This is too real. NRA conventions are associated with large declines in accidental gun injuries because all the gun owners are too busy talking about guns to actually be playing around with them!
"A decline of 63% was seen in the states where the conventions were being held, apparently due to large numbers of gun owners being at the events, as well as, in some cases, gun venues such as firing ranges or hunting grounds having closed while their staff attended the convention."
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"Some historians estimate that as much as 10 percent of a working family’s income in industrializing Britain was spent on opium. ... It was as if the shift toward modernity and a wholly different kind of life for humanity necessitated for most working people some kind of relief — some way of getting out of the train while it was still moving. It is tempting to wonder if, in the future, today’s crisis will be seen as generated from the same kind of trauma, this time in reverse. If industrialization caused an opium epidemic, deindustrialization is no small part of what’s fueling our opioid surge." NY Magazine
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Very interesting review of Black Panther's aesthetics and cultural references (no major spoilers), though I think there's a conversation to be had about the weight of expectation placed on the film. Science fiction about, and made by, white people is free to imagine a future radically different from the past and the present... but only because the past and present of white people is *already* so thoroughly represented. Viewers can be relied on already to have taken that all on board and be ready for something radically new.
So I can totally see why the film-makers, when finally given a massive Hollywood budget to depict Africa, would focus on representing so much of the actually-existing cultural richness that has been hidden from Western eyes (of all races). It's a lot to ask that they do all this *and* represent an entirely novel, utopian future, all in the space of one movie!
"To be truly utopian, a narrative must move beyond simply re-assigning the present to a future time. For Black Panther, this would mean beginning from a utopian archive. It would mean fashioning a radically new African world from a backcloth that is itself utopian and not merely anthropologically available."
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"The collision of technology and commercial sex makes many reach for criminalisation, seeking to “solve” the problem of prostitutes encroaching on your leafy suburban street or your holiday let. But if the government were really interested in reducing harm or tackling exploitation – which it largely isn’t – it would end immigration detention or increase the resources given to trafficking survivors and asylum seekers, not embark on more failed and harmful attempts to eradicate commercial sex through criminalisation." Guardian
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It would be kind of funny if it weren't so tragic... The police definition of "gang" is much more "group of ethnic minority kids who like hanging out together" than "people who are jointly involved in a violent or otherwise criminal enterprise"
"Although young black people are more likely to be suspected by the police of being gang members, they commit a proportionally small amount of violence. In their study, published in 2016, Clarke and Williams found that 81% of the individuals on Greater Manchester police’s list of suspected gang members were black. Yet during the same period, black youth were responsible for just 6% of serious violence by young people in Manchester. Similar patterns were found in London, where Metropolitan police data showed that in 2015-2016 less than 5% of serious youth violence was linked to alleged gang members...
When you plot the youth violence data on a map, you see these hotspots in north Manchester and Wythenshawe, and little ones in central-south. About 70% of the people who represent all of the marks on those hotspots were white British. But when you look at the map of alleged gang members, “there’s just this one big hotspot, right in Moss Side.” [a predominantly black area]"
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"The case of Singapore is more than just a funny gotcha to use against right-wingers. It actually raises an interesting question about what it is people care about when it comes to “capitalism” and “socialism.” Is capitalism primarily about markets or private ownership? Relatedly, is socialism primarily about ending markets or promoting collective ownership? Often these things are bundled together, but they are logically and practically separable. Singapore (and Norway, among others) shows that it is quite possible to collectively own the means of production while also using price systems to assist in the allocation of productive factors. This is what market socialists have been saying for a hundred years."
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Really helpful article re Jordan Peterson. It does clarify for me that he's basically a standard patriarchal, authoritarian conservative, dressed up in confusing language. So, while I loathe his politics, I think my earlier interpretation of him as exactly "a fascist apologist" was simplistic. This was rooted partly in my own instant dislike of him (which I stand by), and partly in his obsession with Soviet and especially 1930s history, which is something fascists are also super into.
"A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected."
" If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve."
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I don't love David Brooks generally, but this is a good point. Trump in the US can be thought of as broadly analogous to Berlusconi in Italy. He arose out of a loss of faith in democracy and democratic institutions, and will probably further undermine that faith by his extreme statements and inability to govern effectively. If we don't make a concerted effort to correct the ship, there's no reason we won't see increasingly political extremism in subsequent election cycles.
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Speaking of legalisation, Los Angeles' cannabis ordinances sound so positive and radical I keep wondering if there's a catch somewhere...?
"The new ordinances in L.A. create a “social equity” tier of applicants who will receive priority for licenses to own and operate marijuana businesses. These are people who have past convictions for marijuana-related crimes, or who live in an L.A. neighborhood that was a verifiable target of enforcement during the drug war. It’s an attempt at restorative justice for the minority communities most negatively impacted by marijuana prohibition."
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"The question, then, is how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion. It is striking, though unsurprising, that while men tend to respond to sexual marginalisation with a sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, women who experience sexual marginalisation typically respond with talk not of entitlement but empowerment. Or, insofar as they do speak of entitlement, it is entitlement to respect, not to other people’s bodies." London Review of Books
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This piece crystallises some of my own ephemeral musings on (the crisis of) masculinity. In brief: we are fragile pieces of flesh in the midst of a vast, overwhelming and indifferent universe. Masculinity* is fundamentally an ideology that evades this tragic reality. Boys don't cry; instead they construct elaborate fantasies of power and control, and then try to act them out. But the small pieces of control we achieve, often at the expense of others, are pretty worthless in the face of our own insignificance and mortality. I like the author's plea not to "waste the crisis". If we feel the control slipping out of our hands, let's not redouble our efforts and try grip even harder. Let's instead try to recognise that it was always illusory.
(*In one particular sense of the word. Masculinity can also refer to perfectly fun and harmless things, like certain aesthetic choices)
"Certainly, men would waste this latest crisis of masculinity if they deny or underplay the experience of vulnerability they share with women on a planet that is itself endangered. Masculine power will always remain maddeningly elusive, prone to periodic crises, breakdowns and panicky reassertions. It is an unfulfillable ideal, a hallucination of command and control, and an illusion of mastery, in a world where all that is solid melts into thin air, and where even the ostensibly powerful are haunted by the spectre of loss and displacement."
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"In pre-colonial societies ... ethnicity was a fungible cultural artefact, one that was not necessarily encoded into one’s genes, attached to particular homelands or imbued with ideas of political sovereignty. Individuals and even entire societies could navigate in and out of them. In fact, even the ideas of kinship and shared ancestry were “notoriously malleable to serve contemporary social or ideological purposes. But once rooted in the social consciousness, mythology convincingly impersonates reality.”... However, for a colonial administration that required order and control in order to facilitate its extractive aim, such inexactitude was unacceptable. Confronted with the reality of the diversity on the African continent, the European colonisers tried to hammer it into compliance with their preconceived ideas. Much of this was accomplished using administrative measures and backed up by brute force." The Elephant
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"Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic [dog-directed speech], comprising of both dog-directed prosody and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs’ attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets." Discover
