SKINT

A post-consumer handbook

[skintmag]

Are Private Schools Immoral?

A conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones about race, education, and hypocrisy.

“Goldberg: What’s so interesting here is that you're not talking about stereotypical Trump voters in Alabama. You're talking about hipster Brooklyn. Liberals kind of piss you off?

Hannah-Jones: I am only writing and speaking to liberals at this point. I'm trying to get people who say they believe in equality and integration but act in ways that maintain inequality and segregation to live their own values. The most segregated parts of the country are all in the progressive North. If you could just get white liberals to live their values, you could have a significant amount of integration.“

[skintmag]

School choice is a scam in segregated neighborhoods

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ agenda to further privatize education would leave even fewer good schools for low-income black and brown students.

The scholar Dr. Charles Payne from the University of Chicago, while supportive of charters that do good work, accurately critiqued the charter industry, saying that “it has produced largely mediocre results that are only accepted because of the race of the children served.”

[skintmag]

Susan would complain that the present, the life she was living moment to moment, felt unreal to her. Only the future really mattered, for that was where her ideal life resided. 'If I just wait a little longer', she would remark in a tone of wry despondency, 'there’ll be this magically transformative event and everything will come right.'

Josh Cohen, Minds turned to Ash [1843]

[skintmag]

We’ve always valued democratic citizenship, and democracy is almost an obsession of America. What’s contested is what democracy looks like, how it’s constituted, and how we arrived there. And over the last few decades—not just here, but in Britain and other places around the world—the liberalization of the market, that is to say the unfettering of market forces, has led us to not just worship the market and to believe in the capacity of the market to yield all positive outcomes, but it’s also led us to equate unfettered capitalism with full-fledged democracy. And therefore, citizenship becomes consumership. And so, over the decades…you find an increased sense that to be a citizen is to be a consumer. The more access you have to goods and consumption, the more rich and full your citizenship is, the more fully realized your democratic project is.

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, interviewed in Surviving Trump: Marc Lamont Hill Wants You to Resist [The Millions]

My Palestinian brothers and sisters have a word called sumud—and sumud is steadfastness. We have to be steadfast. You know, steadfast means that resistance doesn’t happen just at a march or a rally. It’s not just a momentary blip on the screen. It’s a lifelong commitment to resisting. If we can remain steadfast, then I think we win.

[skintmag]

How recommendation algorithms tried to make me a Nazi

Sometimes I feel like in life my only goal is to not be able to be put in a box.

[skintmag]

Employees physically leave the office, but they do not leave their work. They remain attached by a kind of electronic leash — like a dog.

Benoit Hamon, quoted in Starting In 2017, French Workers Will Be Legally Protected From Off-Hours Work Email [HuffPo]

“The texts, the messages, the emails — they colonize the life of the individual to the point where he or she eventually breaks down.”

[skintmag]

Insofar as the definition of 'white supremacist' includes Bernie Sanders, the term is not going to retain significant stigma, or even be understood by most of America. Insofar as attempts to point that out are met, by academics on social media or opinion journalists at left-of-center outlets, with the most uncharitable, dubiously accurate construals possible, followed by disparaging insults and performative stigmatization––well, if you’re a progressive who is incapable of constructively engaging with a Mother Jones staffer, what possible hope do you have of reaching the swing voters who will decide the outcome of the 2018 midterms?

Conor Friedersdorf, “The Scourge of the Left”: Too Much Stigma, Not Enough Persuasion [The Atlantic]

“Performative stigmatization”. 

[skintmag]

The consumer is the clock which regulates the relationship between employer and employee.

German activist, quoted by Frank Trentmann: How Humans Became 'Consumers': A History [The Atlantic]

[skintmag]

Rob Arcand, Sonic Youth [Real Life Mag]

[skintmag]

Tech companies are roaringly productive, but they don’t need to produce anything in particular. Only the anxiety and desperation of a species liberated from purpose.

Sam Kriss, “Watching the World Rot at Europe's Largest Tech Conference” [The Atlantic]

For all the usual guff about dynamism and entrepreneurship, it’s clear that Web Summit isn’t really about showcasing new ideas or changing the way anyone does anything. The point is to attract buyouts or investment; this is how so much of the tech industry functions. ... The game isn’t to build anything that might last, but to secure just enough money to land unharmed when the crash finally happens.

[skintmag]

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

Rebecca Solnit, How to Be a Writer [LitHub]

[skintmag]

A panel on diversity is like a panel on world peace. It should be seeking a time when we no longer need such panels. It should be a panel actively working towards its own irrelevance.

Marlon James, Why I’m Done Talking About Diversity OR, Why We Should Try an All-White Diversity Panel [LitHub]

The fact that we’re still having them not only means that we continue to fail, but the false sense of accomplishment in simply having one is deceiving us into thinking that something was tried.

[skintmag]

Can you imagine if, no matter who won, I still felt like an equal member of society and comfortable in my own skin? That would be amazing. It’s kind of fun to imagine.

Nation’s Women Fantasize About Some Future Election That Isn’t Absolutely Pivotal To Their Well-Being [The Onion]

[skintmag]

The woman is allowed to be the voice and the soul and the emotive creature — and the guy is the creator and the maker and the genius

Bjork: ‘I’m not into normcore sexuality’ [London Evening Standard]

[skintmag]

Poland's abortion ban proposal near collapse after mass protests

Parliamentary committee urges MPs to vote proposal down as minister says wave of protests ‘taught us humility’

Tens of thousands of people boycotted work and classes on Monday to protest against the proposals, which if enacted would impose a blanket ban on abortion, including in instances of pregnancy as a result of rape or incest. ...

Jarosław Gowin, the minister of science and higher education, said on Wednesday that the protests had “caused us to think and taught us humility”.

[skintmag]

It was 'women's work.' ... The engineers were the men and the women were the mathematicians or the computers. The men designed the research and did the manly stuff and the women did the calculations, you know, at the behest of the engineers.

Margot Lee Shetterly, Author of Hidden Figures, interviewed in 'Hidden Figures': How Black Women Did The Math That Put Men On The Moon [NPR]

[brooklynmutt-deactivated2021090]

What Mike Pence thinks vs. What Donald Trump says. 

via CNN