Toots 🐘 from 06/26 to 06/30

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.

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

9:04 – Mon 26 June 2023

Image Not Shown: Healthcare worker praying for blessing while wearing safety equipment for working in hospital during coivd-19 pandemic

Feeling ‘called’ to your job can hide mistreatment from Futurity

…workers who viewed their work as a spiritual calling had greater satisfaction and were less likely to feel discriminated against on the job.

Hashtags: #Work #Religion

Anecdotally, I’ve definitely seen secular versions of this, where people who have some emotional bond to their job—needing it to stay in the country, having a prior relationship with their boss, thinking of their work as incredibly important, and so forth—have the same issues, where they don’t even recognize problems. In fact, I’ve known several managers who deliberately handed out important-sounding titles and cultivated personal relationships with certain workers, in hopes of keeping them from complaining. (I didn’t stay long at those jobs.)

12:07 – Mon 26 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

If I can rejoice for a moment, / Death at an early age would still be a long life.

Yuan Mei

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:05 – Tue 27 June 2023

A pride-progress flag in a breeze
Image credit: Image by Cecilie Johnsen. Free to use under Unsplash License.

Istanbul marks Trans Pride March with police violence and detentions from Global Voices

The scenes from the trans march were reminiscent of the International Women’s Day march on March 8, when local police barricaded many of the side streets leading to meeting points the organizers had announced, shut down subway lines, and set up checkpoints.

Hashtags: #LGBTPride #Turkiye #Protest

Honestly, how insecure do you have to feel in your own gender and sexuality to want to control and shut down a Trans Pride parade…?

12:03 – Tue 27 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Do nothing secretly; for Time sees and hears all things, and discloses all.

Sophocles

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:06 – Wed 28 June 2023

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: Samuel Alito

Justice Alito’s op-ed is a confession of corruption from Daily Kos

It’s almost as if he’s saying that because they were rich, they were treated differently.

Hashtags: #USPol #Alito #SCOTUS #Corruption

Alito seems to stand on the edge of a breakdown, probably because he sees Kavanaugh and Barrett ruling in fairly reasonable ways on cases instead of joining he and Thomas in their unvarnished authoritarian dissents. And I admit that I wouldn’t mind if he had to retire…

12:02 – Wed 28 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

No one can escape the power of language.

Virginia Woolf

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:01 – Thu 29 June 2023

Indigenous women in politics: banned presidential candidate Thelma Cabrera (left) and Congress candidate Blanca Ajtún in Panajachel, Guatemala
Image credit: Dánae Vílchez / openDemocracy

Meet the Indigenous women taking on corruption in Guatemala’s elections from openDemocracy

These candidates are also trying to preserve the country’s fragile democracy, following recent setbacks under the leadership of right-wing president Alejandro Giammattei, who has been in office since 2020.

Hashtags: #Guatemala #Democracy

Again, it looks a lot like authoritarians really over-extended themselves, this time, with all their work in almost every country falling apart. I suppose that I already expected this, because I told everybody that the “rise of fascism” actually looked more to me like cornered animals lashing out than actual power, but I didn’t expect to see authoritarians in places as different as Guatemala and Russia fall apart at the same time that American conservatives tear each other apart.

12:01 – Thu 29 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Words are mighty, words are living: Serpents with their venomous stings, Or bright angels, crowding round us, With heaven’s light upon their wings

Adelaide Anne Procter

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

9:03 – Fri 30 June 2023

AfroCuisine team
Image credit: Photograph by B.Korlah, released under CC-BY-SA 4.0

African & Proud (AP) organizes AfroCuisine to capture and showcase the diverse array of African culinary traditions. from Wikimedia Diff

…participants were really excited to learn about Wikibook-Cookbooks and were so excited to participate in the contest while also creating contents around African Cuisines.

Hashtags: #Wikibooks #Food #AfricanCuisine

While not the most critical story in the news, I always look forward to having more diverse options for food and more Free Culture content to work with.

12:05 – Fri 30 June 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The Urning (his word for a gay man -jc) is not by a hair’s breadth any more dangerous to immature boys than the genuine man is to immature girls.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Hashtags: #Quotes #LGBTPride

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.

Image Not Shown:

To debunk science misinformation, consider these factors from Futurity

They found that when a correction offers a detailed explanation, the audience is more likely to be receptive, and the misinformation is more likely to be debunked.

I see problems with this idea, like that you would need someone to listen to the detailed explanation, but it still seems worth filing away.

Content Warning: Russian Politics

Image Not Shown: A woman poses for a photo in front of the Wagner Group military vehicle

Wagner’s mutiny punctured Putin’s ‘strongman’ image and exposed cracks in his rule from The Conversation

…it was the intervention of Belarus President Lukashenko that brought about an end to the mutiny, not any words or actions from Putin.

Russia has never looked like it had a stable government, to me. The collapse of the Soviet Union and sloppy attempt to change to a capitalist economy didn’t help the image, and things have gotten progressively worse, until this week. Now, Prigozhin has proven that a relatively small armed group can reach the Moscow city limits with no resistance, and Putin has shown that he will flee, when challenged. Will neighbors try to snag some extra real estate that people used to consider theirs? Will the Russian people seize the opportunity to protest? We’ll have to see.

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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.