Marketplace informed me today that they are now marketing a brand of yogurt for men, which inevitably got the nickname "brogurt."
I'll give you cash if you can show
a chick as lovely as my bro
My friend who went MTF didn't have top surgery at all, simply allowing the hormones to kick in and grow small breasts of her own. The total for her transitional surgeries came to $20,000 which she somehow managed to cover despite being in her first year of grad school at the time. I have mad respect for her for pulling that off.
One of my acquaintances had the problem that follow-up medical care due to complications from transition surgery is also not covered. That's pretty brutal as it means no matter what you (or your frat brothers) save you might still have large unplanned debt.
I don't know anything about the usual politics of that college or that frat, but that's awesome. They've now raised $16K according to their fundraising page.
Not only is the fundraising excellent, the fact that the guy they're doing the fundraising for is a member of the frat speaks well for them.
My trans friends are not universally enthusiastic about this. Paraphrasing and combining a little: "Great, someone with privilege and a strong social network can afford to pay the medical-industrial complex." Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum, which is... a low bar for praise.
My fraternity at UNC has some transgendered members.
Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum, which is... a low bar for praise.
I kind of hate this reaction. Do you need a high bar for praise? Praise is cheap. And stroking people a little for acting decently is, IME, not a bad way of getting more decent behavior.
That doesn't mean anyone's obliged to praise anyone for anything, or that acting decently in one regard overrides being a jerk in another (if that were the case). But getting cranky at people because they're preening a bit over how nice they've been seems to me like a serious waste of crankiness.
(the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum
I don't think they're looking for any reward other than "how about rethinking your own stereotypes while you're at it."
10. Are they getting after this case, then?
13: Probably, yes, given the general politics of the place. However, I have some enormous problems with the way that case is currently being (mis)reported, but it will have to wait until tonight because I'm pretty swamped at work.
Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum, which is... a low bar for praise.
A low bar would be them not barring the person. All the money is something laudable, surely.
OTOH, isn't Emerson regarded as having a very high DFH-quotient? More than Ivies, say? Hesitant to make this a plaudit for frats in general.
I love trans activists, but sometimes, based on M limited E, I want to be like "stop nitpicking minor linguistic differences and hyper-policing each other for activist authenticity! You guys really genuinely don't have basic civil rights! People can murder you with impunity! There are bigger fish to fry!"
Hard to see this as anything other than an unambiguous win for both trans people, although I guess I'm sort of perfectly situated to enjoy a bros helping trans bros story.
Not sure what "both" is doing in there.
In what sense can people murder transexuals with impunity, Halford?
My guess is that "When I found out she was really a dude I freaked out and stabbed her seventeen times with a steak knife" is still treated more respectfully as a defense than it ought to be, or at least that Halford's referring to something along those lines.
I always feel a little weird talking about trans issues -- I literally don't know anyone trans, or at least I don't know anyone trans that I know to be trans.
(that would be in meatspace. Online, I'm never sure where to draw the line around who I "know" and who I'm merely aware of.)
19 -- not so much that, though it may happen, as police putting murder of trans people far, far down on the list of crimes worth investigating and pursuing to conviction. Which, to its credit, the LAPD is apparently pretty decent about, thanks largely to . . . trans activists.
I also don't know that I know anyone to be trans, but I hope that if I discovered otherwise, I would be not be an awkward asshole about it. The bros helping their bro to unbro is a charming story.
19, 22, etc: This is a relevant and interesting claim
Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum, which is... a low bar for praise.
Just joining those who say: (1) they have maybe gone a little beyond simply not being bigoted scum and (2) that publicly recognizing that not being bigoted scum is laudable is a good thing. Maybe it is a low bar, but since there are still plenty of people yet to make it over that bar it can't hurt to offer encouragement to those who do.
So do they kick her out once she's completed transition? I don't know if it's a mixed sex organization but it doesn't look like it from a cursory reading.
Delurking because I was actually a member of this (tiny) arts fraternity in college; the alumni listserv got an email about a month ago that the actives were doing this, and it's been crazy to see this story get traction over the last couple of days. And now it's on Unfogged! Surreal.
26: The article linked in 26 bugs me, but I can't articulate why nor decide whether my reaction is justifiable. People should click though and discuss so I can decide what to think.
28: I thought he was ftm -- did I get that backwards?
Nope, I'm right -- the story refers to him living in an all-girls dorm pre-transition in high school, and hating it. So he's an eligible frat member.
They could still help with unbra-ing though. And one hopes that they will!
Oh, they helped him to bro. That's nice too but I would prefer it the other way.
29: the actives
Is this a term?
30: I don't know. Wouldn't we have to wade through the actual claims of violence against marginalized groups to see whether they really are about racism? Seems like an empirical question.
I certainly don't doubt that it's true.
It should have been:
wearing raising cash to do the trick--
a bro as lovely as our chick
The article linked in 26 bugs me, but I can't articulate why nor decide whether my reaction is justifiable.
I thought it was a good rant. The thing that made me suspicious was the fact that it was entirely anecdotal, and didn't offer any statistical evidence for the thesis.
But I'm inclined to believe that sort of shell game happens somewhat frequently, and that it's worth calling out (with no evidence to support that belief).
If you don't want to read the article linked in 26, here's the conclusion:
Almost every marginalized group that cites evidence of overwhelming discrimination and violence, especially police violence and abuse, is actually citing statistics against African-American members of that group.
The point of all this is that journalism repeatedly fails to accurately report that people of color suffer the overwhelming majority of police violence. The racism built into the very foundations of American society and culture ensures that this violence continues, is under-reported, misrepresented as evidence of criminality, when it fact it is evidence of the criminalization of people of color, especially Black Americans.
It's my understanding that writings about the criminalization of black people -- with detailed discussion of the history of urban and policing policy, etc. -- isn't especially rare, so I don't think this is a radical claim.
Most recently, Khalil Gibran Muhammad was on Bill Moyers discussing his The Condemnation of Blackness.
Shorter article in #26: "Stop standing up for people who aren't like you! This means you, people who might actually draw media attention to the problem."
The link is really just talking about police violence, and within those parameters, it's probably true. It kind of pretends to have a broader conclusion than it really does, though.
42: I can see why you'd react that way, but I think it's more "Stop being unrealistic about exactly who is at risk for this sort of abuse." I don't know how solid their data is, but taking it at face value, that seems to be a decent point to make.
42: Wait, ned, what? Do you think the article is saying that white people shouldn't stand up against discrimination against marginalized groups? I'm confused.
30: I had a bit of the same reaction: It kind of bugged me and I'm not at all sure if I am right to be bugged.
I guess a couple of the reasons for this are (1) It's a huge claim -- basically any group claiming to be shit on by the cops is coöpting anti-black violence in order to play the victim -- and I have *zero* idea if it's true or not and (2) It's kind of doing the Agony Olympics thing.
But if (1) really is true then maybe (2) matters a lot less.
basically any group claiming to be shit on by the cops is coöpting anti-black violence in order to play the victim
I don't think it's making that huge a claim.
Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum, which is... a low bar for praise.
I'm sympathetic to this feeling - I mean, as a gender-non-conforming person with gender identity concerns myself - but I don't like the way it gets turned into an activist truism. I think it suggests that everyone is starting from a neutral place and that therefore it's just totally trivial to step forward and support your marginalized friends, when actually a lot of people either are committed to asshole prejudice and bigotry or are really, really ignorant and apathetic, and it takes some determination and smarts to get past that. When you are, for example, a very mainstream cis dude, you've been socialized to be a very mainstream cis dude, you hear a lot of messages all the time about how you need to perform masculinity correctly and ward off various social threats from trans people and queers and so on...even if you want to be different, you're constantly getting all these messages from the people around you trying to pull you back into the normal social habits of your kind. It's not trivial to get past all that stuff.
I'd rather not talk about the deets here for activist privacy reasons, but I've been peripheral to working on a case where a group of majority-white folks have done some pretty serious and well-organized support work for a young person of color. Now that support work was not perfect, of course, but there was a lot of fund-raising, publicity, doing stuff to personally support the person and make sure that their friends, family and clergyperson were able to talk to them - I mean, in an ideal world this project would have been POC-led and I'm sure there are other rhetorical things that I'm not picking up on that would have been better, but at the same time, I saw all this unfold and saw a lot of good, solid, real work that the actual person and the friends/family/clergy were really happy with. It was therefore very upsetting to me to read some out of town activists who were not doing support work - who were POC, which means I guess you should take my comments with a grain of salt - trashing on the efforts of the support group as being just a bunch of white people who wanted to show off their radical credentials, cheesy white people ruin everything, etc etc. Most of the white people working on that project were themselves pretty seriously socially marginalized and had made some meaningful sacrifices to do the work, and no one had gone around looking for pats on the back - it was just the same old "oh, well, mainstream people think they are so special when they are just doing what any decent person would do" line of reasoning.
It's obviously not what any decent person would do, because hardly anyone does it.
Also, it's frustrating to me because this "oh, they think they are so special for meeting this low, low standard" thing seems to insult the actual marginalized people involved. Like, presumably the frat kid with this video is actually friends with these people, and is actually happy that his friends have helped him out, just as one of the people who was called out for insult by the activists in my situation was an actual friend of the person the committee was working to help.
If some friends of mine helped me and the response of my activist peers from elsewhere was "what, those shitty cis people are only helping Frowner to prove that they have street cred" I would not feel very good about it.
Obviously it's ridiculous to go around expecting to be praised for being a Very Very Special Ally, but when folks aren't doing that, I wish that activists could drop the "you think you're so special but you're really just a selfish over-privileged cookie-seeking user" routine that we so often fall into.
Yeah, I think that post started out on the right track, but it tended to elide the fact that in many regions of the country, there just aren't enough Black people for them to be the main target of oppression. Also, class.
49 sounds right to me. I overreacted.
The lack of reproductive health, for example, is if anything a bigger problem in largely white rural places (Nebraska) than in largely black rural places (South Carolina). The former places are even more sparsely populated, and the parents of girls who need help are more likely to be religious zealots.
48 is exactly what I would have liked to say, but didn't quite, in 11.
Also, you know who I think should get more credit for being Very Special Allies? Working-class people who are constantly refusing to be held inside the color line. I suppose this is just macro-anecdata, but it sure seems like, as I move around the working-class neighborhoods and spaces of MPLS, I am VASTLY more likely to see multiracial friend groups and families than I am in any other section of society. Especially for young men, multiracial friend groups are running a significant risk of increased police harassment, with nontrivial consequences for the rest of their lives. How many middle-class people would disregard that kind of social/official pressure to conform?
I want to add, too, that trashing on the non-marginalized friends who are helping someone out puts the actual marginalized person in a rather funny position, when things are probably already kind of tricky. Like, do you side with your marginalized peers ("yeah, my frat brothers kind of suck for helping me transition since they're just playing into cis savior-ism and they aren't helping other more marginalized trans people") or do you side with your friends? If you side with your friends, do you feel like you have to stand by them 100%, so that you can't say "yeah, actually you are pretty awesome but I wish you would [do minor thing differently]"?
I mean, I certainly have experience with, like, men who want to be "feminists" because they get lots of praise and attention but who don't really actually care about feminism and drop out when they stop getting constant praise and love, but unless there's some evidence of that kind of behavior, I think it's nice to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Also, I think that "I learned about this situation because I care about my friend, and now I am really dedicated on this topic" is actually a great way to become mobilized - one of the few ways that really sticks.
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Oh, god, deliver me from talking to my mother about how to cut and paste over the phone. She wanted me to write an email of complaint to her landlord for her, so I did, with a bracketed note in it telling her to be sure that I'd got the facts she told me straight. Now she can't forward it or delete the bracketed note, and is mad at me for (a) including the bracketed note given that she can't delete it, and (b) not being able to solve her inability to forward it. And I know my tone slipped a bit, but I really really can't help over the phone.
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You could resend it without the bracketed bit, at least, I guess?
Rfts is far more patient than I am.
I don't think that's a sign of patience so much as "here, if I do this for you swiftly, perhaps it will lead you to leave me be." This is a flaw of mine as a parent also.
More on 26, although I'm not sure this argument works: there aren't any black people who aren't also in a whole bunch of other groups. If such groups fight oppression of their black members, wouldn't those alliances add up to something a lot better than we have now?
It certainly seems worth trying.
A common solution for parent IT support is grandkids.
My mom does not know how to insert spaces into text messages. She tends to run-on sentences, and mixes mis-spelled Czech and English. Her SMSs are up there with a balance board or soldering for a sobriety test.
Working-class people who are constantly refusing to be held inside the color line.
This is making me laugh because I'm now imagining the line as an actual physical thing. "Yo, I dodged that shit like the Matrix."
My list of over-60 people to whom I am obligated to occasionally offer free tech support currently stands at, I think, six.
Yet another advantage to having 40 year old grandparents.
I just get so thrown, though. She's been using a computer at home regularly since the early 90s (since the early 80's if you count playing Pac-Man on an Atari 800, but we probably shouldn't). She day-trades stocks online (which also worries me, but generally her investment skills are better than mine, so what am I going to say about it.) But when she gets stuck on something it's right to "All right, I put the typewriter in front of the TV, what do I do now?" She's not familiar with anything at all -- selecting text is crazy moon language, cut and paste likewise, she clicks on buttons and nothing happens... there's no communication possible.
Also, they (the fraternity as a whole) seems to want to be rewarded for not being bigoted scum actively helping someone many of their kind want nothing to do with. Your friends seem to be taking that "don't bother trying to be an ally because there's no way you can possibly be good enough to win my approval" thing that I really do not get.
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I might be getting an unseemly amount of amusement by scrolling through the meetup groups in my area. Who will swell the ranks of Utah's Naturist Couples and Cthulhu Live?
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Way pwned. Sorry. Reaction got under my skin.
I think there's some basic confusion going on between "Not as bad as they might have been" and "Not as good as they might have been." Someone who's expecting praise for not being as racist/homophobic/transphobic/sexist as they might have been (that is, they were a little bigoted, but not as bad as that other guy over there) is a maddening twerp -- being a little, but less than might be expected, bigoted might be forgivable, but it's nothing you get stroked for.
Someone who's doing something actively good, on the other hand, deserves some kind of praise. No one's obligated to notice them, it may not be a big enough deal to go out of your way to recognize their actions. But if the only reason you're aware of them is a good thing, rather than a bad thing, it's not good to start harping on all the other good things they haven't done (given that you're not spending your life dishing out individual condemnation to the other 350M people in the country who also haven't done the same good things). Doing some small good thing shouldn't make you a target for picking apart all the ways you deviate from perfection.
I think the "What do you want, a cookie?" reaction that's perfectly appropriate to the first sort of person gets wrongly applied to the second a fair amount, and that's what's happening here.
More on 26, although I'm not sure this argument works: there aren't any black people who aren't also in a whole bunch of other groups. If such groups fight oppression of their black members, wouldn't those alliances add up to something a lot better than we have now?
I didn't think it was making an argument beyond, "here's a big important thing that many people gloss over -- try to pay attention and notice when it's happening." That's why I called it a rant; I don't think it's offer analysis or proposing action beyond just, "be aware."
Also, if you're trying to raise money for something, publicizing your efforts is pretty much Job #1.
Huh. I wonder if transgender surgery is going to be a required benefit in Exchange insurance plans.
"Doing some small good thing should't make you a target for picking apart all the ways you deviate from perfection."
It sometimes seems like half of the progressive blogosphere spends about half of it's time doing exactly that.
I realize that it's mostly an onlime phenomenon, but still.
Huh. I wonder if transgender surgery is going to be a required benefit in Exchange insurance plans.
That's not what "exchange" is referring to.
Looks like mostly not (left to states to decide).
I agree with 67 last, except that there really has to be no mind-reading involved. If someone says they want praise, then it's fine to think, or snark, about how they don't deserve it. But when someone jumps to that, without any basis, it's more narcissistic than what they are imputing.
The Judean Front thing is funny because it's true. And not funny because of all the good that hasn't been done over the years because of exactly that sort of thing.
"Doing some small good thing should't make you a target for picking apart all the ways you deviate from perfection."
I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "hey, you did X, but X isn't going to be very useful unless you also do Y" or "you are doing X but actually Y is more urgent" or "you're doing X to help Y, but actually doing X this way hurts Z"....It's not that doing something good should make you immune from critique - I think that's what started off the whole "don't think you're so special just because you did One Little Thing" business.
I don't know, I'm a pretty lousy radical and a lousy participant in the internet because I generally am sympathetic to "I meant well" and "I am doing my best" and "I didn't understand so I made a mistake", which are all positions that one is not supposed to take. At the same time, I often do mean well and often make mistakes, and I'd rather live in a culture where we rip each other apart for mistakes or failings a little less often.
That makes you a much more effective radical and internet participant, if the goals are effecting change and changing minds, rather than moral masturbation.
75.1 -- Whether or not those things are appropriate is going to depend on a whole bunch of things, including the relationship of the speaker to the others (benefactor, victim) involved. And surely efficacy of the statement has to be job 1. 'You're helping your friend, but that person over there has a higher Misery Score, so you should be helping them instead, asshole' isn't likely to accomplish anything other than demonstrate a level of intensity on the part of the speaker.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "hey, you did X, but X isn't going to be very useful unless you also do Y" or "you are doing X but actually Y is more urgent" or "you're doing X to help Y, but actually doing X this way hurts Z".
For the first and second of those, while those are reasonable things to say, they seem to me like things that should have really, really little negative weight associated with them. Unless you're going around criticizing people for reading mystery novels instead of fighting the good fight (which someone might do, but most don't) saying "You did good[ish or at least neutral] thing X where Y would have either been more useful or made X more effective" seems like it should be friendly advice to an ally who's trying, rather than critique of a fuckup. (I don't think you've disagreed with that exactly, I'm just thinking that I wouldn't consider that sort of comment criticism, and would think someone delivering it as criticism would be a bit of a jerk.)
The third one is real criticism, but if someone's doing harm, you've got to tell them about it.
"you are doing X but actually Y is more urgent"
People are really unlikely to take this well, unless it's from a good friend. The retort always comes back about how, well, Z is even more urgent than that! And why don't we spend 16 hours doing Y instead of 4!
ref. Peter Singer, Mrs. Jellyby, etc.
"hey, you did X, but X isn't going to be very useful unless you we can find a way to also do Y"
This I would think appropriate.
I mean, much of this is an artifact of the internet - in actual radical communities, people tend to be much nicer, even when you've screwed up and are getting on their last nerve. And I say this as someone who put together an event last year that was poorly conceived to start with and because I had not done enough due diligence about the speakers then proceeded to go off the tracks to the point where I had to meet with a couple of people to try to figure out how to fix things - stuff is mostly okay now, the event was not actually solely my responsibility and I don't really want to talk about all the details, but it was not a good month when that went down. But even the sharpest-tongued person who shared their criticism with me was surprisingly decent about it and did not actually wish to see me reduced to flinders. In general, when people actually know each other, people tend to be very generous and kind if you're sincere in your apology and attempt to do better.
I mean, much of this is an artifact of the internet - in actual radical communities, people tend to be much nicer, even when you've screwed up and are getting on their last nerve. And I say this as someone who put together an event last year that was poorly conceived to start with and because I had not done enough due diligence about the speakers then proceeded to go off the tracks to the point where I had to meet with a couple of people to try to figure out how to fix things - stuff is mostly okay now, the event was not actually solely my responsibility and I don't really want to talk about all the details, but it was not a good month when that went down. But even the sharpest-tongued person who shared their criticism with me was surprisingly decent about it and did not actually wish to see me reduced to flinders. In general, when people actually know each other, people tend to be very generous and kind if you're sincere in your apology and attempt to do better.
I had the same negative reaction as a lot of people to the article linked to in 26, when Tedra first linked to it. After talking with her about it though, I decided that if you don't acknolwedge the powerful interaction between race and other forms of marginalization, you are going to wind up misallocating resources.
For instance, many transgender activists do go out of their way to support trans peope in minority communities. But unless you keep it in mind that the problems people face get radically worse when compounded by race, you aren't going to do that.
79: I think it work great in the context of "By doing X, you look to me like the sort of person who wants to work on Specific Problem W. In the context of Specific Problem W, Y, rather than X, is the real low-hanging fruit: the same amount of effort you're putting in on X would do more good to solve the same problem you're interested in if you devoted it to Y instead."
That doesn't really apply to the case in the OP, where Specific Problem W the frat is concerned about isn't 'helping trans people generally' but 'helping their frat brother who's trans' (they might reasonably move from the second to the first if they stay interested once their brother's taken care of, but he's the primary concern for now). But in general it's a class of advice that could very easily be helpful and appreciated.
I also think I talk like Tarzan. Movie Tarzan, not well-educated book Tarzan.
Well, with the "Y is more urgent" piece, it depends on what Y is. If you say to me, "you want to support trans youth and you're working on running a coffee hour, but with your skills you could be lobbying to get housing, and because of [statistic] housing is way more urgent and they really need people with your skillset" that seems pretty plausible, while if you say "you're working on running this coffee hour and actually you should be working to stop fracking because of global warming and mass deaths" that tends to veer into Jellyby land.
But with extra confusing variables!
I think the lesson of the article in 26 is not "It is nice to do X, but Y is really more important." It is more "It is nice to do something in the class X, but really the highest priority stuff in that class is X1." There might be better or worse ways of saying that, but if it is true, it should be said.
I beat LB because I added subscripts!
90 --I didn't get that from the article, and did get the sense Parsi rejects in 47. It read to me that the activists are being dishonest by emphasizing only the attribute that they share with the victims, and actively ignoring the attributes of the victims that are more likely the cause of the violence. 'You're being tricked into doing X, when the real issue is Y' isn't it's nice to do something in the class X
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Yes, sports fans, you read that headline correctly. The top 1% has captured all of the income gains since 2009 and then some, roaring ahead while the rest of the population slipped behind. A new paper by Emmanuel Saez (along with his frequent co-author Thomas Piketty, a long-standing cataloguer of income inequality) estimates that the income gains to the top 1% from 2009 to 2011 were 121% of all income increases. How did that happen? Incomes to the bottom 99% fell by 0.4%.This confirms a pattern that Matt Stoller highlighted: that income inequality increased more under Obama than under Bush.
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26: Hmm. My hunch is that Black Muslims actually suffer less from ant-Muslim violence than other Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims. Might be true that Black Hare Krishnas suffer more from prejudice than other colors of Hare Krishnas, but I doubt the flack they get is so disproportionate as to actually be the dominant signal in the total flack that Hare Krishna's get. The anecdotal flavor of the post is also pretty unconvincing. But there might be something to it over all.
It does remind me that once I thought of trying to find all the maternal filicides by race and compare the outcomes. But it was too depressing to slog through the news reports. How many young mothers of color have undiagnosed post partum depression?
54
I have a similarly computer challenged elderly relative. It can be frustrating.
These days it's easier than it used to be to take control of a relative's computer remotely in order to do tech support. Chrome has a little app-thing to do it right from the browser, for example. It's still a huge pain in the ass, but that does smooth things a bit.
My parents are leaning towards setting up their computers so I can do remote support. It won't work if my dad gets a mac, though, since I don't know enough about macs to do tech support.
My grandfather doesn't know a lot about computers, but boy howdy has he mastered forwarding emails.
Evidence in favor of the hypothesis of 26.
Speaking of computer problems I recently figured out (hint if Windows Update stops working this can be a sign of infection and not just some random glitch) that my computer had been infected for weeks with Alureon (aka pihar.c). Hopefully I have removed the infection but it appears to have left behind millions of junk files (over 50GB) in \Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\AJ536L1Y. Is it safe to just delete them all?
My dad and my FIL are both ex-programmers (well, my dad still is, just no one pays him for it any more), so either of them would probably laugh in my face if I offered tech support.
C's grandpa was much more of the "click first, ask questions later" persuasion, which occasionally caused problems, but fortunately he always phoned the Apple helpline first. We bought him a modem for his 86th (or thereabouts) birthday.
Evidence in favor of the hypothesis of 26.
Wait, what? Just about everything that's been released on that case so far is "your black gay mayoral candidate has been found dead and we have a person of interest in custody."
103
Wait, what? ...
The short blurb currently on TPM reads:
Marco McMillian was a candidate for Mayor of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the first openly gay candidate for office in the state's history. His body was found on a the Mississippi River levee Wednesday morning, an apparent murder victim.
Which omits "black" (although this is mentioned in the full story and there is also a picture elsewhere on the front page).
Evidence in favor of the hypothesis of 26.
Well, let's face it, "politically active black guy found dead in Mississippi" is a bit "dog bites man", isn't it. You have to find some way to put a new spin on it otherwise it isn't really news.
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Where's Moby? I've just learned, via Facebook, that someone I know recently moved into a yurt.
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A high school friend lives on a big spread with a tiny brick house and a few yurts.
"Well, let's face it, "politically active black guy found dead in Mississippi" is a bit "dog bites man", isn't it. You have to find some way to put a new spin on it otherwise it isn't really news." That's sort of the point of 26, no? There is a market for news about other groups being oppressed. There is not so much of a market about blacks being oppressed.