Toots 🦣 from 06/03 to 06/07

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.

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

9:02 – Mon 03 June 2024

Image Not Shown: A person holds a Not Your Model Minority sign amid a large crowd in New York City's Times Square on January 18, 2022

How the ‘model minority’ myth harms Asian Americans from The Conversation

Income inequality among AAPIs is high, with more than 10 groups, including Burmese, Hmong and Mongolians, experiencing poverty at rates equal to or worse than the national average.

Hashtags: #AAPIHeritage #Racism

You want to always remember—as described to me by friends and colleagues of mine of Asian descent over the years—that immigration presents a massive filter to people. You need, first, to have the motivation and resources (or a family with them) to relocate to another country. Then, especially coming from Asia, you often need to prove that you can benefit the host country. Because their children get raised by over-achievers with something to prove, they tend to also excel.

This applies to Asian-Americans, but also applies to the families of immigrants from almost anywhere. And it also doesn’t apply universally, nor does it sustain itself across many generations, so even Asian-Americans from relatively privileged backgrounds often receive criticism for not fitting a stereotype. And when we also use that stereotype to ignore groups that don’t get the same kind of exploitative pseudo-respect, we can see the danger in the stereotype.

12:05 – Mon 03 June 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none.

Samuel Butler

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:06 – Tue 04 June 2024

BaYaka hunter-gatherers in Congo playing musical instruments and dancing, which helps them to spread cultural traits and specialized vocabulary between different groups
Image credit: Rodolph Schlaepfer/U. Zurich, made available under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, with attribution back to Futurity.org

Hunter-gatherer cultural networks in Central Africa have ancient origins from Futurity

They then compared how the structure of cultural diversity—the similarity between groups in musical instrument and subsistence tool repertoires, based on the presence or absence of similar musical instruments—correlated with genetic diversity at different points in time.

Hashtags: #Language #Music #Africa

While I find it fascinating on principle that we can now chart the interactions between cultures with some degree of fidelity, it mostly reminds me of how, when I went to school, educators seemed to have an obsession with talking about “cultural diffusion” without quite understanding what the phrase meant. For example, local media would often run bare-bones educational material, often literally a teacher in an empty room with an opaque projector to broadcast their supplemental materials and sketches. I remember stumbling on one “global studies” session (what New York State called early high school social studies classes at the time), where the teacher diligently gestured at a photograph of a market near a bridge, talking about how you could see the culture diffusing…

The field has come a long way, in other words.

12:06 – Tue 04 June 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

Every ruler must remember three things. Firstly, that he rules man; secondly, that he rules according to law, and thirdly, that he does not rule forever.

Agathon

Hashtags: #Quotes

5:43 PM – Tue 04 June 2024

Posted on Cohost

Discovery of the End

(OK, but for all the people halving the name to call the ship Disco, why not use the entire name and make it very disco, and drop a mirrored ball…?)

Since I wrote something wrapping up Picard when it ended, it felt reasonable to do something similar for Star Trek: Discovery, a show that I actually mostly enjoyed. Unlike the rest of this “third generation” of the franchise, Discovery always seemed to want to break the mold and actually explore new (conceptual) space, even if it didn’t always get there. Or as I describe it in my snarkier moments, the only show (OK, along with Prodigy) in the modern franchise not trying to constantly convince me that I’d feel better watching TNG instead.

The post continues for about two thousand words, so I won’t subject readers to the whole thing here. I did post it to Buy Me a Coffee, if you don’t want to read it on Cohost.

9:04 – Wed 05 June 2024

Google logo neon light signage
Image credit: by Mitchel Luo, made available under the terms of the Unsplash License

Google Laid Off Workers That Help Investigators During School Shootings and Kidnappings from 404 Media

“While some roles were consolidated in new U.S. locations, fewer than a dozen roles on the team were eliminated. Those impacted have the opportunity to apply for other roles at the company,” the spokesperson said.

Hashtags: #Google #Capitalism #PublicSafety

I can’t help note the extraordinary luck that Google had to have everyone talking about their janky Reddit-trained AI at a time when they chose to shutter the team responsible for helping stop dangerous criminals while preventing law enforcement from stomping through everyone’s private data…

12:01 – Wed 05 June 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

There’s not a joy the world can give like that it takes away.

Lord Byron

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:07 – Thu 06 June 2024

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: Samuel Alito speaking at an event

Red Flags Over the Supreme Court from OtherWords

Promoting a 2018 gathering at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C. called “The Turnaround: An Appeal to Heaven,” Sheets declared, “The Church is about to move into a completely new level of enforcing Kingdom rule and the will of God on earth.”

Hashtags: #USPol #SCOTUS #SamAlito

One of my favorite weird old novels has a protagonist who discovers a radioactive energy source and embarks on a global assassination campaign against anti-science cranks and religious dominionists, most prominently American judge and presidential candidate Greenleaf P. Stubbs. I point this out not to call for Alito’s death, by any means, but to say that if you had described him to me a few years ago, I would’ve insisted that you had created a tribute to Eden Phillpotts, because he defies all sense.

Clarence Thomas, I can at least understand (if not respect) as a separatist at heart, but Alito consistently acts like a sad Bond villain with no nuance…

12:02 – Thu 06 June 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:03 – Fri 07 June 2024

Image Not Shown: A sign outside the Internal Revenue Service building is seen, May 4, 2021, in Washington

The IRS makes its free e-file program permanent from Fast Company

Since the Direct File trial began in March, more than 140,000 taxpayers used it to file their tax returns, claiming more than $90 million in refunds, agency officials said.

Hashtags: #USPol #Taxes #IRS

Good. As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t have the opportunity to use the government’s system this year, but this expansion puts the country on a path to a far better tax system. More people going directly to the source means fewer people going to TurboTax or H&R Block, which means that they can’t spend as much money lobbying Congress to make the tax system more onerous.

12:03 – Fri 07 June 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities.

Isadora Duncan

Hashtags: #Quotes

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: Sergio Brito (right), director of the short documentary with his production team

New Wayuu documentary tells the story of a return to ancestral lands in Colombia from Global Voices

Chevron arrived in Alitayén, the ancestral territory of Brito’s family, with promises of employment and compensation for the exploitation work. Both of these promises were accomplished, but the benefits of the project remained in the hands of the leaders of one of the community’s clans.

I’d honestly rather have an article about the story behind the documentary, but I’ll take what I can get, here…

Image Not Shown: A domed building stands against the blue sky and white clouds

State laws threaten to erode academic freedom in US higher education from The Conversation

As detailed in the AAUP white paper, only a handful of people testified in favor of SB 17, and almost all had stated or unstated affiliations with right-wing think tanks. In contrast, more than a hundred educators and citizens testified, or registered to testify, against the bill.

I wish that we had a solution to this sort of policy-laundering. I mean, you would think that having so many organizations say “ignore everything that we’ve learned in the past thousand years and the opinions of the overwhelming majority of Americans, and follow our argument” would get them laughed out of every institution including courts, but apparently the veneer of intellectualism works and continues to pose a danger.

Image Not Shown: A suite of old, mainframe-style computers. Looming over them is a carny barker, waving a cane. Perched atop one of the mainframes is a skeleton in a robe, drinking a goblet of blood. On the right, a credulous, gap-toothed child in old-timey clothes grins in marvel at the barker's pitch. The background is an out-of-focus filing room filled with ranked filing cabinets and busy clerks

Real innovation vs Silicon Valley nonsense from Pluralistic

The green energy revolution – funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act and the Science Act – is accomplishing amazing feats, which are barely registering amid the clamor of AI nonsense and other hype.

Given the utter lack of actual utility for AI, one might almost consider the possibility that somebody might have enough of a vested interest in (for example) fossil fuels to want to push renewable energy out of the news with something that happens to waste a lot of energy in failing to serve its purpose…

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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.