#if you find this content titillating you NEED to address it

[dancingisdangerouss]

[dgcatanisiri]

This is too long for me to be comfortable to put out without a cut, but dear god, did I need to rant and ramble on this subject...

I always feel awkward when I want to complain about how video games portray and fandom reacts to queer men, because I feel like the conversation (at least here on Tumblr) gets focused on the female protagonists - you know, the Commander Shepard or Alexios/Kassandra debates and that sort. The things where there’s valid comments to make about how important these female protagonists are, especially in an industry that is deeply misogynistic, and, in the case of the Assassin’s Creed protagonists, keep being developed with an eye towards the female-only protagonists, only to have a male protagonist shoved alongside them, if not upstaging entirely (such as Jacob being the center of Syndicate’s marketing, or how Bayek was originally going to die and Aya be the central protagonist of Origins, or the creation of Alexios and probably male Eivor on the basis of “women protagonists don’t sell.”)...

BUT, when I want to talk about my perspective as a gay man, as wanting to play these games for that empowerment, get to enjoy these games for representing me as a gay man, because Shepard, Ryder, Alexios, etc. get to be played as such, that having these male characters who are able to be played as attracted to other men means something to me, and that leads me to not just play the male characters, but prefer them to the female characters, or even to talk about the subject of homophobia in both the games themselves and the fandoms surrounding them... I do feel like there’s this pressure to just effectively shut up and stay quiet and let the women have their empowerment, that the moment needs to be theirs, not mine, that “fandom” (meaning the monolithic entity that is ‘the fandom’ and not necessarily any singular individual who I’m referring to or anything) is pressuring for anyone who enjoys the male protagonists for whatever reason to be silent and let the women enjoy their win, even if there’s a win for underrepresented men in there as well, or even a need to address the problems of homophobia by not representing queer men. That in its way, it’s effectively saying that a win against the sexism against the industry is outweighing or more important than any win against the homophobia. (Or, since I brought up Shepard, racism, considering that Shepard, Ryder, any game with the character creator, can be different skin tones as well, but that’s outside my lane.)

Like, this isn’t a callout post or any kind of directed screed against anyone, just... I suppose it’s a cumulative effect, based on the fact that I remember what the internet in the corners I frequent was like when Odyssey dropped, focused very much (and understandably - let me be clear that I have no desire to step on anyone’s victory or enjoyment of these games here) on Kassandra, and it felt like the fact that I got to play a character I could portray as gay (don’t start me on the bloody DLC though...) was a victory celebration at a table set for one, while (to really stretch my metaphor) seeing this massive party happening across the dining room at the same time, and that (and again, I’m really straining my metaphor, I’m aware), if I wanted to join that party, they would not combine our celebrations, I would have to join in theirs, and, in my wanting to pay attention to my victory, getting laughed at for it. It’s one of those things that makes fandom feel a little alienating, because I don’t particularly have much of a place that feels like it’s a space for me to celebrate my victories, rare as they are, and on occasion, even end up with the impression that, so far as fandom at large cares, that victory I want to celebrate is somehow less important. That the importance of Alexios, playable as a gay man, meant less than Kassandra, period. And, with Valhalla and Cyberpunk’s release on the horizon, along with (maaaaaaybe?) a Mass Effect Trilogy remaster, I find myself bracing myself for this to start up all over again.

And I know some of this is based in the fact that Tumblr and the transformative elements of fandom in general are more of a space that is dominated by women in fandom, who are going to celebrate the wins for them. That’s just how things shake out, I understand that it’s as much the place I’m going for involvement and interaction with fandom at large as it is anything else. Just... I obviously don’t fit in to the areas of “straight male” fandom, and then getting to the places in the “marginalized” segments of the fandom, it still feels like I need to find my way over to the margins of the margins to feel like I have a place in fandom more generally.

Like, I understand that I have male privilege and that is a factor in things - the male characters are probably more likely to be the ones in the marketing, so I get to see that idealized image of myself individually all over the covers and posters and trailers. BUT that doesn’t remove the straight privilege of the people who are shutting down conversations about the importance of the male PCs being portrayed in M/M relationships, even starts going into the realm of casual homophobia - because no acknowledgement of how important it is for the portrayal of gay men, or bi men, IS homophobic. I mean, how often do these companies have their official accounts post images of the M/M pairings? I’ve seen BioWare account retweet FemShep/Garrus and FemShep/Kaidan things, on top of the MaleShep/Female LI pairings. I’ve even seen FemShep/Liara content, which... We could go into the way that F/F pairings get fetishized and tend to be there as either fodder for cishet male titillation or just because the female PC gets swapped in for the male PC (in the way of Peebee riding a non-existent dick in the FemRyder romance scene in Mass Effect Andromeda), I don’t mean to discount that being a thing, so queer women are getting a short stick too. But where’s the M/M relationships? Hell, remember the whole #MakeJaalBi thing? After we got that notice about the patch for his romance would come... Has any official Mass Effect account actually SHOWN content of BroRyder and Jaal?

I mean, remember the Citadel DLC? The appearances of Kaidan’s romance material included FemShep, and Cortez’s content included a split second shot of just him and Shepard holding hands, and since it was blink and you’ll miss it, that means that it doesn’t even make any effort to portray the M/M relationships. And since I brought up Jaal already, BioWare had to be publicly shamed into offering M/M relationships in equal amounts to the other pairings in Mass Effect Andromeda. Like, it’s bad that Peebee’s romance for FemRyder just had the model swapped in for BroRyder, sure. But at least that content was THERE, at release. For gay/bi men who wanted to romance male characters, we have to make sure that we get that patch downloaded (meaning if you play the game without an internet connection, you can’t get access to his romance) - and only because the outrage actually GOT a response, which is not necessarily the norm in this industry.

Hell, the disparity there actually GOT noticed - if you include Scout Harding as a romance, M/M romances are the lowest numerical romances in Dragon Age Inquisition as well, with only Dorian and Bull as options. And I didn’t even realize this until this past year, despite being disappointed in those two options. Even recognizing that Harding is more of a fling than a full romance, it’s still more than M/M romances had. The closest we got was being able to flirt with Cullen twice before he shuts it down (and the rants I’ve had on THAT subject...). 

And that’s just the focus with BioWare - I saw it all through the initial release of Odyssey, while I know that the official metrics are all saying that Alexios saw more play than Kassandra, Kassandra got a lot of positive response in the fandom that was often framed in opposition to Alexios, that she was the “better” protagonist. 

Like, I’m bolding this for emphasis, and so if anyone is TL;DRing this it’s eye-catching enough: My issue is the dismissal and denigration of the male PCs when building up the female PCs. It is not being against celebrating the female PCs. It’s just the way that people will, in their positivity towards a female PC, dismiss the audience who relates to and connects with the male PC. The way that I’ve seen since day one the common “joke” that male Shepard is unnecessary, condemning the voice acting, even asking why he’s there when female Shepard is “the real Shepard”.

It makes fandom a hostile place to be when you’re looking to that character as your representation, your inspiration. Yeah, it’s a joke, but when it is coming from all corners, or at least feels like it, all the time, the humor dies, and you’re left with just the words. The words telling you that this mirror for yourself is something that people don’t care about.

Again, it’s that feeling of already being on the margins and then being pushed further. You are the freak among the freaks. 

But it feels like saying any of this, like I have, is opening the door to be dismissed as being sexist, or misogynistic, or lesbophobic, or anything like that, because people want to boil down what I’m saying to no more than “but what about MEN? Why aren’t you talking about MEN?” in that dismissive way that so many MRA trolls attempt to derail the conversation - except, no, I am TRYING to have a genuine conversation, about men who aren’t represented, men who need these male characters as much as women need the female ones - queer men get the short stick in a lot of cases, like this goes back to the representational matters in a lot of kids TV shows - while we can absolutely talk about the bad representation it was broadly, I remember when Voltron concluded, having Shiro, having arguably the lead male character of the show, end the show marrying and kissing another man... That was heavily ignored by Tumblr. Meanwhile Tumblr EXPLODED for Korra and Asami or Bubblegum and Marceline. 

It’s seeing what is representation for me as a queer man being played down or ignored while the queer women are praised. And, again, I’m not trying to take anything away from queer women, or women in general, but... Where, exactly, am I supposed to look for that same empowerment? And, more importantly, when the same media offers the empowerment for both groups, like video games do, why does it seem almost expected that I as a queer man back off and allow this to just be for the women in general, when the whole point of a variable protagonist is that it allows that empowerment for EVERYONE?

I mean, I say it feels like “opening the door” to these comments because it has happened before, and likely will again. Because saying “this joke feels hostile to me, as a member of an underrepresented group, can we please not?” or speaking about my individual experiences and feelings - often even just in my own space, on my blog, frequently only tagged with my individual tags for organization in my space, rather than publicly shouting it through a megaphone by putting it in public tags, and somehow STILL getting attacked for these comments - is apparently all those things... That’s been the response I’ve gotten to saying things like this in the past. 

And, in case I haven’t been clear with the repeated comments and the bolded statement above, it’s not about me, a man, trying to take away this thing for women. Rather, it’s me, a queer person - and fine, yes, a queer man - who wants to celebrate being seen, wants to celebrate what is still not a common thing of seeing myself in my media, and then feeling like I’m being shoved out of the way because other people celebrating their representation is considered more important, to hell with me and my mirrors.

Like, I’m not saying any of this is anything actively conscious or even intentionally malicious. It does seem like a reflexive defensive position - “men have tried to take this from us, so we’re not letting ANY man through.” I don’t want to come across as flippant or not aware of the fact that this isn’t a walk in the park for women. I get it, I really do. I’m just... It does feel like my struggles are something that I’m being told to downplay in the name of allowing others to have their celebration.

Thing is, my own experiences as a queer person already leave me feeling like I’m getting that as well - I mentioned before (and have elsewhere) that Dragon Age Inquisition’s M/M romances didn’t work for me. But I have often felt like I need to downplay the fact that I don’t emotionally connect to Dorian as a character - in the immediate aftermath of the game’s release, you could not say ANYTHING negative about him without getting shouted down as either a homophobe or dealing with internalized homophobia. Meanwhile, I’m here, pointing out that, hey, the previous games did not really have any direct homophobia, and the little bits that did lean in that direction felt more like the writers living in a homophobic society and not able to wholly divorce that in their writing than anything in-universe. To me, Thedas was a place where being gay was a difference that made no difference. And then Inquisition tore away that escape from homophobia so bluntly.

So, Dorian doesn’t empower me, you ask, so what about Bull? Yeah, I identify with “queer man” because while I’m a man romantically attracted to other men, I’m also asexual - just regular vanilla sex is in the fringes of my comfort zone. Bondage is an outright catapult out of there. At mach three. So I’m left uncomfortable by both of my “options” in Inquisition. And the response I have always braced myself for when I bring this up, when I do add my voice to the conversation about the M/M options, is “well, they can’t please everyone, and this was good for some people, so you should be content with that.” Being told I can’t have everything, so feeling uncomfortable at best is just something I have to live with, because hey, THOSE OTHER PEOPLE got satisfied, and so you should just be happy for them.

It’s that pained metaphor I offered earlier - the victory celebration isn’t for me, I’m on the outside looking in EVEN STILL. I am the freak among freaks. 

Where is my place to belong, in all of this? Because it’s honestly hard to find, when all the spaces deemed “for me” still feel like an exclusionary party?

[adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction]

Practicalities of Censorship

Every so often I see a thread cross my dashboard arguing about censorship with relation to AO3 - in particular people claiming that AO3 is bad because it allows basically any story regardless of content, that people are bad for supporting it, or that AO3 should implement some method by which problematic fics get taken down. These complaints are usually met with explanations around the history or AO3, why it was implemented the way it was, and why thinking that AO3 is fine the way it is does not equal being a pedophile. I want to tackle this from another angle - practicality.

Let's assume for the sake of this post that the people making these arguments are correct and that there are some things which shouldn't be allowed on AO3 (or an an alternative fic platform set up to be a better version of AO3 without all the bad stuff - I'll mostly be taking about "fixing" AO3 in this post but the same problems would apply to setting up a new and "safer" fic site). There are a lot of arguments against censorship to do with quality of works produced and whether this results is less good art when people are scared to produce things that might get banned, or whether there is artistic merit to works that display despicable actions. Let's just imagine for the moment that the whole argument is settled and the "let's purify AO3 for the sake of the children" crowd are correct. What would need to happen next? This isn't something I've seen addressed in these posts.

There are a lot of problems with censorship. Skipping over the ethical discussion of whether censorship is good or bad and in what circumstances it should be accepted, let's focus on two practical aspects: deciding what should and shouldn't be banned, and how you would implement such a ban. Let's start with problem one: where do you draw the line?

Let's assume we have some scale of rating from absolutely sickeningly awful deserving of destruction to perfectly clean and innocent with not the slightest thing wrong with it. Somewhere between these two endpoints is a line and everything to one side of it is bad and should be banned/blocked/deleted from AO3, etc. Everything on the other side of the line is fine and should be left available for people to read. Some things may seem easy to define. Fic A is incest porn, where a child is graphically raped in a way that's cleanly meant to titillate rather than horrify and the abuse is glorified and justified in text, and it's full of poor writing, spelling and grammar mistakes, and has no artistic merit as a work (how you judge artistic merit would need a few thousand words to explore as a subject on its own right). Let's stick that on the bad side of the line since that's the sort of thing that people on Tumblr are crying out to be banned. Fic B is a fluff fic where a character makes another character soup because they're feeling ill and they watch movies together. Nothing remotely sexual, just two adult characters being sweet to each other. So we'll put that on the good side of the line, right?

But the problem comes in deciding where that dividing line should be and what should be done about the things that sit close to the line. You could come up with some simple rules. Let's say, "Everything involving underage incest is on the bad side of the line." Seems straight-forward. But what if you have a story dealing with someone's recovery from incest and CSA? The story has a character who was abused in the past and the narrative deals with them getting therapy and overcoming their trauma. None of the abuse is shown in the text of the story, it all happens off-screen as it were, and the story sends a message that incest and CSA are bad but offers hope to former victims. Surely that story would belong on the good side of the line? So maybe we amend the rule to, "Everything involving graphic incest is on the bad side of the line." That would let us keep the story about overcoming the trauma on the good side but block anything that uses incest as porn. But is consenting incest between grown adults treated the same as abusive incest?

And what if you get a story that's more about the trauma but that has a handful of flashbacks about the rape that would count as graphic. These flashbacks are meant to be horrifying not sexually exciting. Would that be okay? Is it the intent of the scene that matters? But in that case, what happens if the author writes a scene that's intended to be horrifying but a reader interprets it as arousing? Would it be okay if the author includes a disclaimer in the notes saying that this is a terrible thing and shouldn't be done in real life? Is it the intensity of the scenes shown directly in the story? In which case, where do you draw the line between something described explicitly and something merely eluded to? Is it the precise terms used? Which terms? Or how many times those terms are use? Is a subtle allusion to an event okay? In which case, what happens with a slightly less subtle allusion?

The stories that are far away from the line are easy to place, but the ones close to it become a challenge. Any attempt to define straight-forward rules starts to fall apart quickly and you get to the point where you have to argue on a case-by-case basis for each story, which would involve a massive amount of time invested to check each of these stories and decide whether or not they're allowed. Once again the practicalities of "how would you enforce something like this?" rear their ugly head but that's a question we'll address later.

We also have the problem that where I might draw the line between the bad and the good might be different from where you would draw the line, and would be different from where someone else would draw the line. Let's go back to Fic B as described above, our perfectly innocent fluff story. I might think that's perfectly acceptable, but if those two characters are both the same gender, there will be some homophobic people who will say that it's wrong and corrupting innocents because it sends the message that homosexual relationships are good. Or even if the characters are different genders, some highly religious people might think it sends a bad message if those characters are unmarried and living together in a relationship, even if nothing explicit happens within the story. Or what if the characters are married but it's an interracial marriage? A KKK member might say that sends a bad message. Different people have a different idea of what counts as bad content.

In the real world, there have been cases of books that address racism being banned because they use the n word. Harry Potter has been banned by religious groups. According to the website www.banned-books.org.uk a sweet children's book about two penguins hatching an egg was banned by a lot of schools and libraries in the US because the two penguins are both male - even though this story was actually based on a true story. The book Black Beauty, about the experiences of a horse, was banned during the Apartheid in South Africa simply for including the word "black" in the title. If you look at that site, a lot of books have been banned for a lot of different reasons and a lot of good literature has ended up caught up in the censorship usually because religious groups objected to in on moral grounds.

You could say "don't let the bigots and racists be in charge of the censorship," but historically, when censorship has come into play in the past, the people who tend to end up the worst for it are minorities. LGBTQ+ groups and people of colour tend to get censored more than straight, white men. Stories about their experiences often deal with problematic issues and therefore they get banned. The groups that generally end up making decisions about what is and isn't okay tend to be the groups that have the most power to begin with, and the end result is silencing of minority voices. This is one reason I'm very wary of anything to do with censorship, because the people who usually end up the worse for it are those who most need their voices heard.

But let's imagine all of these problems are magically overcome and we come up with a perfectly clear set of rules about what counts as good and bad fic and the dividing line is agreed by good, rational people who aren't remotely bigoted and who are able to define the criteria for what should be banned in a way that will only ever block the harmful stuff.

We still have to deal with the practicalities of enforcement we set aside earlier. We've built our perfect set of rules to define good and bad fics and now we want to put them into practice to ban any of the awful stuff. How would you go about doing it?

We could try and get machine filters to do censorship by looking for keywords and particular tags or using more complex algorithms to judge what a piece of content is about, but this ends up with chaos like Tumblr auto-flagging a lot of perfectly clean content, or YouTube blocking videos that just happened to be by/about LGBTQ+ people. Any software based implementation would struggle because someone talking about a thing as a problem contains the same words as someone glorifying that thing, and machines tend not to be great at picking up tone. You would get a massive amount of errors with things being falsely flagged as bad and things being falsely let through despite breaking the rules.

And people would be sneaky. Someone wanting to include their graphic story wouldn't tag it as for over 18s because tagging something as for over 18s would get it banned, so they would tag it as something else. The terms "lemon" and "lime" used to describe fics by older members of fandoms started from exactly this sort of thing. Websites decided to not allow adult content so people continued to post adult content but they used the citrus scale for tagging it so people would still be able to find it. Which works when people know the terms to look for or avoid, but which doesn't work for people not in the know. Is a "lemon" or a "lime" fic more explicit? Do you know what a fic being tagged as "grapefruit" would mean? By their nature, these tags are coded, which is not great for clarity.

Any sort of system that just blanket bans key words or tags would result in people just not using those keywords and tags but posting the stuff anyway. It would actually make the situation worse because there would still be incest porn and the like, only now it wouldn't be tagged. As it stands on AO3, people use the tagging system very well and people who don't want to see the incest porn can do things like exclude that tag from searches, or just not open fics they see that have the tag. If there were rules in place to not allow anything with that tag, then people would stop using the tag, which would actually mean more people would see incest porn they didn't want to because it would no longer be tagged properly, or it would be tagged using code words which only mean something to the inside group. It would be much harder to avoid the things you don't like.

So let's say we don't let a computer decide what's breaking the rules. Let's say there is a system by which readers can flag a fic as being inappropriate to get it banned. Human beings get to decide, but what's the threshold? Does a thing get banned as soon as someone reports it? Or does it need to be flagged by multiple people to be banned? In which case fics written in tiny fandoms might slip through the cracks because not enough people are reading it to them flag it. This is also open for exploitation. Someone who takes a dislike to a particular person might encourage others to flag their fics as inappropriate, regardless of whether or not they are. Someone might create fake accounts or log in anonymously over proxies to spam a fic with flags.

And even if no one acts maliciously to abuse the system, not everyone will be careful about checking the precise and perfect rules defined to mark the difference between acceptable and unacceptable work. People will flag things incorrectly, based on their own viewpoints of what should or shouldn't be allowed, which we've already said is a problem because everyone will draw the line in different places based on their own beliefs.

So what's the alternative to a community-driven method for managing content? You could have specific people whose job it is to go through content and decide whether it adheres to the rules. Maybe a computer system or community flagging could funnel fics into a review channel where human beings check every one carefully. These people would understand the rules and be certain to always judge fics accurately according to the magically perfect rules defined earlier, which are guaranteed to only ever block bad fics but never block a good fic.

So problem solved, right? We have our perfect rules perfectly implemented.

Except where humans are employed to check whether content is acceptable or not, it involves a large number of people checking through basically the worst content out there. Some social networking sites do this sort of thing now and it can be hugely traumatising for people who do that work. It's not good for them mentally to have to be exposed over and over to the worst content being put up online. There tends to be a high turnover in those jobs because they burn out fast, and that's where people are being paid for this stuff.

A site like AO3 relies on volunteers so it would require a large number of people to volunteer to look at the darkest most gruesome content and decide if it breaks the rules or not. Either you have people who hate those sort of fics doing this out of a sense of duty to maintain the purity of the content, in which case they will probably struggle with having to read a load of stuff they really, really don't enjoy. Or you will have people volunteer because they really like those fics and this is the way for them to read them. And that probably defeats the point of doing this, because it means that the people who would be seeking out those stories anyway would be the ones reading them to see if they break the rules.

There are a lot of problems with censorship, both ethically and practically. Even if you are fully on the side of censorship from a moral standpoint, you have to address the practical concerns if you want to propose an implementation.

As it stands, I think the current system works. There is stuff on AO3 that I would not in a million years want to read, but I don't have to. AO3 is brilliant for its tagging system and I can look at the tags and nope past fics that are full of my personal squicks or that I think endorse something terrible. Readers can exclude tags they want nothing to do with or just not click on ones that include elements you dislike. You can curate your own experience, which actually works with the whole idea of everyone drawing a line in a different place. You and I will have different stories we want to avoid, and we can both choose to avoid them based on author's tagging for them, rather than some other person decreeing what is acceptable for either of us to see.

If you still think that AO3 should be blocking or banning certain content, have a think about how this would work in reality. Because when ideas like that are implemented in the real world, all manner of problems happen.

I think the fact that this post is still a couple of thousand words long with me skipping over several parts of the debate is a sign that this is not a simple problem that can be easily fixed.

[bigskydreaming]

maurianasravenholdt replied to your post:

So, okay. The posts about how psychodrama and...

I read all of this and was very interested. I have to sit with it for a while, because I have questions. If, for example, a non-con fic is written by a survivor, is it not also taking away personal agency to say that ‘there are too many of that kind of fic’ or ‘someone else might be titillated by your fic so it shouldn’t be published’? Some of it feels… eerily familiar to what survivors of rape and harassment face regularly. The censorship of their coping mechanisms.

See, but this is precisely why I always make a point to stress that my aim is fostering an environment that encourages personal accountability, rather than people ducking and hiding communally behind the shield of ‘well some survivors use it to cope’ - when we all know damn well from the sheer volume of noncon, pedophilia and incest SMUT specifically....that its not all being written by survivors. Not to mention there is a significant tonal difference between various fics, with many feeling more ‘permissive’ and even encouraging of the noncon scenarios vs those that have at least a bit more ambiguity to them and suggests that the author has at least mixed feelings about what they’re writing and more likely is working through some stuff than just seeking to write masturbation fodder for people into this stuff.

Like, its impossible to know how many fics like this are written by survivors as attempts at coping mechanisms vs how many are written by nonsurvivors just for sexual gratification.....just like its impossible to know which are written by which. Nor, do I think, should it even be attempted - that’s the gatekeeping I’m so often accused of wanting. The idea that survivors must flash their trauma credentials at the top of a fic as a disclaimer for being allowed to write it.

The point is not identifying works written by survivors vs non survivors, the point is merely hold a macro level awareness that REGARDLESS of which fics are written by which authors.....it remains inarguable that there is no stretch of the imagination in which EVERY ONE OF THESE FICS is written by survivors for self-healing reasons.

So the thing about the coping mechanisms argument above all else, in terms of why I hate it so much, is because by extension....given how often its held up as a defense against criticism of these works in general....there’s no way that everyone who trots out that argument is ACTUALLY one of the survivors writing these things for self-healing.

Which is a big reason why the sight of that argument always has me raising my hackles in the first place....because again - I don’t know who’s a survivor and who isn’t, I’m not TRYING to vet anyone or tell the difference...but I don’t NEED to in order to still be aware that over the years there’s been a shitload of people who have happily used survivors that happen to agree with them or hold opinions that enable their own ‘kinks’....as kinda a human shield against criticism. And that to me, is absolutely disgusting and reprehensible, and the willingness people have to engage in that kinda bullshit is a problem in and of itself, IMO.

But all of that ultimately circles back around to....personal accountability. I’ve never argued for any kind of fandom accountability, where only certain people, appropriately vetted and appointed or what the fuck ever, get to weigh in on certain conversations or write certain content. I’ve merely always been arguing....regardless of whom these things might or might not apply to...I at LEAST want the people who hear what I have to say on these matters and find I’ve mentioned new angles or perspectives they hadn’t considered before, that make them question the....unquestioning way they’ve parroted these arguments before or written these fics assuming its no big deal because general fandom sentiment assured them it wasn’t....like, if people just stopped running from even having these arguments or hearing these criticisms at all, and just started re-examining their own choices on these matters and whether or not they’re entirely comfortable with long-unquestioned decisions or arguments once they apply a little more scrutiny to them....honestly, that’s a good enough start for me. 

Again, I don’t know who is a survivor who actually uses writing dark noncon fics as a coping mechanism, and who isn’t a survivor and just writes them because they’re their ‘guilty pleasure’ or whatever. But YOU know, as in you, any individuals reading me writing posts like this. And I don’t have to know who is whom, in order to just ask that people who DO know perfectly well what applies to them and what doesn’t, like....then THINK about these things.

I’m well aware it won’t do anything to address the people that categorically just don’t give a fuck because they actually ARE pedophiles and the like, and actually get off on all this stuff with full self-awareness as to what they’re doing and seeing appeal in it at its basest levels.....like, they’re not going to do a damn thing differently, sure. But the more people stop seeing ‘well survivors use it to cope’ as an acceptable shield to hide behind if it has nothing to do with them and their reasons for writing certain content....the more these other people have to scramble for other arguments entirely, to hide behind. Which is more and more likely to show them for what they are, and make them stick out as predators rather than community.

Censorship is useless and always will be, IMO. Because the problem isn’t that these works exist. The problem is that these works and the permissive atmosphere they’re regarded in blanket all of fandom in such a way that actual predators have abundant camouflage to move around in and act like they’re just part of the gang, like any other fan.

Censor these kind of works, shut off the faucet....doesn’t accomplish anything towards the true issue of there still being predators in all these fandom spaces....and now they simply have to be even more circumspect and subtle about grooming potential victims, etc.

But the more we build atmospheres of personal accountability in our fandom spheres, expecting people to look honestly at their own actions and impacts and make their choices based on actually asking their consciences what they’re okay with rather than just blindly repeating the things they’ve been told that save them from having to do that work...THAT actually has potential to address the real root issue. Because the more being expected to be aware of your impact and footprint among your own community becomes actually commonplace....the more the behavior of those who still refuse to prioritize anything over their own wants, 24/7, sticks out and makes people wary of that. While at the same time....the more people, minors especially, are encouraged to do their own critical thinking in regards to these matters before drawing their conclusions on what THEY feel most comfortable with.....the less vulnerable they become to the grooming tendencies of predators who RELY on this idea of just....accepting ‘this is the way fandom works though’ when presented with it by older, more established fans.

So ultimately, my beef with the coping mechanisms argument is that as long as fandom’s happy to spout it unanimously as their go-to defense against criticism on these matters, really it just goes to show its being used as a derailing tactic. Allowing the people who AREN’T survivors whom its true for, to just toss it up there without a second thought, and never have to engage honestly with the conversation we’re trying to have.

As to the validity and viability of these fics as coping mechanisms? Tbh, like....that’s not really something I’m all that interested in arguing. The concerns I outlined in that other post are still there and things I stand by, but like I also said in it, and said here....I have zero interest in arguing with someone who says “no, this helps me” and instead telling them no, you’re wrong, it doesn’t. 

I do think its still reasonable to at least ask people keep in mind the arguments about why they perhaps do as much harm as good. I do think its appropriate to expect people to be a little less confident in putting forth “this is the way this works” to newcomers and minors in fandom who look to them as examples, hear all this validation of this specific coping mechanism and assume it must be a good thing, and if it doesn’t seem to work for them too, well they must be doing it wrong. And also, I think its important that people acknowledge that coping mechanisms are NOT innately good or healthy. They’re simply tools we come up with to deal with our traumas, and like any tools, they’re not inherently good or bad, right or wrong. I mean, you start going around getting into fights to distract from shit you have bottled up and aren’t dealing with, to just feel alive, as a way to punish yourself, etc....all of those reasonings for frequent physical fights can still viably fall under the umbrella of being ‘coping mechanisms’ for being physically abused at home yourself and with no possibility of fighting back against your abuser....but does that make them automatically healthy? And does that mean that you’re not still harming the people you pick fights with just to have an excuse to beat on someone? No and no.

And so on that note, I don’t think its unreasonable to expect even survivors to keep that in mind when making decisions as well, because our desire to heal and move past our trauma is not permission or an excuse to hurt other people in the process. And again - I have zero desire to track down any single individual, figure out whether or not they’re a survivor, and quiz them on their choices and motivations and decide whether I approve or not. I just want people to stop trying to act like we all live in a vacuum and our choices can somehow affect people positively, but never negatively. Simply because we don’t want to pair any kind of responsibility with the escapism we come to fandom for.

But we talk a lot about how online fandom was ‘made’ and who made it and a lot of other things that basically signal our awareness that fandom is an artificial construct. It didn’t just exist as it is, and we stumbled across it and what we found is what we got. We made it. Its homegrown.

And there’s a big problem, IMO, when we’ve ended up in a state where we go about literally building communities....while simultaneously trying to hold on to the idea that we’re each only here to take what we can from our communities and have no responsibility towards each other, to at least honestly be aware of our impact and influence on others around us...and to make an effort to not carelessly inflict or help perpetuate harm, while blithely saying oh that has nothing to do with us. 

When we ask ourselves even the simple question of “are these fics actually helping me or do I just want to believe that, or are they a placebo maybe, or are they maybe simply desensitizing me, and either way, what effect are they having on my community at the same time? And if I can’t actually confidently say they’re helping me heal, they’re what I NEED, and other people are claiming concern and harm stemming from this overall trend I’m contributing to here....does it really hurt me to look around for other potential coping mechanisms that I might feel more confident in, or won’t carry such concerns?

The reason I object so much to being constantly accused of wanting censorship, is that’s the complete ass backwards takeaway of literally everything I’ve ever said on this subject.

After all, censorship is ultimately an external third party being responsible for deciding what is and isn’t published and proliferated, based on their reasoning.

What I’m arguing for, and always have been, is the EXACT LITERAL OPPOSITE:

Encouraging and ultimately expecting individuals to be responsible for what they do and don’t publish and proliferate, and actually APPLY their own reasoning to their choices there, rather than simply hitting “Publish” without a second thought and waiting for the kudos and comments to roll in while preparing to ignore all criticism, regardless of what it may be.

[lanonima]

anyway, I’ve been thinking about some stuff. under a cut because it’s really long and rambling, no real point just musings about my identity and relationship with media

I’ve talked before about my relationship with the word queer (and other identity words) but not really my relationship with media and I think that’s also something that is strongly affected not only by who I am but also by when I grew up

like, when I was a young queer kid, since I knew very early on, there was no lesbian media that wasn’t porn written by men for men. Literally what you got was the subtitled Sailor Moon VHS tapes from Blockbuster if you were lucky

when I was in high school the most famous yuri was Strawberry Panic which is horrible and predatory and I hate it, and most lesbian media back then was like that when it existed at all - very clearly not being produced for actual lesbian readers in the same way yaoi is not produced for gay readers

however the fact that gay characters were (and are) usually written by women -  even though it’s pretty bad rep by today’s standards and even modern BL is definitely not representative of actual gay relationships - means that as a queer woman I’ve always ended up relating a lot more to gay, male characters written by women, and so I��ve always had a positive opinion of BL as a genre - it really did a lot for me when I was young and I have no problem with today’s teens still being into it

(although to be fair I tend to relate to characters with an intersection of depression and homosexuality rather than just gay characters but that’s a different essay for a different day)

I know that BL is a pretty controversial topic nowadays

and yes, these days there is a lot more mainstream media, and a lot more fandom media which can cater to whatever. “queer media” as opposed to BL/GL. but while I primarily write about lesbians myself, making the books I would have wanted to read, I’m really not drawn to read or watch queer media produced in the west. fandom is one thing - though I really don’t consume very much fanfic at all - but when it comes to mainstream media, the things being produced with gay and lesbian characters really don’t appeal to me. I’m kind of picky, I know, so I have to be interested in the thing by itself already, I won’t watch something just because it’s gay. I’m glad people are enjoying these shows and books and that the quality and quantity is increasing, but I can’t get into the vast majority of them.

obviously I’ve gotten really into danmei and baihe recently. other than the fact that xianxia is amazing and gives me a lot I didn’t know I wanted in fantasy, they also have a different approach to romance and intimacy. now of course there are cultural differences and issues of censorship neither of which I’m qualified to talk about since I’m a white American BUT relationships in the Chinese media I’ve consumed (queer or straight) tend to be a lot less overwhelming and a lot less focused on sex as the end goal and most of the intimate moments are very soft and domestic. and I think that I’m really drawn to this kind of writing about relationships as an asexual person who often has a complicated relationship with love and sex, I can understand it a lot more. I’m finally reading romances that really, really appeal to me and make sense to me and the fact that so many webnovels are queer and in a genre I want to read is a bonus! I’m having a good time.

anyway.

being part of fandom or any genre which can be classified as BL/GL brings its own issues with it and I know there’s always back and forth and back and forth but I mean. which side should I be on? how am I expected to relate to media? as a white American, as a lesbian, as a woman, as an asexual, as someone with mental illness? it’s ridiculous right? all of those needs are different and can’t necessarily be addressed by the same media or even the same style of media

There are some things which are undeniably true:

-it’s very dangerous to be a woman in this world and fandom/self-published media is often the only safe space that girls have to explore their sexuality

-however it isn’t fair to say girls only fetishize gay relationships because that’s all they write when in fact the overwhelming majority of good characters in media are male, the overwhelming majority of good chemistry is between male characters. the prevalence of m/m fic is statistically accurate to the ratio of m:f characters

-it’s also true that female characters are harder to write about because before you can even start you have to strip them of all the inherent sexism and bad writing and completely build up from nothing, whereas with male characters you can just start (and I would say that even in original media young women also tend to write about men because we’re societally conditioned to think men are better and more interesting - most of my characters were male until I got into college at which point I started writing about women almost exclusively, but in order to do that I had to deal with a LOT of internalized garbage. it was not a given but a conscious choice and process to get here)

-that being said, it’s also complicated as a queer person, or any marginalized person because we must always deal with the fact that yes, some people are fetishizing us and yes, the vast majority of media “about” us is not really about us. It’s not written by us or for us or telling stories we want to see, it’s usually titillation for someone else

-there’s always going to be a lot of misinformation in media, because publishers and producers care more about money and will choose to cater to white, straight men and women, and in fandom because a lot of content is being produced by teenagers or just people that are not familiar with what they’re writing about

-there are plenty of queer people in fandom, but they’re always going to be outnumbered and even if they aren’t, bad institutional education and limited access to good educational resources will always mean that most queer fic isn’t going to be particularly accurate. there’s fewer queer people in mainstream media because people straight-up don’t care about us (not that I have to say that, we all know) and so for that and the previous reason, mainstream queer media is also not likely to be that accurate

now things are slowly beginning to meander in a positive direction but it’s going to be a long time, and when everyone is relying on fandom to find what they want there will inevitably be clashes in what people like, want, and need. unfortunately there are no easy answers. identity and media is always going to be complicated, identity and fandom will always be complicated

I just wish that people would be willing to step back so we could all have the space we need to explore the things we want to explore, that’s what fandom is there for, after all. but I know asking people to be nice and stay in their own lane on the internet is often a lost cause

in any case, I’m going to keep writing what I want to write and reading what I want to read and hoping that eventually American society and media will catch up with the kinds of things I’d like to consume...but I’m not really holding my breath, you know?

[the-wall-flower-girl-blog]

A Skeletal Anime Star Is Teaching American state loads regarding the japanese Comics trade

One of my favorite new anime this season isn’t filled with explosive action or high drama. It’s not even the one regarding highschool athletics. It’s a few skeleton named Honda Yosuga no Sora sells books. in addition as being uproarious, he offers some fascinating insight into the globe of commerce comics in Japan.

 Honda is that the star of Gaikotsu Shotenin Honda-san—or, as it’s known as in its currently-broadcasting subtitled unharness on Crunchyroll, Skull-face proprietor Honda-San. supported a comedic manga series that come into being on-line on the japanese art website Pixiv, Honda-San could be a dramatized recollection of the mangaka’s actual past as a shop worker. each character at Honda’s shop is loosely supported a former colleague, thus they’re all sporting masks—and ar solely known by them—to obscure their faces. And Honda himself is simply straight up a skeleton, resulting in the fantastical absurdity of a skeleton, a lady in a very full-on knight’s helmet, another in a very kitsune mask, and a man in a very motorbike helmet moping around in a very shop.

Honda-San principally gets its slice of life comedy out the overall stresses of operating retail—coping with long lines and dumb client queries, having to place out stock and maintain the shop, addressing over-aggressive PR folks attempting to pitch promos, things like that. It’s a series that finds joy in incompatible along the over-exaggerated absurdity of those cloaked workers with the relatable humdrum nature of this sort of labor. however as a result of Honda himself is guilty of addressing manga and foreign comics at his store, loads of the private humor in his stories conjointly tends to cope with comics themselves—and thus, in addition as riant your ass off at the antics of it all, you furthermore may get a sliver of insight into however comics ar treated and sold-out in Japan.

 Honda-San has solely airy seven episodes thus far—they run regarding eleven minutes long, covering 2 very little vignettes for each one. Even therein short time it’s managed to the touch on everything from the literal physical variations between yank comics and Japanese manga, the thought rise of “Boys Love” romance books—especially however it clashes with the quantity of actual LGBTQ-centric comics material in Japan—to doujinshi (self-published manga), and even content and censorship problems that thought retailers need to cope with once commerce adult material. It’s all after all, vie primarily for laughs (especially the sex-centric stuff, because, well, awkwardness regarding titillating material is a simple gag). however even then, it’s all done whereas giving bit of insight into simply however comics retail operates within the country, and insight into trade trends that you just wouldn’t extremely expect out of a cute very little anime series a few skeletal proprietor.

Honda’s unknown place of labor isn’t simply dedicated to commerce manga, sort of a Mandarake or Animate, thus it’s not like all of his customers ar conservativist comics nerds. It’s folks shopping for stuff they don’t perceive for his or her children (stuff like, as you may have seen in infectious agent clips of the show creating their approach around social media recently, R-rated titillating books!), or most apparently, foreign tourists wanting to urge a slice of Japanese culture. Honda doesn’t dismiss those customers only for being nerdy gaijin or no matter, however instead with patience guides them with a unfortunate earnestness that's simply a joy to observe. whether or not it’s gay men trying to find comics that represent LGBTQ+ romances in a very additional profound manner, or hordes of excitable ladies simply trying to find some inconsequential bishonen protagonists to squeal over, Honda welcomes all with a smile. a rather cheesed off smile—and, well, as a skeleton the grim smile is sort of the default anyway—but it’s a smile however.

 It’s that concentrate on foreigners that produces Honda-San thus fascinating to observe as a foreigner, giving you a weird, funny very little window into a world that’s not extremely given loads of attention in anime. You return to Skull-face proprietor Honda-San for a couple of absurdists laughs, and within the method, however you keep to be told a bit one thing regarding the japanese comics trade in a very delightfully kinky approach.

 Haruka and Sora Kasugano area unit returning home, to an area stuffed with recollections.

 Having lost their oldsters in an exceedingly tragic automobile accident, the twins resolve to come back to the rural area and begin life afresh at their grandfather's house, the haunt a relentless reminder of moments from their past. acknowledgment them area unit childhood friends Nao Yorihime and Akira Amatsume, and newcomer Kazuha Migiwa. it's a heat welcome, symbolic of the times that ought to come back.

 Their peace is just passing, however, as suppressed emotions, born from vows each new and forgotten, begin exerting their influence on the twins' new lives. And at bottom, a dark secret, solely well-known to them, begins to unshackle.

 Based on the visual novel by Sphere, Yosuga no Sora not solely explores the ability of lost recollections and true love once the bonds of the many become tangled, however additionally raises the queries of morality and social acceptance.

 Yosuga no Sora  EP.1

Yosuga no Sora  EP.2

Yosuga no Sora  EP.3

Yosuga no Sora  EP.4

Yosuga no Sora  EP.5

Yosuga no Sora  EP.6

Yosuga no Sora  EP.7

Yosuga no Sora  EP.8

Yosuga no Sora  EP.9

Yosuga no Sora  EP.10

[nofomoartworld]

[NSFW] A Brief History of Japanese Rope Bondage

This article contains adult content.

Taut lines, complex designs, and knots that would make a sailor blush are bound together in the art of kinbaku, or erotic Japanese rope bondage. The practice is part sculpture, performance, and pas de deux, and these days, you don’t have to be kinky to have seen it. Artists and enthusiasts have adopted the practice, bringing doses to the public in fashion magazines and art galleries alike. A search for #kinbaku on Instagram yields an infinite scroll of over 60,000 tagged posts.

To the uninitiated, kinbaku might seem like the latest in pop-BDSM, but the tradition evolved over centuries before making it to the smutty, nipple-free crannies of social media. Historical antecedents include representations in shunga, Japanese erotica that once doubled as sex education for newlyweds, and Japan’s version of the Kama Sutra, Shijuhatte. Katsushika Hokusai’s Dream of a Fisherman’s Wife is an iconic reference to rope erotica—the ukiyo-e woodblock print depicts the ecstasy of a woman ravaged by octopuses whose tentacles intertwine and titillate her body in rope-like fashion.

The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, 1814 © Katsushika Hokusai

Just as the tools of Western subjugation have become the subject of fantasy, rope has had a similar pattern of expression. The metal chains used to anchor damsels in distress in Western fairy tales find their correlate in the rope that subdues captives in Japanese folklore. In his definitive text on the subject, The Beauty of Kinbaku, author and teacher Master "K" explains that shibari, the general term for rope tying, has had myriad practical and decorative functions throughout Japan’s history, in Shinto spiritual offerings, Sumo wrestling, and traditional kimono. Its adoption into erotic practice is simply another application of rope—a tool inextricable to the culture itself.

During the feudal Edo era, the dominant samurai class used rope in combat and to restrain prisoners of war in a martial art called hojojutsu, a brutal practice that bears little resemblance to the kinbaku of today. At the time, from the 17th to the 19th centuries, official Tokugawa crime laws used knots to torture and extort confessions from captives and to display alleged criminals. Each public punishment specifically fit the crime, so the tie used to administer it created a legible, symbolic admonition for crowds of onlookers.

In the early 20th century, kabuki theater began adapting rope ties into its highly stylized performances, presenting the earliest instances of what is now recognized as kinbaku. The technique of hojojutsu was reimagined so that actors could recreate the moves safely on stage, and redesigned to be more boldly aestheticized, giving audiences a more prominent visual experience.

This seminal illustration, 10 Tied Women by Kita Reiko, appeared in Kitan Club in 1952. Circulation exploded following the issue it appeared in, influencing the magazine’s SM direction. Courtesy of Master "K"

After World War II, fetish magazines on both sides of the Pacific featured kinbaku in provocative illustrations, and later, photographs. Popular magazines like Kitan Club and Uramado were exchanged with mainstays from the American underground like Bizarre, beginning the cross pollination of two global fetish cultures, which has continued to this day.

To the untrained eye, kinbaku doesn’t look all that different from its roots in torture, but practitioners extol the virtues and pleasures of “sub space,” in which submissive partners can achieve a meditative state that is deeply therapeutic—finding, like so many BDSM enthusiasts, liberation in bondage. “When it’s done properly, kinbaku is not painful at all. It’s completely sensual,” Master "K" explains in an interview. "You can come out of a kinbaku session feeling every bit as relaxed as you do coming out of a good hot yoga practice,” he says, imparting how techniques stimulate erogenous zones, releasing endorphins and dopamine in the brain.

Despite providing one-on-one tutelage to a few select clients, Master "K" claims to have receded from the kinbaku scene in the face of its newfound popularity. Like much of the old guard, he is skeptical of the DIY ethos spilling over from the BDSM community post-Fifty Shades of Grey. Between YouTube copycats to alleged masters doling out workshops, he cautions that the technique demands rigorous study beyond hipster attention spans and weekend workshops. “In America, there’s a tendency to want to pay five dollars and expect that in two weeks you’re an expert. This is not something anybody can do without serious thought and learning,” he says, likening self-taught tiers to self-taught dentists.

In the 1950s, Bizarre magazine publisher, John Willie, became fascinated with kinbaku when he was sent magazine clippings from a correspondent in Japan and began incorporating the practice into his BDSM photography. Willie’s interpretations were also disseminated in Japan, where they effected Japanese technique as well. © John Willie, Courtesy of Bélier Press

He emphasizes that kinbaku is a practice in which a tier “[takes] on a tremendous amount of responsibility for [a] partner,” and that “kinbaku, at its most important, is about communication, empathy, and real understanding before any technique is applied.” Beyond knowing basic anatomy and the location of nerve centers, that means checking in with someone on a physical and psychological level, such as asking if a submissive is on medication or if they have significant past injuries. Then, and more importantly, a tier must know how to adjust techniques to address particular needs. “The dirty little secret,” he says, both here and in Japan, is that kinbaku models get hurt.

Master K says he’s delighted that kinbaku is coming out of the shadows, “and being appreciated, hopefully for the right reasons ... It is very empowering and is [finally] being seen for that instead of misogynistic junk.”

To learn more about kinbaku history, influential masters, and art appearances, grab yourself a copy of The Beauty of Kinbaku by Master "K".

Related:

[NSFW] Erotica and Manga Mingle in This Bisexual Illustrator’s Surreal Fantasies

[Exclusive] 'Samurai Jack' Creator Genndy Tartakovsky on Why the Show Is Getting Darker

A Rare Work of Japanese Erotic Art Hits the Auction Block

from creators http://ift.tt/2kpyUWc via IFTTT

[benrleeusa]

[John K. Ross] Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions

Interviewing prisoners, Auer deference in criminal cases, and Rand Paul's neighbor.

Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

After four years of litigation, Philadelphia's civil forfeiture machine will soon grind to a halt. IJ Senior Attorney Darpana Sheth has the details over at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Woman enlists the help of Virgin Island marshals with truant 15-year-old son. Allegation: Marshals arrive and find boy relaxing unarmed but nevertheless shoot him, rendering him quadriplegic. Third Circuit: No immunity. You can't shoot someone who provides no serious threat of immediate harm.

Pro-tip from the Third Circuit for attorneys requesting fees: Don't have a single-spaced, 6- to 8-point font, 44-page fee petition including "hundreds of inappropriate, unethical entries that would likely be illegal if billed to a client." You might find yourself facing no fees, a sanction, and a referral to the attorney disciplinary board.

The Fifth Circuit finds that Louisiana's law requiring a doctor to have hospital admitting privileges in order to perform an abortion is not unduly burdensome because only one of the six affected doctors had tried and failed to obtain such privileges.

Teachers at a Louisiana charter school vote to unionize. The school ignores the vote, arguing that the National Labor Relations Act applies only to private employers, and the school is a political subdivision. Fifth Circuit: The school is privately owned and operated, and has privately chosen board members; it's a private employer. Concurrence: That's right, but not because the NLRB said it's right.

The Fifth Circuit considers the titillating question of whether Louisiana can prohibit erotic dancers between the ages of 18 and 20 from exposing their breasts and buttocks and holds that, while the law is not overbroad, it is unconstitutionally vague because it doesn't say how much "clothing" is sufficient. Preliminary injunction affirmed; the show will go on.

Drug suspect flees Tupelo, Miss. police and hides in a crawlspace. K9 officer orders him to come out and then releases a dog, which bites the suspect until he flees the crawlspace, tackles the officer, and nearly beats him senseless before the officer shoots four times, killing the suspect. The Fifth Circuit rules that qualified immunity is warranted.

But, on remand from the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit says, "Yeah, we got this one right the first time," and again rejects qualified immunity for Sachse, Tex. officers who fired on a 17-year-old who was holding a gun to his head, which he then discharged, severely disabling himself.

Former Detroit Mayor convicted of litany of crimes relating to city contracts, including extortion, bribery, fraud; sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to pay $4.5 mil in restitution to city. Sixth Circuit (2015): Restitution should reflect the amount the victim lost, not necessarily the profit defendants gained. Recalculate. District court: Fine. Pay $1.5 mil. Sixth Circuit (2018): That's more like it.

Man attacks his neighbor, a U.S. senator from Kentucky, takes plea deal wherein the gov't agrees to seek 21-month sentence. But wait! The judge sentences him to just 30 days. Prosecutors appeal the sentence, in spite of alleged implication by the gov't that no appeal would be made. Sixth Circuit: The language in the plea deal waiving the man's right to appeal does not imply a reciprocal waiver of the gov't's right to appeal. (Note: There is a circuit split on the issue.)

Ohio prison officials deny in-person interviews with death row prisoners who took part in deadly 1993 Lucasville prison riot. Media: Which violates the First Amendment. Sixth Circuit: Not so. A blanket ban on in-person interviews with death row inmates is content neutral. And because it also serves a legitimate security interest, the ban would likely also be permissible even if it had specifically targeted content related to the riot. In the context of prisoners' rights, "'neutral' does not require that a regulation be divorced from the speech's content."

After a 5-foot-tall woman continues walking despite a Wymore, Neb. officer's command to "get back here," the officer grabs her in a "bear hug," throwing her to the ground, breaking her collarbone and causing her to briefly lose consciousness. Qualified immunity? This Eighth Circuit panel says yes, over the dissent's observation that some things are so obviously wrong that we shouldn't need on-point cases to tell us not to do them.

Fun fact: North Dakota is the only state that does not require voters to register. You just show up with ID, which must have a residential address on it, and vote. District Court: Many Native American voters lack residential street addresses. Stop enforcing that part of the law. Eighth Circuit: Injunction stayed. "There is no universal rule that forbids a stay after Labor Day."

California Uber drivers: We're Uber employees (not independent contractors), so we're entitled to expense reimbursements. Plus, Uber didn't turn over all our tips. District court: This merits a class action. That being so, let's sort through a ton of issues. Ninth Circuit: Actually, this case should have gone to arbitration. The district court's class-related orders are vacated. The arbitrability of arbitration strikes again!

Butylone is an illegal hallucinogen, and so are its positional isomers—molecules with the same chemical formula but a certain different arrangement of atoms. Ethylone might be a positional isomer of butylone, but the regs are unclear. Eleventh Circuit: All right, we're "just going to have to science the heck out of this." Defendant's conviction is vacated. Deference to the DEA's view of the regs doesn't belong in a criminal case. Instead, we remand for an evidentiary hearing on the scientific community's definition of "positional isomer." Concurrence: "Criminal statutes and regulations need to be written in a way that allows a reasonable person to understand what is prohibited."

Allegation: Birmingham, Ala. school resource officers have a nasty habit of pepper spraying and then failing to help decontaminate students. District court: That calls for a change in policy. Eleventh Circuit (over a partial dissent): Reversed. By our calculation, students have a 1.6 out of 10,000 chance of being unconstitutionally sprayed. That's not frequent enough for class action plaintiffs to have standing. And we don't need to decide if there's a constitutional violation; it wasn't clearly established that the alleged conduct was unlawful; qualified immunity applies. (A handful of individual students can keep the $5k damages awarded to them, though.)

Plaintiff is such a prolific inventor that the Patent and Trademark Office employs 14 examiners just to review his applications, some of which have languished for decades. Seeking to take some work off their plates, the PTO enacts new regulations that basically allow them to sit on his applications forever, with no right of appeal. Arbitrary and capricious? District Court: No need to answer that, because I don't have jurisdiction. Federal Circuit: Actually, you did. No harm, no foul, though, because he loses anyways. (H/t: Andrew Trask.)

Back in 2013, Adams County, Penn. law enforcement caught Justen Irland waving a gun during a road rage incident. After he pled guilty to disorderly conduct, law enforcement tried to forfeit his legally owned gun—even though it had no express statutory authority to do so—through so-called common law forfeiture. This week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement could not forfeit the gun since there is no legal basis for common-law civil forfeiture in Pennsylvania. Click here to read IJ's amicus brief urging the court to consider law enforcement's incentive to seize property (it keeps 100 percent of forfeiture proceeds).

[vileart]

Feed Dramaturgy: Ailin Conant @ Edfringe 2018

What was the inspiration for this performance?

When we began working on Feed, it was in the wake of Brexit and Trump and we thought we were going to be doing a piece on echo chambers, fake news, and social division.  The more we researched, however, the more we realised that Feed was actually about capitalism. 

It’s a play about the attention economy and how our focus as consumers—our engagement, our emotional arousal, and the time we spend with our eyeballs drinking in content—is the greatest commodity on the current market. This means that anything that provokes emotion—humour, scandal, outrage, sensationalism—rises to the top while nuance and deep thinking are pushed out the picture. 

Fake news and social divisions are a part of that, but they are a tangential by-product of a much darker and more insidious thing and really only the tip of the iceberg.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas? 

I think in this age of highly personalised and curated content, live performance is one of the best spaces for public discussion because A) it’s shared and B) it’s live.  These are two things that are becoming increasingly rare in our hyper-connected-but-disconnected world.

How did you become interested in making performance?

I don’t actually remember because I was so young, but my mum tells me she used to take me to see a touring kid’s Shakespeare company that did cut-down versions of Shakespeare plays when I was in nursery, and that from about age five I started pestering her to let me be in the shows.  

I had to wait until I was eight to join the troupe,

after that I never looked back.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

Every show invents its own new approach, doesn’t it?  With this show, we began with a series of workshops working with professional playwrights and young people to address this itching question about social media: how it was changing our relationship to ourselves and to other people.  

It’s such a vast subject so the real work of this play was about selecting and articulating the subject, something that took us months.  At one point we were working with the Tactical Technology Collective (creators of the sell-out pop-up The Glass Room) to create a joint foyer exhibition, and two days through the discussion and partnership we realised, ‘Ah wait, Feed is about the attention economy, whereas The Glass Room is about the data economy.’  

Don’t worry if that disambiguation goes over your head, we’re still getting our own heads around it after months of researching.  So the process of making this show has been very different to others in that the landscape is constantly shifting; the subject we’re trying to articulate is evolving so quickly and is such a popular discussion point in the current zeitgeist that a significant part of the process has been just trying to understand and keep up with the subject. 

We have to be on top of what is general knowledge, and what is specialist knowledge, all while figuring out how we can apply theatre to bridging the gap between the two in a poetic and engaging way.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

You might know from our past work, The Fantasist, Nobody’s Home, and The Marked, that we’re passionate about translating internal experiences… using visual theatre to flip the human mind inside-out and show a protagonist’s mental journey through the tangible world.  

In the past we’ve dealt with individualised subjects like bi-polar disorder and post-traumatic stress, but Feed feels like the first piece we’ve ever done that looks at a lived mental experience that almost all of us are grappling with in some way: the onslaught of stimulation from smartphones and social media, and how we are coping with and adapting to our new information landscape.  

What’s surprising is that Feed actually feels like the most neurotic show we’ve made to date.  There’s a certain logic to something like traumatic experience, where there may be a swirl of emotions to navigate but somewhere in there you can find the vulnerability, the humanity, the logic, the root.  The attention economy, on the other hand, is capitalism unleashed on the human mind; it’s addiction, it’s manipulation, it’s deception, and it’s completely devoid of any ethics or monitoring.  

It’s a world in which every human experience is a commodity.  Making this play has made us all feel a little bit less sane.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

With past shows, we always had a clear goal of increasing empathy for the protagonist (and by proxy, anyone with a similar story or background).  But Feed has been created in reaction to a moment in time when we were experience empathy burnout; when victim-driven news items were flooding our Facebook feeds and we felt ourselves shutting down to the plight of humans living the various crises of our time.  As storytellers, we needed to take a step back and look at the underlying dynamics of the stories of our times.  

We’ve learned a lot in the process about the way we tell our stories to ourselves as a species, and it’s really changed the way we see things, especially the way we take things in.  In a way, it’s been liberating…building Feed has given us just a tiny bit of reflective distance between ourselves and the media around us, and with that some relief from the whirlwind of guilt and rage and titillation and stimulation that it does its best to suck us into.  

I guess, we want people to laugh, we want people to be provoked and slightly uncomfortable, we want people to see familiar things from a new perspective, we want people to fully embrace and grieve the problems of our times…but mostly, in the space of digestion and reflection that follows, we want to share with our audiences that very small gift of a little bit of freedom from the all of the senseless chatter and noise, so that they have the space reconnect to what’s most real and important.

Feed

Pleasance Dome (King Dome), Potterow, Edinburgh, EH8 9AL

Friday 3rd – Monday 27th August 2018 (not 15th), 14:00

from the vileblog https://ift.tt/2L1vfv7

[yes-dal456]

Muddled Guidance At Menopause

By definition, a muddle is an untidy or disorganized collection. The verb denotes propagating confusion by bringing some topic into just such a state. I regret to say that, accordingly, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is poised to muddle the management of symptoms, and chronic disease risk at menopause.

As I have indicated recently, and repeatedly over the years, I have enormous respect for the USPSTF, an influential panel of independent experts who generate strictly evidence-based guidelines for clinical preventive services, i.e., those medical practices dedicated to the prevention of morbidity and premature mortality. The group’s standards are high, consistent, and transparent, and their conclusions are influential on clinicians, payers, and the government for good reason: they are well informed and reliable.

But they are not infallible. Applying very strict standards of evidence to the medical literature has a well-known liability attached to it: the potential conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence. The latter is when we know, decisively, that something does not work. The former- far more common, alas- is when the current state of evidence is insufficient to tell us for sure one way or the other.

The Task Force is no stranger to the problem of absence of evidence. Many times over the years they have concluded, in effect, that they could not reach a conclusion. The customary language has been along the lines of: “evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms for…” A current example garnering just such guidance, and a latter grade of “I” to denote the insufficiency of evidence, is routine screening for cognitive impairment in older adults. 

The Task Force is also able to acknowledge that at times there is sufficient evidence regarding benefits and harms, but that they are too closely balanced on the scales of public health to render a summary judgment. They have recently reached just such a conclusion regarding prostate cancer screening, assigning a letter grade of “C.”

Unfortunately, the latest draft recommendation issued by the Task Force- addressing the use of hormone replacement at menopause to reduce the risk of chronic disease- misconstrues absence of evidence for evidence of absence, and overlooks some crucial evidence into the bargain. The Task Force has rendered a verdict of “D” for that topic, inveighing against it. This is only a draft recommendation at this point, and we are in an open comment period. So here’s my comment: the Task Force got this one wrong.

With the possible exception of nutrition, where we seem entirely committed to perpetual confusion despite the clarity of fundamental truths, few topics in medicine have been so badly muddled as hormone replacement (HR) at menopause. For many years, we were all quite confident in considerable, net benefits based on observational studies. During that era, we were surely mistaking some bathwater for the baby.

Then, when randomized trials, notably HERS and the WHI, were conducted- a small surfeit of harms were seen with HR. Note that the surfeit was, indeed, small, and the results of both trials showed a mix of harms and benefits- with no difference between intervention and control groups in total mortality. Rather, the WHI was stopped early once it was clear that hormone replacement was not on track to produce a statistically significant benefit overall.

How did a mix of benefits and harms, no overall mortality difference, and “not consistent with the requirements for a viable intervention for primary prevention of chronic diseases” get translated into a blanket recommendation against HR? By distorting the subtleties of the evidence into the customary and toxic brew that results routinely when medicine and the media cook together: hyperbole, oversimplification, and the banality of sound bites. 

The media in general are devoted less to our edification and more to our fleeting but recurrent attention, and titillation. The prevailing mantra is “afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.” This has direct implications for HR at menopause that have concerned me deeply for a decade or more, and is a general threat to understanding in the service of public health. 

We had grown comfortable with the idea that HR reduced chronic disease risk, so a qualified reality check indicating that the matter was subject to considerable uncertainties was the truth, but a truth unsuitable for afflicting the comfortable. To afflict the comfortable, the media message needed to be: “hormone replacement will kill you now.” In 2002, there were many headlines along just such lines.

That the benefits and harms were closely balanced was the least of the reasons this media 180 was egregious and harmful. Another, more important matter was that only one very particular, and notoriously bad version of HR had been studied: the combination of horse (rather than human) estrogen (Premarin), with a high-potency, synthetic progesterone (Provera). By way of analogy, we might conduct a study of breathing oxygen at some concentration markedly different from that in our native atmosphere, tally the harms of oxygen toxicity, and issue a blanket recommendation against breathing the stuff. If you don’t immediately see the folly in that, I invite you to hold your breath until it comes to you.

But even the fact that there are different approaches to HR, and much better preparations than “Prem/Pro,” was not the biggest problem with the HR-is-bad-for-you-now conclusion. The biggest problem was that: women vary. 

All of the data on HR and health outcomes, viewed with careful attention to sub-groups, show a highly significant, age-related pattern. Women who replace ovarian hormones right at menopause derive considerable benefit; women who delay for a decade do not. Summary judgment that ignores this highly significant dichotomy is seriously deficient.

Also misguided is applying the questionable conclusion we have reached about combination HR (estrogen plus progesterone) to other forms of HR, namely estrogen alone. Women who have undergone hysterectomy- a population of some 20 million in the U.S.- can take estrogen on its own. The WHI study showed that the use of unopposed estrogen in women with prior hysterectomy who took it early after menopause reduced mortality significantly. Worded differently: the fear of HR induced by our “afflict the comfortable” approach to medical news has killed tens of thousands of women prematurely, and needlessly, over the past decade and a half.

The wrong hormone replacement at the wrong time for the wrong women is sure to impose net harm. The right preparations at the right time for the right women are reliably beneficial. Much decision-making takes place between these obvious extremes, and such decisions should- like those for prostate cancer screening- issue from personal discussions between patient and provider. 

Summary judgment against HR is unfounded, misguided, and leads only to the perpetuation of a vintage mistake in new directions. I encourage the Task Force to reconsider this topic accordingly. In the interim, I advise a discussion with your provider about what’s right for you, to find a personalized path through the prevailing muddle.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

Immediate Past-President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

Follow at: LinkedIN; Twitter; Facebook

Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; Verywell; Forbes

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2qrNc6L from Blogger http://ift.tt/2rHK4bI

[imreviewblog]

Muddled Guidance At Menopause

By definition, a muddle is an untidy or disorganized collection. The verb denotes propagating confusion by bringing some topic into just such a state. I regret to say that, accordingly, the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is poised to muddle the management of symptoms, and chronic disease risk at menopause.

As I have indicated recently, and repeatedly over the years, I have enormous respect for the USPSTF, an influential panel of independent experts who generate strictly evidence-based guidelines for clinical preventive services, i.e., those medical practices dedicated to the prevention of morbidity and premature mortality. The group’s standards are high, consistent, and transparent, and their conclusions are influential on clinicians, payers, and the government for good reason: they are well informed and reliable.

But they are not infallible. Applying very strict standards of evidence to the medical literature has a well-known liability attached to it: the potential conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence. The latter is when we know, decisively, that something does not work. The former- far more common, alas- is when the current state of evidence is insufficient to tell us for sure one way or the other.

The Task Force is no stranger to the problem of absence of evidence. Many times over the years they have concluded, in effect, that they could not reach a conclusion. The customary language has been along the lines of: “evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms for…” A current example garnering just such guidance, and a latter grade of “I” to denote the insufficiency of evidence, is routine screening for cognitive impairment in older adults. 

The Task Force is also able to acknowledge that at times there is sufficient evidence regarding benefits and harms, but that they are too closely balanced on the scales of public health to render a summary judgment. They have recently reached just such a conclusion regarding prostate cancer screening, assigning a letter grade of “C.”

Unfortunately, the latest draft recommendation issued by the Task Force- addressing the use of hormone replacement at menopause to reduce the risk of chronic disease- misconstrues absence of evidence for evidence of absence, and overlooks some crucial evidence into the bargain. The Task Force has rendered a verdict of “D” for that topic, inveighing against it. This is only a draft recommendation at this point, and we are in an open comment period. So here’s my comment: the Task Force got this one wrong.

With the possible exception of nutrition, where we seem entirely committed to perpetual confusion despite the clarity of fundamental truths, few topics in medicine have been so badly muddled as hormone replacement (HR) at menopause. For many years, we were all quite confident in considerable, net benefits based on observational studies. During that era, we were surely mistaking some bathwater for the baby.

Then, when randomized trials, notably HERS and the WHI, were conducted- a small surfeit of harms were seen with HR. Note that the surfeit was, indeed, small, and the results of both trials showed a mix of harms and benefits- with no difference between intervention and control groups in total mortality. Rather, the WHI was stopped early once it was clear that hormone replacement was not on track to produce a statistically significant benefit overall.

How did a mix of benefits and harms, no overall mortality difference, and “not consistent with the requirements for a viable intervention for primary prevention of chronic diseases” get translated into a blanket recommendation against HR? By distorting the subtleties of the evidence into the customary and toxic brew that results routinely when medicine and the media cook together: hyperbole, oversimplification, and the banality of sound bites. 

The media in general are devoted less to our edification and more to our fleeting but recurrent attention, and titillation. The prevailing mantra is “afflict the comfortable, comfort the afflicted.” This has direct implications for HR at menopause that have concerned me deeply for a decade or more, and is a general threat to understanding in the service of public health. 

We had grown comfortable with the idea that HR reduced chronic disease risk, so a qualified reality check indicating that the matter was subject to considerable uncertainties was the truth, but a truth unsuitable for afflicting the comfortable. To afflict the comfortable, the media message needed to be: “hormone replacement will kill you now.” In 2002, there were many headlines along just such lines.

That the benefits and harms were closely balanced was the least of the reasons this media 180 was egregious and harmful. Another, more important matter was that only one very particular, and notoriously bad version of HR had been studied: the combination of horse (rather than human) estrogen (Premarin), with a high-potency, synthetic progesterone (Provera). By way of analogy, we might conduct a study of breathing oxygen at some concentration markedly different from that in our native atmosphere, tally the harms of oxygen toxicity, and issue a blanket recommendation against breathing the stuff. If you don’t immediately see the folly in that, I invite you to hold your breath until it comes to you.

But even the fact that there are different approaches to HR, and much better preparations than “Prem/Pro,” was not the biggest problem with the HR-is-bad-for-you-now conclusion. The biggest problem was that: women vary. 

All of the data on HR and health outcomes, viewed with careful attention to sub-groups, show a highly significant, age-related pattern. Women who replace ovarian hormones right at menopause derive considerable benefit; women who delay for a decade do not. Summary judgment that ignores this highly significant dichotomy is seriously deficient.

Also misguided is applying the questionable conclusion we have reached about combination HR (estrogen plus progesterone) to other forms of HR, namely estrogen alone. Women who have undergone hysterectomy- a population of some 20 million in the U.S.- can take estrogen on its own. The WHI study showed that the use of unopposed estrogen in women with prior hysterectomy who took it early after menopause reduced mortality significantly. Worded differently: the fear of HR induced by our “afflict the comfortable” approach to medical news has killed tens of thousands of women prematurely, and needlessly, over the past decade and a half.

The wrong hormone replacement at the wrong time for the wrong women is sure to impose net harm. The right preparations at the right time for the right women are reliably beneficial. Much decision-making takes place between these obvious extremes, and such decisions should- like those for prostate cancer screening- issue from personal discussions between patient and provider. 

Summary judgment against HR is unfounded, misguided, and leads only to the perpetuation of a vintage mistake in new directions. I encourage the Task Force to reconsider this topic accordingly. In the interim, I advise a discussion with your provider about what’s right for you, to find a personalized path through the prevailing muddle.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

Immediate Past-President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

Follow at: LinkedIN; Twitter; Facebook

Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; Verywell; Forbes

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://bit.ly/2s4F1yw

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/18/ny-times-facebooks-zuckerberg-bucking-tide-takes-public-stand-against-isolationism-15/

NY Times: Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Bucking Tide, Takes Public Stand Against Isolationism

Mr. Zuckerberg, 32, chose to make the statement as an update to his original founder’s letter, which was published in 2012 when Facebook went public. In that letter, he wrote that the social network “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Continue reading the main story

In an interview this week at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he started Facebook, “the idea of connecting the world was not controversial.”

“The default assumption was that the world was just incrementally moving in that direction,” he said. “Now, that’s actually a real question.”

Mr. Zuckerberg released his missive amid a fierce debate over the merits of globalization. In the United States, President Trump has displayed a deep streak of nationalism. Last year, Britain voted to quit the European Union. Those moves and others have been taken as signs of how globalization has caused strains — making it more difficult for companies to navigate a new world order.

Against that backdrop, the timing of the letter is notable. While other technology executives, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, regularly update their founder letters each year — often tied to financial results — it is the first time Mr. Zuckerberg has refreshed Facebook’s mission statement since the company’s initial public offering.

Mr. Zuckerberg said his reasons for writing the updated letter began to take shape before last year’s presidential election, spurred by broader trends. He said he recognized that more people were feeling left behind by globalization, and by societal and technological changes. As a result, he wanted to focus different parts of Facebook in a way that helped people better come together.

“We have to build a global community that works for everyone,” he said. “I really don’t have much doubt that this is the right direction to go in the long term.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to reorient Facebook, which turned 13 this month, around these new realities. His letter is filled with abstract ideas, including the notion of “social infrastructure” and how to create stronger online communities, with few detailed steps about how to realize those goals.

One top priority is building inclusive online communities that are supportive, safe and informed environments, to help strengthen bonds in the offline world as well. Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the idea of using Facebook to create this “social infrastructure” — essentially a digital means of connecting people around shared interests — mirroring social groups in the physical world like churches, governments and unions. That may encourage connections among people that transcend national and international barriers, he said.

Continue reading the main story

While Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned several concrete steps that Facebook has taken toward some of these goals, he gave few other specifics. He did not address how his vision might conflict with those of political leaders around the world, nor did he mention how emphasizing global connections benefited Facebook’s finances.

Getting to this point did not come easily. Since going public, Facebook has been on a growth tear, becoming one of the world’s biggest and most valuable public entities.

Yet the power that Facebook has amassed has raised hackles globally. The social network is blocked in China, has stumbled in India and is facing a thicket of regulatory questions in Europe. More recently, Mr. Trump’s election prompted an outcry over whether Facebook influenced the American electorate with false stories on its site. The company has scrambled to contain the fallout, undertaking several experiments to better sort through what people see on its site.

A key moment for Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift in thinking about how to be a global company happened six months ago. In September, Facebook censored an iconic photograph that featured a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. Mr. Zuckerberg said the image, titled “The Terror of War,” was rightly censored by Facebook at the time because the company’s content policies did not allow child nudity.

Facebook users disagreed, arguing that the photograph was not titillating but rather illustrated the perils of modern warfare. The social network eventually allowed the image to be posted on its site, noting that it had inherent news value.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the episode made him realize how ineffective Facebook’s content policy was at a global scale, given that cultural norms vary greatly by country. He said Facebook needed to get to a place in which users could perhaps choose their own content policies based on local laws and preferences, a marked departure from the company’s blanket global approach of the past decade or more.

“I don’t think that we, sitting here in California, are best positioned to know what the norms in communities around the world should be,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “At some point, you just need a more dynamic system where people can just express that themselves.”

Mr. Zuckerberg spent much of his letter focused on the importance of personal relationships. He pointed to “very meaningful groups” — Facebook groups that people frequently engage in and return to — that are often centered on topics like parenting, sports or other shared interests. When people find an interest they are passionate about and form such a group, they are some of the most tightly connected relationships on Facebook, he said.

To foster more of these groups in a safe way, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook needed to change some of the ways that it operated. That includes improving community safety with product updates similar to Facebook’s “safety check,” a tool that lets people mark themselves safe during catastrophes. Mr. Zuckerberg said that governments regularly called Facebook to confirm that Safety Check was activated during crises like the massacre at a nightclub in Florida last year.

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized Facebook’s role in keeping communities well-informed, which will necessitate tackling misinformation and highly polarized news. He alluded to Facebook’s shifting role as a distributor of news, saying the social network is “not just technology or media.”

Facebook’s goal, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was not to usurp traditional institutions like governments, religious groups and other communities that share interests. (When asked if he wanted to run for president of the United States, he laughed and declined.) Instead, he said, creating tightly knit online groups would make these traditional institutions stronger.

It also would not hurt that such groups and connections could well make Facebook more essential to people, which in turn may increase the company’s profits.

“There’s a social infrastructure that needs to get built to deal with modern problems in order for humanity to get to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I just think it would be good if more people thought about things like this.”

Correction: February 18, 2017

An article on Friday about an update to Facebook’s mission statement misstated, in some copies, the location of a nightclub massacre last year. It was in Florida, not Paris. (A nightclub massacre in Paris occurred in 2015.)

Continue reading the main story

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

[yes-dal456]

Why Everything We Know About Salt May NOT Be Wrong

A recent New York Times column offered us this provocative headline: Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong. Presumably that means- it may be right, too. Hence, my counter-headline.

I think what we know mostly is right. Here’s what I think we know:

Too much salt is bad for us. That one is almost tautological, since if it weren’t bad for us, it wouldn’t be too much.

Most of us consume too much salt. Most of the salt we consume- roughly 80%- is processed into foods we didn’t prepare ourselves. Eat less of those processed foods- especially hyper-processed foods, processed meats, and fast food- and more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, unsalted nuts and seeds - and you’ll be better off for many reasons both related and unrelated to salt. Prepare meals at home from wholesome ingredients when possible and you’ll be better off. Drink plain water preferentially when thirsty- and you’ll be better off again. That’s what I think we know, and I think it’s all correct. If you like to get your punch lines and move on, our work here is done.  

For the rest of you:

What we seem not to know about salt is the ideal intake level, and in particular, variations in that level based on age, health status, and genetics, among other factors. But we have long known that sodium is an essential nutrient, that we all need some, and that it’s possible to consume too much or too little. Debate about where best to draw the dividing line, and in particular whether it should be drawn in different places for different populations, is more a matter of refinement than refutation, evolution rather than revolution. It’s how science is supposed to advance.

The source of the new provocation presented to us in the Times is two research papers recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, one involving mice, the other ten male cosmonauts in a simulated space environment. If that sounds like a somewhat dubious start to a dismissal of decades of research involving actual human beings, in much larger numbers, and subject to such pesky nuances as living in earth-like conditions, I’m inclined to agree. Mice and cosmonauts may teach us interesting new things about salt, but they are unlikely to reveal that everything learned to date is wrong.

Looking at the studies, they did no such thing. As acknowledged by the Times reporter, the papers are rather dense, enumerating a great many measures in recondite detail. For our purposes here, the gist will do.

The investigators found that both the ten healthy men in their simulated space station, and C57/BL6 mice are good at conserving levels of body water across a range of sodium intake. Complex hormonal fluctuations, some directly in response to diet and some part of underlying body rhythms, allowed for marked variation in the excretion of sodium (i.e., its removal in urine) without corresponding changes in urine volume. We have long known of the kidneys’ ability to concentrate or dilute urine over a wide but finite range, and these findings fit comfortably within that expanse of understanding.

Translating their own findings into succinct take-away messages, the researchers suggest that, in mice, “the kidneys, liver, and skeletal muscle form a physiological-regulatory network for extracellular volume control…” In plain English, the kidneys and other organs in the body work together, under the influence of various hormones, to regulate fluid volume and electrolyte levels. When mice were given a high sodium load in the absence of a high water intake, they generated water in their own bodies by breaking down fat and muscle. 

In humans, the researchers noted that: “long-term maintenance of body fluid homeostasis…may be less dependent on external water sources than is currently believed.” Fluid intake did not vary reliably with salt intake in the cosmonauts, but the more salt they consumed, the hungrier they tended to be.

The two studies are clearly valuable to the advance of science in this area. The finding that hunger varied with sodium intake in the cosmonauts far more reliably than thirst is particularly interesting. But the notion that the findings are an invitation to the general public to abandon all we thought we knew about salt intake is wrong, dangerous, and irresponsible.

It has long been clear that salty is a preferred flavor sensation that stimulates appetite. While sweet is the one flavor preference known to be innate, a predilection for salt comes easily, early, and all but universally. The salience of this in modern food processing, and its relevance to efforts by Big Food to maximize how much eating we all do, and thus their profits, is addressed in considerable detail by Michael Moss among others, in both his book- and his writing for the New York Times.

While it is somewhat surprising that salt fostered hunger more than thirst in the cosmonauts, I’m not sure that precludes the prospect of it doing both in the real world. At any given bar stool, tasty, salty snacks fairly reliably invite eating; perhaps it’s that eating as much as the salt per se that tends to invite concomitant drinking. 

The Times column, noting that high salt intake under conditions of fixed water intake may induce the body to break down muscle and fat, suggests a possible advantage of high salt intake for weight loss. But the appended reflection is precautionary: salt intake appears to stimulate hunger. In other words, salt intake may help with weight loss only if you eat a lot of salt, and despite being very hungry, don’t eat more food. Welcome to the “Salt Diet,” and the kind of deprivation that causes every other diet to fail. Interesting mechanistically? Yes. A reason to abandon all we thought we knew? Surely not.

This particular invitation to nutritional nihilism, by a journalist seemingly devoted to that very cause, is especially concerning and unfortunate. After many years of clarity about public health goals related to sodium- namely, the benefits of consuming less- confusion has recently been propagated by the legitimate debate among scientists over optimal levels. That debate has been misrepresented to imply that efforts to reduce intake by those consuming what we might call modern, industrial diets is premature. But intake levels in the U.S. and much of the modern world are well above the range being debated. Sodium excess is the current, clear, and all but omnipresent danger.

How much so? The Center for Science in the Public Interest attributes hundreds of thousands of premature deaths to excess sodium intake in the U.S. A recent study in JAMA, stunningly unmentioned in the Times column, examined dietary factors associated with chronic disease and premature death at the level of the entire U.S. population. The single dietary factor associated with the most cardiometabolic death was: excess sodium intake.

As noted above, we get most of our sodium from processed foods- so perhaps the ills of sodium are in part attributable to the company it tends to keep. Be that as it may, the JAMA paper is a timely reminder of how foolish it would be to abandon all we thought we know about salt.

We thought we knew that excess salt is bad for us, and it is. We thought we knew that most of us consuming modern diets get too much, and we do. We thought we knew that salt makes us hungry, and it does. We thought we knew that it makes us thirsty, too, and maybe that depends in part on what and how much we eat. We thought we were uncertain about the ideal threshold for sodium, and how variable it might be, and indeed- we are. We don’t need to know everything to know that we don’t know nothing.

The coverage in the NY Times seems part of a disturbing pattern in health journalism. In apparent solidarity with far less reputable publications, the paper tends to favor nutrition controversy over consensus, and to exaggerate the out-of-context significance of any given study for the sake of provocation, if not titillation. 

The misrepresentation of any one study, small group of cosmonauts, or batch of mice- and the incremental advance in understanding they contribute- as a replacement for all we knew prior is a pernicious theme in modern health journalism that wounds public health. Hyperbolic headlines propagating unfounded positions and misapprehensions put salt in those wounds. Among the things I thought we knew about salt, I thought we knew we certainly shouldn’t do that.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

Immediate Past-President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

Follow at: LinkedIN; Twitter; Facebook

Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; Verywell; Forbes

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from http://ift.tt/2ptsGXX from Blogger http://ift.tt/2ptdCcU

[imreviewblog]

Why Everything We Know About Salt May NOT Be Wrong

A recent New York Times column offered us this provocative headline: Why Everything We Know About Salt May Be Wrong. Presumably that means- it may be right, too. Hence, my counter-headline.

I think what we know mostly is right. Here’s what I think we know:

Too much salt is bad for us. That one is almost tautological, since if it weren’t bad for us, it wouldn’t be too much.

Most of us consume too much salt. Most of the salt we consume- roughly 80%- is processed into foods we didn’t prepare ourselves. Eat less of those processed foods- especially hyper-processed foods, processed meats, and fast food- and more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, lentils, unsalted nuts and seeds - and you’ll be better off for many reasons both related and unrelated to salt. Prepare meals at home from wholesome ingredients when possible and you’ll be better off. Drink plain water preferentially when thirsty- and you’ll be better off again. That’s what I think we know, and I think it’s all correct. If you like to get your punch lines and move on, our work here is done.  

For the rest of you:

What we seem not to know about salt is the ideal intake level, and in particular, variations in that level based on age, health status, and genetics, among other factors. But we have long known that sodium is an essential nutrient, that we all need some, and that it’s possible to consume too much or too little. Debate about where best to draw the dividing line, and in particular whether it should be drawn in different places for different populations, is more a matter of refinement than refutation, evolution rather than revolution. It’s how science is supposed to advance.

The source of the new provocation presented to us in the Times is two research papers recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, one involving mice, the other ten male cosmonauts in a simulated space environment. If that sounds like a somewhat dubious start to a dismissal of decades of research involving actual human beings, in much larger numbers, and subject to such pesky nuances as living in earth-like conditions, I’m inclined to agree. Mice and cosmonauts may teach us interesting new things about salt, but they are unlikely to reveal that everything learned to date is wrong.

Looking at the studies, they did no such thing. As acknowledged by the Times reporter, the papers are rather dense, enumerating a great many measures in recondite detail. For our purposes here, the gist will do.

The investigators found that both the ten healthy men in their simulated space station, and C57/BL6 mice are good at conserving levels of body water across a range of sodium intake. Complex hormonal fluctuations, some directly in response to diet and some part of underlying body rhythms, allowed for marked variation in the excretion of sodium (i.e., its removal in urine) without corresponding changes in urine volume. We have long known of the kidneys’ ability to concentrate or dilute urine over a wide but finite range, and these findings fit comfortably within that expanse of understanding.

Translating their own findings into succinct take-away messages, the researchers suggest that, in mice, “the kidneys, liver, and skeletal muscle form a physiological-regulatory network for extracellular volume control…” In plain English, the kidneys and other organs in the body work together, under the influence of various hormones, to regulate fluid volume and electrolyte levels. When mice were given a high sodium load in the absence of a high water intake, they generated water in their own bodies by breaking down fat and muscle. 

In humans, the researchers noted that: “long-term maintenance of body fluid homeostasis…may be less dependent on external water sources than is currently believed.” Fluid intake did not vary reliably with salt intake in the cosmonauts, but the more salt they consumed, the hungrier they tended to be.

The two studies are clearly valuable to the advance of science in this area. The finding that hunger varied with sodium intake in the cosmonauts far more reliably than thirst is particularly interesting. But the notion that the findings are an invitation to the general public to abandon all we thought we knew about salt intake is wrong, dangerous, and irresponsible.

It has long been clear that salty is a preferred flavor sensation that stimulates appetite. While sweet is the one flavor preference known to be innate, a predilection for salt comes easily, early, and all but universally. The salience of this in modern food processing, and its relevance to efforts by Big Food to maximize how much eating we all do, and thus their profits, is addressed in considerable detail by Michael Moss among others, in both his book- and his writing for the New York Times.

While it is somewhat surprising that salt fostered hunger more than thirst in the cosmonauts, I’m not sure that precludes the prospect of it doing both in the real world. At any given bar stool, tasty, salty snacks fairly reliably invite eating; perhaps it’s that eating as much as the salt per se that tends to invite concomitant drinking. 

The Times column, noting that high salt intake under conditions of fixed water intake may induce the body to break down muscle and fat, suggests a possible advantage of high salt intake for weight loss. But the appended reflection is precautionary: salt intake appears to stimulate hunger. In other words, salt intake may help with weight loss only if you eat a lot of salt, and despite being very hungry, don’t eat more food. Welcome to the “Salt Diet,” and the kind of deprivation that causes every other diet to fail. Interesting mechanistically? Yes. A reason to abandon all we thought we knew? Surely not.

This particular invitation to nutritional nihilism, by a journalist seemingly devoted to that very cause, is especially concerning and unfortunate. After many years of clarity about public health goals related to sodium- namely, the benefits of consuming less- confusion has recently been propagated by the legitimate debate among scientists over optimal levels. That debate has been misrepresented to imply that efforts to reduce intake by those consuming what we might call modern, industrial diets is premature. But intake levels in the U.S. and much of the modern world are well above the range being debated. Sodium excess is the current, clear, and all but omnipresent danger.

How much so? The Center for Science in the Public Interest attributes hundreds of thousands of premature deaths to excess sodium intake in the U.S. A recent study in JAMA, stunningly unmentioned in the Times column, examined dietary factors associated with chronic disease and premature death at the level of the entire U.S. population. The single dietary factor associated with the most cardiometabolic death was: excess sodium intake.

As noted above, we get most of our sodium from processed foods- so perhaps the ills of sodium are in part attributable to the company it tends to keep. Be that as it may, the JAMA paper is a timely reminder of how foolish it would be to abandon all we thought we know about salt.

We thought we knew that excess salt is bad for us, and it is. We thought we knew that most of us consuming modern diets get too much, and we do. We thought we knew that salt makes us hungry, and it does. We thought we knew that it makes us thirsty, too, and maybe that depends in part on what and how much we eat. We thought we were uncertain about the ideal threshold for sodium, and how variable it might be, and indeed- we are. We don’t need to know everything to know that we don’t know nothing.

The coverage in the NY Times seems part of a disturbing pattern in health journalism. In apparent solidarity with far less reputable publications, the paper tends to favor nutrition controversy over consensus, and to exaggerate the out-of-context significance of any given study for the sake of provocation, if not titillation. 

The misrepresentation of any one study, small group of cosmonauts, or batch of mice- and the incremental advance in understanding they contribute- as a replacement for all we knew prior is a pernicious theme in modern health journalism that wounds public health. Hyperbolic headlines propagating unfounded positions and misapprehensions put salt in those wounds. Among the things I thought we knew about salt, I thought we knew we certainly shouldn’t do that.

-fin

David L. Katz

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital

Immediate Past-President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Senior Medical Advisor, Verywell.com

Founder, The True Health Initiative

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Read at: INfluencer Blog; Huffington Post; US News & World Report; Verywell; Forbes

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://bit.ly/2r29RL9

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New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/18/ny-times-facebooks-zuckerberg-bucking-tide-takes-public-stand-against-isolationism-14/

NY Times: Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Bucking Tide, Takes Public Stand Against Isolationism

Mr. Zuckerberg, 32, chose to make the statement as an update to his original founder’s letter, which was published in 2012 when Facebook went public. In that letter, he wrote that the social network “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Continue reading the main story

In an interview this week at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he started Facebook, “the idea of connecting the world was not controversial.”

“The default assumption was that the world was just incrementally moving in that direction,” he said. “Now, that’s actually a real question.”

Mr. Zuckerberg released his missive amid a fierce debate over the merits of globalization. In the United States, President Trump has displayed a deep streak of nationalism. Last year, Britain voted to quit the European Union. Those moves and others have been taken as signs of how globalization has caused strains — making it more difficult for companies to navigate a new world order.

Against that backdrop, the timing of the letter is notable. While other technology executives, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, regularly update their founder letters each year — often tied to financial results — it is the first time Mr. Zuckerberg has refreshed Facebook’s mission statement since the company’s initial public offering.

Mr. Zuckerberg said his reasons for writing the updated letter began to take shape before last year’s presidential election, spurred by broader trends. He said he recognized that more people were feeling left behind by globalization, and by societal and technological changes. As a result, he wanted to focus different parts of Facebook in a way that helped people better come together.

“We have to build a global community that works for everyone,” he said. “I really don’t have much doubt that this is the right direction to go in the long term.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to reorient Facebook, which turned 13 this month, around these new realities. His letter is filled with abstract ideas, including the notion of “social infrastructure” and how to create stronger online communities, with few detailed steps about how to realize those goals.

One top priority is building inclusive online communities that are supportive, safe and informed environments, to help strengthen bonds in the offline world as well. Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the idea of using Facebook to create this “social infrastructure” — essentially a digital means of connecting people around shared interests — mirroring social groups in the physical world like churches, governments and unions. That may encourage connections among people that transcend national and international barriers, he said.

Continue reading the main story

While Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned several concrete steps that Facebook has taken toward some of these goals, he gave few other specifics. He did not address how his vision might conflict with those of political leaders around the world, nor did he mention how emphasizing global connections benefited Facebook’s finances.

Getting to this point did not come easily. Since going public, Facebook has been on a growth tear, becoming one of the world’s biggest and most valuable public entities.

Yet the power that Facebook has amassed has raised hackles globally. The social network is blocked in China, has stumbled in India and is facing a thicket of regulatory questions in Europe. More recently, Mr. Trump’s election prompted an outcry over whether Facebook influenced the American electorate with false stories on its site. The company has scrambled to contain the fallout, undertaking several experiments to better sort through what people see on its site.

A key moment for Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift in thinking about how to be a global company happened six months ago. In September, Facebook censored an iconic photograph that featured a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. Mr. Zuckerberg said the image, titled “The Terror of War,” was rightly censored by Facebook at the time because the company’s content policies did not allow child nudity.

Facebook users disagreed, arguing that the photograph was not titillating but rather illustrated the perils of modern warfare. The social network eventually allowed the image to be posted on its site, noting that it had inherent news value.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the episode made him realize how ineffective Facebook’s content policy was at a global scale, given that cultural norms vary greatly by country. He said Facebook needed to get to a place in which users could perhaps choose their own content policies based on local laws and preferences, a marked departure from the company’s blanket global approach of the past decade or more.

“I don’t think that we, sitting here in California, are best positioned to know what the norms in communities around the world should be,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “At some point, you just need a more dynamic system where people can just express that themselves.”

Mr. Zuckerberg spent much of his letter focused on the importance of personal relationships. He pointed to “very meaningful groups” — Facebook groups that people frequently engage in and return to — that are often centered on topics like parenting, sports or other shared interests. When people find an interest they are passionate about and form such a group, they are some of the most tightly connected relationships on Facebook, he said.

To foster more of these groups in a safe way, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook needed to change some of the ways that it operated. That includes improving community safety with product updates similar to Facebook’s “safety check,” a tool that lets people mark themselves safe during catastrophes. Mr. Zuckerberg said that governments regularly called Facebook to confirm that Safety Check was activated during crises like the massacre at a nightclub in Florida last year.

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized Facebook’s role in keeping communities well-informed, which will necessitate tackling misinformation and highly polarized news. He alluded to Facebook’s shifting role as a distributor of news, saying the social network is “not just technology or media.”

Facebook’s goal, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was not to usurp traditional institutions like governments, religious groups and other communities that share interests. (When asked if he wanted to run for president of the United States, he laughed and declined.) Instead, he said, creating tightly knit online groups would make these traditional institutions stronger.

It also would not hurt that such groups and connections could well make Facebook more essential to people, which in turn may increase the company’s profits.

“There’s a social infrastructure that needs to get built to deal with modern problems in order for humanity to get to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I just think it would be good if more people thought about things like this.”

Correction: February 18, 2017

An article on Friday about an update to Facebook’s mission statement misstated, in some copies, the location of a nightclub massacre last year. It was in Florida, not Paris. (A nightclub massacre in Paris occurred in 2015.)

Continue reading the main story

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New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/18/ny-times-facebooks-zuckerberg-bucking-tide-takes-public-stand-against-isolationism-13/

NY Times: Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Bucking Tide, Takes Public Stand Against Isolationism

Mr. Zuckerberg, 32, chose to make the statement as an update to his original founder’s letter, which was published in 2012 when Facebook went public. In that letter, he wrote that the social network “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Continue reading the main story

In an interview this week at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he started Facebook, “the idea of connecting the world was not controversial.”

“The default assumption was that the world was just incrementally moving in that direction,” he said. “Now, that’s actually a real question.”

Mr. Zuckerberg released his missive amid a fierce debate over the merits of globalization. In the United States, President Trump has displayed a deep streak of nationalism. Last year, Britain voted to quit the European Union. Those moves and others have been taken as signs of how globalization has caused strains — making it more difficult for companies to navigate a new world order.

Against that backdrop, the timing of the letter is notable. While other technology executives, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, regularly update their founder letters each year — often tied to financial results — it is the first time Mr. Zuckerberg has refreshed Facebook’s mission statement since the company’s initial public offering.

Mr. Zuckerberg said his reasons for writing the updated letter began to take shape before last year’s presidential election, spurred by broader trends. He said he recognized that more people were feeling left behind by globalization, and by societal and technological changes. As a result, he wanted to focus different parts of Facebook in a way that helped people better come together.

“We have to build a global community that works for everyone,” he said. “I really don’t have much doubt that this is the right direction to go in the long term.”

Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to reorient Facebook, which turned 13 this month, around these new realities. His letter is filled with abstract ideas, including the notion of “social infrastructure” and how to create stronger online communities, with few detailed steps about how to realize those goals.

One top priority is building inclusive online communities that are supportive, safe and informed environments, to help strengthen bonds in the offline world as well. Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the idea of using Facebook to create this “social infrastructure” — essentially a digital means of connecting people around shared interests — mirroring social groups in the physical world like churches, governments and unions. That may encourage connections among people that transcend national and international barriers, he said.

Continue reading the main story

While Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned several concrete steps that Facebook has taken toward some of these goals, he gave few other specifics. He did not address how his vision might conflict with those of political leaders around the world, nor did he mention how emphasizing global connections benefited Facebook’s finances.

Getting to this point did not come easily. Since going public, Facebook has been on a growth tear, becoming one of the world’s biggest and most valuable public entities.

Yet the power that Facebook has amassed has raised hackles globally. The social network is blocked in China, has stumbled in India and is facing a thicket of regulatory questions in Europe. More recently, Mr. Trump’s election prompted an outcry over whether Facebook influenced the American electorate with false stories on its site. The company has scrambled to contain the fallout, undertaking several experiments to better sort through what people see on its site.

A key moment for Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift in thinking about how to be a global company happened six months ago. In September, Facebook censored an iconic photograph that featured a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. Mr. Zuckerberg said the image, titled “The Terror of War,” was rightly censored by Facebook at the time because the company’s content policies did not allow child nudity.

Facebook users disagreed, arguing that the photograph was not titillating but rather illustrated the perils of modern warfare. The social network eventually allowed the image to be posted on its site, noting that it had inherent news value.

Mr. Zuckerberg said the episode made him realize how ineffective Facebook’s content policy was at a global scale, given that cultural norms vary greatly by country. He said Facebook needed to get to a place in which users could perhaps choose their own content policies based on local laws and preferences, a marked departure from the company’s blanket global approach of the past decade or more.

“I don’t think that we, sitting here in California, are best positioned to know what the norms in communities around the world should be,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “At some point, you just need a more dynamic system where people can just express that themselves.”

Mr. Zuckerberg spent much of his letter focused on the importance of personal relationships. He pointed to “very meaningful groups” — Facebook groups that people frequently engage in and return to — that are often centered on topics like parenting, sports or other shared interests. When people find an interest they are passionate about and form such a group, they are some of the most tightly connected relationships on Facebook, he said.

To foster more of these groups in a safe way, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook needed to change some of the ways that it operated. That includes improving community safety with product updates similar to Facebook’s “safety check,” a tool that lets people mark themselves safe during catastrophes. Mr. Zuckerberg said that governments regularly called Facebook to confirm that Safety Check was activated during crises like the massacre at a nightclub in Florida last year.

Continue reading the main story

Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized Facebook’s role in keeping communities well-informed, which will necessitate tackling misinformation and highly polarized news. He alluded to Facebook’s shifting role as a distributor of news, saying the social network is “not just technology or media.”

Facebook’s goal, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was not to usurp traditional institutions like governments, religious groups and other communities that share interests. (When asked if he wanted to run for president of the United States, he laughed and declined.) Instead, he said, creating tightly knit online groups would make these traditional institutions stronger.

It also would not hurt that such groups and connections could well make Facebook more essential to people, which in turn may increase the company’s profits.

“There’s a social infrastructure that needs to get built to deal with modern problems in order for humanity to get to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I just think it would be good if more people thought about things like this.”

Correction: February 18, 2017

An article on Friday about an update to Facebook’s mission statement misstated, in some copies, the location of a nightclub massacre last year. It was in Florida, not Paris. (A nightclub massacre in Paris occurred in 2015.)

Continue reading the main story

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link