[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: Senate anti-science committee, our probable new Secretary of Defense, women computers, child jailed for shooting her abuser, the fire in Oakland, varieties of anger, Palin chides Trump, Trump encourages extrajudicial murder, and ultralikes for Black Mirror=-
Articles:
Climate scientists condemn article claiming global temperatures are falling
Alan Yuhas from The Guardian
The Senate committee of science, space, and technology is quoting Breitbart freaking news for their climate science "data," and Trump's not even the president yet. Leave it to Bernie to sum it up:
“Where’d you get your PhD?” Sanders asked. “Trump University?”
Seriously.
[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: Professor watchlists, female genital mutilation in America, more alt-right definitions, bee for a day, Trump's war on science, stop with the stigma, Black Mirror, and Silenced=-
Articles:
Professor Watchlist website elicits both fear and ridicule in US universities
Mazin Sidahmed from The Guardian
So people you disagree with are "anti-American." This is either outrageous hyperbole or really, really screwed. I know this kind of rhetoric has been going around for a while now, but come on. The dangerous thing about lists like this is that, like the article mentions, they paint those listed as targets for lunatics who feel a violent need to prove a point. Gabrielle Giffords was on such a list (thanks, Sarah Palin).
[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: Video games & humanity, violence against female professions, MDMA to treat PTSD, psilocybin to treat depression, ancient/intelligent machines, and Dragon Age: Inquisition=-
Articles:
How Video Games Change Us
Laura Miller from Slate
OK, off the bat, settle down! This isn't one of those "games turn kids into psychokillers" articles, though it discusses a book with that premise and rather roundly debunks it. She also makes a very good point that articles with even the slightest criticism, or even calls to criticism, are attacked so completely as to shut down the conversation. Is that what gamers want? Zero conversation about their medium? Attacking, Trump-like, any and all critique? Not this gamer.
Something in particular she said resonated with me:
Filter bubbles aren’t an unanticipated consequence of the pleasures of social media: They are its main attraction. They offer us the dream of inhabiting a curated reality.
"Curated reality." Ouch. But she's right. I've been writing about this for years. Online life allows one to avoid the unpleasant, whether it is a troll e-shouting obscenities to news one disagrees with, to the point where many are surprised those that disagree still exist (witness: recent election).
She also talks about Battlefield I and the hyperreality of the recreated experience—that obsessive attention to detail that tries to evoke the horror and trauma of war without the main aspect that made it all so horrific: one's own pain, one's own impending doom, one's own mortality. Agsin, she has a point.
I know that FPSs aren't supposed to evoke your own impending doom and inflict unimaginable physical pain. I know that when I shoot some Raiders in Fallout in the head and those heads suddenly explode in an incomprehensible morass of disassociated eyeballs and streams of red, I sometimes find myself giggling. I also know that doesn't mean that, when I see an actual human being gunned down, I will also giggle. Quite the contrary.
From my point of view, the violence in shooters is part of the system of the game, normally a simple equation of, "If I don't shoot them, they will shoot me." The violence is often exaggerated to ridiculousness, such with flying eyeballs, and I fully understand this is not the world I live in.
The area that does concern me is the disconnect many people face when interacting with other actual, living human beings within gaming constructs. It's one reason I don't engage in multiplayer gaming experiences, other than the fact that I suck at games in general and would sink any team I found myself part of. It's the, "Well, I'm not actually shooting you in the face, so it doesn't matter if I'm a prick" mentality, the treatment of other persons inhabiting a space as NPCs to be bullied, harassed, blocked, ignored, and discarded.
Yes, I can mute the pricks around me in cyberspace, but I wish I didn't have to.
[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: The devils of PC culture; corporate right-wing activism, best of 2016 Scifi/fantasy, The Doors, and crisis management=-
Articles:
Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy
Moira Weigel from Th Guardian
This is some great history and perspective that helps explain the disastrous result on discourse done by accusations of "politically correct!" It shuts down the conversation while simultaneously claiming oppression of truth by "elitist" agendas. Run awaaaaaaayyyy!
[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: profiling the NRA, down with the poor, down with women's health, down with Einstein, fictive transplants, down with CNN, down with the first amendment, her worst nightmare, & AHS Hotel finale=-
Articles:
This Sociologist Spent A Decade Studying the NRA — and Saw How It Paved The Way for Trump
Alex Yablon from The Trace
Rhetoric, fantasy, perspective, disgust, sadness.
[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: Anonymous confession of an almost-racist, the self-fellating NRA, please boycott this UNC professor, hate crimes rising in Trumptown, how citizens became consumers, controlling the media, arrested for being outside-while-female, and American Horror Story=-
Articles:
'Alt-right' online poison nearly turned me into a racist
Anonymous from The Guardian
Language is a powerful thing. Indoctrination often works in subtle shades. It cracks me up when liberals are accused of this because, so far, liberals totally suck at the persuasion game. We think facts and earnest conversation can convince people to recognize common sense, scientific consensus, and compassionate sensibility. This might have been true at some point in our history, and we think it's true because it's what we, ourselves, respond to, but for those with minds made up, beliefs locked in, and villains lynched, it is worse than ineffective—it convinces them they were right about us all along.
[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: Trump's legal wakeup call, makeup tips for domestic abuse, 81x the wealth for whites in D.C., educational saturation a predictor of unTrumpiness, inventing the Russian threat, modern meanings of 'like', fundamentalist white America, Dollhouse, & Spanish Lake=-
Articles:
'A recipe for scandal': Trump conflicts of interest point to constitutional crisis
from The Guardian
Apparently Trump has it all legally wrong that the President can have no conflicts of interest (ahem); he says he's giving his business to his kids, yet his kids are sitting in on meetings with foreign leaders, and foreign leaders seem to be making way to ease Trump's business interests in their countries, not to mention booking rooms in his many hotels across the globe.
The constitutional problem is specifically about receiving payments and/or gifts from foreign leaders, and the existential problem is about whether Trump will or will not intervene in foreign governments based on his business interests. Apparently the electoral college can block his ascendance to the Presidency if he does not figure out this business boondoggle, though I wouldn't count on it. No...pun...intended.
