Linkage

This is just brilliant:

As I was picking up my car from the mechanic last week, the maskless man ringing me up from behind the plexiglass gestured to my mask and asked a by-now familiar question: “Are you sick or trying not to get sick?” He said it with kind curiosity, with none of the ridicule or hostility that so often meets people “still” wearing masks in public. I happily replied that I was trying not to get sick.

He then shared the following information with me: others at the shop had been pressuring him to remove the plexiglass barrier that barely separated him from the customers, but he refused. A friend of his this year died of “it”; the mechanics at the shop are constantly out sick with “it”; and one mechanic lost his leg due to a blood clot after being intubated for three months with “it.” Not once was the word “Covid” mentioned, but we both knew what we were talking about. It had ravaged people he knew, and he wasn’t willing to get rid of the last protective barrier that separated him from the customers who come in sick all the time. In his own way, he insisted on continuing to acknowledge the pandemic by protecting himself the best way he knew how.

The fact that we could talk about Covid without ever mentioning it by name struck me. Others in the waiting room surely heard us, too, and knew what we were talking about. After all, nobody has really forgotten Covid. But what most people have done, collectively, is decide that it is over by fiat; that is, they have ejected Covid from their reality and therefore their vocabulary. “Covid” has become a forbidden word. What has resulted is an unnecessary mystification of the present: gruesome signs of Covid are all around us, as my mechanic saw so clearly, but we are without adequate language to describe it.

[…]

When Trump said that the pandemic would end if we just stopped testing for it, the public was rightly outraged. We were new to the pandemic, not yet fatigued by the inconvenience of caring for others. And so we could easily see through this proposed sleight of hand; we knew that viruses exist even when we don’t go looking for them. But this is exactly the policy that has been universally adopted under a Democratic presidency: almost every method we developed for measuring the true extent of the pandemic in 2020 has been eliminated, not because the threat disappeared but rather to disappear the threat. Just one reliable metric remains, wastewater data, and it reveals the truth: we are still in a biological pandemic, killing and disabling millions. 

[…]

What this sleight of hand conceals is the fact that the social end of the pandemic was manufactured to restart the engine of capital as quickly as possible to quell a newly-radicalized society. At least in the United States, the early pandemic ushered in the most robust social safety net that many of us had seen in our lifetimes: we all received a universal basic income; unemployment benefits doubled; child poverty was cut in half; the changes to manufacturing and travel for which climate activists have been agitating for decades were implemented in the blink of an eye. The lie that bureaucracy is slow and the government’s hands are tied was laid bare. We saw, for the first time, what the state could really do for us when it prioritized people over profits.

In a recent study, I interviewed 12 teachers, primarily in rural towns in the Northeast, about how they deal with problems that arise in the classroom every day. They discussed how they came up with responses based on best practices they had learned in school from resources such as books and videos. They also spoke of techniques they learned in professional development workshops.

Of the nine who worked in public schools or publicly funded child care centers, however, all but one of the teachers were influenced by pressure to follow a curriculum to fidelity. This pressure came from administrators in the form of threats of punishments and even job loss, as well as from colleagues who questioned when they taught a curriculum differently. 

[…]

The term “fidelity” comes from the sciences and refers to the precise execution of a protocol in an experiment to ensure results are reliable. However, a classroom is not a lab, and students are not experiments.

As a result, teachers and teacher educators have long decried fidelity and the impact it has on them and their students.

One participant in my study, a fourth grade public school teacher, described an oppressive environment at her school: “They were really driving the curriculum down our throats. We need to meet this at this date. And everyone should be at this lesson at this date.”

This counteracted what she was taught in college – every student is different, and every classroom is different. Not all teachers will be on the same lesson on the same day.

“Car dependency has a threshold effect – using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.”

The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed people’s responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race and disability.

The results were “surprising”, Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

“Some people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,” she said. “The study doesn’t call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isn’t a choice, so diversifying choices is important.”

Gradually, our notions of who a person is have expanded — first to include Germans and Swedes (look it up, Ben Franklin was repulsed by how not-white they were), then Irish men and other European men, then white women, then slowly, everyone else. But that habit — dare I say, pleasure — of being a person among non-people? This country doesn’t let go of it easily. And the personhood of everyone who isn’t a white man is constantly open to question.

You can work non-people like dogs. You can set a non-person on the task of cleaning your house and feeding your children, and whether she likes doing it doesn’t have to enter the equation. You don’t need to care if a non-person drowns in the Rio Grande or dies of thirst in the desert. If non-people are rounded up and sent to Mexico, well, look at the rest of us! We’re all people here, and our being here after the purge of the non-people proves it.

And, sure, maybe you think you’re white. Latinos can be white. Hell, Latinos like Nick Fuentes, Enrique Tarrio and Mauricio Garcia are well-known white supremacists. But that’s not how it works when the monster is loose. White people will point their fingers at other white people and say, “They’re not people like us!” And then, just like that, you go from being white to being the target of white people.

So the reason many of us are confused about why Latinos would vote for Trump is because of that frenzied evil that so often shamefully overcomes white people in America when we let loose our racism. When white people act on our worst racist impulses — like deciding that non-white people don’t belong here, or that some people here are "vermin," or that everyone from a certain place or background is a criminal and a rapist — we enact terrible violence on our neighbors. People get hurt. People get killed. And it is never only the “right” people. When the beast is feeding, it eats everything it can reach. Including you. Including me.

File under "Paywalled but pertinent."

The Harris campaign chose not to respond to the Trump ads — not even to point out, as the Lincoln Project did, that trans health care for prisoners (including surgery) was the policy of Trump’s Bureau of Prisons during his first term. In campaign rallies, Harris’s litany of “freedoms” invariably ended with gay rights (“The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride”). It never once included trans rights. The same was true for Democratic candidates down the ballot. Before McBride was banned from the Capitol bathrooms, she was excluded from the Democratic National Convention stage.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called the  Capitol trans bathroom ban dangerous for “all women and girls” because “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt because she might not look woman enough.” That’s a lot like someone in 1955 objecting to Jim Crow laws because some white people might get mistaken for Black people. AOC didn’t mention McBride or civil rights.

Trans people have become untouchables.

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If it sounds like I’m terrified, I am — as are many trans Americans and their families. In recent years there has been an escalation in the number of anti-trans bills introduced in Republican state houses (669 bills in 2024). Most are targeting trans minors, taking away bathrooms, sports, books, forcibly outing them, outlawing “crossdressing,” greenlighting hate speech, criminalizing any mention of gender identity, and criminalizing their parents, doctors and counselors. As Trump has vowed, and as the state of Oklahoma has done, they’re not going to stop with children.

But what terrifies me most doesn’t just concern trans people. I’ll pose my fear as a question: What percentage of the German population was Jewish at the time of Hitler’s rise? The answer — 0.75% — is lower than most people guess.

The Nazi party gaslit a nation into thinking that a group comprising 0.75% of its population was a threat that could “poison” its culture, seize its economy and needed to be stopped. During the 1930s, before Germany’s “final solution” to “the Jewish problem,” more than 400 anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued by national, regional and municipal officials, gradually eliminating Jews from public life, employment, education, culture, travel, hospital care and turning them into outcasts.

In response to their electoral losses, the “Left” in both countries began adopting New Labour and New Democrat policies, which sought to blend conservative language with their own agendas to win elections. This approach — referred to as “triangulation” — essentially sugarcoated neoliberalism.

I would argue that [Bill] Clinton and [Tony] Blair did more to consolidate and make neoliberalism seem inevitable than Thatcher and Reagan ever did. In fact, when Thatcher was asked what her greatest accomplishment was, she said it was Tony Blair. She had gotten Labour to buy into her views. Blair himself said he saw his role as building on Thatcher, not undoing her work.

The biggest privatizer in American history was Clinton; he did more to privatize than Reagan. The biggest cuts to welfare spending were Clinton’s, as was the launch of the war against crime, which led to mass incarceration, creating an underclass without actually contributing to public safety.

What you saw was neoliberalism transforming the Left, which lost the connection between inclusion and equality, between privilege and power. The Left lost its way. It treated fragmentation — social fragmentation — as inevitable. It gave up on the idea of society, the idea of a larger common good — in other words, it gave up on the idea of solidarity. We just accepted the idea that globalization and technology were immutable.

In essence, the Left adopted two key messages from Thatcher’s era: first, that “there is no alternative” to the current economic and technological realities; and second, that “there is no society” — obligations only extend to individuals and their immediate circles or “little platoons.” These ideas became central to the Third Way left.

JD Vance brought all of that pathological hatred of Haitians to bear when he accused Haitian immigrants, whom he considers a threat, of eating cats (the same cats he also considers a threat to white birth rates). The racists who participate in the anti-immigrant online mobs do the same. Not everybody who is piling on is aware of the deep and disgusting history of racism toward Haitians: After all, many online MAGAs have an aversion to knowing things about the other peoples of the world. But they know enough (that Haitians are Black and vulnerable in this country) to derive glee from participating in cruelty.

It hurts, of course. It always hurts when you are reminded of just how many white folks hate your people. It always stings to see a few other Black people or other supposed allies join in the denigration. I think the insult that Haitians are eating pets is doubled for me because I know for a fact that white Americans care more about their family pets than they do about Haitian immigrants being threatened and harassed right now. If all of Haiti were a nature preserve for cats and dogs, it would be protected at all costs. Since it is a home for free Black folks, its people are treated like dogs.

But being hurt and being defeated are two different things. White folks have been trying to strangle Haiti and Haitians into submission for over 200 years, and yet we are still here. What I can laugh about is this: The white supremacist forces multicultural America is trying to defeat in this election are forces little ol’ Haitians defeated literal centuries ago. America is still trying to get at our level.

What we can see from this example of Nazi Germany, and from studying other instances of fascist movements around the world, is that there are five major themes of fascist education:

1. National greatness
2. National purity
3. National innocence
4. Strict gender roles
5. Vilification of the left

These themes are essentially different ways that fascist movements stoke grievances among the dominant group they serve in order to further their aims. In the process, they are careful to eliminate any contradiction of their narrative. This would include, for example, any scholarly research revealing flaws in national myths, any form of education that clearly reveals national guilt, any suggestion that diversity and plurality might be beneficial to society, or that more equitable gender relations might be beneficial, or that the political left is significantly less of a threat than they imagine.

The time it took me to go from "Oh, this is so much better than Alta Vista!" to "OMG! This is the Web's single point of failure!" was much longer than it should have been.

The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.

[…]

In November 2015, we became aware of the problem and consulted a number of well known SEO experts. None of them could explain the issue, especially since Proton Mail has never used any blackhat SEO tactics, nor did we observe any used against us. Mysteriously, the issue was entirely limited to Google, as this anomaly was not seen on any other search engine. Below are the search rankings for Proton Mail for ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’ taken at the beginning of August 2016 across all major search engines. We rank on either page 1 or 2 everywhere except Google where we are not ranked at all.

[…]

All throughout Spring 2016, we worked in earnest to get in touch with Google. We created two tickets on their web spam report form explaining the situation. We even contacted Google’s President EMEA Strategic Relationships, but received no response nor improvement. Around this time, we also heard about the anti-trust action brought forward by the European Commission against Google(new window), accusing Google of abusing its search monopoly to lower the search rankings of Google competitors(new window). This was worrying news, because as an email service that puts user privacy first, we are the leading alternative to Gmail for those looking for better data privacy.

In August, with no other options, we turned to Twitter to press our case. This time though, we finally got a response(new window), thanks in large part to the hundreds of Proton Mail users who drew attention to the issue and made it impossible to ignore. After a few days, Google informed us that they had “fixed something” without providing further details. The results could be immediately seen.

A comprehensive roundup of the LLM hype dumpster fire.

We observe a recent trend toward applying large language models (LLMs) in search and positioning them as effective information access systems. While the interfaces may look appealing and the apparent breadth of applicability is exciting, we are concerned that the field is rushing ahead with a technology without sufficient study of the uses it is meant to serve, how it would be used, and what its use would mean. We argue that it is important to reassert the central research focus of the field of information retrieval, because information access is not merely an application to be solved by the so-called ‘AI’ techniques du jour. Rather, it is a key human activity, with impacts on both individuals and society. As information scientists, we should be asking what do people and society want and need from information access systems and how do we design and build systems to meet those needs? With that goal, in this conceptual article we investigate fundamental questions concerning information access from user and societal viewpoints. We revisit foundational work related to information behavior, information seeking, information retrieval, information filtering, and information access to resurface what we know about these fundamental questions and what may be missing. We then provide our conceptual framing about how we could fill this gap, focusing on methods as well as experimental and evaluation frameworks. We consider the Web as an information ecosystem and explore the ways in which synthetic media, produced by LLMs and otherwise, endangers that ecosystem. The primary goal of this conceptual article is to shed light on what we still do not know about the potential impacts of LLM-based information access systems, how to advance our understanding of user behaviors, and where the next generations of students, scholars, and developers could fruitfully invest their energies.