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When you learn white people history in white people schools your whole life, one of the most poisonous threads running through it is this confident, implicit trust in institutions. This idea that the government, while imperfect, is nonethless reliably on the side of Good For All. Most white people learn about the Civil Rights Era only through a few carefully-selected MLK quotes misinterpreted as a call for niceness. If you're about the Black Panthers at all, it's often with an air of danger and menace, even now. So I didn't learn about Assata Shakur and the Panther 28, I didn't learn about Fred Hampton and COINTELPRO, I didn't learn about Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover and the Southern Strategy and the FBI's strategic attacks on Freedom Riders, until I was in my thirties. we as white people have NO LIVED CONTEXT for what it means to grow up as Black in America, where the entire system of law enforcement is not just not there to help, but is actively at war with you, and carefully rewriting the narrative to make the victims look like the threat.

This is a tool for anonymizing photographs taken at protests. It will remove identifying metadata (Exif data) from photographs, and also allow you to selectively blur parts of the image to cover faces and other identifiable information.

If the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button? --- The truth is, genuine allyship is not kindness, it is not a charitable act, nor is it even a personal commitment to hold anti-racist ideals – it is a fall from grace. Real allyship enacted by White Americans, with a clear objective to make equitable the lived experiences of individuals across racial lines, means a willingness to lose things. Not just the extra $50 in one’s monthly budget by way of donating to an organization working towards racial justice. I mean palpable, incalculable loss. The loss of the charmed life associated with being a White person in America. Refusing a pay raise at one’s job and insisting that it be reallocated to co-workers of color who are undoubtedly being underpaid. The loss of potentially every close relationship with other White friends and family members who refuse to acknowledge or amend their behaviors that reinforce systemic oppression. The loss of bodily safety, by way of physically intervening when violence is being inflicted on to Black bodies. This notion, one of true allyship, extends so far beyond the purview of contemporary White engagement with racial justice that it seems fanciful; almost laughable. I hardly ever allow myself the mental space to contemplate it. To wonder, if the White people in my life could hit a button and instantly remove the privileges afforded to them along racial lines, would they hit that button? Would they truly want to wake up tomorrow, in an America in which my life mattered just as much as theirs, if it came at the cost of all they have come to know and enjoy in the vein of White privilege? To expect true allyship from the White people in my life would be to ask them to be willing to sacrifice the thing that they covet most, though they may never be truly conscious of it: their Whiteness. So, I don’t. I respond to each message I receive with “thank you for thinking of me”, place my phone face downward on my desk, and prepare for another day of navigating White America.

The emergence of house music is due to Black women in spite of the racism and sexism that they faced.

This list was included on the sleeve on Panda Bear’s album ‘Person Pitch.’

I think this is why the "cancel culture" moral panic gets under my skin so much. *So* many of Americans' false unof people and events come from the fact that the media was traditionally run by a tiny number of gatekeepers.

From January to the end of June, over 500,000 people died of confirmed cases of Covid-19. In order to demonstrate the magnitude of the pandemic, James Beckwith made a time lapse map of each Covid-19 death. “Each country is represented by a tone and an expanding blip on the map when a death from Covid-19 is recorded. Each day is 4 seconds long, and at the top of the screen is the date and a counter showing the total numbers of deaths. Every country that has had a fatality is included.” As was the case with the pandemic, the video starts slow but soon enough the individual sounds and blips build to a crescendo, a cacophony of death.

A font pairing app that helps you match Google Fonts. You can place the fonts on top of each other, side by side, or in the same line.

*10 Modern CSS layout and sizing techniques that highlight just how robust and impactful a single-line of styling code can be.

Over the course of three decades and with 80 million records sold, Enya has morphed into more than musician: She's her own adjective. What makes her music — and the mysterious woman behind it — appealing to so many? Anne Helen Petersen visits the reclusive singer in Ireland.

Checkboxland is a JavaScript library for rendering anything as HTML checkboxes. You can use it to display animations, text, and arbitrary data. It also supports plugins, so you can build more powerful APIs on top of it. Checkboxland is dependency-free, framework-agnostic, and fun! 🙃

Somebody added the slide guitar wolf whistle after every line in Steve Miller Band's "The Joker" and the result is hilarious!

Hear Steve Miller's 1973 classic enlivened considerably by the addition of dozens more wolf whistles

That’s right: 49 slide guitar wolf whistles in one track

I posted this in mltshp too!

I got on Reddit.

There are 49 wolf whistles in a new parody version on YouTube that's encouraging donations to the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.

What Microsoft could have learned from veteran botmakers on Twitter.

Key was on the boat waiting to see if the British would release his friend when he observed the bloody battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore on Sept. 13, 1814. America lost the battle but managed to inflict heavy casualties on the British in the process. This inspired Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner” right then and there, but no one remembers that he wrote a full third stanza decrying the former slaves who were now working for the British army.

Not since the sixties and seventies, with the black power movement, flowering of Afrocentric scholarship, and debut of Alex Haley’s Roots, novel and mini-series, has there been so much popular interest in the history of slavery.

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority” and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay

If all I said was “suck my dick,” you can’t arrest me for that. Before the video even started, I asked him for like five minutes what the reason for handcuffing me was. So I was like: “You can’t hear me? Then I’m going to sing it to you.” The words just came. And I already know, if this went to your supervisor, [sings] you about to lose your job. I know my rights and I know the law.

After a terrifying spring spent in lockdown and a summer of protests in the streets, things are going to get a lot worse in the fall. --- As millions of people experience a sudden collapse of their income at the very moment their landlords are allowed to start kicking them out, other bills will also come due. Payments on millions of paused student loans will begin again at the beginning of October; the more than 4 million homeowners who received a six-month pause on their mortgage after April’s mass layoffs will need to start making payments again at the end of October. […] You might have noticed a few major things — like, well, the coronavirus pandemic — missing from this equation. If we’re really lucky, we won’t experience a nasty second wave of infections in the fall and early winter, spurring new rounds of attempted lockdowns shortly after the economic plane crashes into the mountain — lockdowns that will once again disproportionately affect Black people and people with low incomes who can't safely work from home. Fingers crossed on that one.

Though it remains to be seen whether these changes will be catalytic or merely cosmetic in fighting institutional racism and police violence, the swiftness of their accumulation has been remarkable—and demonstrates how quickly changes can be made when those in power have the will to make them.

It sometimes seems that automated bots are taking over social media and driving human discourse. But some (real) researchers aren’t so sure. --- Defining the bot is a tricky problem; technically, it could be any automated account, like a news aggregator, or amplification software, like Hootsuite. Mr. Kazemi found many bots tweeting about Covid-19, including neighborhood health clinics using marketing software to post daily pandemic P.S.A.s about washing your hands. He also found that humans were often mistaken for bots. Consider the “grandpa effect,” as he called it: people who were mistaken for bots because they used social media in “uncool or gauche” ways, he said. Users fond of hitting the share button on news articles also resulted in false positives. This led Mr. Kazemi to wonder whether Botometer should be renamed “Normiemeter.” He tweeted: “Can you imagine the headlines? ‘50% of accounts tweeting about Covid are normies.’”

Useful for estimating the number of people at a protest, rally, concert, etc. This tool helps you estimate (and fact-check) the maximum number of people standing in a given area. Click on the map to start delimiting the area. Copy the URL to share the result.

Create cards and draw lines between them. Kinopio is the visual thinking tool for new ideas and hard problems.

Turns out letting "efficient" monopolies control our food supply was a terrible idea. --- “If you pull out one little thing in that specialized, centralized, consolidated chain, then everything crashes,” said Mary Hendrickson, a rural sociology professor at University of Missouri. “Now we have an animal welfare catastrophe, an environmental catastrophe, a farmer catastrophe, and a worker catastrophe altogether, and we can trace a lot of this back to the pursuit of efficiency.”

Iceberg is a beautiful, flexible writing editor for crafting posts with the WordPress block editor. Iceberg allows you to write within the WordPress block editor in a way that feels much more natural than working with “blocks”. Our goal is not to remove blocks, but rather to deemphasize them – and any non-essential elements within the editor – to promote a focus on writing.

Misrepresenting the process of European colonization of North America, making everyone an immigrant, serves to preserve the “official story” of a mostly benign and benevolent USA, and to mask the fact that the pre-US independence settlers, were, well, settlers, colonial setters, just as they were in Africa and India, or the Spanish in Central and South America. The United States was founded as a settler state, and an imperialistic one from its inception (“manifest destiny,” of course). The settlers were English, Welsh, Scots, Scots-Irish, and German, not including the huge number of Africans who were not settlers. Another group of Europeans who arrived in the colonies also were not settlers or immigrants: the poor, indentured, convicted, criminalized, kidnapped from the working class (vagabonds and unemployed artificers), as Peter Linebaugh puts it, many of who opted to join indigenous communities.