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.

9:03 – Mon 01 November 2021

The Anger of Tesla Fans Is Becoming a Problem from Slate

…a Tesla booster with a large online following tweeted, “If they try and take Autopilot away from us we will riot so hard January 6 will look like a day at Disneyland”…

Frankly, they have always been a problem. They’ve been harassing dissenters for years, and making a mess of various parts of the economy by blindly following whatever the billionaire drunkenly tweets when he’s lonely. What the author really means is that it’s now also a problem for white men like himself, who are no longer given a pass by the crypto-fascist cyberpunk wannabes among the company’s fan-base.

12:04 – Mon 01 November 2021

[Sitting Bull] was an enigma at best. He was not impulsive, nor was he phlegmatic. He was most serious when he seemed to be jocose. He was gifted with the power of sarcasm, and few have used it more artfully than he.

Charles Eastman

9:04 – Tue 02 November 2021

Studying political science motivates college students to register and vote — new research shows from The Conversation

…almost half of adults in the United States did not know impeachment proceedings originate in the House of Representatives.

I’m just going to say it: There’s a reason that Republicans are constantly looking to gut education and replace it with nationalist indoctrination along the lines of the too-boring-to-mock 1776 Commission. They don’t want people to vote, and they don’t want people to know how the government works. That’s it.

12:03 – Tue 02 November 2021

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.

Chief Joseph

9:01 – Wed 03 November 2021

Minneapolis Could Become One of the First US Cities to Replace Its Police from VICE News

…swap out the city’s police department with a Department of Public Safety that employs professionals trained to respond to mental health crises, instances of substance abuse, and issues surrounding homelessness.

This situation is well worth watching. It didn’t happen this time, but when it happens—and I think that it needs to happen, somewhere—the stories around it are going to be awash in disinformation, as authoritarians blame every problem on the lack of abusive policing. So, we need to both monitor the successes and look closely at the failures to make sure that the right issues get fixed when the model inevitably spreads.

Even here, the blame is being pushed on the phrasing “defund the police,” as if that’s unclear.

12:05 – Wed 03 November 2021

When the prison, stake or scaffold can no longer silence the voice of the protesting minority, progress moves on a step, but not until then.

Lucy Parsons

9:02 – Thu 04 November 2021

Audit finds public art tends to honor white men, violence from Futurity

…representative of tensions around public art that have arisen following Floyd’s death, amid a renewed effort to remove monuments celebrating figures associated with white supremacy and replace them with new works highlighting marginalized voices.

This doesn’t just apply to monuments, incidentally. At one point, I considered the idea of launching a Free Culture fictional currency, something that people could easily use in films or games. The project largely came to a halt, when I started brainstorming the sorts of people and events to commemorate on each bill and coin, noticing that—particularly in the United States—currency is primarily about powerful white men or war.

I probably still have those notes. Maybe I’ll take another pass at them, someday, and see what I can come up with.

12:01 – Thu 04 November 2021

You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

Will Rogers

9:05 – Fri 05 November 2021

Pandora Papers revelations across Lusophone countries from Global Voices

Numerous prominent business people who support Bolsonaro’s government were also listed, including Luciano Hang and Otávio Fakhoury.

Unsurprisingly, a large fraction of involved names are from former colonial possessions—which were left with depleted resources and sham governments—and/or fascist regimes. They go well together…

12:02 – Fri 05 November 2021

I am no Spotted Tail, who will say one thing one day, and be bought for a fish the next. Look at me! I am poor, naked, but I am chief of a nation.

Red Cloud

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.

Top driver of unintended pregnancy is belief it’s not possible from Futurity

The analysis showed that more than one-third of women with unintended births cited low perceived susceptibility as a reason for contraceptive non-use—in other words, they didn’t use a contraceptive because they didn’t think they could get pregnant.

For decades, we’ve heard that sex education is key to reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions. This is important to showing us why that’s true.

Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company from VICE Motherboard

It was flagrantly abstract, showing more the dream of the metaverse than anything resembling reality. We’re told that two real people, filmed with real cameras on real couches, are in a “digital space.”

The industry hasn’t convinced anybody—except for the tiny minority of people actively working on virtual reality—that virtual reality is at all interesting. Facebook won’t fix privacy or moderation concerns. And most of the world still doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle more than sending text messages. But somehow, we’re supposed to believe that Facebook is going to usher in a digital utopia.

Would it be mean if I suggested that the engineers just hook the executives up to a high-end system that looks like their office and homes and…leave them there?

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