silveradept | One very big bit of news and a lot of smaller ones

Hello. Let us begin with a graphic story about wealth inequality, and the ways that the people who are best positioned to raise objections about it are often the ones who feel they have the most to lose by doing so. (And sometimes, in the States, the ones who are "made an example of" when they do so that everyone else is too afraid to also speak up about the inequality.)

The conception of self-love as something more akin to lovingkindness, at least, as described in this letter. I'm more used to self-love as the concept of putting your own oxygen mask on before trying to help others, rather than ascending to a state of loving everyone and the small things just stop being important.

Returning to the idea of a quick coffee or event to suss out whether someone's going to be dateworthy material before committing to a longer date. Apparently as opposed to doing all of the things online and then finding out that someone isn't nearly as good in person as they are online. Perhaps I am An Old, but I have always thought the idea of finding people through shared activities as a better way of finding potentially compatible people rather than expecting two strangers to have a romantic encounter. If for no other reason that if you are both doing something you enjoy, even if you think there may not be romance involved, you have found someone to hand out with that likes some of the same things you do. Of course, there's also the destructive potential of a person being an absolute tool and making that activity less doable because they'll want to be there at the same time you are.

Perhaps I am more inclined to seeing it because it's getting toward Srs Bzns Politics Season where I am, but I have been subjected to a fair number more of people putting their politics on their vehicles, and almost all of them have been advertisements that whomever put the stickers on the vehicle is living in an alternate universe, rather than the one that they need to be in for effective engagement. The persons adopting fascist symbology and a willingness to allow those charged with keeping "law and order" to disregard both are, for the most part, so common as to be part of the backgound. But one vehicle had two stickers on it, one stating "Hate America? Vote Democrat!" and the other "Vote Conservative! If liberalism worked, you'd still be in California." which both made me smile at their unstated assumptions. (And not least because I wanted to stay where I was, but the dictates of paying off my student loans meant I had to go elsewhere to get a salary high enough to live and make it work, so it wasn't liberalism that failed me at all, but the consistent belief that people who perform public services are little more than parasites on "real" people and should be paid accordingly. (And the consistent belief that a job that mostly women do deserves a pocket money salary because all women are already married to high-powered money-making executives who are the real breadwinners.)

The one I had to laugh about, however, was the person in the lift-kitted truck (for those unfamiliar, U.S. car culture often likes to customize their vehicles in one of two directions - sufficiently low to the pavement that traversing bumps in the road could result in serious undercarriage damage ("lowriders," usually associated with Latine and Black cultures (and the racist assumptions about gang membership and antisocial behavior that accompanies)) or as high as the suspension can be raised without causing serious structural damage or risk of being blown over in a stiff breeze (using "lift kits" that essentially create a gap between the body of the vehicle and the wheels)) that was raised very clearly to "my car is the externalization of the lack of confidence I have in my masculinity" levels of height, with two flags attached to the back of the truck bed, one that was a large U.S. flag (there are, theoretically, regulations on the display of the flag which this setting almost surely is in continual violation of) and the other displaying a banner supporting the twice-impeached previous administrator's run for the next election cycle, with the subtitle, "Fuck Your Feelings." The juxtaposition of the person who feels the need to externalize and broadcast their insecurities in the guise of macho bravado and their banner declaring that the feelings of the observer don't matter was certainly worth a laugh. (I realize in practice, it's a declaration of "only my feelings matter, but I wish that person a very much people making fun of them without any consequences.)

As for a certaiin amount of smugness and also the understanding that one does not mess around with the record-keepers, after getting into trouble with the National Archives and Records Administration for destroying or hiding documents that are properly part of the record of his administration and therefore not his to take or destroy, and returning back several boxes that had been brought improperly to his Florida residence earlier in the calendar year, and then again supposedly returning all of the documents that might still have been at the administrator's residence in June, the Federal Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant against the previous administrator and his property and retrieved several more boxes worth of records and information, many of which contained classification markings still upon them, which could very well lead to charges under the appropriate statutes about the mishandling of national defense information or other applicable actions. While the previous administrator is claiming that he has privileges over the documents (he does not) or that he declassified the information contained in the documents (without going through the appropriate procedures to do so that would avoid any concerns about the classification status of the documents), a redacted photograph released in a Department of Justice filing suggests that not only were the documents clearly marked with their classification markers, they were present in materials that suggested there was intent to conceal the documents from investigators. There is significant speculation about who else may have been able to see the information during the time that it was outside of the appropriate Secure Compartmentalized Information Facilities and what kinds of secrets may have been revealed by a now-former official who had a penchant for revealing that kind of information in his dealings with others, or in conducting national and international business in public spaces, even if the business itself was not for public consumption.

Mostly, though, there's a lot of wondering whether this might be the time, the action, that actually qualifies as a crime and can be proven sufficiently that the previous administrator would not only be put on criminal trial, but convicted and sentenced to jail in such a way that would prevent him from being the frontrunner of the same party that nominated him the previous time around. Which may be a bit more of playing Whack-A-Mole, as I'm sure there are people who would spring up into his place were he to be barred from running for office, but at the very least it would prove there are limits to what you can get away with.

In the most recent Organization for Transformative Works election for the Archive of Our Own Board, there was significant concerns about one of the candidates running that they might act antithetically to the purpose of the Archive of Our Own, in perhaps a desperate attempt to bring AO3 back to availability in China. There was a lot of social media material I saw around about not voting for that candidate because of the fundamental misunderstanding there about what AO3 exists for. It also, as many things seem to do these days, reignited a small flare here and there about those who are looking for something "safe" to browse in and those who are adamant that AO3 must exist as a place where even the unsafe stuff is allowed to exist, because of all the purges that have already happened when someone decides their place needs to be "safe" for someone (usually advertisers.)

Staying in fandom for a bit, the various horror concepts proposed in Ernest Cline's Ready Player One and Ready Player Two that just waltz by, unremarked upon.

Harvey Guillén wrote about his own coming out, now that the character he portrays on What We Do In The Shadows has done the same.

Fandom, and participation therein, as a search for both connection and validation, which tracks pretty well for me. People who are gathered around shared interests both want to have that bunch of entities to talk about their shared interests to and to have that bunch of entities interact with the work that they might present to the group. As is noted in the clarifications and extensions post for the original, validation doesn't have to happen at scale, and fandom shouldn't be the only place where someone seeks community, but the fundamental point is still there. And an interesting sidebar in relation to boundaries and also to how easy it is to internalize rejection as being about you, because you were vulnerable and asked, rather than examining to see whether the community you were trying to join actually wanted you there and was set up in such a way that would welcome you. It's a lot easier for me to say "it's my fault" than to conclude "that system was never going to accept me." Even if the evidence is pretty obvious. [Bad username or site: osteophage @ pillowfort] points out that when your community doesn't really support conversations, even if the interface nominally does, you end up with situations where people are socialized not to converse. (Tumblr seems much more like a broadcast interface, like Twitter, with all of the attendant issues that come with a broadcast interface designed to ensure context escape happens as swiftly as possible, and a single post spawns fragmented threads all over the place that don't connect to each other or acknowledge each others' existences.)

Mainstream reporting about trans children likes to center on the issues and anxieties that the parent or parents have about their children, and not about talking and listening to the children themselves. The belief being reinforced there is that being trans is something that's a fad or something pathological (but with overeager doctors who want to medically transition a chhild at first indication.) It also often gets framed as a trans person being self-serving and selfish, when it's usually more likely to be self-preservation and the perceived selfishness is because the person perceiving it looks to preserve their own worldview and status over supporting the person transitioning. Who often do not perceive how much every trans person has had to empathize with (as in "think about the experience of and the mental state of," not necessarily "be benevolently disposed toward them) cis people for every moment of their lives, even in moments where cis people are displaying a deliberate lack of empathy toward trans people. Because so many people do not like it when they aren't treated as the unmarked default that everyone else has to position themselves in difference to.

Applying the idea that the various -isms are part of one system rather than separate systems that occasionally intersect so as to allow a person to transition without feeling like they are somehow joining the enemy or participating in their own oppression. At least, if I read the article correctly, it feels like the ultimate synthesis of the various systems of oppression is into one system that privileges a very specific person (the bourgeois WASP) and that the ultimate goal is to prevent that person from getting all the privileges, which can be done by anyone, regardless of their identity. (Even if it may be easier or harder for a person, based on how close they are to the person who will be privileged in the system.)

liv offers some thoughts about how "personal responsibility" cannot be the sole solution to a systemic problem and failure, with regard to an infectious agent that spreads extremely well through the air.

While dismissing claims against the city and the police department for their role in the matter, a court allowed a civil suit against an officer who lethally shot a man who was not a threat in 2017 over a SWATting incident. The person who called in the threat is currently serving a twenty year sentence. The importance of this is that the courts ruled that the doctrine of qualified immunity did not apply in this case.

Something that illustrates the stark difference between the views of police in the UK and police in the US: complaints about police at a Pride event in the UK that are complaining about the police dancing and otherwise joining in the celebration while in uniform, rather than doing police actions. Whereas here in the states, there's basically the attitude that any police offiver in uniform should be unwelcome at a Pride event . (Then again, police at Pride in the US seem equally as likely to allow or perpetrate violence on the people there as they would be to do their job of providing for public safety.)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences apologized for the treatment of Sacheen Littlefeather, the Native American Woman sent in 1973 to refuse an Oscar on behalf of Marlon Brando. Better late than never, certainly.

In the United States, the places that had the most economic benefit from enslavement of others are also the places that currently have the largest rates of gun ownership. Presumably because everyone believes having a gun will keep them safe from the other race that they see as violent criminals. Additionally, although it's a bad idea to think that it's somehow exploitable or manipulable without consequences, if white people believe certain gun rights, like concealed carry permits, are being used more by black people, support for keeping that gun right is much lower. There's almost always an intersection somewhere that anti-blackness appears.

Japan would like to get more tax revenue from alcohol sales, so it's inviting people to submit ideas on how to get young people to drink more. Despite the information about alcohol not being good for you that seems to have been internalized by younger people and also is promoted by the health ministry.

Comparisons between menstrual education films highlight the lack of good education at the time, but also showcase subtle differences on how menstrual products were supposed to be viewed.

Looking though the archives of a women's prison to find the different ways that queerness existed in the past, even through the biases of the prison system. The accusation of witchcraft and sorcery as a way of explaining queer behaviors by royalty (and several other kinds of behavior as recorded in other works), which tracks with the most common use of witchcraft accusations: correcting perceived imbalances in social situations.

Historic droughts and low water levels all around the world are bringing to the surface all sorts of archaeological discoveries. That's lots of artifacts to grab and study. The problem? Droughts.

Finding lost paintings under other paintings, where the original may have been painted over because of pique by the person covering it up.

A brown bear cub rescued in Turkey appeared to have had a significant dose of grayanotoxin-dosed honey and was acting accordingly.

In technology, a frequency used in a Janet Jackson video matched the one that certain laptop hard drives were using (in the past), causing the computers and the hard drives to crash.

Turning the International Phonetic Alphabet into a minimalist, but still understandable, version which also happened to draw up things that had been put on other charts and columns into a single whole, making things less eurocentric in the process.

Scientists being very enthusiastic about the idea of extending the time where a person may be able to get and stay pregnant. They're couching it as a matter of health benefits to those who delay their menopause for later, but I'm sure there are more than enough legislators and politicians that would salivate at being able to extend their requirements that all persons who get pregnant carry their fetus to "birth," regardless of viability to the point where they can demand that women take fertility treatments for as long as possible.

Drawing in the data from a glucose monitor and displaying it in Minecraft, which requires posting the data to a place and using a mod to Minecraft to construct a computer and monitor and then display that data. (Also, I am wondering about the security of the data stream from monitor to Minecraft.) It is a clever way of making sure important information is available while engaging in long gaming sessions!

Last for this entry, the changing nature of the swear word in the 16th century CE, and how some things that are vulgarities now were simply part of the vulgar language then.

Additionally, Netflix allegedly courts binge-watchers to the point where they make decisions about renewals and additional seasons based on how many people watch the entire thing in the first week after release. For MegaCorp A, they wait an entire month before deciding whether a show gets another season. As someone who is An Old and grew up in the realm where, even though we had cable, new shows released in one episode a week, rather than whole seasons at once, the idea of having to watch an entire multiple-episodes season within a single week (or month) of release for it to count is extremely NO. I have to do stuff like work, y'know?

Admittedly, with this kind of metric idea in mind, it could certainly promote more shows that have the advantage of having representation and being entirely mediocre. I'm watching a show that's like that right now, aggressively mediocre but with lots of representation of people and situations you wouldn't usually see.

To play us out, a rather lovely concertina and band performance from Talisk and Mohsen Amini.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)