Toots 🐘 from 07/10 to 07/14

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.

9:07 – Mon 10 July 2023

Image Not Shown: A collage of images of Black women activists

What the Black feminists who resisted state violence can teach us about care from openDemocracy

Needs that can and should be met socially have been displaced onto individuals, while corporations produce profits from the care economies that exploit workers.

Hashtags: #Feminism

I normally ignore articles about the UK, but this caught my interest due to the important activism.

12:04 – Mon 10 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Never leave anyone behind—not on the battlefield and not in our country. And never put a service member in harm’s way without understanding the cost—the very real and very human cost—of war.

Tammy Duckworth

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:04 – Tue 11 July 2023

Image Not Shown: A group of multiracial kindergarten students sitting on the floor in a classroom, looking up at the teacher who is sitting on a chair in front of them. They have serious expressions on their faces.

Does preschool shortchange kids from working-class backgrounds? from Futurity

In doing so, the researchers examined students’ behavioral engagement during whole-class discussions—a core part of the preschool curriculum in Europe and North America.

Hashtags: #Education

I don’t actually know what preschool looks like, these days, but my extremely vague recollection of those days in my life seem to back this. Students from wealthier backgrounds expect everyone to want to interact with them and help them, while those from backgrounds where they might not have constant companionship often got left behind.

12:02 – Tue 11 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

So long as the labors and drudgery of the world is thrown actively upon one class, while another class is entirely exempt from it, there is a radical injustice in it. And injustice in society is like a rotten timber in the foundation of a house.

Samuel Gridley Howe

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:06 – Wed 12 July 2023

Content Warning: US Politics, Josh Hawley

Image Not Shown: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) gestures toward a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump gathered outside the U.S. Capitol to protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's electoral college victory Jan. 6, 2021

Josh Hawley puts white nationalist words in the mouth of a Founding Father from Daily Kos

…hints at where Hawley might be getting his news and memes: the places where white nationalist misinformation about Founding Fathers is circulating.

Hashtags: #WhiteNationalism #GOP #USPol #JoshHawley

Admittedly, I always find it bizarre when I see articles say things like, “Hawley is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School who clerked on the Supreme Court and in general has a reputation as one of the Republican Party’s most brilliant minds,” because that gets right to the heart of most journalism about Republicans. People try to dig for nice things to say about them, creating this mystique, instead of beginning and ending with the fact that he worries about men becoming too effeminate—which shows a remarkable level of homophobia and misogyny—and spends his time with white nationalists. Why would I care that people call him intelligent?

12:01 – Wed 12 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Is there much discord? No, only when she plays the piano.

Tad Dorgan

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:05 – Thu 13 July 2023

Content Warning: Police violence

Image Not Shown: People in the Brooklyn borough of New York City protest police violence against Black women on Sept. 5, 2020

Police treatment in black and white — report on Minneapolis policing is the latest reminder of systemic racial disparities from The Conversation

Indeed, policing in the United States was established on the practice of controlling specific populations. In the 19th century, for example, policing in the South was designed to monitor the movement of enslaved Black people.

Hashtags: #Policing #SystemicRacism

I’ve written about the origins of policing, and this report confirms a lot of what I indicated, there. We don’t have a problem with “bad cops.” We have a problem of building systems designed to enforce white supremacy, which encourages and requires the “good” and “bad” cops to treat people differently based on race.

12:03 – Thu 13 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

What people want is simple. They want an America as good as its promise.

Barbara Jordan

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

6:13 PM – Thu 13 July 2023

Posted on Cohost

✊

I don’t usually comment on things when I share them, but seriously: While any time makes a great opportunity to cut back on corporate-produced entertainment and spend at least the remaining amount on indie artists (to atone for your Star Wars habit or whatever you have), today makes an especially good time to do that.

Partly, because doing so will help diversify the media available to us, so that we don’t have half a dozen companies with overlapping shareholders controlling every industry. But also because I think it would look hilarious if things got so bad for the studios that Disney had to sell Indiana Jones on eBay or Discovery/Warner had to find a different parking lot management company to sell DC to, since Kinney no longer exists.

I also dropped an edited version on Mastodon, for the people who prefer it.

Do I need to explain this? Does anybody need me to expand on any of the details? Oh, OK, but I did warn you.

I’d like people to spend more on Free Culture, specifically, because that way we all win. But I’ll happily accept…OK, look, I can’t find great numbers, but it looks like the average American currently spends about five hundred dollars per year on streaming services. I assume that they mean “individual adult” and not household, and the Census Bureau tells me that about 78% of our population of about 333,287,557 has become an adult, or 259,631,007, giving one country—I don’t have the patience to run the numbers for the rest of the world, but I’d love it if someone else did the work for me—a streaming budget of $129,815,503,500, or one-point-three billion dollars.

That only includes streaming. It doesn’t include buying physical media or digital downloads. It doesn’t include going to the movie theater. The number probably does include music, and I don’t know how much that would account for. But as an approximation to start with, we have well over a billion dollars.

Do you have any idea what that would look like if we spent that kind of money on independent media, instead? Think about only the sorts of works that we’ve seen in the Free Culture Book Club, and the tiny budgets that people used to create them. If we gave half a hundred thousand dollars—a tiny fraction of the streaming total—to the creators of something like Valkaama, for example, would we have an endless franchise with its own multiverse but some parts of it deleted from the historical record over contractual disputes, or would we have dozens of additional works that we can share and adapt?

Meanwhile, it sounds like the studios already feel some pain. Disney+ started losing subscribers over the winter, and it sounds like none of Disney’s current theatrical releases have lived up to expectations. Paramount has also tried to stem massive losses for the past couple of months, leading some analysts to start speculating on which studio will buy them at a huge discount. Warner/Discovery hasn’t stopped flailing since well before AT&T bought them. If we give them money, they’ll pass it on as CEO bonuses and stock buy-back…

9:03 – Fri 14 July 2023

The Many Branches of the Fediverse
Image credit: by Per Axbom https://axbom.com/fediverse/, Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International

The Newcomer’s Guide to Mastodon, from a Crusty Old-Timer from We Distribute

Honestly, starting with Mastodon and shifting to something else is pretty common for people on the network. Many platforms implement Mastodon’s own client API, meaning dozens of Mastodon apps can be used elsewhere.

Hashtags: #Mastodon #Fediverse

Most of my regular readers probably already know a lot of this, since I’ve spoken about this same transition before, but it always makes sense to refresh that idea and get perspectives from other people.

12:05 – Fri 14 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

But an apology to all is perhaps due for the very chatty manner in which the author has taken his friend, the reader, into his confidence…

Theodore Ayrault Dodge

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

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: A screenshot of the video, showing a presentation slide explaining the on-and-off open source history of Solaris

Seriously, don’t sign a CLA from Drew DeVault’s blog

This is particularly pathetic in cases like that of SourceGraph, which used a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Such licenses already allow their software to be incorporated into non-free commercial works, such is the defining nature of a permissive license, with relatively few obligations: in this case, a simple attribution will suffice.

Agreed on all counts. Nobody uses a Contributor License Agreement for their Free Software project unless they plan to change the license once the project becomes popular, and shake off the community. I don’t know why people keep falling for the scam.

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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.