Links: 09/11/15

The Word of God, Tasneem Mandviwala

Sady Doyle on rape jokes: “They’re asking you to think about what else might be in there — what we know, from history, is too often found in there. To know that some people are flammable, and to be careful where the spark lands. Because, in the end, I don’t believe you when you say you don’t care. You are human. You are too good to want the innocent creatures burned.” (content warning: graphic description of sexual assault and animal abuse)
How an Ohio reporter helped convict more than 100 rapists: “‘How were they able to pick the most vulnerable people, the people that either had drug addictions, or mental health issues, or other problems, and prey on those people? They didn’t get caught because we couldn’t deal with creating a system that helps those people, or listens to those people, or believes those people.‘”
The Truth of “Black Lives Matter”: “They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact — that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued.”
On Kanye West and Black Humility: “How many conversations have you had with people where they refer to a confident black man as ‘self-important’ while a white man gets an adjective like ‘brash’?”
Fascinating piece on Civil War re-enactors: “But to leave out the stories of and facts about the slaves, who built the buildings in which he stands and worked the gardens from which he pulls ingredients, is not only a lie, he says, but also an act of aggression toward those who need to learn and understand our shared past.”
Purity culture as support of the status quo: “Purity ideology means that no Christian will ever again be quite as pure and righteous and clean as they are at that moment of conversion.”
I was kind of annoyed at this article about Amish romance–the author has a good understanding of what evangelicals are looking for in romance novels, but she also seems to use a single Amish romance with a totally ridiculous and over the top plot as a stand-in for all Amish romances and that is not how that works: “Peering out from a wire rack in a grocery store was a religious vision of sorts: a paperback romance novel that neatly summed up classic yearning, confining cultural norms, and the hazards of defiled purity.”
Lovely and thoughtful post on one of my favorite novels: “And so, necessarily within Strong Poison, there is a sense of alteration, of the world unmade and remade. Of yourself unmade and remade.”
Your anxiety isn’t an excuse to be an asshole: “And if I were, the last thing in the world I would need is this dumb fucking self-care rhetoric that essentially tells you, ‘You’re a golden anxiety flower, and everyone else has to deal with you.’” (I read this piece more along the lines of “Hey, remember that other people are people too and everyone has stuff” as opposed to “Suck it up, buttercup” but your mileage may vary!)
Spring–or is it?: “Spring is an artificial concept imported and imposed upon the Australian landscape when those invaders should have been chatting to the Traditional Owners about the six (or seven, or two) seasons.”
The Witches of Salem: “In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence followed.”
On Yi-Fen Chou: “You had to stay visibly Other so you could remain a racialized fetish-object; the more assimilated you seem at first glance, the less reason he would have to use you to garnish his work.”
Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” may not have been created by him: “‘One of my female friends who had adopted the pseudonym Richard Mutt sent me a porcelain urinal as a sculpture; since there was nothing indecent about it, there was no reason to reject it.'”
This sounds like a really interesting game: “Your job is to protect your children from hunters, an impossibly steep task that I was not able to do. It seemed possible at first, but the spear-wielding figures, dark lines slashed against the world, just overwhelmed me in the end.”
On the Power User problem: “it might be more fruitful to reimagine software whose default user is not a composite of focus testers, the designers and their imagined user types, and demographic/usage data, but a potentiality of users willing to adapt software to their particular needs and desires.”
New species of ancient human! “To find one complete skeleton of a new hominid would be hitting the paleoanthropological jackpot. To find 15, and perhaps more, is like nuking the jackpot from orbit.”
Justice Department sets sights on Wall Street executives: “‘We’re not going to be accepting a company’s cooperation when they just offer up the vice president in charge of going to jail.'”
I like cranky Michael Stipe: “‘Go fuck yourselves, the lot of you—you sad, attention-grabbing, power-hungry little men.'”
So there are some scholarships available for Smofcon. There’s a hitch, though: “The recipients will be selected by a committee of Robbie Bourget, Kevin Standlee and René Walling.”