As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:06 – Mon 18 March 2024

Image Not Shown: Student raises hand and asks lecturer a question

Anti-racist interventions don’t stress teens out from Futurity

…no evidence that the intervention is stressful or has an adverse impact on students’ feelings of belonging in their school community.

Hashtags: #Racism #Education

Yes, sure, they only ran a small study. However, I’d say that it compares quite favorably to the range of studies that the “anti-woke” (pro-doze?) crowd uses to back their assertions to the contrary. They don’t even have concrete anecdotes of students feeling alienated when finding out about racism. They can only project their own fears of people finding out about their racism.

12:07 – Mon 18 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decision-maker, that her choice be controlling. If you impose restraints that impede her choice, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory

9:05 – Tue 19 March 2024

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: US president Joe Biden gives his State of the Union address at the US Capitol

Biden must not let Trump frame the ‘immigration debate’ from openDemocracy

This dynamic, which here in America is deeply rooted in white supremacy and often focused on ‘protecting’ (white) women and children, oozed from Britt’s response to the SOTU, in which the senator misleadingly invoked an anecdote about a woman supposedly trafficked by drug cartels to back up her claim that “president Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace”.

Hashtags: #USPol #Immigration

While I try not to indulge the “I demand that politicians deal with the issue that I care about, in precisely the way that I want it dealt with” genre of political writing—largely because it never targets the authoritarians or bigots, and feels like some nobody screaming into the void—I actually wanted to share this, because I’ve seen so many liberal and progressive voters openly salivating about “outflanking the Republicans on immigration,” without even trying to sugar-coat the bigotry and xenophobia that interest represents.

Republicans will always paint Democratic administrations as “weak,” no matter how much danger they put innocent people in. You can’t “outflank” people who want closed borders, ethnic cleansing, and concentration camps. We do all remember the concentration camps, right, in 2019, when the Trump administration rewrote the “public charge” rules and ignored Supreme Court precedent to put refugees and other migrants in open-air prisons in the desert? Yeah, as far as Democrats ever try to go to “beat them at their own game,” they’ll happily move the Overton Window further right. Biden would probably figure this out on his own, but he’ll have much more trouble figuring it out, if people keep telling him to act with more cruelty in hopes of tricking the Republicans.

12:03 – Tue 19 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

The lack of understanding that comes from actual ignorance is notorious. Most North Americans know nothing even of Puerto Rico, which has been under the Stars and Stripes for thirty years; so it is hardly surprising that they are apt to confuse Uruguay with Uganda.

Muna Lee

Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory

9:01 – Wed 20 March 2024

Image Not Shown: An authoritarian leader-type figure with a green demonic head standing in front of a castle with a mousetrap past the gate

Bullies want you to think they’re on your side from Pluralistic

…workers held up their end of the bargain – creating value for the companies that employed them – but their bosses reneged on the part of the deal where they got a fair share of that value.

Hashtags: #Labor #Capitalism #EthicalAI

I don’t necessarily buy Doctorow’s entire argument—do I ever?—because he often frames his arguments as objecting to copyright in general, and because he seems to desperately want certain terms to go viral like his last big one did, but I at least appreciate him laying out the argument as he does.

12:06 – Wed 20 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

When you laugh you relax, and when you relax you give freedom to muscles, nerves and brain-cells. Man seldom has use of his reason when his brain is tense. The sense of humor makes a condition where reason can act.

Alice Moore Hubbard

Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory

9:02 – Thu 21 March 2024

Image Not Shown: A hand in a suit and watch toasts another hand in a red, white, and blue jacket, with the article title between them

More for Them, Less for Us from OtherWords

Congress can tackle the entwined problems of inadequate corporate tax payments and excess executive pay on several fronts. Raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent (just halfway back to Obama-era levels) would generate $1.3 trillion in new revenue over the next decade.

Hashtags: #Taxes #Inequality

It really does seem like a mistake to allow any entity to have money—let alone one that you can’t throw in prison if necessary—sufficient to influence the government to exempt them from maintaining the economy that they use to get that money.

12:01 – Thu 21 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

Toilers live the life of animals — that is work, and sleep, with short intervals for food. Now let us put our heads together and see if this is right; if things out to, and will, go on forever in this way.

Theresa Malkiel

Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory

9:03 – Fri 22 March 2024

Content Warning: US Politics, Hateful Laws

Image Not Shown: Florida House Representative Michele Rayner, left, hugs her spouse, Bianca Goolsby, during a march at city hall in St. Petersburg, Florida, on March 12, 2022, to protest the controversial Don't Say Gay bill passed by Florida's Republican-led legislature

Tide may be turning as Florida legislature kills multiple anti-LGBTQ+ bills from Daily Kos

Even DeSantis admitted last month that some school districts had gone too far in accepting challenges to remove titles from school library shelves.

Hashtags: #LGBT #USPol

Authoritarians in a democracy can’t help acting like dogs, sadly. They’ll chase cars and, if they feel sufficiently weak, might even put in enough work to prove themselves and catch one. And then they need to figure out what to do about that situation. And their plight will never stop making me laugh.

I’ve said it before, but to repeat: Authoritarianism doesn’t work. It looked like it worked for thousands of years, because it didn’t have much competition. Once the Enlightenment got people talking about governing by the consent of the governed, equality, and so forth, the only authoritarian regimes left—that anybody cares about, I mean, not the likes of Hungary or North Korea—can only keep things running with a lot of money from the oil industry. Without that economic advantage, the more democratic and equal country will always outperform its rivals.

12:05 – Fri 22 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

The working woman, by recognizing her rights, raises her head in pride and gets ready for the struggle. The time of her degradation has passed, she is no longer the slave sold for a few coins, she is no longer the servant of, but the equal to man, his partner, by his being her natural protector, and not her lord and master.

Jovita Idar

Hashtags: #Quotes #WomensHistory

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Image Not Shown: A screenshot of a ten-second "savoring" exercise, illustrated by a small Amazon-branded robot instructing a warehouse worker with dark skin

Amazon Tells Warehouse Workers to Close Their Eyes and Think Happy Thoughts from 404 Media

Workers have been saying for years that in light of grinding hours, intense surveillance, and driving shifts that require them to pee in bottles, wellness initiatives like “Savoring” screens are unhelpful and infantilizing.

Because 404 Media appears to support Webmentions, this seems like a useful time to start integrating them into the actual blog posts. Therefore…

in reply to: Amazon Tells Warehouse Workers to Close Their Eyes and Think Happy Thoughts

Honestly, if you portrayed Amazon in a children’s cartoon, people would call it overly simplistic for the audience. And yet, they keep finding ways to live down to their reputation…

Image Not Shown: A screenshot of the "NFT Nick" video

Choose rich from [citation needed]

Sterlingov is not to be confused with the other cryptocurrency mixing service operators, Roman Storm and Roman Semenov, who are facing charges for their operation of Tornado Cash. Apparently there’s a rule somewhere that if you operate a crypto tumbler, you have to be named Roman S.

Despite the entirely hypothetical money that I could have had, I laughed at cryptocurrency as far back as when I could have mined it on my home PC, and still do. No matter the price to buy, to make money—the useful kind that people will give you things for—you still need someone willing to buy it from you with actual money. And because of that, and that fact that it builds its entire premise on a rich-get-richer scheme, you have a space extremely friendly to scams and poor planning of all sorts.

Like 404 Media, Molly White seems to have Webmentions running, so…

in reply to: Choose rich

Amazing that crypto news really only has three categories: “Nothing can possibly go wrong now,” items like you’ve collected showing it going wrong, and “cryptocurrencies invent thing that the rest of the economy has had for centuries, even though they insisted that they’d never need it, because blockchain”…

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Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.