The Digest—Tuesday, 6 December, 2016

06 December, 2016

The Digest—Tuesday, 6 December, 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: Fake news, tax on CEOs, Michigan's broken recount system, Satellite timelapses, and yes, words actually matter=-

Articles:

Fake news, real violence: 'Pizzagate' and the consequences of an Internet echo chamber
Brian Stelter from CNN

The people who promulgate this stuff either don't care if there are consequences or, worse, want there to be consequences like this. They want violence and armed insurrection. They want their "enemies" killed. Unfortunately, those they consider enemies are fellow citizens with whom they disagree. Such as driving all the way across the country to fire a gun in a pizza parlour. And now our nation is set to be governed by a cadre of such people, with the Asshole-Stunter-in-Chief, well, chief among them.

Portland to vote on taxing companies if CEO earns 100 times more than staff
Nicky Woolf from The Guardian

Finally, some elected officials willing to do something about this, if only bring attention to it.

US election: broken machines could throw Michigan recount into chaos
Sam Thielman from The Guardian

Isn't part of the point of the recount making sure the number of electronic ballots matches the number of paper ballots? Yet Michigan's system tosses recount results if the numbers don't match up. What kind of idiot wrote that law? (I'm not looking it up.)

Google's satellite timelapses show the inconvenient truth about our planet
Jonathan Jones from The Guardian

This will just prove to stalwart nonbelievers that Google is in on the "conspiracy" of global warming and is probably a Chinese puppet.

Actually, Paul Ryan, the President's Words Do Matter
Dahlia Lithwick and Robert L. Tsai from Slate

THANK. YOU. Someone had to make this plainly explicit. Not that anyone who buys into that bullshit will read it, or would believe it if they did.

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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.