This is a passage from Will Storr's new book, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It (2022):
Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonising a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny. This might sound melodramatic, but we all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play: those cousins are built into our coding. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks. It seduces us with stories.
As Korean food continues to influence American dining, with Korean fried chicken and bibimbap appearing on all types of menus, a variation on that interplay is unfolding in the kitchens of chefs with backgrounds like Mrs. Hong — Korean adoptees who came to the United States in the 1970s and ’80s. These chefs are coming to terms with a heritage they didn’t grow up with. And they are enthusiastically expressing it through the very public, and sometimes precarious, act of cooking for others.
In the process, they’re finding fulfillment — and sometimes attracting criticism from other Korean Americans that their cooking isn’t Korean enough.
An estimated 200,000 Koreans have been adopted globally since 1953, roughly three-quarters of them by parents in the United States, said Eleana J. Kim, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging.”
Yes, let's keep dividing people against each other and publishing articles pretending that this finger-wagging attitude is worth discussing at the NYT (or anywhere). How about this alternative? We should honor people who cook well, regardless of their immutable characteristics or upbringing. How incredibly stupid and destructive have some of us become regarding this idea of cultural appropriation? Check out this article by Jonathan Turley: "White Owners Of Mexican Food Truck Shut Down After Being Accused of Cultural Appropriation." Here's an excerpt:
Kali Wilgus and Liz “LC” Connelly thought that they had realized their dream when they opened Kooks Burritos in Portland Oregon. They were even more excited when the local newspaper Williamette Week decided to do a feature article on their new business. The two women recounted how they watched Mexican women making tortillas on a trip to Baja California and adopted what they saw. That admission however led to furious accusations that the two white women were guilty of “cultural appropriation.” They eventually shutdown their food truck.
And, of course, let's keep dividing people into two--count'em--two "colors." After all, it has been such an incredibly successful strategy for the U.S. so far. If you think I'm exaggerating, take a look at the "anti-racist" teaching materials common in many of our schools. They are all over the internet, though most legacy media outlets won't give you links to these poisonous materials. Those who embrace these newish "anti-racist" teaching materials apparently forgot who Martin Luther King was.
As Matt Taibbi pointed out in his book, "Hate,Inc., "[W]hat most people think of as 'the news' is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business."
Firearm deaths include all deaths involving guns, such as homicide, suicide, and accidents. More people in the US die from suicide involving a firearm than homicides or accidents. There were a total of 45,222 firearm deaths in the US in 2020, an increase of 14% or 5,155 firearm deaths from 2019.
The resulting vomit of coarse and disrespectful language shocks even Buck Angel. Click the images if you are not easily offended by extremely crude language.
Gladwell’s point seems to be that if you ask police to stop millions of cars and pedestrians, and instruct them to look for pretexts to conduct searches of all of them, police will override their “default to truth” and begin to see threats in innocent people everywhere. He’s trying to be understanding about scenes like the Encinia video, by asking readers to look at the policy context underneath that car stop.
The backdrop of the Ferguson, Missouri case, for instance, involved the strained finances of the city. As the Justice Department later found, “City officials routinely urge [police] to generate more revenue through enforcement,” which meant busting people not just for breaking the law but violating municipal order codes...
Individual police got most of the blame, and in some cases deserved it, but it’s politicians desperate for revenue or lower crime numbers who artificially heighten stranger contacts, jack up numbers of bogus summonses and tickets, and push people like Brian Encinia to fudge pretexts for thousands if not millions of stops and searches.
A percentage of those encounters will always go wrong, and when they do, it’s not always all about racism. It’s usually also about political stupidity, greed, and laziness, and a host of other problems our habit of reaching for simplistic explanations prevents us from understanding. Saying it’s all about race or white supremacy isn’t just inaccurate, it lets bad actors off the hook — especially city politicians and their upscale yuppie donors who vote for these interventionist policies, and are all too happy to see badge-wearing social janitors from middle-class towns in Long Island or Westchester take the rap when things go bad.
Gladwell concludes that “Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers,” but I think that doesn’t put it strongly enough. Bland is what happens when police spend too much time talking to strangers, and when the rest of us talk too little about why that is.
Gladwell opens the above talk (regarding his book) with this:
I wanted to talk a little bit about it a paradox about human communication which i think is extremely important and relatively under-recognized and that is that everything that is good and meaningful and powerful about a human communication has a price as it turns out I think the price is worth paying but I think sometimes we overlook the consequences of the fact that there is this particular consequence to effective communication.
The problem at the heart of the two puzzles is that people assume that they can make sense of others based on relatively simple strategies. But when it comes to strangers, nothing is as simple as it seems.
There are three major strategies that people use to make sense of strangers:
People default to truth.
People assume transparency.
People neglect coupled behaviors.
These three strategies ultimately fail because they operate under the assumption that simple clues are enough evidence of a stranger’s internal thoughts or intentions. We will look at each of these strategies separately to see where they came from and why they often result in failed interactions with strangers.
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