#pluralistic media

[endimpunityday]

Foster Freedom of Expression.

As the United Nations agency with a specific mandate to promote “the free flow of ideas by word and image”, UNESCO works to foster free, independent and pluralistic media in print, broadcast and online. Media development in this mode enhances freedom of expression, and it contributes to peace, sustainability, poverty eradication and human rights.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me WEDNESDAY (Apr 11) at UCLA, then Chicago (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Audre Lorde counsels us that "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," while MLK said "the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me." Somewhere between replacing the system and using the system lies a pragmatic – if easily derailed – course.

Lorde is telling us that a rotten system can't be redeemed by using its own chosen reform mechanisms. King's telling us that unless we live, we can't fight – so anything within the system that makes it easier for your comrades to fight on can hasten the end of the system.

Take the problems of journalism. One old model of journalism funding involved wealthy newspaper families profiting handsomely by selling local appliance store owners the right to reach the townspeople who wanted to read sports-scores. These families expressed their patrician love of their town by peeling off some of those profits to pay reporters to sit through municipal council meetings or even travel overseas and get shot at.

In retrospect, this wasn't ever going to be a stable arrangement. It relied on both the inconstant generosity of newspaper barons and the absence of a superior way to show washing-machine ads to people who might want to buy washing machines. Neither of these were good long-term bets. Not only were newspaper barons easily distracted from their sense of patrician duty (especially when their own power was called into question), but there were lots of better ways to connect buyers and sellers lurking in potentia.

All of this was grossly exacerbated by tech monopolies. Tech barons aren't smarter or more evil than newspaper barons, but they have better tools, and so now they take 51 cents out of every ad dollar and 30 cents out of ever subscriber dollar and they refuse to deliver the news to users who explicitly requested it, unless the news company pays them a bribe to "boost" their posts:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The news is important, and people sign up to make, digest, and discuss the news for many non-economic reasons, which means that the news continues to struggle along, despite all the economic impediments and the vulture capitalists and tech monopolists who fight one another for which one will get to take the biggest bite out of the press. We've got outstanding nonprofit news outlets like Propublica, journalist-owned outlets like 404 Media, and crowdfunded reporters like Molly White (and winner-take-all outlets like the New York Times).

But as Hamilton Nolan points out, "that pot of money…is only large enough to produce a small fraction of the journalism that was being produced in past generations":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-will-replace-advertising-revenue

For Nolan, "public funding of journalism is the only way to fix this…If we accept that journalism is not just a business or a form of entertainment but a public good, then funding it with public money makes perfect sense":

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/public-funding-of-journalism-is-the

Having grown up in Canada – under the CBC – and then lived for a quarter of my life in the UK – under the BBC – I am very enthusiastic about Nolan's solution. There are obvious problems with publicly funded journalism, like the politicization of news coverage:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approving-richard-sharp-as-bbc-chair-included-tory-party-donor

And the transformation of the funding into a cheap political football:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-defund-cbc-change-law-1.6810434

But the worst version of those problems is still better than the best version of the private-equity-funded model of news production.

But Nolan notes the emergence of a new form of hedge fund news, one that is awfully promising, and also terribly fraught: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet owned by short-sellers who pay journalists to research and publish damning reports on companies they hold a short position on:

https://hntrbrk.com/

For those of you who are blissfully distant from the machinations of the financial markets, "short selling" is a wager that a company's stock price will go down. A gambler who takes a short position on a company's stock can make a lot of money if the company stumbles or fails altogether (but if the company does well, the short can suffer literally unlimited losses).

Shorts have historically paid analysts to dig into companies and uncover the sins hidden on their balance-sheets, but as Matt Levine points out, journalists work for a fraction of the price of analysts and are at least as good at uncovering dirt as MBAs are:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-02/a-hedge-fund-that-s-also-a-newspaper

What's more, shorts who discover dirt on a company still need to convince journalists to publicize their findings and trigger the sell-off that makes their short position pay off. Shorts who own a muckraking journalistic operation can skip this step: they are the journalists.

There's a way in which this is sheer genius. Well-funded shorts who don't care about the news per se can still be motivated into funding freely available, high-quality investigative journalism about corporate malfeasance (notoriously, one of the least attractive forms of journalism for advertisers). They can pay journalists top dollar – even bid against each other for the most talented journalists – and supply them with all the tools they need to ply their trade. A short won't ever try the kind of bullshit the owners of Vice pulled, paying themselves millions while their journalists lose access to Lexisnexis or the PACER database:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/24/anti-posse/#when-you-absolutely-positively-dont-give-a-solitary-single-fuck

The shorts whose journalists are best equipped stand to make the most money. What's not to like?

Well, the issue here is whether the ruling class's sense of solidarity is stronger than its greed. The wealthy have historically oscillated between real solidarity (think of the ultrawealthy lobbying to support bipartisan votes for tax cuts and bailouts) and "war of all against all" (as when wealthy colonizers dragged their countries into WWI after the supply of countries to steal ran out).

After all, the reason companies engage in the scams that shorts reveal is that they are profitable. "Behind every great fortune is a great crime," and that's just great. You don't win the game when you get into heaven, you win it when you get into the Forbes Rich List.

Take monopolies: investors like the upside of backing an upstart company that gobbles up some staid industry's margins – Amazon vs publishing, say, or Uber vs taxis. But while there's a lot of upside in that move, there's also a lot of risk: most companies that set out to "disrupt" an industry sink, taking their investors' capital down with them.

Contrast that with monopolies: backing a company that merges with its rivals and buys every small company that might someday grow large is a sure thing. Shriven of "wasteful competition," a company can lower quality, raise prices, capture its regulators, screw its workers and suppliers and laugh all the way to Davos. A big enough company can ignore the complaints of those workers, customers and regulators. They're not just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They're too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Would-be monopolists are stuck in a high-stakes Prisoner's Dilemma. If they cooperate, they can screw over everyone else and get unimaginably rich. But if one party defects, they can raid the monopolist's margins, short its stock, and snitch to its regulators.

It's true that there's a clear incentive for hedge-fund managers to fund investigative journalism into other hedge-fund managers' portfolio companies. But it would be even more profitable for both of those hedgies to join forces and collude to screw the rest of us over. So long as they mistrust each other, we might see some benefit from that adversarial relationship. But the point of the 0.1% is that there aren't very many of them. The Aspen Institute can rent a hall that will hold an appreciable fraction of that crowd. They buy their private jets and bespoke suits and powdered rhino horn from the same exclusive sellers. Their kids go to the same elite schools. They know each other, and they have every opportunity to get drunk together at a charity ball or a society wedding and cook up a plan to join forces.

This is the problem at the core of "mechanism design" grounded in "rational self-interest." If you try to create a system where people do the right thing because they're selfish assholes, you normalize being a selfish asshole. Eventually, the selfish assholes form a cozy little League of Selfish Assholes and turn on the rest of us.

Appeals to morality don't work on unethical people, but appeals to immorality crowds out ethics. Take the ancient split between "free software" (software that is designed to maximize the freedom of the people who use it) and "open source software" (identical to free software, but promoted as a better way to make robust code through transparency and peer review).

Over the years, open source – an appeal to your own selfish need for better code – triumphed over free software, and its appeal to the ethics of a world of "software freedom." But it turns out that while the difference between "open" and "free" was once mere semantics, it's fully possible to decouple the two. Today, we have lots of "open source": you can see the code that Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook uses, and even contribute your labor to it for free. But you can't actually decide how the software you write works, because it all takes a loop through Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook's servers, and only those trillion-dollar tech monopolists have the software freedom to determine how those servers work:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/04/which-side-are-you-on/#tivoization-and-beyond

That's ruling class solidarity. The Big Tech firms have hidden a myriad of sins beneath their bafflegab and balance-sheets. These (as yet) undiscovered scams constitute a "bezzle," which JK Galbraith defined as "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

The purpose of Hunterbrook is to discover and destroy bezzles, hastening the moment of realization that the wealth we all feel in a world of seemingly orderly technology is really an illusion. Hunterbrook certainly has its pick of bezzles to choose from, because we are living in a Golden Age of the Bezzle.

Which is why I titled my new novel The Bezzle. It's a tale of high-tech finance scams, starring my two-fisted forensic accountant Marty Hench, and in this volume, Hench is called upon to unwind a predatory prison-tech scam that victimizes the most vulnerable people in America – our army of prisoners – and their families:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The scheme I fictionalize in The Bezzle is very real. Prison-tech monopolists like Securus and Viapath bribe prison officials to abolish calls, in-person visits, mail and parcels, then they supply prisoners with "free" tablets where they pay hugely inflated rates to receive mail, speak to their families, and access ebooks, distance education and other electronic media:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

But a group of activists have cornered these high-tech predators, run them to ground and driven them to the brink of extinction, and they've done it using "the master's tools" – with appeals to regulators and the finance sector itself.

Writing for The Appeal, Dana Floberg and Morgan Duckett describe the campaign they waged with Worth Rises to bankrupt the prison-tech sector:

https://theappeal.org/securus-bankruptcy-prison-telecom-industry/

Here's the headline figure: Securus is $1.8 billion in debt, and it has eight months to find a financier or it will go bust. What's more, all the creditors it might reasonably approach have rejected its overtures, and its bonds have been downrated to junk status. It's a dead duck.

Even better is how this happened. Securus's debt problems started with its acquisition, a leveraged buyout by Platinum Equity, who borrowed heavily against the firm and then looted it with bogus "management fees" that meant that the debt continued to grow, despite Securus's $700m in annual revenue from America's prisoners. Platinum was just the last in a long line of PE companies that loaded up Securus with debt and merged it with its competitors, who were also mortgaged to make profits for other private equity funds.

For years, Securus and Platinum were able to service their debt and roll it over when it came due. But after Worth Rises got NYC to pass a law making jail calls free, creditors started to back away from Securus. It's one thing for Securus to charge $18 for a local call from a prison when it's splitting the money with the city jail system. But when that $18 needs to be paid by the city, they're going to demand much lower prices. To make things worse for Securus, prison reformers got similar laws passed in San Francisco and in Connecticut.

Securus tried to outrun its problems by gobbling up one of its major rivals, Icsolutions, but Worth Rises and its coalition convinced regulators at the FCC to block the merger. Securus abandoned the deal:

https://worthrises.org/blogpost/securusmerger

Then, Worth Rises targeted Platinum Equity, going after the pension funds and other investors whose capital Platinum used to keep Securus going. The massive negative press campaign led to eight-figure disinvestments:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-05/la-fi-tom-gores-securus-prison-phone-mass-incarceration

Now, Securus's debt became "distressed," trading at $0.47 on the dollar. A brief, covid-fueled reprieve gave Securus a temporary lifeline, as prisoners' families were barred from in-person visits and had to pay Securus's rates to talk to their incarcerated loved ones. But after lockdown, Securus's troubles picked up right where they left off.

They targeted Platinum's founder, Tom Gores, who papered over his bloody fortune by styling himself as a philanthropist and sports-team owner. After a campaign by Worth Rises and Color of Change, Gores was kicked off the Los Angeles County Museum of Art board. When Gores tried to flip Securus to a SPAC – the same scam Trump pulled with Truth Social – the negative publicity about Securus's unsound morals and financials killed the deal:

https://twitter.com/WorthRises/status/1578034977828384769

Meanwhile, more states and cities are making prisoners' communications free, further worsening Securus's finances:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Congress passed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act, giving the FCC the power to regulate the price of federal prisoners' communications. Securus's debt prices tumbled further:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

Securus's debts were coming due: it owes $1.3b in 2024, and hundreds of millions more in 2025. Platinum has promised a $400m cash infusion, but that didn't sway S&P Global, a bond-rating agency that re-rated Securus's bonds as "CCC" (compare with "AAA"). Moody's concurred. Now, Securus is stuck selling junk-bonds:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s1541

The company's creditors have given Securus an eight-month runway to find a new lender before they force it into bankruptcy. The company's debt is trading at $0.08 on the dollar.

Securus's major competitor is Viapath (prison tech is a duopoly). Viapath is also debt-burdened and desperate, thanks to a parallel campaign by Worth Rises, and has tried all of Securus's tricks, and failed:

https://pestakeholder.org/news/american-securities-fails-to-sell-prison-telecom-company-viapath/

Viapath's debts are due next year, and if Securus tanks, no one in their right mind will give Viapath a dime. They're the walking dead.

Worth Rise's brilliant guerrilla warfare against prison-tech and its private equity backers are a master class in using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. The finance sector isn't a friend of justice or working people, but sometimes it can be used tactically against financialization itself. To paraphrase MLK, "finance can't make a corporation love you, but it can stop a corporation from destroying you."

Yes, the ruling class finds solidarity at the most unexpected moments, and yes, it's easy for appeals to greed to institutionalize greediness. But whether it's funding unbezzling journalism through short selling, or freeing prisons by brandishing their cooked balance-sheets in the faces of bond-rating agencies, there's a lot of good we can do on the way to dismantling the system.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

Image: KMJ (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boerse_01_KMJ.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[the-bottle-system]

tag ur headmates

[younes-ben-amara]

إثرَ تَشيْطُن المنصّات صار الويب مجرد 5 مواقع ضخمة كلُّ واحد منها مليئ بلقطات شاشة من الأربعة الأخرى

ما هذه المجموعة من المختارات تسألني؟ إنّها عددٌ من أعداد نشرة “صيد الشابكة” اِعرف أكثر عن النشرة هنا: ما هي نشرة “صيد الشابكة” ما مصادرها، وما غرضها؛ وما معنى الشابكة أصلًا؟! 🎣🌐 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #104 مرحبًا والسلام عليكم وجمعة مباركة*؛ بسم الله. *انطلقت بعون الله تعالى في العدد يوم الجمعة لذا إن نشرته في غيره فلا بأس: جمعة مباركة على أية حال. 🎣🌐 صيد الشابكة العدد #104🔄 دورة حياة المنصات:…

[nymvaline]

Well, that's two separate well explained recommendations for Kagi. (Cory Doctorow mentioned it in passing in a couple previous Pluralistic posts.) Guess I'm hopping on board to see what's up.

[dayaxwriter]

How Network Switches Work

How Network Switches Work: Unveiling the Magic Behind Seamless Data Routing

Introduction

In today's interconnected world, where the exchange of information is vital, network switches play a pivotal role in ensuring data flows seamlessly from one device to another. Whether in a small home network or a sprawling corporate infrastructure, network switches are the unsung heroes that enable efficient data transmission. This article delves into the inner workings of network switches, shedding light on their fundamental principles and the magic that makes them an integral part of modern networking.

What Is a Network Switch?

A network switch is a piece of networking hardware that connects devices within a local area network (LAN). Its primary function is to receive incoming data frames from devices like computers, printers, or servers and then forward those data frames to their intended destination within the same network. Unlike hubs, which broadcast data to all devices within a network, switches are intelligent devices that make data transmission more efficient by selectively sending data only to the device that needs it.

How Do Network Switches Work?

Network switches operate on the Data Link Layer (Layer 2) of the OSI model. To understand how they work, let's break down the process step by step:

1. MAC Address Learning:

ü When a network switch is initially powered on, it doesn't know the location of devices on the network.

ü It begins by examining the source MAC (Media Access Control) addresses of incoming data frames.

ü The switch maintains a MAC address table, also known as a MAC address forwarding table or CAM table, where it records the MAC addresses of devices connected to its ports.

2. MAC Address Table:

§ As data frames arrive, the switch adds entries to its MAC address table.

§ Each entry in the table associates a MAC address with the port through which the device is connected.

§ This table allows the switch to quickly determine where to forward data frames in the future.

3. Frame Forwarding:

· When a data frame arrives at the switch, it examines the destination MAC address.

· The switch looks up the destination MAC address in its MAC address table to find the corresponding port.

· If the port is the same as the incoming port, the switch doesn't forward the frame, preventing unnecessary traffic.

· If the destination is on a different port, the switch forwards the frame only to that specific port, ensuring efficient data transmission.

4. Broadcast and Unknown MAC Addresses:

Ø If the switch receives a broadcast frame (destined for all devices within the network), it forwards it to all ports except the source port.

Ø If the destination MAC address is not found in the MAC address table, the switch behaves like a hub and broadcasts the frame to all ports, learning the source MAC address in the process.

Benefits of Network Switches:

Improved Efficiency: Network switches enhance network performance by minimizing unnecessary traffic, reducing congestion, and increasing bandwidth availability.

Enhanced Security: Since switches only send data to the intended recipient, they provide a higher level of network security compared to hubs.

Scalability: Switches can accommodate a growing number of devices and are a scalable solution for expanding networks.

Smart Management: Many network switches offer advanced management features, allowing administrators to monitor and control network traffic more effectively.

Expanding on the importance and versatility of network switches:

Evolution and Varieties of Network Switches

Over the years, network switches have evolved to meet the demands of various network environments. Today, there are several types of network switches catering to diverse needs:

Unmanaged Switches: These are basic switches designed for plug-and-play simplicity. They are ideal for small home networks and require no configuration. Unmanaged switches automatically learn and forward data frames.

Managed Switches: Managed switches offer greater control and flexibility. Network administrators can configure them to optimize performance, set up VLANs (Virtual Local Area Networks), prioritize traffic, and monitor network activity. These switches are common in business and enterprise networks.

Layer 2 and Layer 3 Switches: Layer 2 switches operate at the Data Link Layer (MAC address), while Layer 3 switches can route traffic at the Network Layer (IP address). Layer 3 switches are like a hybrid between a switch and a router, making them suitable for more complex networks.

PoE (Power over Ethernet) Switches: These switches not only transmit data but also provide power to connected devices like IP cameras, VoIP phones, and wireless access points, eliminating the need for separate power sources.

Stackable Switches: These switches can be stacked together to operate as a single unit, simplifying management and scalability in larger networks.

[communist-ojou-sama]

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing benign, or rationally calculating intentions to western powers, but malevolent and actively irrational ones to non-western powers, all while claiming to be jaded, and cynical toward all parties?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly ascribing a goal of benign truth-telling to western corporate media sources, while ascribing a character of total falsehood to non-western state media, such that truth can't even be mined from it by one who understands its biases?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly portraying western societies as all being pluralistic, awash with a a number of perspectives unfortunately drowned out by their ruling class, while portraying all non-western polities as consisting entirely of drones, utterly subservient to authority, with the Sole exception of voices that are pro-western and strive for the same goals in western powers, in their terms?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

When you see a post on tumblr about global politics, stop and think!: Is the author implicitly placing the work of western and western-trained academics on a pedestal, and treating it as ontologically more valuable than the work of groups of global south scholars with similar qualifications, who disagree with the western consensus?

Stop! That isn't cold, cynical analysis, it's crackpot realism! We must not be crackpots! We must not listen to the crackpot realists! We must strive for true geopolitical realism!

[rootjin]

y‘all need to stop saying „woman, life, freedom“ instead of jin, jiyan, azadi and here is why:

The struggle of women in Iran against a repressive theocratic regime cannot be separated from the struggle of Kurdish women against NATO-backed authoritarianism in Turkey and IS extremism in Iraq and Syria.

The iconic slogan of the protest movement - "jin, jiyan, azadi" or "woman, life, freedom" - has its roots in Kurdish women's over 40-year struggle against NATO-backed authoritarianism in Turkey and IS extremism in Iraq and Syria. Kurdish women in Iran, who were the first to use it in early protests, have an equally strong history of resistance against foreign intervention, repressive regimes and religious fundamentalists.

However, this history has been erased from mainstream narratives about the protests - but it is important for understanding how the uprising fits into the longer history of revolutionary struggles in the region.

The slogan "Jin, jiyan, azadi" has its origins in the Kurdish resistance movement in Turkey. It reflects the unique role of women in the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and in groups influenced by its ideas.

The meaning of ideas and symbols can change when they transcend borders and goals. But for Iranian women on the street today, "jin, jiyan, azadi" is as revolutionary a sentiment as it was for the Kurdish women who originally developed and spread it. In both Iran and Kurdistan, women are leading mass movements in unprecedented ways, and women's insistence on freedom from male and state violence is at the center of a struggle for the freedom of an entire society.

For women in the region, these parallels are clear. Women in northeastern Syria defied the constant threat of Turkish shelling and drone attacks and organized a mass march in Qamishlo in solidarity with women in Iran. Kurdish feminist political prisoners in Turkey cut their hair and expressed their support for the uprising in their court defenses.

Yet internationally, mainstream media, politicians, brands and celebrities are dividing these women's revolutions by erasing the Kurdish roots of this slogan and the struggle it represents. It is common for "Woman, Life, Freedom" to be written in English or "zan, zendegi, azadi" in Farsi without even mentioning the original Kurdish words.

Western leaders who proudly say "woman, life, freedom" to opportunistically support women in Iran have criminalized the movement that gave birth to "jin, jiyan, azadi" and are providing Turkey with the weapons with which to attack these women.

Real solidarity with the women's resistance requires us to remember that "jin, jiyan, azadi" is not a hashtag or a current trend. The phrase is a political philosophy that represents countless women from all walks of life who are on the frontlines of the struggle for a democratic, peaceful and pluralistic Middle East, free from all forms of oppression and exploitation.

In order to support these women, it is necessary to stand with them all against all the threats they face. Likewise, it is necessary not to allow their struggles against the various manifestations of patriarchy, imperialism, oppression and war to be divided, commodified or decontextualized.

IT‘S CALLED JIN JIYAN AZADI AND IT‘S KURDISH!

KURDISH WOMEN HAVE BEEN KILLED FOR NOT ONLY SAYING THIS BUT ALSO FOR LIVING AFTER IT.

KURDISH WOMEN ARE STILL BEING KILLED FOR BELIEVING IN THIS IDEOLOGY.

[mariacallous]

Alabama Chief Justice Tom Parker, who wrote the concurring opinion in last week’s explosive Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos have the same rights as living children, recently appeared on a show hosted by self-anointed “prophet” and QAnon conspiracy theorist.

Parker was the featured guest on “Someone You Should Know,” hosted by Johnny Enlow, a Christian nationalist influencer and devoted supporter of former President Donald Trump. Over the course of an 11-minute interview, Parker articulated a theocratic worldview at odds with a functioning, pluralistic society.

“God created government,” he told Enlow, adding that it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”

Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group, was the first to report on Parker’s appearance on the program.

That a state’s chief Supreme Court justice would associate himself with Enlow is a cause for alarm. Enlow is a prolific conspiracy theorist, often weaving QAnon apocrypha with prophecies he claims to receive directly from God.

As reported by Right Wing Watch, Enlow has claimed that Trump “is on assignment” from God to work with the angels Michael and Gabriel to take down George Soros and Bill Gates, among others; he has claimed that Russian President Vladamir Putin is fighting “Luciferian pedophiles” in Ukraine, in a battle to stop them from deploying vaccines and 5G that would turn people into transhumanist semi-robots; and he has claimed that the majority of other world leaders are “satanic” pedophiles who “steal blood” and “do sacrifices.”

Enlow’s interview with Parker was uploaded to Rumble, the alt-tech video platform, on the same day the Alabama Supreme Court issued its opinion that sent shockwaves throughout the reproductive rights community. The ruling, which makes fertility clinics liable in wrongful death lawsuits for harming or destroying an embryo, has already imperiled access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) in the state.

“Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” wrote Parker, a longtime anti-abortion advocate sometimes credited with building the legal framework to overturn Roe v. Wade. “Even before birth,” Parker added, “all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Parker used similar theological language in his interview with Enlow, thanking Enlow for promoting the “Seven Mountains” on his show. As HuffPost has reported before, the “Seven Mountains Mandate” is a doctrine at the core of the New Apostolic Reformation, an evangelical movement that believes in the supernatural, including the existence of modern-day apostles and prophets, and which is characterized by a belief in Christian dominionism. The Seven Mountains Mandate is the belief that Christians must conquer the “seven mountains” of societal influence — education, media, religion, family, business, entertainment and government — and force fundamentalist Christian values onto every part of American life, in order to pave the path for Christ’s return.

“As you’ve emphasized in the past, we’ve abandoned those Seven Mountains and they’ve been occupied by the opposite side,” Parker told Enlow, suggesting the chief justice is familiar with Enlow’s show. Enlow is a big proponent of the Seven Mountains Mandate, and maintains a far-right website with his wife called “Restore Seven.”

Parker also told Enlow that God is “equipping me with something for the very specific situation that I’m facing” as the Alabama chief justice.

Enlow, as noted by Media Matters, praised Parker and appeared mindful of not dragging the judge into even more controversial topics. He told Parker that he’s “in such a key place that we don’t want to have any conversations that hurt you in any kind of way, but we appreciate who you are, who you are in the kingdom.”

[ukrfeminism]

Westminster city council and Social Work England last week became the latest to join a list of organisations – including Arts Council England, a barristers’ chambers and a thinktank – found to have discriminated against a female worker because of their gender-critical beliefs.

The social worker Rachel Meade’s winagainst the council and her profession’s regulator means she joins a select but growing group of gender-critical feminists who have successfully brought discrimination claims on the basis of their beliefs.

Gender-critical feminists believe sex is biological and cannot be changed, and disagree with trans rights activists who say gender identity should be given priority in terms of law-making and policy. Clashes in workplaces – in some cases with those who regard the focus on biological sex as transphobic – have led to a string of employment tribunals.

On Monday, a tribunal began hearing a constructive dismissal claim from Roz Adams against Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre. Next month, Kenny McBride’s case against the Scottish government is due to be heard in Glasgow, while judgments are pending in a claim from Prof Jo Phoenix against the Open University and that of the Green party’s former deputy leader Shahrar Ali against the party.

In all four cases – and more in the pipeline – the claimants argue they were discriminated against because they hold gender-critical beliefs.

They hope to follow in the footsteps of the barrister Allison Bailey, and of the researcher Maya Forstater who obtained a landmark judgment in 2021 that her gender-critical beliefs were a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. The campaign group Sex Matters, founded by Forstater, has identified at least 19 current cases.

After the Meade case last week, which like several others involved disciplinary action being initiated against an employee as a result of social media postings, Westminster council said it would “consider what changes we need to make”. For the local authority it comes too late to prevent a payout, but other employers may need to learn from it.

Lucy Lewis, a partner at the law firm Lewis Silkin, said that on such a politically charged issue, employers could feel they must act quickly after a complaint.

“Because this has become a politically toxic issue, there’s a sort of temptation [on the part of employers] to take a kneejerk reaction rather than the considered view of actually, what is the impact, is there another way we can address this [other than disciplinary proceedings or suspension]?

“People are being influenced by the very public and political dialogue on this and actually there’s value in just taking a step back and understanding all the factors.”

Georgina Calvert-Lee, an employment and equality barrister at Bellevue Law, agreed that the wider debate – in which gender-critical feminists and advocates of transgender rights have been at loggerheads – may have influenced employers, but said they must adjust their behaviour in light of the case law.

“What Forstater and Bailey have done is they’ve set this very strong precedent of tolerance,” Calvert-Lee said.

“Above all, in a pluralistic society, which is what we want, you have to accept that people are going to have different views and some people are going to find their colleagues’ views completely obnoxious – but nevertheless protected because freedom of speech is something that … has been really promoted and underlined.

“It’s always been there but it’s been sort of forgotten in some of these culture wars.”

After settling a case with a gender-critical volunteer, Katie Alcock, Girlguiding UK said it remained “a home for trans people” but added: “We agree that sex and gender are different, and will reflect this in the language we use.”

After another case that was settled out of court, brought by the student James Esses, who was thrown off his course for expressing gender-critical views, the UK Council for Psychotherapy conceded it was a valid professional belief that children suffering from gender dysphoria should receive counselling rather than medical intervention and people should not be discriminated against for such beliefs. Esses’ case against the Metanoia Institute continues.

Calvert-Lee said the cases to date showed the importance of employers training staff “about what is acceptable and what’s not and what amounts to harassment and what probably doesn’t – the sort of respect they should give to each other”, as well as giving training to those staff investigating complaints.

“Whenever there’s some sort of complaint which involves a belief that’s basically pitted against another belief, they [the investigator] have to be completely neutral,” she said. “It’s not on for the investigator to come to it very overtly with their own value judgment.”

The tribunals have made clear that it is not a free-for-all but a balancing exercise. For instance, David Mackereth – an outlier in that he lost his case based on gender-critical beliefs – was found to have crossed the line by misgendering service users at the Department for Work and Pensions, making its decision to dismiss him reasonable.

Calvert-Lee believes the recent increase in cases will ultimately be a blip rather than a growing trend, as workplaces become more aware of the need to handle complaints and concerns more carefully.

The events that led to Meade’s claim came “just weeks before the Forstater employment appeal tribunal decision was given”, she said, and the results of the Forstater and Bailey cases would mean “employers will have training, and so they’re likely to fall off, you’re likely to have fewer cases”.

Lewis said there would always be “bad eggs” but compared the situation to legal cases on manifestations of religious belief at work, such as wearing a cross.

“You have a flurry of cases and people that aren’t lawyers … wonder why those cases go away,” she said. “In a common law system like ours, you have cases that set out some of the principles employment tribunals need to consider and then really good organisations like the CIPD [Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development] take all that reasoning, they give advice and training to employers and then employers are clear about what they need to do, how they should manage this kind of conflict in the workplace.”

She added that the media attention afforded to gender-critical cases perhaps suggested that they were more common than they really were. In fact, she suggested there were likely to be a greater number of claims brought by transgender people alleging harm, though many go unreported.

“The overwhelming majority of employers are not setting out to discriminate; they’re not just thinking ‘well all people with gender-critical views are bad, so we’re just going to get rid of them’,” said Lewis.

“They just have got strong alternative views in the workplace and they haven’t known how to navigate through that conflict.”

[mitchipedia]

Hollywood provides good jobs because of strong unions.

Cory Doctorow:

Burbank is prosperous because the unions made sure that everyone – the grips, the costumers, the animators, the actors, the writers, the teamsters and the pipefitters – gets a decent wage, decent health care and a decent retirement. My pal the set-dresser who worked crazy hours shlepping furniture around sitcom sets for decades? All that work did bad stuff to his joints, which meant that he needed a hip replacement in his forties – which was 100% covered, including his sick leave while he recovered. He was able to take early retirement in his late fifties, with a solid pension, with his health in excellent shape and many years of happiness with his partner stretching before him. That's what unions get you: a good job that might be hard at times, and the costs of your work are borne by the employer who profits from your labor.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Carbon neutral” Bitcoin operation founded by coal plant operator wasn’t actually carbon neutral

I'm at DEFCON! TODAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). TOMORROW (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Water is wet, and a Bitcoin thing turned out to be a scam. Why am I writing about a Bitcoin scam? Two reasons:

I. It's also a climate scam; and

II. The journalists who uncovered it have a unique business-model.

Here's the scam. Terawulf is a publicly traded company that purports to do "green" Bitcoin mining. Now, cryptocurrency mining is one of the most gratuitously climate-wrecking activities we have. Mining Bitcoin is an environmental crime on par with opening a brunch place that only serves Spotted Owl omelets.

Despite Terawulf's claim to be carbon-neutral, it is not. It plugs into the NY power grid and sucks up farcical quantities of energy produced from fossil fuel sources. The company doesn't buy even buy carbon credits (carbon credits are a scam, but buying carbon credits would at least make its crimes nonfraudulent):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

Terawulf is a scam from top to bottom. Its NY state permit application promises not to pursue cryptocurrency mining, a thing it was actively trumpeting its plan to do even as it filed that application.

The company has its roots in the very dirtiest kinds of Bitcoin mining. Its top execs (including CEO Paul Prager) were involved with Beowulf Energy LLC, a company that convinced struggling coal plant operators to keep operating in order to fuel Bitcoin mining rigs. There's evidence that top execs at Terawulf, the "carbon neutral" Bitcoin mining op, are also running Beowulf, the coal Bitcoin mining op.

This is a very profitable scam. Prager owns a "small village" in Maryland, with more that 20 structures, including a private gas station for his Ferrari collection (he also has a five bedroom place on Fifth Ave). More than a third of Terawulf's earnings were funneled to Beowulf. Terawulf also leases its facilities from a company that Prager owns 99.9% of, and Terawulf has *showered * that company in its stock.

So here we are, a typical Bitcoin story: scammers lying like hell, wrecking the planet, and getting indecently rich. The guy's even spending his money like an asshole. So far, so normal.

But what's interesting about this story is where it came from: Hunterbrook Media, an investigative news outlet that's funded by a short seller – an investment firm that makes bets that companies' share prices are likely to decline. They stand to make a ton of money if the journalists they hire find fraud in the companies they investigate:

https://hntrbrk.com/terawulf/

It's an amazing source of class disunity among the investment class:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

As the icing on the cake, Prager and Terawulf are pivoting to AI training. Because of course they are.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/09/terawulf/#hunterbrook

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

TFG :: Sign of the Day... this billboard on a highway in Michigan... the swingiest of swing states...

Mary Elaine LeBey

* * * *

What’s at stake in 2024

At least once a week, I receive a note from a parent telling me that their son or daughter will not vote for Biden because he supports Israel. Many (but not all) of those letters ask me to articulate reasons why their son or daughter should vote for Biden, notwithstanding his ongoing support for Israel.

I wrote the following note today in response to a reader who sent a email about his son. I thought it might be helpful to other readers having conversations with adult children who are considering not voting for Biden.

I do not recommend forwarding this list to a son or daughter with a note saying, “Read this.” Conversations about the war in Gaza and support for Biden are difficult and should be approached with caution, respect, deference, and due regard for timing. Consider this list as a resource when the opportunity presents itself for such a discussion.

Here it is:

Trump has threatened to cancel the visas of students protesting in support of Palestinians and “send them home” immediately.

Trump is a much stronger supporter of Netanyahu than Biden and will not put any pressure on Netanyahu to end civilian casualties, while Biden has been putting significant pressure on Netanyahu to avoid civilian casualties.

Trump has promised to round up, imprison, and deport ten million immigrants using the US military, which will cause a humanitarian and civil rights disaster in the US, including the deportation of US citizens based on their surnames, language preference, and ethnicity.

Moreover, supporting Trump increases the likelihood that

Your son’s sisters, girlfriend, and female friends will be demoted to second-class citizens by being denied access to abortions, contraception, and IVF; they and their doctors will face ruinous criminal and civil penalties, even for miscarriages that seem “suspicious” to the fundamentalist police.

Your son’s LGBTQ friends will lose their right to marry and can be legally discriminated against by anyone who claims a religious basis for doing so.

Your son’s Black and Hispanic friends will see their right to vote diluted or denied entirely.

Trump will pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, threatening your son’s health, safety, and economic security and that of his children.

Trump will weaken NATO, increasing the likelihood that your son and his friends will be sent to fight in conflicts in Europe to stop Russia’s advances against former USSR republics.

Your son’s friends will continue to be saddled with crushing student debt.

Your son and his friends will lose guaranteed access to healthcare through the Affordable Care Act.

Your son’s parents’ economic security will be threatened by cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Rights to free speech on social media will be suppressed when they do not comport with MAGA ideology.

The DOJ and FBI will turn into the equivalent of the German Stasi—the personal guard of a despotic ruler.

The Supreme Court will be further stacked with reactionary justices who will reign during most of your son’s lifetime, implementing white Christian nationalism in place of an open, tolerant, pluralistic democracy that maintains the separation between church and state.

If your son is still pursuing an education, his academic curriculum will be determined by the likes of Moms for Liberty, the Federalist Society, Steven Miller, Ron DeSantis, and Marjorie Taylor Green

The Civil Service will be replaced with MAGA loyalists who will ignore the Constitution and laws of the US to implement Trump's policies of revenge and hate

Your son should lobby Joe Biden to change policy, protest the administration’s policy, and organize resistance to that policy all he wants. But threatening to withhold his vote is wrong and self-destructive. It will encourage others to abandon Biden by giving legitimacy to the idea that there is an equivalency between Biden’s support for Israel and the multitude of deprivations and injuries Trump will inflict on hundreds of millions of Americans during a second Trump term.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[there-are-4-lights]

new game

I've made a game out of saying borderline terfy things to people when we're one on one

I was with my guy friend's girlfriend and we were talking about virtue signaling companies like how every store has a rainbow flag in the window.

I said something about how weird it was when like corporations were posting stuff about black lives matter, like , idk i dont really want to know what starbucks is doing to fight racism.

And she agreed and said she thought it was annoying those times when everyone changes their Facebook picture to a French flag,or a Ukrainian flag, etc etc because The Current Thing has happened

And i was just like "heh like when ppl put pronouns in their zoom screennames".

On the walk back from the show i did the same thing again; she was talking about a documentary she'd seen about cults so we were talking about cult documentaries and the dynamic in high control groups

And i was like "hey that reminds me of that one documentary about detransition and how she described the dynamic in her former community" and then i went back to recommending some other cult documentaries.

so let's make a game! take baby steps to counter pluralistic ignorance in your circle.

This is easiest if the conversation isn't about trans/lgbtq. (Literally any other topic is better- social media, cults, mental health, whatever- trans is just the issue around which things behave strangely).

And don't bring it up out of nowhere, make it be a logical example of what you're talking about. this isn't "friend who makes everything about pronouns", this is "friend who models logical thinking in a world where otherwise smart people turn their brains off for this one thing".

[sethshead]

There is no available record of when exactly Nur Omar Mohamed was in active service. He was almost certainly involved in the Ogaden invasion of Ethiopia and the 1982 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia.

It is more questionable his degree of direct culpability for the Isxaaqi genocide, which was carried out by rival clan militias armed and encouraged by the Mohamed Ziyad Barre government. Senior officer positions in dictatorships can be cushy rewards for regime supporters and family members of the autocrat. Many used their rank to avoid danger and potential harm. He need not have been called to the or even worn a uniform by then. Then again, the regime at all levels was guilty of its crimes against humanity, and even in an administrative capacity Col. Nur would thus have assisted in the slaughter.

What cannot be questioned is that the family were elites in Mohamed Ziyad Barre’s government. They were not just commoners caught haplessly in the violence that replaced a brutal dictatorship with brutal warlords and brutal anarchy; they were well placed members of the regime, who fled being called to account for the human rights abuses carried out in the name of their comfortable lifestyles. They were closer to Miami Batististas than to the desperate, homeless refugees of popular imagination. Rep. Ilhan admired her father and had fond memories of the childhood she spent in such privilege. It does make me how much she prefers those memories to the pluralistic, deliberative, representative and consensual body in which she now serves.

[horsesource]

"Without a change in mentalities, without entry into a post-media era, there can be no enduring hold over the environment. Yet, without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities. Here, we are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of founding an 'ecosophy' that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology…

From this ecosophic perspective, there would be no question of reconstituting a hegemonic ideology, as were the major religions or Marxism...Out of the capitalist chaos must come what I call 'attractors' of values: values that are diverse, heterogeneous, dissensual...An essential condition for succeeding in the promotion of a new planetary consciousness would thus reside in our collective capacity for the recreation of value systems that would escape the moral, psychological and social lamination of capitalist valorization, which is only centered on economic profit. The joy of living, solidarity, and compassion with regard to others, are sentiments that are about to disappear and that must be protected, enlivened, and propelled in new directions. Ethical and aesthetic values do not arise from imperatives and transcendent codes...

The suggestive power of the theory of information has contributed to masking the importance of the enunciative dimensions of communication. It leads us to forget that a message must be received, and not just transmitted, in order to have meaning. Information cannot be reduced to its objective manifestations; it is, essentially, the production of subjectivity, the becoming-consistent of incorporeal universes. These last aspects cannot be reduced to an analysis in terms of improbability and calculated on the basis of binary choices. The truth of information refers to an existential event occuring in those who receive it. Its register is not that of the exactitude of facts, but that of the significance of a problem, of the consistency of a universe of values. The current crisis of the media and the opening up of a post-media era are the symptoms of a much more profound crisis.

What I want to emphasize is the fundamentally pluralist, multi-centered, and heterogeneous character of contemporary subjectivity, in spite of the homogenization it is subjected to by the mass media. In this respect, an individual is already a "collective" of heterogeneous components. A subjective phenomenon refers to personal territories - the body, the self- but also, at the same time, to collective territories - the family, the community, the ethnic group. And to that must be added all the procedures for subjectivation embodied in speech, writing, computing, and technological machines...

Subjectivity is forged through multiple mediations, whereas individual relations between generations, sexes, and proximal groups have weakened. For example, the role of grandparents as an intergenerational memory suppon for children has very often disappeared. The child develops in a context shadowed by television, computer games, telecommunications, comic strips. A new machinic solitude is being born, which is certainly not without merit, but which deserves to be continually reworked such that it can accord with renewed forms of sociality. Rather than relations of opposition, it is a matter of forging polyphonic interlacings between the individual and the social. Thus, a subjective music remains to be thereby composed."

"Remaking Social Practices" Felix Guattari