Author: Christopher Parsons

Content moderation is something that is fraught with challenges; is too much speech being blocked as a result? Too little bad speech that harms others being permitted? Does moderation enable political actors to distort the public sphere? Enable corporations to advance their interests at the expense of competitors and innovators?

These are all important elements of the ‘content moderation’ debate. But it’s not what has me thinking about moderation at the moment. Instead, it was a more localized environment — a conference setting — that left me with a bad taste in my mouth because of how things were not moderated. Specifically, in a situation where there were only men on a panel addressing threats to electoral processes, another older white man asked how society should deal with cases where women accuse politicians of sexual impropriety, abuse, or other misdeeds: how do we deal with such threats to the political process that run the risk of undermining white men’s abilities to run for office?

The panelists muddled through the question/statement and noted how these disruptions could be challenging for electoral processes. None asserted, as panelists, that women do not tend to allege such activities unless they genuinely happened; women know the costs of making even the most absolutely best-founded allegation, insofar as society will demonize the accuser and tend to shield or defend whomever is accused. Moreover, while an accuser may suffer for the rest of their life for raising the allegations — they may be less likely to be employed, as an example — the accused tends to be fine: they can re-enter society after a minimal ‘cooling off’ period and shrug off the allegation or accusation.

So I was annoyed by the panelists and their decision(s) to not engage with the question head on. But I was most upset that the moderator for the panel didn’t just slap down the ‘question’ and move on: the very fact that the question was upheld as legitimate by the moderator showcased the structural problem that continues to face women who merely want to declare that given persons are, or have been, dangerous. Moderation at the global scale carries with it a unique set of challenges — noted in the opening paragraph — whereas in more localized settings those challenges are remarkably less problematic. It was deeply disappointing that in such a localized setting male white privilege was permitted to reign supreme, with no moderation, though it did affirm to me — and made much clearer — that panel moderators and panelists themselves need to be more affirmative in not accepting the premise of the question in the first place.

And, failing a willingness to stand up and push back against questions that raise doubt about women’s experiences, how people react to such questions at least indicate which men are not committed to equity in a meaningful sense and, as such, are not persons who strike me as suitable to collaborate with on current projects. I just don’t think that I could, or would want to, work with someone who carries a latent suspicion of women either consciously or unconsciously.¹ That’s a value-set that I cannot appreciate or understand, and think is fundamentally the latent set of values that had led to the passive approval of individuals and political parties which are substantially committed to the supremacy of (white) men over all other persons in the political commons. And that’s a kind of value-set that needs to be stamped out and have a stake driven through its ideological heart.

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Inspiring Quotation of the Week

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

– Fredrick Douglass

Piece of Poetry

Love after love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

– Derek Walcott

Great Photography Shots

Grey Chow’s astrophotgraphy is absolutely stunning; looking at it, it makes clear that the universe is so much larger than we imagine and surrounds us, though often in ways in which our sense of time prevents us from immediately perceiving.

Music I’m Digging

• Tom Misch – Reverie (EP) // Misch has a kind of jazzy album which I’m enjoying listening to when I’m cooking or reading, or just generally want to generate a downtempo mood in my home. It’s not the most magical of sounds but it is pleasant to have playing in my backgrounds.
• Logic’s Bobby Tarantino, Bobby Tarantino II, and YSIV // Logic is a rapper who came from Maryland and, for his first few years, thrived principally on mixtapes. The character/play of the Bobby Tarantino series showcases both a kind of nihilism in the lyrics as well as solid rhythms and poetic inflections, and strong homages to the classic eras of west coast wrap. YSIV has a series of tracks that I’m absolutely captured by: Wu Tang Forever is one of the best Wu Tang songs from the past decade or so, 100 Miles and Running speaks to the challenges and triumphs that come with success, and the final track on the album — Last Call — is a really beautiful story of his life and what he went through to become where he is now. I’ve been listening to logic on near-constant replay for a week and I’m still just picking out more depth and appreciation for the work he’s doing.
• Abir – Mint (EP) // I’ve been listening to Abir’s 2017 album over a series of playlists for over a year, but it just never struck me that it was part of the same album. That’s not because it lacks cohesion — it does! — and more that I just hadn’t paid sufficient attention to link everything together. The album significantly speaks to being alone, or single, and surviving in the world. Survival, I think, is probably the right word: Tango, Young & Rude, and Finest Hour all speak to the challenges that can arise especially following challenging relationships, or even preceding new ones. The album, on the whole, feels cohesive and as though it could also be merged with a larger series of works to create a narrative arc of relationships through a full album.

Neat Podcast Episodes

• Modern Love – I Was Hardly the Perfect Fit // This podcast, about a distant father trying to connect with his son who lived with his ex-wife, resonated with me; though the relationship that I had with my own father was notably different, elements of the story sounded similar to the relationship that I had with my own dad. The ending — where the strength of their present relationship was revealed — was painful: it was exactly the kind of relationship I’d have dreamed to one day built with my own father.
• Lawfare – Jim Baker on AI and Counterintelligence // Jim has a good, broad, assessment of the counterintelligence challenges associated with AI technologies. He isn’t a technologist so the assessment of AI is pretty high level/superficial at the technical level, but the analysis of ways that foreign state actors might interfere with or compromise the development of domestic (USA in this case) AI systems, algorithms, and technologies is relatively comprehensive. It’s a useful listen if you want a good and fast intro to some of the challenges in this space.

Good Reads for the Week

• Four Hundred And Eighty Two (On Vulnerability // I found this transcription of David Whyte to be beautiful and powerful; the thrust is to unpack what is vulnerability and why it’s not something to run from but to embrace. Fundamentally our relationships, at their core, are best when they involve committing to vulnerability to one another. The pursuit of vulnerable relationships is the pursuit of relationships that matter the most, and resonate the most, throughout the course of our lives.
• How to get that great “hoppy” beer taste without the exploding bottles // Jennifer Ouellette has a cool story of how Brewer-scientists figured out how dry hopping beer leads to refermentation and, by extension, increases to pressure in cans and bottles. Specifically, brewers can add hops after the heated fermentation process to impart flavours but without significantly contributing to the bitterness that is often associated with hops when they are heated. The culprit to the refermentation was found and that may mean there are fewer exploding dry hopped beers on shelves and homes as brewers take the results to heart.
• Why Public Transportation Works Better Outside the U.S. // While I may disagree with some of the cheery assessment of Toronto’s transit infrastructure, English’s article nicely summarized the core differences between transit systems in the United States and other jurisdictions around the world. Key is that investment never has stopped in other jurisdictions and urban planners have built transit with the idea of people and businesses then coming to encircle the transit hubs, as opposed to trying to build hubs into existing urban infrastructure.
• Senate Truce Collapses as G.O.P. Rush to Confirm More Judges Begins Anew // The norms of governance continue to be challenged by the GOP while they seek to transform the quality and types of justice that will likely be meted out in the coming decades. The systematic stacking of the judiciary with Republicans will mean that even should Democrats manage to disrupt and undue the GOP’s gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts, that any legislation they pass will likely undergo undue scrutiny and hostility from an increasingly politicized judicial branch of government.
• Eight Stories of Men’s Regret // This set of eight stories demonstrate different levels of sexual aggressiveness or assault or inappropriate behaviour. They’re not the sole worst kinds of stories that exist but, in a way, that’s what makes them most significant: they are public revelations of the misdeeds of men that reflect their failures and, in some cases, the social pressures that led to their misdeeds. Those pressures do not excuse the behaviours, nor do they justify them. They do, however, provide a mirror upon which men can see themselves, through these other men, in questioning their own pasts and considering how to engage with other persons in the future.
• Collapse of ancient city’s water system may have led to its demise // The failure of Angkor’s irrigation and water delivery system is a warning that societies are typically ill-suited to deal with massive changes in weather, let alone climate. It can and should be read as a herald of what may come six centuries later as our politicians and publics steadfastly fail to address the real, serious, and imminent threats posed by climate change.
• The Goal in Love // I like this essay because it asserts we should be seeking ourselves, first, in our relationships as opposed to trying to find ourselves in the persons we enter into relationships with. Indeed, if I can think of single major lesson I’ve learned in the past few years it is the importance of accepting yourself and not depending on others to enable such acceptance; it’s by being comfortable with ourselves as whole persons that we are able to engage in wholesome relationships with one another.
• When to Open a Bottle: Aging Wine Without the Anxiety // While I move too often to even contemplate what it would be like to cellar a wine for a decade or more — let along have the space to do so! — this article from the New York Times is helpful in guiding a novice through the process of properly investing, aging, and testing wines that have been cellared.
• The Ultimate What To Bring Guide // I understand the rationales provided for making sure that you always have all the camera lenses you might need when on vacation, with a focus on covering off a fast prime, as well as having a short-, and long-range zoom. But I actually think that most travel is better done with a pair of lenses, maximum. My preference is a 35mm or 50mm equivalent, and a long-range (e.g. 80mm-300mm) zoom if I’m going to be travelling into the wilderness. I personally find that by having a fixed focal distance I’m inspired to be more creative and mindful of what I’m shooting, and spend more time just shooting as compared to thinking about what lens I need and when I need it.

Cool Things

• Pantsdrunk, the Finnish Art of Relaxation // The clear counterpart to hygge, the Danish word for a special feeling of coziness. God bless the Fins.

Footnotes

1. Yes, people can awaken and change. And so in the future it’s always possible that people holding these values might turn into someone I’d feel comfortable working with. But in the here and now I don’t think it would be appropriate to work with, or support, persons who hold (or at least don’t oppose) such views. ↩