Five Highlights from the Past Twenty Digests - Dinner Table Digest № 40
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
For the 40th Edition of the Dinner Table Digest, I thought I’d feature 5 stories from the last 20 Digests, something that I had intended on doing with the 20th edition, and never quite got around to finishing. So, procrastination be damned, I’m going to finish this one!
Dinner Table Digest 21 - Elephant in the Zoom: Progressive Infighting - Ryan Grim - The Intercept
That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.
Dinner Table Digest 27 - When Lawmakers purged ‘immorality’ from Florida’s Universities - Emma Pettit - The Chronicle of Higher Education
[Florida Democratic Governor Charley] Johns wanted the legislature to create an investigative body, one that — in the language of the bill he co-sponsored — would probe “all organizations whose principles or activities ... would constitute violence, or a violation of the laws of the state.”
The language was vague, but its purpose was obvious: to interfere with the NAACP and block integration. Such committees became common across the South. One Florida lawmaker warned that the bill’s broad mandate would open the door to “witch hunts.” But opposition to the nascent civil-rights movement overpowered that concern.
Dinner Table Digest 29 - Ministry of Violence Parts 1-III - Talia Levin
Dinner Table Digest 30 - 2SLGBTQ+ Individuals at my alma mater, Briercrest Bible College - CBC News
One student said she was struggling with her sexuality and feeling suicidal, and that a counsellor told her to pray it away. Another said a professor wrote a derogatory word on a white board in class to describe homosexuals. Others said speakers were brought in to teach them how to deny their sexuality, and they were encouraged to marry a person of their opposite sex.
Dinner Table Digest 34: The Problem With the Pain Scale When You Live With Chronic Pain - Joe Gardner - The Mighty
A chronic pain patient’s pain scale is very different from the standardized pain scale. If you want me to rate pain on a scale of 0-10, you have to realize my chronic pain scale 0 is the standardized scale’s 2. On the chronic pain scale, I’m usually at a 6 or 7 when I decide I have to go to ER, which converts to the standard scale’s 8 or 9. You also have to realize I have become very good at hiding signs of pain. I try not to talk about it because I know my friends and family get tired of hearing it. I try not to grimace when the pain hits me because I don’t want to answer questions and discuss my newest pain. I use distraction a lot to help me get through the harder times. I don’t like to draw attention to myself; I don’t want people to feel sorry for me or treat me differently because of my illness. I just want to be seen as “normal,” even though I feel anything but normal.
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