Toots đ from 01/09 to 01/13
As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I donât include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I donât notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I donât feel restricted by message length.
Also, I donât generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
9:01 â Mon 09 January 2023
Artists reimagine Jamaicaâs Nanny of the Maroons as much more than a warrior queen from Global Voices
âŠnot only as a strong leader but also as a more profoundly thoughtful and spiritual person, in touch with her ancestral knowledge and the natural environment around her.
I knew nothing about this story, before, but I now want much moreâŠ
12:07 â Mon 09 January 2023
Still from the fount of joyâs delicious springs / Some bitter oâer the flowers its bubbling venom flings.
9:06 â Tue 10 January 2023
âWhisper networksâ thrive when women lose faith in formal systems of reporting sexual harassment from The Conversation
If these reports arenât ignored altogether, women who file them can end up having their morals questioned or their reputations sullied. They may face retaliation, such as getting demoted.
I should note that this can cut the other way, too. The article talks about who gets punished, but victims often donât want punishment at all. They want the offending behavior to stop. Therefore, in companies that do focus on punishing for any harassmentâan improvement over doing nothing, yesâvictims often also feel reluctant to report, because that makes them seem responsible for someone losing their job, when they could have apologized and learned better behavior.
12:05 â Tue 10 January 2023
One in whom persuasion and belief had ripened into faith, and faith become a passionate intuition.
9:07 â Wed 11 January 2023
Congress Has No Idea if George Santos Can Legally Serve in Congress from VICE News
No one in a position of authority, it appears, has asked this question. Nor is anyone exactly responsible for doing so.
I have two thoughts about this story.
First, the Santos campaign ran repulsive ads showing the horrors of âJoe Bidenâs America,â which seem to revolve around the existence of non-white women who speak up. I donât care that he lied. I care that his âplatformâ centers hatred, and it bothers me that nobody in media or politics seems to want to bring that up, instead talking about him like a clever trickster hero who we happen to disagree with.
Also, though, this mess goes back to the Obama/McCain campaign. The lack of framework for publicly validating candidates allowed racist birtherism to thrive on the far right, while ignoring legitimate questions about McCainâs eligibility. I mean, at the time of McCainâs birth, we did not automatically extend citizenship to children born on military bases. We have rectified that flawâand I do see it as a flawâin the laws since then, but we canât call him native-born. And yet, nobody questioned his eligibility, and nobody stepped forward to assert that they had proven Obamaâs eligibility.
As a result of this sort of mess, how long do you think we have before someone like a certain Twitter CEO follows his contradictory claims about his degree claiming that his mother actually gave birth to him in Kentucky? And who stops him?
12:02 â Wed 11 January 2023
Be thou generous, and gentle, and forgiving; as God hath scattered upon thee, scatter thou upon others.
16:02 â Wed 11 January 2023
For the sake of having thrown in my two cents on the #GeorgeSantos fiascoâŠ
1) His lies are pretty tame, in comparison to the campaign ads that he ran, and itâs telling who (in the area, who would have seen the ads) had no issues with his sexist, racist campaign.
2) Have we considered just having someone different show up at the Capitol every day claiming to be George Santos? What is Kevin McCarthy going to do, claim to know which one is which�
I decided to test the waters of Post more directly, figuring Iâd go more overtly political than usual, since (a) the topic does bother me since Santos ârepresentsâ part of my area and (b) politics seems the order of the day on the service.
9:05 â Thu 12 January 2023
Mitochondria with âsolar panelsâ give worms longer lives from Futurity
Known to decline with age, membrane potential is a topic of great interest in the scientific community because of its potential role in a number of age-related diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders.
I admittedly donât have the background to understand much of the science, here, but it sounds promising.
12:06 â Thu 12 January 2023
Be patient, if thou wouldst thy ends accomplish; for like patience is there no appliance effective of success, producing certainly abundant fruit of actions, never damped by failure, conquering all impediments.
9:02 â Fri 13 January 2023
New Jersey mandates media literacy for K-12 students from Fast Company
According to one recent survey, just 38% of people said they learned how to analyze media messaging in high school.
I have to applaud this, but you can probably guess that based on how much media criticism that I write about and re-post. Even if we ignore the political, people need to understand when a report or ad wants to diminish critical thinking or eliminate competitors.
12:03 â Fri 13 January 2023
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? / Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
Bonus
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didnât fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Maya people shopped at places like todayâs supermarkets from Futurity
Horowitz set out to address this knowledge gap for the Kâicheâ by examining the production and distribution of obsidian artifacts, which are used as a proxy by archeologists to determine the level of economic development in a region.
Notice how we keep learning that what we know about ancient communitiesâespecially in the Americasâmostly comes through a colonial lens that requires people to appear backward and/or dependent. When we look at the actual evidence, though, their world looks increasingly like ours.
Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.
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