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.

9:05 – Mon 02 October 2023

Image Not Shown: Close-up of megaphone against red wall

Terrorist propaganda holds predictable patterns from Futurity

Results of the content analysis showed an emphasis toward in-group loyalty and fairness across all propaganda, while purity-based language was directly related to the frequency of an organization’s attacks and an increase in the number of deaths and casualties.

Hashtags: #Terrorism #Propaganda #Communications

I wouldn’t call any of this surprising, but like the article says, you can’t do the work of fighting their propaganda without understanding what it says and how it works.

12:06 – Mon 02 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

ICE has been granted an unlimited range to terrorize Latino communities around the country, regardless of citizenship or status.

Adriano Espaillat

Hashtags: #Quotes #HispanicHeritage

9:07 – Tue 03 October 2023

Image Not Shown: A frame of a Fox News interview by Jesse Watters, captioned Residents in Blue Cities Are Embracing the Decay

Seattle residents go wildly off-script with Fox News reporter from Daily Kos

It’s Green Jacket Lady who takes time out of her day to give Johnny the slapdown everyone on Fox News deserves. “Who are you getting these facts from?” she laughs.

Hashtags: #FoxNews #Seattle #HellscapeSeemsNice

I suppose that this won’t change their approach, but I do have to appreciate that it has become far more difficult for them to find people to “play along” with their nonsense.

12:01 – Tue 03 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

And so it’s not just economic reasons why racism exists, but there are economic reasons why racism is perpetuated and incentivized.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Hashtags: #Quotes #HispanicHeritage

18:06 – Tue 03 October 2023

đŸ„š Posted on Cohost

Every Office Has a Garak


When I almost responded to a colleague, this morning, that of the many conflicting things that another company had told us on a call, that “it’s all true, especially the lies,” my role suddenly came into focus.

Mysterious past? Taking an interest in unconventional younger colleagues? Lunchtime-adjacent meetings? Literary discussions, off-book projects, maintaining covert information channels? Sense of someone sending me into exile? Wide range of unrelated-seeming skills, most of which have a weird story about a time that I had to work with someone halfway around the world under ill-defined but tense circumstances? Yes, yep, uh-huh, check, and mm-hmm.

I appear to have become
the Office Garak. I guess that I finally need to get that sewing machine working again to complete the transformation. And word of warning? If you can’t spot the Garak in your office
it’s probably you.

For the record, I have a “mysterious” past to the extent that more than half the companies that I’ve worked for no longer exist, with many having gone through multiple rounds of someone buying them, and that company going out of business. However, it does make discussing my past interesting: Did I write COBOL programs to test voicemail phone-trees, or did someone fabricate that as a front so that I could monitor the airport across the street
?

Oh, and for the (presumed majority of) readers unaware of the context, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine included recurring character Elim Garak—played by Andrew J. Robinson—an exiled former spy who, posing as a tailor, takes the young doctor character under his wing, almost always communicating through subtext. Garak became a popular secondary character, certainly one of my favorite characters on a show full of great characters, and the folks on Cohost disproportionately love DS9, hence posting there.

Although, I also mostly find myself giddy at my creation of Cohost’s #Am I the Garak? hashtag, which I hope sees further use by my fellow probably-not-spies


9:03 – Wed 04 October 2023

Image Not Shown: Photo of Ignacio Tomichå Chuvé by Anna Luisa Daigneault for Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages

A lasting legacy of Ignacio Tomichå Chuvé: Revitalizing the Besɚro language on the internet from Global Voices

As soon as he returned home to the city of Santa Cruz, he began recording audio files to upload on his SoundCloud account, which included traditional songs, how to say greetings and other short lessons of the language.

Hashtags: #Besiro #Language #Bolivia #DigitalActivism

This feels like the sort of story that I should have heard about before Chuvé died, but I suppose that the world sometimes works that way.

12:07 – Wed 04 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

People should not be waiting years to get an answer on their asylum claim.

JuliĂĄn Castro

Hashtags: #Quotes #HispanicHeritage

9:01 – Thu 05 October 2023

Content Warning: Transphobia

Image Not Shown: Trans rights protesters outside the Oxford Union where gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock spoke in May 2023

Cancel culture? Trans-inclusive writers say they face abuse and censorship from openDemocracy

Stock told openDemocracy any abuse Tobin had received was not her responsibility as she had not tweeted her complaint about The Tab at Tobin directly, nor mentioned her online by name.

Hashtags: #Bigotry #FreeSpeech

As always, for powerful people, “freedom of speech” only protects reinforcing bigotry


12:04 – Thu 05 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

You quickly realize how much trust people place in you when you assume responsibility for their medical care.

Serena Auñón-Chancellor

Hashtags: #Quotes #HispanicHeritage

9:04 – Fri 06 October 2023

Image Not Shown: A multicolored letter-G as the iris/pupil of an eye

How To Turn Off Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” Ad Tracking—and Why You Should from the Electronic Frontier Foundation

If you use Chrome, you can disable this feature through a series of three confusing settings.

Hashtags: #Google #Chrome #FLoC #PrivacySandbox #AdTracking

I feel the need to point out that, in my lifetime, I’ve watched the publishing industry transition directly from “we can’t survive without advertising, and that requires some compromises” to “advertising doesn’t work at all, so we use it as a pretext for data-mining operations.” Maybe we should find better business models, if true


12:03 – Fri 06 October 2023

Quoted on Mastodon


the echo of many plays / Still lingered in the folds of the curtain, / While phantom figures crouched low in the chairs, / Beating applause with vapor hands.

Mercedes de Acosta

Hashtags: #Quotes #HispanicHeritage

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: President Joe Biden speaks to striking United Auto Workers on the picket line outside the Willow Run Redistribution Center, UAW Local 174, Sept. 26, 2023, in Van Buren Township, Mich

In a First for a US President, Biden Joins Auto Worker Picket Line from Voice of America

The union claims more than 400,000 members. Many point to the sharp rise in company profits and CEO pay but also to the much smaller rise in worker pay.

It shouldn’t, at this point, but it does still surprise me how little play this story got. Even in what they want you to call far-left press, they jumped directly from demanding that Biden support the UAW to complaining about something unrelated


Image Not Shown: The Serpent Mound in Ohio. Krista Backs

The story of Ohio’s ancient Native complex and its long journey for recognition as a World Heritage site from The Conversation

Serpent Mound lies 125 miles to the south of Newark. It is a nearly 1,400-foot-long effigy of a coiled serpent that also tracks the summer and winter solstice.

I have never heard of it, and assume that they mean a different Newark than the two that I know about, but it sounds like an interesting site.

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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.