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 don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:01 – Mon 09 January 2023

Artists reimagine Jamaica’s Nanny of the Maroons as much more than a warrior queen from Global Voices


not 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 more


12:07 – Mon 09 January 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Still from the fount of joy’s delicious springs / Some bitter o’er the flowers its bubbling venom flings.

Lord Byron

9:06 – Tue 10 January 2023

‘Whisper networks’ thrive when women lose faith in formal systems of reporting sexual harassment from The Conversation

If these reports aren’t 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 don’t want punishment at all. They want the offending behavior to stop. Therefore, in companies that do focus on punishing for any harassment—an improvement over doing nothing, yes—victims 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 – Tue 10 January 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

One in whom persuasion and belief had ripened into faith, and faith become a passionate intuition.

William Wordsworth

9:07 – 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 “Joe Biden’s America,” which seem to revolve around the existence of non-white women who speak up. I don’t care that he lied. I care that his “platform” 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 McCain’s eligibility. I mean, at the time of McCain’s birth, we did not automatically extend citizenship to children born on military bases. We have rectified that flaw—and I do see it as a flaw—in the laws since then, but we can’t call him native-born. And yet, nobody questioned his eligibility, and nobody stepped forward to assert that they had proven Obama’s 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 – Wed 11 January 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Be thou generous, and gentle, and forgiving; as God hath scattered upon thee, scatter thou upon others.

Sa’dī

16:02 – Wed 11 January 2023

Shared on Post

For the sake of having thrown in my two cents on the #GeorgeSantos fiasco


1) His lies are pretty tame, in comparison to the campaign ads that he ran, and it’s 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 I’d go more overtly political than usual, since (a) the topic does bother me since Santos “represents” part of my area and (b) politics seems the order of the day on the service.

9:05 – Thu 12 January 2023

Mitochondria with ‘solar panels’ 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 don’t have the background to understand much of the science, here, but it sounds promising.

12:06 – Thu 12 January 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

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.

Bhāravi

9:02 – 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 – Fri 13 January 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? / Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Alexander Pope

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.

Maya people shopped at places like today’s supermarkets from Futurity

Horowitz set out to address this knowledge gap for the K’iche’ 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 communities—especially in the Americas—mostly 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.