The week's doomscrolling in review: Issue 1
Welcome to my attempt to start what may or may not be a weekly, or bi-weekly, or mid-weekly curation of my doomscrolling sessions, possibly with colour commentary along the way. This week's has a very American political vibe because that's what's dominating my socials and news feeds. But steady on! Read all these great articles, or just leave it up to me to click all those GDPR cookie settings for you and go with my dubious takes on them.
Anti-endorsements are all the rage...
I've become a kind of collector of anti-endorsements this election season. The Mississippi Free Press dropped a banger of one which I missed in the post above. It opens with a retelling of the case of Sen. Ernest Lundeen, a Minnesota senator who died in a plane crash on the way to give a speech that was ghost-written by an agent of Nazi Germany's Third Reich. It connects that with the history of fascists in America, drawing line to the present situation today. The main thing, being, that none of this should be surprising. It mentions Harris just once, a key trait of an anti-endorsement, and focuses its attention on the massive threat that can only be avoided by selecting her on the ballot.
"Fascism is not only in our past, though. It’s in our present. And fascism is present in the growing efforts to ban books in schools and public libraries. It’s present when politicians pass laws to intimidate educators out of teaching our true and full history of racism. It’s present when demagogues target efforts to promote diversity in public life." — Mississippi Free Press
Elon is a national security threat
Casey Michel
He's got national security clearance, contracts throughout government and is openly spending mad cash and lobbying for a candidate that's most hostile to every agency or institution that would be tasked with holding Elon to any accountability.
Elon's America PAC should be done up for human trafficking, coerced labour practices, reckless endangerment... everything possible. People it contraced to be shipped to Michigan allege they didn't even know what they were really being hired for, that they were given massive engagement rates and threatened with being stuck with their hotel bills if they didn't meet them. The whole artical reads like hell, or what it might be like to work in an Amazon warehouse. I tend to think paid door-knocking shouldn't be legal at all, though. If you need to hire people for that you don't really have a political movement. If you need another reason to keep Trump out of the White House, it's so there's a better chance that this freak get's properly investigated and prosecuted.
This just in...
Get his ass. And then nationalise SpaceX. Sell off Starlink.
Anti-Trans risk assessment mapping updated
Erin Reed
Erin Reed has been tracking anti-transgender legislation across the United States for the past 5 years and updated their map on just how risky each state can be for trans people to live, or even visit, due to the heated, anti-trans rhetoric in political ads and campaigning around the country. "Should Trump win, extreme restrictions nationwide are likely. If Trump loses, restrictions could still go into place via congressional budget fights," Reed posts. Whenever you're thinking things are getting better, be sure to pull up what geography looks like for others.
We could have nice things
David Nir
If enough Democrats can hold a few key states, the U.S. could be on track to have a de facto popular vote, if not a literal one. As the Downballot reports, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is "a multistate agreement under which member states pledge to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote—regardless of the outcome in their own states." If America had enough states committing to this, the entire results math changes, and landing in a Trump predicament becomes far less likely. As you'd expect, Republicans hate it.
A new found love for pocket money
Miranda Bryant
I pay with my card a lot. Like, most the time. I often don't have any cash on me. But I still can't stand it when restaurants, shops or any physical business won't take the paper money I've got in my wallet or jingling in my pocket. If there's a review or feedback request and I have the time, I remove a star and leave a note about it. It shouldn't be legal to reject physical money, it's legal tender. Going cashless is also exclusionary: Some folks don't have payment cards for all kinds of reasons, including lacking a bank account, homelessness, and probably a lot of other reasons I can't think of. Or they just don't want to use them. There are all kinds of rational privacy and anonymity reasons for it. Maybe someone has a violent partner spying on all their expenses and they're shopping for everything they need to make an escape. The 'why' is nobody's business. But letting all shops go cashless can also be a national security risk, as some Nordic countries are discovering thanks to their bad neighbour to the east. In the event of a cyber attack on the internet, mobile networks, banking services, etc. suddenly you have a population with no way to buy things. It shouldn't take Russia scaring countries into maintaining cash transactions, but it's not a bad argument to use for it.
Online-only transactions for physical services is a mistake
Jim Waterson
Related to the above story, but here in UK I still can't get my teen a youth discounted Oyster card for all the Transport for London services over a month after some kid hacked TfL website. Why? Because you can't buy them in person. TfL runs all kinds of fees through its online payment service, which was apparently hacked with the help of a requirement that had kept it's platforms backwards compatible for long-unsupported web browsers that can't deal with modern websites are the security they often bring, including Internet Explorer 6 for fuck sake. Outdated software users are system gangrene. It may sound harsh, but you have to always keep lopping off the dangerous limb. But it's been more than a month and the service has not come back as there seems to be no budget to fix anything, and yet no effort to move the ability to buy these services back to, say, your local train station, where they never should have left. UK could stand to take a lesson from Sweden or Norway before Russia catches wind of this.
Re-writing history for the conservative white guy's ego
Nathan J. Robinson
So, the Wall Street Journal covered it first (free gift link, I think) and really well, but it has a high and mighty paywall, so it's nice the Current Affairs is writing about it in the open. Biden appointed U.S. Archivist Colleen Shogan and her team at the National Archives and Records Administration have been white washing history at the National Archives Museum, removing or making less prominent displays on subjects such as U.S. treatment of indigenous Americans and the WWII internment of Japanese Americans. One argument they make is that "visitors shouldn’t feel confronted," which is idiotic, that's what history does. The deeper rational for this is fear of angering Republican lawmakers that can target the agency’s budget, or somehow piss off a highly triggerable Trump administration. And here, I'll just end it with Timothy Snyder's first chapter in his book On Tyranny, currently sitting on my coffee table...
Do not obey in advance: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." — Tim
Are robots writing your doctor's medical reports?
GARANCE BURKEOpenAI's Whisper transcription service has been rolled out to tens of thousands and clinics and scores of health networks via med tech companyNabla, and is used by local doctors and in hospitals. It appears that it may not be keeping the best notes. The AP article includes a bunch of studies. One "discovered hallucinations in about half of the over 100 hours of Whisper transcriptions" analysed. Another had seen some form of misleading content in every tested use of Whisper. A while ago, it was found that some California police departments were using AI to ghost write their officer's patrol and incident reports. There needs to be a new legal field in generative AI malpractice. But you may want to see how your GP is using it.
Palestine remains the issue
With the constant news of death and suffering out of Gaza, and now in Lebanon, it's a heroic act on its own to think of other possible ways things could be, so on that account alone, Narwan Muasher's piece in Foreign Affairs is worth reading, even if to see there are people thinking of other ways aside from conflict. Belief in the viability or chance of a 'two-state solution' is at all time lows, and for many Palestinians its never been very high, anyway. The U.S., UK and others hide behind the rhetoric of pushing for a two-state solution that is entirely separated from the reality people in Israel and Palestine see day to day, and after 30 years of towing the same line, it may be time for a different approach. Muasher makes a case for anything that happens next to be focused on rights first, and states second.
"Focusing on the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, not their governments’ dueling claims to sovereignty, will push the communities toward a solution in which both can live in peace and dignity. It is the only viable alternative for both communities." — Narwan Muasher
Disrupting more of the status quo may depend on it. Speaking of which...
Malak A Tantesh
Forget about what military and political leaders say and watch what they do, rhetoric is performative, deployment is reality. Removing settlers from Gaza in 2005 was not an end of an occupation, it was just re-organising a workflow. The Guardian reports: "On 21 October, the radical movement Nachala held a festival on the Sukkot holiday titled: 'Preparing to Settle Gaza.' It was attended by senior members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet as well as representatives of his Likud party. The finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on his way to the event that the Gaza strip is 'part of the land of Israel,' adding that settlements were the only true form of security."
How to criminalise climate change activism around the world
Amy Westervelt
A great investigative piece by The New Republic on The Atlas Network, connecting right wing think tanks around the world, describing itself as “a nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all individuals.” It supports local lobbyists with funds, cash and expertise to go after any nuisance climate activists, a sort of Open Societies Foundations, but for evil fuckers.
And that's a wrap. Happy Monday.
