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, the merrier! 🙂
Atlah Church Is Classified As A Hate Group. It’s Able To Run A School Anyway. (from the Huffington Post): “Manning isn’t just an outrageous character, perfect fodder for a satirical late-night show and click-baity internet headlines. He also runs a K-12 private school at the church, the two units of which are called Great Tomorrow’s USA Elementary/Middle and Atlah High School. His persona there is anything but an entertaining spectacle.
Around the same time Manning was gaining notoriety for his dangerous rhetoric, he locked a teenage boy named Sharif Hassan in the church’s basement, according to Hassan and several other congregants and students from that time.”
Hurricane Maria’s lasting impact on Puerto Rico’s children revealed in report (from the Guardian): “The study is one of the largest attempts in US history to survey young people after a major natural disaster. It is also the largest sample ever of Hispanic youth impacted by disaster, a group underrepresented in existing research.”
The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons (from Scientific American): “People who revisit Hardin’s original essay are in for a surprise. Its six pages are filled with fear-mongering. Subheadings proclaim that “freedom to breed is intolerable.” It opines at length about the benefits if “children of improvident parents starve to death.” A few paragraphs later Hardin writes: “If we love the truth we must openly deny the validity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” And on and on. Hardin practically calls for a fascist state to snuff out unwanted gene pools.”
Dear White People, Please Stop Pretending Reverse Racism Is Real (from Vice): “One of my friends reacted to the piece with absolute outrage. This person, a white male journalist, told me that I was trying to “shut down white voices.” Towards the end of our exchange, in which he admitted he was worried he was eventually going to lose his job to a person of colour, he called me a “bigoted little witch.”
His views sound extreme, especially for someone who works for a mainstream media organization. But he’s not alone. It seems the more we talk about racism, the stronger another narrative becomes—one that paints white people as the ones who are truly oppressed.”
Waiting for Bad People to Die (from John Pavlovitz): “I wanted to tell her that these impulses were wrong, that such feelings were unhealthy, that this kind of consuming hatred toward another human being was dangerously toxic.
I wanted to remind her that this level of contempt for a stranger, was the very thing she abhorred in the people she feels this way toward.
I wanted to steer her from such negative energy—but I couldn’t do any of these things.
I understood her.
Her desperation and hopelessness make total sense.
This is a natural human response to unchecked brutality and unrelenting cruelty: wanting it all to end.
You don’t actually wish harm to people, you just wish harmful people would stop harming people—and there seems to be nothing in them that will move them to stop.”
The Incredible Shrinking Woman (from Medium): “And deep down what I really wanted to say to this woman was that it’s not actually her fault. Because it was not her who asked me, “Who’s gonna want a big woman with short hair?” when I chopped it all off in college. Gave me the sage advice of “A man doesn’t care how big you are as long as your stomach is flat!” Or inflicted the pain of the man I loved reminding me of my sexual unattractiveness, the largeness of my ass, and his lack of satisfaction as I stared at his equally large body. She couldn’t have known any of these things that afternoon as snowy mountains gave way to rolling green hills outside the windows. So maybe I was just seeking a kindred spirit, a kind look between the seats that let me know that while her tucking and folding may have been different, she was trying to shrink, too.”
Iacon East 