Toots š from 04/03 to 04/07
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 donāt include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I donāt notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I donāt feel restricted by message length.
Also, I donāt generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.
10:30 ā Sat 01 April 2023
Oh, good. Brands have decided that their April Fools jokes (unilaterally āwe have a product that you wonāt wantā) now need to be sent to my inbox.
I was going to say that āI feel like thereās a better way of doing this,ā but the better way is probably just ādonātāā¦
For anybody who wants the details, a company tried to get me to click on an e-mail for a hybrid almond-walnut, and another tried the same for compost-scented soap. And while, sure, Iāll tolerate their āpranksā on their own websites, I donāt need it delivered to me.
9:02 ā Mon 03 April 2023
Image Not Shown: Amitai Gross reads from the Haggadah while preparing to dip parsley into salt water as part of the Passover meal, called the Seder
Why is Passover different from all other nights? 3 essential reads on the Jewish holiday from The Conversation
Maxwell Houseās Haggadah has become a classic, with even the White House using it. But itās also changed with the times: nixing words like ātheeā and āthine,ā for example.
Hashtags: #Passover
In order to retain the spirit, but not butcher anybodyās language or privilege one language over another, Iāll wish a rather literalist sweet Passover to all celebrating it, this week. Although, should we start calling it Pesach, like normal adults who acknowledge non-European culturesā¦?
12:07 ā Mon 03 April 2023
Let us disperse from our aloofness and serve the weak who made us strong, and cleanse the country in which we live.
Hashtags: #Quotes #ArabAmericanHeritage
9:04 ā Tue 04 April 2023
Content Warning: US Politics, Anti-Democratic Laws
Image Not Shown: Abortion rights protesters in Cincinnati, Ohio
The GOP war on direct democracy has spread to at least 10 states from Daily Kos
In a healthy democracy, a party that sees its opponents pass a string of popular measures despite lockstep opposition would reconsider its priorities. Yet Republican lawmakers in nearly every red and purple state that allows initiatives have tried to make the process far more restrictive.
Hashtags: #USPol #Democracy
It goes to show how weak even they see themselves, doesnāt it? After spending untold sums of money to capture the Supreme Court to protect dark money, over twenty years revitalizing moves to suppress voting, a bit more than a decade to capture state legislatures, and more. But even with all those advantagesāeffectively cheating, in any other contextāthey still canāt win, and now want to give themselves the right to overrule what their constituents vote on.
Donāt get me wrong. I still consider them dangerous. But I consider them dangerous in the same way that I consider a wounded animal dangerous, lashing out in hopes of doing enough damage to escape, rather than because it has the superior position.
12:02 ā Tue 04 April 2023
In our movement workā¦you almost want to clear the glass so that people understand itās the same people trying to oppress me as trying to oppress you.
Hashtags: #Quotes #ArabAmericanHeritage
9:07 ā Wed 05 April 2023
Image Not Shown: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford speaks before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018, in Washington, DC. Ford accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland.
Why people feel āhimpathyā for sexual harassers from Futurity
Women who make sexual misconduct complaints often experience organizational and third-party retaliation for reporting misconduct, which can take a severe toll on their well-being. In contrast, men accused of engaging in sexual misconduct rarely experience transfers or terminations and are less likely to be terminated or resign than their victims.
Hashtags: #Gender #Misconduct
When I used to regularly write on Quora, I often repeated the ideaāI forget where I picked it upāthat we treat men like protagonists, women like members of the supporting cast or, worse, props. Therefore, while I find studies like this important, I also disagree with the interpretation of their findings, to a significant extent, or at least their interpretation.
Specifically, I see no problem with extending sympathy to someone accused of hurting someone, because humans empathize and need empathy. I see the problem in the lack of sympathy extended to more vulnerable people in general, particularly their accusers. We need to treat everybody like a protagonist, because we donāt live in a world with a supporting cast.
12:04 ā Wed 05 April 2023
[Air combat] is just business. Itās what weāre trained forājust like you might be trained for any business.
Hashtags: #Quotes #ArabAmericanHeritage
9:01 ā Thu 06 April 2023
Content Warning: Transphobic Laws
Image Not Shown: Drag queen Cali Je plays a ukulele and sings to a group of children at a reading event on 18 March 2023 in Pocatello, Idaho
The USās anti-drag movement is state-sponsored LGBTIQ persecution from openDemocracy
ā¦the vagueness of the lawās wording is probably the point ā it leaves much open to the interpretation of the enforcer.
Hashtags: #Transphobia #USPol
As a confession, I hate that bigots have put me in a position of defending drag. My admittedly limited experience with drag acts has suggested that they fall less into āfun campā and more into ārepulsive misogyny played off as ironic,ā so Iād just as soon ignore it. Yet even I can seeāand could, before people started writing about itāthat they wrote this to send cops out to harass anybody who doesnāt appear to strictly conform to an imagined gender binary.
12:03 ā Thu 06 April 2023
You cannot study the life of a people successfully from the outside.
Hashtags: #Quotes #ArabAmericanHeritage
9:03 ā Fri 07 April 2023
Image Not Shown: A sequence of trees, each of whose leaves form a circular link in different orientations, the links forming a chain, with the middle of five burning away
Could Britain finally be ready to seriously discuss reparative justice with the Caribbean? from Global Voices
In August 2019, history was made when a reparations agreement was signed between The University of the West Indies and the University of Glasgow, the first such contract since people enslaved by the British were fully emancipated in 1838.
Hashtags: #Reparations #UK
I wonder how far this path former colonizers will go. The world needs it, so that we can move on, but you know that once one country bends, people will force the rest of the world to follow. As a result, you know that leaders fill international meetings with pressure to hold off on doing anything usefulā¦
12:06 ā Fri 07 April 2023
Desperation, as any other human feeling, is diverse and vast in different people.
Hashtags: #Quotes #ArabAmericanHeritage
Bonus
Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didnāt fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.
Image credit: licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Have you heard? Wikimedia has a Sound Logo from Wikimedia Diff
From the Boardās perspective, it is essential that listeners on audio devices have an opportunity to learn about the trusted source of their information, especially when it comes from our movement and is contributed by thousands of volunteers.
I donāt use voice assistants, so Iāll probably never hear the sound logo again, but I do like it. And it raises interesting questions as to what kinds of organizations will probably need such logos in the future. Many traditional media outlets have something similar, which plays over their logo, often a mini-jingle with only a couple of notes, but this seems like new ground, in some ways.
Image Not Shown: A person wearing a cloth mask, shopping for apples while looking into the camera
Extra food assistance cushioned the early pandemicās blow on kidsā mental health from The Conversation
ā¦children in families getting SNAP benefits in 2020 did not generally experience any change in their mental or emotional health compared to prior years, despite the heavy stress of the pandemic.
Once again, it turns out that, when we give families money, the children in those families have fewer problems. An outside observer might almost conclude that a lack of money causes deep and lasting problems in a capitalist economy, and that we should probably fix that.
Image Not Shown: Colorized photograph of American general Ulysses S Grant at Cold Harbor, with hand on hip, 1864
Donald Trump isnāt even the best president to be arrested from Daily Kos
Civil War veteran and policeman William H. West, a Black man, was sent to investigate reports of speeding carriages.
Corporate media keeps telling us how āunprecedentedā they find charging a former President of the United States with crimes, showing that they either didnāt bother to do the most central research to that assertion or oppose prosecuting people who they find more important than the rest of us. Iāll let you decide for yourself which side they land on.
Unrelated: Now that I weigh embedding article images in these posts, I increasingly hate how many of these outletsāeven media outlets that broadly commit to Free Culture content, such as Kosās public domain default licenseāpay Getty for images. It leads to inane situations like this, where I canāt include a photograph from 1864, which should have fallen into the public domain a long time ago, because someone poorly colorized it, and Getty claims a false copyright on everything that it touches.
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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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Tags: linkdump mastodon socialmedia week