Weekly Grounding #44
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“Forget Boomers vs Millennials, the Next Conflict Is Millennials vs Each Other”
At The Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch analyzes the massive wealth gap within the Millennial generation. He argues that this gap is largely attributable to the “increasingly hereditary” nature of home ownership in the United States and United Kingdom. He writes that “the winds that whipped up a perfect storm of intergenerational conflict are changing. Demographically and electorally, boomers are now a fading force. And as the targets of millennial ire increasingly recede from view, they may soon be replaced by another privileged, property-owning elite much closer to home: millennials who have benefited from family wealth.”
Burn-Murdoch goes on to observe that “In the US, while the average millennial had 30 per cent less wealth than the average boomer by age 35, the richest 10 per cent of the cohort are now about 20 per cent wealthier than their boomer counterparts were at the same age, according to a recent study by researchers in Cambridge, Berlin and Paris. Not all millennials are created equal.” The following graph demonstrates just how unequal they are:
“‘Come Out, You Animals’: How the Massacre at al-Shifa Hospital Happened”
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports on the Israel Defense Forces’ massacre at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza for Mondoweiss. According to one of his sources, “The medical compound housed several buildings, including maternity wards, specialized surgery buildings, and cardiac wings. When the soldiers entered the compound, everyone was ordered to evacuate the buildings. Drones carrying speakers broadcast the army’s orders, telling people that they must exit and gather in the courtyard. ‘The drones kept saying, ‘come out, you animals.’’”
Hajjaj continues: “Despite the army’s claims about the al-Shifa operation’s strategic and military importance and the number of alleged Hamas and PIJ members it had arrested and killed, it obfuscated the real intended purpose of the operation, which was to destroy the health system in northern Gaza and worsen the already disastrous humanitarian conditions. The entire compound is now unfit for use. Even the morgue, containing countless bodies of the slain, was burned down. Israel’s ‘operation’ at al-Shifa was, indeed, a success, and that success was to put Gaza’s largest hospital out of service and hasten social collapse in the north.”
“What's Bill Gates Up To? Have ‘Irregularities’ Found in Funding HPV Vaccine Trials Faded?”
At Counterview, Colin Gonsalves chronicles the sordid history of the Gates Foundation in India in light of Bill Gates’ recent meeting with Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi: “In mid-2009, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine ‘demonstration projects’ were conducted by the Seattle-based NGO, Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), in collaboration with the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the State governments of Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The projects were funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Public memory fades quickly and politicians of all hues wait for this memory to fade so as to carry on regardless of the effect of their policies on the health of the nation. In 2010, says the [Department Related Parliamentary Standing] Committee report, ‘The entire world was shocked by media reports about the deaths of female children in Andhra Pradesh after being administered the HPV vaccines. The project was reportedly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.’”
Gonsalves continues: “On informed consent the ICMR acknowledged that ‘there were gross violations of norms in Andhra Pradesh. 9543 consent forms were signed, 1948 had thumb impressions, while hostel wardens signed 2763 forms. In Gujarat 6217 were signed and 3944 had thumb impressions. Very large number of parents/ guardians were illiterate and could not even sign in their local language. The wardens/ teachers/ head-masters were not given written permissions by the parents/ guardians to sign on behalf of their girls. On many forms, witnesses had not signed. Neither the photographs, nor the photo ID cards of the parents/ guardians/ wardens is pasted in the consent form. On many forms investigators had not signed. On some forms, signature of the parents / guardians is not matching with their names. The date of vaccination in some forms was much earlier than the date of signatures.’”
For more on the ethics of vaccine mandates and the history of forced vaccination in India, see my essay, “The Truth of the Anecdote.”
“NH Proposes Testing Mandate, Homeschoolers Rally”
Dave Dentel of the Home School Legal Defense Association reports on homeschooling families’ successful efforts to defeat a proposed bill in the New Hampshire state legislature “that would have undermined a key component of their homeschool programs—the ability to customize curriculum to meet students’ individual needs.”
Dental recounts the democratic efforts of these families to successfully stop the bill in its tracks: “Many of the 500 homeschooling parents and students who attended the March 4 public hearing on the bill described its various flaws. The crowd filled the main committee room at the statehouse and spilled over into several other chambers… In several hours of testimony before the House Education Committee, the only person who spoke in favor of H.B. 1610 was its sponsor. Two days later, committee members voted unanimously against the bill.”
“Male Values, Avatars and Classical Material”
offers some insightful personal reflections on the male mentors in his life for : “Looking back I think a lot of times I wasn’t interacting with these men alone, but with their avatars — their projections of themselves and not necessarily who they really were. Since men are notoriously reluctant to expose their inner life to others, you always have to be aware that the man you’ve talking to, or observing, has put tremendous effort into creating an convincing one or two dimensional version of themselves for public consumption. If you meet a man who seems limited and emotional flat-lined, best believe they are not as simple as they seem. In the company of men, information about private passions, secret fears and concealed vulnerabilities are rarely revealed and, if when they are, its usually done with great reluctance and often under duress.”George continues: “In the history of American men, the current generation of social media sharing is very much an anomaly. I grew up meeting many stoic men of my grandparent’s generation and the more open cohort who came of age in the ‘60 and ‘70s. The men of my generation I hung with, who matured in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but [sic] it was mostly the language of commerce, athletic obsession, military life or creative expression. Often their inner lives were an undiscovered country they, at least openly, rarely visited. Considering the self-righteous, yet self-centered hot takes that liter today’s social media, revealing a lot of short sighted, clueless thinking, we’re probably lucky our grandparents didn’t have to deal with Twitter while toiling in the American century.”
“Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?”
Merve Emre offers a fascinating review of John Guillory’s book, Professing Criticism, for The New Yorker (this essay is from last year, but I just came across it this week). Emre’s interpretation of Guillory is sociologically relevant beyond the world of literature and literary criticism addressed in his book: “[H]e draws a social and psychological sketch of the scholar, a specimen who appears, from all angles, to be hideously deformed. If there is a thesis that unites the essays in ‘Professing Criticism,’ it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ Any kind of occupational training imparts to its recipients both a sense of mastery and a certain obliviousness to what this mastery costs—namely, the loss of other ways of perceiving the world. Related terms are ‘occupational psychosis’ (John Dewey), ‘trained incapacity’ (Thorstein Veblen), and, most recently, ‘nerdview’ (Geoffrey K. Pullum), all more openly pejorative than ‘deformation.’ Yet they get at the anxious and somewhat pitiable aspects of professional scholars (especially when one encounters them in herds) that Guillory, a model of courtesy and tact, sidesteps. A professional is not unlike a racehorse that has worn blinders long enough to have grown numb to the feel of them.”
Emre expands on the effects of professionalization: “Today, in academe, one looks around with dismay at what a century of professionalization has wrought—the mastery, yes, but also the bureaucratic pettiness, the clumsily concealed resentment, the quickness to take offense, and the piety, oh, the piety! The contemporary literary scholar, Guillory tells us, is marked by an inflated sense of the urgency and importance of his work. This professional narcissism is the flip side of an insecurity about his work’s social value, an anxiety that scholarly work, no matter how thoughtful, stylish, or genuinely interesting, has no discernible effect on the political problems that preoccupy him. On some level, he knows that this ‘form of political surrogacy,’ as Guillory provocatively describes it, is not enough to achieve the cultural centrality that great critics of the nineteenth century enjoyed. But that does not stop him from grasping for it. ‘The overweening self-regard of the scholar is the behavioral correlative of an overestimation of the aim of scholarship, which is in turn an attempt to cope with radical uncertainty about this aim,’ Guillory writes. ‘If only it were enough to say, with Aristotle, that the desire to know is all the reason of the scholar’s labors!’”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.