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Category: Commonplacing

Uncomfortably close to an unwitting GOP self-reveal: “. . . if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” — Mitch McConnell

We Are the Problem

Quoth @PlaguePoems:

We blame the virus for
the disastrous condition
of our schools
the catastrophic state
of our hospitals
the ruinous structure
of our workplaces
the collapsing authority
of our institutions
so we need not acknowledge
the virus is not cause
but revealer
of our society’s frailty.

American Sociopathy

In the United States in the year 2021, you, as an American citizen, do not necessarily have the right to vote.

You do not necessarily have the right to teach or to learn about matters of race, gender or anything else state lawmakers consider “divisive concepts.”

But you do have one absolute, sacrosanct, inviolate, God-given, self-evident and inalienable right: the right to refuse a coronavirus vaccine — and to infect as many people as you can.

— Dana Milbanks

The Self

I believe the self is, at least in part, a cleverly disguised deception that allows the social world in and allows us to be “overtaken” by the social world without our even noticing.

—Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (Crown Publishers 2013)

Leadership Failure

… As senators and House members trapped inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday begged for immediate help during the siege, they struggled to get through to the president, who—safely ensconced in the West Wing—was too busy watching fiery television images of the crisis that was unfolding around them to act or even bother to hear their cries for help.
— “Six Hours of Paralysis”

Statistics and Tears

In fact, the more who die, sometimes the less we care, [Paul] Slovic said in an interview. In greater numbers, death becomes impersonal, and people feel increasingly hopeless that their actions can have any effect.

Statistics are human beings with tears dried off," Slovic said. "And that’s dangerous because we need tears to motivate us.”

— William Wan and Brittany Shammas

Leadership and Trust

Trust is fundamental, reciprocal and, ideally, pervasive. If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible. The best leaders trust their followers with the truth, and you know what happens as a result? Their followers trust them back. With that bond, they can do big, hard things together …

— George P. Schultz

Children Watching

“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. — This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The film’s ongoing relevance represents an ambiguous answer to its directors’ main question: What were the children of a New Orleans neighborhood learning as they watched their parents during the conflicts surrounding school integration in November 1960?

To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.

— Alex Ross, “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2020 issue.

The Sod

Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: “Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don’t get it out, I’ve got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again.” Son: “It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father’s broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?”

—Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, June 1938. New York Public Library.

“Naomi [who denounces ‘climate alarmism’] said her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking.”

— Desmond Butler and Juliet Eilperin, “The Anti-Greta: A Conservative Think Tank Takes on the Global Phenomenon.”

Yes, our cognition is bound up in our social existence, as Ludwik Fleck noted in 1935.

How Open is Open Access?

The following quote from an article about art education seems to have broader implications: “Early excitement for the Internet’s democratic potential has been replaced by a complicated marketplace of competing agendas of consumption, entertainment, social networking, and political action that continues to offer both opportunity and exclusion. Increased participation is coupled with a persistent digital divide, a gap in who has access to digital technologies and who does not, illustrating that ‘disparities in technology access and use are related to socioeconomic status, with income, educational level and race among the… Read more How Open is Open Access? →

Information and Meaning

False information gains strength from its roots in stories that make sense to a lot of people; mow down the latest false facts and more will soon sprout until we address those stories themselves—and the reasons people believe them.

– Paul, J. Croce, “What We Can Learn from Fake News,” History News Network, July 23, 2017, http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/166400.

Blogging

…The iterative practice of regular blogging has its own set of joys. For me, writing begets writing. The blog doesn’t distract from my formal academic or scholarly work. It feeds it. It becomes a form of discipline, like doing sit-ups every morning, a practice I long ago abandoned. My abdominal muscles are flabby, but when I sit down to write, whatever the context, I feel strong.

— David Perry, “3 Rules of Academic Blogging,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2015

Global History’s Blind Spot

From Jeremy Adelman, “What is Global History Now?,” Aeon, March 2, 2017: “Global history preferred a scale that reflected its cosmopolitan self-yearnings. It also implicitly created what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in Strangers in Their Own Land (2016) called ‘empathy walls’ between globe-trotting liberals and locally rooted provincials. Going global often meant losing contact with – to borrow another of her bons mots – ‘deep stories’ of resentment about loss of and threat to local attachments. The older patriotic narratives had tethered people to a sense of bounded unity.… Read more Global History’s Blind Spot →

A hard thing to teach

“What was once seen as standing ‘outside’ history, demanding silent contemplation but resisting explanation or contextualisation, has now been firmly historicised. Comparative genocide studies, histories of colonialism and genocidal violence, studies of western penal practice and more besides have demonstrated that the processes which led to the Holocaust were integral to modern history, not an aberration from it.”

— Neil Gregor, “‘To Think is to Compare’: Walther Rathenau, Trump and Hitler,” History Today, February 20, 2017