The Bluestocking, vol XXVII: Sanders, Students and Shark Lies
Evening,
I certainly can't complain that my life is monotonous - this week I pratted around in a garden centre for This Week, and re-read Milton's Areopagitica for Radio 3.
Have a great bank holiday!
Helen
Bernie. No.
Sanders’ most expansive argument is against “closed primaries,” which have entered his stump speech as a fundamentally unfair part of the process. But closed primaries weren’t created in response to Sanders—they are a long-standing feature. Critically, they are far from the least democratic part of the process. That goes to caucuses, which by their design preclude the vast majority of a given electorate from participating. If closed primaries are undemocratic for keeping out registered independents, then caucuses are undemocratic for keeping out everyone. Yet Sanders hasn’t railed against them. And why would he? They’ve delivered his largest victory margins and have fueled his campaign.
The Democrats are now finding out, as the Republicans did before them, what happens when you let someone with no loyalty to the party have a shot at becoming your nominee. Hard not to see this as entryism, particularly when you read this piece about the dying days of the Sanders campaign. Three million more people have voted for Clinton, and yet a hardcore of Sanders supporters will never accept that they lost.
The Big Uneasy
“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m goinghome, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”
So much to chew over in this New Yorker dispatch from Oberlin, a liberal arts college that is at the frontier of the student identity politics movement: class, alienation, respectability politics, students as consumers, self-righteousness, the currency of victimhood, the graduate job market. And it walks the line between boggling at twentysomethings saying daft things and acknowledging that, sometimes, the students have a point.
How technology hijacks your brain
Slot machines make more money in the United States than baseball, movies, and theme parkscombined. Relative to other kinds of gambling, people get ‘problematically involved’ with slot machines 3–4x faster according to NYU professor Natasha Dow Schull, author of Addiction by Design.
But here’s the unfortunate truth — several billion people have a slot machine their pocket.
A former magician and ethicist for Google on what's wrong with current product design.
How My Street Sharks Lie Became The Truth
Another telltale sign the info you’re reading isn’t true is the character Roxie, a female Street Shark I made up loosely based on real character Rox (not to be confused with the Roxie in this less influential Street Sharks fan fiction). People on forums continue to be confused about why they can’t find anything about her or anything else from this mythic “alternate” Street Sharks series. They must seriously be feeling the Mandela Effect. Some suspected that something was wrong, but couldn’t quite figure out what or how or why. After all, what kind of person would intentionally sow lies about Street Sharks across the internet? I still love reading utterly baffled questions on Wikipedia talk pages, IMDB message boards, Facebook groups, and random YouTube commenters from desperate people trying to track down “the one with the girl Street Shark.”
Jordan Minor confesses to having written fake episode summaries for an 80s kids TV show, which people now claim to remember actually happening.
Quote of the week: "This is the biggest problem of the world: Facebook has bought two-thirds of the new media companies out there without spending a dime because they own a majority of their mobile. That’s great for Facebook, but bad for their platform." (Oh god, I agree with Shane Smith of Vice.)
And while we're here, let's talk about Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who has confessed to funding deliberately overblown lawsuits against Gawker, in revenge for them outing him as gay. This is one of those knotty cases that has something for everyone. IMO Gawker were wrong to publish Hulk Hogan's sex tape, because it was effectively revenge porn. But the legal system be about redressing the harm to Hogan, not tanking an entire media organisation. And the whole thing sits very poorly with the idea of Thiel as a libertarian. He wants to build a seastead to get around employment law, but he's happy using the courts system to get his revenge on an organisation that displeased him? Maaaaaaaaaaaaaate.
Guest gif: I don't even want to know what this is about.
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