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 26 February 2024

Content Warning: Racism

Image Not Shown: A Black boy uses a fountain marked ‘colored’ at a North Carolina county courthouse in 1938

Separate water fountains for Black people still stand in the South – thinly veiled monuments to the long, strange, dehumanizing history of segregation from The Conversation

Over the years, those words were covered up by different ceremonial plaques. But for some Black Ellisville residents, the fountains still stir up painful memories of second-class citizenship.

Hashtags: #Racism #History #JimCrow

When the headline said “thinly veiled,” I didn’t expect that to literally mean that they hung a sign over the previous signs. Horrible.

12:07 – Mon 26 February 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

It is a fact that slavery flourished in the United States and constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of African slaves’ lives, liberty and cultural heritage. As a result, millions of African Americans today continue to suffer great injustices. But reparation is a national and a global issue, which should be addressed in America and in the world.

John Conyers

Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory

9:02 – Tue 27 February 2024

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: Ron DeSantis at a podium labeled Moms for Liberty

Turns out the GOP does have a few ideas—and they’re all terrible from Daily Kos

If they can’t win on woke, Republicans can always go back to their sure winners, like the 14 states that refused money to feed hungry school children, the 26 states that refused additional federal unemployment benefits during the pandemic, a push to raise drug prices, and the brilliant idea to eliminate not student loan debt, but student loans.

Hashtags: #USPol #GOP

It took me more than eight years, but I finally agree with the people who said that they like Trump in politics, on the basis that “white people” (they meant fans of Republicans) no longer felt an urge to stay quiet. I say that I agree now, because I see that the entire party has exposed itself as purely destructive. And when you trace back their sentiments, you can quickly see that we didn’t lose the “good” Republican Party over the last few years. We lost them decades ago, but they had the sense to stay quiet, so that we would treat their often-literally medieval ideas as legitimate topics of discussion.

They now openly support mass poverty and death, though, so we no longer need to pretend that they might have valid points. And for that, I thank Donald Trump


12:06 – Tue 27 February 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

We are passing through times that will secure for us a higher and nobler celebration. American gold will never secure freedom equal rights and justice to our race. No! Before these can come American slavery must be crushed, and its foul stain wiped from the Nation’s escutcheon.

Harriet Jacobs

Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory

9:04 – Wed 28 February 2024

Image Not Shown: Singra Mro with students. He has started the Rengmitca Language Learning Program to save the endangered language

One man is trying to save a language in Bangladesh with only six native speakers from Global Voices

In 2015, linguist Peterson announced in a press conference in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, that there are only 30 people remaining who can speak the Rengmitca language. All of them were over the age of 50, and he feared that the language could face extinction with their passing if younger generations failed to learn it.

Hashtags: #Bangladesh #Language #Culture

I wish them the best of luck, here, because I don’t know that a community of only six can build back to a living language.

12:03 – Wed 28 February 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory

9:03 – Thu 29 February 2024

Image Not Shown: Transgender woman drinking tea looking through the window at home

Community connections can ease stigma exposure for trans people from Futurity

The researchers demonstrated a link between higher exposure to gender-related stigma and a pattern of cortisol variation that was blunted, sluggish, and flattened, indicating a lowered ability to regulate the body’s stress response.

Hashtags: #Gender #LGBTQ #Stress

In plainer language, we have a responsibility to provide emotional support to transgender people when they come out, end of story.

12:04 – Thu 29 February 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

Whose starward eye / Saw chariot “swing low”? And who was he / That breathed that comforting, melodic sigh, / “Nobody knows de trouble I see”?

James Weldon Johnson

Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory

9:01 – Fri 01 March 2024

Content Warning: US Tax Season

Image Not Shown: A person prepares taxes at a computer

Free Tax Filing: A Crucial Step Toward Unrigging Our Economy from OtherWords

Buoyed by funding the IRS received though the Inflation Reduction Act, the Direct File pilot is another example of the Biden administration’s commitment to tackle junk fees that chip away at people’s economic wellbeing and to foster a government that better serves the American people.

Hashtags: #USPol #Taxes #Economy

I did my taxes last weekend, as it turns out, using TurboTax, since my situation gets a bit too complicated for the IRS system. It “only” took about two nightmarish hours, as one website decided to make me play shell-games to find my W-2 (salary), Intuit wouldn’t connect to my credit union, the software kept asking me to “review” empty documents that—if I touched anything—would create a new document, leaving the empty still flagged as needing review, and more.

All this, to produce a twenty-page document that they send to the IRS, so that the IRS can compare it with their analysis—since everybody involved already sends the information to them—and tell me if I got it right. It reminds me of the story that, in the 1920s, food manufacturers originally produced boxed cake mixes that included powdered eggs or substitutes, and only needed water to reconstitute the batter. Market research showed that the people who would buy the mixes felt turned off, because they wanted to participate in the process, thereby condemning us all to lousy cake mixes that also require us to have fresh eggs and milk to stir in
except that nobody gets a satisfying feeling from transferring data from one form to another.

In short, I want the IRS funded properly, so that they can expand this program massively—then obsolete it, so that those of us with less-strenuous taxes can take their word for the bill or refund—and to see Intuit and its cohort driven out of business.

12:02 – Fri 01 March 2024

Quoted on Mastodon

The people closest to the pain should be the closest to the power.

Ayanna Pressley

Hashtags: #Quotes #BlackHistory

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: Avast Software. Collage by 404 Media

FTC Fines Avast $16.5 Million For Selling Browsing Data Harvested by Antivirus from 404 Media

Jumpshot then packaged this data and sold various products based on it, including the company’s so-called “All Click Feed.” That product allows a client to buy information on all of the clicks Jumpshot has observed on a particular site, such as Amazon.com, Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com, or eBay.com. Internal documents mentioned companies such as Expedia, IBM, Intuit, which makes TurboTax, L’OrĂ©al, and Home Depot, and employees are told to not speak publicly about relationships with these companies. The idea, Jumpshot said in a previous press release, was to “provide marketers with deeper visibility into the entire online customer journey.”

Before moving to Linux, I briefly tried Avast when then-competitor AVG, before the scandals and acquisition by Avast, seemed to have a few problems running on my computer at the time. Avast didn’t last long, because even then, it felt too invasive.

That said, I hope that the Clam AV team pays attention to this, because Windows now needs a no-cost virus scanning utility—Clam AV only has an on-access solution for Linux, right now—and having a Free Software solution to recommend, where someone can inspect the code to know that the team doesn’t do anything troubling with data, would benefit a lot of people.

Image Not Shown: Stacks of magazines with the VICE logo, showing avoidable industrial accidents

Vice surrenders from Pluralistic

And yet, at every turn, through a succession of increasingly incompetent owners who bought the stumbling, declining Vice at fire-sale prices and then proceeded to hack away at the wages and tools its journalists depended on while paying executives salaries so high that they beggared the imagination, Vice’s reporters continued to turn out stellar material.

Long-time readers presumably know that VICE used to make up a significant part of my news diet, as evidenced by my tweeting (at the time) around a hundred-seventy of their articles in the format that became these social media roundup posts. 404 Media begins to fill that void, and it pleases me to hear that they feel financially stable. And I look forward to listening to the unauthorized tell-all soon.

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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.