The week's doomscrolling in review: issue 4
This week's doomscroll review lacks a format, a theme, and even a chronology. Enjoy.
I keep changing the format for the one piece of newsletter-ish content I attempt to put on this platform. It's still deep in the experimental phase. There's not much of a format or theme even. This time it's more of a highlights reel.
Published on the ol'e blog this week
I only got a couple of new pieces knocked into the WèBlog this last week (if a week is covering more than seven days), not counting this thing if I actually finish it before Monday...
The 'five stages of grief' is a trap
Yours Truly
In which we explore a real–world example of the weaponisation of The Five Stages of Grief and kindly ask content creators to think of other ways to be cathartic in the wake MAGA striking back that don't lead people into acceptance of bad situations that should just be resisted.
Elements of a reasonably good digital security resource
Yours Truly
There's been an uptick of requests for digital security advice after the 5th of November, and not an insubstantial amount of sharing of middling to very poor advice, which I'm not going to get into. Instead, here is a new page on the blog dedicated not only to the Best in Show online digital security resources, but a quick guide on how to tell if you're looking at something worth using.
Reading
(Possibly not written in the past week, but read in that period by yours truly.)
- On the Coming Merger of Tech and State Power: There is a convergence of power as billionaires in the technology industries, which classically have tried to circumvent government regulations, have decided it may just be better to either partner with it or become it. Elon Musk may be the the poster child for it, but he's not the only player. If you've ever binged those U.S. Congressional or UK Parliamentary sessions in which they've called in the heads of tech giants to face a grilling which more or less turned into further evidence of the lack of tech literacy in government, you'll know how poorly equipped our political representatives are for this one.
- Related: That story pairs nicely with with this interview with AI expert and former Dutch MEP, Marietje Schaake: "The way we think about technology is shaped by the tech companies themselves."
- Related: Trending more on UK's right-leaning news outlets who may see this as a good thing, it's rumoured that Elon — having bought the government he wants in the U.S. — is planning to dump $100 million on Nigel Farage's Reform UK skullduggery.
- The Invisible Man: Yes, it's a sprawling, first-person yarn about living on America's overpopulated fringes as a homeless person, but it's also just a stunning piece of long-form literary journalism by Patrick Fealey. This kind of writing is like gold dust, now. We need to cherish and celebrate when it happens even as it describes a grim reality. Talents is often not rewarded with riches. Wealth is forever being concentrated in the wrong places. Such as when Maurizio Cattelan gets $5.2 dollars for duct taping a banana to a wall and then a crypto nerd spends $6.2 million to eat it.
- A Kamala Harris Canvasser’s Education: There are a lot of lessons this one that I think many Democrats — still frothing at the mouth in indignation over the results and not ready for the necessary introspection — don't want to read. On her first day canvassing for Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania, former WaPo journalist Julia Preston writes "I began to sense a dissonance between the celebrity-inflected exuberance of the Harris campaign and the bleak mood and raw divisions I encountered in the streets."
- Related: For a few brief salad days the major polls in the U.S. gave Kamala Harris' campaign a slight lead. Internally, it turns out, the campaign's own more forensic polling showed it was always behind. A few of us get the sour grapes "I told you so" rights as campaign aides now say that it was "Harris' loyalty to Biden prevented her from distancing herself from the administration's record, even when facing pressure to do so."
- The Local Sheriffs Gearing Up to Help Trump Carry Out Mass Deportations: Here's a free WSJ link while I still have the subscription. The headline does the article a dis-service by sounds like yet another turn of the screws, but underneath it is a look at Trump's plans to expand a federal program "that gives sheriffs and other agencies certain ICE powers" to create countless local militias (financially rewarded for following orders and penalised if they don't) against migrant families. Beyond that though, it's a tour of the fairly wild west approach local sheriff's offices have long maintained, often with tenuous grasps on the rights of people living in their jurisdictions.
- How Biden Made a Mess of Ukraine: (soft as melted butter paywall) The myth and legend of Joe Biden's foreign policy acumen always fails under scrutiny, he's a prime example of failing up. Anyway, here's meticulous analysis by Phillips Payson O’Brien in The Atlantic, of how the Biden Administration continually "mishandled the war in Ukraine, not only hampering a beleaguered ally’s ability to fend off a Russian invasion but also throwing away a remarkable chance to improve America’s global standing and democratic powers’ position in the world."
Recommended Podcast
I came to the Jewish Heretics podcast in the past week due to this earlier recorded one with journalist and artist Molly Crabapple, which I highly recommend (learn all about the Jewish Labor Bund!) but have since let it autoplay through a number of other episodes.
Back to doomscrolling: other bits and pieces...
- Things are kicking off in Georgia, where the government has dropped its EU bid, and the country's president has declared the Putin-supporting regime illegitimate. This is how you treat bad power transitions.
- "The conflicts of Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon all come together and overlap in Aleppo,” writes Yaroslav Trofimov in WSJ, in one of the better explainers of what we are seeing this weekend with Assad losing control once more.
- Australia is pretending it can block anyone under the age of 16 from using social platforms. This never works.
- The FBI is investigating a consultant linked to Exxon Mobil for allegedly orchestrating a hacking operation that targeted environmental activists, leading to the leak of their emails.
- Elon Musk has gone to court against The Onion, alleging it can't buy Alex Jones' old Twitter accounts in its acquisition of InfoWars, claiming he is the actual owner of every account on the platform. If you get defamed by anyone on Twitter, I guess you can sue Elon.
- The U.S. is going to war against nonprofits that don't stay on what either Congress or the White House considers to be acceptable messaging. It's not not waiting for a Trump regime to start the attack. The Intercept covers it in two pieces:
- A UN memo reports that that gangs looting aid packages in Gaza (WaPo gift link while I still have them) are operating in areas under Israeli control get "passive if not active benevolence” or even “protection” from Israel's military.
Next week
The 'Blame' post. In which we punch right, left and take a few jabs at the centrists. With diagrams, because I'm just playing with different diagraming tools. I have tried to write this one three times only for the post to turn into something else. Those are currently on the blog, can you guess which ones?
