I considered writing something about the Supreme Court decisions, here. However, that comment quickly grew, so I’ll turn it into a Sunday post. In any case…

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.

9:05 – Mon 20 June 2022

Patriarchy and purity culture combine to silence women in the Southern Baptist Convention from The Conversation

More than merely the value of forgoing sex until marriage, purity culture centers sexual purity as a primary measure of the value of young women, who need to remain “pure” to attract a godly man in marriage.

You’ll also find a critical sex abuse scandal/cover-up going on in this story, but societies primarily use these “purity” ideas to control women—I’ve often said that the word slut basically means “someone who feels more comfortable in her sexuality than me, and I don’t like that,” after all—and it invariably supports xenophobia. The Ku Klux Klan refers to itself as an organization built around chivalry, for example, and they mean that they want to protect what they see as a woman’s honor (by which they mean virginity) from what they see as a threat, non-white people.

12:01 – Mon 20 June 2022

America is a nation built by people who see what can be, unburdened by what has been.

Kamala Harris

9:01 – Tue 21 June 2022

Artificial light in cities lengthens pollen season from Futurity

The study indicated the combination of increasing ALAN with rising temperatures intensifies the early start to spring for many urban plants.

It surprises me that nobody has done this research before. Growing up, I remember many studies indicating that flowering and fruiting took its primary cues from the hours of light in a day. That makes sense, given that nothing else on the “calendar” triggers nearly as many reactions in a plant as light.

In any case, for people with allergies who don’t understand why they’ve gotten worse over the last century, now you know (partly) why.

12:05 – Tue 21 June 2022

Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.

Eric Holder

9:02 – Wed 22 June 2022

The healing power of breathing from the Wellcome Collection

The Daoyin jing lists the six healing breaths (he, si, hu, xu, chui, and xi), each associated with a particular organ and set of ailments.

I suppose that it makes sense that so many cultures have developed similar ideas, but I still found the story interesting.

12:04 – Wed 22 June 2022

Until we get equality in education, we won’t have an equal society.

Sonia Sotomayor

9:03 – Thu 23 June 2022

The ‘Rez Accent’: Native Americans Are Making English Their Own from Voice of America

They found that Native American and Canadian First Nations communities speak different English dialects, but many share similar patterns of pitch, rhythm and intonation — features that linguists call prosody, the “music” of language.

I see an irony in this story, in that we all recognize this accent, but probably more from decades of white actors playing offensive stereotypes, rather than from exposure to indigenous cultures.

12:03 – Thu 23 June 2022

Love is revolutionary because it has us treat ALL people as we would ourselves — not because we are charitable, but because we are one. That is love’s radical conclusion.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

9:04 – Fri 24 June 2022

Celebrating Juneteenth With Bold New Ideas from OtherWords

We need big investments in public housing, rent control, and down payment assistance for first-time buyers from marginalized backgrounds to ameliorate historical injustices and address the current crisis.

I don’t fully agree with the article, because it reeks of “let’s not make this about race” when we need to make it about race to make any real progress, but we could probably consider many of the policy proposals “evergreen,” in addition to improving racist policies.

12:02 – Fri 24 June 2022

We need the historian and philosopher to give us with trenchant pen, the story of our forefathers, and let our soul and body, with phosphorescent light, brighten the chasm that separates us. We should cling to them just as blood is thicker than water.

Arturo Alfonso Schomburg

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.

Boy, gig companies sure hire disastrously sloppy lawyers from Pluralistic

With just months to go until the election, the Massachusetts supreme court unanimously ruled that the worker misclassification initiative is so badly drafted that it can’t appear on the ballot.

This happens more frequently than most of us expect. Culture constantly messages us that fascists and abusers have their acts together more than anyone else, that they work dispassionately and intelligently to achieve their goals. And yet, we see them fall on their faces, over and over, because they can’t exercise any self-control. We see this everywhere from the gig economy to Trump to the right-wing members of the Supreme Court, all of them assuming that their side already took over the country and that they can ignore rules and etiquette.

A Mayan spiritual guide accused of ‘witchcraft’ in Guatemala, later released from Global Voices

He also mentioned that for a long time the ancestral councils had been the guardians of the hills and the rivers, although they are no longer seen that way by the society.

I admittedly haven’t followed this story deeply, but it sounds suspiciously like the government drew a line from popular protests against their policies to the role of mysticism in historic protests, and so decided to make an example of this man.

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