“I’m not sure what these pundits think a fascist assault on liberty looks like, but this is it: the occasional slow trickle, occasional bombardment blast, of outrageous proposals and policies meant to utterly shock a populace into submission. This is the calculation made by Trump’s team, but especially Steve Bannon: If they heave enough batshit concepts at us, eventually we’ll become numb to the horror. Any watered-down version of said policies will begin to look rational by comparison, and we will consent. Part of that paralysis looks like pundits saying, ‘Don’t focus on this one! This one is the distraction.’
No, it isn’t. Each monstrous statement is part of the same puzzle”
Nothing lasts forever. Not love, not peace, not joy. Every good thing ends.
I want to appreciate the good thing while it lasts.
Today and for the next 50 days, I will live in a country led by a man of grace and humor and compassion. A wise leader who is hard-working and honest, who embodies the highest ideals, whose presence in that role is a stunning proof of the possibility of national redemption.
This is my pledge to myself: I will do my best to live fully in those 50 days, not take them for granted, not taint them with fearful anticipation of what comes next.
Because every good thing ends. I don’t want to miss any of it while it’s here.
There are a lot of fake news sites on the internet. They make up fake stories that people will want to share and click on, then make money from advertising. They don’t care whether a story is true or not, and sometimes the lies they make up have serious consequences.
Given how many fake stories are around, it’s important to learn how to be skeptical of fake stories so you don’t get tricked.
One way to tell whether news is fake or real is to look at where it’s coming from. If you don’t know the source for something, try googling it before you share it. If you can’t find a source that looks credible, it’s likely made up.
Similarly, if you see a link to an article and you don’t recognize the domain name, it might be from a fake news website. Before you decide whether to believe the story or not, click through to the website and see what else is there. If the other things on the site look fake, the story you clicked is likely fake too.
(Some sites contain both real and fake news. But if a story *only* appears on a fake news website, it’s almost certainly fake. So if you can’t find the story anywhere else, err on the side of assuming it’s fake.)
There are a lot of different indications that a story is fake — I don’t know all of them, but I do know a good way to learn them:
If you read snopes.com and politifact.com regularly, it can help you to learn how to recognize fake stories and unfounded rumors. Those two sites examine a lot of rumors. Then they say which ones are true, which ones aren’t, which are partly true, and how they know. They also say which ones they’re not sure about, and why they’re not sure. They explain a lot about how rumors spread, and what the signs are that something is made up.
The more examples you’re familiar with, the harder it is to trick you into believing fake stories. Both because you won’t believe the stories that you already know are fake — and because seeing a lot of examples analyzed makes it easier to spot the signs of a made up story.
tl;dr Fake news is a big problem right now. One way to increase your immunity to fake news is to read snopes.com and politifact.com regularly. Scroll up for a couple more suggestions on how to detect fake news.
josh marshall wrote a piece back in july (I think?) observing that the dying off of people for whom mid-20th-century fascism was a living memory might be a factor in its re-emergence today. I think maybe those graphs reflect that.
I think I read that one, or at least the same idea. It makes sense; that’s the same logic behind people becoming anti-vaxxers because they can’t learn the horrible lessons of history without actually suffering them themselves. God I wish more people read books and serious articles.
Or on the more generous side, perhaps the problem is with the poll questions. Maybe millennials are more optimistic and desire something more socialist than our capitalist corporatist democracy.
Something I’m trying to understand better is the way each generation has to prove things to itself by direct experience. When I was younger it took the form of “fuck those older people have no idea what my life is like and should stop thinking they have any right to tell me what to do.” And then I got older, and became a parent, and got to experience that same conversation from the other side.
I think it’s a key variable in how human societies work, how much deference we pay to the experience of our elders and how those interactions play out. I suppose with the accelerating rate of technological and cultural change it’s rational to show less deference, because the older generation’s experience really is less relevant.
But there are some cycles we really should not be repeating, some experiments we shouldn’t be running. But… we’re running them anyway. I guess if I’m going to try to find a bright side, it might be that our descendants are going to have the benefit of some extremely vivid experimental results that will inform the rest of their lives.
Hey all my homies let’s do a little experiment, take this test and reblog with your score, age, and state/country in the tags. A passing score is 60% or 15/25 correct so let’s see who really has what it takes to be a citizen of the United States!
I’m from England and I literally could only answer a few of these
19/25, 24 from Scotland.
15/25, 22 from England
I’m from fucking America and I got 16 out of 25.
I got 10 out of 25 and i am an amercan
Huh, 19 out of 25, from Ireland.
WOO 25 OUT OF 25, I AM A TRUE COASTAL ELITE
even though i really wanted to answer #4 with this
25 out of 25!
(Considering I took AP US history in high school, I’d better have known the answers to these…) (Though that was 11 years ago. Fuck, now I feel old at 27.)
From Maine here.
23 out of 25
I took AP Us History Also.
Alabama
24 out of 25, but both an AP History student and a bit of a history nerd.
20/25, and totally Canadian.
22 out of 25. Considering I’m half asleep and took APUSH in the last century, that’s all right.
If you had told me a year ago that on this date I would be desperately hoping a long shot effort to elect Mitt Romney president would succeed, I would not have believed you. And yet here we are.
Please enjoy my third and final Poe Party Behind the Scenes vlog, taking you all the way from the week after we wrapped to just a couple weeks ago. This entire Poe Party experience has been a huge part of my life this year. Thank you all for being a part of it, every step of the way.
In the Netherlands, abortion is freely available on demand. Yet the Netherlands boasts the lowest abortion rate in the world, about 6 abortions per 1000 women per year, and the complication and death rates for abortion are miniscule. How do they do it? First of all, contraception is widely available and free — it’s covered by the national health insurance plan. Holland also carries out extensive public education on contraception, family planning, and sexuality. An ethic of personal responsibility for one’s sexual activity is strongly promoted. Of course, some people say that teaching kids about sex and contraception will only encourage them to have lots of sex. But Dutch teenagers tend to have less frequent sex, starting at an older age, than American teenagers, and the Dutch teenage pregnancy rate is 9 times lower than in the U.S.
I endorse evidence-based medicine, and evidence-based activism.
Off Marblehead [Q Class yachts, including Lively Lady, and possibly Falcon II, in foreground] Leslie Jones, August 1932 Boston Public Library, Print Department, Leslie Jones Collection Accession # 08_06_012837 (CC BY-NC-ND)
An unexpected highlight of Thanksgiving: one of those “I have a book to show you, book lady” conversations was an unexpected reveal.
Meet the subversive musings of Rebecca McCann and her Cheerful Cherub, as also noted by the Neglected Books Page, originally created for the Chicago Evening Post.
P.S. did cities really used to have nighttime papers and daytime papers? That’s so soft and romantic. I’m all nighttime paper all the way.
McCann created her comic strip in 1917 and her many interesting creative works were collected and published by her best friend, who detailed in the intros her friend’s boundless creativity and three marriages wedged in to her very short life–she died at 30.
