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silveradeptCheers! Let's begin with the photographs and lurid details of the removal of an artificial penis attached to the top of a Eureka gazebo.
Because you needed a laugh, ever since the state of Texas's Republican majority decided that nobody needed to have a permit or training to carry a gun, to make it easier to buy alcohol, to make it less convenient and more difficult for not-white people to vote or help people with voting, and to make it impossible for any pregnant person in Texas to abort by setting a line that is so short that most people won't know they're pregnant until after the line that's been set. And rather than trying to enforce such a thing themselves, which would almost certainly draw an injunction from a higher court, the state decided that any person who believes another person has helped someone have an illegal abortion in the state can sue that person, with a $10,000 USD penalty plus attorney's costs to be paid as a bounty to the plaintiff if the suit succeeds, no penalties enforced on the plaintiff, not even attorney's costs, should the suit fail, and a presumption that if a person is being sued, they are guilty of the offense and will be liable for the bounty if they do not appear in court to defend themselves. It is designed to allow free reign to persons who have made it their life's work to harass and intimidate others and to require them to exhaust themselves from nuisances and vexatious litigants and maintain a perfect defense. Ah, and also, any clinic that has even one successful suit against them will be shut down as an additional consequence in addition to having to pay out money. (Which, y'know, the way they designed the thing might mean it could also be exploited by vexatious litigants who want to harass and bankrupt and drown the vigilantes the Republicans wanted to have power. Or possibly the Republicans themselves.)
The highest court of the United States declined to hear any arguments or provide an injunction against the law, allowing it to go into effect and signaling other states that have been trying to do something similar that this is potentially a venue they can use for themselves. This is likely an advance warning that they will not continue to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision as good law and precedent when a case that challenges it comes before them later on in the year.
It seems very clear that the Republican party in most states and nationally has long since given up the appearance of wanting a democracy and to share power with an opposing party. One can hope that the elected Democrats and liberal direct action groups are ready to discard any premise of collegiality or norms that interfere with their ability to get things done and make it difficult for the opposition to undo what they have done. Because now we're seeing what happens when the competent zealots have enough power to enforce their specific white supremacist patriarchal beliefs on everyone.
wendelah1 has a list of organizations that money could be poured into and information that can be shared if you have persons in Texas who need to know about logistics of getting out of the state, or about how to request and obtain pills through the mail.
I have a sneaking suspicion that there will also be further attempts to reinstate the Comstock laws and other such restrictions so that someone who is attempting to use the federal mail system to obtain constitutionally-protected material will find their material inspected and seized by over-reaching state entities. Or that the mail carriers will also be sued under these statutes for abetting an abortion, even though they do not know what the mail contains. Both the Lyft and Uber corporations have said they will defend their drivers if they are sued under the law, on the solid argument that transporting a person as your job should not be something where you have to assess your legal risk and whether you have the money to pay the bounty and the attorney fees if your ride doesn't say where they're going, or if they say to go somewhere else and then walk themselves to the clinic from there. Or similar things. There are probably going to be a fair few companies who are setting up legal defense funds so that if their employees are sued in the course of their normal corporate duties, there's money for them to defend themselves. (Who's going to want to work for a company that decides it's an acceptable business decision to make their employees defend themselves and possibly have to pay more money than they would earn in a year as a penalty to some fanatic who decided to sue because you were close enough to somewhere that might have provided an abortion to someone?)
A site that wanted to collect tips on people to serve them with litigation under the law has been told by its initial hosting provider that the site is a Terms of Service violation and they must find another. This is while such a tip site was being repeatedly spammed with false names and details to force such crusaders to waste time and resources chasing realistic-looking shadows. While one hopes that such zealots will never find a home or won't be surprised if they are constantly being spammed, either for DDoS purposes or to give them too much junk data to do anything actionable with.
It's a terrible situation, and it's likely to be replicated elsewhere. (I would like to see a solicitor sue all the persons who approved, voted for, constructed, or signed the legislation into law under the provisions of the law, since it seems abundantly clear that by creating this law, they intended for more abortions to happen, rather than less, and to have them have to keep paying out bounties for unsuccessful defenses because they created the law they are being sued under.)
And now, another laugh - the excuse of female socialization, a catch-all, get out of all things excuse to use in any situation, the more ridiculous the better.
And a fic collection administered bymelannen that is described as "Someone has sex they want, which leads to a pregnancy they don't want, which leads to an abortion they do want, and they don't regret it a bit."
An account of labor reforms and laws that doesn't begin with the understanding that workers' labor actions are usually what precipitates changes in law and practice is hopelessly fundamentally flawed. Especially when it wants to go "Democrats good, Republicans bad," because, as we have known and younger generations are finding out, Democrats are more than happy to do things that are harmful to the interests of ordinary people and to refuse to recognize May Day as a proper holiday. Because the history of labor is often obscured and hidden by capitalists and their interests to try and convince us all we should be grateful to have a job, rather than agitating to be paid the value of our labor and given enough time to pursue our lives outside of work.
Even the things that most people think of as completely anodyne, like knitting and dyeing yarn, still have racism woven into them. Adella Colvin, who does dyeing, is succeeding with help and good product.
Attempting to throw money at a problem until it goes away doesn't always work, as people who had ill-thought plans to turn a cruise ship into the hub of a floating space that would only trade in cryptocurrencies. The people who tried it didn't know enough about how to run a cruise ship so as to avoid being slapped repeatedly by the very bureaucracy they wanted to escape from. They could have taken their fantastic wealth and put it toward solving social problems, but we have already long since determined that the rich would rather try to solve problems that would personally benefit them rather than problems that would benefit everyone.
The Guardian has pulled paragraphs involving an interview with Judith Butler that referenced the increasing alliance between the reactionary far-right and the transphobic left. As a refresher, nobody should be surprised about Judith Butler's current stances regarding biological essentialism and the framing presented that suggests there is supposed to be a great social controversy about transgender people. The author of the piece offered a question rewrite that would not reference a current event, since the answer itself did not reference the event either, but found both question and answer disappeared, apparently after a lengthy conversation among the editorial staff that the original author never got to be part of. The deleted section itself, in a more screen-reader-friendly form, thanks to![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
vassraptor. And, the whole original article, as captured by the Wayback Machine, so that the full context of the deleted section is available.
A jewelry advertisement in India featuring a transition and someone getting ready for her wedding is a hit. India, like many other places, has legal protections but not necessarily a full societal acceptance for trans persons, so a good ad can help. Watch the ad, called "Pure As Love".
Philip Roth, far from being an auteur who only thought of the art, was a hustler who happily asked for and returned favors when it came to promotion, prizes, and other accolades. Which was amply helped by the network of contacts he developed and was willing to do favors for as well. Which might be disheartening to others. Or, we might be in the situation where skills we thought we had at a high level have slipped because we haven't been able to practice them. It's not a matter of shame if your skills are at different levels because there's been a pandemic. As it may be, cultivating the attitude that it does not have to be perfect or overachieved or exactly right in the particulars, but that it does get done may be incredibly freeing from a situation, or incredibly freeing for an institution paralyzed by the characteristic that it has to be done right or not at all. And in a world that increasingly encroaches on the idea that childhood is supposed to be for fun and casual play, rather than a development pipeline for a scholarship or an eventual high-level career, being okay with being a casual and doing things for the fun of it is a skill much more desperately needed.
Going to see the self-sufficient who got their start in previous decades, but the article treats them as if they were preserved in amber, a relic of a past that has no relevance to the present, except, perhaps, for their cannabis cultivation and the artifacts that have been left behind, all of the failures that couldn't be or weren't recovered from. Neither, I suspect, should they be lionized as the rugged folk that all USians dream to be, but all throughout, there's very clearly a conflict going on in the background that only comes to the forefront when the people who are living on their land mention it - the conflict between the person who wants to live on terms where they get to decide what counts and how much of society and government they want to interact with, the government that either fails to understand them or sees them as a threat to (capitalist) society, and the society around them, which rarely paints them on their own ideas, instead of perpetually referencing a specific time period that has been flanderized and reworked into a narrative that always speaks of them with a prejudice, but not usually the one of "they had sufficient privilege to be able to attempt this and then either succeed or fail at it."
Taking the idea of what sparks joy out to a logical conclusion, some people are now promoting the idea that relationship minimalism is something to aim for, cultivating and pruning friendships until only those ones that are most rewarding remain. The advice around is to jettison those things that are toxic, especially toxic people, but as described in the piece, it certainly seems like the kind of thing that easily tips over into performative things or putting someone on the pathway that results in far more toxic ideologies that promote the idea that lesser beings are unworthy of kindness, friendship, or other such humanity.
Animal photography that catches exactly the right funny moment, usually with just a touch of anthropomorphization. The native rice of North America, those who tend and harvest it, and the threats it has from industrialized rice grown in paddies with high mechanization. Video footage of Wally climbing on board a boat, with encouragement from some of the offscreen commentary folks. Night-time garden pictures of hedgehogs, foxes, and other woodland creatures.
The way that history and science are taught in many USian contexts is of a more enlightened modernity looking back at the previous eras and shaking their heads at their backwards and wrong beliefs, even the ones that had been tested to the limits of their scientific knowledge. And while someone might say "science marches on" as a general idea and be relatively correct, it also requires all the people who claim to be doing science to be on their best science game. Sometimes the reviewers of something dismiss a paper out of hand because "everyone knows" the menstrual blood is toxic and couldn't possibly have any other scientific use. Which is the sort of thing that I then pair with the issues of trying to both eradicate the practice of menstrual exile and making the experience of those who are forced to go through with it as comfortable and sanitary as possible, which certainly seems like you could do something on both fronts together, but the point being that some things that science has already dusproven still live on in cultural or religious practices. Or people who feel that science has become altogether too complicated for the layperson to understand, and is therefore a secret plot by the elites (which is never helped along when it turns out that, say, people who created an opioid epidemic not only got to profit handsomely peddling things they knew were addictive, but are then exempted from the liability they have incurred, allowing them to disappear with their wealth intact). Well, those people often develop or return to older theories of disease and medicine that are entirely wrong, but are comprehensible. Terrain theory, for example, which hits the sweet spot of denying most of modern germ theory and insists that personal choice and strict adherence to a restricted diet will purge the body of the toxins it manufactures in response to deviation from the ideal. Not only do you not have to understand anything complicated, you get to blame someone else's morally bad choices as the reason why they're sick. It's great for people that want to feel holier than thou, or smarter than thou, and that they can take control of their health, rather than having to rely on experts who have studied things who can be dismissed as a cult more interested in profits than health. (See above, re: the Sacklers and how what they did is an example for these kinds of theories to gain traction.)
The combined rage of all the vaccinated, directed toward the willfully unvaccinated, with an entire platoon of fucks being given. Definitely not directed at all toward those who genuinely cannot get vaccinated, not really directed at people who will get vaccinated once they've had a conversation with a person that trusts them, or worse, they have to watch someone die from the virus, fully directed at those who can and instead choose to use horse paste, or some other grifter's product, and who promote lies and conspiracies about the vaccine in an attempt to get others to endanger their own lives.
With the return of many schools to in-person instruction, despite the face that a large swath of students cannot get vaccinated still, there is, of course, that ever-charming situation where parents believe they know better and that their views are the ones that should be adopted across the school system and they choose to use violence and intimidation to try and accomplish this. Like people who bring zip ties and intend to arrest a principal for enforcing the school's quarantine policy that requires a student not be in school for seven days after being exposed to a positive COVID case. Or they attack other places, like pepper-spraying a pediatrician's staff member in response to being asked to put on a mask while in the office. We have our own people who take masks and then don't actually wear them, or who wear them deliberately improperly, and they get shirty when we tell them they have to wear the mask and to wear it properly. Kind of makes you wish that we there were some way of ensuring that people who have more than enough money to help everyone were required to make that money available to the government so it could be used for public goods and services while we properly waited out the necessary periods to get everyone vaccinated (that can).
In technology, an increasing number of attacks that require no interaction from the target at all to succeed should have Apple rethinking how its components work and how much permission and attack surface they get to have. And while it might be unlikely that any given person becomes a high value target for a state actor, it is one of the fervent hopes of technology that it can resist such things should that happen.
The Los Angeles Police Department routinely collects the social media information of the people they talk to, to feed into Palantir. They also have broad authority and very few constraints on surveilling and using false personas to monitor people's social media. Because, of course, we all know that the police are trustworthy with people's information, and would definitely not use anything that a person posted as an excuse to be more terrible to them, or to charge them with obscure things, and certainly aren't the kind of people who start playing copyrighted music if someone is filming an interaction with them, assuming that the finely-tuned vigorous copyright claim algorithms will stop anyone from being able to post any such interaction. </sarcasm>
Last for tonight, two elements from Volume 36 of Transformative Works and Cultures. First, An Archive of Whose Own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction's digital infrastructure is a smart piece about how AO3's free speech maximalism influenced the design of the Archive and the opinions of the founders of the Archive shaped the warning system. These approaches' are now more readily apparent, since AO3 has come into contact with problems that it did not envision and did not build capacity to handle into the design. AO3 may have options for mitigation of the problem, but all of them come with specific kinds of costs. I appreciate the way the article talks about the obvious flaws of more easily-implemented solutions: expanding the warning system to include new categories brings the problems of not every author understanding the taxonomy or choosing to ignore it, and excluding works as unsuitable for the Archive brings not only the problems of a lack of shared understanding, but places the burden of enforcement and interpretation on whatever group of persons have signed up for or been assigned to content moderation. As we have seen, content moderation is a taxing situation, where people are regularly exposed to the worst things that humans can come up with and they have to make decisions on those as well as potential grey area cases. Plus, content moderation systems tend to require people to self-identify along various axes if they want their work to stay up, which could open them up as targets for harassment by others because of those identities, or increase the harassment that they are already receiving. The proposed solution, such that it is, is about establishing accountability, but as "generous accountability," a phrase I have seen used about the information professional series, like the 2020 ACRL President's Program session called "Shifting the Center: Transforming Academic Libraries Through Generous Accountability" and whose main thrust I'm borrowing from Mia Mingus's Dreaming Accountability post to mean a lack of punishment and belief that making a mistake, including the mistake of doing a racism, and being called to account on it should be seen as an opportunity for growth and doing better, rather than a confirmation that someone is intentionally irredeemably a Bad Person by doing that thing. (Much of that fear and how it gets socialized, especially into white people, is excellently explained by Tema Okun's remix of her original article about the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.) Generous accountability, then, involves people having to be vulnerable and willing to listen when someone tells them that their action didn't follow their intent, or that it had effects that need to be worked on, or that their fic uncritically replicated a bad stereotype. None of which are judgments that an immutable part of their selves will always do evil in that realm.
The problem that arises from taking a vulnerable stance, though, is that there are ten thousand voices who want to rush in and fill that void with their own selves, and the dangers of that are pointed out in the second article I wanted to share, The Cult Structure of the American Anti. Here we see someone showcasing various means and methods by which the act of creating works with fictional characters in specific situations is deliberately interpreted as being an expression of someone's immutable self, such that the creation of the work becomes a declaration of one's real-life beliefs and intended actions. The focus of most of these conflations of fiction and reality is in the space where there exist laws that would criminalize the actions of the fictional characters, were they to take place outside of the fictional realm. The people doing this conflation cloak themselves in the language of social justice and try to present their case as being one of simple morality and law, where all people who are acceptably moral and law-abiding are on their side, and the other side are people who intend to break the law if given the opportunity to do so, with no space available for victims to write fictions that help them process what happened to them, or for imagination to take flight and be curious about what might happen, or for certain tropes to be played out to more or less explicit degrees with familiar or favorite characters. As with toxic masculinity, the definition of what is sufficiently pure seems to be a matter of group consensus, but with the same problem that the opinion will move in more radical directions because people who are trying to perform their membership in the group will do and say more radical things in a belief that it will keep them farther away from the fringe where they might be ostracized. If you have lived through a moral panic, whether in the realm of the embodied or the digital realm, this probably looks and sounds familiar to you. (Especially if you have seen what happens when a moral panic goes after a popular fannish site.)
How does one achieve generous accountability in conjunction with knowing who should be listened to on the subject and who should be rejected, especially on a subject like racism, where white supremacy is woven in sufficiently deeply to white culture that things that seem anodyne are anything but? "Listen to marginalized people" makes a good high-level concept, but marginalized people are not a monolith, and if you look hard enough, and in the right places, you can find whatever you would like to feed your confirmation bias, and probably from someone who identifies as belonging to the marginalized group you've been told to listen to. Who might be talking outside of their lane on something else.
Information professionals have been wrestling with the idea of who counts as authoritative and how to impart to a student how to check someone's authority for decades now, but the problem grew on an exponential scale once it became cheap and easy to put your words anywhere you damn well pleased, with the increased problem that some places can make themselves look exceedingly authoritative and be full of shit all the way down. Plus, authoritative doesn't necessarily mean "has a degree" or even "has a degree in the relevant discipline," when there's enough demonstrated structural problems with the academy and publishing (both commercial and academic) and their gatekeeping exercises that people who are authorities on various subjects may never get more platform than a web page of a blog post (or the viral video of violence being done to them), while newspapers and presses turn out thinkpiece after thinkpiece about how nobody should pay any attention to them because the people with degrees, money, and political power say it's not a problem, and subtly or unsubtly threaten that the power structures of society will be turned against anyone who refuses to believe in this orthodoxy.
In the Twitter post by the author about the Cult article, there's a significant number of replies and quote tweets that mock the rigor of the piece by pointing out that it contains blog posts and tweets, in addition to those who attack the piece as defending the things they consider morally indefensible. Others mock the mockery as a fundamental misunderstanding of how primary sources work, which is a warranted point to make (if you are talking about something that originates and propagates on the World Wide Web, good source citation will inevitably involve things that originated on the World Wide Web), but I also think that something like this also involves the too-simplified approaches that information professionals and educators take when trying to instruct young students about the importance of authority. The common refrain I hear when research papers are involved for primary education is "My teacher said I can't use the Internet." or "My teacher told me I could only use print sources." I would like to believe these are oversimplifications of a more nuanced position that was abridged for time, to wit, "You cannot simply find someone agreeing with you on from the World Wide Web, cite it in your paper, and call it a day. Instead, you must put in the effort to establish the authority of the speaker on the subject. The most common way of doing this is by pointing to their credentials as a measure of expertise, but you can make the argument that someone is authoritative on the matter of their own lived experience, and if there are enough people who are also having that lived experience, you can then make an argument that the lived experience is true, even if you don't have someone with academic or journalistic credentials to backstop the argument. Or, if you are applying established knowledge to a novel situation, you may not have citations, but you will have to establish that you are not misreading the people you are drawing upon or trying to inappropriately extend their work and conclusions to your situation." The point is to engender a healthy skepticism of everything you read, regardless of medium. As fewer print reference works are printed (since they often become obsolete soon after being printed) and more and more of our scientific and journalistic work is solely online or in hypertext, a blanket ban on online sources becomes highly counterproductive. Which is why I immediately say that our online resources almost always come from print resources, and if the teacher is really a stickler for only print, they have my blessing to chop off any indication that the material was accessed online from their bibliography. I would rather teach someone good research and discernment skills than arbitrarily restrict what they can do.
My information science graduate school course had a day where we, information science students, were supposed to find various answers contained in the printed ready reference works in the library space, without resorting to any on-line access, since one of the things that the World Wide Web is generally good good at is giving you answers to factual queries. We failed miserably, because we had no idea what was contained in the ready reference works to even know where to begin looking. A person who had been trained on the use of those works for several years and had professional experience in the matter would have much less trouble finding the answers to the questions in such a short time, because they would already know where to go. That is the secret to my working magic with computers for others, finding their needles in haystacks with a few clicks and clacks - I already know where to look, and I speak sufficiently fluent computer that I can make the machine point me in the correct direction. I think the point of the exercise was to make us appreciate what we had in the networked computing age, but what it actually did for me was make me grumble about how unfair it was to throw a bunch of graduate students into a space where they weren't familiar with the resources and expect them to do anything with them.
Which circles us back around to the point about generous accountability. We all have to do the work to determine whether we're listening to someone because they know what they're talking about or because they're saying what we want to hear. Often times, the people who are saying the most difficult and uncomfortable things are the people who have the knowledge, but not always. And sometimes it turns out that the people who have talked a good game about being allies and progressives have not done actions that go along with that. Free speech maximalism and "defeat speech with more speech" aren't effective tools for figuring out good accountability, because they fall prey to the paradox of tolerance in their quest for letting all voices be heard.
If we can ever decouple intentions and actions from each other, and figure out how to stop people from weaponizing intents (either as "I never intended to be -ist, so it can't be -ist!" or as "The actions you did were evil, so your intent must have been evil, and now you are forever evil, don't bother trying to improve, because you will always do evil, no matter how hard you try not to"), then we may be able to engender a culture of generous accountability that points out our mistakes and encourages us to do better.
Because you needed a laugh, ever since the state of Texas's Republican majority decided that nobody needed to have a permit or training to carry a gun, to make it easier to buy alcohol, to make it less convenient and more difficult for not-white people to vote or help people with voting, and to make it impossible for any pregnant person in Texas to abort by setting a line that is so short that most people won't know they're pregnant until after the line that's been set. And rather than trying to enforce such a thing themselves, which would almost certainly draw an injunction from a higher court, the state decided that any person who believes another person has helped someone have an illegal abortion in the state can sue that person, with a $10,000 USD penalty plus attorney's costs to be paid as a bounty to the plaintiff if the suit succeeds, no penalties enforced on the plaintiff, not even attorney's costs, should the suit fail, and a presumption that if a person is being sued, they are guilty of the offense and will be liable for the bounty if they do not appear in court to defend themselves. It is designed to allow free reign to persons who have made it their life's work to harass and intimidate others and to require them to exhaust themselves from nuisances and vexatious litigants and maintain a perfect defense. Ah, and also, any clinic that has even one successful suit against them will be shut down as an additional consequence in addition to having to pay out money. (Which, y'know, the way they designed the thing might mean it could also be exploited by vexatious litigants who want to harass and bankrupt and drown the vigilantes the Republicans wanted to have power. Or possibly the Republicans themselves.)
The highest court of the United States declined to hear any arguments or provide an injunction against the law, allowing it to go into effect and signaling other states that have been trying to do something similar that this is potentially a venue they can use for themselves. This is likely an advance warning that they will not continue to uphold the Roe v. Wade decision as good law and precedent when a case that challenges it comes before them later on in the year.
It seems very clear that the Republican party in most states and nationally has long since given up the appearance of wanting a democracy and to share power with an opposing party. One can hope that the elected Democrats and liberal direct action groups are ready to discard any premise of collegiality or norms that interfere with their ability to get things done and make it difficult for the opposition to undo what they have done. Because now we're seeing what happens when the competent zealots have enough power to enforce their specific white supremacist patriarchal beliefs on everyone.
wendelah1 has a list of organizations that money could be poured into and information that can be shared if you have persons in Texas who need to know about logistics of getting out of the state, or about how to request and obtain pills through the mail. I have a sneaking suspicion that there will also be further attempts to reinstate the Comstock laws and other such restrictions so that someone who is attempting to use the federal mail system to obtain constitutionally-protected material will find their material inspected and seized by over-reaching state entities. Or that the mail carriers will also be sued under these statutes for abetting an abortion, even though they do not know what the mail contains. Both the Lyft and Uber corporations have said they will defend their drivers if they are sued under the law, on the solid argument that transporting a person as your job should not be something where you have to assess your legal risk and whether you have the money to pay the bounty and the attorney fees if your ride doesn't say where they're going, or if they say to go somewhere else and then walk themselves to the clinic from there. Or similar things. There are probably going to be a fair few companies who are setting up legal defense funds so that if their employees are sued in the course of their normal corporate duties, there's money for them to defend themselves. (Who's going to want to work for a company that decides it's an acceptable business decision to make their employees defend themselves and possibly have to pay more money than they would earn in a year as a penalty to some fanatic who decided to sue because you were close enough to somewhere that might have provided an abortion to someone?)
A site that wanted to collect tips on people to serve them with litigation under the law has been told by its initial hosting provider that the site is a Terms of Service violation and they must find another. This is while such a tip site was being repeatedly spammed with false names and details to force such crusaders to waste time and resources chasing realistic-looking shadows. While one hopes that such zealots will never find a home or won't be surprised if they are constantly being spammed, either for DDoS purposes or to give them too much junk data to do anything actionable with.
It's a terrible situation, and it's likely to be replicated elsewhere. (I would like to see a solicitor sue all the persons who approved, voted for, constructed, or signed the legislation into law under the provisions of the law, since it seems abundantly clear that by creating this law, they intended for more abortions to happen, rather than less, and to have them have to keep paying out bounties for unsuccessful defenses because they created the law they are being sued under.)
And now, another laugh - the excuse of female socialization, a catch-all, get out of all things excuse to use in any situation, the more ridiculous the better.
And a fic collection administered by
melannen that is described as "Someone has sex they want, which leads to a pregnancy they don't want, which leads to an abortion they do want, and they don't regret it a bit."An account of labor reforms and laws that doesn't begin with the understanding that workers' labor actions are usually what precipitates changes in law and practice is hopelessly fundamentally flawed. Especially when it wants to go "Democrats good, Republicans bad," because, as we have known and younger generations are finding out, Democrats are more than happy to do things that are harmful to the interests of ordinary people and to refuse to recognize May Day as a proper holiday. Because the history of labor is often obscured and hidden by capitalists and their interests to try and convince us all we should be grateful to have a job, rather than agitating to be paid the value of our labor and given enough time to pursue our lives outside of work.
Even the things that most people think of as completely anodyne, like knitting and dyeing yarn, still have racism woven into them. Adella Colvin, who does dyeing, is succeeding with help and good product.
Attempting to throw money at a problem until it goes away doesn't always work, as people who had ill-thought plans to turn a cruise ship into the hub of a floating space that would only trade in cryptocurrencies. The people who tried it didn't know enough about how to run a cruise ship so as to avoid being slapped repeatedly by the very bureaucracy they wanted to escape from. They could have taken their fantastic wealth and put it toward solving social problems, but we have already long since determined that the rich would rather try to solve problems that would personally benefit them rather than problems that would benefit everyone.
The Guardian has pulled paragraphs involving an interview with Judith Butler that referenced the increasing alliance between the reactionary far-right and the transphobic left. As a refresher, nobody should be surprised about Judith Butler's current stances regarding biological essentialism and the framing presented that suggests there is supposed to be a great social controversy about transgender people. The author of the piece offered a question rewrite that would not reference a current event, since the answer itself did not reference the event either, but found both question and answer disappeared, apparently after a lengthy conversation among the editorial staff that the original author never got to be part of. The deleted section itself, in a more screen-reader-friendly form, thanks to
A jewelry advertisement in India featuring a transition and someone getting ready for her wedding is a hit. India, like many other places, has legal protections but not necessarily a full societal acceptance for trans persons, so a good ad can help. Watch the ad, called "Pure As Love".
Philip Roth, far from being an auteur who only thought of the art, was a hustler who happily asked for and returned favors when it came to promotion, prizes, and other accolades. Which was amply helped by the network of contacts he developed and was willing to do favors for as well. Which might be disheartening to others. Or, we might be in the situation where skills we thought we had at a high level have slipped because we haven't been able to practice them. It's not a matter of shame if your skills are at different levels because there's been a pandemic. As it may be, cultivating the attitude that it does not have to be perfect or overachieved or exactly right in the particulars, but that it does get done may be incredibly freeing from a situation, or incredibly freeing for an institution paralyzed by the characteristic that it has to be done right or not at all. And in a world that increasingly encroaches on the idea that childhood is supposed to be for fun and casual play, rather than a development pipeline for a scholarship or an eventual high-level career, being okay with being a casual and doing things for the fun of it is a skill much more desperately needed.
Going to see the self-sufficient who got their start in previous decades, but the article treats them as if they were preserved in amber, a relic of a past that has no relevance to the present, except, perhaps, for their cannabis cultivation and the artifacts that have been left behind, all of the failures that couldn't be or weren't recovered from. Neither, I suspect, should they be lionized as the rugged folk that all USians dream to be, but all throughout, there's very clearly a conflict going on in the background that only comes to the forefront when the people who are living on their land mention it - the conflict between the person who wants to live on terms where they get to decide what counts and how much of society and government they want to interact with, the government that either fails to understand them or sees them as a threat to (capitalist) society, and the society around them, which rarely paints them on their own ideas, instead of perpetually referencing a specific time period that has been flanderized and reworked into a narrative that always speaks of them with a prejudice, but not usually the one of "they had sufficient privilege to be able to attempt this and then either succeed or fail at it."
Taking the idea of what sparks joy out to a logical conclusion, some people are now promoting the idea that relationship minimalism is something to aim for, cultivating and pruning friendships until only those ones that are most rewarding remain. The advice around is to jettison those things that are toxic, especially toxic people, but as described in the piece, it certainly seems like the kind of thing that easily tips over into performative things or putting someone on the pathway that results in far more toxic ideologies that promote the idea that lesser beings are unworthy of kindness, friendship, or other such humanity.
Animal photography that catches exactly the right funny moment, usually with just a touch of anthropomorphization. The native rice of North America, those who tend and harvest it, and the threats it has from industrialized rice grown in paddies with high mechanization. Video footage of Wally climbing on board a boat, with encouragement from some of the offscreen commentary folks. Night-time garden pictures of hedgehogs, foxes, and other woodland creatures.
The way that history and science are taught in many USian contexts is of a more enlightened modernity looking back at the previous eras and shaking their heads at their backwards and wrong beliefs, even the ones that had been tested to the limits of their scientific knowledge. And while someone might say "science marches on" as a general idea and be relatively correct, it also requires all the people who claim to be doing science to be on their best science game. Sometimes the reviewers of something dismiss a paper out of hand because "everyone knows" the menstrual blood is toxic and couldn't possibly have any other scientific use. Which is the sort of thing that I then pair with the issues of trying to both eradicate the practice of menstrual exile and making the experience of those who are forced to go through with it as comfortable and sanitary as possible, which certainly seems like you could do something on both fronts together, but the point being that some things that science has already dusproven still live on in cultural or religious practices. Or people who feel that science has become altogether too complicated for the layperson to understand, and is therefore a secret plot by the elites (which is never helped along when it turns out that, say, people who created an opioid epidemic not only got to profit handsomely peddling things they knew were addictive, but are then exempted from the liability they have incurred, allowing them to disappear with their wealth intact). Well, those people often develop or return to older theories of disease and medicine that are entirely wrong, but are comprehensible. Terrain theory, for example, which hits the sweet spot of denying most of modern germ theory and insists that personal choice and strict adherence to a restricted diet will purge the body of the toxins it manufactures in response to deviation from the ideal. Not only do you not have to understand anything complicated, you get to blame someone else's morally bad choices as the reason why they're sick. It's great for people that want to feel holier than thou, or smarter than thou, and that they can take control of their health, rather than having to rely on experts who have studied things who can be dismissed as a cult more interested in profits than health. (See above, re: the Sacklers and how what they did is an example for these kinds of theories to gain traction.)
The combined rage of all the vaccinated, directed toward the willfully unvaccinated, with an entire platoon of fucks being given. Definitely not directed at all toward those who genuinely cannot get vaccinated, not really directed at people who will get vaccinated once they've had a conversation with a person that trusts them, or worse, they have to watch someone die from the virus, fully directed at those who can and instead choose to use horse paste, or some other grifter's product, and who promote lies and conspiracies about the vaccine in an attempt to get others to endanger their own lives.
With the return of many schools to in-person instruction, despite the face that a large swath of students cannot get vaccinated still, there is, of course, that ever-charming situation where parents believe they know better and that their views are the ones that should be adopted across the school system and they choose to use violence and intimidation to try and accomplish this. Like people who bring zip ties and intend to arrest a principal for enforcing the school's quarantine policy that requires a student not be in school for seven days after being exposed to a positive COVID case. Or they attack other places, like pepper-spraying a pediatrician's staff member in response to being asked to put on a mask while in the office. We have our own people who take masks and then don't actually wear them, or who wear them deliberately improperly, and they get shirty when we tell them they have to wear the mask and to wear it properly. Kind of makes you wish that we there were some way of ensuring that people who have more than enough money to help everyone were required to make that money available to the government so it could be used for public goods and services while we properly waited out the necessary periods to get everyone vaccinated (that can).
In technology, an increasing number of attacks that require no interaction from the target at all to succeed should have Apple rethinking how its components work and how much permission and attack surface they get to have. And while it might be unlikely that any given person becomes a high value target for a state actor, it is one of the fervent hopes of technology that it can resist such things should that happen.
The Los Angeles Police Department routinely collects the social media information of the people they talk to, to feed into Palantir. They also have broad authority and very few constraints on surveilling and using false personas to monitor people's social media. Because, of course, we all know that the police are trustworthy with people's information, and would definitely not use anything that a person posted as an excuse to be more terrible to them, or to charge them with obscure things, and certainly aren't the kind of people who start playing copyrighted music if someone is filming an interaction with them, assuming that the finely-tuned vigorous copyright claim algorithms will stop anyone from being able to post any such interaction. </sarcasm>
Last for tonight, two elements from Volume 36 of Transformative Works and Cultures. First, An Archive of Whose Own? White feminism and racial justice in fan fiction's digital infrastructure is a smart piece about how AO3's free speech maximalism influenced the design of the Archive and the opinions of the founders of the Archive shaped the warning system. These approaches' are now more readily apparent, since AO3 has come into contact with problems that it did not envision and did not build capacity to handle into the design. AO3 may have options for mitigation of the problem, but all of them come with specific kinds of costs. I appreciate the way the article talks about the obvious flaws of more easily-implemented solutions: expanding the warning system to include new categories brings the problems of not every author understanding the taxonomy or choosing to ignore it, and excluding works as unsuitable for the Archive brings not only the problems of a lack of shared understanding, but places the burden of enforcement and interpretation on whatever group of persons have signed up for or been assigned to content moderation. As we have seen, content moderation is a taxing situation, where people are regularly exposed to the worst things that humans can come up with and they have to make decisions on those as well as potential grey area cases. Plus, content moderation systems tend to require people to self-identify along various axes if they want their work to stay up, which could open them up as targets for harassment by others because of those identities, or increase the harassment that they are already receiving. The proposed solution, such that it is, is about establishing accountability, but as "generous accountability," a phrase I have seen used about the information professional series, like the 2020 ACRL President's Program session called "Shifting the Center: Transforming Academic Libraries Through Generous Accountability" and whose main thrust I'm borrowing from Mia Mingus's Dreaming Accountability post to mean a lack of punishment and belief that making a mistake, including the mistake of doing a racism, and being called to account on it should be seen as an opportunity for growth and doing better, rather than a confirmation that someone is intentionally irredeemably a Bad Person by doing that thing. (Much of that fear and how it gets socialized, especially into white people, is excellently explained by Tema Okun's remix of her original article about the Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture.) Generous accountability, then, involves people having to be vulnerable and willing to listen when someone tells them that their action didn't follow their intent, or that it had effects that need to be worked on, or that their fic uncritically replicated a bad stereotype. None of which are judgments that an immutable part of their selves will always do evil in that realm.
The problem that arises from taking a vulnerable stance, though, is that there are ten thousand voices who want to rush in and fill that void with their own selves, and the dangers of that are pointed out in the second article I wanted to share, The Cult Structure of the American Anti. Here we see someone showcasing various means and methods by which the act of creating works with fictional characters in specific situations is deliberately interpreted as being an expression of someone's immutable self, such that the creation of the work becomes a declaration of one's real-life beliefs and intended actions. The focus of most of these conflations of fiction and reality is in the space where there exist laws that would criminalize the actions of the fictional characters, were they to take place outside of the fictional realm. The people doing this conflation cloak themselves in the language of social justice and try to present their case as being one of simple morality and law, where all people who are acceptably moral and law-abiding are on their side, and the other side are people who intend to break the law if given the opportunity to do so, with no space available for victims to write fictions that help them process what happened to them, or for imagination to take flight and be curious about what might happen, or for certain tropes to be played out to more or less explicit degrees with familiar or favorite characters. As with toxic masculinity, the definition of what is sufficiently pure seems to be a matter of group consensus, but with the same problem that the opinion will move in more radical directions because people who are trying to perform their membership in the group will do and say more radical things in a belief that it will keep them farther away from the fringe where they might be ostracized. If you have lived through a moral panic, whether in the realm of the embodied or the digital realm, this probably looks and sounds familiar to you. (Especially if you have seen what happens when a moral panic goes after a popular fannish site.)
How does one achieve generous accountability in conjunction with knowing who should be listened to on the subject and who should be rejected, especially on a subject like racism, where white supremacy is woven in sufficiently deeply to white culture that things that seem anodyne are anything but? "Listen to marginalized people" makes a good high-level concept, but marginalized people are not a monolith, and if you look hard enough, and in the right places, you can find whatever you would like to feed your confirmation bias, and probably from someone who identifies as belonging to the marginalized group you've been told to listen to. Who might be talking outside of their lane on something else.
Information professionals have been wrestling with the idea of who counts as authoritative and how to impart to a student how to check someone's authority for decades now, but the problem grew on an exponential scale once it became cheap and easy to put your words anywhere you damn well pleased, with the increased problem that some places can make themselves look exceedingly authoritative and be full of shit all the way down. Plus, authoritative doesn't necessarily mean "has a degree" or even "has a degree in the relevant discipline," when there's enough demonstrated structural problems with the academy and publishing (both commercial and academic) and their gatekeeping exercises that people who are authorities on various subjects may never get more platform than a web page of a blog post (or the viral video of violence being done to them), while newspapers and presses turn out thinkpiece after thinkpiece about how nobody should pay any attention to them because the people with degrees, money, and political power say it's not a problem, and subtly or unsubtly threaten that the power structures of society will be turned against anyone who refuses to believe in this orthodoxy.
In the Twitter post by the author about the Cult article, there's a significant number of replies and quote tweets that mock the rigor of the piece by pointing out that it contains blog posts and tweets, in addition to those who attack the piece as defending the things they consider morally indefensible. Others mock the mockery as a fundamental misunderstanding of how primary sources work, which is a warranted point to make (if you are talking about something that originates and propagates on the World Wide Web, good source citation will inevitably involve things that originated on the World Wide Web), but I also think that something like this also involves the too-simplified approaches that information professionals and educators take when trying to instruct young students about the importance of authority. The common refrain I hear when research papers are involved for primary education is "My teacher said I can't use the Internet." or "My teacher told me I could only use print sources." I would like to believe these are oversimplifications of a more nuanced position that was abridged for time, to wit, "You cannot simply find someone agreeing with you on from the World Wide Web, cite it in your paper, and call it a day. Instead, you must put in the effort to establish the authority of the speaker on the subject. The most common way of doing this is by pointing to their credentials as a measure of expertise, but you can make the argument that someone is authoritative on the matter of their own lived experience, and if there are enough people who are also having that lived experience, you can then make an argument that the lived experience is true, even if you don't have someone with academic or journalistic credentials to backstop the argument. Or, if you are applying established knowledge to a novel situation, you may not have citations, but you will have to establish that you are not misreading the people you are drawing upon or trying to inappropriately extend their work and conclusions to your situation." The point is to engender a healthy skepticism of everything you read, regardless of medium. As fewer print reference works are printed (since they often become obsolete soon after being printed) and more and more of our scientific and journalistic work is solely online or in hypertext, a blanket ban on online sources becomes highly counterproductive. Which is why I immediately say that our online resources almost always come from print resources, and if the teacher is really a stickler for only print, they have my blessing to chop off any indication that the material was accessed online from their bibliography. I would rather teach someone good research and discernment skills than arbitrarily restrict what they can do.
My information science graduate school course had a day where we, information science students, were supposed to find various answers contained in the printed ready reference works in the library space, without resorting to any on-line access, since one of the things that the World Wide Web is generally good good at is giving you answers to factual queries. We failed miserably, because we had no idea what was contained in the ready reference works to even know where to begin looking. A person who had been trained on the use of those works for several years and had professional experience in the matter would have much less trouble finding the answers to the questions in such a short time, because they would already know where to go. That is the secret to my working magic with computers for others, finding their needles in haystacks with a few clicks and clacks - I already know where to look, and I speak sufficiently fluent computer that I can make the machine point me in the correct direction. I think the point of the exercise was to make us appreciate what we had in the networked computing age, but what it actually did for me was make me grumble about how unfair it was to throw a bunch of graduate students into a space where they weren't familiar with the resources and expect them to do anything with them.
Which circles us back around to the point about generous accountability. We all have to do the work to determine whether we're listening to someone because they know what they're talking about or because they're saying what we want to hear. Often times, the people who are saying the most difficult and uncomfortable things are the people who have the knowledge, but not always. And sometimes it turns out that the people who have talked a good game about being allies and progressives have not done actions that go along with that. Free speech maximalism and "defeat speech with more speech" aren't effective tools for figuring out good accountability, because they fall prey to the paradox of tolerance in their quest for letting all voices be heard.
If we can ever decouple intentions and actions from each other, and figure out how to stop people from weaponizing intents (either as "I never intended to be -ist, so it can't be -ist!" or as "The actions you did were evil, so your intent must have been evil, and now you are forever evil, don't bother trying to improve, because you will always do evil, no matter how hard you try not to"), then we may be able to engender a culture of generous accountability that points out our mistakes and encourages us to do better.
