Toots đ from 05/08 to 05/12
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.
9:07 â Mon 08 May 2023
Content Warning: Systemic child abuse
Image Not Shown: Young white woman walking hand in hand with African child
Whether or not a man convicted of abusing African âorphansâ is exonerated, the missionary system that brought him to Kenya was always deeply flawed from The Conversation
The Western obsession with African orphans began in the 1830s, when British and European mission organizations started working in eastern Africa â the same region where Durham would volunteer nearly 200 years later.
Hashtags: #Africa #Missionaries
While it has a lot of competition, the insistence that we need to âfixâ how non-white people raise their children while leaving so many of our own to die from malnutrition or violence has to rank as at least among the most destructive policies.
12:07 â Mon 08 May 2023
Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal.
Hashtags: #Quotes #JewishAmericanHeritage
9:01 â Tue 09 May 2023
Image Not Shown: Google CEO Sundar Pichai giving a presentation
Scary âEmergentâ AI Abilities Are Just a âMirageâ Produced by Researchers, Stanford Study Says from VICE Motherboard
The researchers wrote that a personâs choice of a ânon-linearâ or âdiscontinuousâ measurement can result in what appear to be sharp and unpredictable changes that are then falsely labeled as emergent abilities when in reality the performance curve is increasing smoothly.
Hashtags: #AI
This doesnât surprise me at all. For all the hype, the more that I play with these machine learning systems, the more the results look like they havenât improved significantly over classical procedural algorithms, for understanding and generating content. I like that the chat interface allows me (sometimes) to workshop an idea to get closer to what I wanted, but I still find myself doing most of the work, with the AI either providing the seed of an idea or serving as a âplacebo assistant.â
12:05 â Tue 09 May 2023
Media freedom plays an indispensable role in informing the public, holding governments accountable, and telling stories that otherwise would not be told.
Hashtags: #Quotes #JewishAmericanHeritage
9:03 â Wed 10 May 2023
Image Not Shown: Demonstrators support Montana trans lawmaker Zooey Zephyr after she was banned from the floor of the Montana legislature for speaking out against an anti-transgender bill
Republicans are trying to crush dissent but the public is fighting back from openDemocracy
The tactics include those encapsulated in the acronym DARVO â deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender. Thatâs what the Republican Party does, whether in Tennessee or Montana or Washington DC.
Hashtags: #GOP #USPol #Democracy
I keep saying that the reason that âthe arc of the universe bends toward justiceâ has a lot to do with the effort that it takes to maintain unjust systems. When a few people take a real stand against it, it tends to collapse.
12:06 â Wed 10 May 2023
Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.
Hashtags: #Quotes #JewishAmericanHeritage
9:05 â Thu 11 May 2023
Content Warning: Overt racism in the Drug War's origins
Image Not Shown: Nixon White House aide John Ehrlichman testifies before the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973
The Drug Warâs Dark Origins from OtherWords
By 1937, Harry J. Anslinger â Americaâs first âDrug Czarâ â had successfully lobbied Congress to ban cannabis using startlingly racist language. âReefer makes darkies think theyâre as good as white men,â he claimed. âThere are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers.
Hashtags: #DrugWar #Racism
I already knew most of this story, but this contextualizes it nicely, and not everybody has already read about it. While I happen to not have any interest in drugs, seeing the background makes it difficult for me to support any prohibition.
12:03 â Thu 11 May 2023
A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks.
Hashtags: #Quotes #JewishAmericanHeritage
9:04 â Fri 12 May 2023
Image Not Shown: A visitor takes a picture with his mobile phone at the Google stand on the second day of the Mobile World Congress on Feb. 28, 2017, in Barcelona
âWe have no moatâ: Big tech prepares to lose AI race to open-source from Daily Kos
Open source tools that are now in millions of hands allow individuals and small groups to race past what were seen as roadblocks to AIâs further advance. Theyâre building tools that are faster, smaller, and more easily updated.
Hashtags: #AI #FreeSoftware #OpenSource
Despite my vocal lack of excitement over machine learning above, I definitely appreciate that this hasnât ended up in the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations looking to destroy worker rights. If they become useful, the democratization makes it far more likely that workers will use these products to save time, rather than have it replaced by a system that has trouble remembering what it said.
12:01 â Fri 12 May 2023
Capitalism attacks and destroys all the finer sentiments of the human heart; it ruthlessly sweeps away old traditions and ideas opposed to its progress, and it exploits and corrupts those things once held sacred.
Hashtags: #Quotes #JewishAmericanHeritage
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.
Image Not Shown: A lab-coated scientist amidst an array of chemistry equipment. His head has been replaced with a 19th-century anatomical lateral cross-section showing the inside of a bearded man's head, including one lobe of his brain. He is peering at a large flask half-full of red liquid. Inside the liquid floats the Capitol building.
Ostromizing democracy from Pluralistic
Thiel says that mothers are apt to sideline the âscienceâ of economics for the soppy, sentimental idea that children shouldnât starve to death and thus vote for politicians who are willing to tax rich people.
I donât always enjoy Doctorowâs blog, because he often has a coined term that he desperately hopes will become mainstream, will mostly tell a story that provides excuses to link to prior posts of his, or seem like he copied the article in after writing it somewhere else, due to the prominent explanation that you can also find the material inâŚthe blog post that you can see in front of you.
However, this time, he gets at a bunch of interesting ideas, including some that Iâve talked about, likeâin my post on licenses, and yes, I realize how crass that looks after calling out Doctorow for using his posts as excuses to link back to his own blogâhow âthe Tragedy of the Commonsâ came from a racist place intended to destroy cooperation.
Content Warning: Samuel Alito
Image Not Shown: WASHINGTON, DC --- JULY 23: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is seen after a swearing in ceremony for Mark Esper to be the new U.S. Secretary of Defense July 23, 2019, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC. Esper succeed James Mattis to become the 27th U.S. Defense Secretary.(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Alito wallows in self-pity while womenâs lives are in jeopardy from Daily Kos
He then admitted the fear wasnât real. âI donât feel physically unsafe, because we now have a lot of protection.â He is âdriven around in basically a tank, and Iâm not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force.â
While I donât have a favorite book, I find Number 87 by Eden Phillpotts (as âHarrington Hextâ) in 1922 an interesting candidate, for a number of reasons. In it, a wealthy man named Bruce, due to oddities in his childhood, becomes obsessed with bats. When, on a job, he discovers a powerful radioactive energy source, he becomes a vigilante known as The Bat. Seriously, 1922.
Like a certain comic book character seventeen years in the future, this fellow creates a bat-like costume, signature vehicle, and signature weapons. Unlike said future comic book character, he uses his weapons and persona (fursona?) he went on a global murder spree in hopes of wiping out the anti-science and fascist movementsâŚOK, and trade unionists, for some reason. He counted among his victim Judge Greanleaf P. Stubbs, an American presidential candidate on the Republican ticket who had the next election in the bag, despite his isolationist policies. I canât say that I condone the protagonistâs actions, but for two out of the three categories, after spending that past couple of years listening to Alitoâs constant whiningâŚI get it, man.
Oh, and if any of that description sounds familiar, I toned (presumably an alternate-universe) Bruce down and stuffed he and his equipment into the background of the Silver Bat, giving the League part of its excuse for a bat theme.
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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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