It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better!
You’re Not Angry Right Now, You’re Grieving (from John Pavlovitz): “Grief looks a lot like anger on the outside. Sometimes it seems simply like unmerited rage, but it’s really the frustration the heart feels when it finds itself in trauma that it can’t make any sense of. The lashing out, is the pressure of our helplessness needing a release.
We’re not supposed to be in this situation. Our bodies and our brains aren’t equipped for this kind of protracted pain, this prolonged elevated urgency. Crisis isn’t supposed to be never-ending. This isn’t how grief is supposed to work.”
I “Detoxed” My Vagina And This Is What Happened (from Refinery 29): “Beyond the usual dicks/fingers/tampons etc, women are cautious about putting anything up their fanny. With good reason. I’m not sure what I’m doing is potentially bad for me. Well I actually do know it’s potentially bad for me as the gynaecologist already expressly told me it was. I start to feel like I have cramps but think I might have cramps before? Does anything inspire the same paranoia as our vagina?
That night I figure my vagina’s “detoxing” so I can have a few drinks and a few cigarettes. By the time I’m leaving the pub it feels like I’ve got Berocca in my snizz.”
White people assume niceness is the answer to racial inequality. It’s not (from the Guardian): “In addition to niceness, proximity is seen as evidence of a lack of racism. Consider the claims many white people give to establish that they aren’t racist: “I work in a diverse environment.” “I know and/or love people of color.” “I was in the Peace Corps.” “I live in a large urban city.” These are significant because they reveal what we think it means to be racist. If I can tolerate (and especially if I enjoy and value) proximity, claims of proximity maintain, I must not be racist; a “real” racist cannot stand to be near people of color, let alone smile or otherwise convey friendliness.”
My Mother Is Not A Bird (from the New York Times): “So much of the conversation about death is euphemism. People use words like “passing.” And in the fog of loss they leap for answers, claiming any number of things are their loved ones returning. They point at birds and butterflies and say, “That’s Mom.” They hear a crash in their basement and think, “There she is again.”
I don’t think of my mom as a thump in the basement.”
Steven Pinker’s fake enlightenment: His book is full of misleading claims and false assertions (from Salon): “Since my primary area of academic research is “existential threats,” and since Pinker has an entire chapter dedicated to this issue — aptly titled “Existential Threats” — I decided to pull out my exegetical microscope and take a closer look at what Pinker had to say. What I found was startling, but not altogether surprising in light of Bell’s observations: Mined quotes, cherry-picked data, false dichotomies, misrepresented research, misleading statements and outright false assertions on nearly every page.”
Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’ (from the Guardian): “His return to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico after 35 years was to reveal an appalling discovery. The insect population that once provided plentiful food for birds throughout the mountainous national park had collapsed. On the ground, 98% had gone. Up in the leafy canopy, 80% had vanished. The most likely culprit by far is global warming.”
Do Trump Supporters Deserve Our Charity? (from Daylight Atheism via Patheos): “In general, I believe people should be treated with the same compassion they show others. And I don’t believe that anyone could have supported Trump for any reason other than malice. His flagrant cruelty was the central message and selling point of his campaign: cruelty to immigrants, to refugees, to women, to people of color, to Gold Star families, to disabled journalists, to former POWs… the list goes on and on.”
How conservative media transformed the Covington Catholic students from pariahs to heroes (from the Guardian): “On Tuesday night, Fox News hosts continued to feast on the controversy, which was sparked by a standoff between Covington Catholic high school students and a Native American veteran called Nathan Phillips. Footage show students wearing pro-Trump Maga hats taunting the Omaha tribe elder. The relentlessly repeated talking point – that there was a collective “rush to judgment” on the boys because they were Trump supporters – was used by conservative anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attack mainstream media and left leaning social media users.
On Wednesday morning, Sandmann got almost nine minutes of airtime on a national breakfast program to make his case, after his family hired a Republican-linked PR firm.”
The Myth of the Boner Werewolf. (from the Pervocracy): “There’s a pernicious myth out there that the male sex drive is unstoppable and irresistible–that once a man is aroused, he literally cannot control his actions. We tell jokes about “thinking with the other head” and “all the blood went out of his brain” that aren’t entirely jokes. We have a cultural narrative in which sexual arousal makes a man into a goddamn werewolf.
And we expect women to tiptoe around this uncontrollable male sexuality. We tell them to watch how they dress, lest they wake the beast. We tell them “some guys can’t control themselves”–not won’t, but can’t. We tell them to be careful what they start, because they’ll be expected to finish it. Hell, way too often we outright tell them that they have no right to withdraw consent once sex has started.”
And that’s all for this week! Drop by again for even more articles that will make you go, “Hmmmm”. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 