79 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. One challenge is whether – or how – this conversation becomes generative of traditional scholarship, such as a more linear, peer-reviewed article.

      Comment by amidont: There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

  2. Jan 2024
    1. These institutions are designed to support individuals and their habitats, reversing the current dynamic where people and their environments appear to serve institutions.

      for - flipping the institutional web - Tools for the Commons - to create regenerative institutions

  3. Dec 2023
    1. you can see it all the time it's 00:41:37 unbelievably it's unbelievably painful we look at all the our institutions
      • for: polycrisis - entrenched institutional bias, examples - entrenched institutional bias - bank macro economic policy - lobbyist

      • paraphrase

        • James provides two examples of major institutional bias that has to be rapidly overcome if we are to stand a chance at facilitating rapid system change:
          • Bank of England controls macroeconomic policies that favour elites and not ordinary people and
            • these policies are beyond political contestation
          • In the normal political system, lobbyists through the revolving door between the top levels of the Civil Service and the corporate sector bias policies for elites and not ordinary citizens
  4. Sep 2023
  5. Aug 2023
    1. the GI Bill provided a range of benefits to returning World War II veterans including low-cost mortgages job training and college tuition the implementation of these benefits was not Equitable across racial lines though the 00:04:36 legislation itself didn't explicitly differentiate benefits based on race in practice the distribution of its benefits was largely influenced by social and institutional racism the GI Bill worked in tandem with existing racially discriminating housing and 00:04:48 lending practices such as redlining and restrictive covenants which effectively excluded black veterans from enjoying the same opportunities for homeownership as their white counterparts redlining was a discriminatory practice where 00:05:00 lenders would designate neighborhoods with a high percentage of black people as high risk areas for mortgage lending these areas were often outlined in red on maps used by Banks and other lending institutions hence the term redlining 00:05:13 this led to a systemic denial of Home Loans or Insurance to People based on the racial or ethnic composition of their neighborhoods
      • for: history - suburbs, GI Bill, racial discrimination, structural racism, institutional racism, racial discrimination
      • paraphrase
        • The GI Bill institutionally and structurally discriminated against people of color and played a major role in how suburbs expansion was racially discriminatory against people of color
    1. When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home, what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?
      • for: collective interest,
      • paraphrase
        • When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home,
          • what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?
        • By contrast, the interests of individuals and groups within the larger goup, such as
          • unlicensed gun owners,
          • protesters of various stripes, or
          • hate-mongers on social media
        • are pretty easy to delineate.
        • No surprise then that the dysfunctional courts often choose
          • personal interests over
          • an amorphous and undefinable “collective interest”.
      • insight
        • reason why the judicial system often sides with a definitive, but often harmful group, over a vague but beneficial group
      • quote
        • modernity has hollowed out the word "collective interest
      • author
        • James Gien Wong
        • Stop Reset Go
  6. Jul 2023
    1. Human institutions are purely human creations. Theironly legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whomtheir existence ultimately depends. If institutions fail toserve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transformthem
      • for: system change, institutional change, paradigm shift
      • quote
        • "Human institutions are purely human creations.
        • Their only legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whom their existence ultimately depends.
        • If institutions fail to serve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transform them."
      • Author
        • David Korten
  7. Mar 2023
    1. Europe invented the practice of turning words around on themselves. You need only look to the treaties between American Indian peoples and various European governments to know that this is true. Draw your strength from who you are.
      • Critique
      • I doubt that European culture invented institutional deception but through colonialism, they were certainly leading practitioners of it
  8. Feb 2023
  9. Jan 2023
    1. you asked for the main lesson because i i mean i think there are several but but if i had to pick out one i think what i would focus on is the emphasis on personal or individual 00:06:12 transformation i mean if you think of the history of the western tradition i mean i think there's a lot to appreciate in terms of institutional transformation if you think about something like anti-slavery movements and civil rights 00:06:26 movements and unions and more democratic forms of government etc and that's really really important but there's also this question is that kind of collective or institutional transformation enough 00:06:40 unless we also have kind of personal transformation otherwise i think it tends to be subverted if we're still motivated if many people are still motivated by the three poisons of greed 00:06:53 you know ill-will delusion

      !- institutional scale transformation : relation to personal transformation - unless institutional transformation is accompanied by personal, individual transformation, it can be subverted

  10. Dec 2022
    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYycpKcUhc4

      We need more social acceptability for neurodivergence in much the way we accept the use of eyeglasses without attaching a social stigma to it.

      What ways is this like exacerbating the stigmas of racism and institutionalized racism? How can we break down these broader barriers without othering people?

  11. Oct 2022
    1. The overrepresentation of AfricanAmericans as poor, in and of itself, has been found to undermine support forantipoverty initiatives by activating racist and classist stereotypes about lazi-ness and lack of motivation among African Americans and people experiencingpoverty (see also Chapter 6).15
  12. Sep 2022
    1. David Brady and colleagues have shown this to be empirically the case across29 rich democracies. The authors focused on four major risks of poverty—loweducation, single motherhood, young adults heading a household, and unem-ployment. They found that although the prevalence of these risks in the UnitedStates is actually below the average in other countries, the rate of poverty inthe United States is the highest. The reason is that “the penalties for risks inthe United States are the highest of the 29 countries. An individual with allfour risks has an extremely heightened probability of being poor in the UnitedStates.”

      How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

      What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

      Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

    1. https://www.aei.org/articles/what-malcolm-gladwell-gets-wrong-about-poverty/

      What creates "strong families"? It's definitely more than a two-parent household. Economic and social support are highly helpful as well as a myriad of other factors.

      Watch the potential for subtle right leaning bias here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute#Political_stance_and_impact

    2. Limiting zoning regulations, allocating relocation vouchers (as my AEI colleague Michael Strain has proposed), and implementing school-choice reforms all might be among the options in tearing down the walls that separate the poor.

      As he rightly says they "might be", but where are his small scale experiments providing any support for these claims??

      School-choice is lovely in major cities that might provide it, though often it's a socio-economic ghetto creator moving privileged white children from their dark skinned neighbors. Why not force better public education and funding by rolling back the strangle hold on economic spending going back to Regan? School-choice is nice, but it continually feels more like a dog whistle for institutional and structural racism.

      And don't forget that for the smaller communities that only have one school option things are even much more dire.

  13. Aug 2022
  14. Jun 2022
    1. But systems of schooling and educational institutions–and much of online learning– are organized in ways that deny their voices matter. My role is to resist those systems and structures to reclaim the spaces of teaching and learning as voice affirming. Voice amplifying.

      Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

      There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

      Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

      Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

      Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)


      My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

    1. https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizations-and-complaint-a-goodbye-to-google-43fd8045991d

      As ever, we need to do more listening. And reading, there's lots of interesting references in here to read.

    2. Ahmed teaches us how much we can learn from complaints. “The path of a complaint… teaches us something about how institutions work,” what she calls institutional mechanics.
    3. I’ve also learned, thanks to my doctoral training in sociology, that one must expand one’s personal problems into the structural, to recognize what’s rotten at the local level as an instantiation of the institutional. Our best public sociologists, like Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco, do this exceptionally well.
    1. In concreteterms, a state that levies taxes amounting to only 1 percent of the na-tional income has very little power and capacity to mobilize society.
  15. May 2022
    1. By exam-ining how movement toward equality has actually been produced, wecan learn precious lessons for our future and better understand thestruggles and mobilizations that have made this movement possible,as well as the institutional structures and legal, social, fiscal, educa-tional, and electoral systems that have allowed equality to become alasting reality.

      Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

  16. Apr 2022
    1. As Professor Thuesen explained, the key proponent of naming Archdale Hall for the state’s one-time colonial governor was Johns Hopkins University’s own Francis T. King. King was a business associate to Johns Hopkins and personally chosen by Hopkins to serve as a founding trustee of our university. As librarian and Professor of English Dorothy Lloyd Gilbert reported, students at Guilford advocated naming the new building Phoenix Hall; it was erected literally out of the ashes after a fire destroyed the school’s meeting house. King, who headed the Baltimore Association to Advise and Assist Friends in the Southern States, saw things otherwise and managed to prevail. Named in the 1880s, Archdale Hall still stands today and is the oldest building on the Guilford College campus.2
      1. For more on Francis T. King’s influence at Guilford College, see Damon D. Hickey, “Pioneers of the New South: The Baltimore Association and North Carolina Friends in Reconstruction,” Quaker History 74, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 1-17.

      Francis King was a Quaker and a business associate to Johns Hopkins and personally chosen by Hopkins to serve as a founding trustee of the university.

      King headed headed the Baltimore Association to Advise and Assist Friends in the Southern States. He influenced Guilford College to name a building there Archdale Hall after John Archdale, a 17th century colonial governor of the Carolinas and a Quaker who oversaw the enactment of their early and exceedingly harsh slave codes.

    1. Even as he was critical of overabundance, Gesner exulted in it, seeking exhaustiveness in his accumulation of both themes and works from which others could choose according to their judgment and interests.

      Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

    1. Neuropsychiatrists at UCLA had found a willing partner in Governor Reagan’s California Department of Justice, to the tune of $750,000 (equivalent to roughly $4.5 million today), and a whopping $1.5 million from the state. It was prominently affiliated with researchers like Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin, who had gained scientific fame for their work creating brain implants in human patients to change behavior and motivation; also on board was former LAPD police chief James Fiske, a man known for terrorizing the city’s Black population.

      It looks like Ronald Reagan had issues with mental health care even as far back as the 1970s. This incident at UCLA was just a precursor to defunding state mental health care that was already apparently having issues at the time.

  17. Mar 2022
    1. Refinement is a social process

      The idea that refinement is a social process is a powerful one, but it is limited by the society's power structures, scale, and access to the original material and least powerful person's ability to help refine it.

  18. Feb 2022
    1. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universities-say-they-want-more-diverse-faculties-so-why-is-academia-still-so-white/

      Some good examples of senior and well-known people who have failed to get tenure, largely because of race.

      Examples of how the system is set up to exclude diversity in terms of how the game is played.

    2. First, consider who gets to make the rules. Tenured scholars who, as we’ve noted, are mostly white and male, largely make the rules that determine who else can join the tenured ranks. This involves what sociologists call “boundary work,” or the practice of a group setting rules to determine who is good enough to join. And as such, many of the rules established around tenure over the years work really well for white scholars, but don’t adequately capture the contributions of scholars of color.

      Boundary work is the practice of a group that sets the rules to determine who is and isn't good enough to join the group.

      Link to Groucho Marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

  19. Jan 2022
    1. Consider, as well, the extent to which the tools of abstraction are themselves tied up in the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As the historian Jennifer L. Morgan notes in “Reckoning With Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic,” the fathers of modern demography, the 17th-century English writers and mathematicians William Petty and John Graunt, were “thinking through problems of population and mobility at precisely the moment when England had solidified its commitment to the slave trade.”Their questions were ones of statecraft: How could England increase its wealth? How could it handle its surplus population? And what would it do with “excessive populations that did not consume” in the formal market? Petty was concerned with Ireland — Britain’s first colony, of sorts — and the Irish. He thought that if they could be forcibly transferred to England, then they could, in Morgan’s words, become “something valuable because of their ability to augment the population and labor power of the English.”This conceptual breakthrough, Morgan told me in an interview, cannot be disentangled from the slave trade. The English, she said, “are learning to think about people as ‘abstractable.’

      This deserves to be delved into more deeply. This sounds like a bizarre stop on the creation of institutional racism.

      How do these sorts of abstraction hurt the move towards equality?

    1. Companies should not assume they can release a product without thinking about its unintended uses and then undo the harm that results. This often doesn’t work.Some technology

      Many products, including technology and social media products, can have a multitude of uses including unintended off-label uses. This can lead to harmful and deleterious effects on large groups of people.

      On the other hand, some users may also see great benefits from off-label use cases. As an example, despite it being a vector for attacks and abuse, some marginalized groups have benefited from social media through increased visibility, the ability to create community, and expand their digital access.

      As a result it's important to look at how a product is being used in the marketplace and change or modify it or create similar but different products to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.

    1. Or, in Lallemant’s words: ‘I can say in truth that, asregards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and tothose who dwell in France. I would never have believed that, withoutinstruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorouseloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management inthings to which they are accustomed.’25

      How do we go from such varied statements from Jesuits which entered the popular discourse to the complete erasure of this knowledge in subsequent generations. Was the greed for land and power so great?

    1. Any Negro who wishes to live must live with danger from his first day, and no experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.

      Norman Mailer

    1. If you visit the Web site of the Online Computer Library Center and look at its WorldMap, you can see the numbers of books in public and academic systems around the world. Sixty million Britons have a hundred and sixteen million public-library books at their disposal, while more than 1.1 billion Indians have only thirty-six million. Poverty, in other words, is embodied in lack of print as well as in lack of food. The Internet will do much to redress this imbalance, by providing Western books for non-Western readers. What it will do for non-Western books is less clear.
  20. Dec 2021
  21. Nov 2021
    1. Once it was not just okay but admirable that Chua and Rubenfeld had law-school students over to their house for gatherings. That moment has passed. So, too, has the time when a student could discuss her personal problems with her professor, or when an employee could gossip with his employer. Conversations between people who have different statuses—employer-employee, professor-student—can now focus only on professional matters, or strictly neutral topics. Anything sexual, even in an academic context—for example, a conversation about the laws of rape—is now risky.

      Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

      I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

    2. Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

      While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

      These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

      If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

      Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

    3. Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

      Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

      Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

      Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

      It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

      Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

    4. One of the people I spoke with was asked to apologize for an offense that broke no existing rules. “I said, ‘What am I apologizing for?’ And they said, ‘Well, their feelings were hurt.’ So I crafted my apology around that: ‘If I did say something that upset you, I didn’t anticipate that would happen.’ ” The apology was initially accepted, but his problems didn’t end.

      Even in cases where one apologizes for offences which don't break existing rules and the apology is accepted by the transgressed, the social ostracism doesn't end. This is a part of the indeterminate length of the social sentences that transgressors suffer.


      What exactly are these unwritten rules? In some cases they may be examples of institutional power wielding influence in cases where people aren't giving the full benefit of humanity and consideration to others. Some may call some of these instances microaggressions or social constructs similar to them.

    5. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor. This—the convicting and sentencing without due process, or mercy—should profoundly bother Americans.

      There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

      In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

    6. Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.

      Great quote by itself.


      How useful is the statute of limitations in cases like slavery in America? It goes against a broader law of humanity, but by pretending there was a statue of limitations for going against it, we have only helped to institutionalize racism in American society. The massive lack of a level playing field makes it all the harder for the marginalized to have the same freedoms as everyone else.

      Perhaps this is why the idea of reparations is so powerful for so many. It removes the statue of limitations and may make it possible to allow us to actually level the playing field.

      Related:

      Luke 12:48 states, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Is this simply a statement for justifying greater taxes for the massively wealth?

    7. There is a reason that Laura Kipnis, an academic at Northwestern, required an entire book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, to recount the repercussions, including to herself, of two allegations of sexual harassment against one man at her university; after she referred to the case in an article about “sexual paranoia,” students demanded that the university investigate her, too. A full explanation of the personal, professional, and political nuances in both cases needed a lot of space.

      Definitely unfortunate for Laura Kipnis (to me on the surface), but are these growing cases helping to deconstruct some of the unfair power structures which we've institutionalized over time? Dismantling them is certainly worthwhile, but the question is are the correct institutions and people paying the price and doing the work? In Kipnis's case, she probably isn't the right person to be paying the price, but rather the institution itself.

      Another example of this is that of Donald McNeil in the paragraph above (in the related article).

    1. Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

      I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

      Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

      Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

      A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

      An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

      A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.


      A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.


      What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.


      Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.


      How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

      The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)


      Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.


  22. Oct 2021
    1. Part of the reason "race" & "gender" as identities make people so angry (aside from those people being comemierdas) is that they're used as immutable characteristics visible from the outside -b/c the State really, really wants them to be- while they are, scientifically, not.
    1. terrifyingothers from the like practices. . .

      Legalized terrorism written into the Virginia slave code in the 1700s.

    2. Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact thatlaws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates thestrength of that tendency. In 1661 a law was passed in Virginia that “in caseany English servant shall run away in company of any Negroes” he would haveto give special service for extra years to the master of the runaway Negro. In1691, Virginia provided for the banishment of any “white man or woman beingfree who shall intermarry with a negro, mulatoo, or Indian man or woman bondor free.”

      In the late 1660's laws began to be passed which institutionalized racism and further increased the split between otherwise equal white and colored friends by increasing punishment toward whites working in concert with people of color.

  23. Sep 2021
    1. Kevin Marks talks about the bridging of new people into one's in-group by Twitter's retweet functionality from a positive perspective.

      He doesn't foresee the deleterious effects of algorithms for engagement doing just the opposite of increasing the volume of noise based on one's in-group hating and interacting with "bad" content in the other direction. Some of these effects may also be bad from a slow brainwashing perspective if not protected for.

  24. Aug 2021
    1. The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

      Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

      Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

      Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

      Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

      Some core ideas of critical race theory:

      • racial realism
        • racism is normal
      • interest convergence
        • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
      • Whiteness as property
        • Cheryl Harris' work
        • White people have privilege in the law
        • myth of meritocracy
      • Intersectionality

      People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

      Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

      Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

      KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

      SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

      • Law enforcement got upset and the school district
      • Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
      • Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

      It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

      What are you afraid of?

  25. Jul 2021
    1. Crenshaw and her classmates asked 12 scholars of color to come to campus and lead discussions about Bell’s book Race, Racism, and American Law. With that, critical race theory began in earnest.
    1. If you want to understand why I’ve made these arguments, you first need to recognize that for decades, right-wing thinkers and judges have argued that policies that lead to racial inequities are “not racist” or are “race neutral.” That was the position of the conservative Supreme Court justices who recently upheld Arizona’s voting-restriction policies. Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent—which is hard to prove—rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to prove.
  26. May 2021
  27. Mar 2021
  28. Jan 2021
    1. We have thus an example in which the hand behind the invisible hand is visible, in line, therefore, with Mittermaier’s presentation of the pragmatic view in which humans deliberately decide upon an institutional framework within which an invisible hand is supposed to operate. If, however, we were to argue that the appropriate institutional arrangements would have emerged of their own accord, in other words without such planning, Mittermaier would classify us among the ranks of the dogmatic free marketeers. For a dogmatic free marketeer, the hand behind the invisible hand is also invisible.

      The difference behind a pragmatic and dogmatic free market - in a pragmatic market - the hand behind the invisible hand is visible, whereas in a dogmatic market - the hand behind the invisible hand is also invisible.

  29. Dec 2020
    1. Now 59 and still living near Boston, Darryl knows police had fewer tools at their disposal when his mother was killed. He also knows his mother was easy prey. But he said he still struggles to understand how Little was permitted to kill vulnerable people again and again — 92 more times, by Little’s account.“It’s hard to fathom. I mean, how does someone get away with that? Transient or otherwise?”

      It shouldn't escape one's attention that this story itself is focused on a white victim and her (likely less-than-marginalized) white son.

  30. Sep 2020
    1. These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during the Gilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

      This philosophy also overlaps some of the resurgence of white nationalism and structural racism in the early 1900's which also tended to disadvantage people of color. ie, we can blame the coloreds because it's not structural inequality, but the failure of the individual (and the race.)

  31. Aug 2020
  32. Jul 2020
  33. Jun 2020
    1. Goldman, P. S., Ijzendoorn, M. H. van, Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S., Goldman, P. S., Ijzendoorn, M. H. van, Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Bradford, B., Christopoulos, A., Cuthbert, C., Duchinsky, R., Fox, N. A., Grigoras, S., Gunnar, M. R., Ibrahim, R. W., Johnson, D., Kusumaningrum, S., Ken, P. L. A., Mwangangi, F. M., Nelson, C. A., … Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S. (2020). The implications of COVID-19 for the care of children living in residential institutions. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(20)30130-9

  34. Feb 2019
    1. Is the freedom of the individual served by neoliberalism? Centrality of the state for this freedom, which NL denies. “neoliberal thinkers deliberately sustain the fiction that ‘the market economy’ is a natural and spontaneous order that must be placed beyond politics … The question of how authority can be something other than domination and private power shaped the ideas and action of those who built the tradition of constitutional democracy in western societies from the 16th to the 20th centuries … basic needs were those that had to be met before the individual could practically enact the status of a free subject or person. It was such needs provision that made it possible for individuals to be both personally secure and to enjoy an equality of opportunity to develop as individuals free to discover their talents and gifts … the representation of market society as a spontaneous order is pitched to the punters while, within the tent of the doctrine’s initiates, it is fully understood that the state has to be both a strong state, and to be re-engineered in order to impose neoliberal institutional design.” YeatmanFreedom.pdf
  35. Jan 2019
  36. www.at-the-intersection.com www.at-the-intersection.com
    1. no, you know, that is kind of the holy grail for every retail trader.

      trading algorithms

    2. Um, uh, I haven't seen a ton of success where people wanna go after retail and institutional at the same time.
  37. Nov 2018
    1. Instructional Design Strategies for Intensive Online Courses: An Objectivist-Constructivist Blended Approach

      This was an excellent article Chen (2007) in defining and laying out how a blended learning approach of objectivist and constructivist instructional strategies work well in online instruction and the use of an actual online course as a study example.

      RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

    1. Distance Education Trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration

      This article explores the interaction of student based learner-centered used of technology tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts as new and emerging technology tools. With distance learning programs becoming more and more popular, software applications such as Writeboard, InstaCol and Imeem may become less of the software of choice. The article looks closely at the influence of technology and outcomes.

      RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

  38. Oct 2018
  39. Sep 2018
    1. The power of that scene in Black Panther lies in its critique of Western museums as symbols and products of colonialism and repositories of empire’s loot.

      Distinguish the institution's culpability in colonialism and cultural appropriation, versus the individual's desire to share ideas, knowledge, and history--including (assumed) the critique of colonializing practices of the institutions.

  40. Dec 2017
    1. Isomorphism in the context of globalization, is an idea of contemporary national societies that is addressed by the institutionalization of world models constructed and propagated through global cultural and associational processes.
  41. Nov 2017
  42. Dec 2016
    1. One challenge is whether – or how – this conversation becomes generative of traditional scholarship, such as a more linear, peer-reviewed article.

      There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

  43. Aug 2015
    1. data deposition is limited to researchers working at the same institution,

      Not necessarily. For many institutions, as long as one of the researchers is affiliated, the data can be deposited