Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• What If Trigger Warnings Don’t Work? - New psychological research suggests that trigger warnings do not reduce negative reactions to disturbing material—and may even increase them. - link

• R. Kelly Is Found Guilty on All Counts, Twenty-five Years Too Late - The verdict leaves several questions unanswered, including how the many people Kelly victimized will begin to heal. - link

• Republicans Are Gambling Recklessly on the Debt Limit - While Democrats haggle over priorities, Republicans take an ominous tack: threatening a financial cataclysm amid a global pandemic. - link

• Instagram for Kids and What Facebook Knows About the Effects of Social Media - A Senate committee hearing will address whether Facebook is following the example of Big Tobacco. - link

• A Soundtrack for an Unfolding Climate Disaster - In my rural corner of Sonoma County, there is no longer a question of whether fire will come to us; it’s only a matter of when. - link

From Vox

• How mental health became a social media minefield -

  

  Social media is now basically WebMD for mental health.

  When I first downloaded TikTok, in the fall of 2018, it only took a few days for my algorithm to figure out that I have ADHD. To be fair, this isn’t all that impressive, as TikTok and the rest of the internet make it extremely difficult to focus on a single thing for more than five seconds — there is simply so much stuff to look at! — and it’s certainly possible to argue that anyone who spends enough time online may experience some of the symptoms that help psychologists diagnose patients.

  Videos would show up on my For You page with captions like “Hidden signs you’re ADHD” and “what my ADHD brain feels like,” and I’d roll my eyes because I knew what was coming: They’d reference common attributes of the modern mind — difficulty focusing and difficulty switching tasks, difficulty completing boring tasks and difficulty completing difficult tasks — and finish by saying, “If you relate to this, congrats! You probably have attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.”

  The nebulous definition of ADHD, and Big Pharma’s push to diagnose and treat it, has made the disorder’s very existence the subject of intense cultural debate since before I was born. Were we overdiagnosing neurotypical brain functions? Were we overmedicating children who were simply acting like children? Was it all the health care industry’s fault? This line of questioning is a touchy subject for plenty of people who have found meaning and identity and medical help from their diagnosis. It has also turned discussions around ADHD and psychological conditions with similar symptoms — generalized anxiety disorder, depression, autism spectrum disorder — into land mines, capable of turning a good-faith debate into an endless back-and-forth of ad hominem attacks.

  But in the past decade, as social media has forced billions of us to virtually bump into people we never would have otherwise, many of us have also found the need to categorize people into recognizable boxes. One way to do so is by seizing on common human behaviors to name — gaslighting, emotional labor, trauma, parasocial relationships, “empath” as a noun — then disseminating them until they cease to mean much at all. We end up treating mental illness like a subculture, complete with its own vocabulary that only those in the know can use and weaponize.

  It often looks like this: On August 26, a woman posted a TikTok suggesting that “excessive reading” in childhood was considered a “dissociative behavior.” In the video, she turns to the camera and shakes her head as if having a sudden, life-altering realization that explains the trajectory of her life; the comments are flooded with people experiencing the same aha moment. “12th grade reading level in 5th grade you say? Damn … #trauma,” wrote one. “At this point all the character traits I have are just my neurodivergence [atypical mental function],” wrote another. (This wasn’t even the first time this discourse happened.)

  @juliannekelsch

  Maybe dissociative but worth it! #author #reader #booktok #authortok #writertok

  ♬ Just Dance - Lady Gaga

  The responses were not quite as kind once the discussion moved over to Twitter, after writer Jeanna Kadlec tweeted about how she related to the TikTok. Quote tweets ranged from frustrated (“y’all are still absolutely battering any kind of meaning out of the word ‘dissociation’ i see”) to darkly satirical (“oh, you read? that actually means you are mentally ill and abused. i have a huge brain.”) to earnest (“TikTok has pathologized every single behavior and personality trait, which perhaps has done less to destigmatize mental illness and more to dilute it to meaninglessness”).

  Consume too much of the mental health internet and it becomes difficult to even understand what anyone is saying. “There is no strict frontier between what is pathological and what is not,” explains Joël Billieux, a professor of clinical psychology and psychopathology at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. “It’s the way people live them [mental health conditions] and the meaning they give to them, which could result in psychological suffering or difficulties.”

  At the risk of, well, over-pathologizing, it basically seems like there are two types of people: those who tend to appreciate and identify with this kind of internet diagnosis — “[X] behavior is actually a trauma response!” does legitimately make sense for some people and helps them live a happier life — and those who find it not just annoying but potentially harmful, stigmatizing, and unscientific. Nowhere on the internet — at least nowhere that I have come across — have those two types of people ever found much common ground, thereby making such discussions highly unpleasant and unproductive. It’s a terrible loop that we seem destined to replay forever. Is it doing us any good?

  ---

  “It sucks” is the prevailing theory about the internet now, and this is not wrong. There are all kinds of guesses as to why it might be: According to legal scholar and coiner of the phrase “net neutrality” Tim Wu, it’s because of media consolidation and chumboxes; according to author Roxane Gay, it’s because of our tendency to presume the worst in others. Tech journalist Charlie Warzel says it’s because of platform-enabled context collapse, while Atlantic columnist Caitlin Flanagan blames Twitter. Perhaps it’s the never-ending mudslide of algorithmically generated content that leaves individuals stuck under a pile of hatred and extremism, or the ”Like” button, or maybe it’s Congress’s fault.

  All of these things are likely true to some extent, but the theory I’ve been thinking about lately is what the writer P.E. Moskowitz calls the “BuzzFeedification of mental health” and which I’d argue can also be widened to the BuzzFeedification of identity (no shade to BuzzFeed or its quizzes, of course, which provide a great service to the procrastinating).

  “The internet is basically a categorization machine, so part of me thinks it’s inherent to the internet, or at least inherent to corporate social media, where we all feel so overwhelmed by the vastness of the space and the number of people we interact with that we must whittle ourselves down into categories,” Moskowitz told me over email. “ADHD, bipolar, whatever it may be, become micro communities we can find safety and meaning in.”

  Self-selective processes are natural for human beings, and they can obviously be quite useful on the internet, where some amount of gatekeeping is necessary to foster a certain environment. Groups for people whom society often marginalizes — like, say, those with mental illness or who share a common history of trauma — must enforce an element of exclusivity in order to be useful. The trouble starts when, Moskowitz argues, these identity markers are used as a rhetorical tool.

  Moskowitz was the subject of this sort of vitriol in early August, when they posted a photo of their Tetris-like parallel parking job. The photo went viral on Twitter, with dozens of people quote-tweeting and replying that Moskowitz was ableist for failing to consider the cars that now might have a difficult time exiting their spot. They were also called a “malignant narcissist” (not an actual term psychologists would use) by someone who explained that they knew a malignant narcissist when they saw one because, they said, they’d been raised by a malignant narcissist.

  i am being cancelled for being good at parallel parking pic.twitter.com/WzEKOHpM0N

  — ☺︎ p.e. ☺︎ moskowitz ☺︎ (@_pem_pem) July 3, 2021

“I see it most when people want to win arguments — they pathologize themselves to give themselves authority (‘I have XYZ disorder therefore you must listen to me’ or ‘You are being XYZ horrible thing — racist, classist, narcissist, whatever — therefore you’re wrong’),” Moskowitz says. “The categorization allows for a flattening of nuance. You can’t argue with someone calling you a sexist or a sociopath or whatever, and you can’t argue with someone who bases the entirety of their argument in their personal experience.”

This instinct has only intensified over the past 18 months. Amanda Brennan, an internet trend expert at XX Artists, has observed the ways that, after sitting with themselves and reflecting during the isolation of the pandemic, many people have come to monumental realizations about their gender, sexuality, mental health, and identity. “It feels good to say, ‘Here’s a set of predetermined things that I can try on like a hat, and if it fits, it fits,” she says. “It’s like the closet scene in Clueless: You try it on and see how it feels.” (My favorite example of this: a TikTok that reads “when it was supposed to just be 2 weeks on Zoom but now you’re bisexual.”)

One place that Brennan sees it take on some rather unhelpful forms is in fandom discourse — for instance, in May, when Vice journalist Gita Jackson made an offhand tweet about the Harry Potter character Hermione Granger being “annoying” and a “know-it-all” and was then accused of being ableist because some of them felt that Hermione is “coded as autistic.” As the comics news website CBR pointed out, “Jackson is neurodivergent, and the people accusing them of ableism on Twitter seemed to care more about defending a supposedly neurodivergent fictional character than respecting the real neurodivergent person they were talking to.”

Yet it can be an extremely human reaction to defend our own worldviews. “When people are really involved in a fandom, they’re going to see these heavy things from their life in the things that they love because they want to feel more connected to it,” explains Brennan. But sometimes “it starts to become, ‘Well, my headcanon [an individual’s belief about a fictional text that is not canonical to the story] is what matters most, so I’m going to argue that XYZ is X-coded.’ It’s almost like, ‘I want to be seen by this thing that I love, so I’m going to read it this way, and no one else can fight me on it.’”

What we’re talking about here is the problem of being, as it’s often called, “chronically online.” “What’s the most chronically online take you’ve ever seen on the internet?” begins an immensely popular TikTok audio where users can respond and give their own examples. The most common are almost exclusively instances of pathologizing unremarkable behavior: a Reddit comment that suggested a woman was “grooming” her boyfriend because they started dating when she was 19 and he was 18; a video where “cakegender” was given its own pride flag meant to represent “people who feel light and fluffy.”

It’s difficult to talk about this sort of discursive overreach without sounding like a far-right reactionary; indeed, criticisms of over- pathologization have come from conservatives who argue that, to generalize, it’s all just a bunch of self-obsessed liberal snowflake eggheads. “One of the biggest problems is that the far right has correctly identified that this is happening — that the discourse and identity policing has gotten out of control,” Moskowitz tells me, to the point where it becomes hard for others to push back against it without sounding as though you’re siding with an ideology they don’t adhere to. “There needs to be a strong, leftist stance of ‘we’re not going to do this identity-pathology policing thing anymore, but that doesn’t make us reactionaries.’”

Whether doctors over-pathologize certain normal human behaviors has been a subject of great interest in the medical field; when the DSM-V, the standard classification of mental disorders, was published in 2013, many psychiatrists argued that it medicalized typical behavioral patterns and moods, possibly as a result of the pharmaceutical industry’s influence. (One common example here is the potential to misclassify grief over the loss of a loved one as major depressive disorder.)

Billieux has studied gambling and gaming addictions extensively, and warns against the instinct to diagnose every symptom. “The idea of being able to categorize mental illness like you’re categorizing insects, for example, is something that is very complicated and probably is not valid in the context of psychiatric disorders and psychological suffering,” he explains. “These labels are very reductive in terms of defining the psychology of someone, and they tend to ignore individual differences.” He cites studies showing that anywhere between 5 and 30 percent of the general population experience auditory or visual hallucinations — which are stereotypically attributed to mental illness — at some point in their lives without any other issues.

Who’s to say, though, that reflecting on one’s own mental state and seeking help is a bad thing? The American medical system already discourages us from receiving care — it’s unknowably expensive, infuriatingly confusing, and inaccessible to the people who need it most. “There is a treatment gap, which means that there are people suffering who cannot access or don’t want to access psychologists and they should,” Billieux says. “That doesn’t mean that choosing a specific label will help you to overcome this difficulty, or be beneficial at all.”

Take, for instance, generalized anxiety disorder (which I have also been diagnosed with), which hinges on what a patient or doctor decides is an “excessive” amount of a fundamental human emotion. Diagnoses like this are left relatively vague to account for individuals’ ability to function in society and the amount of suffering their anxiety causes, but online, they can sometimes be used as throwaway terms. “For some people, especially when you’re young, there is a bit of a pull to join a group. And the group of people with social anxiety or depression feels like one you can easily join,” Natasha Tracy, author of the book Lost Marbles, on her experience with bipolar disorder, told Mashable.

Many people do benefit from finding the language to describe their psychological experience — it’s the reason group therapy often greatly helps people, explains Inna Kanevsky, a psychology professor at San Diego Community College who uses TikTok to debunk viral myths about mental illness. But she argues that labels aren’t necessarily an instant solution. “Once people start using science-y terms and labeling things, [they believe] they’re contributing to solving the problem, but it doesn’t exactly explain very much. It’s like, what are we going to do?” She uses the example of the online ADHD community to point out that diagnoses can be blurrier than we’d like to think. “Generally, ADHD coping strategies can be helpful for anybody,” she explains. “You don’t need to label yourself to use the advice.”

It can feel special, understandably, to adopt a label around which to frame one’s identity, if not outright cool. And the internet rewards it: “Whereas a therapist might question the usefulness of identifying oneself as permanently aligned with whatever struggle one is experiencing, engagement-driven platforms help frame conditions as points of identity, badges of honor,” explains Isabel Munson in a piece on Real Life. People in our own lives may reward it, too: As writer and TikToker Rayne Fisher-Quann pointed out, friends and family tend to be much more forgiving and understanding when you can excuse behavior using a label, as opposed to trying to articulate the complexities of the human mind at any particular moment.

Treating mental illness like subculture, though, can have unintended consequences. Just a few days ago, I was served a TikTok ad for a direct-to-consumer startup centered on delivering cutely branded ADHD medicine to your door. Was this an ad targeted to me based on what TikTok assumes? Or was this sent out to the general public, implying that there are enough people on TikTok who have or think they have ADHD to make the ad a worthwhile investment?

In a story on internet pathologization for i-D, James Greig writes that easily categorizable people are also easy to market to. “While there is genuine support out there and a lot of good intentions, it’s worth bearing in mind that some of the people involved in pushing these diagnoses have a vested interest in doing so,” he writes. (Consider the zillions of products that claim to quell anxiety, a market that’s exploded over the past decade.)

Perhaps the solution to this sort of categorization and grouping is to redefine the terms. “To me, we should start seeing identities more as things you do rather than descriptors of who you are,” says Moskowitz. “I am trans because I care about trans life, because I commune with other trans people, because I donate my money to other trans people. It’s all well and good if you want to claim an identity, but I think every identity comes with responsibility to the communities it represents, to the histories that made those identities possible. If that makes me a gatekeeper, so be it.”

An overreliance on specific labels to characterize oneself as infallible and others as morally suspect only serves to divide us further, making it more difficult for everyone to get proper support. Is it helpful to dismiss someone because you believe they have borderline personality disorder (itself a somewhat controversial diagnosis), or, on the other hand, is it helpful for someone with BPD to excuse the harm they may cause others based on their own diagnosis? Is it helpful to accuse someone of being ableist for, say, being attracted to “himbos,” or are we expending our anger, our frustration, our cynicism at the state of things on whoever happens to tweet something we didn’t like that day?

Diagnosing issues in each other may feel like progress; it may feel like identifying problems that are solvable. Perhaps we feel that as long as there are enough commenters telling someone their video failed to incorporate every single human experience that things could change for the better. But the main change it’s made so far is creating a cycle of bad-faith name-calling (“You’re being classist!” followed by “Go touch grass!”) and mutual resentment.

I hate internet pathologization for the same reason I hate the concept of generations or niche left-wing political posturing: They needlessly divide people who desperately need each other to further their goals. To use a very banal example, memes like “ok boomer” are funny, but divorced from context they ignore the conditions of low-income older adults who’ve been screwed over by the same forces as young folks. Internet pathologizing is an individualist exercise, basically. As a technically “neurodivergent” person (another term that often feels unproductive to me), I’d much rather connect with other people over the aspects of modern life that everyone, neurodivergent or not, can benefit from: access to medical care, therapy, and child care; higher-paying and flexible work opportunities; community support; and a stronger social safety net.

That stuff is hard, though. It’s a lot easier to scroll TikTok and Twitter, whiplashing between outrage over a hastily written tweet and electrifying realizations that perhaps every aspect of your identity could be explained by a single diagnosis. Either way, we’re sitting around, thinking about ourselves. And that, ultimately, is what it is to be a person — not someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

• R. Kelly was convicted. Are we finally listening to Black women? -

  

  It took decades and dozens of allegations for the singer’s survivors to be heard. Activists aren’t sure the verdict is a turning point.

  For the dozens of survivors who came forward, the R. Kelly verdict was three decades in the making: After a six-week trial, the R&B singer was found guilty on Monday on nine counts of sex trafficking and racketeering. The 54-year-old musician, long accused of disturbing allegations of sexual abuse and harassment, was being held accountable.

  “Thank God they got it right this time,” Stephanie Edwards, who tried for 20 years to convince the world that R. Kelly raped her niece, told The Cut.

  It took the jury just nine hours to deliberate after prosecutors, with the help of 45 witnesses, untangled a web of abuse that targeted Black women and girls as young as 13 and teenage boys. The harrowing stories of these survivors — and their bravery to share them — helped lead to the R&B superstar’s conviction after years of evasion.

  One woman testified that R. Kelly gave her herpes when she was 16 and he was 42. Another shared how Kelly locked her in a room for days without food to eventually wake up having been drugged and raped. Others on the stand told of Kelly forcing them to get abortions, demanding they have sex with other women who were locked up in his studio, coercing them to have sex and perform sexual acts under the threat of a gun, and obsessively recording much of the abuse on video.

  The verdict, many say, is evidence that a cultural tide has turned after years of activism. Since the Me Too movement took off in 2017, Kelly’s reckoning has been a major milestone in the music industry and the first high-profile case in which the majority of the victims were Black women and girls. These survivors had to fight especially hard to have their stories be heard and taken seriously.

  Allegations go back as far as 1996, when a young woman filed a lawsuit against Kelly, saying she was underage when he initiated sex with her; in 2001, another young woman did the same. A year later, police indicted Kelly on 21 counts of child pornography after an anonymous source sent a sex tape to the Chicago Police Department. When the case went to trial in 2008, jurors were not convinced by the video evidence that showed Kelly sexually abusing what appeared to be a young Black girl, and Kelly was acquitted of the child pornography charges.

  In the years since, activists — from Me Too founder Tarana Burke to the women behind the #MuteRKelly social media campaign — have worked hard to cultivate a climate that brings attention to Black survivors. The explosive Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly further brought allegations against the singer to light.

  Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

  Only time will tell if Kelly’s conviction will be an outlier, or if it means that Black women and girls are truly being recognized and taken seriously in discussions about sexual abuse and assault. Much like Harvey Weinstein, who in February 2020 was sentenced to 23 years in prison for third-degree rape and first-degree criminal sexual acts, Kelly’s list of abuses is egregious, excessive, and damning. But there are signs that Me Too fatigue has set in, with the public less interested in following abuse cases, and Kelly’s music still remains popular on streaming platforms. Some who have long followed the allegations see the verdict as a step forward for the country’s most vulnerable survivors — but they note that there’s still a long way to go to change the reality that one in four Black girls will be sexually abused before age 18, according to the American Psychological Association (APA).

  “It’s remarkable the level at which one has to prey upon Black girls and women for there to be this kind of recognition,” Treva Lindsey, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University, told Vox. “It took three decades of allegations, a docuseries, a #MuteRKelly campaign, and more to even produce the moment that we’re in. But the systems that enabled Kelly are still intact.”

  From child porn allegations to Surviving R. Kelly: What led to a conviction

  The world where R. Kelly was able to evade authorities for years looks a bit different from the world in which he was finally convicted this week.

  In 1994, Kelly illegally married R&B singer Aaliyah when she was just 15 years old. When news of their relationship broke, it was mostly discussed as a misguided choice made by a mentor and protégé “in love,” not one of abuser and victim. In the recent trial, however, Aaliyah was noted as Jane Doe No. 1, with a witness testifying that he saw Kelly having sex with Aaliyah when she was 13 or 14.

  What made more headlines than the illegal marriage, though, was what many called Kelly’s “sex tape.” In June 2002, the self-titled Pied Piper was charged with 21 counts of making child pornography that featured oral sex, intercourse, and urination. The video in question had been widely copied and sold, earning a place in the cultural discourse with comedians joking about golden showers and Kelly’s kinks. It took six years for the case to make it to trial, where Kelly was found not guilty on all counts. Jurors concluded that they could not determine that the girl on the 27-minute tape was a minor. While the trial focused on this one sex tape, there were several allegations against Kelly by this time.

  Between “the tape” and his first trial, Kelly only grew in popularity with an NAACP Image Award nomination in 2004 and the release of his cult classic hip hopera, “Trapped in the Closet,” the following year. When Kelly was exonerated in 2008, he left the courthouse with his hand on his heart as he walked by fans with the “flicker of a smile” on his face, the New York Times wrote.

  Back then, the 14 witnesses at Kelly’s trial weren’t believed, or at least weren’t believed enough by the jurors (nine men and three women) to convict him. Kelly’s defense team called the witnesses liars and extortionists and even compared one of them to the devil. Kelly’s lawyers made their entire defense about gold-digging women, since one of the witnesses admitting to stealing a $20,000 Rolex from the musician. The jury explained that the lack of testimony from the victim created “grayness” in the case.

  During Kelly’s 2021 trial, a defense team tried once again to paint women who testified against Kelly as promiscuous and desperate for fame, but the effort didn’t stick — more survivors came forward, and there had been a years-long movement of supporters behind the women this time around that had worked to uncover Kelly’s alleged intricate criminal enterprise and shine a light on a culture that enables predators.

  The #MuteRKelly campaign, founded in 2017, brought greater attention to the longstanding allegations against Kelly, urging individuals, radio stations, and music venues to stop playing his music or hosting his live performances. The movement’s founders, Kenyette Barnes and Oronike Odeleye, two Black women, believed it was time for Black communities to take a stand against R. Kelly by not supporting his music career — less streaming and album sales meant less money for the lawyers and networks that prolonged the abuse.

  Max Herman/NurPhoto via Getty Images

  Scott Olson/Getty Images

  That same year, music writer Jim DeRogatis, who originally broke the story of allegations against Kelly and had been chronicling the allegations against Kelly since 2000, published a BuzzFeed feature detailing information about a “cult” of young women that Kelly maintained. Just four months later, decades of sexual assault and harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein surfaced, launching the Me Too movement to heights activists never believed would happen. For a moment, it seemed as though Kelly’s victims could ride this wave — people tried to vocalize the decades of horror the R&B singer wrought — but their stories weren’t amplified in the way others survivors’ were.

  It took another push for Kelly’s victims to get some attention: The six-part Lifetime docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, directed by dream hampton and released in early 2019, featured several accusers describing their experiences with Kelly and seemed to finally break the weight of silence that had settled in. In the six hours of television testimony, survivors, allies, and advocates laid out the most comprehensive look yet at Kelly’s abuse, making it difficult for people to look away. After the series aired, Kelly was dropped by his record company and later charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and sex trafficking.

  “What’s striking is that the trial revealed an even broader scope of victimization that he perpetrated than the docuseries alluded to,” Candice Norcott, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago who was a featured expert in the Lifetime docuseries, told Vox. “There was still more that was revealed, like the scope of gender identities that he targeted.”

  Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

  Monday’s verdict, after decades of accusations and activism, shows that change is happening, albeit very slowly. One of the biggest critiques at the height of Me Too — which was started by Burke, a Black activist, around 2007 before surging in the wake of the Weinstein story — was that it left out marginalized women, particularly Black women. It only received widespread recognition after actress Alyssa Milano tweeted out the phrase 10 years later and captured stories of abuse that women in Hollywood experienced. Most of the stories that garnered attention centered on white women; meanwhile, more than 20 percent of Black women are raped during their lives, according to the APA, a higher percentage than women overall, and for every Black woman who reports rape, at least 15 Black women do not.

  The unique discrimination that Black women face as a result of misogynoir — the combination of anti-Black racism and misogyny — makes it harder for Black women to report campus sexual assaults, for example, even at majority- Black institutions. Activists have helped bring these realities to the fore in recent years, and Americans have become more receptive to understanding systemic oppression. The fact that jurors at Kelly’s 2021 trial believed the Black women who testified against him, especially given that the women are not famous or wealthy, is significant.

  Still, Lindsey pointed out, survivors can’t help but feel a loss for not being believed for so long. “The verdict finally offers a clear indictment, not only of R. Kelly, of course, but of all the enablers and systems that had to be in place to allow that to proceed,” Lindsey said. “But for Black women and girls, and especially those who are the survivors of sexual violence, it’s not comforting to know that it took three decades of allegations for people to say, ‘Perhaps this was terrible.’”

  Why the greater impact of Kelly’s guilty verdict is tough to predict

  It is yet to be seen whether this trial and verdict will encourage society to listen to and believe Black women and girls going forward.

  There are multiple reasons Kelly’s case may be an outlier. For one, Kelly’s behavior was monstrous in terms of its flagrancy, frequency, and longevity. That isn’t the norm for sexual violence for the average victim, Lindsey said. Kelly was a rich and powerful man, with a network of enablers; he was known to scout teenage girls and commit his abuses in plain sight. His crimes also included some especially foul details — one woman testified that Kelly forced her to smear feces on her face and put them in her mouth. For another, it’s well-documented that Black women and girls are less likely to be seen as victims, or to be believed and supported when they report abuse.

  In fact, there are a number of Black women who have accused high-profile men of sexual abuse whose accounts still deserve serious attention. Jennifer Hough — the woman whom Kenneth Petty, Nicki Minaj’s husband, was convicted of attempting to rape — has said that Petty, Minaj, and their fans have pressured her to recant her story of the sexual assault. The 20 women who have accused hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct face an uphill battle as Simmons denies the allegations with the hashtag #NotMe. And those stories have made the news because the accused men are famous — but what about those who’ve faced sexual violence at the hands of non-famous men?

  “These instances [with Petty and Simmons] tell us we aren’t necessarily somewhere new with how we tackle sexual violence against Black women and girls,” said Lindsey. “There’s still a way that we are willing to villainize and demonize them for their behavior without actually reckoning with the pervasiveness of sexual violence.”

  Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

  Michael Abbott/Getty Images

  There are also other factors that signal a larger, overall Me Too fatigue. Though some dedicated viewers tuned in to Kelly’s 2021 trial daily, posting recaps in Facebook groups or devoting entire YouTube series to analyzing the case, social media attention to the six-week trial was markedly low. When the Weinstein allegations first came out in October 2017, the hashtag #MeToo was used 200,000 times, and 80,000 people were talking about the movement on Facebook. By the time the jury reached a verdict in the R. Kelly trial, #MeToo was hardly being used; meanwhile, one of the top R. Kelly hashtags was #FreeRKelly.

  “I had to kind of search it out a little to find information from the trial,” Lindsey said. “I know there were news sites keeping a daily record, and Black news outlets were pretty good about regular updates, but I did not see that same kind of investment that we saw with the Harvey Weinstein case, in terms of public lure. And this is perhaps one of the most intricate, complex, and just damning cases of serial sexual predation we’ve probably seen in quite some time, but you wouldn’t know that from the news.”

  Norcott also noted having to dig for news pertaining to Kelly’s trial. “There was the context of [Instagrammer Gabby Petito’s] story emerging and getting so much attention while this trial was underway. It’s important to pay attention to how and why that happened.”

  As Spencer Kornhaber noted in the Atlantic, it’s also important to understand that Kelly was convicted not of rape or sexual assault, but of sex trafficking and racketeering, a charge notoriously linked to the mafia. This strategy was a workaround for sexual abuse allegations that had reached the statute of limitations, with the prosecution opting instead to show how Kelly constructed a grand scheme of abuse that involved dozens of enablers. That prosecutors chose this approach also highlights how hard it is to get a sexual assault conviction against a powerful man.

  Then there is Kelly’s popularity as a musician. Though the debate of separating the art from the artist has persisted for ages, there will always be people who are not concerned about consuming the art of an abuser. Just this month, Drake released an album featuring a song credit from Kelly. After Surviving R. Kelly aired, streams of Kelly’s music shot up on Spotify; he currently has 4.9 million monthly listeners. By this point, people have already made up their minds as to whether they will continue to play “Ignition (remix)” or stop listening to it altogether, and Kelly’s guilty verdict is unlikely to affect their decision.

  “There’s a way that a lot of us are grappling with our role as enablers, and as part of rape culture, that also keeps us much more timid in our responses and our investment in the verdict,” Lindsey said.

  Ultimately, activists want the long-overdue R. Kelly verdict to underscore how challenging it is for survivors to tell their stories — and that’s why it’s important that they’re heard, especially Black women and children, who are often some of the most vulnerable. People may be exhausted by Me Too, but the work to dismantle a culture that enables abuse is nowhere near done. “What I hope comes out of this is more messages about accountability and fewer messages about doubt, shame, and the persecution of survivors who decide to come forward,” Norcott said.

• Why 4 companies control the beef industry -

  

  Corporate consolidation is making it impossible for cattle ranchers to stay afloat.

  Cattle auctions happen every day throughout the US; they serve a crucial purpose for the cattle markets. Inside one of these auctions, like the one we profile in St. Onge, South Dakota, you can see how a competitive market functions. There are multiple producers and buyers competing for a commodity, which results in a value, or price, for that commodity.

  But over the past 40 years, the meatpacking sector — made up of the companies that buy and slaughter cattle for consumption — has undergone a dramatic degree of corporate consolidation. In the 1980s, the US relaxed its approach to antitrust enforcement, one tool the government uses to rein in market concentration. Today, only four companies process 85 percent of all the cattle produced in the US.

  Cattle ranchers say this is affecting their ability to compete for good prices and make a living. This is one way industrialized agriculture is making it difficult for independent farmers and ranchers to stay in business in America.

  For this story, we contacted Tyson Foods, Cargill, National Beef, and JBS for comment. We only received a response from Tyson; a representative shared testimony from one of the company’s executives at a recent Senate hearing. We included that in this video, and the full transcript is here.

  This is the first episode of a series we are producing with the Future Perfect team at Vox, a group that explores big problems and the big ideas that can tackle them. We are calling this season The Human Cost of Meat, and future episodes will explore other ways industrial meat production has transformed the lives of people who consume meat, work in the meat industry, or live near a factory farm.

  You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Day/Night Test: Smriti Mandhana’s elegant career-best knock takes India women to 132 for 1 at tea - Most of the second session’s play was washed out but Mandhana stood up the challenge.

• Ashwin hits back at England captain Morgan, asks him to “stop taking moral high ground” - In a series of tweets, Ashwin clarified his stand and made it clear that he would again run if the ball hit a fielder’s body.

• Indian Premier League 2021 | All eyes on Venkatesh vs Bishnoi match-up as upbeat Kolkata faces Punjab - It will be the biggest match-up in the game which is very important for KL Rahul’s Punjab Kings if they have to stay in competition.

• IOC announce Beijing Olympics will not allow foreign spectators - No tickets will be sold to anyone living outside China as Olympic venues open their doors again.

• Rupinder Pal Singh, Birendra Lakra retire from international hockey - Rupinder Pal Singh represented India in 223 matches and Birendra Lakra in 201.

From The Hindu: National News

• ‘Happiness’ curriculum for students - To ease the learning atmosphere when schools reopen on Nov.1

• R. Sajan appointed as new superintendent of Viyyur Central Jail in Kerala - The appointment comes after former jail superintendent A.G. Suresh was suspended pending inquiry in the illegal telephone call case in the jail

• Assam eviction happened because people are Muslims: Brinda Karat - Minorities in Darrang district treated worse than prisoners of war, says CPI(M) team after visiting Dhalpur area

• 69% of India’s adult population has got at least one dose of Covid vaccine, 25% both: Govt - The government said that increased population density raises chances of COVID-19 spread and it will be prudent to avoid non-essential travel and observe festivity at low key.

• Marathon month for the Supreme Court Collegium - Appointments to the High Courts of Punjab and Haryana, Gujarat, Orissa, and Bombay recommended

From BBC: Europe

• Nazi Stutthof camp secretary flees as German trial starts - Irmgard Furchner - accused of complicity in more than 11,000 murders - tried to flee on Thursday.

• Sarkozy: Ex-French president gets jail sentence over campaign funding - The former French president is found guilty of illegally funding his unsuccessful 2012 re-election.

• Maria Kolesnikova: No regrets for Belarus activist jailed for coup plot - Maria Kolesnikova calls the case against her “absurd” in her first interview since her conviction.

• Climate change: Money on the agenda at Milan talks - After the jeers of Greta Thunberg, minsters meet in Italy for the last UN talks before a major climate summit.

• Waterspout hits German port city of Kiel, throwing people from boats - A tornado strikes the city of Kiel, throwing people from boats and ripping roofs from homes.

From Ars Technica

• Fairphone 4 has an incredible 5-year warranty, aims for 6 years of updates - If you want a smartphone with a long life, Fairphone is leading the industry. - link

• PS4 consoles will still be playable long after PSN has died, thanks to this major update - The console’s system-bricking CMOS issue is no more. Will the PS3 be next? - link

• Health workers get panic buttons as COVID deniers get violent - Overworked health workers face jeers, harassment, attacks amid wave of cases. - link

• Scientists test medieval gunpowder recipes with 15th-century cannon replica - A bit of sulfur, a dash of charcoal, a lot of saltpeter and… KABOOM! - link

• YouTube bans vaccine nonsense, such as claims that vaccines alter genetic makeup - YouTube starts crackdown, group led by RFK Jr. among the first to be banned. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• What do pirates call prostitutes -

  Land-Hoe!

  submitted by /u/Super-doodoo
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• A woman awakes during the night to find that her husband is not in bed. -

  She puts on her robe and goes downstairs to look for him. She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee. ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ she whispers as she steps into the room, ‘Why are you down here at this time of night? The husband looks up from his coffee, ’It’s the 20th Anniversary of the day we met’. She can’t believe he has remembered and starts to tear up. The husband continues, ‘Do you remember 20 years ago when we started dating? I was 18 and you were only 16,’ he says solemnly. Once again, the wife is touched to tears. ‘Yes, I do’ she replies. The husband pauses The words were not coming easily. ‘Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car?’ ‘Yes, I remember’ said the wife, lowering herself into the chair beside him. The husband continued. ’Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, “Either you marry my daughter or I will send you to prison for 20 years?’ ‘I remember that, too’ she replied softly. He wiped another tear from his cheek and said”I would have gotten out today."

  submitted by /u/FullMeltxTractions
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• There are 27 bones in your hand -

  28 if you’re lonely

  submitted by /u/im_bored__
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• How do you know a redditor is not a native english speaker? -

  They’ll apologize for potential mistakes after 10 paragraphs of perfect english

  submitted by /u/Tulkas2
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• Gift for sweetheart -

  A young man wanted to purchase a gift for his new sweetheart for her birthday. As they had not been dating very long, after careful consideration he decided a pair of gloves would strike just the right note: romantic, but not too personal.

  Accompanied by the sweetheart’s sister, he went to Nordstrom and bought a pair of white gloves. The sister purchased a pair of panties for herself. During wrapping, the clerk mixed the items up and the sister got the gloves instead. Without checking the contents, the young man sealed the package and sent it to his sweetheart with this note:

  "I chose these because I noticed that you are not in the habit of wearing any when we go out in the evening. If it had not been for your sister, I would have chosen the long ones with the buttons, but she wears the short ones that are easier to remove…..!

  submitted by /u/dala07
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