Linky Friday: The Yokes That Bind
Oppression:
Photo by U.S. Embassy The Hague 
[O2] Paul Heideman writes about black oppression and for all of their faults the socialists are the best political friends they’ve had.
[O3] In the National Review, Gabriel Rossman has a good piece on the history of American lynching and how blacks and whites were lynched differently.
[O4] Slaves kept their freedom by hanging out in the swamps. In the Turtledove Southern Victory series, the swamps played a pretty big role after the black uprising as their last refuge.
[O5] A look at a slave revolt that was lost to history. On purpose.
[O6] Henry Louis Gates Jr writes about slave rebellions.
Relationships:
Photo by davidshort
[R2] Most people aren’t actually very promiscuous.
[R3] An account of a 30 year old virgin who is on the clock.
[R4] Brown widow spiders like older women so much they’re willing to die to be in their company, rather than be with young lady spiders.
[R5] Oh, great, so not only are the dateless missing out in the dating world, they can miss out in the classroom, too. (Being who I am, I consider this article sad. And not because of the dateless.)
[R6] Patrick MacDougald looks at how cheap sex is changing our lives and our politics.
Internet:
Photo by Señor Muñoz
[I2] So why do people leave one social site to another? An interesting look.
[I3] I am actually finally moving on from RSS, but Brian Barrett thinks we may be in for a renewal.
[I4] Russia banned Telegram, an encrypted message app. Google and Amazon helped. The Good Wife actually had a handful of episodes with a really nuanced look at the issue where they had clients on each side of the issue.
[I5] From the Information Age to the disinformation age, and how to make our way through it.
[I6] Felix Salmon argues that it’s time for Facebook to move on from Zuckerberg.
Vice:
Photo by peretzp
[V2] Good news! Cigarettes are apparently no worse for you than drinking an extra glass wine.
[V3] If you’re hurtin’, you’re livin’. (So glad to see a Vice article talking about actual vices.)
[V4] What life is like when you’re a heroin addict.
[V5] From a health maintenance standpoint, q-tips are bad, so this is less ridiculous than some of the things Britain has been doing lately. However, this is America so cold dead hands etc etc.
[V6] The vaping movement has always been conflicted in between “These things are wildly less dangerous than cigarettes” and the belief that it shouldn’t even matter.
Energy & Environment:
Photo by taberandrew
[EE2] I feel like these people don’t know our president well at all. (I will grant that I don’t have a better idea, I suppose.
[EE3] Woohoo! Ocean wind farms!
[EE4] Britain is looking at repurposing mines for electric cars.
[EE5] Josiah Neeley explains how he came around on the carbon tax. Same here: Make it revenue-neutral and I’m in.
[EE6] As coal prospects are replaced with natural gas, some wonder if West Virginia is making the same mistakes all over again. One of the big differences between Texas and Louisiana is how they dealt with the energy companies. The negotiators in Texas no doubt got their cut but made sure at least some state interests were looked after. In Louisiana, they didn’t care so long as they got paid or otherwise couldn’t do better.
I3 I am a fan of RSS. I have used Feedly since Google dropped Reader. It makes it easy to follow the sites that I want, and I do not get a bunch of garbage I do not want. Personally, I never understood why the user would prefer twitter or facebook for getting updates on the sites they follow. I understand why the providers (facebook, twitter, etc) would not be big fans of RSS, though.Report
O2: Socialists were mainly powerless in the United States though. We will theoretically do something for you if we could is not that impressive when it comes to help.
R1: I’m going to dissent and say that calling it love at first sight should be allowed. It’s more romantic and close enough. When I was 29, I feel in love at first sight with a young French woman. It was st my dance studio, she was going to be a new instructor. I saw her and was instantly smitten for the next several years. It obviously didn’t work out. It might have if I was more courageous. I made a preliminary move and success and good signs but couldn’t believe it. Another man with more confidence got her temporarily. I guess I still have some feelings for her. She is perfect. The most beautiful woman I know. Sweet, kind, cute, and elegant.Report
Think you are right on O2 but it is complicated and requires a lot of study. You can still help people when not having official power. Though it would be interesting to see what the Socialists did with the few times they did get elected office.Report
R2: Is this because of Los k of inclination, lack of ability, or both? If you want to be promiscuous it helps to have an extroverted, outgoing personality, and like being out in public a lot even in the age of Tindr. If you really don’t like this, being promiscuous is going to be more like hard work than fun even if your really horny. Most people don’t have enough game to be promiscuous.
R3: I can sympathize. It gets worse.Report
Related to energy and the environment: a really small nuclear power reactor. Imagine, if you will, a somewhat scaled-up version of this in the hands of an ambitious HOA…
From a policy perspective, I note that the reactor testing was done in Nevada. New reactor design testing has historically been done at the Idaho National Laboratory. INL, though, has been tied down in federal court by the State of Idaho, enforcing an agreement the Dept of Energy made to not bring additional nuclear materials to INL until the existing nuclear waste problems are cleaned up. Like the Hanford Reservation in Washington State, the INL cleanup is many years behind schedule.Report
[R2] I always find these studies amusing, and also puzzling, because the presumably intelligent and numerate authors never seem to make much of the arithmetic impossibility of the data they’re examining. How can all these allegedly straight men have all this alleged sex, without any female partners reporting their participation in the events?
And yet, the possibility that men over-report and/or women under-report their sexual activity, sometimes drastically, doesn’t seem to be given any serious consideration.
You figure, maybe there’s a small contingent of women, a top few percent, who are promiscuous out of all proportion to the rest of society? But no, this study finds that this “trend” continues even with the most promiscuous 5% (16 partners for women, 50 for men) and 1% (35 partners for women, 150 for men).
Even if men are counting two extra partners for their left and right hands – demographics not included in the survey – the numbers don’t work out.Report
I figure most (maybe an overwhelming majority) of men vastly overreport their sexual conquests. Or at least they wildly exaggerate. A kiss becomes a make-out session. A make-out session becomes sex. Sex becomes an all-night orgy.
But as a late thirty something adult, I can tell you that sex after a long day at work is really hard.Report
From what I can tell when it comes to African-American rights, nothing. Absolutely nothing. The few socialist mayors spent time trying to bring utilities and trolley systems under municipal control.Report
Linky Friday: The Yokes, They Write Themselves.Report
[O1] “The brief 1835 direct mail anti-slavery campaign was relatively short-lived, and unsuccessful in the short run. But it found success in the long run, by spurring the slavery question into wider national debate.”
The contemporaneous gag-rule on petitioning Congress on slavery was far more important since petitioning was considered an ancient and important Anglo-Saxon right that linked representation with civil society, and JQ Adams would effectively protest the rule as a sectional attack on northern free white rights.
I don’t think this period led to a wider national debate, so much as each section withdrew in suspicion of the other It was the point in time in which the South began to turn towards an affirmatively proslavery ideology in contrast to seeing slavery as a necessary, but temporary institution that would eventually wither away. The 1832 Virginia debates on abolition would be the last in the South.Report
R6: The problem I have with the right-wing here is that they are really, really big hypocrites. Most of them anyway. The young college Republican crowd seems to booze it up and sex it up just as much as any other group of young college students but then they get pious in the open. This is why a lot of liberals are really fed up with the religious right and starting to show no quarter. The religious right still likes to go on and on about how debased our culture is and how cheap sex hurts and degrades us all. And then then you see a trillion sex scandals in the news. Or stories about the drunken and trollish escapades of College Republicans. I think if people like the Cheap Sex author were really sincere, they would focus on their own communities first and leave the rest of us alone.
But they are proving that they are weak and they need to control everyone else because they can’t control themselves.Report
Cheap sex *was* written for the right… it is a criticism of our children and our morals… we can’t escape the culture and the culture is us.
The fact that we let you on the left read it and misrepresent it is a courtesy.Report
R5: and that is why I hate extra credit. (I have had colleagues who handed it out for reasons even more unrelated to the topic of the class than what that prof did). And what about all of the claims about “unfairness”? (I once had a student – who was earning an A, and therefore did not need extra credit – tell me that the scheduled extra-credit event fell on a day his religion told him he was not allowed to do work (1) and as a result i HAD to give him an alternative for equal points. I did, but after that? NO MORE EXTRA CREDIT EVER). I get that some people like to offer it as a way of getting students to attend talks or plays on campus they might not attend otherwise – but really? They should be taking advantage of things that might be important to them without being “paid” for it.
(This generation can get off my lawn. I am still bitter over how some of my classmates got $10 for every A they earned, and I earned straight As and got jack, or at least, it seemed like getting jack at the time)
Also extra credit has gone from “something the over-and-above gunners do” to “something the slackers get so they don’t fail utterly, even though they didn’t turn in five of the regular assignments” and hell no, I’m not making more work for myself for someone who couldn’t be arsed to do the assigned work.
(I will now jump down off my soapbox but as you’ve guessed this is a THING with me)
(1) he was not Orthodox Jewish, in case you were wondering.Report
[O3] Great piece, explaining how whites were lynched as a form of extra-judicial execution, while blacks could also be lynched for minor crimes and to enforce social norms. The point I’d add though, is that the first category typically arose in the context in which the criminal justice system appeared to lack legitimacy. In the 19th century, it wasn’t uncommon for juries to be bribed during deliberations or for affiliates of the accused (politically-connected gangs), to obtain easy pardons.Report
[O4-O6] There seems to be some celebrity doing the celebrity thing about 400 years of slavery being a choice. These seem to be the closest things to choice, die fighting or die hiding in inaccessible terrain.Report
EE3: Excellent. Now if they could just disrupt the view from the Kennedy family estate(s) enough to get old Ted spinning, we could tap his rotating corpse for power as well.Report
Michigan is attempting to create a Herrenvolk Social Democracy with their Medicaid work requirements. Counties with a higher than average unemployment percentage would be exempt from the work requirement but those counties tend to be rural and white:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/5/3/17315382/medicaid-work-requirements-michigan-raceReport
R6: This is one of those essays that I really really want to like, but ultimately find chafing and dishonest.
Like most conservatives, Regnerus presents the past as a time when sexual relationships were stable and simple, even as he makes an obligatory nod to the repression we now see.
But we know that was never true. The Victorian era, the Middle Ages, classical antiquity…all these ages were marked by roiling sexual dynamics where there were plenty of partners, and men looked at porn, or talked about porn, or made stage plays featuring porn.
We know that almost all of historical societies featured slaves, or serfs, or a servant class, whose service included being used for sex on demand. Sex doesn’t get much cheaper than that!
Kind of like my comments on Hylas, I think the conservative project would be more convincing if they acknowledged the complexity and contradictions of our mores and norms and instead of taking a stance of revanchism and restoration, took one of progress that was informed by the past but not captive to it.Report
This brings to mind Katherine Cross’s new essay, on the whole “incel” thing — and that Douthat catastrophy: https://theestablishment.co/the-media-must-stop-taking-incel-agitprop-seriously-9c64be0464f5
Her point: the power dynamics of sex have always been complicated. Conservatives who look back fondly are either ignorant or — too often — yearn for the days when straight white men had all the power.
Also, a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/status/992215582308171776
Some hightlights:
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What certain heterosexual men might be sufferibg from is that they feel themselves under attack from two directions. They see themselves at the bottom of the traditional heterosexual hierarchy when it comes to dating. They also are close enough to the oppressor class to get it from the other targets of the the traditional hierarchy.Report
@leeesq Are you talking about heterosexual white men? If not, I think there’s a bit of complexity lacking in there somewhere.Report
Yes, I’m talking about heterosexual white men.Report
Straight white men are at the bottom of what hierarchy? Who is above them?Report
I can’t speak for LeeEsq, but in my experience as a heterosexual white male l can count the moments that I was at the top of the dating hierarchy on one hand.
I have to compete with successful and charming black men, confident and good looking Asian men, the white kid that has no money but still travels the world, the white guy who is an asshole but looks like Johnny Depp did in the 90’s, the white dude who can make the most cliche opening lines sound like holy scripture, the co-worker who didn’t mess shit up in his teens and has a decent down payment on a decent house in a decent neighborhood etcetera etcetera und so weiter.
Whatever the larger social context is and however much it profits white heterosexual men as a class, dating is in the end between individuals and there are plenty of white heterosexual male individuals who will find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy.
And while I am happy to belong to some dating elite, it doesn’t do shit to change the fact that I am sleeping alone tonight and for the foreseeable future.Report
@mark-van-h
But none of that has to do with your race, gender, or sexuality. Your not at the bottom because your white, male, or straight. Your are at the bottom because you aren’t as charming as that charming black guy, aren’t as confident and good looking as the Asian guy, less fortunate than the trust fund kid, less attractive than the Johnny Depp clone, etc.
So certain straight white guys might be at the bottom, sure… but someone has to be at the bottom; that is how hierarchies work. Lee seems to be speaking as if straight white men as a class are uniquely harmed by the current status quo. That just isn’t true… even if some of those men are really struggling individually.Report
@kazzy
I disagree. @leeesq was not saying ‘straight white men’ as a class at all. He was saying *certain* ones… that some straight white men are just as bad off as everyone else when it comes to the dating hierarchy, but because of their straight-whiteness, they *also* get resentment from the people who (justifiably) resent the dudes that are at the top of the dating pyramid, and generalize that resentment to *them* (who as individuals are in fact nowhere near the top of that particular pyramid) as well.
I would personally s/ “dating” / “sexual desire and agency”, and I still probably wouldn’t agree with him, but since he acknowledged the “white” limiter at my nudging, b/c I couldn’t make sense out of the comment without it (it seemed pretty clear he wasn’t thinking about non-white men in his original comment one way or the other, and I wanted that clarified), I feel the need to defend what he said from your misinterpretation anyway…Report
Thank you Maribou. What you wrote in your first paragraph is exactly what I meant.
There is generally something what I call the marginal member of the oppressor class problem. It doesn’t just relate to white heterosexual men. Stronger, higher status people are more difficult to attack than weaker, lower status people. Therefore, the weaker, lower status members of particular groups are going to feel the brunt of criticism in any given context.Report
Thanks, @leeesq and @maribou . Based on your exchange, I misread “certain” to be a placeholder for “white” as opposed to modifying the unsaid “white” part of “straight white males”. That indeed was a misinterpretation on my part. Sorry for the confusion. I walk back my opposition to the points made here by Lee and @mark-van-h .Report
Ahistoricism of all sorts really gets me angry. Conservatives get ahistorical about sex. A certain type of liberal about food. Without acknowledging what the past was actual like, we can’t formulate good policy or ideas for the present.
At the same time I’ve come to expect ahistoricism because most people can’t thibk historically. It also makes for some very convenient arguments.Report
Who wants to bet how long it will take (if ever) for the NRA to express outrage at how this case was handled?Report
Sometime around June 31.Report