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.

9:06 – Mon 14 August 2023

Content Warning: Discussions of Myths around Sexual Assault, Including Some Blunt Terminology

Image Not Shown: Covers of Sports Illustrated magazine featuring American football players

Belief in rape myths linked to sports media from Futurity

This has changed slightly over time as women have gained more prestige in sports, but overall, the media still promotes men’s sports far more than women’s, and you still see this same formula where men are shown as dominant and women as sexual objects.

Hashtags: #Sports #Media #SexualAssault

This makes a lot of sense to me. While sports themselves have their problems, such as treating athletes as disposable and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few owners, broader problems arise from the culture around professional sports, which derives primarily from the specialist media.

12:01 – Mon 14 August 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:01 – Tue 15 August 2023

Content Warning: US Politics, Institutional Racism

Image Not Shown: Demonstrators hold Confederate flags near the monument for Confederacy President Jefferson Davis on June 25, 2015, in Richmond, Va., after it was spray-painted with the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter'

When Confederate-glorifying monuments went up in the South, voting in Black areas went down from The Conversation

Unlike Reconstruction monuments, post-Reconstruction monuments were erected in prominent public spaces, and their focus shifted toward the portrayal and glorification of famous Confederates. Monument dedication ceremonies were particularly popular around the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, peaking in 1911.

Hashtags: #CivilWar #Reconstruction #VoterSuppression #USPol

As many people have suspected, in other words, these monuments exist entirely for the purposes of intimidation. When someone talks about honoring the South’s heritage, that heritage revolves entirely around white supremacy and oppression, reviving praise for traitors who fought for the states’ rights to perpetuate chattel slavery, in order to remind Black people—and anyone else who doesn’t fit neatly into their views—that they shouldn’t have their freedom, unfortunate but true.

12:04 – Tue 15 August 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

It is very hard for the mind to disengage itself from a subject on which it has been long employed. The thoughts will be rising of themselves from time to time, though we have given them no encouragement, as the tossings and fluctuations of the sea continue several hours after the winds are laid.

Joseph Addison

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:05 – Wed 16 August 2023

Content Warning: US Politics, Bigotry

Image Not Shown: A passenger checking in a suitcase at a Southwest service desk

Judge orders Southwest lawyers to take ‘religious-liberty training’ from far-right hate group from Daily Kos

ADF isn’t just any hate group. It’s the one that employs Erin Hawley, the wife of Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri. It’s the group that brought the legal challenge to mifepristone, an extremely safe medication that has been FDA-approved for abortion since 2000. ADF represented the Colorado baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, as the judge cited in his order.

Hashtags: #ADF #Judiciary #USPol

You might notice that conservative judges don’t even try to hide their biases and corruption, at this point. To me, that means that they either believe that have nothing to worry about, or they feel so worried that they don’t feel like they can’t risk wasting time on maintaining appearances. I’d bet on the latter, so make sure to vote to deprive their hate group-supporting movement of power.

12:06 – Wed 16 August 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another.

Jean Paul

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:03 – Thu 17 August 2023

Content Warning: Disinformation Campaigns, Bigotry

Image Not Shown: Church protest in Skopje, North Macedonia on June 29, 2023

Disinformation fuels church protest against gender equality in North Macedonia from Global Voices

Before the protest, the MOC-AO and right wing circles waged a disinformation campaign to mobilize support against upcoming legislative changes that would advance women’s rights and the rights of transgender people.

Hashtags: #GenderEquality #Macedonia #Disinformation

Everything always seems to come down to gender, with the right-wing, doesn’t it? They want control of women’s bodies, and then they want to use (white) women as the foundation for racist violence. And every time someone tries to fix inequality, they desperately want to put their thumbs on the scale.

12:07 – Thu 17 August 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Those who wish well towards their friends disdain to please them with words which are not true.

Bhāravi

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:07 – Fri 18 August 2023

Content Warning: Human Trafficking, Commercial Media

Image Not Shown: Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard in Sound of Freedom

Sound of Freedom is everything an anti-trafficking film shouldn’t be from openDemocracy

Sound of Freedom’s sensational depiction of trafficking, dehumanization of survivors, and rock ‘n roll attitude to their rescue is as seductive as it is misleading for movie goers. It gives them false information while inspiring them to join the fight against trafficking.

Hashtags: #SoundOfFreedom #HumanTrafficking #Hollywood

Do you know what the world doesn’t need? A generation of creeps who see “groomers” around every corner believing that we solve sex-trafficking by treating it like a suspense-thriller about unaccountable vigilantes, with a white savior fixing countries with predominantly brown populations. For his part, Ballard (the person whose work inspired this mess) claims to reject QAnon, but seems perfectly happy to talk to right-wing hosts about organ harvesting and Satanic rituals.

12:05 – Fri 18 August 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Noble birth is an accident of fortune, noble actions characterize the great.

Carlo Goldoni

Hashtags: #Quotes

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.

Content Warning: Silicon Valley Nonsense, Some Coarse Language

Image Not Shown: An overweight, richly dressed body with a sack of money for a head watches megafauna sink into tar pits, while the (presumed) Uber stock price declines

No, Uber’s (still) not profitable from Pluralistic

Predatory pricing used to be illegal, but Chicago School economists convinced judges to stop enforcing the law on the grounds that predatory pricing was impossible because no rational actor would choose to lose money. They (willfully) ignored the obvious possibility that a VC fund could invest in a money-losing business and use predatory pricing to convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere.

Ride-sharing increasingly looks like little more than an attack on public infrastructure, demanding to privatize public transit, so that the company can lose money, so that people have no options available if they won’t or can’t drive. I’ve even seen at least one town propose replacing their public buses with subsidized Uber rides, a plan seemed designed to completely isolate the people who need the bus, once Uber finally packs it in.

Image Not Shown: A dark-haired woman drinking from a mug and typing on a computer.

Contacting your legislator? Cite your sources – if you want them to listen to you from The Conversation

The results showed that communications from constituents can have a large impact on how legislators vote. For example, emails from constituents encouraging policymakers to support smoke-free workplace bills in New Hampshire increased state legislators’ support on critical votes by an estimated 20 percentage points – a substantial effect.

I don’t necessarily buy the conclusion, honestly. The author states that interviewed politicians said that input that cited sources better conveyed that the writer understood the issue, but that doesn’t necessarily increase the chances that they’ll listen. That said, as the article points out, one has “no downsides to providing evidence supporting one’s position.”

Content Warning: Native American Genocide

Image Not Shown:

Native Americans Share Memories of Indian Boarding Schools with US Officials from Voice of America

The video doesn’t get into much detail, but you can find the three minutes to watch it.

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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.