#article recommendations

[macaron-tea-party]

From Wired: The DNC is paying influencers to push the party line through dark money and likely breaking laws to do it

One of the names listed in the article getting paid is Olivia Juliana who famously claimed loudly she was not a shill for the party and not getting paid for her opinion.

The group in question getting this dark money is called Chorus which looks like is made of multiple popular influencers.

Go read the article it explains a lot of the weird unity on pushing Gavin newson from liberals and other weirdness during the election campaign. Don’t let this story get buried

A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers

An initiative aimed at boosting Democrats online offers influencers up to $8,000 a month to push the party line. All they have to do is keep

[miss-pink-eb]

distractions, girlism, & total public annihilation

march 2024

distractions, girlism, & total public annihilation

march2024

[cerysdelaney]

Thinking About Thinking

The father of cognitive behavioral therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck, dies at 100

The developer of cognitive behavioral therapy, Dr. Aaron Beck, died on Monday at age 100. In 2015, NPR's Invisibilia introduced listeners to

[pennycase]

otherwise ordinary men

Tim Swarens of the IndyStar has a ten-column series, EXPLOITED: Inside the Dark World of Child Trafficking.  I’ve only read the first piece: Who buys a child for sex?  Otherwise ordinary men.  

Some chilling quotes: 

This project began with a question: Who buys a 15-year-old child for sex?

The answer: Many otherwise ordinary men. They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse.

“They’re in all walks of life,” a 17-year-old survivor from the Midwest, trafficked when she was 15, said about the more than 150 men who purchased her in a month. “Some could be upstanding people in the community. It was mostly people in their 40s, living in the suburbs, who were coming to get the stuff they were missing.”

But sex buyers also are shielded by the same cultural attitudes and biases — men are entitled to sex, victims are somehow to blame — that have long protected powerful men who harass and assault women in the workplace and other settings.

It’s tempting to put buyers who exploit children in a box — to say that all of them are pedophiles, a small percentage of the population driven by a deep sickness. But researchers and survivors say that’s not the case.

ECPAT International researchers found that the great majority of men who pay to exploit children are opportunists. They don’t set out specifically to buy sex with a child, but neither do they walk away when faced with the temptation.

I don’t want to speak too soon, because I haven’t read anything else of the series, and it’s possible there is/will be backlash from people in the human trafficking community, but for right now, I’m glad there’s at least one journalist who’s doing this, rather than breathlessly speculating over the plight of the white working class cultural conservatives as click- and pulitzer-bait.

[klinfield]

As often happens as nations are attempting to ward off their demise, they take hard right turn, and Americans and countless earthlings are reeling from the current one. It is now obvious that the accelerating collapse in the United States will inevitably include escalating repression of civil liberties and violations of human rights; collective raging against the machine without recognizing it as machine, off the charts racism, deepening economic equality, the destruction of economic safety nets, and despite Trump's proclaimed military isolationism, more war."

Another great read.

[pennycase]

I’d tell [young people just starting out] to just do it. Secondly—and more importantly—don’t worry about what everyone else has done or is doing. If you constantly think, “Somebody has already made this,” then you’re never going to make anything. I’m not making things that haven’t been done before. It helps to find a way to differentiate yourself, but you don’t need to know how to do that on the first day. Develop and hone your own voice. If you’re not having fun with what you’re doing, you’re either going to burn out or your audience will. But if you enjoy what you do, that energy becomes infectious.

Deb Perelman, The Great Discontent (x)

[pennycase]

I should probably have more confidence, but I don’t, and I don’t believe confidence is all that it’s cracked up to be. Maybe being a little bit worried about how you’re doing actually makes you work harder. Every day, we’re surrounded by pithy articles on Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter that tell us to be confident, go for it, and trust our guts. When I read that, I think, “But I don’t trust my gut, and I’m not completely confident.” What’s wrong with second-guessing yourself and getting a second opinion from outside of your head? Are these truly bad traits? If those feelings make you work harder, then that should count, too.

Deb Perelman, The Great Discontent (x)

[pennycase]

Two sides of the same coin: Conversations via Twitter, by Adrian Chen and ISIS and the Lonely Young American, by Rukmin Callimachi.  

Chen’s profile of Megan Phelps-Roper, a former prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church, has some eery similarities to Callimachi’s profile of Alex, a rural, Christian American woman, courted by ISIS on twitter.  The two articles are radically different in tone, obviously, but I think what was most striking is how quickly both Megan and Alex got emotionally involved with their twitter correspondents and the way that twitter--which often feels exclusively like a brand management tool, or like screaming into the wind--genuinely did motivate them to question their deeply-held beliefs.  

The two women were in very different positions, of course--Alex was isolated and vulnerable, whereas Megan was integrated into her community and self-aware.  Moreover, it appears that Megan’s interaction with strangers on twitter was largely sincere, with no one pressing the secrecy upon her.  By contrast, Alex relieved immense pressure on twitter to keep the interaction and her beliefs hidden from her family.  STILL, the similarities between the two articles are striking and I recommend both.