As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets 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. Most have not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

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

9:01 – Mon 28 March 2022

Powerful protest songs from Kenya and South Africa from Global Voices

He composed another song laced with ambiguous language and Kikuyu idioms to warn the Moi government of the discontentment and disillusionment among the general populace and Kikuyu in particular.

You can’t really go wrong with protest music…

12:01 – Mon 28 March 2022

Nomadism is as much a scientific mode of living in the Nufud as industrialism is in Detroit or Manchester.

Philip Khuri Hitti

9:03 – Tue 29 March 2022

Abortion pills are just as safe to prescribe based on a patient’s medical history as after an in-person exam, new research finds from The Conversation

Only 0.5% of patients experienced a serious adverse event, also comparable to previously reported rates after in-person exams.

This becomes a far bigger deal as states feel empowered to restrict abortion rights. It won’t end well for them, but with “boots on the ground,” states have the physical ability to prevent people from accessing abortions at another site, but they do not have the ability to interfere with the Internet or the mail.

12:05 – Tue 29 March 2022

War is war.

Omar Mukhtar

9:04 – Wed 30 March 2022

Finding the words to talk about emptiness from the Wellcome Collection

People were feeling this thing that they weren’t being asked about, that nobody was writing about, that nobody was researching. It just really felt like an unmet need.

I don’t share this experience—for which I feel grateful, of course—but I have known people who deal with this sort of problem, so I welcome this research.

12:02 – Wed 30 March 2022

Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?

Joseph Jacobs

9:05 – Thu 31 March 2022

There’s No Better Time to Start Kicking Our Oil Addiction from OtherWords

…oil companies “are buying back their own shares, funneling dividends to their shareholders, and paying lobbyists to demand cheap new federal leases so they can stockpile them for future profit”…

I keep saying that moving to renewable energy has the great side effect of impacting the fortunes of the worst people on the planet. Even if we don’t care about carbon dioxide, we should care about stopping the profiteering fascists.

12:03 – Thu 31 March 2022

Let us teach this miserable nation to smile and rejoice with heaven’s bounty and glory of life and freedom.

Kahlil Gibran

9:02 – Fri 01 April 2022

How to recognize intimate partner violence from Futurity

Economic abuse may also include interfering with a person’s ability to earn an income or hold down a job…

Especially after two years mostly stuck at home, we need to check on each other, and some of us need to re-learn what other people consider normal…

12:04 – Fri 01 April 2022

To say that we love nature only when we take the pains to understand her, is trite; but we can only partly understand her when we suffer her to impose upon us her supreme will.

Ameen Rihani

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.

Amazon Is Bombarding Workers With Union-Busting Messages from VICE Motherboard

The company has deployed a staggering amount of anti-union propaganda, bombarding workers with flyers, mailers, Instagram ads, Facebook posts, brochures, videos, phone calls, posters, mandatory meetings, a website, text messages, and notifications on Amazon’s AtoZ app, the platform its workers use for scheduling. The resounding message is “Vote No.”

At this point, I feel like I want Amazon workers to unionize across the board, specifically because they’ve been so offensively awful in trying to resist it…

Facebook’s genocide filters are really, really bad from Pluralistic

The human rights org Global Witness tried buying ads on Facebook for eight pro-genocide phrases that had been used during the 2017 genocide. Facebook accepted all eight ads, even though they duplicated the messages it promised it would block in the future…

Every time one of the big software companies gets an official pat on the back for promising to fix a problem, I like to quickly search for the number of times that they have previously received praise for promising the same thing. They won’t actually change their policies until governments force them to do so, because their current policies extract the biggest profits. Facebook would openly support genocide, if they thought it would bring in a few extra dollars.


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