- Research says there are ways to reduce racial bias. Calling people racist isn’t one of them. (Vox)
- White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo [PDF]
- Why Can't Liberals Talk to Conservatives? or What's really the Matter with Kansas? by Robert D Feinman
- Moral Politics How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff
- Conservatives vs. liberals: Debating a liberal is maddening: They think conservatives are evil, while we think they're silly. By Charlotte Allen
- How to Talk Like a Conservative (If You Must): The left's linguistics guru says liberals have to watch their language. By Dave Gilson
- Psychologists Are Learning How to Convince Conservatives to Take Climate Change Seriously By Jesse Singal
- The Secret to Making Conservatives Care About Climate Change (Take Part)
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Tribalism & Communication articles
Other than the books listed in the post below, I'm going to use this post to collect the articles I find on the subject of Tribalism & Communication.
Political Tribalism, understanding & communication
I've been cruisin' through Goodreads today, trying to find everything I could on the topic of Political/Moral Tribalism & how we can better understand each other & communicate across the divides.
The best way I could figure out how to share the books without taking a zillion hours formatting a blog post, is making a Tribalism & Communication Goodreads Shelf & popping the widget in here.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions, or if you've already read any of these!
The best way I could figure out how to share the books without taking a zillion hours formatting a blog post, is making a Tribalism & Communication Goodreads Shelf & popping the widget in here.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions, or if you've already read any of these!
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Election Day Podcasts!
I'm a New Books Network podcast junkie, and I was attempting to link to some relevant-to-election-day author interviews over on FB, but there were just far too many.! So, movin' it over to blog format. This is just a quick list I have made on my lunch break, looking through the first 20 pages of the New Books in Political Science page, so this is certainly not any sort of comprehensive list!
- The Rise of Trump: America's Authoritarian Spring
- Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona, and Policies of a New American Dynasty
- Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal
- Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls are Born to Lead
- The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency
- Counting Women's Ballots: Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal
- Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior
- Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency
- Racial Realignment: The Transformation of American Liberalism, 1932-1965
- Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority
- From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
- Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America
- Right Moves: The Conservative American Think Tank in Political Culture since 1945
- The Inevitable Party: Why Attempts to Kill the Party System Fail and How they Weaken Democracy
- Insecure Majorities: Congress and the Perpetual Campaign
- Independent Politics: How American Disdain for Parties Leads to Political Inaction
- Too Dumb Too Fail: How the GOP Betrayed the Reagan Revolution to Win Elections
- Why Washington Won't Work: Polarization, Political Trust, and the Governing Crisis
- Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy
- Fed Power: How Finance Wins
- Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections
- Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy
- Welfare for the Wealthy: Parties, Social Spending, and Inequality in the United States
- Campaign Finance and Political Polarization: When Purists Prevail
- Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism
- The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy
- The Deregulatory Moment?: A Comparative Perspective on Changing Campaign Finance Laws
- 150 Years of ObamaCare
- Rethinking the Administrative Presidency: Trust, Intellectual Capital, and Appointee-Careerist Relations in the George W. Bush Administration
- The Democracy Promotion Paradox
- Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World
- Political Advertising in the United States
- American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction
- Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World
- Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics
Thursday, November 3, 2016
Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - THE)
Saw this post over on #AcWriMo today, and I feel like it justifies my focus on blogging on academic topics (none are posted yet, still working on them!) this November. I know I'm not ready to write anything formal yet, but I know that making a habit of consistently writing and blogging will help immensely. Especially with brevity and clarity! And, you know, actually sitting down and doing the writing itself. All things I very much need to work on!
Seven reasons why blogging can make you a better academic writer (pat thomson - Times Higher Education)
Lucretia Mott and I agree: Humans cannot be owned.
I have always been deeply uncomfortable with the discussion of slavery, and how every person and scholar still use the labels 'slave' and 'owner.' It's strange to me that even the most anti-slavery/anti-racists of scholars (that I've been exposed to) still use these terms. Because, to me, just because someone says that they 'own' another person, doesn't mean it's true. You can't 'own' a person.
(Although, I acknowledge the fact that this is semantics, and if you say you own someone, and, through threats of violence, you do control that person, then it does seem that you do, in fact, own them, at least in the very practical sense of the word.)
I've never really articulated this uneasiness before, and I didn't have any preferred alternative terms (as I hadn't really tried to figure any out). But, this morning on my drive to work, I was listening to a New Books Network podcast (as I do on most of my commutes)- Lillian Barger interviewing Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University on her book Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) (And which I really want to read). In it, Faulkner was talking about how Mott was a passionate and a very active abolitionist, and was extremely rigid in her beliefs, even when that resulted in some pretty cold attitudes/actions.
Like me, Mott, too, did not believe that people could be owned. To that end, she refused to participate in the buying and freeing of slaves (which many abolitionists of her day did), even opposing the purchasing and freeing of Frederick Douglas (!!!), because she believed that, in participating in the purchasing of people, even to free them, meant participating in the idea that it was even possible to own a human, which she straight up disagreed with utterly and totally. Faulkner even said that when a former slave showed up at a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, asking for funds to purchase his son, she told him no, and discouraged others from contributing. She believed that those who were enslaved, should escape. They did not need to purchase their freedom, because they are human beings, not objects. Not property.
Now, I certainly would have given every cent I had to the man asking to buy/free his child (unless I was in a position to help him escape otherwise), but at the same time, I do understand, and mostly respect where she is coming from. She is more rigid than I am, or would have been (though I would have been extremely active in helping escaped slaves more than supporting the idea of buying freedoms), but I think that was the first time, strangely, that I heard someone else say, essentially "The institution of slavery? F#*k that. They are people being held prisoners by captors, and we should help them escape, and ban the practice of capturing people and controlling them with violence. They are not property or ownable just because money is exchanged in the trading of these captured bodies." Those are my words, formed while listening to this interview, but very well illustrative of both my and Lucretia Mott's stance, I think.
It's so strange to think that I can't remember coming across this specific idea/stance before. I am quite active in both anti-racist and history circles, and slavery and the abhorrent wrongness is something I hear talk about constantly.. but sometimes things are just said in a slightly different way that leads to that lightbulb moment.
So, this is my declaration of semantic change: I'm going to try to no longer use the terms 'slave' or 'owners' whenever possible, but switch them out for, I think, 'captives'-- maybe prisoners? But that seems to implicate possible wrongdoing on their part, and they aren't quite prisoners of 'war'. Prisoners of capitalism? Prisoners of greed? Hmm. Maybe I'll stick with captives for now. And I will call a spade a spade and those that called themselves slave-owners, are 'captors'. I wish that word had more of a connotation with violence, but it's the best word I know of now.
I don't know much about linguistics/psychology, but there must be the idea that how you talk about things matter, and 'slavery' and 'slave-owners' are such common terms, that they almost.. reinforce the legitimacy of the institution, even when speaking against it.
So, these are my thoughts from this mornings commute. If anyone knows of anyone else who has written or spoken on these ideas, please let me know in the comments! I know I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way, and I'd love to find out what sort of language others have used to talk about this.
(Although, I acknowledge the fact that this is semantics, and if you say you own someone, and, through threats of violence, you do control that person, then it does seem that you do, in fact, own them, at least in the very practical sense of the word.)
I've never really articulated this uneasiness before, and I didn't have any preferred alternative terms (as I hadn't really tried to figure any out). But, this morning on my drive to work, I was listening to a New Books Network podcast (as I do on most of my commutes)- Lillian Barger interviewing Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University on her book Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) (And which I really want to read). In it, Faulkner was talking about how Mott was a passionate and a very active abolitionist, and was extremely rigid in her beliefs, even when that resulted in some pretty cold attitudes/actions.
Like me, Mott, too, did not believe that people could be owned. To that end, she refused to participate in the buying and freeing of slaves (which many abolitionists of her day did), even opposing the purchasing and freeing of Frederick Douglas (!!!), because she believed that, in participating in the purchasing of people, even to free them, meant participating in the idea that it was even possible to own a human, which she straight up disagreed with utterly and totally. Faulkner even said that when a former slave showed up at a meeting of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, asking for funds to purchase his son, she told him no, and discouraged others from contributing. She believed that those who were enslaved, should escape. They did not need to purchase their freedom, because they are human beings, not objects. Not property.
Now, I certainly would have given every cent I had to the man asking to buy/free his child (unless I was in a position to help him escape otherwise), but at the same time, I do understand, and mostly respect where she is coming from. She is more rigid than I am, or would have been (though I would have been extremely active in helping escaped slaves more than supporting the idea of buying freedoms), but I think that was the first time, strangely, that I heard someone else say, essentially "The institution of slavery? F#*k that. They are people being held prisoners by captors, and we should help them escape, and ban the practice of capturing people and controlling them with violence. They are not property or ownable just because money is exchanged in the trading of these captured bodies." Those are my words, formed while listening to this interview, but very well illustrative of both my and Lucretia Mott's stance, I think.
It's so strange to think that I can't remember coming across this specific idea/stance before. I am quite active in both anti-racist and history circles, and slavery and the abhorrent wrongness is something I hear talk about constantly.. but sometimes things are just said in a slightly different way that leads to that lightbulb moment.
So, this is my declaration of semantic change: I'm going to try to no longer use the terms 'slave' or 'owners' whenever possible, but switch them out for, I think, 'captives'-- maybe prisoners? But that seems to implicate possible wrongdoing on their part, and they aren't quite prisoners of 'war'. Prisoners of capitalism? Prisoners of greed? Hmm. Maybe I'll stick with captives for now. And I will call a spade a spade and those that called themselves slave-owners, are 'captors'. I wish that word had more of a connotation with violence, but it's the best word I know of now.
I don't know much about linguistics/psychology, but there must be the idea that how you talk about things matter, and 'slavery' and 'slave-owners' are such common terms, that they almost.. reinforce the legitimacy of the institution, even when speaking against it.
So, these are my thoughts from this mornings commute. If anyone knows of anyone else who has written or spoken on these ideas, please let me know in the comments! I know I'm certainly not the only person who feels this way, and I'd love to find out what sort of language others have used to talk about this.
Wednesday, November 2, 2016
New layout!
After fighting with blogger all day yesterday, trying to just get the template page to load so I could upload a new template, I finally figured it out & fixed it. So, new layout! Huzzah!
Buuuut, this is the free version of this layout, and it seems like I can't really adjust much of anything unless I go into the code, and I have, but I can't seem to figure it out. :\ So... this is a temporary layout, or state-of-the-layout, for now. But, it's still an improvement.
Now I need to make a header, figure out how to make the top bar less ugly, and to stop the ugly no-picture-available picture from always showing up. Hmm...
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