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.

9:03 – Mon 13 June 2022

Ancient pits shed light on Maya tamales and indoor toilets from Futurity

…the archaeologists think the Maya were using the pits as latrines, flushing their toilets with lime water leftover from making tamales.

Mostly due to the Spanish invaders, I assume, we have consistently and grossly underestimated the Native American cultures. I can’t help but appreciate how quickly modern archaeology has overturned much of that narrative.

12:02 – Mon 13 June 2022

The best of prophets of the future is the past.

Lord Byron

9:01 – Tue 14 June 2022

People overestimate groups they find threatening — when ‘sizing up’ others, bias sneaks in from The Conversation

Psychologists call this feeling — that groups hold different values and worldviews from the mainstream, thereby jeopardizing the status quo — “symbolic threat.”

I assume that we’ve all known this. The media will consistently refer to a sixteen-year-old Black kid as a “young man,” but they’ll call a nineteen-year-old white man a “teenager.” Cops consistently justify killing non-white people by claiming that they “feared for their lives” from an unarmed person who they chose to provoke. We could go on, but this at least helps to put a technical term to this.

12:01 – Tue 14 June 2022

Of the persistent mutilation by government soldiers, there can be no shadow of a doubt, should the system maintain forced labor on this scale, I believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years.

Roger Casement

9:04 – Wed 15 June 2022

The US Right knows more guns won’t solve violence. It just doesn’t care from openDemocracy

Imagery associated with the Knights Templar and the phrase “deus vult” is commonly used in alt-right memes, meaning the gun’s branding is unsubtly designed to appeal to both conservative Christians and white supremacists.

You might remember Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech, which she walked back to appease exactly this cluster of interacting far-right, gun-toting, hypocritical Christian, white supremacist groups, and a media terrified of calling them out for trying to institute a theocratic ethnostate, where they have a right to murder people who make them feel uncomfortable.

12:04 – Wed 15 June 2022

The hours of the morning between breakfast and lunch were the time which the inhabitants of Riseholme chiefly devoted to spying on each other

E.F. Benson

9:02 – Thu 16 June 2022

Woman journalists are the most common target of anti-press attacks in North Macedonia, journalist association warns from Global Voices

Out of these, six were verbal attacks on journalists, nine were physical assaults, and there was one case of destruction of personal property.

You can see a semi-natural progression with attacks on journalism, which exposes the collective weakness of the attackers. They tried to spin issues to get the media on their side. When that fails, they claim unfair bias and ignore anything like factual analysis. When people stop believing the bias, they use their platforms to complain about everyone silencing them. And when people can’t buy that, because…you know, “their platforms,” they lash out, hoping to intimidate objective reporters into silence, focusing on women and minority groups, because they embarrassingly think that they have some advantage over them.

12:05 – Thu 16 June 2022

We were people of a circle of supposed high cultivated life conduct by intellectual morality–higher than society in its hypocritical meshes.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

9:05 – Fri 17 June 2022

The Geico STD story is the new McDonald’s Hot Coffee story from Pluralistic

It turns out that arbitration has weaknesses. It’s possible to do mass arbitration — to automate filing arbitration claims by thousands of corporate victims…

I have to laugh at this, because this week’s e-mail—starting on Wednesday, so it’s almost a shame that I scheduled this for Friday—included plenty of e-mail from various service providers that I use, all of them updating their Terms of Service, specifically pointing to the mandatory arbitration agreements.

This story shows that companies really just feel driven to exploit people. They want to force you to give up all your rights—they will try to prevent you from speaking your mind (non-disparagement), protecting your privacy, or having your day in court—but when they can’t steal from you that way, they sue in court to explain why they think that you cheated them with the contract that they wrote and forced you to sign.

Like all authoritarians—and as I’ve said many times, corporations model themselves on authoritarian governments—they need to simultaneously demand a dominant position in all relationships, while also constantly claiming that everyone else victimizes them.

12:03 – Fri 17 June 2022

Waves: river curving; you, eternal flowers / Give me content, while I can think of you.

Harold Monro

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.

Take a virtual tour of cultural sites the U.S. is helping preserve from the Bureau of Global Affairs

You can now explore an online exhibition of sites the State Department’s Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) is helping to preserve.

Unfortunately, you access this through Google, but we still need more projects like this.

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