As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which are not included here unless they happen to be available under a free license. Most are not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I’m not restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

I also don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:05 – Mon 05 April 2021

The conservative movement is rejecting America from Vox

Ellmers’s essay is in line with this tradition, identifying freedom as a right that only a certain section of the population deserves.

This is an excellent article, but it misses an important point in linking it to the Trump campaign and administration, despite the mention of George Wallace. Karl Rove would give interviews to anybody who would listen, talking about REDMAP. Since Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Republicans have embraced the idea that people of color and women need to be controlled, insisting that reversing the effects of discrimination is “the real racism/sexism.” There were plenty of people in the 1930s who wanted to join World War II on the side of the Nazis, and the Nazis modeled their policies on Jim Crow laws. I previously wrote about the divide between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, underscoring that this has always been with us, and we need to treat it as a chronic problem, if we’re going to fix it.

What’s different is that they know that they’re cornered, and like any cornered animal, the movement wants to lash out in hopes of forcing everybody to back away.

12:01 – Mon 05 April 2021

I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.

Kahlil Gibran

9:03 – Tue 06 April 2021

A Cold Civil War Is Being Waged by Republicans from Common Dreams

Republican-controlled state legislatures have proposed 253 bills in 43 states that aim to prevent millions of Americans, and especially Americans of color, from voting in federal and state elections.

And they wonder why Democrat legislators are trying to just ignore them, now, instead of giving them the opportunity to derail help for constituents in favor of more voter suppression.

12:03 – Tue 06 April 2021

It is not my purpose to startle and provoke the reader with sweeping generalities, or to bamboozle him with dogmas old in garments new.

Ameen Rihani

9:01 – Wed 07 April 2021

State Lawmakers Are Cracking Down on Speech from OtherWords

The Idaho budget also prohibits using state funds to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events, and organizations on campus.”

I really don’t know what to tell you, if you don’t see “opposition to social justice” as the most obvious red flag available…

12:05 – Wed 07 April 2021

Let history turn a page of failure and settle its accounts.

Perhaps rage, perhaps shame, perhaps fire may move the heart of a coward.

All these are in us, but all they move is the tongue.

Nasib Arida

9:04 – Thu 08 April 2021

White mobs rioted in Washington in 1848 to defend slaveholders’ rights after 76 Black enslaved people staged an unsuccessful mass escape on a boat from The Conversation

Seventy-six Black men, women and children, having quietly left area farms, hid beneath the deck. Drayton and Sayres steered the ship down the Potomac River.

It’s important, sometimes, to take a moment to realize that, as many times as right-wing jerks try to scare white America about a “race war,” the only times we’ve come close to such a thing has been white people insisting that it’s bad to not hate Black people. If we can just stop doing that, I think we’ll be fine.

12:04 – Thu 08 April 2021

It may not be absolutely necessary for me to say that infallibility cannot justly be ascribed to any author, nor claimed by him, even when writing of his own experiences, and the social environment in which he was born and brought up.

Abraham Mitrie Rihbany

9:02 – Fri 09 April 2021

Sunlight inactivates SARS-CoV-2 way faster than expected from Futurity

…analysis points to the need for additional experiments to separately test the effects of specific light wavelengths and medium composition.

Given how many people instantly tried to get into the business of UV-cleaners for everything that you own—most of which don’t have nearly enough LEDs to do anything useful, which you can verify by comparing the price of any device to the wholesale price of LEDs—it’s disappointing that it took this long to get this research moving.

12:02 – Fri 09 April 2021

…the more I learned about the constitutional principles and the attempts to obtain equality, and the more I saw the country pick itself up and recover and try to do better when it fell the other way, the more impressed I became…

Rosemary Barkett

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, here are any additional articles that didn’t fit into the week, but too weird or important to not mention.

Bert Rose, pioneer of Jamaica’s independence-era dance movement, dies at 81 from Global Voices

Rose was among the seventeen founding members of the NDTC, brought together by Jamaican cultural icon, the late Rex Nettleford and choreographer Eddy Thomas.

Not every article needs to be about earth-shattering consequences. Sometimes, it’s just remembering the impact of an artist that too few people are aware of.

Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.