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Inclusive Language Guide - Oxfam Policy & Practice
Inclusive Language Guide - Oxfam Policy & Practice
Language has the power to reinforce or deconstruct systems of power that maintain poverty, inequality and suffering. As we are making commitments to decolonization in practice, it is important that we do not forget the role of language and communications in the context of inequality. The Inclusive Language Guide is a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end.
·policy-practice.oxfam.org·
Inclusive Language Guide - Oxfam Policy & Practice
Laura Wagner: It's Not About Hypocrisy (Defector)
Laura Wagner: It's Not About Hypocrisy (Defector)
Is this “right-wing hypocrisy,” or is it the right’s coherent vision for enforcing a very specific social order? What is it going to take for liberals to understand that “hypocrisy” is not a charge for which right-wing authoritarians must answer at the risk of losing clout, but a tenet of and testament to their power? It’s really not complicated: Dahm and his ilk don’t care about protecting children; they care about “protecting” certain children from certain things (like books and drag queens) that they consider threats to a white supremacist patriarchal social order. That’s it! With this understanding, what’s even the point of pretending to debate a creep like Dahm on policy particulars?
ointing out so-called right-wing hypocrisy might make the Jon Stewart-watching crowd feel superior to their political foes, but it does nothing to actually build a movement capable of overcoming them. In fact, it does worse than nothing; its smugness serves to flatter the sensibilities of its liberal viewers while obscuring the way political power is built and used in this country.
Charging a person (like Dahm) or group (like Republicans) with hypocrisy, frames the issue (protecting children, for example) as something having to do with appealing to individuals’ senses of reason or conscience and ignores the existence of social and economic systems that help maintain a status quo in which children are not only murdered in their schools and turned into cheap laborers, but are in general considered property of their parents, often to their own detriment. It’s obvious but worth saying: If such problems could be solved by merely pointing out politicians' perceived hypocrisy, they would’ve been solved by now.
·defector.com·
Laura Wagner: It's Not About Hypocrisy (Defector)
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible (The Onion)
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible (The Onion)
Good journalism is about finding those stories, even when they don’t exist. It’s about asking the tough questions and ignoring the answers you don’t like, then offering misleading evidence in service of preordained editorial conclusions. In our case, endangering trans people is the lodestar that shapes our coverage. Frankly, if our work isn’t putting trans people further at risk of trauma and violence, we consider it a failure.
We stand behind our recent obsessed-seeming torrent of articles and essays on trans people, which we believe faithfully depicts their lived experiences as weird and gross. We remain dedicated to finding the angles that best frame the basic rights of the gender-nonconforming as up for debate, and we will use these same angles over and over again in hopes that this repetition makes them suffer. As journalists, it is our obligation to entertain any and all pseudoscience that gives bigotry an intellectual veneer. We must be diligent in laundering our vitriol through the posture of journalistic inquiry, and we must be allowed to fixate on the genitals.
·theonion.com·
It Is Journalism’s Sacred Duty To Endanger The Lives Of As Many Trans People As Possible (The Onion)
Andrew Paul: Relax, Google’s LaMDA chatbot is nowhere near sentient (Inverse)
Andrew Paul: Relax, Google’s LaMDA chatbot is nowhere near sentient (Inverse)
“Honestly if this system wasn’t just a stupid statistical pattern associator it would be like a sociopath, making up imaginary friends and uttering platitudes in order to sound cool,” AI developer and NYU Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus tweeted yesterday.Marcus also laid out a detailed rebuttal to Lemoine’s sentience claims in a blog post, dispelling widespread misassumptions regarding the nature of “self-awareness” and our tendency to ascribe it to clever computer programs capable of mimicry. “To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn’t,” he writes. “It’s just an illusion, in the grand history of ELIZA, a 1965 piece of software that pretended to be a therapist (managing to fool some people into thinking it was human), and Eugene Goostman, a wise-cracking 13-year-old-boy impersonating chatbot that won a scaled-down version of the Turing Test.”“Six decades (from Eliza to LaMDA) have taught us that ordinary humans just aren’t that good at seeing through the ruses of AI,” Marcus told me over Twitter DM. “Experts would (or should) want to know how an allegedly sentient system operates, what it knows about the world, what it represents internally, and how it processes the information that comes in.”
Unfortunately, all the theatrics and shallow coverage do a disservice to the actual problematic consequences that can (and will) arise from LaMDA and similar AI software. If this kind of chatbot can fool even a handful of Google’s supposedly expert employees, then what that kind of impact can that technology have on a more general populace? AI impersonations of humans lend themselves to all sorts of scam potentials, con jobs, and misinformation. Something like LaMDA won’t end up imprisoning us all in the Matrix, but it can conceivably convince you that it’s your mom who needs your Social Security number for keeping the family’s records up-to-date. That alone is enough to make us wary of the humanity (or lack thereof) at the other end of the chat line.
Then there are the very serious, well-documented issues regarding built-in human biases and prejudices that plague so many of Big Tech’s rapidly advancing AI systems. These are problems that the industry — and, by extension, the public — are grappling with at this very moment, and they must be properly addressed before we even begin to approach the realms of artificial sentience. The day may or may not come when when AI make solid cases for their personal rights beyond simply responding in the affirmative, but until then, it’s as important as it is ironic that we don’t get let our emotions cloud our logic and judgment calls. Humans are fallible enough as it is, we don’t need clever computer programs making that any worse.
·inverse.com·
Andrew Paul: Relax, Google’s LaMDA chatbot is nowhere near sentient (Inverse)
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
For the record, this is a remarkably mediocre song. I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible song, though it really flirts with terribleness. No, it’s got some basics down: it (mostly) rhymes in all the right places (though that last couplet is a real doozy), it uses a chord progression (I-V-vi-IV) that is enshrined in more hits from the western pop canon than I care to count. But I think you’d agree that there’s something lacking, beyond the little obvious glitches — the missed or repeated rhymes, the grammatical mistakes, the overall banality of the content. Getting the song down, I had to fight every impulse to better the song, to make it resolve where it doesn’t otherwise, to massage out the weirdnesses. I wanted to stay as true to its creator’s vision as possible, and at the end, there’s just something missing. I want to say that ChatGPT lacks intuition. That’s one thing an AI can’t have, intuition. It has data, it has information, but it has no intuition. One thing I learned from this exercise: so much of songwriting, of writing writing, of creating, comes down to the creator’s intuition, the subtle changes that aren’t written as a rule anywhere — you just know it to be right, to be true. That’s one thing an AI can’t glean from the internet.
·colinmeloy.substack.com·
Colin Meloy: I had ChatGPT write a Decemberists song
Jenn Schiffer: how to grow a web presence, 1/n
Jenn Schiffer: how to grow a web presence, 1/n
the places we grew our careers and social circles on have all been damaged beyond repair by men who, despite having billions of dollars, look like they have the suds and the emotional intelligence of a paper straw 5 minutes after it has entered my iced latte. they're surrounded by yes-men with less-money who are about half as smart as the character i played in my early satire days. i truly hope they all find the immortality they seek, and also that they then get trapped in quicksand, respectfully.
·livelaugh.blog·
Jenn Schiffer: how to grow a web presence, 1/n
Guy Hoffman: Why I Don't Care if Students Use GPT
Guy Hoffman: Why I Don't Care if Students Use GPT
“It's like a calculator” is a common quote I hear about ChatGPT. As if the idea is what matters and writing it down is just a necessary evil or technical chore that needs to be done by someone or somecode. But anyone who writes for a living knows that in many ways writing is thinking. The process of translating vague ideas into a coherent text helps structure ideas and make connections. The time spent editing and re-editing weeds out important ideas from marginal ones. The effort to address an imaginary reader, to clarify things to them, helps eliminate unnecessary style decisions. Finding your own voice helps you understand yourself and your contribution to the world better.
·write.guyhoffman.com·
Guy Hoffman: Why I Don't Care if Students Use GPT
Nitish Pahwa: A New Netflix Hit Has Fans in Ecstasy, but They’re Missing Its Troubling Subtext (Slate)
Nitish Pahwa: A New Netflix Hit Has Fans in Ecstasy, but They’re Missing Its Troubling Subtext (Slate)
Let’s start with the religious iconography. This is hardcore Hinduism through and through, an apt representation for a country that’s employed authoritarian tactics to empower violent Hindu nationalism and transition to a de facto ethnocratic state. [...] The Rama iconography later in the film, added to Bheem’s submissiveness, makes this narrative choice seem more pointed: Commemoration of the Ramayana has been one of the bloodiest flashpoints for Islamophobic violence in India, with Hindu nationalists having destroyed a Mughal-era mosque that was supposedly located at Rama’s birthplace. The Rama temple now constructed in its place is a symbol for the belief that India should be a holy land for Hindus; it’s even been put on billboards in Times Square. It’s likewise worth noting that the Vande Mataram custom flag that appears in essential scenes like the boy’s rescue—protecting Bheem from the train’s flames, for one—was in part designed by Veer Savarkar, the father of Hindu nationalism.
·slate.com·
Nitish Pahwa: A New Netflix Hit Has Fans in Ecstasy, but They’re Missing Its Troubling Subtext (Slate)
Ed Zitron: Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
Ed Zitron: Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
Most if not all of the people let go from these companies could be retained, but corporations - and in particular tech companies - have consciously colluded with each other to push a false narrative about how they are the victims of an economy that continues to enrich them. And that’s because their leadership isn’t judged by how well they treat their employees, but rather by how they protect the interests of their shareholders. And really that’s what’s happening. Everybody is laying people off, and thus it’s an easy time for huge corporations to justify doing so based on vague economic forces. This is a coordinated public relations campaign to trade human capital for working capital. It’s either that or these executives are utterly ignorant of the economic forces affecting their companies. This isn’t a bug, but rather a feature of modern market capitalism. Tech execs are playing from a rulebook that’s fundamentally devoid of empathy, compassion, and respect for human beings. By the standards of shareholders, they’re doing their job. But from any moral standpoint, they deserve to be kicked into the sun. --- Mr. Pichai appears to have plenty of money to have fun with - as all of these CEOs do, because they are being paid so much that they have entirely left the realm of human concerns. Even if it’s something far more craven - that profits are fine, and they are just using this as an excuse to cut “excess” - layoffs do not work. They make the company less profitable and the remaining employees less effective. Imagine if a single employee made this big of a screw-up. Would they be retained? Would they survive? No. They would be shitcanned in seconds and told that it was a “difficult decision.” Here’s an easy decision: fire Sundar Pichai, fire Satya Nadella, fire Doug Herrington, and fire any executive that has to lay off hundreds or thousands of people because they got too excited about making their shareholders money.
·ez.substack.com·
Ed Zitron: Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
100 People: Statistics
100 People: Statistics
86 would be able to read and write; 14 would not 7 would have a college degree 40 would have an Internet connection 78 people would have a place to shelter them from the wind and the rain, but 22 would not 1 would be dying of starvation 11 would be undernourished 22 would be overweight 91 would have access to safe drinking water 9 people would have no clean, safe water to drink
·100people.org·
100 People: Statistics
Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, Kellen Browning, Kate Conger: Elon Musk’s Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave (NYT)
Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, Kellen Browning, Kate Conger: Elon Musk’s Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave (NYT)
Employees were also having difficulties figuring out who was still on staff, and what areas of infrastructure needed more support to keep things up and running. One worker who wanted to resign said she had spent two days looking for her manager, whose identity she no longer knew because so many people had quit in the days beforehand. After finally finding her direct supervisor, she tendered her resignation. The next day, her supervisor also quit. Others were spending hours trying to track down which teams they were on. Some said they were asked to oversee duties they had never handled before. The changes were occurring in a near total information vacuum internally, employees said. Twitter’s internal communications staff has been laid off or left, and workers said they were looking outward for information from media articles. Mr. Musk has increasingly downplayed the role of traditional media over the past few months, citing Twitter as one of the best platforms for the rise in “citizen journalism,” as he put it.
·nytimes.com·
Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, Kellen Browning, Kate Conger: Elon Musk’s Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave (NYT)
Sarah Mesle: The Heirs and Their Hair: On HBO’s “House of the Dragon” (LA Review of Books)
Sarah Mesle: The Heirs and Their Hair: On HBO’s “House of the Dragon” (LA Review of Books)
I think the problem is that the show uses my feminism to try to make me root for Rhaenyra’s succession, instead of taking my feminism seriously enough to really write a show about why feminism matters. Misogyny drives the plot. But the show can’t really decide how much misogyny matters to being a person in this world.
·lareviewofbooks.org·
Sarah Mesle: The Heirs and Their Hair: On HBO’s “House of the Dragon” (LA Review of Books)
Jamelle Bouie: What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root? (NY Times)
Jamelle Bouie: What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root? (NY Times)
If it were up to the national majority, American democracy would most likely be in a stronger place, not the least because Donald Trump might not have become president. Our folk beliefs about American government notwithstanding, the much-vaunted guardrails and endlessly invoked norms of our political system have not secured our democracy as much as they’ve facilitated the efforts of those who would degrade and undermine it. Majority rule is not perfect but rule by a narrow, reactionary minority — what we face in the absence of serious political reform — is far worse. And much of our fear of majorities, the legacy of a founding generation that sought to restrain the power of ordinary people, is unfounded. It is not just that rule of the majority is, as Abraham Lincoln said, “the only true sovereign of a free people”; it is also the only sovereign that has reliably worked to protect those people from the deprivations of hierarchy and exploitation. If majoritarian democracy, even at its most shackled, is a better safeguard against tyranny and abuse than our minoritarian institutions, then imagine how we might fare if we let majoritarian democracy actually take root in this country. The liberty of would-be masters might suffer. The liberty of ordinary people, on the other hand, might flourish.
·nytimes.com·
Jamelle Bouie: What if We Let Majoritarian Democracy Take Root? (NY Times)
Alex Zielinski: Wheeler, Ryan Unveil Unfunded Proposal to Criminalize Homelessness (Portland Mercury)
Alex Zielinski: Wheeler, Ryan Unveil Unfunded Proposal to Criminalize Homelessness (Portland Mercury)
Mayor Wheeler announced a much-anticipated proposal to ban homeless camping in Portland at a Friday press conference. This idea, which has been hinted at in various forms for more than a year, follows a growing drumbeat of vitriol from upset Portland property owners, businesses, and other members of the public about the impact that visible homeless camping has on the community—and its reputation. “Simply put, we can no longer tolerate the intolerable,” said City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who co-sponsored the proposal outlined by Wheeler on Friday. “It's time to take some risks to get our city out of this ditch.” Yet, without the needed boost of significant funding, clear support from other government agencies, and interested contractors, the proposal appears little more than a plan to create an eventual plan.
·portlandmercury.com·
Alex Zielinski: Wheeler, Ryan Unveil Unfunded Proposal to Criminalize Homelessness (Portland Mercury)
Alex Zielinski: The Myth of "Service Resistant" People Living Outside (
Alex Zielinski: The Myth of "Service Resistant" People Living Outside (
“Calling people ‘service resistant’ helps distance us from responsibility,” says Marc Jolin, director of the county and city's Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS). “If someone says they’re not interested in services, it doesn’t mean they want to be homeless. It should make us ask, ‘Are we offering the right services?’”
·portlandmercury.com·
Alex Zielinski: The Myth of "Service Resistant" People Living Outside (
Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
The problem is, Kanye behaves as if the only real and brave truth tellers today are conservatives with money. He acts as if the rich right wing holds a monopoly on criticisms of the Democratic party or liberal activists. This ignores a host of progressives and radicals – people like Cornel West, Nick Estes, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Mariame Kaba, Aja Monet, the Rev Jeremiah Wright, and too many artists and grassroots organizers to name who criticise the liberal establishment more fiercely than the right and with commitments to end oppression. In fact, entire progressive and radical traditions exist where people of all races offer vigorous critiques of the status quo with surgical precision. We need fewer “free thinkers” and more critical thinkers who ask about these traditions and find their places within them. The question for me is whether billionaire Kanye can ever really know about these robust traditions. Not because he doesn’t already know or will never learn about them, but because to know them is to also learn their critiques of gross wealth accumulation, Black capitalism, desire for imperial leadership, and so much more of what Kanye currently represents. Supporting free thinkers with weak conservative analysis does not threaten his status, land, antisemitic views or bank account.
·theguardian.com·
Derecka Purnell: Kanye West keeps moving further and further to the right. Why? (The Guardian)
Accidental gap (Wikipedia)
Accidental gap (Wikipedia)
In linguistics an accidental gap, also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern, is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite being theoretically permissible by the grammatical rules of that language.
·en.wikipedia.org·
Accidental gap (Wikipedia)
IE11 end of support countdown
IE11 end of support countdown
this is a fun little app that counts down to the end of support of Internet Explorer 11 + a few more features like a list of articles/websites that tell you why you should stop supporting IE11 and a list of websites that already dropped support.
·death-to-ie11.com·
IE11 end of support countdown
Confessions of a Scambaiter, Part I (Global Anti-scam Org)
Confessions of a Scambaiter, Part I (Global Anti-scam Org)
Scambaiting is the action of conversing with a scammer for a prolonged period of time so as to distract him/her from further scamming. --- I will admit that scambaiting began as a form of vengeance. A few weeks fresh from my scam discovery D-Day, the urge to seek some form of justice still raged through my veins. I began with language apps, then stemmed into Facebook and dating apps. In the beginning, the goal was only to waste the scammer’s time. After a while, it became a form of dark therapy, allowing me to relish over and over that I had “played” the “player” -- I was in on the charade before the scammer could even begin his charade. There was no sympathy for scammers, just a burning desire to know why they would scam sincere and kind people. I had heard that some scammers were human trafficked into their job, but I couldn’t believe it. It was to me another ploy from the scammer playbook -- engender sympathy from victims to maximize profits. My perspective has shifted since then to a better understanding of the industry, one in which things are not totally black and white. I’ve also gained a better perspective of what can be lied about and what can’t. The following tales highlight some of the most memorable moments since I started scambaiting last August. I hope to put a face behind the people involved in scamming and shed light on human trafficking. […] Luckily for Daddy, his workplace is kind. All employees receive a minimum wage base pay, plus a 16% bonus for successful scams. They live in a relatively clean dormitory, and no one is beaten or hurt. Workers may go out freely on certain days, being tourists at the Burj Khalifa, shopping for groceries, or visiting fresh fruit farms. The employees, most of whom have likely never before left their home country, overall appear to be enjoying their scam life. This can be juxtaposed next to the weekly influx of victims we receive in our victims group, many of whom are in tears or suicidal. Many of whom lost their life savings. […] Recently, Daddy showed off his $21k bonus from scamming an individual out of nearly $138k. He was so excited he could barely sleep for days.
·globalantiscam.org·
Confessions of a Scambaiter, Part I (Global Anti-scam Org)
Max Read: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Max Read: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
These texts are usually the lead-in to romance scams that usually end with fake crypto deposits, written so as to imply wealth and success on the part of the scammer, who is often an abused and captive worker operating multiple phones and attempting to con several people from a compound operated by shady gambling rings somewhere in Southeast Asia. […] Now what? It seems likely we can expect this species of pig-butchering scam to eventually fade into the background, thanks to victims getting wise and authorities cracking down. An interview with the subject of the GASO rescue mission suggests that the scam rings’ operations in Europe and North America, at least, are not as profitable as they’d hoped…
·maxread.substack.com·
Max Read: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
Robin James: SCOTUS to US: There is no such thing as civil society
Robin James: SCOTUS to US: There is no such thing as civil society
Civil society was something that existed among white Europeans and which was supposedly lacking among indigeneous peoples across the rest of the globe. Because personhood and all the rights that go with that status were thought to exist only in civil society and not in the state of nature, it was then no violation to colonize land thought to be in the state of nature or to treat people thought to be in that state as property. Social contract theory used the idea of “civil society” to justify the colonial/racial project of excluding non-white people from personhood. […] By de-funding public education, rendering public space inherently more risky, and eliminating the right to privacy in one’s sexual and reproductive choices, these three decisions all eliminate the existence of a key element of classically liberal social ontology: the civil private sphere (i.e., the realm of civil privacy, the private sector, etc.). Put simply, they’re reworking the way the U.S. Constitution models the relation between public and private from the classically liberal model the framers used in the 18th century into a neoliberal one premised on the idea that, as Margaret Thatcher infamously put it, “there is no such thing as society.” In this neoliberal model, there is no civil society (e.g., public space, the realm of individual civil privacy, etc.) and the state only exists to enforce the boundaries of the patriarchal racial capitalist framing of the domestic private sphere.
·its-her-factory.com·
Robin James: SCOTUS to US: There is no such thing as civil society
David Bentley Hart: Three Cheers for Socialism (Commonweal Magazine)
David Bentley Hart: Three Cheers for Socialism (Commonweal Magazine)
In the late modern world something like socialism is the only possible way of embodying Christian love in concrete political practices. --- Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy? […] …where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid. […] States depend upon capital for revenues, material goods, and political patronage. Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive. Without corporations, the modern state would lack the resources necessary to perpetuate its supremacy over every sphere of life.
·commonwealmagazine.org·
David Bentley Hart: Three Cheers for Socialism (Commonweal Magazine)
The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial
The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial
All of this — the bad-faith scrutiny, the obsession with minor discrepancies, the confidence that vast conspiracies can be discovered on Google — is instantly recognizable from previous explosions of internet-enabled misogynistic bullying. The “body language experts” that swarmed around Heard spent years applying the same junk science to Amanda Knox, Meghan Markle, and Carole Baskin. The gremlins who targeted Anita Sarkeesian during Gamergate pretended to be offended by the (extremely minor) technical errors in her videos rather than her presence in their boy’s-only treehouse. The best evidence for the motivations behind the anti-Heard campaign is that while her every slip-up has been dissected ad nauseum, Depp’s far more numerous and consequential discrepancies have been all but ignored. His testimony that he was too high on opioids to attack Heard during the airplane incident, for example, contradicts his own text messages (“angry, aggro injun in a fuckin blackout”) from the day after. His absurd denials of his drug problem belie his own contemporaneous communications and bolster Heard’s account. In the final week of the Virginia trial, he bafflingly claimed that he hadn’t sent text messages from his own phone — I guess someone hacked into it and sent texts that sound exactly like him? […] Heard is not a perfect victim and has never claimed to be. In her own testimony, she admitted to engaging in screaming matches, fighting back, and insulting Depp in the final year of the relationship. The judge in the UK trial said there was probably some truth in Depp’s accusation that Heard was condescending about his drug use, something that triggered his sense of internalized shame and, ultimately, his rage. The psychologist who saw them in 2015 said both partners had poor communication skills and weren’t able to de-escalate fights or have productive conflicts. This is all damning evidence against Heard and I see no reason not to believe it. But remember: The relationship at the heart of this case was one in which the smaller, less powerful partner has evidence of at least 10 serious incidents of violence. Black eyes, bloody lips, trashed homes, chunks of ripped-out hair on the carpet. WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT WHETHER SHE WAS ANNOYING SOMETIMES? […] If you entertain the possibility that Heard has not concocted an elaborate hoax but is in fact an actual domestic abuse victim, having an emotional reaction when her husband shows up and merrily announces that he has broken his promise to her — a broken promise which may put her safety at risk — her actions suddenly make more sense. […] There is almost no evidence that the op-ed had any effect on Depp’s career. Over the previous decade, Depp had released a string of high-profile bombs (The Rum Diary, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai, Dark Shadows — I haven’t even heard of most of these) and had been the subject of numerous articles documenting his dimming star power. For years, set leakers reported that he showed up late and drunk and needed an earpiece to remember his lines (Depp says he used it to listen to music). […] In hindsight, the verdict came down the minute the judge allowed the case to be televised. Jurors weren’t sequestered or sheltered from the internet in any way, meaning they were likely exposed to the same bad-faith memes and out-of-context clips as everyone else. Plus, this case has been swirling around the internet for years, making an impartial jury an impossibility in the first place. One man was allowed to stay in the jury pool after revealing a text from his wife that read, “Amber is psychotic.” I have no idea what happens next, but I do know that Depp’s unbelievably cynical strategy to discredit his ex-wife’s abuse claims (Jessica Winter called it “a high-budget, general-admission form of revenge porn”) was a resounding success. Heard is now one of the most hated figures in America. Even if she overturns the decision on appeal, she will likely never be cast in a major Hollywood role again — what studio wants to risk a hostile internet campaign before they even start shooting? Depp’s core claim — women advance their careers by accusing powerful men of abuse — doesn’t even hold up to the evidence of his own abuse accusation. Heard is ruined; Depp is in pre-production for his next role; other alleged abusers are already copying his legal strategy. And outside the courtroom, America’s march backward toward the 1950s continues apace.
·readthepresentage.com·
The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial
rzashakeri/beautify-github-profile
rzashakeri/beautify-github-profile
This repository helps you to have a more beautiful and attractive github profile, and you can access a complete set of tools and guides for beautifying your github profile. 🪄 ⭐
·github.com·
rzashakeri/beautify-github-profile
Rusty Foster: What Are You Willing to Do? (Today in Tabs)
Rusty Foster: What Are You Willing to Do? (Today in Tabs)
The truth is, I don’t know what to do. I hugged my own third grader goodbye this morning and sent her off to school. The middle school she’ll attend in three years is remote today because they discovered “threats” in a bathroom. We live in a country where statistically, until age 19, she is most likely to die of a gunshot wound. So what am I willing to do? Anything.
·todayintabs.com·
Rusty Foster: What Are You Willing to Do? (Today in Tabs)
Devin Oktar Yalkin: How Ellen won, and then lost, a generation of viewers (LA Times)
Devin Oktar Yalkin: How Ellen won, and then lost, a generation of viewers (LA Times)
Ellen DeGeneres did not “betray” queer people. Such a claim presumes that she owes us, or speaks for us, and that impossible burden — one she has faced since she came out on “Ellen” — is part of what landed her in this mess in the first place. Still, I cannot help but feel exasperation at her defensive crouch when she’s questioned about Bush, or Hart, or her responsibility for the toxic work environment on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” I cannot help but roll my eyes at the self-pitying strain that runs through “Relatable,” her scrupulously unilluminating 2018 Netflix stand-up special, in which she professes, or performs, frustration at the indignities of the celebrity stratosphere. […] As in her interview with Hart, her segment on Bush, her farewell announcements on “Today” and with Oprah, the Dakota Johnson moment inadvertently expressed a central feature of modern American life, and of DeGeneres’ own post-aughts crises: that the very rich and the very famous, the odd Dolly Parton excepted, are in solidarity mostly with themselves. […] For DeGeneres, who built her career on playing versions of “Ellen,” by appearing, as a queer woman in a patriarchal society, not only “normal” but ordinary, this evolution couldn’t help but hold symbolic resonance. Because “progress” is not an achievement but an action, and to let up the fight is already to lose it. From “Don’t Say Gay”-style legislation in the U.S. and the prevalence of transphobia in U.K. media to the deadly threat to queers in Russia and its occupied territories, LGBTQ people are engaged in a tug of war on a tectonic scale, struggling ceaselessly just to keep our footing. It does not seem so outrageous to me, in this context, to expect the most prominent LGBTQ American to pull in the same direction, or at least to accept that the price of holding the vanishing center is becoming a little less beloved. It’s not as if DeGeneres has been driven into hiding. She simply forfeited her position as the queer celebrity everyone — me, my mother, George W. Bush — could agree on, because in a time and place of such terrifying revanchism, it is not enough to be agreeable. For those of us frightened by the change she once represented being so swiftly rolled back, DeGeneres’ fumbling attempt to keep her distance turns out to be the one choice we couldn’t forgive, and will not forget. When we lost Ellen, she lost us.
·latimes.com·
Devin Oktar Yalkin: How Ellen won, and then lost, a generation of viewers (LA Times)
howisFelix.today? · Felix Krause
howisFelix.today? · Felix Krause
An enormous amount of personal data and 'quantified self' information that this person has kept via trackers and manual input for years. Source: https://github.com/KrauseFx/FxLifeSheet
·howisfelix.today·
howisFelix.today? · Felix Krause