The Montoya Minute 03.09.20
Let's talk Logos, what's happening in Delhi, RZA's guided meditations, ICE tracking apps, UCSC fired grad students, everything is not fine in China, I need an intern!
Lets talk about Logos: Appeals to logic aka the mind. This type of appeal relies on data, analogies, stats, quotations, citations from experts and authorities. Is cognitive and rational.
It’s the least sexy one. It relies on empirical evidence.
Empirical: originating in or based on observation or experience
Empirical research: is research using your damn eyes and ears to do research and gather evidence as a way of verifying that something is real or bs.
The only thing is— it’s super easy to invalidate good empirical research. As we can see with things like pseudo science and religion (no shade to religion but it doesn’t require empirical evidence and it’s used to invalidate science pretty regularly… so is what it is.) — this is of course when people don’t know how to determine good research from literal made up info.
Emotions are the most powerful form of appeal. It’s why the Trump administration bombards us with constant highs and lows. Remember how willing we were to give up our privacy and civil liberties after 9/11? People make poor choices when they come from a place of stress, fear, and emotion —that’s not my opinion, it’s a fact.
When European-Americans are convinced all the Black and Brown people are after them and ruining their lives— they want to know someone is going to take control and guide them to safety. Trump does that.
Why do you think he’s always claiming everything he does is the best? And that everything is going according to plan? It’s constant reassurance to calm his jumpy, scared followers. He’s literally creating the problems and then taking credit for “resolving” them.
It’s why scapegoating is such a powerful tool. Creating an enemy with a scary narrative makes it easier to control people with fear. This is also why controlling your own narrative is everything.
We’ll talk more about appeals next week.
Primaries are over! Let’s look at some of the news that’s not about Elections real quick shall we?
Sh*t You Should Know
What Happened in Delhi Was a Pogrom
The violence unleashed against Muslims in Delhi by armed Hindu mobs during President Donald Trump’s visit to India is a portent and a lesson. As Trump sat down to dine with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, on Tuesday, Hindus in the same city were beating and shooting Muslims, and Muslims were fighting back, trying to defend their homes and businesses from looters and arsonists. More than 40 people were killed—including an 85-year-old woman too frail to flee her burning home—and more than 200 people, mostly Muslims, were injured.
The Delhi police, who report directly to Home Minister Amit Shah, either stood idly by or escorted the mobs. Videos of police breaking CCTV cameras and taunting prone and bleeding Muslim men while filming them with their smartphones circulated on social media. The violence echoed that of 2002, when Modi was chief minister of Gujarat and authorities there did nothing to stem carnage that killed some 1,000 people, the majority of them Muslims. It also brought back memories of the revenge killings of at least 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi after the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.
Any type of nationalism ultimately results in othering and scapegoating because it is a practice based on exclusion. As we see here in the US belonging to a country or being “American” isn’t based on birth or actual citizenship, it’s based on rules of behavior as well as random ideas about class, race, and hierarchy. Right now in India, being Indian means not being Muslim. You can see the dilemma for people who are in fact both Indian and Muslim. Creating a narrow definition allows anyone who falls outside of it to be treated unfairly.
RZA DROPS NEW EP OF GUIDED MEDITATION TRACKS FOR CREATIVES
RZA is without a doubt a master of many talents which is nothing short of his genuine creativity. In support of fellow creatives, right on Wu Wednesday, the abbot of the Wu-Tang Clan dropped a new EP titled Guided Explorations. The five-track EP is a part of a collaborative effort with premiere herbal tea TAZO, where RZA is stationed as the listener’s calming guide to revelation.
The five tracks are strategically formulated to help aspiring creatives breakthrough any burden that may be preventing them from access to their core intuition through the act of meditation.
This is dope.
ICE Is Using Location Data From Games and Apps to Track and Arrest Immigrants, Report Says
I keep seeing “human trafficking” used as an excuse as to why DHS wants certain information and it’s bullshit. Think of what this will lead to. Every time this administrations does something horrific and wild they’re testing us to see what the reaction will be. No reaction means they are on to the next step in their master plan.
The data is drawn from inconspicuous cell phone apps, like games and weather apps, that ask the user’s permission to access their location. But the data has been used by DHS to “help identify immigrants who were later arrested,” and by CBP to identify cell activity in places such as remote desert areas on the Mexican border, according to the Journal, which said it both reviewed documents and spoke to people “familiar with the matter”…
Notably, ICE was reportedly first given access to the data for usage in anti-human trafficking and drug smuggling efforts, but later began using the data to carry out deportations. The agency wouldn’t confirm or deny that…
At least one privacy advocate said that the news was alarming. “This is a classic situation where creeping commercial surveillance in the private sector is now bleeding directly over into government,” Electronic Privacy Information Center general counsel Alan Butler told the Journal.
After Announcing Firing of Grad Assistants, UC-Santa Cruz Is in Turmoil
This idyllic University of California campus spiraled toward a labor crisis on Monday in the aftermath of an extraordinary decision to send dismissal notices to 54 striking graduate students who are withholding winter-term grades to demand a cost-of-living adjustment.
In the wake of the mass firing, it was unclear who would handle the undergraduate courses that would have been taught by the teaching assistants. More than 500 other graduate students have pledged not to fill the spots vacated by the dismissed teaching assistants.
Rather than quelling the uprising, the dismissal added fuel to the fire. On Monday, the first business day since dismissal letters were sent to the students, an energized crowd of a couple of hundred graduate students and their allies gathered on a picket line at the campus’s main entrance.
The strike underscored the precarious living conditions of graduate students, especially in a city like Santa Cruz facing an affordable-housing shortage, where the modest graduate-student stipends — pay in exchange for supporting university teaching and research — often fall short. The average rental in Santa Cruz costs $2,600 per month, according to RentCafe. The base take-home pay for many graduate teaching assistants is about $2,100 a month.
Ya’ll in Grad School I refused to TA, the pay was so freaking low it made more sense to just not do anything. You’ve got a full load of courses, tons of reading, and a thesis or looming comp exams. The TAs in my program worked full time jobs, went to school full time, and many had families. Not to mention you have to build an entire course.
I know we think of colleges as liberal places of learning but they’re not. It’s elitist, hyper yt, and hyper male. The university is called an Ivory Tower for a reason. Ivory Tower: a state of privileged seclusion or separation from the facts and practicalities of the real world. It’s also colonial era symbolism cuz where did they get the ivory from? Africa and Asia. —And we all know what they were doing over there.
Dictatorships Are Making the Coronavirus Outbreak Worse
This is why the whole “this is fine” narrative doesn’t freaking work. Not in China, not in the US, not anywhere.
On February 27, in the midst of the now-growing worldwide coronavirus outbreak, Chinese human rights activist Yaqiu Wang pointed out a tragedy: “No matter how stretched government resources are, silencing criticism will always be the Communist Party’s number one priority.”
She was referring to the fact that yet another citizen journalist, Li Zehua, had just been arrested in China for reporting on coronavirus. But her comment is timeless, a core observation of how authoritarian systems operate…
In China, Dr. Li Wenliang warned his fellow colleagues in Wuhan about the massive potential dangers of coronavirus back in late December. Instead of listening to him, authorities accused him of “severely disturbing the social order.” Eventually, he was infected and killed by the virus. He became a national hero—and a rare rallying point for Chinese netizens to brazenly voice dissent online…
Over the past two months, Chinese doctors, journalists, and citizens reporting the truth have been hunted down and silenced, or have disappeared. Proper public health measures that could have been taken were not, out of fear of displeasing the Communist Party. Today, officials are reporting around 2,900 deaths. But in a reality where entire families are dying and where prisons are now reporting outbreaks, that number seems like a certain underestimation and the product of a paranoid regime.
I’m looking for a research assistant intern for the newsletter!
Are you a student looking for college credit? Are you a writer looking to learn more about research? I want you to be my intern! I need help looking up terms, putting them into plain language as well as looking up related news stories. It’s going to be 2-4 hours per week depending on my workload. If you’re interested email me 2-3 writing samples (it can be: an essay, article, short stories, personal writing, etc.) and a few paragraphs about your experience and why you want to work with me.
Email me @ yvetteactually86@gmail.com
Thanks for joining me! See you next week! Don’t forget to like and share!