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Zazzle baby apparel, but modeled by adults.

So, for example, if a cop guns down another black youth sleeping in his car, people can murmur “bad apple” all they want, but it’s a stochastic bad apple, right? I mean, “bad apple” is just polite speech for “lone wolf.” That cop is both a single person and the trigger finger of a broadly entrenched and disseminated worldview, an individual expression of structural force. But that leaves us with the task of understanding where that structural force comes from. We can’t simply trace things to some other bad apple, some demagogue spouting racist bullshit; that just leaves us adrift in the endless chain of ideas, dealing with one apple (or not) as another rolls into place. White supremacy, because that is what we are really talking about in Christchurch, New Zealand, and in Vallejo, California, is itself not simply an idea but a self-replicating power structure, the ongoing dispossession and domination of some by others, a dis

Development organizations and Western feminists think that empowering poor women means giving them chickens or sewing machines. It doesn’t. --- [T]he term was introduced into the development lexicon in the mid-1980s by feminists from the Global South. Those women understood “empowerment” as the task of “transforming gender subordination” and the breakdown of “other oppressive structures” and collective “political mobilization.” They got some of what they wanted when the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 adopted “an agenda for women’s empowerment.” In the 22 years since that conference, though, “empowerment” has become a buzzword among Western development professionals, but the crucial part about “political mobilization” has been excised. In its place is a narrow, constricted definition expressed through technical programming seeking to improve education or health with little heed to wider struggles for gender equality. This depoliticized “empowerment” serves everyone except the women it is supposed to help. [...] [T]here is a skirting of the truth that without political change, the structures that discriminate against women can’t be dismantled and any advances they do make will be unsustainable. Numbers never lie, but they do omit. [...] In this system there is little room for the complexities of the recipients. Non-Western women are reduced to mute, passive subjects awaiting rescue.

The shift to an organized industry also has political implications—and not just because journalists are becoming more active through their union work. In the larger scheme of things, unionized media workers are starting to see the world and themselves in a new light. Journalism, like other creative-but-poor industries, is predicated on the idea that its practitioners are just lucky to be doing what they love; they’ve long been conditioned to believe that there’s something inherently prestigious, even noble, about this type of white-collar work. But as media jobs become more precarious, undermined by the same monopoly forces affecting workers in other parts of the economy, media workers are increasingly seeing themselves as workers first. This is what Marxist-minded leftists have long termed class consciousness, and that consciousness is spreading, within legacy and digital media brands alike. [...] To reclaim the foundations of a free press in America, media workers need to get serious about dismantling tech monopolies and implementing policies that would reverse our new Gilded Age. It seems to be no coincidence that countries that operate the freest press regimes, such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland, also have comparatively low income-inequality. The Jonah Perettis of the world think that they can solve the media crisis in isolation, without acknowledging that they are integral to and have benefited from the system that gave rise to this crisis in the first place. [...] What’s more, union activism can help bridge the yawning power dynamic that now separates tech monopolies from the flailing media sector. Tech companies will have to feel threatened if they’re going to implement reforms and meet media companies more than halfway—and the companies themselves clearly pose no threat at all. The way the media business works now is that Facebook and Google and Apple News reap the bulk of the profits produced by the labor of journalists—either by leapfrogging the ownership structure entirely or enlisting short-sighted owners, who mostly compete with one another, to give away their content for a pittance.

By expanding the definition of what constitutes personal data—and by extension, what constitutes a breach of personal data—and applying a standardized notification requirement to the entire EU, the GDPR appears to have generated a much larger data set of reported incidents and thereby significantly widened our window into what types of breaches are occurring. The vast majority of companies are still not being fined for failing to protect their customers’ data, and the vast majority of fines are still too small to register with the companies that are being penalized. (Arguably, even 50 million euros is a fairly trivial sum to Google, which brought in $136.8 billion in revenue in 2018. For comparison, 50 million euros is equivalent to roughly $57 million, or 0.04 percent of Google’s 2018 revenue.)

This document exists to lay out some general principles of running a small social network site that have worked for me. These principles are related to community building more than they are related to specific technologies.

I stopped fucking with Eminem when he couldn’t stop making rape jokes in his rhymes as he approached 40 years old. There is a time when all of us have to re-evaluate the distance we actually have from dangerous moments. Eminem has a distance that never runs out. A distance that only grows wider. And there are those who would call him edgy for not realising this, while ignoring those who realise that their proximity to danger is a lot slimmer, and yet they’ve still found a way to stay alive. No one finds this funny. [...] What Macklemore didn’t embrace was the thing that Eminem embraced before him: if you are in a system that will propel you to the top off of the backs of black artists who might be better than you are, no one black is going to be interested in your guilt. It has played out in every genre since the inception of genre, or since the first song was pulled by white hands from wherever a black person sang it into the air. No one knows what to make of the guilt. [...] Macklemore did what I would have hoped he would have done, even if he did it painfully and with a tone of self-congratulation. What no other white rapper was able to do before him. He stopped just apologising for what he imagined as undeserved fame and instead weaponised it, losing fans in the process. The major function of privilege is that it allows us who hold it in masses to sacrifice something for the greater good of pulling up someone else. Macklemore, whether intentionally or not, decided to use his privilege to cannibalise whiteness, tearing at his own mythology in the process. When I saw him last year at a festival, he performed White Privilege II to a captivated white audience. Halfway through the song, he left the stage entirely empty, walking off and making room for two black poets and a black drummer to read poems about police violence and gentrification. It was a stunning image, an artist holding the mouth of his audience open and forcing the slick red spoonful of medicine down their throats.

Language is not the be all end all. This isn't about policing language or censoring words, but about critically examining how language is part of total ableist hegemony. This is about being accountable when we learn about linguistic ableism, but it is also about being compassionate to ourselves and recognizing that to varying extents, we have all participated in ablesupremacy and ablenormativity. This is about understanding the connections between linguistic ableism and other forms of ableism, such as medical ableism, scientific ableism, legal ableism, and cultural ableism. [...] If you find yourself using this ableist language, please take a minute to re-examine how your perspective has been informed by ableism. This isn't an accusation or an insinuation that you are automatically an Evil Person. We have all participated in ableist structures, and are all continually learning and unlearning. But if you are truly committed to building more just and inclusive communities, then it is critical to unlearn how we have been conditioned into accepting ableism in all parts of our lives and societies, including in our language.

The conveniently toothless word “empowerment” is easily mocked, but the mockery itself serves a darkly useful purpose: What cannot be taken seriously need never be examined, let alone condemned. This comfortable habit of casual derision prevents Western media watchers from grasping the real import of certain ideas, like this one, “empowerment,” which is now become a fig leaf for questionable claims and even outright fakery, especially where women’s rights are concerned. Beyond this, the kind of rhetoric in which “empowerment” appears is often the kind that is meant to make you stop thinking about something, rather than keep thinking about it. [...] Empowerment is a word you can use to distract, to deflect criticism, and even to raise money. In the context of specific foreign policy influence, putting an empty, pretty concept in the place where a fact or an idea or an action might have been is… well, it’s one way of practicing dismediation.

Trump is in thrall to an alien power because of the compulsions of intersecting profit schemes that require not just mutual interest but political intervention which must in turn be concealed because of a peculiar social pretense, one lacking in any material reality, that there both should be and is a separation between the political and the economic. Which, like, no shit. What we have just described is the political-economic arrangement in which we live. My dudes, all capitalists are in thrall to an alien power and that alien power is capital itself. It is not the same as wealth. It is the great and entangled set of relations that both compel and allow for the increase and concentration of wealth. It may involve personal relationships and it is easier for us to grasp when it does. Mostly it does not. The wage that a textile worker can demand is shaped by the rates of textile workers thousands of miles away whom they will never meet, by the unemployment of people they will never know, and by the development of new machines they may never use. And yet all of this action seems to be coordinated to deliver profits over there and misery over here, over and over. No wonder we keep on misrecognizing this situation as a conspiracy. But it is not, except in so far as society itself is a conspiracy. It is, however, an alien power. It structures our actions from a distance, after all. It exists outside of us but it passes through us, using us for its own sustenance. It can never come to rest, must always increase itself or cease to exist, and thus the capitalist must seek whatever deals can allow his capital to expand, and do what it takes to make that happen. [...] America if you want a president—and here I challenge Popula readers to write in with a coherent account of why you want a president—who is not in thrall to an alien power, you are going to need to make some structural changes, the very kind of changes that conspiratorial thinking and fantasies of purging corrupt individuals are unable to contemplate. Back away from the yarn and nails. They will not rescue you.

What began as an attempt at a simpler life quickly became a life-style brand.

Investigating the tallest tale in the ice cream business.

Rebecca Skloot article on veterinarians who treat fish, as field evolves to meet demands of pet owners; number of households that keep fish is about 13.9 million, and there are nearly 2,000 vets to serve them.

The trailer has always held a special place in the American imagination. Once a symbol of freedom and mobility, it became — through waves of economic hardship and discrimination over the course of the 20th century — a testament to the limitations of the so-called land of opportunity. Stated another way, trailers became the province of the have-nots, and along the way, the pernicious myth of “trailer park trash” became core to a set of stereotypes about lower-class white people. [...] With almost no cultural images of dignified life on the inside of a trailer, or in the often close-knit neighborhoods that trailer parks become, Americans cling instead to the simple, outmoded ideas about trailers and their inhabitants that they’ve held for nearly a century.

Disinformation, once it’s done telling its lie, is finished with you. Dismediation is looking to make sure you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again [...] Dismediation is a form of propaganda that seeks to undermine the medium by which it travels, like a computer virus that bricks the whole machine. Thus, for example, Information: John Kerry is a war hero who was awarded three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star; Misinformation: John Kerry was never wounded in the Vietnam War; Disinformation: John Kerry is a coward; Dismediation: ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ are disinterested sources of information about John Kerry, equivalent in integrity to any other source that might be presented on the evening news. These four narratives were distributed simultaneously across various channels during the 2004 election, though only one of them (the first) is true. [...] The lasting harm of this unfortunate episode, however, was not to Kerry’s reputation or to his candidacy. It was that afterward, millions of minds were uncertain as to what really constitutes “news,” or “reporting,” or “fact-checking.” This state of uncertainty hasn’t ever been adequately addressed, let alone mended. [...] Dismediation isn’t discourse. It doesn’t disinform, and it’s not quite propaganda, as that term has long been understood. Instead, dismediation seeks to break the systems of trust without which civilized society hasn’t got a chance. Disinformation, once it’s done telling its lie, is finished with you. Dismediation is looking to make sure you never really trust or believe a news story, ever again. Not on Fox, and not on NPR. It’s not that we can’t agree on what the facts are. It’s that we cannot agree on what counts as fact. The machinery of discourse is bricked. That’s why we can’t think together, talk together, or vote together. [...] Dismediation is hard to combat, as it distorts not the facts, but the means by which facts can be understood. It’s like trying to win a chess game when the board has been flung into the air and the pieces scattered; quite often the bewildered victim finds himself trying in vain still to play e5 Qxe5 or whatever.

Many vets resent online vendors for undercutting their prices for pet medications. Some vets, however, provide the online and discount vendors with their supplies.

The Swedish company Teenage Engineering has won over kids — and professionals — with a revolutionary idea for a synthesizer: Make it simple.

Comics from my journal.

In this article, we uncover how PageSpeed calculates its critical speed score.

Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes. --- I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way. I had experienced worse things than this, but none threatened my American understanding of a life as much as a called-off wedding did. What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.

For a brief moment, Tumblr played host to a tight-knit, but open-minded, community of music lovers who were thinking and writing deeply about music and its place in the world. --- In some ways, we were naïve. When Music Tumblr was humming, few people stopped to think that what we were really doing was providing free content to a large company that was trying to figure out how to turn that content into money. Just about everyone I can think of from the Music Tumblr days is now on Twitter, and just about all of them seem miserable there. You go to Twitter expecting the worst, and it rarely disappoints. As crazy as it sounds now, for a short while, in this time and place, social media seemed like a good idea. But there's always hope.

Once upon a time, my Tumblr Dashboard was full of writing about music.

Oregon’s particularly lax regulation combined with the expanded economic opportunity attracted an influx of bad actors. And, as a result, the state’s cannabis community, in particular the growers in the southern part of the state, changed. For a long time before the legalization of recreational marijuana, growers were operating on a small scale as family businesses. Some were compliant with state laws regarding medical marijuana, and others sold cannabis into in-state and out-of-state illicit markets, but in both cases most of these growers were part of the local community. Many of these small growers are beginning to get out of the business now, due to the overproduction of cannabis in the state since the passage of Measure 91, driven by both licensed and unlicensed moneyed interests who are developing large-scale cannabis farms, and who often do not live or participate in the local community, and thus have less investment in the care of the land and community.

There is no accurate Map of the Territory. That we can’t see the Territory as it is is not the only reason for impossible accuracy. We would also fail in creating the perfect Map because the most accurate Map of the Territory can only be the Territory itself.

Alienation is not only a feeling of detachment from the world, in Marxism it is a condition of literal theft. Workers exit the day with less than they had when they entered — Americans know this instinctively if not explicitly, which is why our national dream is to “work for myself” before a company “uses me up.” A reality show about the line cooks at a moderately expensive brunch place wouldn’t feel anything like Nosrat’s slow-food explorations; there’s nothing calming or even appetizing about the corner-cutting necessary to cook for someone else’s profit. When it comes to food, industrial efficiency is often gross. Contrariwise, unalienated labor is sublime. This is virtuosity performed for its own sake, and it’s the truth behind the saying “the best things in life are free.” For example, hallowed above all on fine-dining TV from Top Chef to Chef’s Table is the concept of the “family meal” — the pre-service food that chefs cook for their restaurant staff. Unlike the alienated dinners they’ll serve later, family meal is a place for experimentation and risk. You can’t buy your way in, it’s the workers’ privilege alone. Most creative professions have their version of the family meal, and those of us who work in those jobs are willing to trade a lot for the occasional unalienated moment when we can give and/or receive work directly.

People say, “I don’t play the politics game, I don’t pay attention to politics” — well, the environment is getting poisoned, families are getting pulled apart and deported, prisons are privatized, real-life Nazis live happily among us, Native Americans are so disenfranchised our country is basically still colonizing them, Puerto Rico has been abandoned, the American education system has been turned into a business, and every day 96 people get shot and killed. You might not be a big fan of politics, but you can still participate. All you need to do is vote for people you believe will work on these issues, and if they don’t work the way they should, then it is your responsibility to call them, organize a town hall and demand that they show up — hold them accountable. It’s their job to make our world better.

The left’s rallying cry is a repudiation of Trump’s immigration policy — and a challenge to Democrats. --- Objectively, the Trump immigration agenda — “unshackling” ICE agents and reiterating that every unauthorized immigrant “should be worried” about getting deported — is a reinstatement of the status quo during Obama’s first term. But because it’s a change from a period of relative safety — deportations did go down in the final years of the Obama administration — and because of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, it feels like something new. Trump sees rank-and-file law enforcement officers as his natural allies in a culture war. Progressives have responded in kind: by targeting not just the Trump administration officials appointed to run immigration enforcement but ICE agents themselves, whom they have cast as moral monsters whose power needs to be drastically curtailed or destroyed.

Viewed from one angle, the rise of get-girls-to-code initiatives is progressive and feminist. Many people involved in the movement are certainly progressive feminists themselves, and many women have benefited from these initiatives. But there are other ways to look at it too. Women are generally cheaper, to other workers’ dismay. “Introducing women into a discipline can be seen as empowerment for women,” says Ensmenger. “But it is often seen by men as a reduction of their status. Because, historically speaking, the more women in a profession, the lower-paid it is.” Hicks, the computing historian, can’t stand it when people tout coding camps as a solution to technology’s gender problem. “I think these initiatives are well-meaning, but they totally misunderstand the problem. The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.” Ironically, says Hicks, these coding initiatives are, consciously or not, betting on their graduates’ failure. If boot camp graduates succeed, they’ll flood the market, devaluing the entire profession. “If you can be the exception who becomes successful, then you can take advantage of all the gatekeeping mechanisms,” says Hicks. “But if you aren’t the exception, and the gatekeeping starts to fall away, then the profession becomes less prestigious.”

What’s played over the speakers at Logan originates in a room in a yellow house in North Providence. --- This question of how to please everyone is something that many large public spaces — and small private spaces — deal with on a daily basis. This desire to please the largest crowd — or not to offend — drove the popularity of “elevator music.” On some level, this challenge continues to drive companies like Spotify to create better and better algorithms. And it drives Dalzell to continually add and delete, listen and select.

Abortion is health care, of course. But attempting to depoliticize abortion or insist that the procedure is categorically identical to other health care procedures downplays the implications of abortion in a way that removes it from any honest analysis of its political salience. Because the anti-abortion movement has long dominated the conversation with the assertion that abortion is murder, the impulse to remove abortion from a murky moral debate and frame it as a simple matter of health is understandable. But it is not simply a medical choice with no repercussions beyond the realm of the personal; abortion affects everyone. One in four women will have at least one abortion in their lives. Our communities have been shaped in a million invisible ways by people having abortions—abortions that allowed them to build their lives and careers and families with intention. Abortion has shaped families who live comfortably at the top, and lack of access to abortion has denied many poor families the ability to shape their own futures. Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a personal choice. But suggesting that abortion is a private matter between doctor and patient mistakenly characterizes it as an individual issue, as opposed to a fundamental human rights issue and a matter of justice. Abortion bans are one of many strategies the right is employing in a much larger project to disenfranchise poor people and people of color. This is also about controlling women and their bodies, of course, though ultimately wealthy women will always be able to buy their freedom. The question of when life begins is deeply personal, and there will never be anything approaching consensus on the matter. But the abortion debate isn’t about when life begins: It’s about how much money a pregnant person needs in order to purchase their own self-determination, and about who our society deems worthy of freedom. The people fighting to ban abortion aren’t trying to eliminate abortion—if they were, they’d be advocating for medically accurate sex education, insurance plans that cover birth control, and widely accessible emergency contraception. If abortion opponents truly believed that abortions become increasingly evil as pregnancy progresses, they wouldn’t be trying to ban abortions at six weeks and implement waiting periods designed to make it impossible for those without means to terminate their pregnancies as soon as possible. The most compelling argument that abortion is health care is the fact that the lack of abortion access is a rapidly escalating public health crisis, one that will only continue to deepen existing contours of inequality. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world, and in some places that rate is four times higher for black women. Abortion is health care, but we do not live in a country that frames health care as an inalienable human right. The fight for abortion rights is a structural power struggle, with clear winners and losers.