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silveradeptIn the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, United States of America v. Donald J. Trump. Count 1: 18 U.S.C. Section 371 (Conspiracy to Defraud the United States). Count 2: 18 U.S.C. Section 1512(k) (Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding). Count 3: 18 U.S.C. Subsection 1512(c)(2), 2 (Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding). Count 4: 18 U.S.C. Section 241 (Conspiracy Against Rights). It is official, the work of Special Counsel Jack Smith's grand jury has returned an indictment with four counts specifically against the previous administrator. There are six unindicted co-conspirators in the charging document, some of whom are easy to determine and who may not have been charged…yet for their own roles in the actions to come, but at least for now, there are actual charges for his continued campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election, up to and including the mob that stormed the Capitol Building in an attempt to disrupt the certification of electoral votes.
Because it is a trial of national significance, Democrats in the House of Representatives are asking for the trial to be televised, rather than allowing the trial to proceed without cameras, as is normal for federal criminal trials.
The indictment itself takes pains to point out right from the beginning that the behavior being charged is not protected speech, and that the defendant was entitled to speech and to make legal challenges regarding the outcome of the election. Which he did. And lost those challenges. The behavior charged, instead, is not about seeking redress of grievances, but about defiance of law, subversion of legal elections, and attempting to hold on to an office to which the defendant was no longer legally entitled to.
Beyond this newest federal indictment, new charges have been added to the classified documents case against the previous administrator, alleging that he and another person attempted to destroy evidence of misdeeds relating to the case. There's also a third federal case against him regarding falsification of business records in relation to his 2016 campaign and the "hush money" payments in trying to spike a story about an alleged affair with an adult film actress. And past that, Fani Willis's grand jury returned forty-one new indictments for the Defendant's alleged actions in Georgia, and 18 charged co-conspirators along with him, so there's more than enough criminal charges to keep the Defendant busy all throughout the next year.
It appears that the defendant is getting hit with charges for both the crimes and the cover-ups, in those situations in which he bothered to attempt cover-ups. As the charges rain down and the defendant posts more and more material that is supposedly in his defense or accusing those who charge him of malfeasance, it seems to be clear that the current front-runner of the Republican Party will have to use the broad pardon powers of the President to absolve himself of wrongdoing should he be elected once again to the office. It also seems likely, though, that if anyone else were to capture the nomination and the office, at least in the current field of contenders, they too would use the pardon power in such a way, or at least they must leave open the option to do so until such moment as they are elected, at which point they can decide for themselves whether they really do believe in the innocence of the defendant, or whether they were suckering his voters into choosing them with no real intent of letting the defendant go free.
Mind you, in a less terrible world, we wouldn't have to be talking about whether or not the country is poised to try and elect again a man who has been multiply charged with federal crimes and might elect someone convicted of them, depending on how swiftly the trials go. People who believe the United States is better than this are going to have that belief sorely tested in the next year.
Furthermore, whatever the outcome of the trials may be, we definitely need to know, as a country, without any sliver of doubt, that they were argued with the best people and the most persuasive arguments that both sides could bring to the trial, and that the judge overseeing the trial acted professionally, impartially, and without bias. While there will be at least some segment of the population that refuses to believe the outcome was legitimate if their preferred result did not happen, the majority must be able to believe and understand that the trial itself was conducted fairly and without manipulation.
Not that the peope who have bought into the belief that the defendant is a messianic or godly figure will stop and think about what has been accused here. Supposed Christians are rejecting the teachings of Jesus in favor of the teachings of Trump, believing, as the evangelical movements of Graham, Falwell, Osteen, and others always have, that fraternity, compassion, and acceptance of the alien and those not like them are weaknesses and capitulations to the influence of Satan. Because those people have convinced themselves that they alone are the elect, the chosen, and that their elevated status only confers power and privilege on them, rather than additional responsibilities and burdens to bring about what the religion says is the ideal kingdom. Such that they see core teachings as the Sermon on the Mount as "liberal talking points" rather than a description of the virtues of someone who calls themself a Christian.
kesbeacon looks at Barbie as a movie that could have been about the experience of questioning and possibly transitioning from one identity to another, but ultimately retreated to safer ground. Which also gets a couple of thoughts about the movie, like the way in which all of the Barbies are cast as "Barbie" in the credits, despite the clear indication that the Barbies distinguish between themselves, not because of name, but because of what they do. Except where they do, of course, because the characters that are unique, the ones that aren't Barbie or Ken, they have their names, like Alan or Maggie. And in the credits scene, where there are advertisements of the various dolls, they don't have the Black doll as Barbie, they gave her a different name. So not everyone in Barbieland is a Barbie, a Ken, or a Skipper. And the naming of other dolls that aren't Barbie, Ken, or Skipper, tend to be for models that are discontinued, in the movie.
And there's also the bit there that's a throwaway gag where Barbie, upon entering the real world, mistakes beauty pageant contestants (in their swimwear outfits, if I remember correctly) as the Supreme Court of Barbieland. So, I guess the justices don't wear the robes of office, but follow the same idea as President Barbie, who you can only distinguish from the others by the face that she has a giant sash that says "President" on it. (And possibly because she wears pants. I think she's the only one who wears pants that we see. And is also the only one who specifically is asked whether she wants to put some pants on after she returns from the void of bimbodom.) If that's the case, then one wonders just how much patriarchy was already in place in Barbieland, or, as was pointed out, how much toxic femininity was already in place and a whole bunch of the Barbies might have been willing to put down the society they were in, even if it led to bad places, just so that they didn't have to keep their heels up all the time. It might have been nice to see one of the Barbies go "Thanks, but I kind of liked the role I was playing here, rather than having to be so completely on all the time."
Things that were liked about the Barbie movie, especially the genius of using Matchbox 20's "Push" as the ur-expression of patriarchy-dudes and how they expect to relate to their bimbo Barbie girlfriends.
Another of the unexpected benefits of remote work is the benefits to workers of color who get to avoid all of the office racism and microaggressions. As the fully-remote work options dry up, because companies failed to believe the proof of their experiment that remote work is perfectly fine for most things and instead insist that workers be in a specific spot for a specific amount of time, workers of color are having to decide between whether it's worth keeping their mental health or whether they need the money and career advancement opportunities more than they need a work environment free of the daily toll of racism. It's not a fair choice to have to make, and not everyone gets the opportunity to do so.
American Library Association President Emily Drabinski is the most recent of convenient targets for censorious forces that want to control what is acceptable to teach in schools and furnish in libraries. The excuse they're using is that no red-blooded 'Murican institution should be associating with someone who has publicly self-identified as a Marxist lesbian, but in this particular context and time, Emily could have said she liked mustard on hot dogs instead of ketchup and there would be equally as much howling about how libraries need to engage in widespread censorship of their materials and programs. Since the most common thread of attack in this era is to accuse libraries of making sexually explicit material available to children and to further attack that librarians are actively pushing this material on children, while many of these organizations say "Marxist" is what they're objecting to, there's a nonzero chance that what they're really objecting to is "lesbian," because that would upset their perception of the librarian as a white Christian middle-aged woman with a husband who actually makes the money for their family and who has the real decision-making power in their relationship. So that they wouldn't have to contemplate the possibility that she might have a professional degree and training about the collection and programming and that it might disagree with whatever a man in her community thinks. (Because, of course, in their perception, no matter what kind of woman she is, a man automatically is wiser and better-suited to make decisions about everything than she is.) Given that in the past, several library associations chose to leave the American Library Association rather than racially integrate themselves and have often been on the wrong side of history about who should be able to use their libraries, the calls for further defederation because of "Marxism" sound like equally loud calls for defederation because someone is an out lesbian and they object to her being President of the ALA and an out lesbian in public. (To their credit, ALA realized they at least needed to do the minimum to support their queer library workers and put out a press release about forming a task force and a communications plan on how to make sure their queer workers feel safer and at least nominally heard.)
The ALA did tweet about the interview and their support for President Drabinski, and the replies are equally split between "she said she's a Marxist, and is therefore personally responsible for all of the deaths under Communist regimes!" (Does that mean I get to hold those people personally responsible for all the death and destruction that happens under capitalism?) and "She's pushing pornography on children and exposing them to sexual material so that she can sexually abuse that child!" (Tell me again who is most likely to commit sexual abuse of children, and which organizations are the ones most likely to cover it up and reassign their personnel to other places rather than remove them from positions where they will have the opportunity to prey on children.) It's free-floating nonsense arguments, but much like the cultists above who have rejected Jesus in favor of The Defendant, all the evidence in the world about how libraries operate and what kind of controls parents already have over their child's borrowing habits and how material is filed in the appropriate places for appropriate audiences based on professional judgment won't dissuade someone who has made up their mind that the library is a site of liberal indoctrination, just like schools.
This doesn't necessarily mean those people are fundamentally stupid and will never be able to rise from their delusions, but it does mean that there is a lot of people being wrong in public, and fixing that often takes time and personal experience and a host of other things that are annoying, intense, and don't always have a great success rate at getting people to change their minds. Especially because this particular moral panic doesn't have the easiest in available, which was "Hey, I'm white, you're white, we agree that we're equals, let's see where we can find a compromise that will make everyone feel like they've been heard and very few white people actually have to do anything to change."
So instead we have federal judges blocking laws that would have made librarians criminally liable for children finding material that lawmakers objected to and residents buying and donating multiple copies of books that were checked out and then held hostage by people who objected to the queer content in them. Upon seeing the failure of their plot, the hostage-takers returned the books. I still think that the library could have considered filling theft charges, since the thieves declared their intent to steal and hold the books until the library agreed to get rid of them as a condition of their return. It may not have been a good PR move on the library's part in the community, but it would have been an excellent signal of what finding out will be like when you fuck around with the library on these matters.
Otherwise, we often get situations where a library that's trying to get their millage passed for the third time in a reactionary-conservative place has offered to label all the books with descriptive text of what might be found inside of them. In hopes that having a summary available when they flip open the book will be enough to appease the reactionaries so that they can know exactly which books to demand be removed from the collection. So that they'll fund the library, now secure in their belief that the library will never decide to do anything against them again, on pain of having their funding removed again.
And for as much as we like to believe there will be alternative pathways to get those kinds of books into the hands of kids, safely, securely, and without the possibility of retaliation, remember that there are people who patrol their neighborhoods and the Little Free Libraries in that space so they can remove books they think are "objectionable" and substitute Bibles or other material properly in line with their Christian theocratic values. And they're probably the kinds of people who would spy on their children's Internet usage to make sure they weren't getting forbidden materials from digital avenues, either. The collection at the public library is often the single place where a person can explore things, without the intrusion of someone else into their reading choices. (That's also being eroded with new laws that demand children have explicit approval to check out materials or that give their caregiver unfettered and unlimited access to the records of what their child checks out from a library.)
Iowa librarians, faced with an impossible deadline and vague standards about what books they were required to remove or restrict, turned to ChatGPT for answers about whether specific books contained the forbidden content. Which is a headdesk in several ways, the least of which is that you never ask ChatGPT or any other large language model for anything that requires accuracy, because ChatGPT cannot perceive accuracy, it only perceives whether it's plausible in the language. But also, the timeline to review all of the materials was impossibly short, and the law that is requiring the view is vague to the point where it will demand the most conservative interpretation and most self-censorious behavior just to be sure that there isn't something that the state will try to hold a librarian criminally liable for.
The proposal to close all ticket offices at train stations in the UK has plenty of knock-on effects, including making train travel that much more difficult for blind and partially-sighted people. Especially in situations where previously-booked passenger assistance fails to materialize or there are situations that machines will not tell a person about unless they specifically manage to get the machine to recognize what they're looking for. And machines won't be able to tell someone that they should be going to a different station than the one they have booked because they have more connecting trains or similar. It's part of the reason why people who are serious about accessibility are best poised to have people who have accessibility needs try to navigate spaces, sites, and the like, so that they can provide honest feedback about how things (likely don't) work and what would be helpful to making them work better.
A magistrate justice signed off on a search warrant for a newspaper in Kansas, allowing the police to seize all of the equipment, personal and professional, of all of the people who worked for or owned the newspaper. The raid appeared to be motivated by a desire to suppress an immanent story about the political connections and past misdeeds of a restaurant owner in the area. The raid was also apparently authorized in violation of federal law protections against search and seizure of newspapers, which insist that materials must be subpoenaed rather than seized, so it's hard to see it as anything but an intimidation tactic, using the police as the instrument of someone connected. The paper hadn't run the story with the information from a source, but then were accused of participating in identity theft along with a lot of nasty Facebook posting from the business owner about how the paper is trying to ruin the business and presenting slanted materials instead of facts. The message sent was certainly clear: stop investigating and refuse to do your job.
The state of Michigan has enacted a school meals program for all public school students. In addition to the obvious benefits of not having children go hungry because they can't afford food, the program also believes that fed children will see improved academic outcomes from not having to worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether they've had enough food. (Because you cannot be humanitarian for humanity's sake in the United States, you have to have some other justification for spending public dollars on something that might benefit people. Especially if they're Black or brown people.)
Attempting to live off the grid is difficult and deadly, and those who attempt to do it without the proper preparations, sadly, often end up dead. Even if they're smart and think they have prepared enough, this is the kind of thing that works best when built up slowly and with copious amounts of backup plans in case something goes completely wrong. And often done with other people who can help cover the skills that you lack.
A short primer on writing arrow wounds, and the likelihood that someone is going to die from getting hit with an arrow. Basically, for the medicine level of societies where arrows are used as the primary ranged weapons, getting hit with an arrow without enough armor to prevent it from puncturing flesh is likely going to cause permanent damage or death in most cases, and this is an intentional design of arrowheads and the force that arrows are flying at.
Foxes, much like humans, prefer food they don't have to work for or solve puzzles for.
Having dismantled much of their surveillance apparatus and made decisions to treat SARS-CoV-2 more like a seasonal infection rather than a still-ongoing pandemic, there will be a lot of guessing on how to handle infections and mutations in the coming months.
Promising developments on the fight against the virus, however, as a set of antibodies has been discovered that can beat known variants of the virus and may have some effect toward preventing further infections. We can hope that it turns out to be as promising and might be useful for setting up another vaccination. It would be nice if it were the last one of the lot and we can lick the thing for good.
synecdochic posts about the various nasal sprays available in the United States that claim to provide some protection against a SARS-CoV-2 infection, and which might work as one component of a system of defenses against infection. (Especially in situations where there may have been a high risk and masks weren't worn (possibly because they were forbidden, or because it was something where removing a mask was unavoidable.)
In technology, once again, Large Language Models have difficulty determining whether things we definitely know are human-written are actually human-written, because their statistical modeling only allows them to make guesses about things that look more or less like the training data they've been built with. And thus, documents like the United States Constitution and the translated works of the Christian Bible score high on the "an LLM wrote this" because of their similarity to training data, rather than being able to even make comparisons between contemporaneous corpuses.
SUSE, the Linux company headquartered in Germany, has a very real and very long-running anti-semitism problem, to the point, apparently, of forbidding the mention of Jewish holidays, discrimination against Jewish employees, and doing things like scheduling a big conference on a day in which no observant Jew would be working. Given how much SUSE (and openSUSE) are often in discussions of distributions to try, that the company responsible for them has this kind of issue is very concerning for the continuation of the company and the product.
A Polish creator of spyware designed to infect Android phones and transmit sensitive data to the attacker has gone out of business after someone cloned their databases and then destroyed the service itself. Good riddance to bad software.
Wilson Aerospace alleges that Boeing, after arranging for a demonstration of a proprietary torque wrench that could work in tight spaces, stole the intellectual property and transmitted it to competitors to develop inferior knockoffs. This seems like something that might be classified as "penny wise, pound foolish," and that's before anything else comes to light as part of the discovery process of the lawsuit involved.
The beginnings of research into how absorbent various menstrual products may be, although there's still a fair amount of approximations going on in trying to figure out such things, and since there's not necessarily much for standardization or regulation, there's a lot more work to do.
The use of a webcam to capture what the preserved remains of the originator of the idea of the panopticon sees from his box at the college, day in and day out. And thus, we get to see what the reactions are to the sight of seeing a person in a preserved state and on display for the students and visitors to observe.
Social media means dealing with other humans (but also dragons, aliens, kittens, bots, and others). While there's a lot of excitement and people moving from the company that Elon bought to the second company that Jack Built or the one the Zuck created, there's also the federated social networks that speak similar protocols across each other as they traverse from server to server. Because it's not one person imposing their rules on everyone else, though, interactions between servers and their administrators has the potential to shape the way the network works. Or doesn't. Stepping into a culture that isn't yours, that doesn't signpost itself well, and also tends to assume its own rules are everyone's rules, and that doesn't make cool people easily discoverable creates a high bar to entry. (There's a lot of complaining about Mastodon, specifically, because it's the highest profile of the Fediversal materials, but also because it's not the best at good UX, much like a lot of other open source things.) The other part is that, like so many other places in society, some people assume they have the right to speak and everyone else has to listen to them, and that anyone who challenges them on this or disagrees with them must be prevented from speaking. One of the supposed strengths of federation is the ability, as an admin, to choose who you want to share with and receive things from and who you don't, and for a user, to find a server whose admin decisions are in line with your own beliefs. (The practicalities are more difficult, of course, because not everybody is as transparent as they could be about what they do and don't do, and there's no easy way of knowing whether any given server is seen as generally okay or whether it's seen as someone the rest of the place doesn't want to hang out with.) If actually using that power to decide what you and your users do and don't want to see and do produces a storm of abuse (much of which can probably be credibly laid at the feet of "but women shouldn't be allowed to tell men no!"), then the tools themselves are not as useful as they claim to be.
Last out, a quick and easy guide to finding out what any given privacy policy is going to do with your data and what kinds (and how much) of data will be collected by using the service.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else 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.)
Because it is a trial of national significance, Democrats in the House of Representatives are asking for the trial to be televised, rather than allowing the trial to proceed without cameras, as is normal for federal criminal trials.
The indictment itself takes pains to point out right from the beginning that the behavior being charged is not protected speech, and that the defendant was entitled to speech and to make legal challenges regarding the outcome of the election. Which he did. And lost those challenges. The behavior charged, instead, is not about seeking redress of grievances, but about defiance of law, subversion of legal elections, and attempting to hold on to an office to which the defendant was no longer legally entitled to.
Beyond this newest federal indictment, new charges have been added to the classified documents case against the previous administrator, alleging that he and another person attempted to destroy evidence of misdeeds relating to the case. There's also a third federal case against him regarding falsification of business records in relation to his 2016 campaign and the "hush money" payments in trying to spike a story about an alleged affair with an adult film actress. And past that, Fani Willis's grand jury returned forty-one new indictments for the Defendant's alleged actions in Georgia, and 18 charged co-conspirators along with him, so there's more than enough criminal charges to keep the Defendant busy all throughout the next year.
It appears that the defendant is getting hit with charges for both the crimes and the cover-ups, in those situations in which he bothered to attempt cover-ups. As the charges rain down and the defendant posts more and more material that is supposedly in his defense or accusing those who charge him of malfeasance, it seems to be clear that the current front-runner of the Republican Party will have to use the broad pardon powers of the President to absolve himself of wrongdoing should he be elected once again to the office. It also seems likely, though, that if anyone else were to capture the nomination and the office, at least in the current field of contenders, they too would use the pardon power in such a way, or at least they must leave open the option to do so until such moment as they are elected, at which point they can decide for themselves whether they really do believe in the innocence of the defendant, or whether they were suckering his voters into choosing them with no real intent of letting the defendant go free.
Mind you, in a less terrible world, we wouldn't have to be talking about whether or not the country is poised to try and elect again a man who has been multiply charged with federal crimes and might elect someone convicted of them, depending on how swiftly the trials go. People who believe the United States is better than this are going to have that belief sorely tested in the next year.
Furthermore, whatever the outcome of the trials may be, we definitely need to know, as a country, without any sliver of doubt, that they were argued with the best people and the most persuasive arguments that both sides could bring to the trial, and that the judge overseeing the trial acted professionally, impartially, and without bias. While there will be at least some segment of the population that refuses to believe the outcome was legitimate if their preferred result did not happen, the majority must be able to believe and understand that the trial itself was conducted fairly and without manipulation.
Not that the peope who have bought into the belief that the defendant is a messianic or godly figure will stop and think about what has been accused here. Supposed Christians are rejecting the teachings of Jesus in favor of the teachings of Trump, believing, as the evangelical movements of Graham, Falwell, Osteen, and others always have, that fraternity, compassion, and acceptance of the alien and those not like them are weaknesses and capitulations to the influence of Satan. Because those people have convinced themselves that they alone are the elect, the chosen, and that their elevated status only confers power and privilege on them, rather than additional responsibilities and burdens to bring about what the religion says is the ideal kingdom. Such that they see core teachings as the Sermon on the Mount as "liberal talking points" rather than a description of the virtues of someone who calls themself a Christian.
kesbeacon looks at Barbie as a movie that could have been about the experience of questioning and possibly transitioning from one identity to another, but ultimately retreated to safer ground. Which also gets a couple of thoughts about the movie, like the way in which all of the Barbies are cast as "Barbie" in the credits, despite the clear indication that the Barbies distinguish between themselves, not because of name, but because of what they do. Except where they do, of course, because the characters that are unique, the ones that aren't Barbie or Ken, they have their names, like Alan or Maggie. And in the credits scene, where there are advertisements of the various dolls, they don't have the Black doll as Barbie, they gave her a different name. So not everyone in Barbieland is a Barbie, a Ken, or a Skipper. And the naming of other dolls that aren't Barbie, Ken, or Skipper, tend to be for models that are discontinued, in the movie.And there's also the bit there that's a throwaway gag where Barbie, upon entering the real world, mistakes beauty pageant contestants (in their swimwear outfits, if I remember correctly) as the Supreme Court of Barbieland. So, I guess the justices don't wear the robes of office, but follow the same idea as President Barbie, who you can only distinguish from the others by the face that she has a giant sash that says "President" on it. (And possibly because she wears pants. I think she's the only one who wears pants that we see. And is also the only one who specifically is asked whether she wants to put some pants on after she returns from the void of bimbodom.) If that's the case, then one wonders just how much patriarchy was already in place in Barbieland, or, as was pointed out, how much toxic femininity was already in place and a whole bunch of the Barbies might have been willing to put down the society they were in, even if it led to bad places, just so that they didn't have to keep their heels up all the time. It might have been nice to see one of the Barbies go "Thanks, but I kind of liked the role I was playing here, rather than having to be so completely on all the time."
Things that were liked about the Barbie movie, especially the genius of using Matchbox 20's "Push" as the ur-expression of patriarchy-dudes and how they expect to relate to their bimbo Barbie girlfriends.
Another of the unexpected benefits of remote work is the benefits to workers of color who get to avoid all of the office racism and microaggressions. As the fully-remote work options dry up, because companies failed to believe the proof of their experiment that remote work is perfectly fine for most things and instead insist that workers be in a specific spot for a specific amount of time, workers of color are having to decide between whether it's worth keeping their mental health or whether they need the money and career advancement opportunities more than they need a work environment free of the daily toll of racism. It's not a fair choice to have to make, and not everyone gets the opportunity to do so.
American Library Association President Emily Drabinski is the most recent of convenient targets for censorious forces that want to control what is acceptable to teach in schools and furnish in libraries. The excuse they're using is that no red-blooded 'Murican institution should be associating with someone who has publicly self-identified as a Marxist lesbian, but in this particular context and time, Emily could have said she liked mustard on hot dogs instead of ketchup and there would be equally as much howling about how libraries need to engage in widespread censorship of their materials and programs. Since the most common thread of attack in this era is to accuse libraries of making sexually explicit material available to children and to further attack that librarians are actively pushing this material on children, while many of these organizations say "Marxist" is what they're objecting to, there's a nonzero chance that what they're really objecting to is "lesbian," because that would upset their perception of the librarian as a white Christian middle-aged woman with a husband who actually makes the money for their family and who has the real decision-making power in their relationship. So that they wouldn't have to contemplate the possibility that she might have a professional degree and training about the collection and programming and that it might disagree with whatever a man in her community thinks. (Because, of course, in their perception, no matter what kind of woman she is, a man automatically is wiser and better-suited to make decisions about everything than she is.) Given that in the past, several library associations chose to leave the American Library Association rather than racially integrate themselves and have often been on the wrong side of history about who should be able to use their libraries, the calls for further defederation because of "Marxism" sound like equally loud calls for defederation because someone is an out lesbian and they object to her being President of the ALA and an out lesbian in public. (To their credit, ALA realized they at least needed to do the minimum to support their queer library workers and put out a press release about forming a task force and a communications plan on how to make sure their queer workers feel safer and at least nominally heard.)
The ALA did tweet about the interview and their support for President Drabinski, and the replies are equally split between "she said she's a Marxist, and is therefore personally responsible for all of the deaths under Communist regimes!" (Does that mean I get to hold those people personally responsible for all the death and destruction that happens under capitalism?) and "She's pushing pornography on children and exposing them to sexual material so that she can sexually abuse that child!" (Tell me again who is most likely to commit sexual abuse of children, and which organizations are the ones most likely to cover it up and reassign their personnel to other places rather than remove them from positions where they will have the opportunity to prey on children.) It's free-floating nonsense arguments, but much like the cultists above who have rejected Jesus in favor of The Defendant, all the evidence in the world about how libraries operate and what kind of controls parents already have over their child's borrowing habits and how material is filed in the appropriate places for appropriate audiences based on professional judgment won't dissuade someone who has made up their mind that the library is a site of liberal indoctrination, just like schools.
This doesn't necessarily mean those people are fundamentally stupid and will never be able to rise from their delusions, but it does mean that there is a lot of people being wrong in public, and fixing that often takes time and personal experience and a host of other things that are annoying, intense, and don't always have a great success rate at getting people to change their minds. Especially because this particular moral panic doesn't have the easiest in available, which was "Hey, I'm white, you're white, we agree that we're equals, let's see where we can find a compromise that will make everyone feel like they've been heard and very few white people actually have to do anything to change."
So instead we have federal judges blocking laws that would have made librarians criminally liable for children finding material that lawmakers objected to and residents buying and donating multiple copies of books that were checked out and then held hostage by people who objected to the queer content in them. Upon seeing the failure of their plot, the hostage-takers returned the books. I still think that the library could have considered filling theft charges, since the thieves declared their intent to steal and hold the books until the library agreed to get rid of them as a condition of their return. It may not have been a good PR move on the library's part in the community, but it would have been an excellent signal of what finding out will be like when you fuck around with the library on these matters.
Otherwise, we often get situations where a library that's trying to get their millage passed for the third time in a reactionary-conservative place has offered to label all the books with descriptive text of what might be found inside of them. In hopes that having a summary available when they flip open the book will be enough to appease the reactionaries so that they can know exactly which books to demand be removed from the collection. So that they'll fund the library, now secure in their belief that the library will never decide to do anything against them again, on pain of having their funding removed again.
And for as much as we like to believe there will be alternative pathways to get those kinds of books into the hands of kids, safely, securely, and without the possibility of retaliation, remember that there are people who patrol their neighborhoods and the Little Free Libraries in that space so they can remove books they think are "objectionable" and substitute Bibles or other material properly in line with their Christian theocratic values. And they're probably the kinds of people who would spy on their children's Internet usage to make sure they weren't getting forbidden materials from digital avenues, either. The collection at the public library is often the single place where a person can explore things, without the intrusion of someone else into their reading choices. (That's also being eroded with new laws that demand children have explicit approval to check out materials or that give their caregiver unfettered and unlimited access to the records of what their child checks out from a library.)
Iowa librarians, faced with an impossible deadline and vague standards about what books they were required to remove or restrict, turned to ChatGPT for answers about whether specific books contained the forbidden content. Which is a headdesk in several ways, the least of which is that you never ask ChatGPT or any other large language model for anything that requires accuracy, because ChatGPT cannot perceive accuracy, it only perceives whether it's plausible in the language. But also, the timeline to review all of the materials was impossibly short, and the law that is requiring the view is vague to the point where it will demand the most conservative interpretation and most self-censorious behavior just to be sure that there isn't something that the state will try to hold a librarian criminally liable for.
The proposal to close all ticket offices at train stations in the UK has plenty of knock-on effects, including making train travel that much more difficult for blind and partially-sighted people. Especially in situations where previously-booked passenger assistance fails to materialize or there are situations that machines will not tell a person about unless they specifically manage to get the machine to recognize what they're looking for. And machines won't be able to tell someone that they should be going to a different station than the one they have booked because they have more connecting trains or similar. It's part of the reason why people who are serious about accessibility are best poised to have people who have accessibility needs try to navigate spaces, sites, and the like, so that they can provide honest feedback about how things (likely don't) work and what would be helpful to making them work better.
A magistrate justice signed off on a search warrant for a newspaper in Kansas, allowing the police to seize all of the equipment, personal and professional, of all of the people who worked for or owned the newspaper. The raid appeared to be motivated by a desire to suppress an immanent story about the political connections and past misdeeds of a restaurant owner in the area. The raid was also apparently authorized in violation of federal law protections against search and seizure of newspapers, which insist that materials must be subpoenaed rather than seized, so it's hard to see it as anything but an intimidation tactic, using the police as the instrument of someone connected. The paper hadn't run the story with the information from a source, but then were accused of participating in identity theft along with a lot of nasty Facebook posting from the business owner about how the paper is trying to ruin the business and presenting slanted materials instead of facts. The message sent was certainly clear: stop investigating and refuse to do your job.
The state of Michigan has enacted a school meals program for all public school students. In addition to the obvious benefits of not having children go hungry because they can't afford food, the program also believes that fed children will see improved academic outcomes from not having to worry about where their next meal is coming from or whether they've had enough food. (Because you cannot be humanitarian for humanity's sake in the United States, you have to have some other justification for spending public dollars on something that might benefit people. Especially if they're Black or brown people.)
Attempting to live off the grid is difficult and deadly, and those who attempt to do it without the proper preparations, sadly, often end up dead. Even if they're smart and think they have prepared enough, this is the kind of thing that works best when built up slowly and with copious amounts of backup plans in case something goes completely wrong. And often done with other people who can help cover the skills that you lack.
A short primer on writing arrow wounds, and the likelihood that someone is going to die from getting hit with an arrow. Basically, for the medicine level of societies where arrows are used as the primary ranged weapons, getting hit with an arrow without enough armor to prevent it from puncturing flesh is likely going to cause permanent damage or death in most cases, and this is an intentional design of arrowheads and the force that arrows are flying at.
Foxes, much like humans, prefer food they don't have to work for or solve puzzles for.
Having dismantled much of their surveillance apparatus and made decisions to treat SARS-CoV-2 more like a seasonal infection rather than a still-ongoing pandemic, there will be a lot of guessing on how to handle infections and mutations in the coming months.
Promising developments on the fight against the virus, however, as a set of antibodies has been discovered that can beat known variants of the virus and may have some effect toward preventing further infections. We can hope that it turns out to be as promising and might be useful for setting up another vaccination. It would be nice if it were the last one of the lot and we can lick the thing for good.
synecdochic posts about the various nasal sprays available in the United States that claim to provide some protection against a SARS-CoV-2 infection, and which might work as one component of a system of defenses against infection. (Especially in situations where there may have been a high risk and masks weren't worn (possibly because they were forbidden, or because it was something where removing a mask was unavoidable.)In technology, once again, Large Language Models have difficulty determining whether things we definitely know are human-written are actually human-written, because their statistical modeling only allows them to make guesses about things that look more or less like the training data they've been built with. And thus, documents like the United States Constitution and the translated works of the Christian Bible score high on the "an LLM wrote this" because of their similarity to training data, rather than being able to even make comparisons between contemporaneous corpuses.
SUSE, the Linux company headquartered in Germany, has a very real and very long-running anti-semitism problem, to the point, apparently, of forbidding the mention of Jewish holidays, discrimination against Jewish employees, and doing things like scheduling a big conference on a day in which no observant Jew would be working. Given how much SUSE (and openSUSE) are often in discussions of distributions to try, that the company responsible for them has this kind of issue is very concerning for the continuation of the company and the product.
A Polish creator of spyware designed to infect Android phones and transmit sensitive data to the attacker has gone out of business after someone cloned their databases and then destroyed the service itself. Good riddance to bad software.
Wilson Aerospace alleges that Boeing, after arranging for a demonstration of a proprietary torque wrench that could work in tight spaces, stole the intellectual property and transmitted it to competitors to develop inferior knockoffs. This seems like something that might be classified as "penny wise, pound foolish," and that's before anything else comes to light as part of the discovery process of the lawsuit involved.
The beginnings of research into how absorbent various menstrual products may be, although there's still a fair amount of approximations going on in trying to figure out such things, and since there's not necessarily much for standardization or regulation, there's a lot more work to do.
The use of a webcam to capture what the preserved remains of the originator of the idea of the panopticon sees from his box at the college, day in and day out. And thus, we get to see what the reactions are to the sight of seeing a person in a preserved state and on display for the students and visitors to observe.
Social media means dealing with other humans (but also dragons, aliens, kittens, bots, and others). While there's a lot of excitement and people moving from the company that Elon bought to the second company that Jack Built or the one the Zuck created, there's also the federated social networks that speak similar protocols across each other as they traverse from server to server. Because it's not one person imposing their rules on everyone else, though, interactions between servers and their administrators has the potential to shape the way the network works. Or doesn't. Stepping into a culture that isn't yours, that doesn't signpost itself well, and also tends to assume its own rules are everyone's rules, and that doesn't make cool people easily discoverable creates a high bar to entry. (There's a lot of complaining about Mastodon, specifically, because it's the highest profile of the Fediversal materials, but also because it's not the best at good UX, much like a lot of other open source things.) The other part is that, like so many other places in society, some people assume they have the right to speak and everyone else has to listen to them, and that anyone who challenges them on this or disagrees with them must be prevented from speaking. One of the supposed strengths of federation is the ability, as an admin, to choose who you want to share with and receive things from and who you don't, and for a user, to find a server whose admin decisions are in line with your own beliefs. (The practicalities are more difficult, of course, because not everybody is as transparent as they could be about what they do and don't do, and there's no easy way of knowing whether any given server is seen as generally okay or whether it's seen as someone the rest of the place doesn't want to hang out with.) If actually using that power to decide what you and your users do and don't want to see and do produces a storm of abuse (much of which can probably be credibly laid at the feet of "but women shouldn't be allowed to tell men no!"), then the tools themselves are not as useful as they claim to be.
Last out, a quick and easy guide to finding out what any given privacy policy is going to do with your data and what kinds (and how much) of data will be collected by using the service.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else 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.)
no subject
Date: 2023-08-19 06:56 pm (UTC)