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 14 November 2022

Conservative state policies tied to higher mortality from Futurity

…found that labor policies are strongly connected to alcohol-induced causes of death and suicide deaths for men.

I expect that most of us already had an intuition to this effect, but as always, having data to back up the intuition always helps. Interestingly, the one case where they talk about conservative policies having some benefit—marijuana—doesn’t have much history behind it, and seems like a field where “liberal” policy often gets confused with “libertarian” policy.

12:01 – Mon 14 November 2022

We can go no further…unless every tribe unanimously combines to give a check to the ambition and avarice of the whites they will soon conquer us apart and disunited, and we will be driven from our native country and scattered as autumn leaves before the wind.

Tecumseh

9:01 – Tue 15 November 2022

Leaving Twitter now says more about you than Elon Musk from openDemocracy

Twitter has never been safe for minoritized people and, as a woman of color…gendered, racialized and sexualized abuse has always been commonplace there.

I have a similar position, though more nuanced. I often laugh at the people who act like racism didn’t exist in the United States before Donald Trump’s presidency, that abortion rights had any sense of security prior to the United States Supreme Court gutting them, or that Musk made Twitter unsafe. However, I also see this as an opportunity to deprive exploitative companies—like Twitter—of their cash flow. I won’t leave Twitter, but I’ll absolutely recommend that people check out Mastodon; in fact, I have an introduction ready for Sunday’s post.

12:05 – Tue 15 November 2022

I want you to give all these chiefs of the soldiers here to understand that we are for peace, and that we have made peace, that we may not be mistaken by them for enemies.

Black Kettle

9:04 – Wed 16 November 2022

American workers feel alienated, helpless and overwhelmed — here’s one way to alleviate their malaise from The Conversation

Democratic worker control — where companies are owned and controlled by the workers themselves — is not a new concept.

A maybe-amusing anecdote: When I planned out this blog, one post that I wanted to write walked through how corporations had become a refuge of authoritarianism, as it dried up in the rest of the world. I planned to research alternative corporate structures, to find something that looks more like democracy, since democracies consistently outperform authoritarian groups. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to invent the worker cooperative, which…someone already got there.

12:03 – Wed 16 November 2022

They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We were becoming like them, hypocrites and liars, adulterous lazy drones, all talkers and no workers…

Black Hawk

9:02 – Thu 17 November 2022

After a Year of Executive Privilege Fights, Mike Pence Just Tweeted It Out from Empty Wheel

For months, the press has been squawking about how unprecedented it would be to subpoena the former Vice President. But he just made the case for doing so, right here.

I find it amazing how quickly everything seems to want to converge on Trump’s criminal activity. If I remember correctly, Wheeler also broke the story of Trump himself ranting on Truth Social about how he helped rig the Florida elections, which would certainly fit with his claims that he has dirt on DeSantis…

12:02 – Thu 17 November 2022

I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust.

Geronimo

9:05 – Fri 18 November 2022

It is really difficult to see resistance when we don’t see pictures of street protests from Global Voices

We see the resistance, and there are so many interesting developments and initiatives inside the country. There are many people who tried to stop the movement of Russian troops or who protested in some other way.

I do find it interesting that the media basically abandoned Belarus, though I don’t think that anybody believes that any government represents all constituents, so I don’t love that framing.

12:04 – Fri 18 November 2022

Do not misunderstand me, but understand fully with reference to my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I choose. The one who has a right to dispose of it is the one who has created it.

Chief Joseph

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.

Repeat COVID Infections Increase Risk of Health Problems, US Study Finds from Voice of America

People with repeat infections were twice as likely to die prematurely and three times more likely to be hospitalized with illness than those who had not been reinfected, the study found.

In other words, don’t rely on only the vaccine. Surviving the immediate illness works better than the alternative, but you also don’t want to stack up the number of times that you (only) survive.

Elon Musk’s Twitter is more dangerous than you think from openDemocracy

“I was one of the key people behind x.com which became PayPal,” Musk said to Baron. “I know how to make a way better PayPal. There’s a product plan I wrote in July of 2000 where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial product in the world, we’re going to execute that plan.”

This plan, if legitimate, has a few interesting aspects.

First, it shows where Musk might take Twitter that actually would make things worse than merely forcing all of us to see the kind of abuse that disadvantaged people already live with. Specifically, by charging people to interact, Twitter will become a space where only the wealthy have a voice, and they use that voice to extract wealth from everybody else.

Second, it shows that Musk understands Twitter about as well as Mark “Nobody Needs Legs in the Metaverse” Zuckerberg understands Facebook. Nobody has asked for this, except for the people who have already built their own cryptocurrency-run social media that nobody cares about.

Finally, this could result in a hilarious disaster at the Twitter offices, because Twitter still needs to comply with a consent decree. They need to clear everything that they do with user data and creating new products, so the FTC already has an investigation open for Musk’s Twitter Blue fiasco.

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