This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• People with ‘gay-sounding’ voices face discrimination and anticipate rejection — Carrie Woods in the Academic Times reviews a recent paper in the field of stupid men studies: The research highlighted that essentialist beliefs about homosexuality can result in “auditory gaydar,” or the use of vocal cues to infer someone else’s sexual orientation. Whether or not an individual “sounded gay” resulted in different levels of prejudice and avoidant discrimination. […] The findings show that “sounding gay” is something that still carries a significant stigma, especially for men. The men who believed that they “sounded gay” reported higher levels of vigilance regarding their voice, which is something that can create stress in their lives, Fasoli said.
• The Nightmare Is Finally Over, and We Can Say with Absolute Certainty That There Will Never Be Another Death Star Ever Again — Madeleine Trebenski and the pop culture metaphor that never gets old at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Our reports state that, at the time of the attack, the Emperor was playing golf at his resort in Canto Bight, but has since retreated to the farthest reaches of the Outer Rim. He continues to send out communications claiming that he won The Battle of the Death Star, even though flaming chunks of debris from the former moon-sized battle station are currently raining down on nearby planets. Try not to take his refusal to acknowledge defeat and his vow to never relinquish supreme power too seriously. In the wake of our victory, his regime and all of the anti-republic support he has stirred up over the last few years will surely fade back into the dark corners of space from whence they came. There’s no reason to believe that his followers will quietly nurse their hatred in the shadows and commence rebuilding a second Death Star the minute we become complacent and return to the status quo.
• Facecrook: Dealing with a Global Menace — Matt Stoller explains why the new Australian law isn't a "link tax": The law says that if you are a dominant digital platform, then you have an obligation to engage in good faith bargaining with news outlets whose content you distribute over the terms of that distribution. The law only applies if there is a bargaining imbalance with media outlets. So this isn’t a tax, it is an anti-monopoly law. […] The idea behind the law is to mimic a healthy market, where there is transparency of data and a robust set of buyers and sellers instead of a few dominant platforms. […] In other words, despite what Facebook’s PR armies are saying, it isn’t a link tax, it is an anti-monopoly law that Facebook is opposing because the law will undermine the firm’s ability to monopolize the ad market and force transparency in how the firm gathers and manages its vast data horde. […] Facebook’s response to this law was to flex some serious muscles, and block the sharing of news in Australia on its platform. Doing so was a disaster, at least PR-wise, because it revealed how much power Facebook really has. The social media monopolist lost credibility globally, with Canadian and UK politicians attacking the firm as a bad faith actor. Facebook even lost American support; as late as last month, the United States Trade Representative was supporting the company against Australia’s law, but the American government seems to have switched course, and is now neutral. It’s now only a matter of time before Facebook is broken up and regulated.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  
• “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection — Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan in ProPublica: Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters. “We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’” By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day. “We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”
• Cold Truth: The Texas Freeze is a Catastrophe of the Free Market — Jamie Galbraith for INET: In 2002, under Governor Rick Perry, Texas deregulated its electricity system. […] The market system could, and did, work out most of the time. Prices rose and fell, and customers who didn’t sign long-term contracts faced some risk. […] The problem with “most of the time” is that people need electric power all of the time. And Texas’s leaders knew as of 2011, at least, when the state went through a short, severe freeze, that the system was radically unstable in extreme weather. But they did nothing. To do something, they would have had to regulate the system. And they didn’t want to regulate the system, because the providers, a rich source of campaign funding, didn’t want to be regulated and to have to spend on weatherization that was not needed – most of the time. In 2020, even voluntary inspections were suspended, due to Covid-19.
• It’s Always The Same Lie — Kelsey McKinney in Defector (some kind of sports blog, apparently): Americans are being failed in every state. They are dying and suffering while our representatives are arguing over whether to give us 1,400 more dollars in the 11th month of a pandemic. Every level of the United States government is lying to you right now. They are looking you dead in the eye as your family members freeze and cough and drown in debt and telling you that, actually, you’re fine. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” former Texas Governor Rick Perry said in a blog posted on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s website. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.” Current Texas Governor Greg Abbott went on Fox News to place the blame for Texas’s blackouts on green energy sources, and to wield the grid’s failure as a dire warning against the Green New Deal. He was lying, the same way Andrew Cuomo lied when he wrote an entire book about his masterful leadership through the coronavirus pandemic while 15,000 New Yorkers died in nursing homes as a direct result of his policies. He was lying the same way Barack Obama lied when he went to Flint in 2018 and pretended to take a sip of water in front of an outraged community.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  

This who-knows-for-how-long, I have been mostly reading:

• To Defeat Fascism, We Must Recognize It’s a Failed Response to Capitalist Crisis — William I. Robinson in Truthout: Yet many white members of the working class have been experiencing social and economic destabilization, downward mobility, heightened insecurity, an uncertain future and accelerated precariatization — that is, ever more precarious work and life conditions. This sector has historically enjoyed the ethnic-racial privileges that come from white supremacy vis-à-vis other sectors of the working class, but it has been losing these privileges in the face of capitalist globalization. The escalation of veiled and also openly racist discourse from above is aimed at ushering the members of this white working-class sector into a racist and a neo-fascist understanding of their condition. Racism and the appeal to fascism offer workers from the dominant racial or ethnic group an imaginary solution to real contradictions; recognition of the existence of suffering and oppression, even though its solution is a false one. The parties and movements associated with such projects have put forth a racist discourse, less coded and less mediated than that of mainstream politicians, targeting the racially oppressed, ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants and refugees in particular as scapegoats. Yet in this age of globalized capitalism, there is little possibility in the United States or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the “wages of fascism” now appear to be entirely psychological. The ideology of 21st-century fascism rests on irrationality — a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a project that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie.
• Joe Biden’s drive for diversity in top political jobs is only an illusion of change — Nesrine Malik in the Guardian: Biden’s diverse picks, the “very best of the nation”, are not representatives of the people who put them into office as much as they are figureheads. They are ambassadors with no brief other than to stand as proof of meritocracy – if you work hard and are “the very best”, you too can get a great gig. Diversity in government isn’t about solidarity, it’s used as proof of the soundness of the system: the elevation of women in particular as “girl boss feminists” who will not be interrupted, the reduction of the deeply serious business of government to inspiration politics. […] When people are hired to make a government “look” a certain way, by governing parties with conservative politics, it’s usually a way of making change so everything stays the same – or gets worse. Little demonstrates that more than the “most diverse parliament in history” that came to Westminster in 2019. The election of a number of female and black and minority ethnic MPs to the Conservative party, and their rise in the ranks of the cabinet, has produced a government that feels more comfortable in doubling down on policies such as the hostile environment, and where senior BAME ministers have been recruited to the task of denying structural racism.
• What would a state-owned Amazon look like? Ask Argentina — Cecilia Rikap in openDemocracy: Last October, Argentina announced the creation of an online marketplace called “Correo Compras”. The platform is to be run by a state-owned company, Correo Argentino, which is also the country’s official postal service. Argentina has been severely hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, and its lockdown has been among the longest. Even before the pandemic internet penetration in Argentina was already high (74%), and since the lockdown e-commerce and other digital services thrived in the country. Through its publicly owned option, the government aims to offer an alternative to Latin America’s current e-commerce private octopus.
• Before — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Australia’s spy agencies caught collecting COVID-19 app data — Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch could have knocked me down with a feather: Australia’s intelligence agencies have been caught “incidentally” collecting data from the country’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. The report, published Monday by the Australian government’s inspector general for the intelligence community, which oversees the government’s spy and eavesdropping agencies, said the app data was scooped up “in the course of the lawful collection of other data.” […] The report did not say when the incidental collection stopped, but noted that the agencies were “taking active steps to ensure compliance” with the law, and that the data would be “deleted as soon as practicable,” without setting a firm date.
• Do You Know Your Microsoft Productivity Score? — Jacob Silverman in the New Republic: The tech giant recently announced the wide availability of Productivity Score, declaring, “As leaders, it’s our job to make sure people have the tools they need to do their best work. But tools alone are not enough—you also need to help everyone in your organization build the habits that harness the true power of those tools. Until now, it’s been difficult for leaders to get insight into these habits and understand how to help people make the most of the technology they invest in.” (Their emphasis, of course.) The score is a feature within Microsoft 365’s Workplace Analytics, which the company advertises as a way for employers to “harmonize productivity and well being,” “enhance organizational resiliency,” “transform meeting culture,” and “increase customer focus.” Critics and labor advocates say this all amounts to an invasive method of monitoring and cataloging worker behavior, producing inscrutable metrics and forming databases that may be used for union-busting or to tilt the playing field toward employers during annual reviews.
• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Mythbuster: What is quantitative easing and how does it work? — Richard Murphy provides more detail than most people want or need to know. The punchline is this: Politically it has suited the government’s narrative to maintain this pretence that interest is owing on these [BoE-held] gilts. As a consequence of this pretence, successive governments have been able to claim that the cost of government debt servicing has been more onerous than has actually been the case, and have claimed that this has prevented it from undertaking other forms of spending. This claim has been disingenuous. In practice, the income received by the APF as a result of the payment of this interest belongs to the Treasury as a consequence of the management agreement reached between it and the Bank of England, previously noted. The result has been that the income in question has been returned to HM Treasury, as a matter of fact. The accounts of the APF make this clear. The refund has not, however, been used to cancel the interest charge recorded in the government’s own accounts: it does, instead, appear to be shown as part of the ‘other income’ of the government. In accounting terms this might be called a misrepresentation. The two sums should be offset to present a true and fair view of the interest cost that the government actually incurs. The only possible explanation for this misrepresentation has been that it has suited government purposes to make it.
• The Purging of Jeremy Corbyn - The Truth — Esha Krishnaswamy at Historic.ly: In March of this year, we reviewed leaks from an internal report commissioned by the Labour Party ahead of the EHRC report. I have thoroughly read the report and instead of finding instances of anti-semitism amongst Corbyn supporters, the report found instances of sabotage, leaks, and betrayal by the staff of the Labour Party to their constituency: the working class of Britain. Governance and Legal Unit (GLU) was responsible for handling complaints from members regarding anti-semitism, racism and sexism within the ranks. Instead of handling such complaints, the GLU was more interested in attacking and purging Corbyn supporters. […] On April, 2017, when Theresa May called for a general snap election, instead of working to make sure that labour wins as many seats as possible, the staffers intentionally sabotaged Corbyn, his campaign and some members of the Labour Party. In February, they already talked about sabotaging the election in hopes of electing a new leader.
• Secret Amazon Reports Expose the Company’s Surveillance of Labor and Environmental Groups — Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice: A trove of more than two dozen internal Amazon reports reveal in stark detail the company's obsessive monitoring of organized labor and social and environmental movements in Europe, particularly during Amazon's “peak season” between Black Friday and Christmas. The reports, obtained by Motherboard, were written in 2019 by Amazon intelligence analysts who work for the Global Security Operations Center, the company's security division tasked with protecting Amazon employees, vendors, and assets at Amazon facilities around the world. The documents show Amazon analysts closely monitor the labor and union-organizing activity of their workers throughout Europe, as well as environmentalist and social justice groups on Facebook and Instagram. They also indicate, and an Amazon spokesperson confirmed, that Amazon has hired Pinkerton operatives—from the notorious spy agency known for its union-busting activities—to gather intelligence on warehouse workers.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
  
• Rebels, Please Join Me in Wishing Emperor Palpatine Well — Scott Bolohan in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: As I’m sure you have seen by now, Emperor Palpatine has recently suffered horrific injuries after being thrown into the Death Star’s reactor, which subsequently exploded and crashed into Kef Bir. I understand that many of you may have initially reacted with joy upon learning of the Emperor’s incident. This is understandable, as he has tried to kill many of you, but as Rebels, it is imperative we take the high road. Earlier today, Luke, Leia, Han, and Chewbacca all sent their well wishes to Emperor Palpatine. We, in turn, must join them in their show of support for a man who hates them with all of his heart. It is time that we put aside politics and the fact that he wants us all dead, and come together and join in prayer to wish the Emperor a swift recovery. [Or, as Glennzilla puts it:]
• Why Are Democrats Praying for the Speedy Recovery of a “Fascist Dictator”? — Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept: Over the past several years, but particularly in the months heading into the 2020 election, it has become extremely common for prominent Democrats and their media allies to refer to President Trump as a dictator, a fascist, a tyrant hellbent on destroying U.S. democracy, a genocidal racist, and even a Nazi. And yet, the overwhelming reaction in those mainstream precincts to the news that the fascist dictator has contracted a potentially lethal virus is to hope and pray that he makes a speedy recovery whereby he can resume his democracy-destroying, genocidal, tyrannical, fascist rule. […] Perhaps Democratic leaders are simply pretending to be hoping for Trump’s well-being for political purposes while secretly hoping that he suffers and dies. Or perhaps national Democratic politicians have ascended to a state of spiritual elevation rarely seen in modern political history, in which they are capable of praying for even those they most dislike, including ones they believe are imposing fascism on their nation? Or perhaps, maybe more likely, Democratic leaders do not really believe the things they have spent four years saying about Trump and, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney before him, are applying such labels of historic evil to him for political advantage but still see him as one of them, whom they intend to rehabilitate and honor once he is out of power.
• Life in the simulacron — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• The US supreme court may soon become plutocracy's greatest defender — David Sirota in the Guardian: If you get your news from the political press and television ads, you might think the US supreme court is a forum that only adjudicates disputes over the most hot-button religious and civil rights issues. What you would not know is that while the court does periodically rule on those important matters, it spends as much or more of its time using business-related cases to help billionaires and corporations rig the economy against ordinary Americans. In light of that, Amy Coney Barrett’s US supreme court nomination must be understood as the culmination of cynical tactics that Republicans have perfected over the last two decades. The strategy is straightforward: they nominate plutocrat-compliant judges knowing that the corporate-owned media and political system will make sure confirmation battles focus on partisan wrangling and high-profile social issues – but not also on the economic issues that justices often decide. In other words: Republican politicians rely on conflagrations over political process and social issues to mobilize their religious base in service of Republican donors’ real objective – smuggling corporate cronies on to the highest court in the land.
• Commanding View — George Monbiot: I don’t mean to single out Andrew Marr, but to show how even the staunchest defenders of the BBC’s independence unwittingly surrender it. They report from within the castle of power. For most BBC political journalists, politics seem to begin and end in Westminster. A political issue is one that divides the major parties (or divides people within a party). If the parties aren’t divided, it’s not an issue. The BBC’s political reporting, like that of almost all the media, is, in effect, court reporting: what one powerful person said to another, who’s in, who’s out, who might win, who might lose. The really big questions – such as the gathering collapse of our life support systems – are, on most days, outside the circle of light. Above all, because the BBC is unconsciously led by the oligarchs’ agenda, it fails to confront the greatest source of political power: money. The BBC represents politics as a matter of preferences, rather than as a matter of interests.
• Love — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• The Religious Reason Many Americans Refuse to Wear Masks — Kate Blanchard in Religion Dispatches: I can’t help thinking of snake-handlers when I see the President and his minions going maskless. Like many mask-wearing losers, I gazed in horror upon images of the White House ceremony honoring the President’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. In colorful photographs and videos, we saw approximately 150 Republicans hugging, shaking hands, talking closely together, and just generally getting all up in each other’s personal space—almost all of them without masks. As the count of related covid-19 infections surpassed 30 this week, including the President and First Lady, multiple staffers, and high-profile figures like Chris Christie (who’s still hospitalized as of this writing), few of us were surprised to hear Dr. Fauci designate the affair a “superspreader event.” […] After a mere three days (let the reader understand) the President emerged triumphantly from his sick bed, performing a full recovery from the disease that had already killed more than 210,000 Americans and a million people worldwide. What’s more, the President ascended the White House steps, removed his mask with a flourish, and promised that we could all be just like him. Never mind that millions of Americans have minimal health insurance or no health insurance at all; we can be winners too if we just believe! “You’re going to beat it,” he promised; “Don’t let it take over your lives.” The message, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear, came across loud and clear: Only losers die of covid. Only losers are afraid of covid. Only losers let covid alter their lifestyles in any way. So it should come as no surprise that resisting masks is a matter of principle for many Trump voters. It’s a way of proving their faith in the President, his power, and his worldview.
• After The Donald, The Deluge? — Ted Rall: One of history’s least-discussed ironies is a counterintuitive pattern: it is not the vicious tyrants who are overthrown by angry mobs, but well-meaning liberal reformers who promise to fix a broken system and fall short of expectations. […] Biden comes out of the Clinton/Obama/Democratic Leadership Council austerity wing of his party. His instinct will be to spend as little as possible in order to try to balance the budget. “When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare,” says Ted Kaufman, who will run the transition office that will select Biden’s top personnel. “When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit…forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited.” Kaufman, a former Delaware senator, promises that Biden won’t significantly increase federal spending. The streets are already seething. Austerity will bring things to a boil. Political suicide by fiscal means.
• Dinosaur Comics — Ryan North:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The “herd immunity strategy” isn’t part of a scientific debate about COVID-19. It’s a well-funded political campaign. — Abby Cartus and Justin Feldman in Medium: This “herd immunity” strategy is not part of a legitimate scientific debate. It has been rejected by key scientific leaders in the US, UK, Germany, and World Health Organization. Proponents of “herd immunity” haven’t tried to address even basic questions about the strategy, such as how many households would need to be locked down or how many people would still get sick from endemic COVID-19 once herd immunity was achieved. The proposal is not evidence-based and does not reflect even a minority view in the scientific community. Rather, it appears to be the product of an organized, well-funded political campaign in the US and UK. The UK campaign has been described elsewhere. In the US, the campaign appears to be largely coordinated by two right-wing think tanks — the Hoover Institution and the American Institute for Economic Research — in coordination with the Trump administration. [And, in more detail:]
• Scamademics? Right-Wing Lobbying Groups Reviving ‘Herd Immunity’ in the UK — Nafeez Ahmed in the Byline Times: A pernicious but flawed narrative has come to dominate the public debate over the second COVID-19 wave. It is the idea that the science is somehow irreparably divided on what to do about the pandemic. This notion is encapsulated in two different letters sent to the Government by what the press has portrayed as two groups of esteemed scientists – one group supporting the reintroduction of social distancing restrictions, and the other criticising efforts to ‘suppress’ the Coronavirus. Widespread media coverage of the letter has suggested a deep-seated schism at the heart of the British scientific community about how to respond to the crisis. In reality, the authors of the letter that is critical of a COVID-19 suppression strategy have numerous ties to Conservative and Republican Party lobby groups as well as to various agencies of the Government, including HM Treasury, the Ministry of Defence and the ‘Nudge’ Unit – ties which represent potentially serious conflicts of interest. Worse, this group’s claims about the Coronavirus have no basis in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Instead, it represents what one top British epidemiologist has described as “a fringe group of scientists”, out of sync with “most of the public health experts in the world”.
• Good Intentions, Bad Inventions — Amanda Lenhart and Kellie Owens at Data & Society: The tech companies that design and build so many of the devices, platforms, and software we use for hours each day have embraced myths that push a flawed under-standing of digital well-being. While we are encouraged that these companies are dedicating greater attention to social media’s effect on the mental and physical health of users, their current approaches to improving user well-being fundamentally misunderstand how people engage with technology. At its worst, this approach funnels time and resources to making technology more “enriching” for middle-class white users, while failing to address the systemic harms that minoritized communities face. The heart of this misunderstanding is biological determinism, which suggests that our “Paleolithic” brains cannot resist “God-like” technology, placing too much power in the hands of tech companies to both create and destroy our capacity for attention. But attention is not a fixed biological entity, it is a value-laden social category; people stop using social media of their own volition all the time. Current approaches to improving digital well-being also promote tech solutionism, or the presumption that technology can fix social, cultural, and structural problems. At their core, these approaches lack empirical evidence to support them. We want to replace these myths with new evidence-based narratives that shift the conversation toward agency and equity.
• Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing — Jesse Frederik at the Correspondent: I’ve been hearing a lot about blockchain in the last few years. I mean, who hasn’t? It’s everywhere. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve? That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution. […] Enlightened – and thus former – blockchain developer Mark van Cuijk explained: “You could also use a forklift to put a six-pack of beer on your kitchen counter. But it’s just not very efficient.”