Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label social conflict. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social conflict. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

The Portable Panic Room

The New Republic lines it out in good shape. I think it means we've developed a sense of special entitlement that has us thinking we get to set the rules according to our own worldview - and we get to back it up with a personal vigilantism that seems to be triggered by a kinda of permanent paranoid delusion.

Add to that a 30-year drumbeat of "government is worthless - you're on your own", which is courtesy of a very well-funded, nearly omnipresent wingnut media cartel that happily (and purposefully) feeds those delusions, and you've got a large part of the country ready to shoot anybody who crosses some imaginary line.



We’re All Bad Neighbors Now

What explains the rise of noise complaints and get-off-my-lawn violence in America? Research points to one intriguing possibility.


The limits of self-defense and the nature of vigilantism are both perennial American debate topics, but this spring, they boomed louder than ever. In March, a woman in the Bronx stabbed her neighbor to death over a noise complaint. In April, a 20-year-old woman was shot and died after she accidentally turned into the wrong driveway. In May, Daniel Penny, a white ex-Marine, put Jordan Neely, a Michael Jackson impersonator and mentally ill Black man, in a 15-minute-long headlock on a subway in New York City, killing him. It’s anyone’s guess what June will bring.

Trying to make sense of this senseless and ubiquitous violence, whether on the national news or in your nearest NextDoor group, inevitably leads to a handful of rote explanations: There are too many guns, Fox News profits off paranoia, structural racism and impoverishment breeds “random violence.” Or, something is wrong in the minds of Americans, “a mental health crisis grips the city,” people need opportunities to safely express their inner anger. Or both. All we know for certain is that you either die young or you live to become the bad neighbor.

For that is the real crux of the issue: Our definition of “personal space” is expanding, with dire political consequences. The “get off my lawn” logic of a Clint Eastwood movie, the enshrined rights of the “homeowner,” and the cult of personal property have infiltrated even the most public of spaces: the sidewalk, the city bus, the grocery store parking lot.
Intrusion of any kind registers as a cataclysmic event for the person trapped inside their own portable panic room. This rageful individualism shows up in more subtle ways too: Everyone is setting boundaries with the “toxic people” in their lives. Every day is Beef, or The Banshees of Inisherin. And the bigger your bubble is, the bigger its inevitable burst.

In the 1960s, anthropologist Edward T. Hall posited that there are four concentric invisible circles radiating outward from every human being. The smallest ring, within 1.5 feet of the subject’s skin barrier, he named the “intimate.” The next circle, radiating outward from 1.5 feet to about four feet, was “personal.” From there, stretching out to about 12 feet, existed the “social.” The final ring, from about 12 to 24 feet, was the “public.”

Researchers in proxemics—that is, the study of the human use of space—have always understood that the radii of our personal circles “are not static,” says Vikas Mehta, a professor of urbanism at the University of Cincinnati. Proxemic boundaries shift in response to numerous stimuli: motion, touch, volume, body angle, and even skin temperature. These lines of demarcation also vary widely across cultures: Peruvians get much closer than Romanians; Americans are, perhaps surprisingly, somewhere in the global middle, with an average personal space bubble clocking in at 3.1 feet. But everyone has some amount of “personal” territory—and, it follows, territoriality.

This flexibility is useful. Though populated by strangers, a rush hour city bus is the definition of “intimate.” To cope with this crushing proximity, people may use noise-canceling headphones, hold an open newspaper between themselves and the world, or opt for what one researcher in 1999 called the “New York non-person phenomenon”—in essence, a strategic dissociation.

Conversely, and less helpfully, our sense of what’s ours can expand outward. “Road rage” only makes sense if we accept that the driver’s body has, in some meaningful way, grown to encompass their SUV.

More recent findings suggest that Covid-19 changed our spatial reality. During the early phases of the pandemic, millions were confined to their homes and asked to remain hypervigilant in public settings. Anything closer than six feet of distance between strangers implied contamination, both literal and metaphorical, Mehta says. One 2021 study, conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital with just 19 participants, who were tested before and during the pandemic, found that the subjects’ perception of their personal space expanded by 40 to 50 percent on average in response to these public health measures. What was once a roughly three-foot-wide bubble grew, by the second assessment, to about 4.1 feet around. Other senses may also have been affected: Noise complaints have been on the rise for the last half-decade in some cities. The world temporarily quieted in the lockdown, but our sensitivity to sound seems to have only grown in the post-vax period, if noise complaints data in 2021 is anything to go by.

It’s unclear how widespread or long-lasting these trends really were; the current body of pandemic proxemic research is too small to generate any robust conclusions. But it’s hard not to wonder, when surveying the available data, whether many people may still be experiencing a kind of post-pandemic culture shock, without ever having left their neighborhood.

Or, put another way: If Hall’s second circle—the personal—is expanding, Mehta says it likely comes at the expense of the third sphere: the ever-shrinking social.

The “social” space between humans, extending from four to 12 feet, is the domain in which much of modern life unfolds: Store aisles are often between three and five feet wide. Sidewalks may be as little as five feet across. Even in parking lots, drivers rarely have enough room to fully open their doors. So we slip, slide, and squeeze our way through life—usually without incident.

But personal space “invasions” can elicit a range of negative emotions, from squirming discomfort to simmering rage. Sometimes these strong reactions are justified, as in the case of violations like sexual assault, abuse, or physical intimidation. No one has the right to invade another person’s personal space, however defined. Just as often, however, the way people react to close encounters with strangers can feel disproportionate to the situation—as if pent-up anger from other aspects of life were brought to the surface simply by the heat of so many bodies.

While fearmongering about the “state of our cities” is undeserved, anyone who claims not to have witnessed this widespread pain and anger is simply not paying attention. Even the privileged few who have managed to shelter in their stylized homes are showing their social maladjustment: What is the fixation on setting boundaries with “toxic people,” or over-identifying with Ali Wong in Beef, or the widespread claim of “overstimulation,” if not the bourgeois manifestation of these larger obsessions with protecting personal space above all else?

In many ways, our current way of relating to one another feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In summer 2020, in the midst of the nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, we heard ceaseless reports framing property damage as “violence”—as if a police station or a bank storefront were a vulnerable person. Now, when strangers attempt to use property deemed personal—whether a car in a public lot, a driveway to a private home, or, in the minds of some, even a subway car—this is treated as a form of bodily “violence,” an implicit threat to life and limb.

But this version of personal property rights is also co-opting narratives that felt, at one time, diametrically opposed to individualism. In the pandemic, there was an increased focus on cooperation and neighborliness. In the wake of the virus, conversations sprang up nationally about the importance of being involved in one’s community, offering mutual aid, protecting and supporting each other—doing the work of being what Jane Jacobs once called “the eyes on the street.” For every think piece about the benefits of remote work, one can find three or four insisting that adult dormitories, or co-working spaces, or other means of building community are the only answer to Americans’ “loneliness crisis.”

Now it’s clear that these ideals, however noble, can branch off in unexpected ways. You can be the “eyes on the street” for the police. You can use the rationale of “protecting others” to kill someone. While many are mourning Neely, others are valorizing the man who killed him. “You don’t have to wait until some innocent person is stabbed or killed to spring into action,” a letter to the editor of the New York Post read. “The victim made threats and was acting in a belligerent manner. Daniel Penny is a total hero.”

The most potent solutions for our current social crisis—like a weapons ban, or constraints on the purchase of ammunition—feel all but impossible politically. In the absence of hope for collective action, people waste time and money on individualistic fads, like anger management classes. Or worse, they opt out of the social sphere, as part of the “agoraphobic fantasy” of bourgeois ownership, Zoe Hu writes in Dissent.

But at least as far as proxemics are at play, there are opportunities to modify our built environments for the better, without reducing density. Cities could offer tax breaks or other subsidies for people who want to install noise-insulated windows and acoustic wall panels. Investments in public transit—with an eye toward more and more frequent trains or buses, and design modifications like removing middle seats—could free up space. And to help foster safer interactions between neighbors, municipalities should focus on advertisements in public spaces, or even online and in-person workshops, about what bystander intervention is (and what it isn’t).

Most importantly, citizens must remain present in public spaces—especially those who might otherwise have the money to opt out and spend more time in private spheres. Social space only works with other people in it. When an entire class opts for Ubers over light rail or blood-spattered tabloid stories over the reality on the street—essentially an in-situ white flight—the social sphere can tip from rumored decay to real disaster. As always, it’s the people who can’t afford another option who will suffer most. So if there’s one story we tell ourselves, let’s hope it’s this: We must fight to protect the bubble we share.

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Woke Is As Woke Does, Sir


I dunno what you thought should happen, George - or what you think needs to happen - but when things get as shitty as they are right now, people will rebel.

Ain't nobody happy to hear "leaders" bullying and abusing their neighbors, family, and friends.

And when it seems like everything is outa whack, then we're going to get lots of people trying to rectify the situation in a variety of ways.

60 years ago, using the n-word was common, and "normal", and acceptable. 40 years ago, we started to realize that was a really shitty way to talk.

Likewise with "faggot" and calling somebody "woman" in an attempt to drag them down.

So we began to make changes in the way we think, and talk, and act - because society has to evolve, and society's use of the language has to evolve too.

That doesn't mean you should be afraid to push back and try to make your stand - no matter what an atavistic dumbass fool you make of yourself while you're doing it. (I am quite familiar with this particular aspect)

Just know this: Yes, you get to speak your mind, but you don't get to demand never to suffer the blowback.


Opinion
Woke word-policing is now beyond satire - George Will

Sometimes in politics, which currently saturates everything, worse is better. When a political craze based on a bad idea achieves a critical mass, one wants it to be undone by ridiculous excess. Consider the movement to scrub from the English language and the rest of life everything that anyone might consider harmful or otherwise retrograde.

Worse really is better in today’s America (if you will pardon that noun; some at Stanford University will not; read on) as the fever of foolishness denoted by the word “woke” now defies satire. At Stanford, a full-service, broad-spectrum educational institution, an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” several months ago listed words to avoid lest they make someone feel sad, unsafe, disrespected or something. Problematic words include “American,” which suggests that America (this column enjoys being transgressive) is the most important country in North and South America. The list was quickly drenched by an acid rain of derision, and Stanford distanced itself from itself: The university’s chief information officer said the list was not a mandate. The list warns against using the “culturally appropriative” word “chief” about any “non-indigenous person.”

The University of Southern California’s school of social work banned the word “field” because it connotes slavery. So, Joe DiMaggio did not roam Yankee Stadium’s center field. Heaven forfend. Perhaps centerpasture. DiMaggio was a centerpasturer? An awkward locution, but it appeases the sensitivity police. The Chicago Cubs should henceforth play in Wrigley Meadow.

Such is the New York Times’s astonishment, last week the newspaper treated as front-page news the fact that few people like the term “Latinx.” The Times describes this as “an inclusive, gender-neutral term to describe people of Latino descent.” With “Latinx,” advanced thinkers, probably including hyper-progressive non-Latino readers of the Times, have exhausted the public’s tolerance of linguistic progressivism. Progressives’ bewildering new pronoun protocols ignited the laughter that “Latinx” intensified.

Back at Stanford, more than 75 professors are opposing the university’s snitching apparatus. The “Protected Identity Harm” system enables — actually, by its existence, it encourages — students to anonymously report allegations against other students, from whom they have experienced what the system calls “harm because of who they are and how they show up in the world.”

The PIH website breathlessly greets visitors: “If you are on this website, we recognize that you might have experienced something traumatic. Take a sip of water. Take a deep breath.” PIH recently made national news when someone reported the trauma of seeing a student reading Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

The professors urge Stanford to avoid “a formal process that students could construe as some sort of investigation into protected speech, or that effectively requires them to admit their protected expression was problematic. Instead, Stanford can support students who are sensitive to speech without involving the speaker.” Perhaps by gently shipping those who are “sensitive to speech” to a Trappist monastery.

Early in the Cold War, some colleges and universities were pressured to require faculty to sign loyalty oaths pledging they were not members of the Communist Party. Liberals honorably led the fight against such government-enforced orthodoxy. Today, liberals are orthodoxy enforcers at the many schools that require applicants for faculty positions to write their own oaths of loyalty to today’s DEI obsession.

They must express enthusiasm for whatever policies are deemed necessary to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Fortunately, the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina recently joined a growing movement to ban requiring DEI statements in hiring and promotion processes, a recoil against aggressive wokeness.

Being dead, Roald Dahl is spared watching woke editors inflict on his children’s books what Meghan Cox Gurdon, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls “social-justice blandification.” To make them “inclusive,” Dahl’s edited characters are no longer “fat” or “ugly” or anything else that might harm readers. The derisive laughter you hear is from parents who know how unwoke their children are in their enjoyment of vividly, sometimes insultingly, presented fictional characters.

A story is told of a revolutionary socialist who was strolling with a friend when they encountered a beggar. The friend began to hand a few coins to the mendicant, but the revolutionary stopped him, exclaiming: “Don’t delay the revolution!” The socialist thought worse would be better. More social misery would mean more social upheaval. “Arise ye prisoners of starvation” and all that.

In America (take that, Stanford), the worse wokeness becomes, the better. Wokeness is being shrunk by the solvent of the laughter it provokes.

And c'mon, George - what is it about being awake, and aware, and alert, that you're having a problem with?



Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Today's Class Assignment

Yeah, OK, I'll go ahead and try to shame y'all (ie: get all manipulative and shit) by saying "Watch this or don't watch this. Learn something or don't learn something. I can't make you care about the important stuff."

So here's David C Wilson, Dean, Goldman School of Public Policy:


The guy's "quiz", starting at about 25:30 is pretty interesting. He meant it to be about how we gauge merit and "deservingness", but it looked a whole lot like a rightwing push poll to me.

I think I may need a little break from all this.

Monday, January 11, 2021

Continuing The Fight (updated)

It should be hard to imagine a government led by people who think we have a right to Twitter but not healthcare.

It isn't hard to imagine that at all. Not here in USAmerica Inc.

Twitter shut down President Stoopid's account recently because of his insistence on using it to spread the "election fraud" bullshit, and now Amazon has stepped up by kicking Parler off their web services platform because:


And of course, the Q Cucks Clan have reacted with their usual cool and aplomb.



Amazon's suspension of Parler's account means that unless it can find another host, once the ban takes effect on Sunday Parler will go offline.

Amazon notified Parler that it would be cutting off the social network favored by conservatives and extremists from its cloud hosting service Amazon Web Services, according to an email obtained by BuzzFeed News. The suspension, which will go into effect on Sunday just before midnight, means that Parler will be unable to operate and will go offline unless it can find another hosting service.

People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC with weapons on January 19, the day before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

In an email obtained by BuzzFeed News, an AWS Trust and Safety team told Parler Chief Policy Officer Amy Peikoff that the calls for violence propagating across the social network violated its terms of service. Amazon said it was unconvinced that the service’s plan to use volunteers to moderate calls for violence and hate speech would be effective.

“Recently, we’ve seen a steady increase in this violent content on your website, all of which violates our terms," the email reads. "It’s clear that Parler does not have an effective process to comply with the AWS terms of service.”

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the suspension.

In a post on Saturday evening following publication of this story, Parler CEO John Matze, who did not return a request for comment from BuzzFeed News, said it is possible the social network will be unavailable on the internet for up to a week as we rebuild from scratch."

Update - as of this morning, Parler is homeless.


Radicalization is big business. This shit will always be with us because there's always a double digit percentage of wackos out there who need to live in their fantasies, and there will always be cynical manipulative assholes looking to monetize the crazy.

We can't set ourselves up to fail by insisting that any given way of thinking is illegal, so we have to make it plain that there's a big difference between thought and action. 

We also have to insist on understanding the 1st amendment.


We can only push the culture forward and let the loonies know their deliberate ignorance and  abhorrent behaviors won't be tolerated in a civil society.

They won't be employed. and they won't be invited to the neighbors' for dinner, and they won't be welcome at the tailgates until they learn how to mind their manners.



Thursday, May 14, 2020

Yesterday

Out on my walkies yesterday - apparently someone recognizes the need to train the dog owners.


Friday, July 27, 2018

On Being An Ally

NPR:




White people policing black presence is not new. I think it's safe to say it had been tamped down a bit, but lately it seems to be making quite the comeback.

And I don't think it's just because we can be made aware of it more easily. SPLC documents a pretty significant rise in the incidence of "hate crimes", coinciding neatly with the growing popularity of  - oh, I dunno - Donald Fucking Trump(?)

Anyway, "If you see something, say something" is a favorite meme of the Daddy State. We can flip that script and use it to hold these authoritarian assholes accountable.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

The More They Stay The Same

Levittown PA in the 1950s.

"I have no prejudice against the coloreds, it's just that I wouldn't like to have one as a neighbor."

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Led By Example

From the heart of Mike Pence territory - 

Indianapolis Star OpEd:
I am a black man who has, for the vast majority of my life, been proud to be an American. Lee Greenwood’s ballad always makes me emotional. I am also proud to be the boys’ basketball coach at West Lafayette High School.
Monday afternoon, two of my players, both of whom are black, were verbally assaulted by three young men in a black SUV. The men in the vehicle stopped to call them “n-----s.” I have been relatively silent about what has happened in our country since the election, but I can be silent no longer.
Eight years ago, we elected a black man president of the United States. I never thought that would happen in my lifetime, but it did. I believe that President Barack Obama’s election empowered black people in our country. I certainly felt that way.
Now I believe that we have empowered white bigots by electing a white bigot to the highest office in our country. Since the election, there have been far too many instances of bigots who feel that they can be who they are without fear of consequences.
 

Friday, December 05, 2014

In Case You Missed It (updated)

...or in case you've forgotten what real journalism actually looks like:
BY ROLLING STONE | 
To Our Readers:
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story titled "A Rape on Campus" by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie at a University of Virginia fraternity house; the university's failure to respond to this alleged assault – and the school's troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual assaults. The story generated worldwide headlines and much soul-searching at UVA. University president Teresa Sullivan promised a full investigation and also to examine the way the school responds to sexual assault allegations.
Because of the sensitive nature of Jackie's story, we decided to honor her request not to contact the man she claimed orchestrated the attack on her nor any of the men she claimed participated in the attack for fear of retaliation against her. In the months Erdely spent reporting the story, Jackie neither said nor did anything that made Erdely, or Rolling Stone's editors and fact-checkers, question Jackie's credibility. Her friends and rape activists on campus strongly supported Jackie's account. She had spoken of the assault in campus forums. We reached out to both the local branch and the national leadership of the fraternity where Jackie said she was attacked. They responded that they couldn't confirm or deny her story but had concerns about the evidence. 
In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie's account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced. We were trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault and now regret the decision to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. We are taking this seriously and apologize to anyone who was affected by the story.
Will Dana
Managing Editor
It's something of a big deal because when you get it wrong you have to own it, and you have to stand up, and you have to say you got it wrong.  Which is something that happens once in a while, but which is something that seems never to happen in a certain segment of "the media" where they get it wrong a lot and never say so.  

But this development does nothing to lessen the rather dire state of affairs on- and off-campus. We have a problem here and we're not gonna get any nearer to finding the solutions we need unless everybody's willing to stand up and speak the truth as they see it - even when the truth is that they kinda blew the report by not properly vetting the fucking source - which just gives all the wrong people all the perfect excuses to do exactly what RS seems suddenly to be doing, which is to blame the fucking victim.

FUCK ME FUCKLESS WHAT THE FUCK!?!  ISN'T THAT PARTA THE FUCKING PROBLEM IN THE FIRST FUCKING PLACE!?!

Ahem - sorry - channeling Charlie Skinner there for a minute.

The thing that does change right now tho' is that all the usual Smarmroaches will probably come scurrying out to start chanting "Death to The Demon Liberal Media", and the rubes can go back to feeling smugly comfortable sitting and waiting for the Daddy State to tell them what to misunderstand about the next episode of All My Phony Outrage.


hat tip = Facebook friend HH

And The Beat Goes On

Rolling Stone has a bit on 11 instances of Cops Killing Brown People:
Brown and Garner were two people living a thousand miles apart, at very different points in their lives. But they share one tragic fact in common: They were both black men executed in broad daylight by cops. And unless the U.S. Justice Department nails their killers on federal civil rights charges, neither of their families will get even the cold comfort of a day in court.
Sadly, there's nothing new about this pattern of lethal racial profiling. For far too long, African-Americans in this country have had to worry about whether police will kill their loved ones on the slightest pretext without facing any meaningful punishment. Racist violence is a deep-rooted part of this country's history, and it's going to take substantial nationwide reform of the policing and court systems to change this awful reality. Here are 11 of the most heartbreaking examples of black men, women and children killed by police in the last 15 years. Their stories are different in many ways, but none of them deserved to die the way they did – and we could fill many more pages with others like them.

1. Amadou Diallo (1999)
2. Patrick Dorismond (2000)
3. Ousmane Zongo (2003)
4. Timothy Stansbury (2004)
5. Sean Bell (2006)
6. Oscar Grant (2009)
7. Aiyana Stanley-Jones (2010)
8. Ramarley Graham (2012)
9. Tamon Robinson (2012)
10. Rekia Boyd (2012)
11. Kimani Gray (2013)
'Conservatives' spend a buncha time and lung capacity carping about Da Gubmint being overbearing and repressive, but not when it comes to killing brown people - then it's nothing but "cops making a noble effort to do a very dangerous job".

Almost as an aside, in all but a couple of these cases, the cops testified to being afraid the 'suspect' had a gun.  So, also too, 'conservatives', maybe you could rethink some of your bullshit rhetoric about the absolute-ness of the 2nd Amendment.  

After all, if it's OK for you guys to have any gun you want, and it's OK for you to do whatever you want with your guns (including defending yourselves from a violent and repressive Gubmint), then you should be praising brown people for doing exactly the same for themselves, and you should be condemning whoever shoots them down.  Unless of course y'all actually are the racist assholes your arguments and actions usually reveal you to be.

Monday, March 19, 2012

What We Do To People

Putting a couple of stories together.

George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain in Florida murders (IMO) a black teenager and claims self defense.
SSgt Robert Bales murders 16 Afghanis in Panjwai and claims PTSD.

I hope there's no problem generating sympathy and an aching in our hearts for the dead - and for their families, but I get the feeling that we spend way too much time and energy either condemning or excusing guys like Bales and Zimmerman rather than spending any real time or doing any real analysis on how those guys arrived at the decisions that made such a fucking mess of so many lives.

Can't we just stop for a minute and ask what we're doing to people?