Specs

Hank Green on legitimacy in media:

There is nothing actually legitimate about Fox News (or MSNBC for that matter) and young people know this. They don’t trust news organizations because news organizations have given them no reason to be trusting. They exist not to inform but to uphold the biases and values of particular ideologies. Ideologies and values, by the way, that very few young people embody. Even when they try to strike a balance, they do it by pitting different perspectives against each other in staged arguments. But neither perspective looks familiar to most people under the age of 40, so they just tune out.
...
Glozell, Bethany and I don’t sit in fancy news studios surrounded by fifty thousand dollar cameras and polished metal and glass backdrops with inlayed 90-inch LCD screens. People trust us because we’ve spent years developing a relationship with them. We have been scrutinized and found not evil. Our legitimacy comes from honesty, not from cultural signals or institutions.

And with young people having no reasons to trust those cultural signals that we older folks were raised with, this is the only thing that works for them anymore. Our values and interests mesh with theirs enough that they’ve come to trust us. They trust us to make content that they will enjoy and they trust us to be the kind of people they can look up to. People who betray that trust risk losing everything that they have built.

Thanks for the hit of nostalgia!

Oh, Mathnet. You really were the best part of Square One.

On another note, Square One was the only show my sister and I were allowed to stay up late to watch (to the end).

9) Ghostwriter may have killed Mathnet

Internet, you've done it again.

Specs

On extremism:

It’s been repeatedly observed that an Islamic extremist is held to represent all Muslims in the Western media, and indeed a black criminal is held to represent all people of that ethnicity, but a white murderer is strictly an individual, with no generalisations to be made. Such is the ingrained racism in much of white-dominated culture.

That’s what we do: we other the perpetrators of these acts. It’s a natural reaction, and up to a point it’s even psychologically healthy - we must distance our own identities from what we’ve witnessed, because we can’t accept that there’s any circumstance in which we could become such a person. As usual, we then take it too far, by making our sweeping judgements, and allowing fear and suspicion to make us victimise others with only coincidental attributes in common.

Islam isn’t the problem. Religion isn’t even the problem. The problem is that, as ever, there’s a section of humanity who are extremists.

Specs

also, have fun on the 27th. I'll still be in the Okanagan, but I wish I could join in.
Retirement is treating my folks really well, and I think living here has been a positive change for both of them.