By SANDRA E. GARCIA from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2CH9f2G
Monday 31 December 2018
Armed Man in Tactical Clothing Headed to a Texas Church to ‘Fulfill a Prophecy,’ Police Say
By SANDRA E. GARCIA from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2CH9f2G
Trump Digs In, Darkening Hopes for a Deal to End the Shutdown
By MAGGIE HABERMAN and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2Qdoeov
Obamacare, Ruled Invalid by Federal Judge, Will Remain in Effect During Appeal
By SARAH MERVOSH from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2GQ7rIL
Lindsey Graham Suggests Syrian Troop Drawdown Will Take Longer Than 30 Days
By MAGGIE HABERMAN from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2GIQ7p0
Quotation of the Day: C.I.A.-Led Afghan Forces Leave Grim Trail of Abuse
By Unknown Author from NYT Today’s Paper https://nyti.ms/2GMzf0B
Ravens and Eagles Claw Their Way to the N.F.L. Playoffs
By BENJAMIN HOFFMAN from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2Als4qM
Cowboys Send Giants to Another Late Loss
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2QVaF2l
Alabama and Clemson Are Putting a Trademark on the Title Game
By MARC TRACY from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2QXVEgb
A Closed Brooklyn Bridge and 40,000 Pounds of Deli Meat: New York Is That Crowded
By TYLER PAGER from NYT New York https://nyti.ms/2CHhv2E
Shutdown, McKinsey, Gaza: Your Monday Briefing
By REMY TUMIN from NYT Briefing https://nyti.ms/2LIPH0A
‘Outlander’ Season 4, Episode 9: Fraser Hospitality
By GENEVIEVE VALENTINE from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2EWOnH6
No-deal Brexit ferry contract sparks concerns
Seaborne Freight was founded less than two years ago and has never run a ferry service before.
from BBC News - Business https://bbc.in/2EWL0jw
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China says it is 'ready to work with US'
China's latest statement suggests trade negotiations between the two countries are progressing.
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Italy budget: Parliament passes budget after EU standoff
Italy's parliament approves a budget for 2019, amid complaints it was revised to placate the EU.
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Susanna Dinnage changes mind on Premier League chief executive role
The Premier League says its prospective new chief executive, Susanna Dinnage, has told the organisation she will not be taking up the position.
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The hottest business stories of 2018
Kylie Jenner, imploding retail sales and an endless summer - the most-read business stories of 2018.
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Bangladesh election: Voting disrupted by violence
Clashes between ruling party and opposition supporters have resulted in 17 deaths.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2Sv4fni
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2Sv4fni
Spoken word poet Dylema: On a stroll through Africa in 2018
Dylema leads us through key events on the continent this year in a specially commissioned poem.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2BZzjVp
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2BZzjVp
Lederhosen love among Austria's millennials
Lederhosen and dirndl dresses are making a comeback in Austria.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AmkSL1
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AmkSL1
Female fightback... 2018 in hashtags
A look at the year's most influential hashtags used by women on social media.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2RntUB7
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2RntUB7
The 90-year-old back-flipping daredevil
This Canadian man is being called the world's most extreme grandpa.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AntDnS
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AntDnS
The Instagrammer who wants to show a different side of Gaza
Instagram photographer Kholoud Nassar wants to show us a different side of Gaza.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AmFuTb
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2AmFuTb
In search of Leonard, my martyred ancestor
Eli Melki looks for traces of a relative who was killed at 33 during a wave of attacks against eastern Turkey's Christians.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2BMln0I
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2BMln0I
2018 in news: The alternative end-of-the-year awards
From the ridiculous to the more ridiculous, here are the weird stories that caught our eye this year.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2s3oDAp
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2s3oDAp
Why legalising gay sex in India is not a Western idea
India's decision to decriminalise gay sex has taken the country back to its roots, some historians say.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2ApBWzF
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2ApBWzF
Remembering the entertainment and arts figures we lost in 2018
Remembering some of the figures from music, film, TV, radio and literature who died in 2018.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2F03HlD
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2F03HlD
Bangladesh clothing factories: Are they safe now?
Are garment factories in Bangladesh safe five years after the Rana Plaza disaster?
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2s3oVat
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2s3oVat
Africa's year in pictures 2018
A selection of the best photos from across and about Africa this year.
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2GIKAyK
from BBC News - World https://bbc.in/2GIKAyK
With U.S. departure, Syria's Manbij braces for upheaval
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California authorities seek motive in triple slaying
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2BP0SR6
6 people injured in jetway collapse at Baltimore-Washington International Airport
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2EY9EiE
Two right-wing ministers form new party ahead of Israel polls
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2EUtcEM
How F-22 and F-35 'DNA' Will Make the 'New' F-16 Viper a Real Killer
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2LFnR5w
California Will Become First State to Require Pet Stores to Sell Only Rescue Animals
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2Aku1nm
Origin of virus that hobbled newspapers still unclear
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2SyWlcN
UK to spend over $130 million on ferries to cope with no-deal Brexit
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2RngW69
Egypt kills 40 'terrorists' in crackdown after Giza attack
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2RoYJW6
UK trade minister says '50-50' chance Brexit may be stopped: paper
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2EY7NKY
Syria's Assad authorizes Iraqi forces to strike IS in Syria
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2Amjt6S
Sherman, T-34 and Cromwell: These Three Allied Tanks Won World War II
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2Rnqqyj
Heads up: Israeli woman stumbles upon Roman busts
An Israeli woman walking near ancient ruins noticed a head sticking out of the ground, leading to the uncovering of two Roman-era busts, archaeologists said Sunday. The life-size sculptures, carved in limestone, were found in the northern city of Beit Shean earlier this month, with the Israel Antiquities Authority dating them to the late Roman period, some 1,700 years ago. The well-preserved busts are of men, one of them bearded, sculpted in the Oriental style that was becoming fashionable at the end of the Roman period, according to Eitan Klein, deputy head of the IAA's theft prevention unit.
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2QXCpTZ
Bali's Agung volcano spews ash in fresh eruption
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2LHA8WZ
Partial government shutdown hitting some Bay Area National Parks hard
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2StsfHw
The Economists, Military, Moralists & Politicians Running Brazil
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2AxjC7Z
Germany: Drugged driver forces car onto airport tarmac
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2Tg6WZN
Putin says Moscow is open for dialogue with the US in New Year letter to Trump
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2BPXBB3
Low mileage 1976 Subaru Brat sells for high dollar price
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2R2W4C7
Ask the Captain: What airplanes did you fly in your career?
Prior to becoming an aviation safety consultant, and USA TODAY columnist, John Cox flew a wide variety of commercial airplanes.
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2So6icU
Fears of intimidation, violence as Bangladesh set to vote
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US winter storms kill seven: media
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2BKTLsY
Will General Motors resurrect the GMC Envoy? Trademark filing raises speculation SUV may be brought back.
General Motors has filed for a trademark on the name Envoy, raising speculation that it will resurrect the once popular GMC SUV.
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2CIsMQt
Missouri man fatally shoots girlfriend, her kids, her mother
from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://yhoo.it/2EYeeyr
A Former General’s New Broadside Against President Trump
Stanley McChrystal has a history of speaking plainly about American presidents and their leadership. His military career ended in 2010 after a Rolling Stone profile quoted him and his aides as criticizing Obama-administration officials, mocking the civilian leaders and painting them as indecisive. McChrystal quickly offered his resignation, which President Barack Obama accepted.
But while the retired four-star Army general’s complaints about the Obama administration centered on its military strategy, his concerns about the current White House, which he articulated in an ABC News interview on Sunday, are rooted in President Donald Trump’s character. McChrystal has criticized the president before, but his remarks on Sunday were timely, given the departure of James Mattis, the defense secretary who previously served as a Marine Corps general, and Trump’s recent war of words with another former military leader.
McChrystal, whom Obama had selected to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in the interview that he would not work for Trump. “I think it’s important for me to work for people who I think are basically honest, who tell the truth as best they know it,” McChrystal explained.
“Do you think he’s a liar?” asked Martha Raddatz, the co-host of ABC’s This Week.
McChrystal raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and responded, “I don’t think he tells the truth.” When Raddatz asked whether McChrystal considers the president “immoral,” the former general replied, “I think he is.”
[Read: Do presidential visits to combat zones offer leaders any insights, or boost morale for troops?]
McChrystal’s comments came about 10 days after Trump’s announcement via Twitter that he’s planning to withdraw 2,200 U.S. troops from Syria. The abrupt decision prompted Mattis’s resignation with a public letter, in which the former general cited differences between himself and the president over “treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors.” In the interview, McChrystal told Raddatz he hopes Mattis’s exit has caused the American public to “take a pause.”
“If we have someone who is as selfless and committed as Jim Mattis resigning his position, walking away from all the responsibility he feels for every service member in our forces, and he does so in a public way like that, we ought to stop and say, ‘Okay, why did he do it?’” McChrystal said. “We ought to ask what kind of commander in chief he had that Jim Mattis, ‘the good Marine,’ felt he had to walk away.”
McChrystal also echoed recent criticism of Trump’s holiday visit to troops serving in Iraq. During the stop, his first trip to a combat zone since he assumed office in early 2017, Trump made a campaign-style speech in which he talked up his plans for expanding the border wall and disparaged his political opponents, claiming that “Democrats don’t want to let us have strong borders.”
“When leaders visit soldiers … there’s a sacred interaction that occurs,” McChrystal said. “You don’t use that as a time to tout your politics or your personal opinions. You use that as a time to reassure them that what they’re doing is appreciated.” He also chided service members who brought Trump paraphernalia to the event—including “Make America Great Again” hats and a Trump 2020 patch—saying that they at least “violated the spirit” of military rules against political activity while serving on active duty.
[Read: Everything’s political to Trump, even killing Osama bin Laden]
McChrystal is not the only ex-military leader to recently rebuke Trump. William McRaven, the retired admiral who oversaw special operations—including the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed—criticized the president for attacking the media and pulling the security clearance of a former CIA chief who spoke out against him. In an interview last month, Trump dismissed McRaven as a “Hillary Clinton fan” and questioned why it took nearly a decade to find bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. McChrystal sprang to McRaven’s defense the next day, calling the president “simply wrong” and “uninformed.”
Trump didn’t immediately counterattack after McChrystal’s criticism. But as the interview was airing on ABC, the president did tweet about an Associated Press poll that found he has higher approval ratings among troops and veterans than he does among citizens who have not served in the military. Overall, 56 percent of veterans said they approve of Trump’s job as president, compared with 42 percent of nonveterans.
Given how the president loves to spar, it’s possible a volley is still on the way. He has fodder to dismiss McChrystal as just another spiteful Democrat: In the fateful profile that cut the general’s career short, Rolling Stone reported that he voted for Obama in 2008.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2AkDHOA
Letter: How to Stop Brain Drain on Indian Reservations
The Blackfeet Brain Drain
After leaving to pursue an education, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain wrote in November, some Native Americans find themselves stuck between a longing to help their community and the lack of viable employment back home. “All too often,” he observed, “success for reservation Indians means leaving your heart in your homeland.”
I would like to add to Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s article. I too am a Blackfoot living and working on the reservation. As I was growing up, my grandparents had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity in their one-room home where they raised their six children. My father’s generation began the quest for the promises of higher education by leaving for school. I remember quite well my grandfather telling me, “It’s a white man’s world, and it runs on education. If you don’t get an education, you’ll live like this. Do you want to live like this?” The chorus of “No, Papa” rang from all of us children sitting in his car. His point was: Go get your education, see the world, expand your mind, then come home.
After attending Cornell University as an undergraduate, then for medical school, I returned as a physician. I have met many highly educated Native people who have chosen to return home to stay and be an agent of change. We need the educated artists and writers of our people to stay and be the nidus of a collective of writers and artists that will take root and blossom in future generations. If you want a certain standard of living now that the reservation doesn’t have then yes, leave. But if you want to fight the good fight and be that agent of change here and now, I invite you to return home and stay.
Ernest J. Gray, M.D.
East Glacier Park, Mont.
Sterling HolyWhiteMountain replies:
Dr. Gray,
I want to thank you for your response to my article; it is a rare moment when two people from the same indigenous community are able to dialogue, if only briefly, in a way that allows other Americans access and insight to our world.
Thank you also for the service you have done for the people on our reservation; Native doctors are rare, and we are lucky to have one of our own working at the hospital. My sisters speak highly of you, and are deeply appreciative of the help you have given during their pregnancies and with their children as they’ve grown.
Your grandfather’s words are as true today as they were then: We have no choice, for now, but to live in an American world. I heard these same things when I was growing up, and believe that every Indian who gets an education should find some way to help other Indians, particularly those from one’s own tribe. It was a struggle for me to justify leaving our community to pursue my writing, with so much need there in so many areas of life. However, I believe in the power of art to change lives—though not the way we usually talk about change—and to make people more honest and beautiful. In order to put myself in the best position to make the best art I can, I had to leave home. It was the hardest decision of my adult life. If I can write one thing true enough to show our part of Indian country, in all its complexity and beauty and difficulty, though, then I will have done something worth doing. And it will not have been only for myself. I still intend to more directly help people on our reservation; I just don’t know how or when that will be.
Sterling HWM
P.S. My mother recently reminded me of the time last winter when she had pneumonia and you came to check on her during a snowstorm. It goes without saying that our family is grateful.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2QVj9qe
83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018
- Most “Himalayan” pink salt is from the Punjab area of Pakistan, not the actual Himalayas.
- Hippos poop so much that sometimes all the fish die.
- In addition to the supermassive black hole at its center, the Milky Way galaxy may be home to thousands of smaller black holes, invisible to even our finest scientific instruments.
- There’s a parasitic fungus that doses cicadas with the hallucinogen found in shrooms before making their butts fall off.
- The Arctic Ocean is now so warm that its floating sea ice can melt even during the coldest, darkest times of the year.
- You can make thousands of dollars a week charging electric scooters.
- When your eyes look right, your eardrums bulge to the left, and vice versa. And the eardrums move 10 milliseconds before the eyes do.
- More than 2 million years ago, well before Homo sapiens evolved, one of our ancient-human relatives lived in what is now China.
- Women who have had six to 10 sexual partners in their lives have the lowest odds of marital happiness, according to one study.
- When Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium opened in 1930, the inland aquarium had to ship a million gallons of ocean water by train from Key West, Florida.
- Twitter is the preferred social network for nudists to meet and connect online.
- The population of older adults who misuse opioids is projected to double from 2004 to 2020.
- The data economy didn’t begin with Google or Facebook in the 2000s, but with electronic information systems called relational databases, first conceived of in 1969.
- At their most voracious, wildfires can grow 100 feet high and consume a football field of forest every second.
- People with autism are 10 times as likely to die by suicide as those in the general population.
- The number of exclamation points now necessary to convey genuine enthusiasm online is, according to most internet users, three.
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An “ice tsunami” killed a herd of musk oxen in February 2011 and kept their bodies perfectly entombed for seven years.
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Ten thousand years ago, the people who lived in Europe had dark skin and blue eyes.
- Facebook sent huge volumes of data about you and your friends to millions of apps from 2007 to 2014, and you have no way to control—or even know—how that information gets used.
- . A fishing cat is a water-loving cat species that lives in swamps, quacks like a duck, and dives from riverbanks to snag unsuspecting fish.
- Astrology is experiencing a resurgence among Millennials, fueled by meme culture, stress, and a desire for subjectivity in an increasingly quantified world.
- In the beginning of 2018, Amazon had 342 fulfillment centers, Prime hubs, and sortation centers in the United States, up from 18 in 2007.
- Ivy League universities took nude photos of incoming freshman students for decades.
- Some fundamentalist Christian groups think the spread of implantable technology is a key sign of the impending apocalypse.
- The shopping mall put a cap on consumerism as much as it promoted it.
- Bees stop buzzing during total solar eclipses.
- The scientist who advised the production team of Interstellar made so much progress on his research in the process that it led him to publish multiple scientific papers.
- High fibrinogen content can help a blood clot stay in a shape like putty—even if it gets violently coughed up.
- Many butterflies in the nymphalid group can hear with their wings.
- Some scientists think the reason you want to squeeze or nibble on a particularly cute baby is to snap your brain out of the euphoria that cuteness can summon, making you able to tend to the baby’s needs.
- In the fourth quarter of last year, 25 percent of all new office space leased or built in the United States was taken by Amazon.
- The first scooter was invented in 1990 by a guy who really wanted a bratwurst.
- The streets of Boston carry an average of four gas leaks a mile.
- In August, Oxford University’s Said Business School came up with a clever way for homeless people to receive cashless donations: Donors could scan the barcodes on homeless people’s lanyards to send them money.
- Don’t worry if you forget all the facts you read in this article by tomorrow—that’s normal.
- Many doctors have difficulty accessing the health records of patients treated previously at another facility; fewer than half of hospitals integrate electronic patient data from outside their system.
- The original indigenous American dogs are completely gone, and their closest living relative isn’t even a dog—it’s a contagious global cancer.
- Donald Trump can’t really send a message directly to your phone. In fact, the president’s ability to address the nation directly in a time of crisis, available since the 1960s, has never been used.
- In 1995, a man in Germany realized his pet crayfish was cloning itself. Clones of that crayfish have now spread all over the world.
- Four hundred years after Galileo discovered Jupiter’s largest moons, astronomers are still discovering some tiny ones.
- The fastest someone has ever hiked all 2,189 miles of the Appalachian Trail is 41 days, seven hours, and 39 minutes. That averages out to roughly two marathons a day.
- The lifespan of a meme has shrunk from several months in 2012 to just a few days in 2018.
- Elon Musk’s $20 million SEC fine might make his ill-advised “funding secured” tweets the most expensive ever.
- Thousands of horseshoe crabs are bled every year to create a miraculous medical product that keeps humans alive.
- Single-celled microorganisms can survive in lab conditions that simulate the icy environment of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
- Only 10 major hurricanes have ever made landfall along the Southeast Atlantic coast, if you don’t count Florida.
- Animals that live in cities are sometimes found to outperform their rural counterparts on intelligence tests.
- Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is shrinking.
- The paleontology consultant for Jurassic Park had a Tyrannosaurus rex eat a doppelgänger of another researcher with whom he had an academic beef.
- Some people think tennis balls are green while others think they’re yellow, and the disagreement has a lot to do with how our brains perceive color.
- Conservatives tend to find life more meaningful than liberals do.
- It’s easier for spacecraft to leave the solar system than to reach the sun. Thanks, physics.
- Despite giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was worth $20 billion when he died, 48 percent more than when he signed the Giving Pledge in 2010 and promised to give away at least half his wealth.
- China consumes 28 percent of the world’s meat—with the average resident eating 140 pounds a year.
- Europa, a moon of Jupiter, may be covered in 50-foot-tall blades of ice.
- You can reconstruct a pretty decent record of historical whaling intensity by measuring the stress hormones in the earwax of a few dozen whales.
- Doing a good deed—or even imagining doing a good deed—can boost an athlete’s endurance by reinforcing his or her sense of agency in the world.
- A science adviser on Stargate: Atlantis imagined a fictional astronomical phenomenon called a binary pulsar system for the show. Years later, such a system was found in real life.
- The lowercase g in Google’s original logo is really, really weird.
- Sixty percent of gun deaths in 2017 were suicides.
- From 1984 to 2015, the area of forest in the American West that burned in wildfires was double what it would have been without climate change.
- An astrologer came up with the phrase “super blue blood moon” to describe a celestial event that’s much less scary than it sounds.
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal caused 42 percent of Facebook users to change their behavior on the platform, according to a survey conducted by The Atlantic. Ten percent of those people deleted or deactivated their accounts.
- In the absence of federal regulation or good research about how skin-care products work, communities of citizen scientists have started compiling pretty decent resources.
- The figure-eight trajectory flown by the Apollo moon missions was the very same path followed by fictional astronauts in a classic silent film from 1929, Woman in the Moon.
- After one year in America, just 8 percent of immigrants are obese, but among those who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, the obesity rate is 19 percent.
- There’s a spider that makes milk.
- Goats love to feast on weeds, and you can rent dozens of them to landscape your lawn.
- Some people have a bony growth on the back of their heel, called a pump bump, that makes it hard to wear pumps and other kinds of dressy shoes.
- Astronomers can still detect ripples in the Milky Way caused by a close encounter with another galaxy hundreds of millions of years ago.
- China built its rocket-launch facilities deep inland to protect them during the Cold War, but decades later it actually makes launching rockets into space more dangerous.
- The folks who make Piaggio scooters hope you might buy an R2D2-like cargo robot to haul a case of Aperol home from the market.
- Shifting the pitch of an audio recording can make it sound like an entirely different word.
- Kids under the age of 8 spend 65 percent of their online time on YouTube.
- A reservoir of liquid water may lurk just a mile beneath the ice-covered surface of Mars’s south pole.
- When people overdose in public bathrooms, many service workers become the unwitting first line of medical responders.
- Some people think that quantum computing will bring about the end of free will.
- Mouse urine is a major cause of asthma for poor kids in Baltimore.
- The House of Representatives’ longest-serving member, Alaska’s Don Young, was first elected to his seat after his opponent died.
- In September, Hurricane Florence dropped about 18 trillion gallons of rain over the Carolinas—enough water to completely refill the Chesapeake Bay.
- Europe suffered its worst carbon dioxide shortage in decades (think of the beer and the crumpets!) because of a closed ammonia fertilizer plant. Yes, these two things are related.
- Americans spent $240 billion on jewelry, watches, books, luggage, and communication equipment such as telephones in 2017, twice as much as they spent in 2002, even though the population grew just 13 percent during that time.
- People get more colds in winter because chilly temperatures make it easier for microbes to reproduce inside your nose.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2AkPPiI
The Mysterious Conversation That Creates an Obsession in Burning
The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series delves into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy cinematic moment from 2018. Next up is Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. (Read our previous entries here.)
“My father has an anger disorder. He has rage bottled up inside of him. It goes off like a bomb. Once it goes off, everything is destroyed.” So begins a confession of sorts from Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an introverted, pent-up writer living on his father’s farm, trying vainly to write. It’s a confession he makes to the poised, handsome Ben (Steven Yeun), an enigmatic businessman who’s dating Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), the girl Jong-su has a lingering crush on. And it’s quickly followed by a much stranger revelation from Ben, one that’s at the center (literally and figuratively) of Burning, Lee Chang-dong’s woozy, beguiling mystery thriller.
In talking about his now-imprisoned father’s nasty temper, Jong-su recalls the day his mother abandoned the family, fleeing her abusive husband. “I burned all her clothes,” Jong-su says, laughing. “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses,” Ben replies, looking absentmindedly into the horizon. “It’s a crime, so to speak.” The two of them are sitting on a porch, stoned, and Hae-mi, the joint object of their affection, is sleeping in the house behind them. Jong-su’s memory suggests a lifetime of buried anger and deep-seated issues planted by his parents’ relationship, things the viewer might have guessed already. Ben’s admission is far, far more inscrutable.
But then, that’s the dynamic between the pair. Jong-su is a simmering cauldron of resentment, class envy, and sexual frustration; Ben is a blank canvas, a suave charmer who seems like a catch one moment and a creep the next. What he tells Jong-su is borderline nonsensical: He scouts out abandoned greenhouses in rural areas such as this one, sprays some kerosene, and lights a match, delighting in the wanton destruction. “You can make it disappear as if it never existed,” he tells a disbelieving Jong-su. “It’s like they’re all waiting for me to burn them down.”
An adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, Burning is a narrative about the male ego’s many forms, and Ben’s destructive impulses suggest that he takes a childlike thrill in the freedom he possesses. But the way he describes his hobby—carefully selecting a greenhouse and burning it every couple of months—sounds almost like a metaphor for the work of a serial killer, hunting and stalking his prey. Jong-su eventually convinces himself that’s exactly what Ben was talking about after Hae-mi disappears. But the only real evidence the viewer has is this conversation; it is, without question, the most arresting exchange of dialogue in a movie this year.
Lee and his cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, shoot the sequence like a fading dream; as the two chat, the sun dims in the sky, and the entire scene is bathed in blue twilight. Yeun plays Ben as so calm and collected that his story feels extremely mundane, like he’s talking about the weather or what to have for breakfast tomorrow. It only makes the confession seem that much stranger. In talking about his father, Jong-su was baring his soul; in offering this reply, Ben seems to be exposing the lack of one. “As I watch them burn to the ground, I feel great joy,” he says, with a hint of a smile.
Maybe Ben really does just like to burn greenhouses (though Jong-su finds no evidence of such). But even then, there’s something deeply unsettling about a wealthy, charismatic man engaging in needless destruction just to feel alive. Though Jong-su is no saint, he is at least an artist trying to engage in the act of creativity, whereas Ben is seemingly thrilled by nothing at all. But his blunt nihilism does reflect the blank heartlessness that, in Jong-su’s eyes, comes with being rich and powerful. It gives the entire conversation the feel of a fantasy, as though Ben is suddenly animated with an evil that only Jong-su can perceive. Their cryptic exchange is enough to lead the latter half of Lee’s film down a violent and corrosive path. But it’s just as easy to imagine that Ben’s confession never happened at all.
Previously: A Star Is Born
Next up: Widows
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2SsiFVk
Civil Discourse Exists in This Small Corner of the Internet
Imagine a place on the internet where a post that begins with “I’m not a feminist” is met with comments quoting Virginia Woolf and asking serious, clarifying questions. A place where a conversation about gun-control legislation unfurls into a thread of analogies, statistics, and self-reflection; where a discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of immigration is carried out in a series of building logical arguments. A place where users with radically different political opinions interact productively and politely, where a willingness to participate thoughtfully is the rule rather than the exception, and where people readily admit when their views on a subject have been altered.
This vision seems like the stuff of technology fantasy; spend five minutes on the platforms that host most of the web’s political arguments, and you’re likely to find name-calling, bigotry, sarcasm, and stubborn assumption. It’s a rare thing to stumble on an online dispute about politics that hasn’t devolved into a furious and chaotic shouting match, where no one can make out what is being said for the noise.
[Read: Is Reddit the world’s best advice column?]
But civil discourse does exist, at least in a small pocket of the internet. Reddit’s Change My View forum, founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, then a teenage musician in Scotland, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other. Its mission statement says that the subreddit is “built around the idea that in order to resolve our differences, we must first understand them.” Turnbull says that he created Change My View because of what he saw as a lack of places to turn to if you wanted to discuss an issue with people who took the opposite perspective. There was social media, but the goal on those platforms was largely not to listen and engage in search of insight. He wanted the forum to be conversational—a way of learning about an issue that wasn’t limited to self-directed research. Because of the unique oasis that Change My View represents from the troll-stalked depths of the rest of the internet, a number of academic studies have used its data to analyze how persuasion and civility work online. It has also spawned a blog and a podcast.
What might be more startling than the forum’s general tone of calm, reasonable disagreement is the fact that so many of its contributors seem to change their minds, even on flash-point subjects such as same-sex marriage, abortion, and gun control. (There are also lighthearted posts: A recent debate took on the intractable question of whether a hot dog counts as a sandwich.) While most users’ opinions aren’t turned 180 degrees, shifts in thinking and perspective occur regularly; “deltas” are awarded to commenters who manage to convince, persuade, or teach in some way. The forum’s rules system states that rudeness and hostility are banned, as are comments that don’t “contribute meaningfully” or challenge the original post’s view in some way, whether that means asking a question, offering an emotional appeal, or providing evidence for a claim. The result is that Change My View is the opposite of an echo chamber, where users reinforce the ideas that the group already holds and police anyone who tries to dissent. Instead, dissent is the point.
[Read: Reddit’s case for anonymity on the internet]
Change My View’s success largely rests on its strict rules and the dedicated team of moderators who enforce them. Elizabeth Weeks, one of the forum’s moderators and a 32-year-old attorney who works in Seattle, said that she was surprised at first by how much users wanted and depended on the rules. Weeks first heard about Change My View in 2013, when she was in law school, and thought that the forum presented an interesting premise, as well as a good place to practice formulating arguments. She enjoyed her conversations there because the rules “set up guardrails, so you could expect to have a quality experience each time.” The rules are one of the main things that users like about the forum, both because they mean that anyone who is behaving in a disruptive way is removed and because they set expectations about the environment that mean that users can operate under an assumption of good faith. Change My View’s rules system works because it is consistent, intuitive, and transparent. The moderation is predictable, and users modify their behavior accordingly.
[Read: Donald Glover fans have taken over a pro-Trump Reddit page]
Larger platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, have struggled with swiftly and fairly moderating posts, with the result that users have little sense of which posts will be deleted for violating the platform’s terms of service and which won’t. That kind of confusion isn’t conducive to the patient and painstaking process of untangling a stranger’s presumptions and prejudices. If Twitter and Facebook are vast wildernesses, overgrown in some places and manicured in others, Change My View is more like a carefully tended garden. Weeks says that Turnbull’s leadership is a big part of why Change My View has been so successful. “Heads of companies often don’t understand the consequences of what they have built,” she says. “But he thinks about that quite a lot. Kal leads by example.”
Change My View’s most important lesson is one that applies beyond its moderated walls, one that anyone who has tried to engage in a productive political argument likely already knows. If you want to convince, meet people where they are rather than where you want them to be. “People respond better if you don’t start out guns blazing, accusing them of being dumb or nefarious,” Weeks says. “The most important thing you can do is listen to people,” says another moderator, Brett Johnson, a project manager in Houston who is 36. “If people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.”
Some of the arguments on Change My View make use of a strategy called moral reframing, a concept studied by the Stanford sociologist Robb Willer that relies on a person’s ability to empathize and understand the point of view of someone who holds different values. Moral reframing means appealing to the morality of the person you are trying to convince rather than your own. Most people have a hard time doing this without being coached, even though it can be an effective means of shifting deeply held beliefs. This “moral empathy gap” is why it is difficult for those with differing political views to understand each other.
Willer says that two factors contribute to the moral empathy gap: information and inclination. Increasingly, Americans don’t have access to or don’t seek enough information to fully understand the opposite side’s positions. Their news sources may represent only one slice of the political spectrum, or they live and work in communities that are overwhelmingly red or blue. The second factor is inclination. How motivated are we to try to bridge the divides between us? What really widens the moral empathy gap is not attitudinal polarization—that is, how the public generally feels about policy—but affective polarization, which measures how much political groups dislike one another. While both types of polarization are getting worse, and have been for some time, affective polarization is getting worse faster, Willer says.
This is why places such as Change My View are so important; the forum is proof that some people are still willing to engage in good faith with “the other side.” Willer says he thought Change My View was an interesting thing to study because it showed that normal people could reach their political counterparts if they wanted to. “It’s not just political strategists … a motivated or clever or empathic person can change somebody else’s mind on something. It’s a reassuring thought,” he says.
Turnbull, Change My View’s founder, says that one of his goals with the forum is to encourage people to change the way they look at admitting that they’ve encountered a perspective or a fact that they didn’t know about before, one that has the potential to alter their opinion about an issue. “People feel that changing their view is somehow losing … that it’s this embarrassing thing,” he says. “We are trying to change that perspective.” To an impressive extent, he has succeeded. Johnson says that this attitude is what initially intrigued him about Change My View when he came across it three years ago. “I found it to be a unique place,” he says. “Most places on the internet, most places in the world, they reward you for being right. But this was a community that celebrates being wrong.”
As a moderator, Weeks worries about the role the forum plays in giving a platform to problematic ideologies. Change My View’s rules don’t ban any specific topic—users may post on just about anything as long as they are willing to truly engage with challenges (that means no soapboxing or propaganda). She says that she came across a number of posts in the forum that disturbed her in the wake of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, a series of murders near the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara committed by a college student named Elliot Rodger, who said that he wanted to “punish” women for not being attracted to him. For his misogynistic crimes, Rodger was eventually held up as a “hero” in some of the internet’s darkest corners.
“If we assume that these people want their views changed, then it’s probably a good thing that these conversations are being had, because hopefully they will change their views,” Weeks says. “But at the same time, the more people see those views being surfaced, they become normal. Are we contributing to an atmosphere where really terrible views that previously would have had no place to go are given a little bit of sunlight?” Those extreme views can and do find expression elsewhere on the internet, and in spaces where there is no one to counter or challenge them, but it’s a question that Weeks says she and the other moderators continue to wrestle with.
Change My View’s model has other limitations. Its users represent a self-selected pool of people who have already declared themselves interested in open-mindedness as a principle. Some of them view the conversations they have there as a game; these users tend to be law students practicing for the bar exam, or former high-school debate stars who think of argument as a sport. Amy Bruckman, a professor and an associate chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, worked on a study of Change My View in 2017. “It’s not clear to me that many people on Change My View really change their views,” she says. “But I think our data suggests that everyone walks away with a broadened perspective, and that’s absolutely of value.”
Johnson believes that the forum offers something else that is increasingly hard to find in the polarized political landscape of 2018: the chance to forge compromise. “Even if we come away and our minds haven’t changed, we understand why the opposition feels the way that they do,” he says. “Most of the time we agree about more than we disagree about, and if we were willing to come to the table and have a conversation, we would discover that most of the time, we are after the same ultimate goal. We just disagree on the best path to get there.”
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2Tg1yWE
No Peace for Them and No Honor for Us
Nothing in the presidency of Donald Trump combines tragedy and farce so perfectly as his decision to withdraw the 2,000 American troops in Syria.
“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he tweeted on the morning of December 19. The claim was false on its face. The Islamic State has lost most of its territory, but it retains thousands of fighters in the desert where the Euphrates River crosses from Syria to Iraq. Those fighters could be more dangerous as insurgents and terrorists than as the territorial army of a self-proclaimed caliphate.
Trump’s announcement was so ill-considered and rushed that it blindsided his most important advisers, prompting the resignations of Defense Secretary James Mattis and Brett McGurk, special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition. Diplomats and aid workers involved in rebuilding liberated Syrian towns were given 24 hours to evacuate the country. U.S. Special Forces now have to abandon the training of the American-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, a job that General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, recently said was only 20 percent finished. For American troops dedicated to the ethic of leaving no friend behind on the battlefield, Trump’s order has to be particularly bitter.
The Syrian Democratic Forces were the only local army capable of beating the Islamic State, and in pushing ISIS out of its strongholds—including the caliphate’s capital, Raqqa—the Syrian Kurds paid a heavy price. America will now leave them to their fate. Turkey considers the People’s Protection Force, or YPG, to be terrorists indistinguishable from the Kurdish Workers’ Party in Turkey, and nothing now prevents the Turkish army from a murderous attack on the Syrian Kurds. In a phone call four days before Trump’s decision, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s autocratic president, played him perfectly, flattering Trump by telling him that, with ISIS defeated, Turkey could take it from here—so why would America stick around for the Kurds? “You know what?” Trump reportedly said. “It’s yours. I’m leaving.” It’s yours—do what you want with it. Now that he’s rid himself of every U.S. official willing to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear, Trump can turn for policy advice to foreign dictators.
[Read: The Kurds are betrayed again by Washington]
The American troops in Syria were never easy to explain. Since a final victory over the Islamic State isn’t possible, what was our goal? Not to end the Syrian civil war—that has never been a serious American aim, since it would require a military and diplomatic commitment that American voters and their elected leaders have no interest in making. The most that Americans have tried to achieve in Syria is to mitigate the worst—to deter Bashar al-Assad from gassing his own people, to stabilize areas occupied by the Syrian Democratic Forces, to counteract Russian and Iranian influence, to keep the Islamic State on the run, to prevent Turkey from slaughtering the Kurds. Those goals suggested an American presence, however small, without end.
Trump looked out across this unsatisfying landscape and saw another way, one more in tune with his own psychic needs, and perhaps with the real desires of most Americans: Declare victory and get out. Claim credit for both the win and the withdrawal. When our enemies return and our friends are wiped out—for not even Trump can believe that this is unlikely—find someone else to blame.
There’s a history behind Trump’s sudden decision. In the face of a war that offers no prospect of complete victory, or any victory, the temptation to betray an ally and call it success has seduced far more serious presidents than Trump. The historical pattern is instructive, and so is the fact that, this time, there’s a difference.
By 1969, the Vietnam War was lost. Instead of telling the American people this hard truth, the new president, Richard Nixon, and his national-security adviser, Henry Kissinger, spent four more years in pursuit of what Nixon called “peace with honor.” He wanted to find a way out of Vietnam that wouldn’t hurt his reelection chances or his broader foreign policy. He wanted to be able to say that 58,000 Americans did not die in vain.
At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger were well aware that peace with honor wasn’t possible—an American withdrawal would mean the end of South Vietnam.
[Reuel Marc Gerecht and Mark Dubowitz: Trump delivers a victory to Iran]
Kissinger’s solution was a deal that would leave the Saigon government in place long enough for the world to blame the South Vietnamese for their own inevitable downfall. “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence,” Kissinger told Nixon in August 1972, during peace talks with the North Vietnamese. “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together for a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October, by January ’74 no one will give a damn.” Kissinger called this scheme “a decent interval.”
On January 23, 1973, after 12 years of Americans fighting and dying in Vietnam, Nixon announced the end of the war in a nationally televised speech that was full of lies. He said that the peace to be signed in Paris “has the full support of President Thieu and the government of the Republic of Vietnam”—our South Vietnamese ally. In fact, Thieu had to be coerced and deceived into accepting the deal with threats and false promises. Nixon told the country, “Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.” The people of Indochina enjoyed barely a day of peace before the fighting resumed, as both North and South Vietnam predictably broke the cease-fire. By keeping North Vietnamese troops in the South and Nguyen Van Thieu in power, the Paris Peace Accords guaranteed that the war would go on, without the Americans.
The cynicism of the decent interval—the deception and self-deception—ensured that the denouement in Vietnam would be cataclysmic. In April 1975, the Ford administration was unprepared to evacuate those Vietnamese partners of America whose lives were directly threatened by a communist takeover. But Kissinger was right: When the end came, not many Americans gave a damn. Congressional Democrats, who viewed any appropriations for Vietnam as wasteful efforts to prolong the war, refused to authorize money to save desperate people. The public, wanting to be rid of the nightmarish memory of the war, paid little attention. Only the heroic actions of individual Americans in South Vietnam, often working against official orders, rescued thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children. Far more were left behind. (This story is the subject of a powerful new book, Honorable Exit, by Thurston Clarke.)
[Daniel Shapiro: Trump leaves Israel in the lurch]
Barack Obama, born the year the American war in Vietnam began, became the next president faced with the elusive search for peace with honor. He opposed the war in Iraq as an Illinois state senator, and he was vindicated when the occupation produced a lethal insurgency, a civil war, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and a terrorist group called al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. In 2008, Obama campaigned on a promise to withdraw American troops. At the beginning of his presidency, he announced that the combat mission in Iraq would end on August 31, 2010. And when that day arrived, he declared success:
Ending this war is not only in Iraq’s interest—it’s in our own. The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its people. We have sent our young men and women to make enormous sacrifices in Iraq, and spent vast resources abroad at a time of tight budgets at home. We’ve persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people—a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now it’s time to turn the page.
It would have been beyond any president’s capacity for bitter candor to say instead: “Iraq has no functioning government. The political class is incapable of compromise. Our chosen partner, Prime Minister Maliki, is thoroughly corrupt and sectarian. After seven years of this war, ordinary Iraqis still live without reliable services or security. We will leave behind a power vacuum that will be filled by Shiite pawns of Iran and Sunni extremists. At some point, Iraqi cities that our troops fought to clear will probably fall again to our enemies. Iraqis being hunted down for their association with us are on their own. We haven’t come close to meeting our responsibilities. But we’re tired, we have our own problems, and so this artificial date I set 18 months ago will have to do as an ending.”
In both Vietnam and Iraq, ending the war wasn’t the wrong policy. The wrong lay in Nixon’s cynically prolonging a lost war for four years, and in Obama’s failure to anticipate the return of chaos in Iraq. The wrong was to pretend that those wars were something other than historic disasters that could never be made right, and to shift our blame to others. If peace with honor is impossible, better to be honest about that fact than to allow an illusion to drift into a catastrophe.
Syria is neither Vietnam nor Iraq. Those 2,000 American troops weren’t an expression of imperial arrogance or blind doctrine. Obama sent them in 2014 with great reluctance, despite his long-standing fear of being drawn into a complex, multisided quagmire. The precipitating event was the threatened genocide of Iraqi Yazidis by murderers from the Islamic State, who killed and enslaved enough to make the threat credible. The Yazidis who survived as refugees—many of whom were later able to return to their homes—owe their lives at least in part to Obama’s intervention. Anyone who opposed it would have been answerable for a great crime against humanity, just as those who supported it are answerable for the thousands of civilians killed by American bombs in the push to free Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State. None of us gets off.
There were reasonable arguments for staying out of Syria, including the lack of any congressional or public debate. It would have been much better for Congress to have authorized the use of force—but the Republican majority washed its hands of the matter. In our hyper-partisan time, foreign policy itself would be just about impossible if it depended on Congress. Nor did congressional authorizations in Vietnam and Iraq ensure either a wise policy or public support.
In four years, four Americans have been killed in Operation Inherent Resolve. The lightness of American casualties has partly contributed to heavy civilian deaths—at least 1,400 in Raqqa—because keeping fewer boots on the ground means greater reliance on air power, which is less discriminating. On the whole, though, U.S. support for the Syrian Democratic Forces—made up of Arabs as well as Kurds—has gained a significant, if slow and painful, return on a small investment. For the first time, there’s a decent fighting force in Syria, a margin of hope between Assad’s barrel bombs and the Islamic State’s bloodlust. Any theory of international relations that looks with indifference on its elimination, and prefers a three-way fight among Erdogan, Assad, and ISIS, shouldn’t be called realist.
This time, an American withdrawal will not have been preceded by years of sunk blood and treasure—just by the president’s lust for bragging rights and his indifference to any cause greater than some chimerical “win.” Trump’s version of peace with honor—like so much about his presidency—is notable for its blatant stupidity, its needless cruelty. Everyone, even the Trump mouthpieces on Fox News, knows that the Islamic State isn’t “defeated.” The betrayal of our Kurdish and Arab allies is entirely gratuitous. They will pay the price; we will soon forget. There will be no peace for them and no honor for us.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2TfYQjW
Reflections on a Year of Outrage
As New Year’s Day approaches, I’ve been looking back and pondering the almost constant expressions of outrage that characterized another year. “The same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable,” the former Slate editor Julia Turner declared. “The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect … It’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch.”
In America’s digital culture, outrage is packaged to almost every niche in the citizenry. People feel a “duty” to be outraged by the offenses being trotted out, Choire Sicha argued in the same Slate story. “Maybe you were guided by fury. Maybe even as you cried out your emotion was moving on,” he observed. “Maybe you were exhausted and ironic. Maybe you were playing to the cheap seats, broadcasting a simulacrum of a human response because you, without realizing it, have become a strange magazine of one, a media brand of yourself.”
And then things turned:
You are speaking, first, into the echo chamber of your friends. But not everyone is in your silo. And so then some stranger is mad at you; then some friend is noticeably silent. You are blocked or you are yelled at. Spiraling conversations come from realms unexpected and unwanted. You are embarrassed, or you are angrier, defensive or passive-aggressive, or laughing at them all. It is a rush of emotion that stretches long but is only an instant. Then, with a slithery zip, the moment is sealed shut. That cycle is replicating itself now all around you …
All those words describe 2018.
Yet they were all written in 2014, when Slate published a year-end package that it called “The Year of Outrage.” It included an interactive calendar noting what Americans had been outraged about every day of that year.
[Charles Duhigg: The real roots of American rage]
Remember when NBC was under fire for broadcasting a comedian’s light mockery of Pearl Harbor survivors? And when a costume that the recording artist Macklemore performed in struck some as anti-Semitic? And when Jennifer Lawrence made a rape joke? And Ira Glass’s dig at Shakespeare? And a Washington Post contributor’s remark on marriage and gender violence? And Raven-Symoné’s comment about her racial identity?
Yeah, me neither.
As I perused the Slate calendar, I started to suspect that most of the items of outrage are forgotten even by many of the people who expressed outrage at the time. Yet four years on, outrage is still regularly pegged to matters as trivial as an aquarium’s tweet about an overweight otter, to cite a recent example.
“All of this raises a question: If nothing comes from the outrage, what was the point?” Jamelle Bouie asked in 2014. “It feels good to express disgust, of course, and when that comes with social affirmation—favorites, retweets, followers, blog posts—there’s an incentive to show more anger. But I think there’s more to it than that. In a world where prejudice and privilege still rule the day, it’s cathartic for a lot of lefties—even straight white dudes—to show outrage, even if it leads to nothing in particular.”
He went on to characterize the costs and benefits of that mode:
By raging against something … you can voice your anger at the status quo, which, in the past year especially, seems to have frozen in place. And with a simple retweet, you can signify just what camp you’re in. In a sense, for the social-media left, cultural outrage is a substitute for politics.
You may not be able to move the Democratic Party toward a more populist agenda or stop the Republican takeover of state governments across the country or protect abortion rights or even make media more inclusive. But you can punish social transgressions and in doing so, affirm the values that are missing from so much of the digital and analog worlds. The problem, unfortunately, is that this doesn’t give you a material win. It doesn’t ameliorate any actual injustice. And it might, in the end, harm efforts to make change. If outrage stands in for activism, if we’re focused on the moral temperature of Internet individuals, then we’re distracted from the collective action—and collective institution building—that makes real reform possible.
There are other costs, too. Some of the “guilty” are over-punished for some social transgressions; even many innocents live in fear of online mobs.
And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous. For example, I’ve argued for many years that more outrage is warranted in response to U.S. drone strikes that kill innocent civilians. Circa 2009, one could convey the horrors that affected certain villages in Yemen or Pakistan by talking about the awfulness of “feeling unsafe in one’s home,” or “the erasure of a marginalized community.”
Now language like that signifies very little. Its power has been sapped by all the people who say they’re unsafe when they mean they’re uncomfortable, and by those who talk as if verbal criticism can literally erase its targets.
On the populist right, too, there are commentators aplenty who treat outrage as though it is an inexhaustible resource—“What kind of man,” a pandering Laura Ingraham once asked, “orders a cheeseburger without ketchup, but Dijon mustard?”—depleting it of its power instead of reserving it for the definitionally anomalous moments when it is both warranted and useful. Their counterfeiting does real harm.
In that same Slate package, Amanda Hess offered a characteristically astute defense of some digital outrage, describing its value to some people:
Social media allows people who have been boxed out of journalistic, academic, and political spaces to speak out about their lived experiences (#ICantBreathe) and call on the elites to address their own unexamined entitlements … Disrupting the rigid structures of language and standards of argumentation enforced by the elites is part of the point. As New Inquiry editor Ayesha Siddiqi said of social media in an interview with the Guardian this month: “Work that’s meant to liberate all people cannot be presented in a language available to very few.” The structures of racism, sexism, and homophobia are too powerful and ubiquitous to topple in a single blow, so online activists grab hold of millions of little examples and start chipping away.
Done right, chipping away can and does improve the world.
But she also warned about pitfalls of this mode: “This new subindustry of identity-based outrage has created its own rigid conventions, and thinkers who don’t play by the rules will themselves be made the target,” she wrote. “A new media order that should be teeming with more vibrant viewpoints than ever is at risk of calcifying into a staid landscape, where original thought is muffled by the wet blanket of political correctness.”
[Read: Bari Weiss and the left-wing infatuation with taking offense]
So how to find the sweet spot? How is someone who wants to deploy outrage constructively, ethically, and effectively to proceed in the year ahead?
One answer is to study recent history and stay cognizant of its lessons. While “The Year of Outrage” was worth reading back when it was published, the package is even more valuable to today’s thoughtful reader. This is partly because the rise of Donald Trump (has any other president ever expressed outrage so promiscuously?), fueled partly by populist-right outrage and a backlash to political correctness, illustrates a consequence of outrage culture as it was described in 2014 that few anticipated.
But more than that, Slate’s daily chronicle of mostly forgotten outrages affords a chance to look back and reflect on a few specific instances when good was achieved—and lots more where nothing was gained at some cost.
from The Atlantic http://bit.ly/2CHMYBR