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.

9:02 – Mon 19 April 2021

Maybe America Is Racist from The Root

Scientists…accept the premise that whenever there are two different possibilities, the simpler one is usually the correct one.

Unless, of course, white people are talking about racism.

A big problem—which I assume that Harriot understands but didn’t want to bog down an excellent article with it—is that it takes courage for a privileged person to process our bigoted complicity in a system. So, you’ll often see right-wingers insist that a criticized action or statement can’t be racist, because a person they respect does or says it, and that person isn’t racist.

So, you can see how we might get from there to insisting that every hate crime, every police execution of a Black man, and every under-funded school is just another coincidence. It’s why activists have started making the distinction between “non-racist” (an identity where you can pat yourself on the back) and “anti-racist” (actively challenging yourself and systems), and why racists always complain about being “made” to feel white guilt.

12:02 – Mon 19 April 2021

[Air combat] is just business. It’s what we’re trained for—just like you might be trained for any business.

James Jabara

9:03 – Tue 20 April 2021

The Racist Roots of Big Tobacco from Common Dreams

Beyond today’s marketing strategies, the tobacco industry’s intricate ties to slavery and colonizer violence runs deep.

It is definitely “interesting” to see cigarette companies try to horn in on Black Lives Matter messaging, knowing full well that their market exists due to slave plantations and that they spent decades targeting advertising at Black neighborhoods.

12:03 – Tue 20 April 2021

Conflicts are created, conducted and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings.

George Mitchell

9:04 – Wed 21 April 2021

How ‘complementarianism’—the belief that God assigned specific gender roles—became part of evangelical doctrine from The Conversation

In 1987, a group including Piper and Grudem met in Danvers, Massachusetts, to prepare a statement…

I was exposed to this mindset a lot back when I spent time on Quora, often used as an attempt to deny misogyny by asserting that treating women equally would actually be bad, because people (read “men”) need women to do all the things that stereotypical men don’t find interesting.

12:01 – Wed 21 April 2021

I think that dealing with my peers was a great experience in preparation for being in public life.

Mary Rose Oakar

9:05 – Thu 22 April 2021

No, floods didn’t bring down ancient city of Cahokia from Futurity

Their new archaeological work shows that the ground surface on which the mound was constructed remained stable until industrial development.

Cahokia is a site that just never stops being surprising. It’s a thousand years old near St. Louis, and may have hit twenty thousand residents at times, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time. But it was basically invisible to settlers, because a lot of it was built in and around pyramidal mounds that mostly now just look like hills.

12:04 – Thu 22 April 2021

We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.

Ilhan Omar

9:01 – Fri 23 April 2021

Amazon’s New Algorithm Will Set Workers’ Schedules According to Muscle Use from VICE Motherboard

Furthermore, Bezos claims that this micro-level algorithmic management of worker’s bodies will be “central” to the company’s strategy going forward.

You know all of those snide comments that people make about the dystopian nature of people allowing their lives to be controlled by clocks and calendars, especially in the context of smart-phones? This is going to make that look like a playground game, literally rushing people around because a mathematical model says that a worker’s back muscles will have recovered sufficiently from lifting the last heavy thing and so shouldn’t go to waste. People are going to get hurt, because a billionaire can’t just treat employees like humans.

12:05 – Fri 23 April 2021

My parents wanted their daughters to reach their full potential. I joke that they said, “We left our homeland so you could pursue your dreams—as long as you’re a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer.”

Dina Habib Powell

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.

Inspiring new generations of Balinese language speakers through superheroes and wikis from Global Voices

The character is “a courageous, agile, fast and strong Indonesian superhero who uses her powers to help sustain the natural and cultural environment of Indonesia.”

The actual book is licensed non-commercial, otherwise I’d cover it for the Free Culture Book Club.

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