Ordinary World
26 Nov 2018
[OW1] There’s no point to regulating Big Tech because it’s failing by Taylor Millard: “It’s no surprise to see the populist right agreeing with Democrats on social media regulations – even if they disagree on how the regulations should be drawn up.”
[OW2] Longing for Community by Berny Belvedere: “Here’s one place where important strands of the left and right can converge: the importance of community. This is an overlooked point of intersection. It is community in two separate senses, sure, but the two senses are mutually-reinforcing. For identitarians on the left, the sense of community worth agitating for is group community—the African-American community, the LGBT community, etc. For communitarians on the right, there is a yearning for thriving local communities. My thesis is that to realize the aspirations of community in the fullest sense of the word, you cannot ignore either of these.”
[OW3] The Charity Walkathon Is Dead, Long Live the Charity Walkathon by Olga Khazan : “Before the internet took over, “runs and walks were a way for people to connect around a common cause,” says Elizabeth Dale, a professor of nonprofit leadership at Seattle University. “I remember as a kid doing a 15-kilometer walk for multiple sclerosis. We had a family friend with MS, and I got to walk in her honor. There was real value in coming together and participating in something with other people.”
[OW4] Asia’s War on History by Richard Scotford: “Today the people of Asia find themselves at a critical juncture, with CPC controlled China demanding that democratic Japan fully face-up to its war time history and stop visiting the Yasakuni Shrine, ‘honour’ war time agreements and face-up to its dishonorable past. Yet, the same CPC, controlled media that demands such submissiveness from an independent sovereign state can’t acknowledge its own, very real and vicious history. And this is why Asia finds itself in a bitter war over history, which may eventually be the prelude to a real war.”
[OW5] INTERVIEW – A Stanford psychologist on the art of avoiding assholes by By Sean Illing: “Asshole survival, Sutton says, is a craft, not a science, meaning one can be good or bad at it. His book is about getting better at it. I sat down with him recently to talk about his strategies for dealing with assholes, what he means when he says we have to take responsibility for the assholes in our lives, and why he says self-awareness is key to recognizing that the asshole in your life may be you.”
[OW6] Red state, Blue state; Country state, City state by O.T. Ford: “If I wanted to guess a white person’s politics from location alone, I wouldn’t ask what state or region. I’d ask how big the city or town was and how close to the center she lived. That’s not a flawless method, but it’s better than “red state or blue state?”. Who actually thought Houston, being in Texas, was conservative? Who thought downstate Illinois, being in Illinois, was liberal? They aren’t. And again, that’s not new.”
[OW7] Instant Pot Politics: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram stories are the future of candidate marketing by Christina Cauterucci: “Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram stories feel like a harbinger of one possible political future, one in which digital-native elected officials take full advantage of the unmediated access to constituents and fans afforded by social media. Millennials and Gen Zers prize a curated sort of authenticity in the celebrities they follow and expect constant documentation of their friends’ lives. In the near future, they may come to demand the same Instant Pot intimacy from the politicians they send to Washington, too.”
[OW8] What works in Healthcare? by Benjamin I. Espen: “I suspect what is going on is that medicine works, just barely, on average. You get things like the long slow decline of maternal mortality from the confluence of lots and lots of little things added together. If you look at anything else, heart disease, or cancer, you will see the same pattern. Vaccines are an exception. Disease rates for things with effective vaccines just drop off immediately. Which brings us to my motivation for bringing this up at all. Random C.”
Born and raised in West Virginia, Andrew has since lived and traveled around the world several times over. Though frequently writing about politics out of a sense of duty and love of country, most of the time he would prefer discussions on history, culture, occasionally nerding on aviation, and his amateur foodie tendencies. He can usually be found misspelling/misusing words on Twitter @four4thefire.
OW 5 is an interesting article. Some thoughts I have:
– One of the best pieces of advice one of my grad-school buddies ever gave me about an a-hole boss I had was, “You just have to work with her; she has to live with herself,” which parallels the “not giving a s—” advice in that article. Sometimes it’s hard not to care when someone is belittling you are is openly rude to you and can be because they have power, and I do tend to be sensitive, but the whole “I can go home at the end of this and be somewhere where this person is not” helps.
I am, deep down, pretty thin-skinned, but I guess I have gotten REALLY good at not showing it.
– Something someone else told me once, that I think about a lot: “If you meet one person in a day who is an a-hole, you met an a-hole. If you think everyone you meet is an a-hole, you are probably the a-hole” and I suspect that is somewhat accurate. I have one or two people in my life who complain about the rudeness and uncaringness of everyone else, and it’s more like, those people aren’t bending to that person’s petty whims.
I actually find I don’t encounter that many a-holes, so I don’t know if that means I’m more tolerant (I certainly had experience with living with it, as a bullied kid) or more oblivious or if I actually have some power to charm people into behaving better around me, I don’t know. Or maybe the fact that I tend not to get angry at the person or really react at all makes it not-fun to be an a-hole to me…
– The idea of “temporary vs. permanent.” I’ve been a temporary a-hole when I was upset or hurting or overly worried and when I look back on it, I feel TERRIBLE about having been that way. I suspect a lot of people do. Permanent a-holes seem not to care.
– YES to the “power corrupts” thing. I see that everywhere: on non-profit boards, in petty bureaucrats at universities, in local politics, in national politics. Power is bad. Money is not the root of all evil as much as power i.s
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