The Digest—Friday, 25 November, 2016

25 November, 2016

The Digest—Friday, 25 November, 2016

[The Digest is a collection of articles, videos, and other media I've viewed and found significant throughout the day. It is a way to divest myself from other social media that is more reliant on likes, click-bait, and peer-approval rather than quality, intelligence, and diversity of opinion, which are the qualities I find important. It is also a way to devote myself to daily contributions to this space...at least in theory.]

-=Summary: Shot by police, Trump "used" by alt-right, Good Girls Revolt, & Deprogrammed=-

Articles:

Chicago-area teen's death by police under investigation
from CNN

I was just writing about this yesterday. "He had a gun." This story is told so often, so persistently, and by people who for so long were unquestionable that it still passes so, so easily. When I read this article, they had yet to find a gun associated with the victim. As it is potentially so harmful to the reputation of the CPD, I would not be surprised if they "discovered" the weapon in 2 days behind some bush, blah blah. And it is, of course, conceivable that the young man did have a weapon.

But there have been so many videos of young black men being shot by police while actively running away from them, while posing no danger, with their backs turned and hands empty. Some people believe that if you're up to no good, it's your own damn fault if police shoot you for it. Really? Would they still believe that if it were their son, or their brother, or their girlfriend?

Doubtful, but then again....

The Alt-Right Is Using Trump
from Slate

Nice to hear definitions and origins from a source who knows some of these people and how they work. He also talks about how the media and the left need to focus on actual actions of corruption, conflict of interest, and bad behavior instead of simply screaming moral outrage about Trump's voters, Trump's appointments, etc. I agree, but I'd give people a couple more weeks to work through that outrage. It's like a mourning process, and we'll (hopefully) become more practical once the initial despair and outrage have passed.

TV/Film:

Good Girls Revolt (2016), episodes 5 & 6
via Amazon Prime

Deprogrammed (2016)
via Netflix

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The Whats, Whys, and Wherefores

Media is everywhere. Its echoes resonate in the air we breathe, the speech we simulate, and the dreams from which we cannot wake. Movies, music, games, self-help and self-delusion and televised mock despair—they persist across all arenas of life, all avenues of interaction. Media invades our relationships, intrudes on our intimacy; it permeates our flesh, our food, burns its implosive images onto our retinas and scars our psyches with its inescapable grasp. That is, of course, why we love it. I'm not here to report the truth, to assert any superior notion of opinion or observation, but merely to serve my own self-interest: writing about those stirred and unrequited passions.

Yet my pace is sometimes a little retarded; sometimes even protarded. Consistently missing the mark relegates my thoughts to the outskirts of relevance. This is the territory of eviscerated ideals, antisocial commentary, works of art, literature, film, and concepts past their prime, things no one has thought of for years—if at all—and analyses otherwise unnecessary in a pop cultural world of self-imposed blindness. I claim no intellectual real estate, just the right to rant in the voided and echoless chamber of my own indulgence.