Lazy linking

First of all, I have created a bluesky account – feel free to follow me. I don’t know how active it will be, but I will try to give it a chance.

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In These Times has reprinted two works by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison on Fascism and Censorship

In this reprint of “Peril” and “Racism and Fascism,” Toni Morrison warns of the creative depths of fascism’s reach.

From 1977 to 1979, June Jordan and Toni Morrison were both a part of The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in a New York City apartment to eat and drink together while discussing liberation. Whether addressing genocide, imperialism or the American literary establishment, the writers in the group, which included Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, saw their work as a means to make interventions against dominant narratives of colonialism and oppression.

Their words ring prescient.

In ​“Peril” (2008) and ​“Racism and Fascism” (1995), reprinted below, Morrison recognizes what the creep of fascism looks like, particularly the censorship of dissent. Found here, in an excerpt of the essay ​“Life After Lebanon” (1984), Jordan reflects on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (funded by American taxes, of course), the backlash she faced after publicly condemning it and the fearless women who supported her in spite of it all. And in an excerpt of ​“Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams” (1986), Jordan underscores the dire need for coalition-building across differences.

The article (and the excerpt I copied) also links to June Jordan’s works

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In the upcoming times, some of this might be useful for people

Anonymous — The Uber-Secret Handbook Version 3.0

This is not an endorsement of Anonymous, a group too undefined for me to have an overall opinion about, but rather a reference to a bunch of advice and practices that can help you stay safer on the internet in a changing future.

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Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’

Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.

It is early days yet, but Bluesky seems like they take moderation seriously, and they allow you to filter messages on a much more fine-grained level than Twitter ever did.

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Concern Grows Around Billionaire Peter Thiel’s Period-Tracking App

Peter Thiel — the billionaire venture capitalist, Gawker destroyer and top dollar conservative campaign donor — is now backing a “femtech” app called 28, according to Vice News.

The app, created by a controversial women’s publication called Evie Magazine, claims to be a “cycle-based” nutrition and wellness program that helps women “reclaim control of [their] bodies, in the most natural way possible.”

This is important. Thiel is a big funder and backer of both Trump and the draconian policies to remove female autonomy

Neither the billionaire’s venture firm Thiel Capital nor Thiel himself are strangers to health and life science investments, but funding a fertility startup is a bit of a turn, especially at a moment during which a lot of Americans have just lost, rather than reclaimed, a significant degree of bodily autonomy.

And a closer look at the app, and those who made it, illuminates a powerful political intersection between tech, health, the wellness industry, and modern conservatism in which conspiracy theories and dubious pseudoscience are feeding a growing counter-counter-culture.

For starters, the science is sketchy. The core premise of the app appears to get women off modern birth control methods, like the hormonal pill or an intrauterine device. Its website is almost comically vague on what the alternative might be, but a focus on “cycles” suggests that it’s essentially the rhythm method, which basically entails attempting to avoid sex during ovulation. That’s fine in principle, but the rhythm method is statistically quite ineffective, with about a quarter of couples using it accidentally becoming pregnant over the average year.

The publication behind the app raises even more questions. Evie appears to be somewhat of a Cosmopolitan-meets-MindBodyGreen-meets-Tomi Lahren situation: makeup, workout, and holistic wellness tips and tricks are sandwiched between transphobic essays and anti-vaxx arguments. Its anti-birth control cycle-tracking app — which, yes, requires that women input potentially incriminating menstruation data — seems like a natural extension of that apparent mission: the rejection of a very specific version of “feminism” in order to embrace an old-meets-new version of traditional femininity.

The app seems like an attempt to gather data, while providing a pseudo-scientific method of birth control. It is easy to foresee a future where the app data will be used to force people to give birth in pregnancies which was caused by people trusting the method promoted by the app.

Thiel, and the companies he control, should never have access to any kind of health or personal data!

 

The Onion buys Infowars

This sounds like a parody article from the Onion, but it is true: The Onion wins auction for Alex Jones’ media company

Alex Jones’ media empire has been sold at auction, and the winner is The Onion. No Joke.

The satirical news outlet bought Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, backed by a group of Connecticut families. Jones said on today’s show that security has notified him he needs to vacate the premises this morning.

Proceeds of the sale will go to paying down Jones’ nearly $1.5 billion debt to families of Sandy Hook victims who won two defamation suits against him for spreading false conspiracy theories about the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., which Jones said never happened. He accused the families of being actors, faking the killing of 20 children and 6 educators, in an effort to drum up support for gun control, and Jones supporters who believed the lies threatened and harassed the families for years.

It is no secret that Alex Jones was hoping for some of this allies to buy Infowars and let him keep the brand. Alas, for him, this was not to be. And he is not taking it well:

“We’re going out like vikings with swords in our arms,” he said. He’s accusing the auction house of rigging rules against him to benefit the families.

“At the last minute, the rules of the auction changed,” he alleged yesterday. “What was going to be an open auction where you […] could offer more money and top [previous] bids, but now they’ve decided that it’ll just be sealed and there’s one bid and whoever’s the highest gets it.”

For a tough guy, he whines a lot, doesn’t he?

As to why the Onion, or rather its parent company, bought Infowars, I think I will let the explain themselves

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’

Today we celebrate a new addition to the Global Tetrahedron LLC family of brands. And let me say, I really do see it as a family. Much like family members, our brands are abstract nodes of wealth, interchangeable assets for their patriarch to absorb and discard according to the opaque whims of the market. And just like family members, our brands regard one another with mutual suspicion and malice.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

All will be revealed in due time. For now, let’s enjoy this win and toast to the continued consolidation of power and capital.

Infinite Growth Forever,

Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO

Sweet justice with a twist of satire. What more could we want?

Lazy linking

Here are a few links that might be of interest

Lady Gaga Never Spoke Out Against Rumors Claiming She’s a Man ‘Because I Didn’t Feel Like a Victim With That Lie’: ‘I’m Used to Lies Being Printed About Me’

Lady Gaga explains why she would not fight against these rumors, since she thought her fighting against them might harm someone else.

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A graph exploration method for identifying influential spreaders in complex networks

The problem of identifying the influential spreaders – the important nodes – in a real world network is of high importance due to its theoretical interest as well as its practical applications, such as the acceleration of information diffusion, the control of the spread of a disease and the improvement of the resilience of networks to external attacks. In this paper, we propose a graph exploration sampling method that accurately identifies the influential spreaders in a complex network, without any prior knowledge of the original graph, apart from the collected samples/subgraphs. The method explores the graph, following a deterministic selection rule and outputs a graph sample – the set of edges that have been crossed. The proposed method is based on a version of Rank Degree graph sampling algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments in eight real world networks by simulating the susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) and susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) epidemic models which serve as ground truth identifiers of nodes spreading efficiency. Experimentally, we show that by exploring only the 20% of the network and using the degree centrality as well as the k-core measure, we are able to identify the influential spreaders with at least the same accuracy as in the full information case, namely, the case where we have access to the original graph and in that graph, we compute the centrality measures. Finally and more importantly, we present strong evidence that the degree centrality – the degree of nodes in the collected samples – is almost as accurate as the k-core values obtained from the original graph.

An interesting paper from 2017.

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Five Russian GRU Officers and One Civilian Charged for Conspiring to Hack Ukrainian Government

Defendants Are Alleged to Have Committed Cyber Attacks in Advance of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine; Also Targeted 26 North Atlantic Treaty Organization Countries

It is the official release of the charge against Tenet and the Russian paymasters that was release a couple of weeks ago. For a good overview of the case, I recommend this article from the Columbia Journalism Review: The Tenet Media Incident

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A rare link in Danish: OPLEVET ETNISK DISKRIMINATION I DANMARK (pdf)

Denne rapport udgør den hidtil mest omfattende undersøgelse af racisme i Danmark
med udgangspunkt i oplevet diskrimination og fordomme. Mens enkeltpersoners egne
oplevelser ikke kan give et præcist billede af det faktiske omfang af diskrimination
og fordomme, så kan oplevelser i kombination med den omfangsrige forskning, der
henvises til i rapporten, tydeliggøre, at der er problemer, der skal løses.

Undersøgelsen tager udgangspunkt i voksne minoritetsetniske personer med
opvækst i Danmark – dvs. personer der enten er født i Danmark eller kommet hertil
som børn (herefter betegnet som minoritetsetniske personer). Overordnet viser
besvarelserne i undersøgelsen, at over 8 ud af 10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver,
at de har oplevet diskrimination eller fordomme inden for det seneste år. Over 6 ud af
10 minoritetsetniske personer angiver, at de har oplevelser, man som udgangspunkt
kan karakterisere som ulovlig diskrimination. For mange er der ikke tale om en enkelt
hændelse, men gentagne negative oplevelser på tværs af bl.a. arbejdsmarkedet, i det
offentlige rum og i kontakten med myndigheder.

This is a report about experienced/perceived ethnic discrimination in Denmark, made by the Danish Institute for Human Rights in 2023

Lazy linking

A few interesting reads on the internet

Pro-Trump defamation attorney Lin Wood must pay former law partners $4.5 million after defaming them as ‘criminal’ extortionists on social media

This sounds like it started out with normal stuff happening when a company split, but clearly Lin Wood have learned from Trump and started defaming his former partners

How Black female science fiction and fantasy writers are upending the narrative

Science fiction has always been a way to envision the future. Sometimes for the optimal; sometimes as the future might be if humans do not zig toward the good and just. As the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote, “the saddest aspect of life right now is that science fiction gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

Black women have always gathered knowledge faster than society writ large gathers wisdom. Thus, a Black woman science fiction — or fantasy — writer might be the most prescient writers of these genres. The field has long been run by mostly white men: the J.R.R. Tolkiens, Philip K. Dicks and George R. R. Martins of the field. But the popularity and foresight of a handful of Black female writers proves that the reading public is ready to imagine a better tomorrow, today.

What I especially love about this article is that I became aware of it because John Scalzi shared it on Threads. He is always trying to promote diversity and promote other people.

Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia

Last February, some 20 men and their wives gathered for dinner at an upscale restaurant in Spokane, Washington, for their annual Valentine’s Day celebration. The men weren’t just friends; they did community service work together. They had been featured on local television, in khakis and baseball caps, delivering 1,200 pounds of food to an area veterans’ center; they were gearing up for their next food drive, which they called Operation Hunger Smash. A few days after the holiday, the men went camping in the snow-speckled mountains outside Spokane, where they grilled rib-eyes and bacon-wrapped asparagus over a bonfire.

They also engaged in more menacing activities. They assembled regularly — sometimes wearing night-vision goggles in the dark — to practice storming buildings together with semiautomatic rifles. Their drills included using sniper rifles to shoot targets from distances of half a mile. And they belonged to a shadowy organization whose members were debating, with ever more intensity, whether they should engage in mass-scale political violence.

They were among the thousands of members of American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Its ranks included cops and convicted criminals, active-duty U.S. soldiers and small-business owners, truck drivers and health care professionals. Like other militias, AP3 has a vague but militant right-wing ideology, a pronounced sense of grievance and a commitment to armed action. It has already sought to shape American life through vigilante operations: AP3 members have “rounded up” immigrants at the Texas border, assaulted Black Lives Matter protesters and attempted to crack down on people casting absentee ballots.

It is a long read, but well worth reading. It is a important view into people who are actively trying to destroy democracy by violent means.

Did Hemingway say “write drunk, edit sober”? Nope—he preferred to write sober.

Writers love to cite Ernest Hemingway’s famous advice, “write drunk, edit sober.” But not only did he not actually say that—he practically said the opposite.

It is one of those annoying quotes that goes around, and it is nice to get it debunked

Rammstein – Angst

Rammstein has release their new album Zeit on April 29th, and at the same time they released their first single/music video Angst (fear), which I interpretate to be a comment on racist fears of “black men”.

I based my interpretation on both the lyrics and the video (especially the ending). You can see both the German lyrics and the English translations at Loudwire, which somehow completely misses the references to racism, and thinks that:

Here “Angst” tackles the age-old fictional monster the bogeyman, which is known as “The Black Man” in other cultural depictions around the world, including Germanic folklore.

Read More: Read English Translation of Lyrics to Rammstein’s ‘Angst’ | https://loudwire.com/rammstein-angst-english-translation-lyrics/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

It is extremely rare that you should only think of the naïve interpretation of a Rammstein song – they usually have layers and layers, often quite critical of the society they live in.

 

Actions have consequences – Danish politics edition

I have been out traveling for the last couple of months, so I didn’t cover this, while it was happening, but a major event happened in Danish politics.

Former Danish minister of immigration, Inger Støjberg, was impeached for illegal orders and found guilty, and now faces 60 days in jail (or more likely, in house arrest with an ankle bracelet).

Former Immigration Minister in Denmark Sentenced to Prison for Separating Couples (NY Times)

Inger Stojberg was sentenced to two months’ incarceration after being found by a court to have illegally ordered the separations of married migrant couples in which at least one person was underage.

Inger Støjberg has tried to make this case into being about protecting child brides, but this is not what the case is about at all. Rather, it was about a minister knowingly giving instructions that breaks both Danish laws and international conventions. The facts are simple, during a period in 2016, Støjberg gave instructions that Syrian refuge couples should be separated automatically if at least one of the people was under 18 years old. While it is legal for the Danish authorities to separate couples if they feel that there are good reasons for this, they are not allowed to do so without an individual evaluation of the circumstances.

Back when this happened, it was legal for Danes to get married when under 18, if they got a dispensation. This option has since been removed (in part to help give Støjberg cover when she claimed that this was to protect the young women).

As a consequence of the judgement, the Danish parliament has to evaluate whether Støjberg is worthy to be a member of the Danish Parliament (Folketinget). The debate about this is happening as I am writing this post, but it is clear that there is a majority for expelling her from the parliament. This is not permanent, as she can be re-elected after she has served her time.

Danish slavery

A bunch of bloggers on FreethoughtBlogs have decided to write blogs somewhat related to slavery or social justice on Juneteenth. This is my entry.

Growing up in Denmark, slavery as a subject was never really addressed much, and if it was, it was treated as something that either happened a long time ago, or happened outside Denmark, or was spun in such a way to show how progressive Denmark was – e.g. Denmark was the first country in Europe to ban the slave trade (more on that later).

The truth is, of course, that Denmark has a long history of slavery. During the Viking age, slavery was widespread, and historical records show that Vikings did heavy slave trading at especially the markets at Hedeby and Bolghar, near the Volga River. While Christianity reduced slavery, the Code of Jutland, from 1241 still contained rules about slaves. In order to downplay the slavery part of the Viking ages, we were taught to call them ‘thralls’ rather than slaves, and made to believe that they were more like indentured labour, which they of course weren’t (this is similar to when Southern racists try to pretend that slaves that served in mansions were treated as “part of the family”).

After the Viking ages, there was a long time where Denmark had nothing directly to do with slavery. That is, until the 17th century, where Denmark became a (minor) colonial power.

This adventure started in November 19 1620, when Tranquebar (now Tharangambadi) became a Danish trading post and fort. After this, from 1659 forward, Denmark created several trading posts and forts in what was called the Gold Coast in Africa (now part of Ghana), and between 1672 and 1733 Denmark, took over, what was know as Danish West Indies, – Saint Thomas, St. John and Saint Croix.

Together these colonies formed the backbone of the Danish involvement in slavery.

Tranquebar was a modest trading post, which doesn’t seem to have been used during slave trade, but the forts on the Gold Coast, on the other hand, were major ports and trading posts for slaves, going to the West Indies. It is estimated that 100,000 slaves passed through these forts, and on to the Caribbean. Before anyone tries to downplay the Danish involvement in the actual slave transportation, it is estimated that 80,000 of those people were transported on Danish merchant ships.

When it became clear that England was heading towards a ban of slave trading (it came in 1807), Denmark decided to give the Danish plantation owners time to prepare, and in March 1792 it was decided to ban slave trading in Danish territories – but not until 1803, and in the mean time, the slavery trade was intensified in order to bring over enough slaves, in order to create a large enough population to keep up with the needs of the plantations. Also, worth noting, the slavery trade ban only banned selling new people into slavery, it didn’t ban plantation owners from selling their current slaves, and their descendants.

In 1847, the Danish king declared that people born after July 28, 1847, were free, while people born before that date, had to serve another 12 years as slaves, before being freed. This obviously wasn’t acceptable for the slaves, and they revolted. As a direct result of the revolts, acting governor general Peter von Scholten 3 July 1848, emancipating all slaves in the Danish West Indian Islands. Something which more or less ended slavery in the Danish territories, though any Danish slaves outside the islands, would still have to serve another 11 years before being free, according to the law.

Well, that’s one hotel to avoid in New York

No, not the Trump hotel, even if that one should be avoided as well. Rather it’s the Arlo Hotel in Soho, where Keyon Harrold and his 14 year son was accosted by a white lady, who couldn’t locate her phone, and assumed Harrold’s son had stolen it. As Harrold makes clear on his Instagram story, this was handled very badly by the Hotel manager, who encouraged her behavior.

This incident should result in the woman getting charged, the hotel manager getting fired, and the Arlo Hotels appologizing and refunding the cost of the stay to Keyon Harrold and his family, at the very least. The Arlo Hotels should also provide proper training to their employees, so this never happens in the future.

The very real cost of racism in human lives

There is a very important article in Slate that everyone should read.

Racism Is a Pandemic

When two colleagues and I started examining infectious mortality rates during the early 20th century, we were looking for regional differences in how the United States handled influenza, tuberculosis, and other kinds of infections. Of course, we were especially interested in that era’s deadly pandemic. The 1918 flu had killed on a scale that’s hard to fathom: an estimated 50 million people worldwide, and half a million in the U.S.

To get a detailed look at infectious disease mortality in that era, we digitized and carefully checked old public health records, linked them to census population estimates, and categorized the causes of death. We didn’t believe the results. We discovered that white mortality during the 1918 flu pandemic was still lower than Black mortality, up to that point, had ever been. This wasn’t only true in the South, but in every region of the United States. This wasn’t about regional public health—it was about racism.

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This spring, while recovering from my own COVID-19 infection, I wondered whether the same thing would still be true today. I found it unfathomable that the disaster unfolding around me that spring in New York, where my parents live and where I had become sick, could bear any resemblance to more typical life in the United States. And yet, thinking about how the 1918 results had stunned me, I wanted to see for myself. As life ground to a halt in the midst of another cataclysmic pandemic, how did the toll of this one compare to that of the more ordinary, ubiquitous catastrophe? Will white mortality during the coronavirus pandemic still be less than what Blacks experience routinely, without any pandemic? I began to work out equations and search for data.

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If the Black population did not experience a single death due to COVID-19, if the pandemic only affected white people, Black mortality in 2020 would probably still be higher than white mortality.

This is a thought experiment. In reality, of course, COVID has hit Black populations hardest, and the inequality in death rates is likely to greater than it has been in many years. Racism is making Black Americans, along with indigenous and immigrant populations, most vulnerable to the pandemic. But the hypotheticals give us an important perspective on the reality: Racism gave Black people pandemic-level mortality long before COVID.

And it is racism that is killing Black people. “Mortality modelers” like me know that there are an awful lot of reasons one person might live longer than another. But when we see that one group in a society consistently dies at younger ages than another, we can look for trends. America excludes Black people from mechanisms of generating wealth, consigns them to the worst schools, confines them to neighborhoods with more pollution and more poverty, targets them with routine violence by state authorities, and treats them with suspicion and hostility when they seek medical care. There is no mystery in those early deaths.

We all know the devastating cost of COVID-19, yet as the article makes clear, the cost of racism on the Black communities is as high, or even higher, year after year.

This has to change. As the article states:

It is time we honestly confront the magnitude of racial inequality in the United States: a pandemic’s worth of death, every single year. Once we do that, our question about radical proposals to combat racism should shift from what is politically palatable to, simply, what will work.

How to completely miss the point

The Danish government party, Socialdemokratiet/The Social Democrats, have made a video which is supposed to show that they support all children.

You don’t have to be able to speak English to get the gist of what the video is about. It is based on the Privilege walk exercise, which is based on Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, and has is meant to illustrate how privilege will affect people.

Now, look at the video from the Social Democrats, and you’ll probably notice straight away that they have completely missed the point of the exercise. The group of children in the video is extremely homogeneous, and there are none with different ethnical backgrounds or with visible handicaps.

Yes, the video ends up with great differences between the children, but the big distance this is only possible because they have changed the questions in order to remove any referring to white and able bodied privileges, and instead focusing on only those that can affect this particular group of children. It is understandable why they have done this, but it goes against the whole concept for the exercise.

I cannot even begin to understand why anyone would do this particular exercise without any representations for the groups that faces systematic discrimination in the Danish society. I can only think that this was done deliberately to not draw attention to the plight of those groups, and instead focuses on more traditionally social democratic priorities – e.g. class and education. This is, unfortunately, not surprising, given how the Danish Social Democrats has become more and more anti-immigrant, in order to win voters back from the xenophobic Danish Peoples’ Party.