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.

15:29 – Fri 20 May 2022

This didn’t make it into last week’s post, and yet somehow, it hasn’t grown any less useful a guide.

Dear journalists, “Great Replacement is (explain in detail), and is discussed regularly on (list of places)” is a commercial, not a report on multiple murders. At LEAST mention the French Nazi who wrote most of it…) Dear journalists, “Great Replacement is (explain in detail), and is discussed regularly on (list of places)” is a commercial, not a report on multiple murders. At LEAST mention the French Nazi who wrote most of it…

Seriously, I wish that I could understand why every outlet—even those who try to diligently avoid naming shooters—thinks that it improves their story to play Tucker Carlson clips and tell everybody where they can watch more. Incidentally, “the French Nazi” gets a shout-out in this post (Friday’s tweet), as a nice coincidence.

9:04 – Mon 23 May 2022

Stimulus cash does the most when it goes to people who spend it from Futurity

…to get the maximum bang for the buck in spurring the economy, lawmakers should give stimulus money to the people who will spend the most of it rather than sock it away in savings…

This seems obvious, honestly. If people don’t spend money, not only do you not get any stimulus—the entire point is actually usually to keep businesses afloat—but you also deflate the economy, risking suppliers as they need to drop their prices (chasing fewer circulating dollars), risking their ability to cover debts.

Because of this, we need to stop calling everything—like the COVID-19 relief checks used as an example of this research—a “stimulus.” Having people save more money has other benefits, like allowing them to more easily weather an upcoming crisis, which COVID-19 could easily have, and may still, become.

Oh, and this research also bolsters another obvious idea: Giving money to wealthy people fails the economy, because wealthy people can never spend money fast enough to make it worthwhile. They also have a disinclination to do so, which is how they stay wealthy.

12:01 – Mon 23 May 2022

…any authority which is not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject one’s fellow man to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is yours.

Toussaint Louverture

9:05 – Tue 24 May 2022

Famously Cheerful Trader Joe’s Workers Are Actually Unhappy and Want a Union from VICE News

Workers at the store are organizing under the banner of Trader Joe’s United, an independent union.

This framing shocks me. Even if the employees feel wonderfully happy, they should still have a union, as a hedge against management changing its policies. How Trader Joe’s deals with this as a company will largely decide whether I shop there again; they should see this as a good thing, but their recent What It’s Like to Work at Trader Joe’s podcast episode tells me that the higher-ups don’t like it.

12:03 – Tue 24 May 2022

Hours of which it is not yet in place to speak, which I might have found long and lonely, passed quickly and cheerfully by, occupied and soothed by the expression of my thoughts in music.

Liliʻuokalani

9:01 – Wed 25 May 2022

Democracy Is Ailing. Here’s How We Can Start Reviving It from Singularity Hub

We’ve come to take it for granted that in relatively affluent countries…democracy will always be the chosen system of government and is unlikely to come under serious threat.

The sentence that I quote really breaks open the entire argument. We don’t have a “resurgence of fascism,” because these people have worked in public view for decades and even centuries. The problem is that most people stopped fighting, thinking that we had solved every problem, giving the cornered animals an opportunity to strike. Many of us stopped participating in democracy, because we decided that the job of fixing it fell to someone else.

When you see liberals demand that Robert Mueller, Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, Bernie Sanders, or whoever fix our problems and get angry when they don’t see immediate progress, they refuse to participate in democracy. When they argue that, no, only extremists care about defunding the police, or smugly point out that no kindergarten teaches Critical Race Theory, they accept racism and corruption as a central part of our society. And when they insist that we focus on “issues that affect everyone,” like the economy or climate change, and ignore “culture wars,” they don’t believe that we have power when we stand together, because many people will die, if we lose those culture wars…

Democracy requires upkeep, just like any system. If we don’t participate in it, it fails.

12:02 – Wed 25 May 2022

The legends following are of a group of sunny islands lying almost midway between Asia and America—a cluster of volcanic craters and coral-reefs, where the mountains are mantled in perpetual green and look down upon valleys of eternal spring.

Kalākaua

9:03 – Thu 26 May 2022

Public education is supposed to prepare an informed citizenry — elementary teachers have just two hours a week to teach social studies from The Conversation

But since at least the 1980s, the nation’s public schools have consistently put social studies on the back burner. This process accelerated with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001…

It seems worth noting—especially as someone who actually went to elementary school during the 1980s—that the state of affairs already had serious flaws, largely revolving around memorization without any context. We don’t need to go back to that. We need to fix that.

12:05 – Thu 26 May 2022

There has been times in which I wished to runaway and beg for my living, but when I think of your kindness towards me, my passion calms quickly, and I dream of the happy future.

Robert Napuʻuako Boyd

9:02 – Fri 27 May 2022

Tucker Carlson’s ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Comes from an Anti-American Nazi from OtherWords

…the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French Nazi René Binet, who served during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French Nazi collaborators.

I already knew a lot of this (not the specifics), but should we even express surprise, at this point? The American right keeps trying to rehabilitate and follow in the footsteps of the Confederacy and the Nazis. They literally fly the flags at rallies, while insisting that people just use the name for anything that they don’t like. Why would their elites follow any other ideology?

12:04 – Fri 27 May 2022

Blessed are you, because you have been consumed by the desires of your own heart.

Davida Malo

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.

Turkey funds women’s groups to counter ‘feminist threat’ from openDemocracy.

GONGOs (government-sponsored non-governmental organizations) are an increasingly common phenomenon, especially in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, blurring the lines between state-controlled entities and civil society.

While I don’t know of an earlier version of this from a government, I should point out that conservative activists posing or presented as progressive activists goes back a long way. For example, you can’t go too far on the Internet without some angry man quoting Camille Paglia at length, demanding that, since Paglia calls herself a feminist, they can disregard what other feminists say when she contradicts them. Government coöptation obviously makes this more dangerous, though.

A(nother) way in which Facebook is the 21st Century’s tobacco industry from Pluralistic

Which is why the totally cool bros at American Edge found a bunch of extremely normal “economic development agencies” to publish op-eds in newspapers across the country to defend Facebook as a force for racial justice (no, really) and American prosperity.

To me, this actually seems like a good sign. Facebook has sold itself as a master manipulation system, able to change the course of elections—remember, Zuckerberg has political aspirations—and alter people’s emotional states. If they had that kind of power, though, they wouldn’t hire marketing teams to try to convince us that advertising-powered algorithmic communication will always result in amplifying hatred for its own sake.


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