Archive for Improving Society
I understand why people who are giving talks or writing articles use phrases like these that assume a shared experience: We’ve all had the experience of … Everyone here knows … You’d be surprised at … But I’d like to recommend not doing that. Such phrases are very often inaccurate (twice yesterday, presenters said things […]
When I criticize someone in the past for having done something that I consider bad by my own modern standards, I often get pushback from friends who say things like: “He was just a man of his time. [Alternative phrasing: a product of his time.] You can’t/shouldn’t judge him by modern standards!” (I’m using he […]
Short version of this post: At my alma mater, Swarthmore College, documents have recently been revealed that describe a lot of awful behavior by members of the two fraternities on campus. Eventually, both fraternities decided to disband. Much longer version follows. Background Swarthmore is a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. For decades, it’s been home […]
A friend just posted a comic about the difficulty of getting kids to look for things that they’re missing (like their shoes). It suddenly occurred to me that my experience with asking kids to look for things is that the kids go off to look but seem kind of at a loss as to how […]
Good tweet from KTO: ...we can either find reasons to improve inclusion, or we can make excuses for continuing past exclusion.— Kat Tanaka Okopnik (@KTOkopnik) August 23, 2018 Which reminds me of a recent thing I was thinking about. During the discussion about this year’s Worldcon programming, I had the following series of reactions (in […]
From Le Guin’s “Introduction to Planet of Exile” (intro written in 1977 or 1978; can now be found in The Language of the Night). Worth reading the whole piece, but here’s a bit of it: […] Planet of Exile was written in 1963–1964[…]. The book exhibits my early, “natural” (i.e., happily acculturated), unawakened, un-consciousness-raised way […]
Some assorted notes about today’s March for Our Lives rally in San José: Followup on my previous post: I was glad that the march started at 11:00 a.m. That gave me time to have a leisurely start to my day and still arrive before the march started. When I first arrived, the crowd nearby was […]
What I want to do today: Laze around the house, reading and watching TV and labeling photos and maybe doing laundry. What I’m going to do today: Go to the March for Our Lives in San José. I’m generally oddly reluctant to attend marches and rallies and such. They involve a lot of people, and […]
I have complicated feelings about this mashup of “Story of Tonight” (from Hamilton) with “You Will Be Found” (from the musical Dear Evan Hansen). On the one hand, it’s a lovely song, and it’s a benefit for March For Our Lives. On the other hand, I had never heard of Dear Evan Hansen before (content […]
I found this gun-control segment on The Takeaway yesterday useful. Lois Beckett, senior reporter for The Guardian US covering guns and gun violence, discusses a number of different gun control proposals, their viability, what they could accomplish, and how much they may actually address America's problem with gun violence. If I understood right, she said […]
Even more about Black Panther’s record-breaking box-office: […] only the fifth film to ever deliver over $200 million in its first three days of release and the second largest four-day gross in history. [Second to The Force Awakens.] […] Black Panther has already outgrossed the lifetime domestic totals for Doctor Strange ($232.6m), Thor: The Dark […]
Just happened across a Joanna Russ essay from 1972, “The New Misandry,” which focuses on praising misandry but is also about feminism and change and differentials of privilege (though she doesn’t use that word) and incrementalism vs radical change. Content warning (both in the article and in my quotes below) for descriptions of behavior patterns […]