Comment by amidont: There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

for - flipping the institutional web - Tools for the Commons - to create regenerative institutions

• for: polycrisis - entrenched institutional bias, examples - entrenched institutional bias - bank macro economic policy - lobbyist

• paraphrase

  • James provides two examples of major institutional bias that has to be rapidly overcome if we are to stand a chance at facilitating rapid system change:
    • Bank of England controls macroeconomic policies that favour elites and not ordinary people and
      • these policies are beyond political contestation
    • In the normal political system, lobbyists through the revolving door between the top levels of the Civil Service and the corporate sector bias policies for elites and not ordinary citizens

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angie_Debo

• for: history - suburbs, GI Bill, racial discrimination, structural racism, institutional racism, racial discrimination
• paraphrase
  • The GI Bill institutionally and structurally discriminated against people of color and played a major role in how suburbs expansion was racially discriminatory against people of color

• for: collective interest,
• paraphrase
  • When the tribe is not a cohesive group but an assemblage of thousands or millions whose only commonality is the place they call home,
    • what exactly does the “collective interest” even mean?
  • By contrast, the interests of individuals and groups within the larger goup, such as
    • unlicensed gun owners,
    • protesters of various stripes, or
    • hate-mongers on social media
  • are pretty easy to delineate.
  • No surprise then that the dysfunctional courts often choose
    • personal interests over
    • an amorphous and undefinable “collective interest”.
• insight
  • reason why the judicial system often sides with a definitive, but often harmful group, over a vague but beneficial group
• quote
  • modernity has hollowed out the word "collective interest
• author
  • James Gien Wong
  • Stop Reset Go

• for: system change, institutional change, paradigm shift
• quote
  • "Human institutions are purely human creations.
  • Their only legitimate purpose is to serve the people on whom their existence ultimately depends.
  • If institutions fail to serve us, then it is our right to eliminate or transform them."
• Author
  • David Korten

• Critique
• I doubt that European culture invented institutional deception but through colonialism, they were certainly leading practitioners of it

—Ronald Reagan

The racist origins of Georgia’s runoff elections by Steven F. Lawson

Read Sat 2022-12-10 7:43 AM

There was a lot of talk about this run off, but this was the only article I saw referencing the historical political reasons why there was a runoff.

LA City Council members walk out as embattled colleague tries to return amid outrage over leaked audio<br /> by Lara Korte and Alexander Nieves<br /> 12/09/2022 04:18 PM EST

read on Fri 2022-12-09 5:16 PM

!- institutional scale transformation : relation to personal transformation - unless institutional transformation is accompanied by personal, individual transformation, it can be subverted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYycpKcUhc4

We need more social acceptability for neurodivergence in much the way we accept the use of eyeglasses without attaching a social stigma to it.

What ways is this like exacerbating the stigmas of racism and institutionalized racism? How can we break down these broader barriers without othering people?

How did we get to this point and how do we move away from it?

What does David Brady's research indicate about the other countries that makes them more resilient to poverty despite these problems?

Is it a feature of institutional racism that causes this problem?

https://www.aei.org/articles/what-malcolm-gladwell-gets-wrong-about-poverty/

What creates "strong families"? It's definitely more than a two-parent household. Economic and social support are highly helpful as well as a myriad of other factors.

Watch the potential for subtle right leaning bias here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute#Political_stance_and_impact

As he rightly says they "might be", but where are his small scale experiments providing any support for these claims??

School-choice is lovely in major cities that might provide it, though often it's a socio-economic ghetto creator moving privileged white children from their dark skinned neighbors. Why not force better public education and funding by rolling back the strangle hold on economic spending going back to Regan? School-choice is nice, but it continually feels more like a dog whistle for institutional and structural racism.

And don't forget that for the smaller communities that only have one school option things are even much more dire.

https://www.pasadenanow.com/main/school-superintendent-deeply-concerned-over-treatment-of-school-janitor-by-pasadena-police-calls-for-investigation

Modeling annotation and note taking can allow students to see that their voices matter in conversation with the "greats" of knowledge. We can and should question authority. Even if one's internal voice questions as one reads, that might be enough, but modeling active reading and note taking can better underline and empower these modes of thought.

There are certainly currents within American culture that we can and should question authority.

Sadly some parts of conservative American culture are reverting back to paternalized power structures of "do as I say and not as I do" which leads to hypocrisy and erosion of society.

Education can be used as a means of overcoming this, though it requires preventing the conservative right from eroding this away from the inside by removing books and certain thought from the education process that prevents this. Extreme examples of this are Warren Jeff's control of religion, education, and social life within his Mormon sect.

Link to: - Lawrence Principe examples of the power establishment in Western classical education being questioned. Aristotle wasn't always right. The entire history of Western science is about questioning the status quo. (How can we center this practice not only in science, but within the humanities?)

My evolving definition of active reading now explicitly includes the ideas of annotating the text, having a direct written conversation with it, questioning it, and expanding upon it. I'm not sure I may have included some or all of these in it before. This is what "reading with a pen in hand" (or digital annotation tool) should entail. What other pieces am I missing here which might also be included?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1524098806345830407.html

https://alex-hanna.medium.com/on-racialized-tech-organizations-and-complaint-a-goodbye-to-google-43fd8045991d

As ever, we need to do more listening. And reading, there's lots of interesting references in here to read.

Understanding the history of inequality and how changes in institutional structures in legal, social, fiscal educational, and electoral systems have encouraged change toward equality, we might continue to change and modify these to ensure even greater equality.

1. For more on Francis T. King’s influence at Guilford College, see Damon D. Hickey, “Pioneers of the New South: The Baltimore Association and North Carolina Friends in Reconstruction,” Quaker History 74, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 1-17.

Francis King was a Quaker and a business associate to Johns Hopkins and personally chosen by Hopkins to serve as a founding trustee of the university.

King headed headed the Baltimore Association to Advise and Assist Friends in the Southern States. He influenced Guilford College to name a building there Archdale Hall after John Archdale, a 17th century colonial governor of the Carolinas and a Quaker who oversaw the enactment of their early and exceedingly harsh slave codes.

Note here the presumed freedom to pick and choose based on interest and judgement. Who's judgement really? Book banning and religious battles would call to question which people got to exercise their own judgement.

It looks like Ronald Reagan had issues with mental health care even as far back as the 1970s. This incident at UCLA was just a precursor to defunding state mental health care that was already apparently having issues at the time.

The idea that refinement is a social process is a powerful one, but it is limited by the society's power structures, scale, and access to the original material and least powerful person's ability to help refine it.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universities-say-they-want-more-diverse-faculties-so-why-is-academia-still-so-white/

Some good examples of senior and well-known people who have failed to get tenure, largely because of race.

Examples of how the system is set up to exclude diversity in terms of how the game is played.

Boundary work is the practice of a group that sets the rules to determine who is and isn't good enough to join the group.

Link to Groucho Marx quote, "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."

Michaud, M., & Center, U. of R. M. (n.d.). Trust in science at root of vaccine acceptance. Retrieved February 8, 2022, from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-science-root-vaccine.html

This deserves to be delved into more deeply. This sounds like a bizarre stop on the creation of institutional racism.

How do these sorts of abstraction hurt the move towards equality?

Many products, including technology and social media products, can have a multitude of uses including unintended off-label uses. This can lead to harmful and deleterious effects on large groups of people.

On the other hand, some users may also see great benefits from off-label use cases. As an example, despite it being a vector for attacks and abuse, some marginalized groups have benefited from social media through increased visibility, the ability to create community, and expand their digital access.

As a result it's important to look at how a product is being used in the marketplace and change or modify it or create similar but different products to amplify the good and mitigate the bad.

How do we go from such varied statements from Jesuits which entered the popular discourse to the complete erasure of this knowledge in subsequent generations. Was the greed for land and power so great?

Norman Mailer

Pickles, K., Copp, T., Dodd, R. H., Cvejic, E., Seale, H., Steffens, M. S., Meyerowitz-Katz, G., Bonner, C., & McCaffery, K. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine intentions in Australia. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 21(12), 1627–1628. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00686-1

Is it simply the stratification of power and roles that is causing these problems? Is it that some of this has changed and that communication between people of different power levels is the difficulty in these cases?

I have noticed a movement in pedagogy spaces that puts the teacher as a participant rather than as a leader thus erasing the power structures that previously existed. This exists within Cathy Davidson's The New Education where teachers indicate that they're learning as much as their students.

While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.

These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.

If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.

Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.

Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?

Even in cases where one apologizes for offences which don't break existing rules and the apology is accepted by the transgressed, the social ostracism doesn't end. This is a part of the indeterminate length of the social sentences that transgressors suffer.

What exactly are these unwritten rules? In some cases they may be examples of institutional power wielding influence in cases where people aren't giving the full benefit of humanity and consideration to others. Some may call some of these instances microaggressions or social constructs similar to them.

There is a growing number of cases in which people are having their lives being completely upended because they are being deprived of due process.

In some cases, it may actually be beneficial as people may have been abusing their positions of privilege and the traditional system wouldn't have prosecuted or penalized them at all. In these cases the dismantling of institutional power is good. However, how many of them aren't related to this? How many are being decimated without serving this function?

Great quote by itself.

How useful is the statute of limitations in cases like slavery in America? It goes against a broader law of humanity, but by pretending there was a statue of limitations for going against it, we have only helped to institutionalize racism in American society. The massive lack of a level playing field makes it all the harder for the marginalized to have the same freedoms as everyone else.

Perhaps this is why the idea of reparations is so powerful for so many. It removes the statue of limitations and may make it possible to allow us to actually level the playing field.

Related:

Luke 12:48 states, "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." Is this simply a statement for justifying greater taxes for the massively wealth?

Definitely unfortunate for Laura Kipnis (to me on the surface), but are these growing cases helping to deconstruct some of the unfair power structures which we've institutionalized over time? Dismantling them is certainly worthwhile, but the question is are the correct institutions and people paying the price and doing the work? In Kipnis's case, she probably isn't the right person to be paying the price, but rather the institution itself.

Another example of this is that of Donald McNeil in the paragraph above (in the related article).

Context: Sonia was watching Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath: Season 3: "Episode 1" and had previously been watching a documentary One of Us about people who had left oppressive seeming Hassidic Jewish communities.

I can't help but that that every culture could be considered a "cult" in which some percentage of people are trapped with comparison to all other cultures on Earth. Based on one's upbringing and personal compass, perhaps living and submitting to one's culture can become oppressive and may seem particularly unfair given power structures and the insidiousness of hypocrisy.

Given this, could there logically be a utopian society in which everyone lives freely?

Even within the United States there are smaller sub-cultures withiin which people feel trapped and which have the features of cults, but which are so large as to not be considered such. Even the space in which I freely live might be considered a cult by others who don't agree with it. It's only the vast size of the power of the group which prevents the majority who comfortably live within it from viewing it as a bad thing.

A Democrat may view the Republican Party as a cult and vice versa, something which becomes more apparent when one polarizes these communities toward the edges rather than allowing them to drift into each other in a consensus.

An African American may think they're stuck in a broader American cult which marginalizes them.

A Hassidic Jew may feel they're stuck in a cult (of religious restrictions) with respect to the perceived freedoms of broader American Culture. Some may feel more comfortable within these strictures than others.

A gender non-comforming person living in the deep South of the United States surrounded by the Southern Baptist Convention may feel they're stuck in a cult based on social norms of one culture versus what they experience personally.

What are the roots of something being a cult? Could it be hypocrisy? A person or a broader group feeling as if they know "best" and creating a rule structure by which others are forced to follow, but from which they themselves are exempt? This also seems to be the way in which authoritarian rules arise when privileging one group above another based solely on (perceived) power.

Another potential thing at play here may be the lack of diversity within a community. The level of cult within a society may be related to the shape of the bell curve of that society with respect to how large the center is with respect to the tails. Those who are most likely to feel they're within a "cult" (using the broader definition) are those three or more standard deviations from the center. In non-diverse communities only those within a standard deviation of the norm are likely to feel comfortable and accepted and those two deviations away will feel very uncomfortable while those who are farther away will be shunned and pushed beyond the pale.

How can we help create more diverse and broadly accepting communities? We're all just people, aren't we? How can we design communities and governments to be accepting of even the most marginalized? In a heavily connected world, even the oddball teenager in a small community can now manage to find their own sub-community using the internet. (Even child pornographers manage to find their community online.)

The opposite of this is at what point do we circumscribe the norms of the community? Take the idea of "Your freedom to strike me ends at my nose." Perhaps we only shun those extreme instances like murder and pornography, and other actions which take extreme advantage of others' freedoms? [This needs to be heavily expanded and contemplated...] What about the over-financialization of the economy which takes advantage of the unprivileged who don't know that system and are uncapable of the mathematics and computation to succeed. Similarly hucksters and snake oil salesmen who take advantage of their targets' weaknesses and lack of knowledge and sophistication. Or the unregulated vitamin industry taking rents from millions for their superstitions? How do we regulate these to allow "cultural freedom" or "religious freedom" without them taking mass-scale advantage of their targets? (Or are some of these acculturated examples simply inequalities institutionally built into societies and cultures as a means of extracting power and rents from the larger system by those in power?)

Compare with Hester Prynne and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Is Facebook ‘Killing Us’? A new study investigates. (n.d.). Retrieved October 25, 2021, from https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2021/07/is-facebook-killing-us-a-new-study-investigates/

Legalized terrorism written into the Virginia slave code in the 1700s.

In the late 1660's laws began to be passed which institutionalized racism and further increased the split between otherwise equal white and colored friends by increasing punishment toward whites working in concert with people of color.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_group_paradigm

Worth looking up the relationship of this to the creation of institutional racism and potential means of dismantling it.

Kevin Marks talks about the bridging of new people into one's in-group by Twitter's retweet functionality from a positive perspective.

He doesn't foresee the deleterious effects of algorithms for engagement doing just the opposite of increasing the volume of noise based on one's in-group hating and interacting with "bad" content in the other direction. Some of these effects may also be bad from a slow brainwashing perspective if not protected for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXYQqDs2Shs

The Attack on "Critical Race Theory": What's Going on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P35YrabkpGk

Lately, a lot of people have been very upset about “critical race theory.” Back in September 2020, the former president directed federal agencies to cut funding for training programs that refer to “white privilege” or “critical race theory, declaring such programs “un-American propaganda” and “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.” In the last few months, at least eight states have passed legislation banning the teaching of CRT in schools and some 20 more have similar bills in the pipeline or plans to introduce them. What’s going on?

Join us for a conversation that situates the current battle about “critical race theory” in the context of a much longer war over the relationship between our racial present and racial past, and the role of culture, institutions, laws, policies and “systems” in shaping both. As members of families and communities, as adults in the lives of the children who will have to live with the consequences of these struggles, how do we understand what's at stake and how we can usefully weigh in?

Hosts: Melissa Giraud & Andrew Grant-Thomas

Guests: Shee Covarrubias, Kerry-Ann Escayg,

Some core ideas of critical race theory:

• racial realism
  • racism is normal
• interest convergence
  • racial equity only occurs when white self interest is being considered (Brown v. Board of Education as an example to portray US in a better light with respect to the Cold War)
• Whiteness as property
  • Cheryl Harris' work
  • White people have privilege in the law
  • myth of meritocracy
• Intersectionality

People would rather be spoon fed rather than do the work themselves. Sadly this is being encouraged in the media.

Short summary of CRT: How laws have been written to institutionalize racism.

Culturally Responsive Teaching (also has the initials CRT).

KAE tries to use an anti-racist critical pedagogy in her teaching.

SC: Story about a book Something Happened in Our Town (book).

• Law enforcement got upset and the school district
• Response video of threat, intimidation, emotional blackmail by local sheriff's department.
• Intent versus impact - the superintendent may not have had a bad intent when providing an apology, but the impact was painful

It's not really a battle about or against CRT, it's an attempt to further whitewash American history. (synopsis of SC)

What are you afraid of?

Quintana, F.-J., & Uriburu, J. (2020). Modest International Law: COVID-19, International Legal Responses, and Depoliticization (SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 3659460). Social Science Research Network. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3659460

Vinck, P., Pham, P. N., Bindu, K. K., Bedford, J., & Nilles, E. J. (2019). Institutional trust and misinformation in the response to the 2018–19 Ebola outbreak in North Kivu, DR Congo: A population-based survey. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 19(5), 529–536. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(19)30063-5

Jamison, A. M., Quinn, S. C., & Freimuth, V. S. (2019). “You don’t trust a government vaccine”: Narratives of Institutional Trust and Influenza Vaccination among African American and White Adults. Social Science & Medicine (1982), 221, 87–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.12.020

The difference behind a pragmatic and dogmatic free market - in a pragmatic market - the hand behind the invisible hand is visible, whereas in a dogmatic market - the hand behind the invisible hand is also invisible.

It shouldn't escape one's attention that this story itself is focused on a white victim and her (likely less-than-marginalized) white son.

This philosophy also overlaps some of the resurgence of white nationalism and structural racism in the early 1900's which also tended to disadvantage people of color. ie, we can blame the coloreds because it's not structural inequality, but the failure of the individual (and the race.)

Jinjarak, Y., Ahmed, R., Nair-Desai, S., Xin, W., & Aizenman, J. (2020). Accounting for Global COVID-19 Diffusion Patterns, January-April 2020 (Working Paper No. 27185; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27185

Public Attention and Policy Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic. COVID-19 and the Labor Market. (n.d.). IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. Retrieved July 31, 2020, from https://covid-19.iza.org/publications/dp13427/

Cruz, C. J. P., Ganly, R., Li, Z., & Gietel-Basten, S. (2020). Imported cases, community action, policy and institutional systems drive Hong Kong’s COVID-19 experience [Preprint]. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/5zuv7

Goldman, P. S., Ijzendoorn, M. H. van, Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S., Goldman, P. S., Ijzendoorn, M. H. van, Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Bradford, B., Christopoulos, A., Cuthbert, C., Duchinsky, R., Fox, N. A., Grigoras, S., Gunnar, M. R., Ibrahim, R. W., Johnson, D., Kusumaningrum, S., Ken, P. L. A., Mwangangi, F. M., Nelson, C. A., … Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S. (2020). The implications of COVID-19 for the care of children living in residential institutions. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(20)30130-9

trading algorithms

This was an excellent article Chen (2007) in defining and laying out how a blended learning approach of objectivist and constructivist instructional strategies work well in online instruction and the use of an actual online course as a study example.

RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

This article explores the interaction of student based learner-centered used of technology tools such as wikis, blogs and podcasts as new and emerging technology tools. With distance learning programs becoming more and more popular, software applications such as Writeboard, InstaCol and Imeem may become less of the software of choice. The article looks closely at the influence of technology and outcomes.

RATING: 4/5 (rating based upon a score system 1 to 5, 1= lowest 5=highest in terms of content, veracity, easiness of use etc.)

Federalism has the capability of being both bad and good. It just depends who you ask. On one side the advantages of fedaralism is it creates more effectiveness and makes the government stable. On the other hand federalism is risky it gets expensive, lead to a complex tax system and is slow in responses to crisis.

Distinguish the institution's culpability in colonialism and cultural appropriation, versus the individual's desire to share ideas, knowledge, and history--including (assumed) the critique of colonializing practices of the institutions.

There is, truly, so much potential in these tools and approaches toward asynchronous, distributed reading and writing. One question I have, already, is how such distributed forms of production-consumption further dissolve notions of textuality and authorship so entrenched within traditional notions and practices of scholarship and empirical research. The flattened hierarchies, especially, threaten the institutionalized power structures which have tightly controlled the design, review, and dissemination of scholarship and research.

Not necessarily. For many institutions, as long as one of the researchers is affiliated, the data can be deposited