Linkage

Things Katy is reading.

in Politics.co.uk  

A solid summary of a distressing few months that seemed to go on for years.

A few weeks ago an anonymous person threatened to kill my friend. Her crime: being trans. This sort of thing is depressingly familiar to anyone who dares to be or support trans online. Away from the darker reaches of the internet, however, the so called “gender critical” (what I understand to be “anti-trans”) movement enjoys platforms in national media and access to the highest corridors of power. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has even appeared to make high profile statements in support. This summer, however, the GC movement’s claims to legitimacy crumbled.

Judith Butler, a titan of feminist academia, argues that the movement enforces the patriarchal gender norms favoured by the religious and far-right. “Men” and “women” are confined to tightly defined stereotypes and anyone who deviates is punished. It would explain why GCs receive support from authoritarians like Vladimir Putin, and far right politicians like Giorgia Meloni.

One might be forgiven for thinking the GC movement spent the summer trying to prove Butler right.

via Natasha Jay
in The 19th  

It's intentionally the opposite of public safety. It's giving violent bigots carte blanche to assault any woman who doesn't meet their expectations of femininity. It's not designed to "work"; it's designed to sow chaos and fear.

These state bathroom bans provide few, if any details about how they would be enforced because they don’t need to — private citizens are often meant to be the enforcers, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks LGBTQ+ legislation.

“The way that the laws are de facto enforced is often through the emboldening of private individuals to police other people’s bathroom use,” he said. “There’s no written enforcement because the proponents of these bills know that just by talking about this, let alone enacting these laws, that they are emboldening individual people themselves to enforce these bathroom bans.”

A recent example that takes this formula to an extreme can be seen in Odessa, Texas. A new expansion of the West Texas town’s ordinance allows individual citizens to sue transgender people caught using bathrooms that match their gender identity and seek “no less than $10,000 in damages,” per the Texas Tribune.

Deputizing private citizens to enforce this kind of law enables high rates of harassment and violence against transgender people as well as cisgender people, Casey said, particularly women who do not conform to traditional ideas of femininity. 

via Mercedes Allen
by Matt Stoller 

The "little fish" in sellers' inflation:

The concept of an economic termite is the cousin to Cory Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ or Yves Smith’s ‘crapification,’ terms that describe how a platform gradually degrades the quality of its service as it gains market power and gets pushed to extract cash by financiers. Economic termites describes where these same forces get into the mostly unseen business foundations of our society and profiteer.

These termites are in the infrastructure or guts of business, like recruiting services, construction equipment or software, the industrial gasses that go into chemicals and electronics, and so forth. It’s the stuff you don’t see that makes our world turn, there’s fortunes to be made, and bottlenecks to foster.

They also explain a dynamic we all face, a profound wariness in our society, a sense that stuff just costs more and is more difficult, for no discernible reason. Added up, these end up sapping our faith in the American system, because they make what seem like simple problems become not just unsolvable, but not even capable of being diagnosed. In this issue, I’ll cover some of the companies you don’t realize are gnawing at the foundation of our society - Verisign, Autodesk, Linde, Assa Abloy, Gracenote, and LinkedIn. And yes, there are legal tools to address them. But first we have to realize that these bottlenecks are everywhere. 

by Evan Urquhart in Assigned Media  

The trans community predicted well in advance that cis women would inevitably wind up being targeted by the growing anti-trans hysteria, and that, because trans women are relatively uncommon, the majority of the harassment would ultimately be targeting cisgender women. That has sadly turned out to be the case as members of the public who’ve been whipped into a transmisogynistic frenzy look to vent their rage on any women who doesn’t adequately perform femininity. The harassment of Harold after her half-marathon is just the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Some of these have been relatively mild, such as fleeting encounters in public restrooms where cis women have been challenged or treated disrespectfully by people who believed that they were trans. A few, however, have been violent, including an incident where a woman was maced, dragged, and kicked after a shop attendant got the mistaken idea she was transgender, and one where a woman was murdered by a man who falsely believed her to be transgender. Both of the victims of violent attacks were Black women, who are believed to be particularly vulnerable to transmisogyny, included misdirected transmisogyny.

Incidents like these, where cis women wind up as targets for hatred and harassment intended for trans women, provide an opportunity to shine a spotlight on just how ugly and pointless the anti-trans panic is, even as harassment and violence towards trans women is often ignored and downplayed. However, it also speaks to the irony of a hate campaign that targets a group of women who are small in number, risk averse, and difficult to distinguish from other women. Cis women don’t just wind up as frequent targets of anti-trans hate by accident, they wind up as targets of anti-trans hate because the loathing and violent anger engendered by the anti-trans movement has to vent itself on somebody, and there aren’t enough visible trans women to slake the bloodlust.

by Chris Hedges 

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

via Bread and Circuses
by George Lakoff ,  Gil Duran 

I have thoughts backed up, many of them, obviously. As election day approached, I found myself thinking more and more about Lakoff, in the context of the New Republicans' ability to convey a narrative about who they are and what they stand for. It's monstrous, but has a kind of coherence. By contrast the Democrats don't have anything like that. As an institution, they are a moral and civil vacuum. They are rightly seen as calculating and untrustworthy.

However I take issue with Duran and Lakoff's assertion that the Democrats were practicing identity politics. If anything they were doing quite the reverse: identity complacency. The Republicans have been wielding identity politics frighteningly effectively.

In 2024, Kamala Harris tried to move to the right to find the mythical “center.” It didn’t work. Moving to the right doesn't get you to the center – because there is no center. When a Democratic politician moves to "the right" during an election, it erodes their authenticity. In fact, such tactics might have demotivated Democratic voters who were disillusioned to see their candidate running as a Republican Lite.

[
]

Moving forward, Democrats must stop making these superficial, last-minute lurches toward Republican ideas. They must frame the case not as left or right, but for the people and the public good. Moving to the right only convinces voters that the right has better ideas. It's a desperate short-term strategy with harmful long-term consequences.

[
]

Especially helpful to Trump were large social media accounts that thrive on engagement from outraged Democrats. As in 2016, Trump’s "opponents" created a parasitic economy in which constant outrage over Trump's every utterance was the name of the game. Again, this was a massive failure – because focusing attention on Trump’s power — even his power to harm — helps Trump. (Don't expect these professional social media hounds to change their tactics. Amplifying Trump is their bread and butter.)

The attacks on Trump managed to help spread his message far and wide. If Democrats and the liberal press had spent less time reacting to Trump, they might have done a lot better job of trumpeting — and trumpeting loudly — their own candidate’s positives. 

via George Lakoff

This is just a shambles:

A key factor that the industry has been keen to not draw too much attention to for over a year is the number of 4G & 5G devices that would no longer work, or would only work on some networks, including for Emergency Calling.

The idea that a 4G or 5G phone could somehow be affected by the shutting down of older technologies like 2G & 3G is a completely foreign concept to people, and rightfully so.

[
]

Unlike with 2G & 3G, 4G & 5G are Data only standards and have no built-in calling functionality, let alone one as well standardised as the traditional Circuited Switched calling from 2G & 3G (GSM/UMTS).

This becomes a problem as to enable calling over 4G & 5G, devices need to have explicit software/firmware support, especially so for Emergency Calling.

Calling on 4G Networks is enabled through the use of VoLTE (Voice over LTE aka ‘4G Calling’), which is a software/firmware VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calling solution for mobile phones.

The world has used VoIP Calling for decades but introducing VoIP data based calling into the mobile sector has proven very difficult.

Voice Over LTE (4G Calling) devices have been around since as early as 2013, however over years the industry has failed to ensure interoperability.

via Ruben
in City Observatory  

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.

Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

in Assigned Media  

Hilarious. Joyless monomaniacs near you are looking for love


According to useless rag The Daily Mail, who interviewed Watson about her cool new phrenology software, the app—called L’App, like some sort of miserable French pre-dinner meal—will use “sex-recognition technology” to “ensure only biological females can sign up.” As ever, I cannot begin to guess what the fuck a “biological female is,” but maybe if we break down what the app is actually looking for we can come up with a few ideas.

When you sign up on the app, you have to let it scan your face, a decision that any dystopian science fiction film can tell you is a fantastic idea. The app will “analyze” features like “bone structure, the shape and positioning of an individual's eyes, eyebrows and nose shape or size” to determine whether or not you’re a true adult human female or just some sort of poseur.

Watson says L’App’s transgender detection is 99% accurate, an absolutely stunning number that I’m absolutely sure is correct and not made up. Considering trans people in general make up roughly one percent of the world population, my back of the napkin math suggests the app can’t actually catch any trans women at all.

[
]

Watson admitted to The Mail that she’s had some particularly amusing trouble fitting in on other dating apps.

“Any time I've joined a lesbian dating app or any other dating app myself, I get banned. To avoid trans-identified males, I will always write a little blurb, nothing disrespectful, saying my preference is for women and please respect my boundaries. And every time I do that I get banned. On one app I was asked to put down my most controversial opinion, so I wrote that J. K. Rowling was right and was banned for that. It's insane.”

Oh yes, Jenny, it’s the rest of the world that’s gone insane. You’re the only one who gets it. The rest of us are simply delusional, and that’s why other lesbians don’t want your rancid ass on their dating app. Have fun on your own app where the icky trans girls aren’t allowed. I’m sure the fact that other lesbians keep banning you from their dating apps is no indication of how successful your purity test app will be.

for Prosper Australia  

The notion that negative gearing leads to an increased supply of rental dwellings is flawed: 92% of
investment is used to purchase existing dwellings, displacing previous owner-occupiers or tenants to
buy or rent elsewhere, respectively, resulting in little to no net increase in the rental stock. Negative
gearing is a poor investment strategy over the long term for investors pursuing capital gain rather
than rental income as housing prices have increased by an average of 2.4% annually from 1880 to
2011 in real terms (before 1996, housing had delivered a real return of only 0.7% annually). Negative
gearing for purposes of realizing capital gain, however, becomes a viable strategy during the boom
phase of a housing cycle as capital values are substantially appreciating. Contrary to claims that
quarantining negative gearing during 1985-87 caused a surge in rental prices, rents increased in only
some capital cities while stagnating or falling in others.

[
]

It is recommended that, at a minimum, negative gearing be quarantined to the purchase of newly-
constructed dwellings, or preferably, be abolished. The Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme
is better targeted towards those who require help in the course of renting rather than subsidising
residential property market investors. Although the CRA could increase rents, it appears to be the
most straight-forward mechanism available to policymakers to aid tenants.