Weekend Links
Ducklings, how is your weekend going?!
I am putting this together on Sunday morning, alternating between typing and playing tug o’ war with Tizzy.
At some point when I really get back into the writing habit I want to maintain, I need to do a whole post on getting a puppy and how it changes your life—very much for the better in our case! We really don’t deserve dogs.
Anyway, we need to finish our weekend morning routine and take the little miss out on a long Sunday stroll so here is your batch of weekend reading to take you through the Sunday Scaries.
If you have at all been following the reporting on the mercenary Wagner Group, you may have seen the recent news that apart from the typical recruits, they have been sourcing fighters from Russian prisons. Which isn’t just scary on its face, but prompts some serious questions for Russa; specifically, what are you going to do with these convicts (many of them highly dangerous) when they get home? Aren’t they just cultivating a new generation of potential bratva with actual war-fighting experience?!
And speaking of dangerous young men, Tom Nichols at The Atlantic suggests that a majorly underreported element of mass killings in America is the narcissism. Once again, I feel like commentors such as Contrapoints has been ahead of this curve for a long time, connecting issues of envy, shame, and justice to gender and political power/lack thereof. I also feel like Mr. Nichols is pulling the common trick of trying to rebrand language - shaking his head somewhat at the term toxic masculinity as being unhelpful, when what he’s actually doing is accurately describing the phenomenon. But on the other hand, I’m a pragmatist and if the term has lost its effectiveness in the discourse, by all means let’s use another. Quibbles like this aside, I do think he’s on to something and that wounded self-regard is at the root of a good portion of our social dysfunction at the moment, which is why I found myself re-reading this piece at least twice this week.
The trouble with being chronically online is that you have to learn a whole new visual or spoken language about once a week to keep up with what the hell is going on.
More Musk shenanigans, but also something of a parable I feel. The difference between power and popularity is something our society struggles with mightily, and the two are often confused. Sure, they can overlap, but not always. A lot of the grievance politics and culture wars issues are distillations of this tension, and one topic that is currently being examined in the public sphere is what role social media plays in our lives? How powerful is it really? How powerful should it be? What guardrails exist and who imposes them? …but lest I get too highminded, it’s just simply very funny that this man bought a popularity machine to stroke his ego and it has backfired this spectacularly.
This story is absolutely chilling. We have “lost” hundreds of thousands of children from the education system. Aside from the very real personal safety and wellbeing questions, what is this going to mean for their communities for years to come?
All the buccal fat and drug-induced weight loss content of late has been wild. A lot of people are going to hate the effects in a few years.
I had noticed this trend but hadn’t actually thought about it, so this article was a fascinating read!
GOOD. Christ, what a dystopian nightmare this moment in American politics is. (Margaret Atwood for the highly relevant win.)
The great culinary mystery abides.
Honestly…Shaun nails it. “Masculinity isn’t in crisis. Patriarchy is.” If this isn’t the kind of thumbnail you’d normally give the time of day to, just trust me and watch the whole thing:
