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Javier E

SUVs Are Bumper-to-Bumper on Dealer Lots, With More on the Way - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...th-more-on-the-way-11562491801

car SUV history

shared by Javier E on 07 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • The number of crossover and sport-utility models on sale in the U.S. has steadily climbed this decade from 70 individual nameplates in model-year 2014 to 96 currently, according to a Bank of America report. By 2023, that figure is expected to rise to 149 models, the most ever for this category, the report found
  • he estimates the profit premiums auto makers have long enjoyed on these models will fall over the next three years, eventually matching the lower margins now earned on sedans.
  • Today, crossovers and sport-utility vehicles make up more than 47% of the new-vehicle market, while sales of sedans and hatchbacks have plunged this decade to only 30% of the market today, down from about 50% during the same period in 2012
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  • Many drivers say they prefer the elevated ride height and bigger cargo space. Auto manufacturers can charge a premium for the vehicles, which cost only slightly more to produce than similar-sized cars because they share much of the same engineering. For instance, the average price paid for a midsize SUV in May was $37,790, nearly $12,000 higher than a midsize sedan, according to sales data from Kelley Blue Book.
  • Japanese and South Korean car companies have also rolled out new sport-utility offerings as their earnings have been hit by slowing sedan sales—long a sweet spot for brands like Toyota and Honda.
Javier E

The Enduring Power of Virtue - James Fallows - International - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...73149

virtue self-control Confucius values china culture education

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • He posed the cultivation of virtue as a superior alternative to the manipulation or coercion of behavior through policy.
  • I'll highlight three virtues from Confucius's thought that I believe are the basic building blocks for all other virtues: One is rén (仁), benevolence or compassion. Another is self-control, which Confucius believed was enforced and nurtured by adhering to proper forms of behavior, or lǐ (礼). And, the third is wise judgment about how to turn benevolent intention into action of a kind that avoids the proverbial road to hell.
  • public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue. (Is it a coincidence that the crossover happens around 1970, the same year I called out in yesterday's graph? Somewhat similar results are had with "virtue" against "institutions," "policies," and "systems.")
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  • I'd go even further. Virtues are paramount because they're the ultimate cause of good consequences, at least among those causes within human control.
  • While many virtue theorists insist that virtues are intrinsically and morally good, Driver defines virtue strictly in terms of outcomes. To her, a virtue is a "character trait that systematically produces good consequences." A trait is a virtue only if it tends to cause good consequences.
  • What the earthquake aftermath shows, however, is the remarkable power of virtue, even in the absence of any explicit legislation or enforcement. Virtue works without TIPS (technologies, institutions, policies, and systems), even though the converse isn't true.
  • Modern psychology research is confirming the power of virtue, as well, and the work on self-control is representative.
  • "Self-control, then, is one of the crucial mechanisms that had to improve in humans, to enable culture to succeed."
  • "Because their persons were cultivated, their families were in order. Because their families were in order, their states were well-governed. Because their states were well-governed, the whole kingdom prospered. From the sovereign down to the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides."
Javier E

How Russia's Propaganda Campaign Exploited America's Prejudices - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ts-exploit-american-prejudices

fb campaign election influence targeting advertising conservative

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices;
  • For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”
  • Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times.
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  • , such examples of ham-handed propaganda likely didn’t raise eyebrows at the time because the function of social media is to affirm its users
  • On Facebook, as opposed to a medium like television, “you’re able to hone in on someone who will likely vote Republican or will likely vote Democrat and hold on to them a bit more,” Borrell told TPM. “You don’t see a lot of crossover. They’ll hold onto you as a voter—at least that’s what [social media] campaigns appear to do.”
  • Facebook, Twitter and Google have flattened the media ecosystem to such a degree that traditional news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times effectively compete with whitewashed demagoguery masquerading as information on sites like InfoWars and Breitbart. The Google News ranking algorithm gives those sites equal footing, and until very recently treated digital troll hive 4Chan as a news source. 
  • “One of the reasons people are dismissing this stuff is they’ll look at one particular instance of this stuff and say, ‘That looks like it might be vaguely anti-Trump,'” Hendrix told TPM. “And you’ll dig under it and see that while it may initially appear anti-Trump it has a subtler purpose, to discourage people from being engaged or to suggest that all politics are so corrupt that there’s an equivalence between the candidates.”
  • The Trump campaign didn’t need conservatives who didn’t dig Trump as a candidate to like him—they just needed those holdouts to believe he was better than Clinton, and the image of a black person supporting him, or at least deriding her as a “racist bitch,” might do the trick.
  • “A lot of it does seem to really prey on identity politics,” Hendrix said.That identity politics was already surging in reaction to the presence of a black president: Conservative pundits have been quick to attribute any unrest that follows episodes of police brutality to Black Lives Matter, wielding #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter hashtags on social media, and to tie all Black Lives Matter positions to Obama, whose justice department had taken first steps toward police reform. Russian-operated accounts gleefully exploited that festering sore spot
  • A Facebook account called “Blacktivist” posted ostensibly pro-black liberation rhetoric that was filled with dogwhistles designed to play on the worst right-wing fears: “Our race is under attack, but remember, we are strong in numbers,” one post uncovered by CNN proclaimed. “Black people should wake up as soon as possible,” said another.
  • People who fear disloyalty don’t just fear activists like BLM. Trump’s resoundingly anti-immigrant campaign, with its cornerstone of a border wall he may or may not ever build, and the nativist grievances that anchor his base dovetail with the Putin government’s desire to see less military and diplomatic cooperation across the West.
  • The @tpartynews account was quick to tie together everything the right fears about undocumented people: “Illegal Immigrants today.. Democrat on welfare tomorrow!” Russian-linked Facebook pages went a step further: “Due to the town of Twin falls, Idaho, becoming a center of refugee resettlement, which led to the huge upsurge of violence towards American citizens, it is crucial to draw society’s attention to this problem,” read a post on the SecuredBorders page,
  • Another Russian-linked group called Heart of Texas, with about 225,000 followers, successfully organized anti-immigrant rallies protesting “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens” and warned of the scourge of “mosques,”
  • Undergirding both the anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiment the Russian propaganda campaign capitalized on is a fear of violence. It’s something the NRA exploited throughout the tenure of the United States’ first black president to great effect, and it was easy for Russian trolls to exploit too.
  • Looking at the ads—though scant few of them have been unearthed by reports as tech companies have declined to publicly release them—it’s clear that the issue of race is paramount. The ads that have surfaced play relentlessly on prejudices against black people, immigrants and Muslims, and Trump’s campaign was a symphony of insults maligning all three groups.
  • Advertising from the Trump campaign was notable for the brazenness of its racialized invective; the Russian propaganda campaign followed suit with a microtargeted series of ads explicitly playing up racism and bigotry, rather than trying to sanitize it with coded phrases and winks. The results were inexpert and scattershot—the improbably named “Williams and Kalvin” seem to be looking at cue cards occasionally in their videos—but Facebook, Twitter and their peers had honed the delivery mechanism so carefully that the r
  • “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in computer science to use Facebook’s targeting tools,” Hendrix said. “These are tools that were built for anybody to be able to target messages and ads to any constituency. They’re designed for the lowest common denominator—to be as simple as possible and to work at scale.”
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: How to Live With the Coronavirus - 0 views

nymag.com/...live-with-the-coronavirus.html

christian culture war pandemic response life death christianist strategies pro-life

shared by Javier E on 04 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • in the absence of certainty, out of a modicum of caution, and facing the risk of a breakdown in the health-care system, we’ve taken (belated) steps to put life first.
  • In my view, it’s the only call a decent society can make. It’s what it really means to be pro-life.
  • There are costs to this collective exercise in empathy and compassion. You contemplate the rising chances of a long and devastating global depression. You look ahead to months and months more of quarantine, empty streets, crippled businesses, shrinking retirement savings, and rising poverty. And you realize that our choice for life over wealth is a little more complicated. There will come a point at which we will have to risk some lives to reopen and save the economy.
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  • if the UK’s GDP falls by more than 6.4% per person as a result of the lockdown, more years of life will be lost than saved.”
  • (there’s a great takedown of the argument here).
  • Let’s just agree nonetheless that in principle, at some point, there will be a crossover moment when quarantine and lockdown cease to have the net-positive impact they are now having. The question is simply when that cross-over occurs, and how we can get there soonest.
  • If we declare victory before we achieve it, we could have the worst of both worlds — a burst in new infections leading to a second shutdown, a collapse of faith in the authorities, more deaths, and a deeper depression.
  • Letting up on an epidemic before it has run its course can create a second wave, as in 1918, and as feared in China right now, that would take the country down in the fall of an election year.
  • At the same time, if quarantine and social distancing are stretched out too long, we could be losing more lives in the aggregate than we would be saving. We could also be risking ever-more extremist politics or even civil disorder
  • What matters is the timing. Getting that right is the single biggest challenge as we go forward. But that requires a huge amount of data we don’t yet have: specifically, a much better sense of just how widespread COVID-19 is in the broader population.
  • we need equipment we don’t yet have: tests for the virus that are quick and easy and ubiquitous; and, perhaps more importantly, serological tests, to see who is now immune and can return to work and normal life.
  • If we’re luckier still, we could get a breakthrough in treatments as doctors and nurses understand this disease better and we buy some time.
  • If we’re lucky and we find out more people have already gotten COVID-19 without the worst symptoms than we now believe, then the return to semi-normal could come more quickly
  • At best, we could get the virus to peak at a level that does not overwhelm our medical system and manage economically until a vaccine is available. At best.
  • The goal is not to “beat” the virus, because it can’t be beaten. Now that it’s a pandemic, it’s here to stay
  • The goal is not to fight it, or wage war on it.  COVID-19 is not a rival military. The goal is to find the optimal path to living with it.
  • I want Anthony Fauci making that decision. Right now, as complete a shutdown as possible is the only sane option.
  • if we make that collective pro-life decision — and, mercifully, we are — we are also saying something quite profound about who we are as Americans. We are saying that the lives of the elderly, and the poor, and the vulnerable matter more, when all is said and done, than our GDP.
  • In this century, the Evangelical right has embraced the cult of prosperity, the efficacy of torture, and the denial of health care to the poor. They upped the ante in 2016, of course, by embracing a pagan worshipper of Mammon, with a sideline in philandery, cruelty, gluttony, pride, deceit, envy, insatiable greed, and the foulest abuse of women
  • In an apparent attempt to defend a president who clearly dismissed and for too long ignored the greatest threat to the U.S. since 9/11, they’ve decided to embrace what they once called the “culture of death.”
  • The correct response to COVID-19, many pastors have declared, is to let it rip.
  • The elderly, instead of protecting themselves, should sacrifice what’s left of their lives to save the jobs of the young and to help Trump keep the economy going. Wealth, it appears, is far preferable to life — or at least when a Republican is president.
  • But if by ignoring “social distancing,” we individually and collectively guarantee someone’s death down the line, why is that not a kind of indirect killing?
  • Yes, Christians should not cower in constant fear of death. But we don’t have to embrace it either. I’m trying to think of a version of the Gospels where Jesus meets a leper and tells him not to worry, he’s going to die some day anyway, and make the best of it; or when he tells Martha and Mary to suck it up, and accept that Lazarus is dead, and move on. He didn’t. In fact, he risked and lost his own life by raising Lazarus from the dead.
anonymous

Defying rules, anti-vaccine accounts thrive on social media - 0 views

apnews.com/...96aaf1ce32d02e215d3b2021a33599

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For years, the same platforms have allowed anti-vaccination propaganda to flourish, making it difficult to stamp out such sentiments now. And their efforts to weed out other types of COVID-19 misinformation — often with fact-checks, informational labels and other restrained measures, has been woefully slow.
  • But since April 2020, it has removed a grand total of 8,400 tweets spreading COVID-related misinformation — a tiny fraction of the avalanche of pandemic-related falsehoods tweeted out daily by popular users with millions of followers, critics say.
  • “While they fail to take action, lives are being lost,” said Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a watchdog group.
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  • “It’s a hard situation because we have let this go for so long,” said Jeanine Guidry, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies social media and health information. “People using social media have really been able to share what they want for nearly a decade.”
  • One such page, The Truth About Cancer, has more than a million Facebook followers after years of posting baseless suggestions that vaccines could cause autism or damage children’s brains. The page was identified in November as a “COVID-19 vaccine misinformation super spreader” by NewsGuard.
  • Facebook said it is taking taking “aggressive steps to fight misinformation across our apps by removing millions of pieces of COVID-19 and vaccine content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.”
  • As U.S. vaccine supplies continue to increase, immunization efforts will soon shift from targeting a limited supply to the most vulnerable populations to getting as many shots into as many arms as possible.
  • Facebook also banned ads that discourage vaccines and said it has added warning labels to more than 167 million pieces of additional COVID-19 content thanks to our network of fact-checking partners.
  • Prior to the pandemic, however, social media platforms had done little to stamp out misinformation, said Andy Pattison, manager of digital solutions for the World Health Organization.
  • “It’s a very fine line between freedom of speech and eroding science,” Pattison said. Purveyors of misinformation, he said, “learn the rules, and they dance right on the edge, all the time.”
  • But blatantly false COVID-19 information continues to pop up. Earlier this month, several articles circulating online claimed that more elderly Israelis who took the Pfizer vaccine were “killed” by the shot than those who died from COVID-19 itself. One such article from an anti-vaccination website was shared nearly 12,000 times on Facebook, leading earlier this month to a spike of nearly 40,000 mentions of “vaccine deaths” across social platforms and the internet, according to an analysis by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.
  • YouTube, which has generally avoided the same type scrutiny as its social media peers despite being a source of misinformation, said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October, when it started banning false claims about COVID-19 vaccinations.
  • “Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation could be a big barrier to getting enough of the population vaccinated to end the crisis,” said Lisa Fazio, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.
  • “If someone truly believes that the COVID vaccine is harmful and they feel a responsibility to share that with friends and family ... they will find a way,” Guidry said.
  • When the Center for Countering Digital Hate recently studied the crossover between different types of disinformation and hate speech, it found that Instagram tended to cross-pollinate misinformation via its algorithm.
martinelligi

As Auto Industry Goes Electric, Can It Avoid A Battery Bottleneck? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-it-avoid-a-battery-bottleneck

electric climate

shared by martinelligi on 15 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • Every major automaker is preparing to pivot from gas and diesel cars to electric and hybrid ones. Ford F-150s and Kia crossovers, Volkswagen hatchbacks and BMW sedans: They'll all plug in instead of fill up. It's a remarkable transformation that will change the way we drive and shake up world energy markets.
  • But the massive shift is raising concern that the world's battery supply chain, from mines to manufacturers, will fail to keep pace, leading to a bottleneck that will slow the pace of electrification and derail companies' business plans — and the fight against climate change.
  • So battery supplies will need to scale up fast — starting with the raw materials that go into them.
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  • In fact, a few years ago, lithium miners anticipated huge growth in electric-vehicle battery demand and expanded quickly — but the expected boom didn't come. Lithium prices collapsed.
Javier E

Opinion | A Big TV Hit Is a Conservative Fantasy Liberals Should Watch - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ative-prestige-television.html

TV series conservative fantasy liberals culture POWeR diversity vision education

shared by Javier E on 10 Aug 22 - No Cached
  • Pop culture says a lot about the hopes we have for politics. And in a politically polarized and unequal society, we express our political identities as tastes
  • We aren’t just divided into red and blue America. We divide ourselves into Fox people versus CNN people, country music versus hip-hop people and reality TV versus prestige drama people. The lines are not fixed — there is always crossover — but they are rooted in something fundamental: identity. Our imagined Americas are as divided as our news cycles.
  • a working paper by two sociologists, Clayton Childress at the University of Toronto and Craig Rawlings at Duke University. The paper is titled “When Tastes Are Ideological: The Asymmetric Foundations of Cultural Polarization.” It is part of the subfield of sociology that studies how culture reflects and reproduces inequality. Childress and Rawlings draw out several asymmetries in how liberals and conservatives consume cultural objects like music and television.
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  • Liberals aren’t watching “Yellowstone” for cultural reasons, and conservatives love it for ideological ones, he said.
  • I watched all four seasons of “Yellowstone” through the lens of these asymmetries. The show is compelling but not groundbreaking. It is too easy to call it a conservative show. Like its audience counterpart, “Yellowstone” thinks it is at war with progress when it is really at war with itself.
  • when it comes to identity and tastes, Childress said it is a “mark of social status for liberals to be culturally omnivorous.”
  • In contrast, conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity. And they are more likely to dislike what liberals like than liberals are to dislike what conservatives like.
  • “People on the left like more pop culture than people on the right,’’ Childress said. “And people on the left don’t dislike what people on the right dislike.
  • The rejection of cosmopolitanism as a desirable attribute is more subtle, but present
  • The West of “Yellowstone” is multiethnic, multiracial and multi-class. There are Black cowboys and complex Native American characters. A pair of lesbians even makes an appearance in Season 2 (although there are no gay cowboys,
  • Regardless of whether you agree with the classification, you have an idea of what other people mean by “elite”: urban, sophisticated and educated. In short, the things that “Yellowstone” skewers at every opportunity. The characters despise California and San Francisco in particular
  • It accommodates feminism by making women the most vicious capitalist actors.
  • The slow dialogue of “Yellowstone” also rejects sophistication. The narrative plods even as the show’s many horses run. And the mood is dour; there aren’t many jokes
  • Those aesthetic choices implicitly argue for simplicity as a moral virtue, something John Dutton telegraphs when he tells a field hand that sometimes the world really is simple.
  • “Yellowstone” sidesteps Westerns’ romanticization of the white imaginary. At dinner last week with my family, my 30-something Black lesbian cousins gushed about the show, although they prefer its Native American characters to the Duttons.
  • There are few strivers in the world of “Yellowstone.” The show’s royalty grudgingly accept higher education as a strategic tool to beat the liberal do-gooders. The poor and disenfranchised don’t dream of going to college at all.
  • the show’s revenge is how well it exposes the material conditions of elitism. Its worldview resembles fantasy but it is brutally realistic about how power operates.
  • Whatever brings its audience to the show, once they arrive, they are playacting within the vision of America that “Yellowstone” holds. The show suggests that elitism and power can be reconciled with our need to be both moral and self-interested. It is a seductive fantasy because it does not ask the audience to give up anything.
  • The nominal diversity of the show’s cast implies that conservatives don’t hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life
  • It acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations.
  • It accepts that Christopher Columbus was a colonizer but implies that the Duttons’ good-enough ends justify the means.
  • If the show rejects sophistication, it takes a hammer to education
  • And it depicts the police as feckless, but it does not want to abolish cops. It wants to choose the cops. That means a lot of guns.
  • “Yellowstone” does not just have gunfights. It has all-out wars. There are military-grade weapons, aerial assaults, night-vision goggles and automatic rifles. When John Dutton cannot win, he starts shooting.
  • “Yellowstone” isn’t ideologically driven, even if ideology is what makes it so comforting for conservative audiences.
  • in the end, the show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future.
  • Republicans don’t solve problems like climate change or economic inequality or water rights or housing costs or stagnant wages. With Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s leadership, the G.O.P. does not even bother to sell a conservative story for America. Audiences looking for that vision in “Yellowstone” might find that cosmetic diversity needn’t be scary, but they won’t find much else.
  • Like Republicans, the Dutton dynasty has one defense against demography and time: Buy guns and hoard stolen power.
Javier E

Naomi Klein on wellness culture: 'We really are alive on the knife's edge' | Well actua... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...iew-wellness-culture-far-right

wellness culture fitness polycrisis response solidarity fascism hierarchy body beauty

shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Why wellness became a seedbed for the far-right is one of several subjects that Naomi Klein explores in her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.
  • She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.
  • some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.
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  • I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.
  • The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.
  • I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?
  • This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.
  • Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.
  • If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.
  • Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.
  • Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.
  • There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project
  • After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again
  • there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.
  • But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.
  • Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?
  • in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.
  • Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.
  • Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.
  • the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.
  • And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.
  • We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.
  • The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.
  • All of this is hard to bear.
  • Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.
  • the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.
  • So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.
  • Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.
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