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Saved by @Alex1Powell

We had a conversation on the podcast about the racialization of dog breeds, where we talked to @BronwenDickey, the author of Pitbull: The Battle Over an American Icon.

 In the 1930s, Pitbulls — which, as Bronwen pointed out to me over and over, don’t constitute a dog breed but a shape — used to be seen as the trusty sidekick of the proletariat, the Honda Civic of canines. (Think of “the Little Rascals” dog.)
.
That began changing in the postwar years and the rise of the suburbs. A pedigreed dog became a status symbol for the burgeoning white middle class. And pitbulls got left behind in the cities.
Aside: USians have flitted between different “dangerous” breeds and media-fueled panics around specific dogs. (anti-German xenophobia in the late 1800s fueled extermination programs of the spitz, a little German dog that newspapers said was vicious and spread disease.)
Some previously “dangerous” dogs get rebranded over the years — German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers. But the thing their respective periods of contempt and concern had to do is that they were associated with some contemporarily undesirable group.
But as pitbulls became more associated with cities their image as “dangerous” has remained — antiblackness being far stickier than anti-German sentiment, obvs.

There are far more news stories about pitbull attacks, which has led to a belief that pitbulls are especially violent.
There are also myths like the idea that pitbulls have jaws that lock and once they bite into you they can’t let go. (That’s...not true.)
We actually don’t know which dogs attack most — Bronwen said that bites from larger dog types are more likely to be *reported* to authorities and obviously more likely to require treatment.
Pitbulls are also so ubiquitous that any big-headed mutt involved in an incident can be transmuted into a pit in the reporting/recollection.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the stigma attached to pitbulls is all very “superpredator.” And that’s not coincidental.
(One thing that really threw me after i talked to Bronwen was the extent to which there is a whole anti-pitbull Twitter universe out there — and their tweets really, really do have that Thin Blue Line/“Immigrants are rapists” energy. They say she’s doing pitbull propaganda.)
The material consequences of this stuff for Black and Latino people are huge: plenty of apartment buildings ban “pitbull-type dogs,” and since pitbulls are a shape, not a breed, it leaves a lot of discretion to landlords and building managers.
You know where I’m going with this: #housingsegregationineverything

It’s not hard to find people talking about imposing pitbull bans on their communities because the dogs “bring the wrong element.”

Denver JUST repealed their ban after 3 decades.

https://t.co/fFcT6IgA58
(What else was happening in US cities 3 decades ago?)
another guest we had on the episode studied people’s perceptions of dogs by breed.

The “whitest” dog — in terms of the level of goodwill shown by the white respondents to his survey?

Labrador retriever.
There’s a reason you see labs in ads and TV shows. And it’s not unrelated to race.
One last thing: that researcher also found that people were more likely to see a dog as a pitbull if that dog was with a Black person.

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Patrick\U0001f578
Patrick🕸
@STILLTish
Another thread on Whittle as a companion to this thread.


Here Stephen makes an impassioned plea for the rights of trans people not to be sterilised. I agree. Does Stephen know that we are now, effectively, sterilising “transkids”? Is Stephen speaking out about this?


Yes. I agree you have the right to be parents. You know many “transmen” who have given birth. What will happen to the kids put on #PubertyBlockers followed by Cross-sex hormones?


Makes a clear statement activists did not want to campaign on “surgical status”. #LeaveNoOneBehind. Also that they have the right to bodily privacy,
Just trans folks? Do women have the right to bodily privacy?
Is this what passing looks like? Ignoring women?
Congratulations


An impassioned defence of the campaign for Self-Identification. Make no mistake this was a demand that women accept male-bodied women in single sex spaces. That was significant over-reach and a massive blunder. Women only spaces, regardless of surgery, is my stance now.
BOOK
Ankur Warikoo
Ankur Warikoo
@warikoo
My top books I read in 2020

A thread...

Almanack of Naval Ravikant
What a stunning and thoughtful compilation of @naval's work and words.
I predict that this is going to define a new industry - curating public content of thought leaders and converting them into

Waking Up: Search for spirituality without religion
@SamHarris provoked me through this book and offered me, an atheist, a lot to think about.
Pick up his works!

Psychology of Money
My most awaited book of this year, since the day @morganhousel announced his book.
A must read for all ages, especially those in their 20s.

I predict this to reach levels of "Rich Dad Poor Dad" over the next 10

Courage to be disliked
What a stunner! Challenges most of our tightly-held beliefs and I found myself nodding more often than not through the book.

Not for the
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pravin palande
pravin palande
@lonelycrowd
It has been exactly 3 years to "how fund managers .." was released. The book took a lot of time to write. Here is a short thread about how it happened ..


2/n the idea came from @kan_writersside who got me in touch with Dibakar Ghosh at @Rupa_Books .. we discussed the idea that it has been 2 decades to the fund management industry and it deserves a book. A lot was written about about Bharat Shah, Prashant Jain and S.Arora..

3/n but there was not much information about investment philosophies and the overall environment of the mid 90s and later on. Kanishk and Dibakar wanted a broader book for everyone and not just the stock market reader. We went to work

4/n we decided to write about the dotcom boom and bust where it all started. The start fund managers came from there. In Feb 2000 IT index had a pe multiple of 420 and the market cap of the sector was 34% of the market. Banks were 5% and some analysts were still bullish

5/n prashant Jain was one of the few fund managers who was out of the sector in November itself and was quietly watching the index go up. There were others but the legend of Jain was at the top of the mind because it is believed he refused to meet the CFO of a big IT company ..
BOOK
David R. MacIver
David R. MacIver
@DRMacIver
One like = one* interesting book pairing

* with an option to give up any time after 100 tweets

(Not formally part of @threadapalooza, just a warm up exercise / fodder for if I do give in to the imp of the perverse and do a 100 threads thread.)

1. "Ritual and its Consequences" with "Games: Agency as Art".

Both detailed analyses of social technologies (rituals and games) and how people engage with them by essentially suspending the normal complexities of the world within a structure. Would reward detailed comparison.

2. "The Collected Schizophrenias" with Ratcliffe's "Feelings of Being"

Autobiography of someone with schizophrenia paired with a detailed phenomenological analysis of what it's like to be schizophrenic. The latter would be an interesting lens to read the former through.

(<)3. "All About Love" by bell hooks and "About Love" by Josef Pieper.

The reason for the pairing is fairly obvious, but each of these has had significant and distinct impacts on my understanding of love.

(Both are fairly religious and/or spiritual)
BOOK
A.R. Moxon
A.R. Moxon
@JuliusGoat
People have wondered why I have spent 3 days mostly pushing back on this idea that "defund the police" is bad marketing.

The reason is, it's an example of this magic trick, the oldest trick in the book.

It's a competition between what I call compass statements. And it matters.


There are a lot of people who think "defund the police" is a bad slogan.

But it's a directional intention. A compass statement.

The real effect of calling it a bad slogan, whether or not intentional (but usually intentional), is to reduce a compass statement down to a slogan.

Whenever there is a real problem and a clear solution, there will be people who benefit from the problem and therefore oppose the solution in a variety of ways.

And this is true of any real problem, not just the problem of lawless militarized white supremacist police.

There are people who oppose it directly using a wide variety of tactics, one of which is misconstruing anything—quite literally anything—said by those who propose solutions—any solutions.

They'd appreciate it if you mistake their deliberate misrepresentation for confusion.

The reason they'd appreciate if if you mistake their deliberate misrepresentation for confusion is, it wastes time that could have been spend on the solution trying to persuade them, with different arguments and metaphors or solutions.

Which they intend to misconstrue.
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Skeptics of universities say: "But most of the people who graduate end up leaving."

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Educating local kids is good for the nation, but doesn't help a region much.

The way a university helps a region is through

4/Undergraduates usually leave town after graduation.

But university RESEARCH pulls in OTHER smart people from other regions, and they stay there.

Here's a paper showing that this is the main way universities increase a region's human capital:

5/Research also pulls in business investment.

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1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

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3/ what I should have known at that time is that only young idiots like myself, with no accomplishments, find list of tiny achievements impressive. Anyone who has actually done anything of substance doesn't gaf

4/ what is actually difficult, and worthwhile, instead is to do ONE single thing for a very, very long time. It's much harder and much rarer and results in outlier outcomes much more often.

Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

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A thread on the life and achievements of Muhiyudin Sayyid Abdul Qadir Jillani RadiAllah who served Islam infinitely as the Reviver (Mujadid) of the 11th Century!


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Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani was born on the eve of the 2nd of Ramadan 470 AH. His birth was a great blessing for the Ummah. It was the arrival of the Sultan al-Awliya (King of the Awliya) of that era, which had been foretold for centuries before his birth.

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When Hazrat Abdul Qadir Jillani was asked by someone what brought him to his high spiritual level, he said, The truthfulness which I promised to my mother. He related the following story:
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Timur Lang, was the founder of Timurid Empire. He was born in April 1336 CE, somewhere in central asia.


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