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.

9:04 – Mon 10 January 2022

American support for conspiracy theories and armed rebellion isn’t new — we just didn’t believe it before the Capitol insurrection from The Conversation

Others dismissed the findings entirely. The Atlantic slammed the “doozy” of a poll as “highly questionable.”

This movement dates back even further than the author seems to realize. When I was young, my parents’ friends were constantly worried about the government having been subverted and/or some constantly impending “race war.” You can see evidence of it in the so-called sovereign citizen movement of tax evaders, too, which has been around for at least fifty years. Even Ronald Reagan preached against trusting democratic institutions.

12:02 – Mon 10 January 2022

To consider, “is this man of our own or an alien?” is a mark of little-minded persons; but the whole Earth is of kin to the generous-hearted.

Panchatantra

9:01 – Tue 11 January 2022

New colonization in Russia’s Arctic threatens indigenous rights from Global Voices

Cut off at the knees, reindeer herders were simply resettled in reservations, while those who rebelled were sent to the Levashovo Wasteland, now a memorial site.

I have yet to find any instance of historical colonization that ended well, and it has resulted in racism, genocide, and a paternalistic view of formerly conquered nations. The fact that anyone still finds it acceptable isn’t great.

12:05 – Tue 11 January 2022

There is not half so much danger in the desperate sword of a known foe as in the smooth insinuations of a pretended friend.

Richard Chamberlain

9:03 – Wed 12 January 2022

Art reveals hidden slavery during reign of Louis XIV from Futurity

…France’s role in slavery has, in fact, been “hiding in plain sight,” explains Martin…

For a while, my observation has been that most cultures like to brush the unpleasant parts of history under the carpet, even while celebrating the symbols of those parts of history. While that behavior currently presents its most obvious dangers in the United States, European countries frequently seem to make claims that there’s no racism in their societies, without ever wanting to raise the question of whether non-white citizens think the same thing.

12:03 – Wed 12 January 2022

There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

Confucius

9:05 – Thu 13 January 2022

January 6 Showed Why D.C. Deserves Statehood from OtherWords

The federal government sets the District’s budget, dictates our laws, and has made a habit of ignoring our desire for statehood.

I may write up a full blog post for it, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that every state-sized territory administered by the United States should be represented in Congress as a state. I once ran the numbers and, if you were to include everyplace that the United States has occupied or included as a territory, broken down to a state-equivalent level, we’d have 139 states to represent. If we include Native American tribes—dependent sovereign nations, as they’re called by the government—that would be another 597, for a total of 736 states.

Granted, not all of those territories are still part of the United States, but it seems overwhelming to even briefly consider the directions that the United States might have taken, if every time we invaded or otherwise took control of a territory, we needed to treat its citizens as our citizens and give them votes in the House of Representatives and Senate.

12:01 – Thu 13 January 2022

A man should never despise himself, for brilliant success never attends on the man who is contemned by himself.

Mahābhārata

9:02 – Fri 14 January 2022

54 years ago, a computer programmer fixed a massive bug — and created an existential crisis from Inverse

The blinking, it turns out, is simply a way to catch the coders’ attention and stand apart from a sea of text.

To be honest, while the research is fairly important, and I’m glad to know Kiesling’s name, this article is poorly written to an almost absurd extent, trying to find some mystical reason for an on-screen indicator. To give an indication of how sloppy it is, the term “cursor” goes back at least as far as slide rules and scientific instruments, where it was used to name—you guessed it—an indicator of position. In Latin, cursor translates to “runner.”

12:04 – Fri 14 January 2022

Hast thou not perfect excellence, ’tis best

To keep thy tongue in silence, for ’tis this

Which shames a man; as lightness does attest

The nut is empty, nor of value is.

Saadi Shīrāzī

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.

Syrians turn war missiles into heaters as winter grips from SciDev.Net

They are also cost-effective, he says, at only $US15, compared to around $US100 for a new heater.

The article does a great job of outlining the immediate dangers involved in this process, though it’s also clearly a problem that missiles have been deployed in such bulk that they’re the cheapest “raw material” available.


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