Linkage

Grindr is full of profiles with caveats about what the user is seeking. They can be typical, harmless details (e.g., “looking for guys between 30–40,” “prefer men who like the outdoors”) but also problematic (e.g., “no fat,” “no fem,” “white only”). I initially assumed my “No Republicans” addition would be a vetting tool, letting conservative men know we’re not a match.

[…]

I’ve been told, more than once, “By shutting out all Republicans, you’re shutting out 50 percent of people.” Never mind that Republicans account for just 30 percent of the population; I typically respond that I’m not someone who shuts out of my life everyone with different political beliefs. The difference here is I’m not looking to date, say, my conservative uncle. (It’s also worth noting that the Venn diagram of men who tell me “No Republicans” is discriminatory and men who have problematic profile standards like “No one fat or over 45” is dangerously close to a circle.)

[…]

Many are also outwardly conservative and publicly homophobic, actively working against LGBTQ+ rights. The anonymity Grindr provides seems to make it easy for these men to compartmentalize—I’ve sadly heard multiple versions of “I’m not a faggot; I just like having sex with men sometimes.” These are the men that I try to have some empathy for, but frankly, they piss me off the most. […] When I relay these anecdotes, my straight friends and colleagues are always surprised, which surprises me, as there’s ample evidence—Randy McNally, Aaron Schock, Roy Cohn—of this particular form of hypocrisy.

Some high-octane anger fuel in this excellent piece:

COVID patients began raising the alarm that they weren't getting better, scientists are still racing to unravel the mystery of why a significant minority of people develop debilitating chronic symptoms while others seem to recover just fine. But if the plight of adults with long COVID remains poorly understood, the millions of children who have it worldwide are practically invisible, their suffering — and the formative years they're losing to this disease — obscured by the myths that COVID is "harmless" for kids and the pandemic is "over".

In Australia, the lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with long COVID are being dismissed by doctors who say there's nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is "all in their head". They're being pushed out of school by teachers who don't understand why they can't come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb COVID transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences.

A small Victorian milk company says supermarket giant Coles has removed its products from 65 Victorian stores in retribution for refusing to give the supermarket a bigger profit margin.

From next month, Gippsland Jersey milk will only be stocked in about 16 Victorian Coles supermarkets, leaving the business with two weeks to find a new home for thousands of litres of milk.

Sallie Jones, who started the company with dairy farmer Steve Ronalds in 2016, said the decision came as a shock.

"We've gone from being awarded Australia's best milk to then being removed off the majority of Coles shelves, which is super disappointing," she said.

This centrist Democratic strategy fits into a larger, longer-term, bipartisan alliance that views protesters as the enemy, and their tactics as a threat to the fundamental interests of our militarized, fossil-fuel-dependent society.

The repressive bipartisan playbook is partly rooted in the 2001 Patriot Act, rushed through and passed overwhelmingly on the wave of fear following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The law led to increased racial profiling, sweeps of millions of private phone records, and a vast expansion of the government’s ability to spy on ordinary citizens. Simultaneously, decommissioned military hardware from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan flowed to local police and sheriff’s departments, allowing them to deploy bayonets, riot shields, grenade launchers, sound cannons, sniper scopes, detonator robots, and tank-like Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected trucks known as MRAPs. (Some of this equipment was restricted under President Obama, then allowed again under Trump.) Hence local police and sheriff’s offices, moving in military-like formation in places like Ferguson (after the police killing of Michael Brown), Minneapolis (after the murder of George Floyd), and the Standing Rock Sioux reservation during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, confronted unarmed citizens as if they were Middle East insurgents. In other words, like the enemy.

Good grief.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near “human level robustness and accuracy.”

But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.

Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

More concerning, they said, is a rush by medical centers to utilize Whisper-based tools to transcribe patients’ consultations with doctors, despite OpenAI’ s warnings that the tool should not be used in “high-risk domains.”

By returning income inequality to the levels found in 1970, the United States could reduce the rate of extreme house poverty sixfold, and cut the rate of extreme rent poverty eleven-fold.

These numbers are so large that they sound magical. But that’s the thing about returning stolen money. It’s a concrete action that, as if by magic, makes people less poor. And when folks are less poor, they can better afford housing.

Sarcasm aside, my point is that the unfolding housing crisis is a catastrophe of poverty that can be solved by reducing inequality. Take money from the rich and hand it to the poor, and the housing crisis will solve itself. And let’s not call this policy ‘socialism’. Let’s call it a return to the ‘Great Society’ (the inverse of MAGA).

To be fair, boldly redistributing income is a big ask that’s unlikely to happen in the short term. Which is why anti-poverty groups are wise to lobby for the smaller ask of subsidized housing. That said, subsidizing rent is like handing food stamps to the victims of theft. It’s less bad than doing nothing. But if we want to eliminate rising rent poverty, there is a better solution. Give back to the American poor the money that was stolen from them.

As political scientist Jacob Grumbach describes, concentrated partisan power, which has built up over the past 30 years and is approaching an apex, means that the states, once hailed by Justice Louis Brandeis as laboratories of democracy, are increasingly turning into laboratories for partisan advantage. And this has stirred the latent potential for rising interstate aggression and conflict, with states governed by Republicans in particular adopting policies and practices expressly designed to impose their power and policy preferences on unwilling citizens, officials, businesses, and states beyond their borders.

To be fair, blue states have also used policy to drive national standards. For decades, conservatives have fretted that California’s emissions and environmental standards stand in for the nation, since it may be too expensive to make one product to meet California’s strict requirements and another for Nebraska’s. Yet our review of state actions in recent years suggests that red states are more determined on this front, and more effective from the perspective of achieving their objectives.

In our view, effective responses to the increasingly ambitious red-state aggression hinge on two critical objectives. The first is to win (or at least not lose) the policy battles around which these conflicts are arising, vindicating the power of blue-state voters to determine their own destinies. The second is to contain the conflicts between states sufficiently to avoid a conflagration. You could say that these objectives draw from two doctrines, one from recent legal theory and practice, and one from common negotiating strategy: constitutional hardball and deterrence.

In the face of red-state aggression, we think it’s time for blue states to embrace their governing majorities as affirmative sources of power—and began to exercise those powers more fully, more effectively, and with greater coordination.

Many have argued that the United States’ two major political parties have experienced “asymmetric polarization” in recent decades: The Republican Party has moved significantly further to the right than the Democratic Party has moved to the left. The practice of consti­tutional hardball, this Essay argues, has followed a similar—and causally related—trajectory. Since at least the mid-1990s, Republican office­holders have been more likely than their Democratic counterparts to push the constitutional envelope, straining unwritten norms of gov­ernance or disrupting established constitutional understandings. Both sides have done these things. But contrary to the apparent assumption of some legal scholars, they have not done so with the same frequency or intensity.

Wait. "The Democratic Party has moved to the left"? When did this happen? Do you mean the Civil Rights Act?

This is one of the most enlightening things I've read recently, but sadly it's paywalled.

In the US, mask wearing, while opposed and evaded by people all over the political spectrum (albeit not equally), was disproportionately associated with reactionary political affiliation, especially in its most demagogic and violent forms. Anti-mask demagoguery associated mask wearing and mask mandates with communism, Nazism, satanism, genocide, suicide and a war on America. This article argues that this demagoguery was not unique to masks or COVID-19, but the rhetorical consequence of the pro-GOP strategic repurposing of twentieth-century anti-communist demagoguery. This demagoguery (which arose after World War I) framed all policy disagreements, not as issues with multiple legitimate perspectives that could be argued qua policies, but as battles in an apocalyptic war between good and evil, and therefore beyond normal political disagreement.

Your RSS reader doesn't (necessarily) have an algorithm. By default, you'll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

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RSS basically works like social media should work. Using RSS is a chance to visit a utopian future in which the platforms have no power, and all power is vested in publishers, who get to decide what to publish, and in readers, who have total control over what they read and how, without leaking any personal information through the simple act of reading.

And here's the best part: every time you use RSS, you bring that world closer into being! The collective action problem that the publishers and friends and politicians and businesses you care about is caused by the fact that everyone they want to reach is on a platform, so if they leave the platform, they'll lose that community. But the more people who use RSS to follow them, the less they'll depend on the platform