what was cast in the 80s and 90s as failure to praise children was actually failure to validate them. When a child comes to an adult, dripping with defeat, and says, “I failed,” praise is, “No you didn’t! You did really well!” and validation is, “You’re really disappointed with how you did, hunh? That sucks.” And over time, if adults do nothing but praise, what children hear is: Your self-doubt and weaknesses are not wanted here. Failure is not acceptable, not even thinkable. I cannot accept you unless you do well.

14. Laurie Penny on why we’re winning the culture war:

Their rage is the rage of bewilderment.

They can’t understand why the new reaction to nude selfie leaks isn’t ‘you asked for it, you whore’, but ‘everyone does it, stop slut shaming.’ They can’t understand the logic of a world where ‘Social Justice Warrior’ just doesn’t work as an insult, because a great many people care quite a lot about social justice and are proud to fight for it.

They can’t understand why they look ridiculous.

15. Greta Christina explains why it’s nonsensical to use the word “radical” as an insult:

Insulting an idea (or a person) simply because they’re radical is an empty insult, devoid of any actual critical content. It’s like calling someone a poopyhead. (Unless, of course, the person’s head is actually made of poop.) And rejecting an idea (or a person) simply because you see them as radical is a sign of lazy thinking. In fact, it’s a sign of no thinking. It shows that you haven’t actually given the idea any consideration. It shows that the only consideration you gave the idea was to think, “I haven’t heard that before, it’s unfamiliar and it seems extreme, therefore it’s wrong.”

16. Ashe Dryden has some really good advice for coping with online harassment.

17. Kate Harding on misplaced concern for “free speech” online:

I’ll go to the mat for the First Amendment, but as far as comments on private websites are concerned, I say squelch ‘em all. The right to speak your mind does not include the right to parasitically attach yourself to a high-traffic website in order to reach an audience you could never earn on your own.

18. Heina discusses the “happy” Down syndrome stereotype:

“Positive” stereotypes are anything but. Those who more or less fit into them are pigeonholed, those who fit some but not all of the characteristics are identity-policed, and those who don’t fit them at all are thrown under the bus. Avoiding such splash damage is as simple as remembering that people with disabilities should not have to achieve heights of perceived “goodness” in order to be allowed to exist, heights that would never be asked of those without disabilities.

19. Katherine Lampe writes about shaming people for attempting/committing suicide (TW):

When you shame a person for mental illness, for attempting or completing suicide, what you’re doing is trying to make yourself comfortable at their expense. When you say, “Think of the people you will hurt,” you’re saying, “THINK OF MY COMFORT!” But most of the people I’ve known who’ve struggled with mental illness have already done that, and it didn’t work. We’ve already thought of you. We’ve already done the volunteer work. We’ve already found new hobbies. We’ve looked at the greeting cars we’ve saved from family and the letters from lovers. It’s not that we don’t know. It’s that none of it helps. And you think… You think, “Who’s the more selfish? Me, for wanting not to have to live in this pain? Or you, for insisting I do to spare you?”

20. Culturally Disoriented on what happens when disabled people try to “self-advocate.”

21. Mia McKenzie discusses the ways in which (white) people get distracted from the issue at hand in the wake of a police shooting of a person of color:

But let’s get something straight: a community pushing back against a murderous police force that is terrorizing them is not a “riot”. It’s an uprising. It’s a rebellion. It’s a community saying We can’t take this anymore. We won’t take it. It’s people who have been dehumanized to the point of rightful rage. And it happens all over the world. Uprisings and rebellions are necessary and inevitable, locally and globally. This is not to say that actual riots don’t happen. White folks riot at sporting events, for example. Riots happen. But people rising up in righteous anger and rage in the face of oppression should not be dismissed as simply a “riot”.

Don’t be distracted by terms like “rioting”. Whether you’re for or against uprising and rebellion (side-eye if you’re against it, though), it’s a tool, not the issue itself. The issue is yet another Black teenager murdered by police. His name was Mike Brown.

22. Sarah Jones writes about the silencing of rape/abuse survivors:

Imagine telling a veteran that they’re too emotionally connected to the subject of war to discuss it properly. Anyone making that argument in public would be dismissed as a crank—and they should be, because it’s an absurd argument. We otherwise readily acknowledge that a person’s direct experience with a subject makes them more qualified to discuss it. It doesn’t grant them infallibility, of course. Nobody can lay claim to that. We’re talking about some level of expertise that the average person doesn’t necessarily possess.

But we hold women to a different standard when the subject is abuse. And then we dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when they start to talk about the existence of a rape culture.

23. Misha explains how people unintentionally enable bullies:

How do you effectively bully as an adult? The same way you effectively bully as a kid: you either figure out the places you can do it where no one else will see you, or you figure out the ways you can do it that people will either not notice or disregard.

24. s.e. smith suggests things to do instead of giving unsolicited advice:

Instead of unsolicited advice in response to a statement where someone is simply speaking to something that’s going on in her life, try just saying: ‘I hear you.’ If you have experience in that area, ‘I’ve been there.’ If you don’t, ‘I’m listening.’ ‘So sorry you’re struggling with this.’ ‘Thinking of you.’ Just stop there. You don’t need to say anything else. The original comment was simply a statement, an expression of frustration or anger or grief or fear or pain, and sometimes, people just need to know that people are paying attention, that people are thinking of them.

25. Leigh Alexander offers some tips for responding to online sexism and discussions thereof:

DON’T: Make stupid jokes. You might be one of tons of people Tweeting at her, tone is hard to read online, and you shouldn’t be putting anyone, especially someone who does not actually know you, in charge of figuring out your sense of humor when they are under stress. You might just be trying to lighten things up or cheer the situation, but let people be angry, let them have heated discussions if they want and need to. Imagine this: Your dog dies, and a stranger walking past thinks you should cheer up, or take it less seriously, and decides to joke about your dead dog. What would you think of them?

26. Jenn M. Jackson on the historic white fear of Black people:

The fear that black people would become too wealthy or accomplished was what caused early twentieth century southern whites to strategically lynch some of the most accomplished black families, the ones who owned a horse and buggy or a nice suit jacket. The fear that black women would steal white ‘massas’ from their whites wives resulted in the intentional objectification of black women’s bodies and hair, demoralizing them, beastializing them, making them into sexual beings rather than human beings. The fear that blacks were thinking too highly of themselves and threatening white business ownership was what caused them to burn it down on June 21st, 1921. White fear has systematically and by design demolished and suppressed black wealth, mobility, and familial progress for over three centuries. What we are witnessing today is no accident.

27. Some excellent advice from Captain Awkward about antidepressants and abusive families.

What have you read or written lately?

MASSIVE Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

Miri13 Comments

Well, I’ve just graduated from college (here are my reflections on that, if you’re interested and missed it). I haven’t done of these for a while, so there are a lot of great pieces here. Hopefully by the time you’re done reading them I’ll have stopped feeling so weird about being an alumna (askdfa;lksfja;lsdfjsf) and will be ready to write again.

1. If you only read one of these things: Over on Culturally Disoriented, there’s a piece about the “family members, friends, neighbors” approach to mental illness advocacy, as exemplified by President Obama at the National Conference on Mental Health. It is so difficult to pick out just one quote from this, but here you go:

Note the construction of the sentence: “We all know somebody – a family member, a friend, a neighbor – who has struggled with mental illness.” The person with mental illness here is always someone else. They are always removed from ourselves. They are the people we help, the people we are sad for, the people we want to save. The people who are sick, the people who are hurting, the people with the problems – they are categorically not us. They are other.

2. Once again people have been whining that the term “cisgender” is “offensive.” Maeve explains why they’re wrong:

The main reason I’m offended by the constant questioning of ‘cis’ and people calling it an abusive term, is that it suggests that when we talk about gender, cisgender people are automatically ‘normal’, and transgender people are to be singled out. It posits cisgenderism as the default. As many homo- and bisexual people have said over the years to heterosexual people: you’re not normal, you’re just common.

3. I’m not the only one writing about Northwestern and depression lately. There’s a beautiful and sad piece on Sherman Ave by Ali Parr, a classmate I unfortunately do not know:

It’s easy to feel insignificant in a school this size. To feel like what you’re doing doesn’t matter, because someone else is doing it better. We are constantly competing and comparing ourselves to others, and feeling like shit in the process. I am pleading with you to stop. Stop comparing yourself to others. They think differently, they move differently, they look differently. They are different. The differences, and what we do with them, are what make humans amazing creatures. We each have something unique to share, and we each have the chance to impact others’ lives more than we know. But individuality means nothing without the support of other individuals. We need to nurture each other, to encourage, to talk. We need to not be afraid to openly and freely discuss issues. To not be afraid. We need to ask for help. To help others ask for help. We need to look out for each other.

4. s.e. talks about medical decisions and how harmful it is when people are forced to make them based on cost:

Because we live in a system where people have to hold fundraisers for basic medical treatment, and where people have to refuse advisable and possibly necessary care because they know they can’t afford it. Where a 65 year old man in hospital after a serious medical event refuses a glass of juice because he’s afraid the hospital will charge him $4 for it, and that will be $4 more on a medical bill that will run into the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands. Patients focusing on costs, of course, are going to be experiencing high levels of stress at a time when they should be focused on recovery, but telling them not to think about the expense, to ‘focus on getting well,’ is ludicrous, because what happens after they get well? If they damn the costs and go for the ‘best’ care available, they may well lose everything.

5. Chally on heteronormativity and scripts:

Heteronormativity isn’t just about the presumption that everyone is heterosexual. The expectation that boys woo girls feeds into your mind the expectation that relationships are necessary for fulfilment, and you are less than if you are not having particular kinds of sex with a particular, and a particular kind of, person at particular intervals. It’s about what Lauren Berlant calls the love plot, in which love is produced as a generic text enabling society to interpret your life as following certain conventions. It’s not about what you want, it’s about what you’re supposed to want. You’re not encouraged to think about what you want in relationships, if anything, so much as you are encouraged to fit a script. Heteronormativity messes things up for everyone, straight people included.

6. Chana thinks I’m good at arguing! And so, in this case, was Richard Dawkins.

7. Mia McKenzie discusses the myth that there is such a thing as a shared “female experience”:

Despite these and a hundred other examples, the myth of shared female experience prevails. Why? Well, the easy answer is that because “women” are so vulnerable to so many different injustices, even if that vulnerability is vastly different from one group to another, lumping us all in together gives us a louder voice and more power to change things. Even if that’s true, the downside of all this lumping together is significant. Because it allows the people with the loudest voices within the group to always be dominating the conversation. And because those voices rarely, if ever, even understand the experiences of the less-heard members of the group, not only can they not speak for them (which they shouldn’t be doing anyway), they can rarely even understand the importance of making space for them to speak for themselves.

8. A great piece satirizing the “friend zone”:

I must say that I find this really unfair. I mean, I’m a nice girl. I have a lot to offer as a friend, like not being a douchebag and stuff. But males just don’t want to be friends with nice girls like me. They can’t help it, I guess; it’s just how they’re wired, biologically. Evolution conditioned our male hominid ancestors to seek nice girls as mates and form friendship bonds only with the other dudes that they hunted mammoths with. It’s true—I know this because I studied hominids in my fifth-grade science class.

9. Crommunist discusses how to distinguish Islamophobia from legitimate criticism of Islam:

The final typical error I commonly see from critics of Islam is where one group or individual is held up as the type specimen for all Muslims. Videos of a disgusting sermon preached by an imam will make the rounds on Facebook, or a crime committed in a Muslim country will hit r/atheism, and every atheist watching will begin to concernedly cluck their tongues and regurgitate shopworn lines about ‘Muslims’. These same atheists, meanwhile, will vigorously (and accurately) point out that prominent atheistic mass-murderers do not represent all atheists or even most atheists (or even many atheists).

10. On children, who are not your property:

How many times do you see parents/people violate children’s boundaries like this every day? Children are tickled (when they’ve expressed displeasure at it) they are taunted and teased and disregarded when they express emotions or “embarass” their parents. We send the message loud and clear from a very early age that children have no rights to their own bodies and they do not have the right to their emotions. The message is:

“What happens to you, and what you feel, does not matter.”

11. For people who are still confused about what censorship means, Erin explains:

Applying pressure to a private business that has condoned, promoted or not taken a position against hate speech against women is not censorship, it’s activism. Our lives are increasingly defined by corporations and their policies. Telling an advertiser to stop objectifying women isn’t censorship, it’s applying consumer demand within the free market. Telling a business to stop sponsoring a show that calls women sluts for using basic birth control — nearly every woman in this country at some point in her life — isn’t censorship, it’s assisting them and other consumers in allocating their dollars wisely. Telling a user-dependent website to stop tolerating rape imagery isn’t censorship, it’s an uprising within the user community for the purpose of adjusting community standards to those that are safer for everyone. Private corporations are free to ignore the activism, and they are also free to do the right thing. When given sufficient nudge they often do, because women are important consumers.

12. Robby defends the concept of women-only groups (he’s talking about secular groups specifically, but this really applies to everything):

But some forms of exclusion can be OK, even if others are not. A group that excludes women is not equivalent to one that excludes men, for the simple reason that we live in a culture that heavily privileges men over women. Creating events that increase the autonomy of men at the expense of women reinforces that disparity, whereas creating events that increase the autonomy of women at the expense of men does not, and may even erode certain inequalities.

13. Jason discusses strawman conceptions of privilege, and defends the term:

Today, as I write this, I have done a number of things that are expressions of my privilege. I used electricity, all day long. I’m writing on a laptop computer, as I often do well into the night. I did groceries, and I did not go hungry. I ate very well. I did some chores around the house. I took a hot bath. I breathed clean air. I drank clean water. I took my omeprazole on time, reminded by my smartphone. Hell, I walked from point A to point B and didn’t get shot at, not even once. All of these things are little luxuries, so commonplace in my life that I am not conscious of them most of the time. They are all expressions of privilege.

That doesn’t mean I have to feel particularly guilty about being white, straight, male, middle-class, living in an area of the world that is not war- or gang-torn. Being conscious of these privileges, and working to reduce inequalities for others when I see ways to do so, is so integrated into my being now — after years of having my consciousness raised in such manners — that I consider it a moral imperative. As a person with a fully-functioning sense of empathy, I truly feel pained when I see people in circumstances that disadvantage them, even ones I don’t experience personally. I might never fully grasp the scope of their own pain, but that doesn’t exempt me from recognizing that pain and because I have a working sense of empathy, wanting to reduce it.

14. Over an Autostraddle, an incredible piece about one woman’s perspective on street harassment as a butch:

There is something strange about the street harassment I receive as a butch in that it is often terrifying and extremely triggering, but something about it makes me feel justified. I am glad these men see me as a threat. I’m glad I’m being read in a way that makes them feel uncomfortable and violent and all the things I fear with every fiber of my being, because even though I know firsthand what terrible things that humans can do to other humans, I’m proud of igniting that in someone who recognized me as queer. It makes me feel like I’m succeeding at my genderqueer identity, at my butch identity, in my masculinity. I’m glad I unnerve that man. I want to thank him for making my nose bloody, just like I want to thank the man who hit me in the face at the bar and the one who called me a “fucking bulldagger” when I stepped between him and his girlfriend.

Hit me, I want to say to them even when my skeleton is quivering with the fear of the familiar and the fatal. I fucking dare you, I want to say. I feel goddamned alive.

15. Keely wrote a really sad and poignant post about leaving her PhD program:

It’s kind of like being broken up with by a person I knew was bad for me. I loved them, cared about them, want them in my life–but I also knew that being fully committed to them was making me miserable, was going to kill me if I kept going the way I was going. I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to resolve the issues that were making me miserable– I was unlikely to ever remake academic culture to be more respectful of work-life balance, to learn to healthily run on less sleep/time for self care, to be willing to brave the insane competition for jobs and for grant money that is the result of a national research budget that doesn’t even keep up with inflation. I knew I was probably going to have to make my graceful exit eventually, because I couldn’t change science enough to tolerate me and my needs, and because I couldn’t suffer thanklessly forever.

16. Chelsea explains how privilege blinds us:

Here’s the deal. If somebody of a different gender than yours says gender matters in a situation, it probably matters. Just because you don’t see something (yet) doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and all your condescending, laughing, and scare-quoting will neither help you see it nor make what I see disappear. If lots of people with some common experience that you lack – a gender, an ethnicity, whatever – are all upset by something you don’t even see, chances are better that you’re facing the wrong way than that it simply doesn’t exist.

17. Ferrett does some equations involving assholes:

That was Stage One of my incipient Asshole Theory: Assholes will consume a certain number of other people.  Whether it’s Russell booking planes for guests or a dazzling troll in some forum who raises good points, an asshole will cause some percentage of your crowd to go “Fuck this.”  And the first stage in Asshole Theory is that you must place a value upon the asshole, and then figure out how many people s/he is worth losing.

18. Laurie says all of my thoughts–all of them–about beauty:

Rather than fighting for every woman’s right to feel beautiful, I would like to see the return of a kind of feminism that tells women and girls everywhere that maybe it’s all right not to be pretty and perfectly well behaved. That maybe women who are plain, or large, or old, or differently abled, or who simply don’t give a damn what they look like because they’re too busy saving the world or rearranging their sock drawer, have as much right to take up space as anyone else.

I think if we want to take care of the next generation of girls we should reassure them that power, strength and character are more important than beauty and always will be, and that even if they aren’t thin and pretty, they are still worthy of respect. That feeling is the birthright of men everywhere. It’s about time we claimed it for ourselves.

What have you read or written lately? Leave links in the comments.

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

Miri1 Comment

What a week. Three midterms, one awful and demoralizing bout of writer’s block, two 80-degree days, and one slightly-viral post. Go forth and read!

1. First and most importantly, we have a new blogger on the network! Her name is Yemisi Ilesanmi and her blog’s tagline is “Proudly Feminist, Proudly Bisexual, Proudly Atheist.” Go welcome her!

2. Dan Fincke is offering affordable online philosophy classes for those who want to be able to tell their Nietzsche from their Heidegger (among other things). Learn more here and sign up here if you’re interested. I’d totally do it if I weren’t brokedy-broke.

3. Speaking of Dan, I found this slightly older post of his that hit me right in the feels:

So, I never stop loving any of the women I loved. I rarely think about most of them. I almost never think of getting back with them. I don’t pine for them. My love for them never disrupts my next relationships or makes me love a new person with any less rapturous infatuation or commitment. But I’ll always love them. I love loving them. I love remembering them and what they meant to me. I love having people who when I think about them, I can find their uniqueness still mesmerizing in a way that never completely wears off. I love that there are people that I can think about and always have this twinge of fascination, however muted with time and distance.

4. Another one for the slightly more moneyed among us: A group of fantastic student activists, including one from my university, are putting together this campaign to teach college students about their Title IX rights, especially as they pertain to survivors of sexual assault. This is really important and there are about three weeks left to donate. It’s called Know Your IX. Check it out.

5. Orlando on rape prevention (this went super-duper viral when I posted it on Tumblr, so trust me, you want to read it):

If owning a gun and knowing how to use it worked, the military would be the safest place for a woman. It’s not.

If women covering up their bodies worked, Afghanistan would have a lower rate of sexual assault than Polynesia. It doesn’t.

If not drinking alcohol worked, children would not be raped. They are.

If your advice to a woman to avoid rape is to be the most modestly dressed, soberest and first to go home, you may as well add “so the rapist will choose someone else”.

6. Jessamyn at Geek Feminism discusses the psychological concept of delayed gratification and uses a recent study to brilliantly show how socioeconomic circumstances can influence human psychology:

The experiment was conceived to study self-control, but there have been several follow-up studies that seemed to indicate correlations between how long the children could hold out on the marshmallow task and their subsequent competence, SAT scores, and brain activity in regions related to control and addiction. In short, people often refer to the marshmallow task study to support claims that willpower at a young age predicts success later in life.

But the assumption there is that waiting is the optimal, if most difficult, strategy. Because sure, waiting for an additional reward could show self-control and the ability to look ahead, when the children think they can trust their environment.

7. Ally says that consent is much more simple than some people seem to think it is:

If you do something to someone’s intimate bits (or with your intimate bits) which you know s/he has not consented to or is unable to consent to at that moment, you are committing an act of sexual assault or rape.

There. That’s it. In practice this means that if s/he says “I’ll do this but I won’t do that” it means you have consent to do this but not do that. If s/he says “I’ll put this here but I’m not having it there” then you have consent to put it here but not put it there. If s/he says “I’ll do this but only if you wear that” then you have consent to do this, if and only if you are wearing that. (I’m mostly thinking of condoms here, but I guess the same principle applies to the pirate outfit. Whatever pushes your boat, you’re still the skipper.) If you ignore this very simple principle, and proceed with an act which your partner has not consented to, you are committing an act of sexual assault or rape.  Oh, and if you do ever find yourself uttering words along the lines of “I’ll do it if I want” then – BIG FUCKING CLUE – you’re a rapist.

8. Chana thinks you should stop FAPing. Wait, let her explain:

What all these people have in common is that when they see a discussion going on about a particular topic, they seem to think to themselves “I know an argument about that topic!” and then proceed to give it, whether or not it’s appropriate or relevant. FAPers see making their argument as so important that it doesn’t matter whether it adds to the discussion or not.

(FAP stands for “fixed action pattern,” by the way.)

9. Mitchell talks about “You can be anything you want!“:

First, as with all, “You can do it if you really try”, messages, saying these types of things implies that if you don’t reach particular goals, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough. While it may be true that there are people who could have been astronauts if they just studied a little harder, that’s certainly not the case for everyone who ever wanted to be an astronaut and didn’t make it. Plenty of people who may have dreamed of being astronauts probably have mental or physical limitations that prevent it from being possible. Plenty of others were probably raised in contexts where they didn’t have access to an educational system sufficient to the task of preparing someone to pursue a career as an astronaut. Others still may have had the pursuit of that particular goal derailed by debt, traumatic life events, personal disasters, natural disasters, etc. The simple reality is that not everyone can be an astronaut, and it’s not just because everyone who doesn’t make it is lazy.

10. Lauren Divito at Bitchtopia gives some advice to men’s advice columns:

I recently came across this gem from AskMen.com: “Top 10: Subtle Ways To Tell Her She’s Getting Fat.”  Not only does this article perpetuate the idea that fat bodies—and fat women’s bodies in particular—are unacceptable, but it doesn’t do straight men any favors, either. If it’s not clear enough from the ratings (87% feeling “furious,” and only 2% feeling like “a better man”) then allow me to spell this out for you: these kinds of articles suck.

[…]No woman’s body type makes her deserving of emotional abuse.  I don’t care if you don’t find a certain body type attractive; you’re allowed to have preferences.  However, that does not give you the right to try to make a woman feel bad about her body.  People should be allowed to feel confident about themselves at any size.  If your girlfriend is happy with her fat self, don’t try to change her.

11. Ozy makes a good case for studying snail sex and dispels the myth that researching arcane subjects is the reason we’re fucked financially right now:

The government is not loads in debt because they have spent a lot of money on research about animal fucking. The government spends most of its money on Social Security, the Department of Defense, and “Unemployment/Welfare/Other Mandatory Spending.” The Department of Animal Fucking Research was, unfortunately, too small to show up on the pie chart.

12. Heina on “fauxminism“:

While trying to set up a One True Feminist or Feminism would be problematic (not to mention blatantly fallacious), if feminism really were just about supporting individual women’s choices, then it would simply be called “female individualism.” While choice is an important part of feminism, it is far from the only part, especially in a world where those doing the talking about feminism often have more choices available to them than those they would criticize.

Feminism, then, does not equal blind support for all women and all of their choices, but working towards a world where more and more women have more and more agency in their lives — a world where women who aren’t hot, extraordinarily talented, Republicans, mothers, assigned female at birth, powerful, or able to look sexy while kicking someone’s ass are still able to be people, too.

13. Wes at Polyskeptic writes about skeptical monogamy and gives a bunch of reasons why skeptics may choose it:

Most people feel sexual or romantic desire for more than one person. However, not everybody does. A couple who approached their relationship skeptically could easily conclude that they were only interested in each other. However, the difference between this and your garden-variety monogamy is that skeptical monogamy (or what Shaun calls accidental monogamy) would not have rules against outside sexual or romantic connections. They just wouldn’t happen, because neither party would be interested. A skeptical couple, however, will know they cannot predict their future desires (especially many years in advance), so a skeptically monogamous couple will not make long-term plans or rules that are dependent upon their desires remaining only for one another.

14. Emily Fincke wrote this amazing piece on sensationalism in the news. Don’t just read the excerpt. Read all of it.

Your false suspense. Your overly-produced segments featuring concerned blonde ladies in news rooms in front of footage of carnage. Your suspenseful music and pre-commercial teasers. Your “shocking breakthroughs” and “exclusive information (which may or may not be correct)”.

You take our human concern and pervert it. You make our desire to know what’s going on and turn us into peeping toms. You take the human interests and make them into reality tv performers.

[…]Until you figure this out, news. I’m going to continue to continue to get my news from brilliant reporters like Seth Mnookin and Taylor Dobbs. I’m going to continue turning to the brilliant group of journalists, both fledgeling and veteran, both professional and amateur, whom I follow on twitter. I will continue to get my morning news from NPR and my evening news from BBC world. I will not be watching your overly-produced reality porn. I will not be giving your sponsors eyes. I will not be falling prey to the messages you send about who are the *correct* people to be afraid of. I will not be absorbing your biases and your messages of fear and hatred. I will not buy into your manufactroversies, and I will not hound innocent young men because they fit the profile you want me to suspect.

Go give me ideas for my blogothon on Sunday, post your own links in the comments, and have a great weekend!

Occasional Link Roundup