Perhaps more commentary than usual - Late September 02022

[silveradept]

Let us begin with the forever complaint that people are reading too much fiction rather than pursuing more appropriate pastimes. Which we combine with a suggestion that if you have works on fanfiction.net that you would like to preserve, you do so immediately in case rumors that the site has been abandoned turn out to be true. Because FFN is a big archive, and if it isn't possible to Open Doors it or there's no coordination to do so, that's a lot of possible works lost to a sudden flare-out.

The State of New York, through the Attorney General, Letitia James, filed civil suit against the previous administrator and his children on allegations of fraud and misrepresentation, seeking $250 million in USD for penalties and a complete ban on the named persons from running a business in the State, as well as penalties preventing them from using certain financial services in the state for several years. This, while we also wait to see if there are any criminal indictments from federal prosecutors about the mishandling of classified documents or other, similar charges, even as the previous administrator provides spurious (and rejected) arguments that the powers of the Executive are such that simply thinking about declassifying a document is sufficient to do it (even though the court also points out the government records are still the property of the government and therefore should not be in the possession of a private citizen, classified or not).

The Republican governor of Florida may have violated immigration and/or human trafficking laws in putting undocumented immigrants on a plane and sending them to Massachusetts. The legal exposure could be even worse if the claims that the immigrants were promised housing and jobs when they landed to get them to go on the plane are substantiated. All because Republican governors think it a strong political statement about border security to send the undocumented into the backyards of people who aren't near a border, on the assumption that such places would engage in NIMBYism once confronted with the undocumented. Because those Republicans believe that the undocumented are simply political chits to be used for their messaging, instead of actual people. (As did the previous administrator.)

As with so many things, it turns out that this idea of sending people northward to places that were expected to reject them is not a new conception, as segregationists and white supremacists hatched a plot in 1962 to send black people northward on the assumption that northerners would be equally as racist and unwelcoming as the environment the black people were leaving. The segregationists only sent a few people northward, thankfully, since they couldn't raise the funds to do more, so the plot failed. But not necessarily because the federal government stepped in and told them to knock it off, but because people turned out to be more welcoming that the white supremacists had believed. Clive Webb examines the program in more detail, including the motivations of the segregationists and the actual results of the program itself [PDF], which mostly turns out to be "continued misery in a new location due to structural racism," although there were pockets of people trying to arrange for the things that were promised without any real belief in their fulfillment.

What might be the unique additional twist of the knife for these events is the lies that were told to the people on the planes about where to register changes of address, or the fact that many of them had immigration hearings in very far away places in the country that they would be expected to appear at in only a short time. The failure to appear at those hearings would result in an immediate order for deportation, of course, with the people not understanding why, since they had been faithfully trying to obey the instructions given them.

I would like to see the federal government, now with yet more evidence that office-holders in the government are not only flouting their law, but endangering others, prosecute those who are responsible for these abuses of power and remove them. (And then, if need be, prosecute their successors who want to try doing the same thing, until either the party corrects itself or someone who understands the correct role of governance is put into the office.) In the interim, however, a class-action lawsuit has been filed, alleging deception and conspiracy to transport the migrants away from where their immigration hearings would be. As well as an allegation that the funds used to transport the migrants were misappropriated from COVID-19 relief accounts.

Adnan Syed, introduced to most of the United States through analysis of his murder conviction by the podcast "Serial," had his conviction vacated after the prosecution declared they no longer had confidence that his conviction had been properly obtained citing violations where potentially exculpatory information had not been properly given to defense counsel among the reasons why the prosecution no longer believed in the integrity of the case. The problem, of course, is that this vacation of conviction took more than twenty years to happen, and may never have happened without the interest in the case revived by the podcast's analysis. (Otherwise, it would be just another dark-skinned man in prison, and those who study the U.S. justice system know full well that dark-skinned men in prison are unlikely to ever be released, even with evidence of malfeasance or malpractice.)

Not all the crowds who come to see the recently deceased Elizabeth II are there because they are solid royalists and supporters of the monarchy. Some are there because they want to say they were there for history. Some of them are there because they are sad an old woman died and they are remembering their own grief. Some are there because they would like to suggest something other than a united kingdom with the same kinds of thinking present. Some are taking the opportunity to remind the rest of us that the empire the Queen represents has committed more than its share of atrocity against the First Nations of the colonies. Watch the way the media distorts the plurality into a singular narrative and wonder whose voices are being excluded, not just in this, but in all media presentations. Notice who can go through a queue of nearly fourteen hours and who won't, because even though there was supposed to be a way for the disabled and the elderly to not have to wait, those slots have either vaporized or been taken up and there aren't enough to go around, and in any case, there's much more police presence to make sure that nobody decides it's time to stage a protest rather than to assist people with getting through and paying their respects in an orderly manner in an orderly amount of time.

Reading and writing history that takes into account the complexity of the past and all of its imperfections, as a review of a book called Black England. The review itself is about those complexities and about reading accounts of people who fought seeming impossibilities, and those who meant well, and the differences of accounts. It sounds like a really good book for people to read.

The University of Cambridge (UK) posted a digest version of a full report and inquiry into how much the artifacts and endowments of the University are derived from participation in the slave trade and slavery and colonial economics, whether as investments from the university itself or gifts from outside, and the thinkers and scholars arguing for the continuation of slavery at the University or in association with the same. There are actions at the end of the digest. As someone in the States, I feel like this would be an excellent thing to do for our universities, corporations, and government as well, with the eye toward reparations and reconciliation for those who are still disadvantaged. (Of course, that would also mean having to do something about military and police budgets, and there are still more than enough white people afraid of anyone who isn't white that we know that's unlikely to happen any time soon.)

Scholarly work about the official categories of illegitimacy and the remedies put into place to make sure that children fathered out of marriage were still supported and able to at least survive in society.

Motherhood is not a barrier to a career as a published writer, but it might delay when the books come out. Especially in societies where the expectation is that women do all of the childrearing and only have time to work on their own pursuits when they're not taking care of their children (or their spouses).

And if you are interested in historical books intended for children (and understand well what that means and what kinds of materials you're likely to find in there...), The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature's digitized collections offers nearly 7,000 works of literature intended for children from several eras of history once the idea of books for children began to take off. (The special collection itself, housed as the University of Florida, comprises more than 115,000 volumes, so the material on digital display is a few percentage points of the full collection.) This is the kind of collection where I would be okay with having on hand works like Little Black Sambo, because the collection here can situate it in its contexts and is likely to be visited by researchers who are exploring things in relation to its themes and contexts. They're people going in with an understanding of what they're going to find and how they want to talk about it. I'm not sure the average public library parent is going in to our collections with the understanding that they might have to have those conversations with their children. (Many of them also, paradoxically, want the authority to determine our collection according to their own belief systems so that they don't have to have those conversations, ever, rather than leaving it up to the professional judgment of the library staff to manage the collection so that when a parent encounters a work that will provoke a conversation, it's a high-quality work that will aid the discussion, rather than something that can be used to reinforce crude prejudices and biases without requiring both child and grown-up to think through their assumptions and conclusions.)

A microhistory of a transgender woman in the Weimar Republic and the National Socialist successors, who, instead of being sent to the gas chambers, had time and considerable expense done to try and reinstate her into society as the sex she was assigned at birth. Her life does not end happily because she has her social supports and her life stripped away from her, but the researchers presenting her life say this is important because it showcases that things seen as uniform were anything but. On a less personal view, and farther back in the past, the presence of unmarried woman and their economic and legal activities in the Mediterranean regions of Europe, with the clear indication that not every woman was looking solely for a husband and that several single women had to think about the disposition of their own assets or how to get monies paid back to them, and so forth.

While the title of the article is about not trying to get a child into a highly competitive school, the point it actually seems to be making is required K-12 education in affluent places is producing children who are going along with the pathways predestined for them, rather than using their collegiate education as a way of determining what they want to do with their life, and the secondary problem is that those affluent children are being funneled into only a small amount of possible careers and degree opportunities, rather than putting their brilliance and abilities in service of the society more generally. The "children from affluent schools are terrified of failure, so they take no risks" part doesn't quite capture the secondary part of the "things may not have been challenging for them" argument, which is usually "there has never been any situation they have been in where they were allowed to experiment and fail and come back from that and see that it's okay" combined with "there has never been sufficient free time for these children to discover the things they want to spend their free time doing." If children and teenagers are discouraged from doing things that can't be turned into a side hustle, then they're not going to figure out things that they would be interested in having as a main hustle at the point in time where they're theoretically supposed to be figuring that out and learning the arts of analysis and critical thinking.

osteophage in meta_warehouse picked up a grab bag of posts that all had a common theme of the different ways people do fandom. From the short forms of "places that want to monetize and advertise on the knowledge bases built by fans should be shunned" to a discussion of the gift economy versus monetization of fandom and a second discussion about whether it's a good idea to have clear distinction between the people who are in it for the inflencer/hustle/training to be a pro and the people who aren't, so that they stop interacting in the same spaces. (That said, I feel like at least some of the ko-fi/commission/patreon space is people going "I don't have that many marketable skills, so if you give me money, I'll give you some more of the things you seem to be enjoying," without it being a direct demand of "you give me money, I give you fanstuff," or that those kinds of things tend to happen in emergencies. (But also, it's a lot easier to do those things in fanart, where there's been a larger amount of protection for spinning things your way that doesn't get copyright-stomped.)

lizrael also linked to a discussion about the ways that AO3 is still sticking true to its name as an archive, rather than behaving as a social media platform. The article title from rollercoasterwords declares the "tiktokification" of AO3, but, Fandom Ancient that I might be now, I recognize that this idea has existed for a long while before TikTok. In that sense, you could substitute any algorithm-driven social media site where the expectation is that works are public and designed to draw eyeballs and fame (or infamy) that can potentially be monetized for TikTok and the point would still stand. In the meta_warehouse post on it, there's also discussion of differing standards around leaving criticism, which themselves may rest on faulty assumptions about whether the writer is trying to ascend the pro ladder or otherwise improve their writing to make their works move toward "quality you would see in published commercial works" rather than as an expression of fandom and nothing more. It's interesting to see both of these discussions framed together, because they both are about dispelling what the poster sees as nearly-ubiquitous assumptions about transformative fandom and their goals, and both of them are situated along the same line, the "people use fanworks as a stepping-stone to works that will make them money" argument. Which, yes, there are many more people now who will admit they have written fanworks before (or during) their careers as people who write other works. John Rogers admitting he's got an AO3 account, and the existence of the "DD don't read" tag for Diane Duane, and Seanan McGuire's routine threads about how much she's going to enjoy curling up with all the fanfic when she's done writing the series that they are based on (and story that she found an editor because the editor was looking for missing chapters of Buffy fanfic.) Also, EL James filing off the serial numbers and making a smash hit, and so on. It's easier for pro writers to admit they come from fannish backgrounds or that they're still engaged in fannish activities. Anyway, point being that the assumption used to be that fanwriters were using the fannish community as a beta reader group to refine themselves into pro writing, using their fanwoks as the lure to get people to give them feedback, and now the assumption seems to be that fanwriters are making works for the applause and to build an audience they can then monetize (either for original works or through systems like Patreon), and the idea of doing a thing because you like doing it and you want others to see it is quaint and unlikely. Still wrong, just interesting to see how the different ways we have of sending money between ourselves have opened up different avenues for the "fan-to-pro pipeline" argument to expand.

And, of course, the ever-present discussions about comments versus kudos and likes. vriddy dove into the archives of metanews and found things like how we already knew that the platforms we use shape the way we interact in fandom, a suggestion that the fandom doesn't necessarily have to be a community-as-such, because it's too large to be a community, but is instead a large group of people who all like the same thing and interact with each other as a contact zone. Which might have communities in it, and those communities together might make up the fandom. (And then we go back to the discussions above about how the ways that differing parts of the fandom interact with it with regard to kudos, comments, and monetization.)

A nice thing that came out of vriddy's dive is a short post by kalloway that still applies here as it did at the time it was posted: three rules about your enjoyment of fandom that are simple to follow (and that we wish more people would follow.)

A very short story about memory and how what was common to you may be incomprehensible to your descendant.

examining a very old tree and also, trying to preserve the very old tree and the need to transport out mountain goats from a national park because the goats are seeking mineral-rich deposits of…human urine and wastewater,

In technology, the miniaturization of card skimmer devices for ATMs, to the point where they can capture the mag-stripe data and then use a pinhole camera to watch a consumer type their PIN into the machine, giving access to the debit card number and PIN to clone and then do fraudulent transactions with. The Krebs article says one of the best techniques to learn is to cover the PIN pad completely with one hand and enter the PIN with the other, such that any cameras looking at the pad won't be able to see the inputs. Since these skimmers often target ATMs, another way of defeating them is to not use ATMs in the first place, but we know that not everyone can avoid the use of their debit/ATM cards and/or obtain sufficient limits in credit to cover most things that they would need to use their debit cards for.

The actual best thing to do in these situations would be to remove the mag-stripe on all cards and go forward with chip-only cards, but not everyone who takes cards necessarily has that equipment or the funds to upgrade their equipment to be able to do this (since people taking cards are usually the ones that have to buy the processing equipment and pay the transaction fees.) And, of course, if the magstripe avenue closes off, I'm sure our clever criminals will find other ways to skim the data they seek and miniaturize those as well. Or find other ways of accessing financial data through weak points and using that to commit their fraud.

The use of surveillance applications by churches, ostensibly to provide accountability, reveals far more about a person than they would want known to their church. This is all things we knew about from parents who are trying to prevent their children from learning and exploring the world outside and themselves, but it's been expanded now, so that people who are in trouble with their churches (for the same kinds of things that are normal but then get classified as dangerous when teens do them) are asked/told to find someone who will hold them accountable for those things, often times someone in a leadership or authority position. If only, of course, we had churches that were more interested in grace and forgiveness and the aspects that admit we are fallible and need help rather than those that believe themselves the elect who are holier and will inherit, so long as they don't fail at being perfect.

Miracle of miracles, a person who believes that digital devices are also useful tools to use for communication and pleasure, rather than simply a Skinner box that needs to be disconnected as soon and often as possible. Which you can contrast with someone who isn't fully sure that online interactions can be as valid as offline ones, although they do at least talk about parasocial relationships and the ways in which people can be more accessible through various media and apps rather than less.

Malicious information added to a routing announcement allowed hijackers to take control of a cryptocurrency node and steal money from accounts that transacted through it. Even though it was only wrong for three hours, that was enough for hundreds of thousands of dollars of cryptocurrency tokens to be taken. And on other crypto-crime, an attempted mugging for cryptocurrency landed would-be attackers in jail, for as much as having fake police uniforms and weapons, and more spillover of physical violence to those who engage in cybercrime. Even less reasons to get into cryptocurrency, it seems, and especially less reason to get into cybercrime.

That said, it looks like blockchain tech is fading from the mania it used to have. NFTs, for example, have fallen 97% from their frenzied highs earlier in the year.

A successful test of a process to cut metal in microgravity environments and not have the debris get in the way.

Last for this post, a doctoral candidate would like to talk to cat owners for 30-45 minutes about their cats and the relationship they have with them. Which is currently only being offered by phone or video communication, so that may be a no for people who don't like doing synchronous communication of that nature.

(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.)

Comments

[vass]

The "children from affluent schools are terrified of failure, so they take no risks" part doesn't quite capture the secondary part of the "things may not have been challenging for them" argument, which is usually "there has never been any situation they have been in where they were allowed to experiment and fail and come back from that and see that it's okay" combined with "there has never been sufficient free time for these children to discover the things they want to spend their free time doing." If children and teenagers are discouraged from doing things that can't be turned into a side hustle, then they're not going to figure out things that they would be interested in having as a main hustle at the point in time where they're theoretically supposed to be figuring that out and learning the arts of analysis and critical thinking.

Well put.

[silveradept]

Thanks. It's a thing I have to grapple with in my day job, because a lot of parents and caregivers are evaluating my offerings in terms of whether it'll be good enrichment for their child, where I would like them to come at it with the idea of whether it'll be fun.