Tuesday, February 27, 2024

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families

"My story from birth?" Odette Nyiramilimo said.
"Do you really have time for that?"
I said I had time. (p63)
Odette was talking to Philip Gourevitch, an American journalist who was traveling around the world doing different stories. This book is what comes out of his travels to Rwanda over the course of three years. At almost 400 pages long, it is laden with harrowing accounts of the 1994 genocide. I knew I would need time to digest this book. I had time.

Gourevitch opened the book with his visit to Nyarubuye, asking himself why he would want to do that. I realized he was preempting my question; I was asking myself whether my decision to read this book meant that I was objectifying the genocide victims for my voyeurism.
"I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom. At least fifty mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor. Macheted skulls had rolled here and there. The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. 
I had never been among the dead before. What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose. I didn't need to see them. I already knew, and believed what had happened in Rwanda.
I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps you hope for some understanding—a moral, or a lesson. But when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda's stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, as horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy." (p15-16, 19, abridged.)

Drivers and Powers

But what drove Rwanda to genocide? Scholars tend to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot be properly called distinct ethnic groups. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, intermingled (p47).

Still, there was an old difference between the two groups: Hutus farm and Tutsis herd cattle. Cattle are more valuable, so Tutsi became synonymous with the elite class. When a Tutsi chief (Rwabugiri) ruled precolonial Rwanda in the 19th century, this stratification accelerated. Hutus began to be defined by whatever Tutsis were not, even if no one can really tell the two apart.

Then came the Europeans. This being the heyday of eugenics, "scientists" were too ready to propound baseless hypothesis that exaggerate minutiae physical differences as a divine ordinance towards class structures. One of them was John Speke, who propounded the biblical myth that the Tutsis descended from Ham-son-of-Noah who came from Abyssinia/Ethiopia, and this made them "the superior race" to the native Negroid.

When Germany set up its administrative posts in Rwanda after the death of Rwabugiri, the feuding Tutsi elites used their support to pursue their interests and further subjugates the Hutus. Then when Belgium won Rwanda as a spoil of World War I from the German, the Belgians made the Hutu-Tutsi polarization the basis of their colonial rule. The Hamitic myth served them well. In 1934 the Belgians issued identity cards that label Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) or Tutsi (14%). This allowed them to administer an apartheid state that shuts out Hutus' opportunities for advancement.

When Rwanda gained independence, the overthrow of colonialism also brought down the Tutsis. The Hutu intellectuals "argued for democracy not by rejecting the myth but by embracing it. If Tutsis were foreign invaders, then Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority." (p58) This led to a bloody revolution in 1959, which was a precursor to the 1994 genocide.
In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The "authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire of strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essen­tially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. (p 128)
Link to the book on Goodreads: here. This note was originally written in 2018.

Friday, October 27, 2023

Internet Reading Q2-Q3 2023

1. Environment, Nature, and Human Biology 

Look, I get it. Aspartame is a weird synthetic molecule that’s 200 times sweeter than sucrose. It’s normal to have a prior that aspartame might be bad for you. The thing is, the alternative to aspartame often isn’t no aspartame but rather sugar or corn syrup or even perhaps even alcohol.

More links

2. Tech and the Internet

Meta in Myanmar (full series): Erin Kissane did a lot of reading and writing about the role of Meta and Facebook in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar. These are what emerged from that work.  

More links

3. Poems and Short Stories
To have understood some small piece of the world
more deeply doesn't have to mean we're not as lost
as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees
stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here
and there stirring differently somehow, more like
resisting stillness...Should it come to winnowing
my addictions, I'd hold on hardest, I'm pretty sure,
to mystery
WHAT HAPPENED BACK there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over. And the end feels—to you, at least—both like the end of a long pilgrimage and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage: don’t both depend on stamina and faith, in the right proportions? Wasn’t the point, at the end, persuasion?
4. Sexuality, LGBTQIA+

Half A Million Kinksters Can’t Be Wrong by Aella 

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5. International

Yesterday, I was in Times Square for a rally in support of the endangered citizens of Palestine. Most of the people there were young. But there were also quite a few elderly people, some hobbling on canes. Because they knew it was important. They were not there to compete with the young, to mutter snide takedowns of the speakers. They had perspective. They had wisdom

More links

6. Economics and causal inference

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7. Writing

Get your work recognized: write a brag document 

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8. Miscellanea I
  • Ever since I left that remote Prairie home and chose the city, I have had the sense that my “real life,” the place where I belong and where there is no loneliness, is somewhere else out there in the world, although I can’t name or find it. I’m eighty now and I live alone
    • “Loneliness is made as well as given, and at a very early age. Deprive us of the attention of a loving, reliable parent, and, if nothing happens to make up for that lack, we’ll tend toward loneliness for the rest of our lives." 
    • I have heard old people say, in a puzzled, sad way, something like, “I have outlived my life.” I suddenly remembered a teaching from many years ago, when I was wandering alone on the prairie one day, immensely sad, full of self-pity, and trying to understand where my dismal feelings came from. There really was no one thing that I could pinpoint: I was sad because I was alive and did not have every single thing I had ever wanted, did not even know all the things I wanted, and I believe now that it was the latter that made me saddest. I was alive and I was a human being and wanting is the condition of the human. 
  • “I feel anxious,” I recite dutifully at the start of each anger management class session, wondering whether “anxious” truly encapsulates the heady mix of shame, hope, dread, and fear that taking such a course produces in me. Shame because enrolling in an anger management course isn’t a high point in anyone’s life, and hope because I thought, in retrospect naively, that taking such a step really could be the beginning of something life-changing.  
    • Here’s what anger management classes get wrong about the world: The course focuses on taming a ubiquitous emotion. But what about addressing its root causes?
  • There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly. 
  • Mistakes Will Be Made by Heather Havrilesky 
  • An idea [to reduce loneliness] is to encourage synchrony. Lonely people struggle to synchronize with others, and that this discordance causes the regions of their brain responsible for observing actions to go into overdrive. This synchrony between individuals can be as simple as reciprocating a smile or mirroring body language during conversation, or as elaborate as singing in a choir or being part of a rowing team. 
9. Miscellanea II

Kieran Egan says that there are three potential jobs we can give to schools: Socialization, Academics, Development. Alone, each of these jobs is terrible; together, they’re worse. And what we’ve done is given schools all three jobs. 

More links


Thursday, April 20, 2023

Internet Reading Q3-4 2022 - Q1 2023

Three quarters' worth of internet readings! Obviously this is going to be a massive pile of links. Let's get started:

1. LGBTQIA+

2. Technology and software
3. Environment, Biology, Science
4. International
5. Development and econ
6. Effective altruism
  • Michael Nielsen's notes on EA 
    • Highlights: EA as a source of moral invention; EA judo--strong critique of any particular "most good" strategy improves EA, it doesn't discredit it; miscellanea (penumbral activity, EA is a cult, longtermism)
  • EA has an embarrassment of riches. It could easily be squandered in the sense that its realized impact falls far far short of what is possible. 
  • How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force 
  • Where is the Social Justice in EA
  • Effective Altruism should emulate Quakerism 
  • Effective altruism, air pollution in Delhi, Supreme Court of India, and trade off between legibility and complexity in evaluating philanthropic efforts
  • Kelsey Piper's 227-tweet hottakes thread on EA
    • (6) Effective altruists are doing way more shit that is not getting lifesaving medical care to people, but the movement is growing faster than it's expanding focus, so every year of growth so far has also been growth in lifesaving medical care provided to people.
    • (43) Another critique: that effective altruism wants to create a bunch of people who are all identical instead of distinct and individual. (44) One person I heard this from felt, herself, pressured to be more like other people, to pick the Impactful career without regard for her strengths. THIS IS VERY BAD DON'T DO IT. (45) Impact can be an input into career choice, but dear god, your strengths should be a PRIMARY input into career choice! Do the things you're good at! Do the things you have the potential to be exceptionally good at!
    • (211) Aaaaand we're back with a very important take, which is that "existential risk is so bad that even a very tiny chance of it is worth taking huge measures" is a terrible explanation of how to make decisions, you should never make decisions like that.
7. US Society
  • A man in a truck ran down two peaceful protesters at the pro-abortion rally in Cedar Rapids. Since the incident, I’ve had people tell me we should have been more polite and better behaved. Was I sure, they ask, that the people injured didn’t somehow incite it? As if anyone deserves to be hit by a car. As if anyone can be good enough to protect them from the violence of our country. I witnessed a man try to kill people and in response, people told me I should be nicer
  • I Caught Two Men Stealing From My Home in Eugene, Oregon  
  • Run. Hide. Fight. by Arjun Byju 
  • How Your Stanford Classmate Became a Con Artist 
  • The Humiliating History of the TSA 
  • Guessing C For Every Answer Is Now Enough To Pass The New York State Algebra Exam 
  • Letters Helped Brittney Griner Survive. Here’s One for Her Future. 
  • Topologist's Map of the United States 
  • Thanksgiving thoughts: On Americas homelessness and loneliness 
  • If the US put fewer people in prison, would crime go up? Not at all 
  • Movemap
  • In the 1960s, my father Ray was involved in the Klan. I can't remember precisely how I came to suspect this about him, but I know it goes back to my childhood. 
  • If a reporter can't recognize propaganda and call it out when he sees it, then what's even the point
  • The Quest for the Perfect Coke Dealer
  • Why the Right Can’t Beat ESG by Julius Krein 
  • Gwoss Dispways of Power: Four years ago I jotted down some thoughts concerning moral puritanism’s hold on our relationship to art, interrogating the desire to punish others for their artistic preferences. For watching the wrong shows, for writing the wrong kind of fanfiction, for enjoying the wrong kind of pornography. But what happens when those same people find themselves up against real, tangible moral wrongdoing?  Mardoll, 40, a self-published YA author, spent the better part of two decades debating the minutiae of queer micro-identities and raising loud moral concerns over everything from cutesy dating sim Boyfriend Dungeon to Isabel Fall’s story ‘I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter’. It came to light that Mardoll was in fact a longtime engineer at arms manufacturer Lockheed-Martin, a position secured for him fifteen years ago by family members already installed at the corporation. Mardoll offered a half-apology, stating that his disabilities made finding any other employment with equivalent health insurance impossible, a claim somewhat undercut by his ownership and recent sale of a house valued at just over four hundred thousand dollars.
8. Community, connections, conversations
9. Trauma and Relationship
  • Trees don’t rush to heal from trauma and neither should we 
  • I choose Elena: on trauma, recovery, and the true cost of sexual violence by Lucia Osborne-Crowley 
  • Psychodynamic therapy helped me overcome trauma when CBT couldn’t by Lucia Osborne-Crowley 
    • Anger says: This isn’t working for me. Expressing anger requires being willing to be seen, which is why you can express it only when you feel confident that a relationship can contain its emotion and move forward. Since I’d always assumed that my relationships were fragile and weak, and that any moment the other person saw me clearly, they’d leave, I couldn’t risk expressing anger. So I dissociated.
  • How to be resilient 
  • Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders 
  • The first line came to me quickly — “Life is short, though I keep this from my children.”   My Marriage Was Never the Same After That
  • LOVE AFTER LOVE by Derek Walcott 
  • How Relationships Change Over Time by Aella 
  • Outsourcing My Orgasm
  • I was pissed. I felt myself wanting him to see me upset so he’d feel bad and apologize. Just to make sure we’re all following — I am now playing insecure mind games with a 567 day old child. I think my son hates me. I am not handling it well.
  • My mentor John Hughes taught me how to write. Then he plagiarised my work. by Joseph Earp 
  • Although it felt more like bereavement for a person than the loss of a thing, the death of a pet isn’t exactly like either 
10. Career
10. Writing and Words
11. Miscellanea

Thursday, June 23, 2022

Internet reading Q2 2022

 New batches of links!

1. Let me put “reading” as queerly as I can. In the act of reading, we are being penetrated by an author’s sequencing of sensuous dildos we call words, which we kiss, which then open us up to viral growth. The word is a dildo? A dildo we kiss? Kissing leads to penetration? Penetration spreads a virus?

More LGBTQIA+ stuff, relationship

2. The Gassing Of Satartia: A CO2 pipeline in Mississippi ruptured last year, sickening dozens of people.

More on global warming, climate change, and the environment

3. Afterparties, stories collected just in time, too late, and from a source gone too soon

More poems, short stories, and writing

4. When women were hired to operate the calutrons, the supervisors ultimately found that the women were better than the highly educated men. If something went wrong, male scientists would try to figure out the cause of the problem, while women saved time by simply alerting a supervisor. Additionally, scientists were guilty of fiddling with the dials too much, while women only adjusted them when necessary.

More science, technology, and the sociology of internet

5. If you want to write applied theory, read empirics. If you want to write empirics, read theory. You would like to have your empirical work place some intellectual capital on the line. What views of the world will we affirm or abandon on the basis of your empirical work? If you do not have an answer to this, then the empirical work will not be very exciting. 

More econ

6. The remaking of New Delhi’s Central Vista provokes troubling questions about the already fraught relationship between architecture and power.

More from Japan, Sri Lanka, Maine, Myanmar

7. Gun control activism: It's as if we’re living in the 1950s and the only groups leading the charge for civil rights are the NAACP and the Urban League, and the only strategy they’re willing to try is polite protest and lobbying. One theory: they has been rolled up under one roof, Everytown for Gun Safety, with deep backing from Bloomberg. 

More on thinking, activism, rationality, and other miscellanea

8. Writings from Andy Matuschak and Dynomight