The Digest—Saturday, 10 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: Hexmas gift from the GOP, Fentanyl execs arrested. Texas forces women to read lies about abortion, Zizek thinks we're all evil and disgusting, William Gibson on the future, Cronenberg's Shivers, Vice News Tonight, and The Good Neighbor (felony murder, privacy, behavior, context, fluffy cats)=-

Articles:

Merry Christmas! Here’s a House Republican Plan to Cut Social Security.
Jim Newell from Slate

Go-go-Gadget Super Arsewipes! Surprised? Oh, it's going to get worse. 

The Digest—Friday, 9 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: What's fake news, the counted, Trump begins the purge, laughing at murder, keep out the gays, Ohio hates local government, saving the torture report, Glenn Beck has regrets, JunkyChicken-in-Chief, & Moon=-

Articles:

Stop worrying about fake news. What comes next will be much worse
Jonathan Albright from The Guardian

Why is the definition of fake news some big question? I'll tell you what fake news is: it's something reported as news that is, quite simply, not true. Like the news story that said the pope had endorsed Trump. That was not true, so it was fake news. Fake news doesn't apply to opinion pieces and pontifications about ideology and policy. 

This blog, for example, is not news, though it contains links to news stories. What I write is not news. It is opinion, diatribe, my own way of working out my feelings about all this shit. It is not fake, either. What I think and what I write might strike others as false and untrue because they disagree with my positions, but that doesn't make it fake news. 

If I posted something that invented a Trump quote, like, "Trump wants to place liberals in concentration camps!" (take that, Glenn Beck), that could be considered fake news, because it presents itself as being news, or at least newsworthy, even though it is (I hope) completely false, and I have no idea why anyone would believe I, alone, had access to such supposed "truth."  If I posted, instead, "The way Trump is treating people is like putting them in a concentration camp," I would be ridiculously insensitive and hyperbolic, but it's not fake news, just hysterical opinion. 

I agree with the author that curating articles to weed out unpopular opinions is unacceptable, but opinions and ideas are not, generally, news. Fake news is reporting as real things that are false, like the story that Clinton et al. are operating satanic pedophile rings out of pizza shops, or that the parents of Sandy Hook victims are just actors hired by evil liberals to push an anti-gun agenda, or that Obama was born in Kenya. These things are demonstrably false. They did not happen. THAT is fake news, and THAT is the kind of shit Trump and his ilk have repeatedly peddled. 

The mania over fake news is deserved. The soon-to-be Asshole-in-Chief and his upcoming cabinet and nominees and appointees are on record pushing fake news stories that heighten aggression, divisiveness, paranoia, and violence. The complete disregard for scientific fact and pursuit of customized "facts"-on-demand is so inherently insidious that everyone should be very concerned. 

Why there is any confusion over what "fake news" means is a total mystery to me, but then so is much of the last year. 

The Digest—Thursday, 8 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: The age of anger, Trump's non-decency, & The Untold History of the United States=-

Articles:

Welcome to the age of anger
Pankaj Mishra from The Guardian

Will we never learn the lessons of history? 

“One gets the impression,” Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion (1927) “that culture is something imposed on a reluctant majority by a minority that managed to gain possession of the instruments of power and coercion.”

What is imposed on the many by the few is the narrative they wish to be told, facts be damned. It's the lie of American goodness and exceptionalism, condemning the tyranny of elected governments while staging coups across the globe, imposing its will on foreign populations and the oppressed. It's the lie that something called a "market" has a "will" or any sense of "fairness" instead of unmitigated hunger for endless consumption. It's the myth of "limited government" apostles using government to undermine, oppress, imprison, and criminalize anyone and anything perceived as a threat to their economic and political goals.

But this vanity, luridly exemplified today by Donald Trump’s Twitter account, often ends up nourishing in the soul a dislike of one’s own self while stoking impotent hatred of others; and it can quickly degenerate into an aggressive drive, whereby individuals feel acknowledged only by being preferred over others, and by rejoicing in their abjection. (As Gore Vidal pithily put it: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”)

And these lies fed people the myth that they, too, could achieve such opulence, and thus such control, and thus safety and recognition and validation, all of which lead to one inevitable outcome: failure to achieve. And on failing to achieve, there cannot be blame lobbed in the direction toward which they, for so long, strived, but instead placed upon those perceived to be taking that dream straight from their hands and gifting it to the undeserved, those grubby takers who play victim for handouts instead of toiling, like them, in ceaseless humiliation and impotence. 

Issues of social justice and equality have receded along with conceptions of society or community – to be replaced by the freely choosing individual in the marketplace. According to the prevailing view today, the injustices entrenched by history or social circumstances cease to matter: the slumdog, too, can be a millionaire, and the individual’s failure to escape the underclass is self-evident proof of his poor choices.

They have receded because of the public and government-sponsored attack on dissent as "Communism" for 40 years, which froze the ability to conduct discourse and debate. They have receded because those in power continue to believe, as did the founding fathers, that you can't trust the citizenry with their own futures, with the truth of fact and history, with the power that might affect that elite's political and economic monopolies. So public will is thwarted, those trusted to maintain their status quo installed at levers of power and control, and the mythologies spun that it is those who want to give that power back who have caused their misery and pain.

Rich and poor alike voting for a serial liar and tax dodger have confirmed yet again that human desires operate independently of the logic of self-interest – and may even be destructive of it. Our political and intellectual elites midwifed the new “irrationalism” through a studied indifference to the emotional dislocation and economic suffering induced by modern capitalism. Not surprisingly, they are now unable to explain its rise.

I want to know to which "elites" this author is referring, as those I relate to have been railing for years against unregulated global capitalism that has shipped jobs overseas, condemned "liberals" who embraced the neocon economy, which then became the neolib economy, too, recognize the realities of oppression and white privilege and misogyny not to hurt the lives of this supposedly forgotten, white working man, but to lift more lives out of poverty and powerlessness, to promote assurances and policies that check unrestrained power and greed, and tear down the establishment forces who think they know better than the people what those people want. This lumps intellectualism with power-hungry cronyism, and the two are not one in the same. 

What Robert Musil called the “liberal scraps of an unfounded faith in reason and progress” have yet again failed modern human beings in their all-important task of understanding their experience. We once more confront the possibility, outlined in Musil’s great novel about the collapse of liberal values, The Man Without Qualities, that the characteristic desolation of the modern human being – his “immense loneliness in a desert of detail, his restlessness, malice, incomparable callousness, his greed for money, his coldness and violence’ – is “the result of the losses that logically precise thinking has inflicted on the soul”.

The Digest—Wednesday, 7 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: Xmess for Feminists, abortion on the way out, Steve Bannon vs. secularism, a photo essay of the violence in the Philippines, killing the middle class, Trump vs. the Constitution, white vs. black at Applebees, Ohio wants guns every-freakin-where, United to charge for carryon bags, business as usual with Trump, Sandy Hook truther arrested, why we think we're more ethical than we are, America's statistical descent into fascism, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, & Black Mirror=-

Articles:

Broomsticks, T-shirts and coffee: what every feminist wants for Christmas
Arwa Mahdawi from The Guardian

1. A nice broomstickDefinitions of feminism can differ so it’s worth quickly recapping what the f-word actually means. Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, might have said it best when he described feminism as a movement that “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practise witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. Now, I hate to make sweeping generalisations, but if you’re going to practise witchcraft, then you’re going to need a broomstick.

Hahahahahaha.

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. 

The Digest—Monday, 5 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: Stunter-in-Chief, the Oakland housing crisis & fire, Virginia pulls To Kill a Mockingbird, byebye police reform, Ben Carson and bootstraps, Clinton did NOT ignore the working class, & Game of Thrones=-

Articles:

The Stunt Presidency
Julia Turner from Slate

In addition to Asshole-in-Chief, he is also Stunter-in-Chief. The staging of events and stunts and gimmicks that played over and over during his campaign, now with the weight of the Presidency behind it. DO WHAT I SAY CUZ I'M PRESIDENT NOW NOW NOW. It doesn't matter if he "saves" anymore jobs because he already pulled the Carrier stunt and "proved" himself. Policy doesn't matter beside anecdote. 

The Digest—Sunday, 4 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: Actors react to director confessing to raping actress with stick of butter on set; byebye Medicaid, unfair voting, and Predator=-

Articles:

Actors voice disgust over Last Tango in Paris rape scene confession
Hannah Summers from The Guardian

Yes, this is pretty disgusting, especially that it took the director confirming this to acknowledge the actor's "story" from almost 10 years ago that no one believed or made a fuss about. "Just another actress whining about being violated," etc. But, no, the director and Marlon Brando actually conspired to shove a stick of butter up a female actor's ass for a scene without telling her first to get a "genuine" reaction. The only way to get a "genuine" reaction to a rape scene is to commit rape. Yeah. Really messed up, and part of a pattern of acceptance of the treatment of women for years, centuries, milennia, to this day.