[Linkspam] Monday, August 1

People resort to violence because their moral codes demand it, by Tage Rai for Aeon (2015-06-18): Violence isn't the product of mental illness. It's the result of the same, very mainstream belief system that frames morality in terms of coercion and punishment, from parenting to prisons. So long as we keep teaching people that violence is what must be done to people who transgress social norms, supposedly-senseless (but actually quite explicable) mass shootings and terrorist acts will continue. Tage Rai explains in detail how violence serves to "regulate social relationships":

Across practices, across cultures, and throughout historical periods, when people support and engage in violence, their primary motivations are moral. By ‘moral’, I mean that people are violent because they feel they must be; because they feel that their violence is obligatory. They know that they are harming fully human beings. Nonetheless, they believe they should. Violence does not stem from a psychopathic lack of morality. Quite the reverse: it comes from the exercise of perceived moral rights and obligations.

Internet trolls are even more hostile when they’re using their real names, a study finds, by Michael J. Coren for Quartz (2016-07-27). A good companion piece to Rai's article, this one about online violence. Coren writes, "People are actually trying to enforce social norms against a perceived violation by a public figure or group," and they are so eager to enforce social norms that anonymity or lack thereof has little if any modulating effect on the desire to regulate others' behavior.

Donald Trump Is a Republican, by Tom Scocca for Gawker (2016-07-29). Trump isn't an anomaly, but rather, the logical conclusion of the past four decades of Republican politics:

Donald Trump is the product of half a century of Republican strategy and ideology. Republican voters nominated him because he’s what generations of Republicans have been guided by and encouraged to vote for.

Nothing about Trump is outside Republican mainstream precedent. It’s just that it’s never all been assembled so blatantly in one package before.

[CW: suicide, ableism] The Effects of Stigmatizing Language on Suicidal Autistics, by M. Kelter (2016-07-30). When you talk about people as if they're burdens, or if people like them should be wiped off the face of the earth, or as if they have no empathy, it turns out that that has an emotional effect on them: "I don't buy that the topic of autism compels us to denigrate autistics. You can tell your story ... and you can refrain from using stigmatizing language. Both of those things are possible, at the same time."

[Content seems to have been removed] It looks like Russia hired Internet trolls to pose as pro-Trump Americans, by Natasha Bertrand for Business Inside (2016-07-27). Ever wondered how some Internet trolls could be that awful? Maybe they're getting paid to be.

"i was asked by @misfitreindeer to make a post about skeletons and debunk a lot of typical transphobic myths about how, y’know, females look like X and males look like Y and that everything works in 100% black in white but it doesn’t actually...", by werewolfxo on Tumblr (2016-01): turns out that you can't ascertain how somebody would have been placed in sexed or gendered categories based on their skeleton.

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley, by Jason O. Gilbert for Fusion (2016-04-28)

Dog Whistles and Insults, by zvi LikesTV (2007-07-30). Yup, this is nine years old, but every word of it still applies as far as language and power: "Sometimes people have a problem when it comes to stopping using offensive language. They think that once they explain that they didn't mean to use the word 'that way' the offended party should change their feelings instead of trying to get the white person to change their behavior."