My friend was shot four times. Our prom dates became pallbearers. Our friends were murdered in front of us and our innocence has been take.
Student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school
Categories
Tag: Violence
It feels like everyone I know has led a more stressful life this year. Beyond the chaos wrought on the global psyche by the American president, there have also been more deaths, serious illnesses, job losses, and emotional meltdowns than normal. In my own case, the death of two parents and ongoing revelations of sexual assaults and abuses near to my life have been incredibly challenging issues to deal with.
So it was with great interest that I read a piece by Ankita Rao on how she has turned dealing with her personal stress into a kind of science experiment. The tests and activities she points to reveal the number of factors in our lives that amplify underlying stress levels as well as the means we can use to reduce stress in our personal lives. I’ve made a commitment since mid-2017 to actively, and assertively, maintain a particular work-life balance. That involves taking on consulting clients only when the monetary outcome is necessary to address particular fiscal stresses (see: student loans) and ensuring that I actually spend time working out, taking photowalks, and letting myself engage in non-productive play.
I haven’t always been successful. But on the whole I’m exercising a lot more, have taken photos I’m incredibly happy with, and am overcoming a longstanding guilt that playing games is somehow undermining my productivity. I have a long ways to go to ensure the balance I’m trying to achieve is a permanent feature of my life but I feel like habits are starting to settle in, and my overall stress levels declining as a result.
Just prior to Netflix’s release of The Punisher some critics argued that the show had an opportunity to — and failed to — respond to the tragedy of gun violence in the United States. I haven’t quite finished the series but I tend to agree that the show is definitely not directly addressing that issue.
But the show isn’t about gun violence. It’s about what losing family means and drives a someone (read: white males) to do. It’s about the problems linked to how soldiers of all stripes are asked to endure physical and mental hardships and then return home without society acknowledging their sacrifices or providing support for their wounds. Or about how even when support is provided that there is no guarantee that those broken humans will ever be whole again. The show is about how fraught relationships become when we are separated from those we relate to, either by distance, by death, or by betrayal. Throughout the episodes I’ve watched a repeated motif, which does pertain to gun violence, is how firearms can prompt the aforementioned hardships, either by killing in the name of one’s country or in the name of one’s personal ideology or simply by accident when weapons are nearby.
I entered the workforce ‘late’ in terms of my ability to save for retirement. Since I went to school until my early 30s, and lived paycheque to paycheque to try and stay afloat, and have loan obligations, it’s not going to be until my late 30s or early 40s when I can ‘really’ save for my retirement. And that assumes that I save for retirement instead of for a home or condo that I own.1
So it was with interest, and trepidation, that I listened to a podcast put out by TVO entitled “Creating Retirement Security.” The conversation they had about people in their 30s was strange to my ears, with guests relying on different baseline facts for their assessments and recommendations. And significantly, not one of the guests recognized that loan payments for student debt are higher than with past generations, nor that repayment periods are longer now than in the past. Several of the guests held an assumption that persons would be saving in their early 20s. While this practice might be true for Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) contributions it’s presumably less the case for Register Retirement Savings Plans (RRSPs) that can grow significantly over the course of 40 years.
Each guest called frequently for ‘financial literacy’. While educational approaches matter and have merit, at the same time such calls assume that retirement decisions should be individualized. Does it fall to specific individuals to ensure that they are earning enough, saving enough, and investing wisely enough to be secure in their retirement? Or is retirement and aging a collective action problem that is best solved as a society as a whole?2
As with many areas of expert knowledge only the barest of basics of financial literacy are likely going to catch on with the general public. Were we, as a society, to take some of the lessons from behaviour economics we’d realize that experts are needed to develop appropriate ‘nudges’ to compel savings,3 while also updating savings models to recognize the precariousness of the labour market for those under 35. That constant threat of un(der)employment, need to service student debt, and potentially provide assistance to parents who have insufficiently saved for their retirement are all pressures on the largest generation now moving through the Canadian workforce. And that’s to say nothing of the need for people to decide if they want to save for their retirement or save for a home that they own. Until all those variables and conditions are appreciated any advice from experts seems to just fall flat.
Great Photography Shots
Flickr released the best 25 shots of 2017 and they’re pretty amazing. The ‘best’ in this case is derived from social and engagement metrics, combined with curation by Flickr’s own staff.
Music I’m Digging
Neat Podcast Episodes
- Hurry Slowly – The Quiet Dangers of Complacency – I like one of the takeaways, that a smartphone is essentially an anti-risk taking device
Good Reads for the Week
- Speaking the Kremlin’s language
- No expert, no guru
- Bitcoin: Seven questions you were too embarrassed to ask
- Match Group: It’s a legal matter, baby and How do you send nudes?
- The Power of RAW on iPhone, Part 1
- A Dragnet of emptywheel’s Most Important Posts on Surveillance, 2007 to 2017
- How to Be Powerful in a Relationship
- Some Delightful Alternatives to the Post-Sneeze ‘Bless You’
Cool Products
- I actually do save every month to the tune of about 10-15% of my paycheque, part for retirement and part for an emergency fund. ↩
- Guests did spend some time talking about whether retirement savings should should be an individualized/collective problem. But the constant refrain that individuals need to be smarter means that individuals, first and foremost, are seen as the parties that have to assume responsibility for their futures and any collective action work is an idealized maybe-solution to aging in Canada. ↩
- To be fair, nudges were discussed, but the hard lessons came down on individuals having to gain literacy to make their own decisions. ↩
The panel also said the coalition should have warned medical staff at the Doctors Without Borders-supported Haydan hospital in Saada governorate before bombing it six times. But the panel dismissed the seriousness of attacking a hospital by concluding there had been no “human damage.” Besides the two patients who the aid group’s country director told me were injured, the attack destroyed the emergency room of the hospital, which had received about 150 cases a week. It was the only medical facility within an 80-kilometer radius, making the “human damage” of the attack incalculable.
The panel also concluded that a February 27, 2016 attack on a village marketplace didn’t kill any civilians, while we documented10 civilian deaths, including a woman and four children. In an attack on another marketplace on March 15 that United Nations research and ours found that 97 people died, the panel incredibly said it saw no proof of civilian casualties. One man told us he lost 17 relatives and another lost 16.
The coalition’s examination of attacks is a reversal of past practice, but there’s a long way to go before its investigations can be considered credible, transparent, and impartial. Since the Saudis haven’t released details about the panel members or the actual reports on each incident, it’s hard to know why their findings are so different from what we and the UN found on the ground.
There are also many more airstrikes that need to be investigated. It is unclear how the panel chose these 8 strikes over the more than 70 apparently unlawful airstrikes that we and Amnesty International have documented, and the more than 100 that the United Nations has. These documented coalition strikes have killed nearly 1,000 civilians.
For instance, a March 30, 2015 strike on a camp for internally displaced people killed at least 29 civilians and another strike a day later on a dairy factory near the Hodaida port killed at least 31. On May 12, the coalition struck a civilian prison in the western town of Abs, killing 25 people.
That same day, aircraft dropped at least five bombs on a marketplace in the town of Zabid, killing at least 60. A July 4 attack on another marketplace in the village of Muthalith Ahim killed at least 65. On October 7, the coalition bombed a triple wedding in the village of Sanaban, killing 43 civilians, including 13 women and 16 children.
There is an ongoing human rights crisis in Yemen, supported by Western technology systems and implicitly backed by the world’s largest superpower. And, at the same time, Canada is selling armoured vehicles to nations known to engage in similar types of human rights abuses.
Scaachi Koul has written a piece that draws on her own experiences of men attempting to prey on her because she is a woman and while she engages in socially normal behaviour. Men who sought to prey on her were explicit in attempting to determine how they could take advantage, drug, or otherwise use her body without attempting to secure her genuine consent.
Koul’s writing makes clear the very normal, human, experiences of being targeted by men and how the intent of those attackers and potential attacker is normalized in contemporary society. The result is that Koul — and other women just like her — must treat social scenarios as a possible environments for attack or abuse. Her lived reality thus turns even seemingly benign situations into ones filled with risk. Koul’s ability to write as clearly and powerfully as she does should make clear to anyone who absolves sexual abuse on grounds of drinking that alcohol is not the problem: men who have internalized their own privilege and power and treat women as objects around them to be used are the problem.
This story is absolutely appalling. In summary, a Canadian judge had pictures of her posted to the Internet without her consent and the result may be that she loses her job despite having done nothing wrong herself. She’s eminently qualified for her job and the fact that she has been subject to sexual harassment/violence should absolutely not disqualify her from her current position. It would be a travesty of justice if, after being victimized, she were to lose her job on the basis of having been victimized.
No skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry:
“Women are the niggers of gender,” the email said. “If you killed yourself, I wouldn’t even fuck the corpse.”
I blinked at my phone, fighting simultaneous urges to hurl my phone across the room in anger and cry. Later that day, someone texted me my address — telling me they’d “See me when I least expected it.”
I haven’t been out to my car at night by myself since January 2nd.
My name is Brianna Wu. I lead a development studio that makes games. Sometimes, I write about issues in the games industry that relate to the equality of women. My reward is that I regularly have men threatening to rape and commit acts of violence against me.
The aggression committed towards these women is truly abhorrent – it speaks poorly to the various efforts to effectively combat sexism and misogyny. No one should be on the receiving end of such comments, ever, and to normalize the sending and reception of them is just wrong. To be clear: this isn’t bullying, but the cases speak to acts of hate. And it’s an area where hate speech laws should be triggered to bring offenders to justice.
Excited Pixels 