«As to why white Americans, who have thirteen times the median household wealth of black Americans, feel threatened by diminished discrimination against black people, neither Sommers nor Norton had an answer that was satisfying to any of us.»
https://a.co/9gAbpeo
«The U.S Department of Education exempted Baylor University from sexual harassment claims regulated under Title IX last month, after the Christian university asked the agency to dismiss discrimination complaints made by students, arguing that the claims were inconsistent with the university’s religious tenets.»
Alrighty, then.
Kurt Vonnegut:
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’
“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”
https://medium.com/writers-blokke/a-life-lesson-from-kurt-vonnegut-of-all-people-4cbd3284c740
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1193091939/montgomery-brawl-memes
From Eric Deggans, NPR’s first full-time TV critic and author of the book Race-Baiter, a book I’ve always wanted to read:
«I always say social media is often like a giant dinner party, where people forget they are sometimes listening in on conversations between other people. In this case, being asked to explain the folding chair memes felt like having someone barge into an ongoing conversation to ask for an explanation.
As I traded messages with people and retweeted the best memes, this felt like a moment where folks could be hilariously Black online and we could all share the experience together, laughing and consoling each other in one viral social media moment.
Someone popping up to demand an explanation felt like they were re-centering the conversation in a way I just wasn’t willing to do right away.
Sometimes, in situations like that, understanding comes best by sitting back, listening widely, and learning. Even for me.
I originally wrote a version of this column for my personal Tumblr page, mostly as a way of processing a response that was new and unfamiliar for me. I don’t know if this reaction is fair – especially given how much I’ve encouraged discussion about race over the years.
But it’s all I have left, in a world where I increasingly feel like a frog in pot of steadily heating water, watching racists and racism get bolder — wondering when the heat will begin to burn me, my loved ones, my family, my friends and my people.
Or when I’ll need to reach out for aid from a helpful brother with a folding chair.»
(btw, I will always be grateful for a Black person who has the patience and takes the time to explain something.)
«Rap is no longer the embodiment of African American resistance it once was. Now, it’s a hyper-commercialized cultural assembly line that’s somehow been re-designed to glorify the very issues it once pushed so hard against.»
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/10/black-rappers-aligning-right-conservative-ice-cube
Fascinating article, actually.
«So how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.»
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/09/madeline-miller-long-covid-post-pandemic/
If I understand correctly, this web site was built and is maintained by Black high-school students in Chapel Hill: https://www.jimcrowinchapelhill.org/
«1990 — Housekeepers threatened with job loss for joining the NAACP; the largest education advocacy organization in Chapel Hill»
1990!!
https://karawynn.substack.com/p/language-is-a-poor-heuristic-for
«One clear reason is that corporations would prefer to use machines for a number of jobs that currently require actual humans who are knowledgeable, intelligent, and friendly, but who also have this annoying tendency to want to be paid enough money to support the maintenance of their inconvenient meat sacks. Not to mention the problematic fact that humans occasionally possess ethics, independent thinking, and objectives besides maximizing shareholder profit.»
Kind of a nothing quote, but I still like it.
Here’s a better one:
«The second reason for this choice is that, as Ted Chiang wryly notes, “there is a market opportunity for volleyballs.” The reference is to the movie Castaway, in which a marooned and desperately lonely Tom Hanks makes a washed-ashore volleyball into an imaginary friend. Humans are a social species down to our core; the more modern life erodes our opportunities for actual human companionship — whether it’s by interposing technology as an intermediary into every interaction, or sucking up all our time with the capitalist/consumerist grind — the more desperate we’ll become for friendly-sounding volleyball substitutes.»
Or this one:
«Computer scientist Timnit Gebru (famously fired from Google in 2020 for raising ethical issues around the use of AI) has repeatedly warned that when the public conversation focuses on red herrings — like the potential morality and values of a wholly-theoretical computer intelligence — we cease to ascribe responsibility to the real people and actual corporations that are creating harmful products. Any action taken to counteract those harms would cut into profit, so the LLM-invested folks would really prefer we all worry about a mirage instead.»
…
«As a society, we’re going to have to radically rethink….»
Well… THAT ain’t happening.
The footnotes are great:
«6. Increasingly I find myself wanting to take journalists by the shoulders and shake them until their teeth rattle. Like Jeff Jarvis, who first correctly noted that ChatGPT “is a personal propaganda machine that strings together words to satisfy the ear, with no expectation that it is right” … and then turned around in the same article [paywalled link] and discussed his “anthropomorphic sympathy” for ChatGPT as a “wronged party”. FOR FUCK’S SAKE, JEFF!»
#artificialIntelligence #ai
Crunchy left to alt-right pipeline, again.
Here, Read This 