Fascist propaganda led directly to modern advertising, and modern advertising has now led us right back to fascist propaganda, aided and abetted by people who saw the right to make a profit as more important than the social implications of their work.
I think this is the time to take more direct action, and to build institutions that don’t just speak truth to power, but put power behind the truth. Stories are how we learn, but our actions define us.
Source: Media for the people
In this essay I use identity-first language (‘disabled women’) instead of person-first language (‘women with disabilities’). Beyond the political and collective reasons for this choice (#SayTheWord), I don’t like the preposition ‘with’. Prepositions are for relationships; I am not in a relationship with disability.
āOne of the great perceived attractions to becoming involved in extremism is it presents a simple way of understanding a complicated worldā
Source: Faith Goldy, Torontoās White-Nationalist Poster Girl
MAGA is a rejection of the foregrounding of the complexity, nuance, and spectrums of humanity. It is a rejection of pluralism and democracy.
For those who are tired of complexity and debate and politics, there are autocrats ready to relieve them of the burden.
Carl Sagan on dystopia, fake news, and big tech:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children s or grandchildren s time ā when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and whatās true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darknessā¦
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
Via: Carl Sagan on Dystopia, Fake News & Big Tech ā OnMyOm: Omās Blog
Thereās a sort of instinct that comes about when the world was designed to kill you. It tells me when Iām up against someone who doesnāt believe I exist.
And whatās crucial is that dissent without disobedience had no value for the victim.
Dissent is not the same as disobedience, as a person may voice protest with an authority but still obey. People who are capable of dissent but incapable of disobedience are often uncomfortable challenging the very legitimacy of that authority to wield power. In contrast, genuine anti-authoritarians are comfortable with both dissent and disobedience when they deem authority to be illegitimate.
Dissent alone may be effective in a genuinely democratic society, but authoritariansābe they Milgramās experimenter authority or U.S. corporatist governmentāignore dissent. Authoritarians realize that simply ignoring dissent is often an effective way to marginalize it, even when that dissent comes from the majority of the people.
As I describe in Resisting Illegitimate Authority, within the human family there are anti-authoritarians-people comfortable resisting illegitimate authority; but at present, for reasons that I discuss, there are not enough of them.
Source: Vital Ignored Truths in Milgramās Obedience to Authority Studies
As I reported for Salon in May, research shows that the real trend is not in young white evangelicals who choose to stay in their churches but leave the Republican Party. Instead, the trend is young white evangelicals leaving the church altogether, and often leaving the GOP at the same time. Research shows a “backlash effect,” in which the more the religious right gets involved in politics, the more younger congregants are likely to throw in the towel and leave both the church and conservative politics behind.
Source: White evangelicals will never dump Trump ā but those who leave the churches will | Salon.com
The Constitution’s original three-fifths compromise was that, for the purpose of representation in the House of Representatives, slaves counted as three-fifths a person. The South obviously wanted it to count as five-fifths because that would give them even more representative power by people who weren’t allowed to vote and the northern states wanted it counted as zero-fifths. The compromise was that each slave counted as three-fifths of a person who couldn’t vote.
Prison gerrymandering is arguably worse because people in prison – like the slaves – can’t vote but they count as an entire person. So they have even more electoral weight with the same lack of voice. And I used a five-fifths compromise on purpose because there’s a clear racial component to this.
Source: What is prison gerrymandering and how does it impact elections? Criminologist John Pfaff explains
Much like the demise of the innovation on the web and within the blogosphere as the result of the commodification of social media by silo corporations like Facebook, Twitter, and others around 2006, the technology space in education has become too addicted to corporate products and services. Many of these services cover some broad functionality, but they have generally either slowed down or quit innovating, quit competing with each other, are often charging exorbitant prices, and frequently doing unethical things with the data they receive from their users. The major difference between the two spaces is that Big Social Media is doing it on a much bigger scale and making a lot more money and creating greater damage as a result.
Instead, let me make some recommendations to thought leaders in the space for more humanistic and holistic remedy. Follow the general philosophies and principles of the IndieWeb movement. Dump (or at least gradually move away from) your corporately built LMS and start building one of your own. Ideally, open source what you build so that others can improve it and build upon it. In the end, you, your classes, your departments, and your institutions will be all the stronger for it. You can have more direct control over your own data (and that of your students, which deserves to be treated more ethically). You can build smaller independent pieces that are interchangeable and inter-operable. The small pieces may also allow new unpredictable functionalities when put together. You can build to make better user interfaces, better functionality, and get what you’d like to have instead of just what you’re given.
the technology space in education has become too addicted to corporate products and services.
Indeed.
More on indie ed-tech:
Communication is oxygen: Collaborative Indie Ed-tech ā Ryan Boren
Psychological models of autism tend to work on the cognitive level of explanation, with some attempting to make links to biological and neurological data. In order to produce cognitive models, all of them rely on accounts of behaviour to make inferences from. A major criticism of these models, is that they are formed (with the exception of monotropism theory, see section 2.5) from a perspective of a cognitive psychology overly restricted by its total adherence to scientific method as the gold standard, which do not value the input of āautistic voicesā, or that of sociological viewpoints on autism. This has come about for a number of reasons, one of which being the splitting of levels of explanation into subject āsilosā (Arnold, 2010). Another was the triumphant victory that biomedical explanations earned at the expense of Bettleheimās theory of the ārefrigerator motherā. This victory would not just produce a rejection of this theory however, but it seems a total rejection of psycho-sociological reflection upon what it is to be autistic, a fatal flaw that only alienated the voices of autistic people further. The victory spared the mother, yet lay the blame at the neurology of the āautistic personā themselves, in the sense that there was something medically deficient about the āautistic personā, and if one could only find the site of the ālesionā one could find a ācureā (Happe, 1994a). Assumptions of what autism is are enshrined in the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV (1994) and ICD-10 (1992) and based upon interpretations of observed behavioural traits. All the psychological theories base their models within this criterion of behaviour led framework, although in the monotropism theory (see section 2.5), this is thankfully balanced by the accounts of lived experience of āautistic peopleā themselves, including one of the authors of the paper, Wendy Lawson.
The current psychological models seem somewhat inadequate at drawing the links between biology and behaviour, but even more so, between biology and the lived experience of autistic subjectivity, often attempting to obscure the āautistic voiceā or ignore it, in an attempt to reduce autistic behaviours to definable objective criteria. The theory of monotropism, is a welcome departure from this theoretical dominance however, largely basing its account in subjective accounts. In so doing, this theory is more applicable to the vast array of subjective differences experienced by autistic people, although perhaps not all. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have achieved the widespread recognition enjoyed by the other theories.
ā…right from the start, from the time someone came up with the word āautismā, the condition has been judged from the outside, by its appearances, and not from the inside according to how it is experienced.ā (Williams, 1996: 14).
Source: Ā So what exactly is autism?Ā
rnbn 