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.

9:04 – Mon 11 December 2023

Image Not Shown: hands hold phone flat while emojis rise up

Online ‘likes’ for toxic social media posts prompt more − and more hateful − messages from the Conversation

When you look at online hate messages, you start to notice clues that suggest, more often than not, that hatemongers are posting messages to each other, not to those their messages implicate and denigrate.

Hashtags: #SocialMedia #Bigotry #Harassment

I feel disappointed that the study doesn’t really get into the flip-side of the issue. Specifically, we often spread the advice to avoid “feeding the trolls,” as if we can only reply to someone with the intent of engaging in a conversation. But in many cases, you can find more value in using the troll’s platform to nudge their audience. When I still posted to Quora, I used to call that “playing to the cheap seats,” making sure that a hypothetical young person stumbling into someone’s hateful post would see another perspective that not only feels less slimy or destructive, but also commands at least as much respect from others.

12:05 – Mon 11 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare; and I dare a little the more as I grow older.

Michael de Montaigne

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:03 – Tue 12 December 2023

Image Not Shown: No war. Saint Petersburg. The inscription was made on the first day of the war

Museum of Russian anti-war street art opens online from Global Voices

The website “No wobble” showcases the artwork, and also the story of the symbols and the Aesopian language that appeared in Russia after February 2022 and how it was used in protest art.

Hashtags: #Russia #AntiWar #Art

Bearing in mind that they showcase street art—and so not every piece feels important—this at least makes a nice gesture.

12:03 – Tue 12 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Men are of three different capacities: one understands intuitively; another understands so far as it is explained; and a third understands neither of himself nor by explanation. The first is excellent, the second, commendable, and the third, altogether useless.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:06 – Wed 13 December 2023

Image Not Shown: Producer Norman Lear speaks in support of thousands of Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers and others in the fifth day of their strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) in a rally at Fox Plaza in Los Angeles' Century City district on Nov. 9, 2007

Norman Lear, producer of TV’s ‘All in the Family’ and influential liberal advocate, has died at 101 from Daily Kos

Controversy suggests people are thinking about something. But there’d better be laughing first and foremost, or it’s a dog.

Hashtags: #NormanLear #RIP

I rarely make a big deal about famous people. I find it crass to suggest that a celebrity’s death means more than some person from your town who neither of us have ever met. However, Lear had a massive impact on the culture—for the better, both in entertainment and politics—for decades. He had some clear flaws, like talking excitedly about how conservatives would write him saying that Archie Bunker made them “feel seen,” without capitalizing on that to change their minds on issues, but I suspect that we’d live in a darker world without his shows expanding what we would accept as American life or his work to oppose right-wing political messaging before anybody else had the sense to talk about it.

12:02 – Wed 13 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory, nothing so expensive as glory.

Sydney Smith

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:02 – Thu 14 December 2023

Image Not Shown: Bangladeshi garment workers rally for higher wages, November 2023

The High Cost of Low Holiday Prices from OtherWords

In the wake of the disaster, North American brands refused to join other global companies in signing on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh.

Hashtags: #Labor #Safety #Prices

Not as often as I like, but I enjoy spending time applying classical “domestic skills” to make things, whether that results in dinner on the table every night, an undershirt, or inconsequential piece of furniture. Apart from the warm feeling of having accomplished something for myself, it quickly illustrates the absurd prices that we pay for almost anything. For example, if I made myself a pair of wrap pants for the summer—something that I keep intending to do, because they look comfortable and not beyond my ability to make—two-and-a-half yards of decent linen would cost me nearly thirty dollars if I can’t find a sale, and it would probably take me somewhere around four to eight hours to cut and sew it. If we set the price of my labor at anything approaching reasonable, like fifteen bucks per hour, then, these pants would cost around a hundred fifty dollars to make.

By contrast, if we go for a sport coat, instead, then we want about three yards of a heavy fabric like wool and a similar amount of lining (sixty to seventy dollars), and enough labor that I’d have a hard time estimating it accurately. Forty hours, maybe? In other words, that sport coat would cost well over five hundred dollars.

Even granting that we don’t have an apples-to-apples comparison, here, between mass production and custom clothing, you can still see the deep difference in price against cost. Most of our clothes probably cost less than the material would cost us on the retail market, never mind figuring in the labor and worker welfare that we would want. And the same goes for almost every class of product.

12:07 – Thu 14 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Happy the man who early learns the difference between his wishes and his powers.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Hashtags: #Quotes

9:05 – Fri 15 December 2023

Image Not Shown: US House speaker Mike Johnson, who is in a ‘covenant marriage’ with wife Kelly Johnson, has said no-fault divorce has turned his country into a “completely amoral society”

Far-right Republicans have unlikely new target in their sights: divorce from openDemocracy

The state-level platforms of the Republican Party branches in Texas and Nebraska have also called for the abolition of no-fault divorce, and the topic has seen some debate in red states’ legislatures in recent years.

Hashtags: #Divorce #USPol #GOP

I don’t actually find this an unlikely target at all. Many conservatives—and not always the extremists—have always hated the idea of a woman filing for divorce without a court forcing her to prove that she has no other recourse. They see it—as several have told me over many years—as a woman’s duty to keep their family together no matter what the situation…and that they believe that all family property inherently belongs to the husband, and so they imagine alimony or even child support as “theft,” rather than a domestic partner’s share of the property based on the extensive labor provided around the house.

As such, they have always had plans like this in mind. The situation has changed, though, in that they have become delusional enough to think that they can make it happen and survive politically.

12:04 – Fri 15 December 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Time is the wheel-track in which we roll on towards eternity, conducting us to the Incomprehensible. In its progress there is a ripening power, and it ripens us the more, and the more powerfully, when we duly estimate it. Listen to its voice, do not waste it, but regard it as the highest finite good, in which all finite things are resolved.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

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: Discussion of AIDS, partial nudity

Image Not Shown: A silence-equals-death AIDS-awareness poster from early in the epidemic

Artists, activism and AIDS from the Wellcome Collection

In 1992, Smith designed six posters, including this one, for the American Red Cross HIV/AIDS Program in Africa. Each poster includes a proverb from a different African country.

Given my age, I certainly know some of this art and some context behind it, but even decades later, it impresses me.

Image Not Shown: Physics teacher discusses concept with virtual class

Scientists may misunderstand the gender gap in physics from Futurity

When scientists draw on individualist arguments to explain gender inequality—thus ignoring these gendered processes—they may blunt initiatives that can promote women’s equity in STEM.

This disconnect makes some sense, unfortunately. While wrong, nobody wants to feel like they got their position unfairly. Therefore, the “facts” need to fit the conclusion of fairness, rather than finding a conclusion that fits the available facts.

In modern politics, this converges on the idea of “wokeness,” where we have a significant minority of people who find it highly offensive for someone to remind them of any unfairness in the world, especially unfairness that they may have contributed to.

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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.