Corporate Dread

[…O]ur culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true. No amount of birdwatching will win a person the presidency or a Beverly Hills mansion; making music with friends will not cure cancer or establish a colony on Mars. But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

[…N]ot all useless activity is actually good. Binge-watching television, being hooked on drugs, or spending one’s day doing nothing but eating are useless activities, to be sure. But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input: the contemplation of nature, the joy of music-making, and even the study of mathematics can be rich and ennobling activities that, while also being pleasurable, reward the intellect and the soul. And the more we engage in these kinds of activities, the more we hone our sensibility and capacity for receptivity […].

While rewarding each of us internally, splendid uselessness enriches the world beyond us. Like the fertile soil of a well-kept garden, a life of splendid uselessness provides abundance far beyond one’s immediate aims, […] tends to overflow, to bring more goodness and beauty into being: one good poem can spark a dozen others […]. »

"I disagree with Kamala's position on the war in Gaza. How can I vote for her?" by US Senator Bernie Sanders

“I understand that there are millions of Americans who disagree with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on the terrible war in Gaza.

I am one of them.

While Israel had a right to defend itself against the horrific Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages, it did not have a right to wage an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people.

It did not have the right to kill 42,000 Palestinians, two thirds of whom were children, women and the elderly, or injure over 100,000 people in Gaza.

It did not have the right to destroy Gaza's infrastructure, housing, and healthcare system. It did not have the right to bomb every one of Gaza's 12 universities.

It did not have the right to block humanitarian aid, causing massive malnutrition in children and, in fact, starvation.

And that is why I am doing everything I can to block U.S. military aid and offensive weapon sales to the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government in Israel. And I know that many of you share those feelings, and some of you are saying,

"How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she is supporting this terrible war?"

And that is a very fair question. And let me give you my best answer. And that is that even on this issue, Donald Trump and his right-wing friends are worse. In the Senate, in Congress, the Republicans have worked overtime to block humanitarian aid to the starving children in Gaza. The President and Vice President both support getting as much humanitarian aid into Gaza as soon as possible.

Trump has said Netanyahu is "doing a good job", and has said Biden is "holding him back". He has suggested the Gaza strip would make excellent beachfront property for development. And it is no wonder Netanyahu prefers to have Donald Trump in office.

But even more importantly - and this I promise you - after Kamala wins, we will together do everything that we can to change U.S. policy toward Netanyahu. An immediate ceasefire, the return of all hostages, a surge of massive humanitarian aid, the stopping of settler attacks on the West Bank, and the rebuilding of Gaza for the Palestinian people.

And let me be clear. We will have, in my view, a much better chance of changing U.S. policy with Kamala than with Trump, who is extremely close to Netanyahu and sees him as a like-minded, right-wing extremist ally.

But let me also say this - and I deal with this every single day as a U.S. Senator - as important as Gaza is, and as strongly as many of us feel about this issue, it is not the only issue at stake in this election.

If Trump wins, women in this country will suffer an enormous setback and lose the ability to control their own bodies. That is not acceptable.

If Trump wins, to be honest with you, the struggle against climate change is over. While virtually every scientist who has studied the issue understands that climate change is real, and an existential threat to our country and the world, Trump believes it is a "hoax". And if the United States, the largest economy in the world, stops transforming our energy system away from fossil fuel, every other country - China, Europe, all over the world - they will do exactly the same thing. And God only knows the kind of planet we will leave to our kids and future generations.

If Trump wins, at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, he will demand even more tax breaks for the very richest people in our country while cutting back on programs that working families desperately need. The rich will only get richer while the minimum wage will remain at $7.25 an hour and millions of our fellow workers will continue to earn starvation wages.

Did you all see the recent Trump rally at Madison Square Gardens? Well, I did. And what I can tell you is that, as a nation, as all of you know, we have struggled for years, against impossible odds, to overcome all forms of bigotry - whether it's racism, whether it's sexism, whether it's homophobia, whether it's xenophobia, you name it. We have tried to fight against bigotry. But that is exactly what we saw on display at that unbelievable Trump rally. It was not a question of speakers getting up there, disagreeing with Kamala Harris on the issue. That wasn't the issue at all. They were attacking her simply because she was a woman, and a woman of colour. Extreme, vulgar sexism and racism.

Is that really the kind of America that we can allow?

So let me conclude by saying this: this is the most consequential election in our lifetimes. Many of you have differences of opinion with Kamala Harris on Gaza. So do I.

But we cannot sit this election out. Trump has got to be defeated. Let's do everything we can in the next week to make sure that Kamala Harris is our next president.

Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong.

...And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about “The Road Not Taken”—not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough), but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. It’s worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play “White Christmas” in December, we correctly assume that it’s a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyce’s Ulysses, we correctly assume that it’s a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

Frost’s poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”), but the literal meaning of the poem’s own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poem’s speaker tells us he “shall be telling,” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, yet he has already admitted that the two paths “equally lay / In leaves” and “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

it's been debunked by snopes

i cannot stress enough that it has been debunked by snopes and contains dangerous misinformation

stop reblogging it! stop retweeting it! you are actively putting people in danger when you do so

In times of need, the archivists always come through.  During Wednesday’s pro-Trump riot at the US capitol, internet archivists started preserving hundreds of photos and videos spreading on social media of the event, which have become immediately relevant as the FBI and other law enforcement groups are looking to identify people who were there.

As Motherboard pointed out yesterday, many easily-identifiable MAGA personalities streamed their raid on the Capitol.  Baked Alaska, for example, took photos and streamed himself in Nancy Pelosi’s office.  Many of these streams have been deleted by either the streamer or the social media platforms where they were hosted.

Reddit users r/AdamLynch started a thread on the Data Hoarder subreddit on Wednesday to assemble archiving efforts, where they initially stored data in a torrent.

Open source research and journalist collective Bellingcat put out a call for people to start saving social media content from the protests as they see it: “Just like after Charlottesville in 2017, many of those who are streaming will delete their streams once they realize how incriminating the footage is.”

The high demand for the files was taxing their bandwidth, however, so they moved it to a MEGA file.

That database, which MEGA deleted due to reports of “child exploitation material, violent extremism, or bestiality,” contained more than 124 gigabytes of photos and videos from multiple social media platforms, included Twitch livestreams like StatusCoup and Touring News.  Others in the subreddit created mirrors of the database, so it’s not lost.

IntelligenceX, a European search engine company, also opened a file transfer protocol server for the public to add to a database of footage from social media yesterday.  

Social media platforms can and do remove posts and entire accounts whenever they want, making preservation of historically important content a challenge.  Facebook, YouTube and Twitter all removed President Trump’s video of him praising rioters and lying about the election results on Wednesday.  Facebook said that it is actively searching for and removing content that qualifies as “incitement or encouragement of the events at the Capitol, including videos and photos from the protestors.  At this point they represent promotion of criminal activity which violates our policies,” according to a company blog post.

“Both platforms and users will remove a gigantic chunk of these materials within a day or two of their upload,” Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, told Motherboard.  “Sometimes, this is no big deal — some random, blurry video may not provide anything useful that isn’t in a hundred other livestreams.”  But one video might show something with an angle or lighting that all the others don’t, he said.  The more raw materials researchers and forensic analysts have, the more they have to work with. “If you are trying to reconstruct the events of the storming, determine the group dynamics/relationships between the stormers, or trying to identify specific people from the group, you need as many photos and videos as possible to establish these research tasks,” Toler said.

The FBI is requesting video or photo evidence “depicting violence” and tips about the riots through a submissions portal, with a limit of 1024 megabytes and four files max.  But the FBI was quite capable of stalking people’s social media profiles and using facial recognition or surveillance footage to track down protestors for damaging police property during the protests for Black lives in the summer of 2020.  Other groups will surely use this footage to try to identify specific protesters.  

During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, organizers told protesters to be very careful about livestreaming and taking photos that showed people’s faces, because police can and do monitor social media to make arrests.  Those protests were heavily monitored by surveillance planes and helicopters, advanced surveillance tools, and cell phone location data-tracking tools.

By contrast, many MAGA protesters streamed themselves and attempted to go viral on social media as a brand building exercise.  People who ransacked the Capitol walked out of the building with federal property, walked back to their hotels, and gathered masklessly as though they’d just been to a fun party.  Black Lives Matter organizers noted the difference in police response, and the comfort that the largely white Capitol-stormer protesters enjoyed while interrupting democracy, versus the often militaristic police response last summer against BLM protesters.