“I love everything my sister loves, but I will not admit it. I know she and her friends will make fun of me. I know my parents will chastise me and correct me. I am learning the rules, and I am learning that boys liking girl things is a very high stakes issue. I am learning that adults react the same way to my interest in makeup as they do to my interest in matches and lighters. [¶] As if maybe, by being what I am, I might burn down something very important to them. Something that makes their life more comfortable and easy.” — Jennifer Coates
Category: Links
Excerpts from interesting articles, occasionally with brief commentary.
This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.
The Best of Men
“I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire.” — Fred Rogers speaking to the Senate, 1969
Benghazi Is a Meme & Other Fun Aspects of Political Rhetoric
“I like that the electorate is able to vote against the establishment when they’re pissed off. But I don’t like it when they don’t seem to know who the establishment is (say, a third generation real estate scion with inherited wealth who appears to have squandered much of it) and that the most important decisions that we make as citizens require no real accountability on the part of the electorate — just a general impression of who the candidate is, based on soundbites and entertainment-oriented media constructions. […] People who can’t locate Benghazi on a map will invoke it while not being able to articulate what our Libyan policy was in the first place because it’s a meme at this point, not an actual event that happened with verifiable facts. […] People who flock to demagogues don’t exactly have an empirical bent in the first place.” — Elizabeth Spiers
Plutocrats & Cartels
“The great fortunes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were built on the backs of worker-consumers in primarily inward-looking national contexts. By contrast, today’s plutocrats thrive by selling their goods and services globally; their success is dramatically less connected to the fortunes of their fellow national citizens than was that of previous generations. Moreover, the two signature types of massive wealth accumulation in the early 21st century have been high technology and financial services. Neither of these industries relies on masses of laborers, so their productivity is detached from the health of any particular national middle class. […] While plutocrats sewed up the licit opportunities afforded by the integration of the global economy, they mostly avoided dealing in goods and services that were banned for moral or prudential reasons. By contrast, deviant entrepreneurs realized that arbitraging the moral and regulatory differences that existed in different jurisdictions worldwide presented fantastic business opportunities — with opportunities continuously emerging as the capacities of different states contracted at differing rates.” — Nils Gilman for The American Interest
The Allure & Benefit of Ritual Epistemology
“Ritual is more powerful than arguments and facts. The Pentecostal church members are a prime example of ritual epistemology: working out truth and meaning not through argument, papers, and conferences, as in analytic philosophy, but through ritual, practice, and experience. […] The time to worry about a ritual order is not when it appears irrational, but when it is so costly (in monetary terms or in terms of suffering or human life) that its costs outweigh its benefits.” — Sarah Perry on Ribbonfarm
Don't ask us to give up pomp and circumstance; it plays a vital part in the pageant of life https://t.co/6P434jwXyt pic.twitter.com/50BP0yE0xN
— Sonya Mann (@sonyaellenmann) June 26, 2016
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