Good news everybody! The Union was approved for Duke Grad Students. I voted yes along with 88% of my colleagues. Personal life updates now as a grad student. I completed my comprehensive exams and my required class work last May. I’m filing the forms to establish my dissertation committee this week. I’ve gotten conceptual buy-in …
Organizing & Resistance
Late Night Open Thread: Taxing Prep
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Enhanced Protest Techniques, Open Threads, Tech News & Issues
Ok, video games have peaked. There's a visual novel coming out that supposedly actually prepares your 2022 US federal tax return through romancing an anime girl. I…. man, this is a lot. https://t.co/TR3XMMruYM pic.twitter.com/am2gk9Iodu — HDKirin (@HD_Kirin) March 22, 2023 Look, they said, the newest scam to harvest Social Security numbers! So easy, even a …
Late Night Open Thread: Taxing PrepPost + Comments (40)
Filing taxes is, at its core, an exercise in sharing personal data, and that makes Tax Heaven 3000 look potentially very very unusual in terms of what it asks players to hand over: It’s one thing to take your taxes to H&R Block, but something else altogether to hand them over to an anime girl in a videogame. Daniel Greenberg, the co-founder of developer MSCHF, acknowledged that worry but told Kotaku that the game does not connect to the internet—presumably why you have to handle the actual filing yourself…
MSCHF is an art collective that “subverts mass/popular culture and corporate operations as tools for critique and intervention.” Among other things, it’s the company that teamed up with Lil Nas X to make Satan Shoes, a collaboration that led it into a legal beef with Nike. Still, I’d be awfully iffy about dropping my tax details into Tax Heaven 3000—which is to say, I just wouldn’t do it. Valve apparently had similar concerns, because a day after the game’s Steam page went live, it was taken down.
Just before the store page was wiped, MSCHF updated the store page description to say that Steam was “deplatforming” the game—visible via SteamDB (opens in new tab)—and hinted that “maybe TurboTax sent a check” to make it happen. I assume that’s not a serious allegation, but MSCHF definitely has some beef with TurboTax and other companies like it…
“Most wealthy countries make tax filing free, if the burden of preparation is even passed along to individuals at all. TurboTax actively seeks to backdoor the regulatory structure that could otherwise seek to rein it in. And it works! The villainous corporation that controls the government from the shadows is a sadly mundane reality. It’s the most boring industry imaginable.”
Tax Heaven 3000, the site states, is essentially a response to that: Where TurboTax is predicated on the “fear, uncertainty, and doubt” people have about taxes, Tax Heaven 3000 is “built on parasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness.”
“All of TurboTax’s cutesy loading animations are fake graphics; TH3K simply makes the fiction the point,” the site states. “For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain in the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. TH3K is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.”…
Greenberg said MSCHF isn’t looking to get Tax Heaven 3000 back on Steam, which I suppose is understandable since it doesn’t know why it was removed in the first place. Instead, the game will be available on Itch.io and directly from taxheaven3000.com —pricing isn’t listed but the SteamDB entry for the deleted Steam store page indicates that it will be free to play. A collector’s edition, with a boxed copy of the game and—of course—an Iris body pillow will also be available…
Intuit is in the workshop cooking up the nastiest, most depraved version of TurboTax humans can imagine to respond https://t.co/9y44ybDKmp
— The Mall Krampus (@cakotz) March 22, 2023
Steam, goddamnit, it is my God-given right to divulge my SSN to the anime woman if I so choose pic.twitter.com/gmnJeSQfag
— Djinn & Tonic ???? (@HegelwCrmCheese) March 23, 2023
Twitter Open Thread: But Seriously…
This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Excellent Links, Tech News & Issues
So close. There are actually about eight of those tiny little pieces holding everything up, and yes, all those teams got slashed. https://t.co/vWhjNn5bpY — Jim Redmond (@jredmond) November 4, 2022 “Reliability engineer on the Twitter Command Center team (TCC)”: Oh, and while the press is focused on how advertisers will handle changes to content moderation, …
Twitter Open Thread: But Seriously…Post + Comments (201)
Click over and read the whole thread:
One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone.
So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1
— John Bull (@garius) November 3, 2022
One laid-off Twitter employee told NBC News that “the only saving grace [for Musk making dramatic changes before Tuesday’s election] is that he changes his mind on things all the time.”https://t.co/NIlXAyHERa
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 4, 2022
There is no sign that Elon Musk has approached the purchase of Twitter in any coherent fashion. He spent six months trying his hardest to get out of the deal, and only gave in and bought the site after discussions of the purchase were publicly revealed in discovery.
I don’t believe that Musk must surely have a nine-dimensional chess plan to make Twitter work according to all the conflicting desires he’s already posted for the site. I think it’s more likely Musk never had a plan, and he’s now floundering from crisis to crisis, all of his own making.
He has absolutely no idea how to fix this. There probably isn’t a way…
Twitter’s 2021 advertising revenue was $4.5 billion. Compare Google’s $209 billion in ad revenue. [Barron’s]
Can Twitter squeeze more money from advertisers? Not by going the way Musk wants to…
The term “free speech” should mean so much more than “gibbering racists and bigots.” Unfortunately, this is 2022, and there’s one very loud group of swivel-eyed loons using these words to mean their assumed right to scream spittle into your face.
Others have written how there just isn’t the market for the sort of right-wing “free speech” site that Musk and his advisors Peter Thiel and David O. Sacks want. This sort of site has been tried, over and over — Parler, Gettr, Truth Social. These sites only ever attract a small core of fringe nutcases, who drive away any non-nutcases. Even Gab eventually had to put in content moderation. [The Verge]…
Twitter can’t work as a money-making business the way Thiel and Sacks have talked Musk into trying to run it. If Thiel wants this, he’ll need to fund it himself, substantially, as an influence loss-leader…
Yes, but what about crypto?
Crypto remains heavily dependent on Twitter.
The Binance crypto exchange put $500 million toward the purchase of Twitter — a bit over a 1% share. Note that this cost them $500 million in actual money, not cryptos…
The people Musk went into the Twitter deal with very much like one thing about cryptocurrency: the promise of a private currency for rich guys to swing their cash around as they please, without such dire threats to human liberty as taxes, capital controls or regulatory oversight. Musk, Thiel and Dorsey (who is also advising Musk) are very into this promise of cryptocurrency…
I don’t believe cryptocurrency can deliver on this promise of the sort of private money that rich guys want. When Facebook tried with Libra, it was rejected instantly by every regulator in the world. The regulators are still writing new rules to stop any such thing happening again.
As well as regulators not allowing it, crypto is just technically bad at being money. Bitcoin failed hard at being a currency for payments. Even the dark net drug market users hated bitcoin, they just weren’t able to use dollars.
That a cryptocurrency-based private money for rich guys can’t possibly work will never stop them from trying, of course. Perhaps they can alienate Twitter’s remaining non-crypto users…
Yahoo! bought blogging site Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013. Yahoo!’s buyer Verizon eventually sold Tumblr to WordPress.com in 2019 for $3 million. The only question for Twitter is how long this takes.
everything is operating in normal parameters, nothing will happen, nothing whatsoever easily foreseeable, unlehttps://t.co/P9pAPKcEZI
— vocational politics stan account 🫳♨️ (@Convolutedname) November 4, 2022
(Insufficiently) Retro History: Rest in Power, Mr. Dick Gregory
This post is in: Absent Friends, Don't Mourn, Organize, Post-racial America
And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede. Dick Gregory, one of a kind, died five years ago today. I found a draft of this post while doing clean-up for the Great Blog Merge, and …
(Insufficiently) Retro History: Rest in Power, Mr. Dick GregoryPost + Comments (18)
I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted. – Dick Gregory
— George M Johnson (@IamGMJohnson) August 20, 2017
Wil Haygood, for the Washington Post — “One day with Dick Gregory made me know he was truly one of a kind”:
… It was in the summer of 2000 when I first met Gregory, having come to Washington from Boston to write about him. Many thought he was dying. He was down to 130 pounds. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma. When I entered the house where he was staying, it suddenly seemed as if I was meeting one of those people you imagine you’d never meet, someone who belonged to newsreel footage mostly. But there he stood, quite bony, eyes sparkling. The Abe Lincoln beard looked a little unkempt. You couldn’t help but feel sad for him. He was famous, and infamous, and dying.
He had given me an address, and told me to meet him there at 4:30 — “in the morning.” I thought the comedian was joking. He was not. He also told me to bring a pair of sneakers.
The next morning I found myself inside a house not far from Rock Creek Park. Gregory came bounding down the stairs. “Hey, baby.” That’s how he talked, like a Motown soul singer. He was crashing at this house. Through the years, people had liked putting him up. After all, he was Dick Gregory, the raconteur of the civil rights movement, the interpreter of modern-day American politics and a one-time presidential candidate. So he slept on sofas, in sleeping bags, on floors. On this particular visit, he explained to me, somebody in Marion Barry’s camp was putting him up. Before we got out the door, he was talking about radiation in cellphones and the danger of it. I was rubbing sleep from my damn eyes…
We kept moving. I wondered if the running had become a recent activity for him. He explained that he had been running since high school. He had been a cross-country runner. “The great thing about running the long distance,” he said, “is you run at your integrity. Running made me forget I was poor.”
Before the sun came up in Rock Creek Park, he had me laughing out loud. There were a good many stories about his peripatetic life. Funny stories about white people, black people, southern sheriffs and the CIA, whose agents he described as “spooks.”…
His political career was, well, interesting. He ran for mayor of Chicago against the big bad wolves of the Daley machine. He didn’t stand a chance, was crushed and decided he needed to set his goals higher. When he launched his run for the White House, he got fan mail — though there were also letters suggesting he check himself into Bellevue, a mental hospital. To boost his presidential ambitions, he printed fake American currency with his picture on it. Agents from the. Treasury Department didn’t think that was funny at all, and arrested him. The politically-inspired shenanigans of the official government — wiretapping civil rights leaders, for instance — had sparked Gregory’s mind so much he became, as the years rolled by, a champion conspiracy theorist. “I woke up with power,” he told me with a straight face, referring to the election in which Richard Nixon won in a landslide…
Dick Gregory, born in my hometown of St. Louis in 1932, actually ran for president in 1968 on the Peace and Freedom Party. pic.twitter.com/IWUpcQgosv
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 20, 2017
Monée Fields-White, for The Root:
… Born Oct. 12, 1932, in St. Louis, Gregory grew up in an impoverished community in that city. He helped to support his family from an early age. In high school he excelled in track and field, earning a scholarship to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He set school records in the 1/2-mile and 1-mile races. His college career was interrupted when the U.S. Army drafted him in 1954.
Gregory began to venture into comedy while in the Army, performing various routines in military shows. After briefly returning to Southern Illinois after being discharged in 1956, he moved to Chicago to join the national comedy circuit, without finishing his degree. He performed mostly in small, primarily black nightclubs while working at the U.S. Postal Service during the day. It was at one of those nightclubs that he met Lillian, the woman who became his wife in 1959. She and Gregory would have 10 children (as well as one child who died in infancy)…
Throughout his life, Gregory remained outspoken on many issues, including world hunger, capital punishment, women’s rights (he marched for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978), health care and drug abuse. In 2005, at a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, he called the U.S. “the most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that ever existed in the history of the planet. As we talk now, America is 5 percent of the world’s population and consumes 96 percent of the world’s hard drugs.” As a protester, Gregory never stopped putting himself on the front lines: In 2004, at the age of 73, he was arrested while protesting against genocide outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington, D.C…
RIP #DickGregory. Thank you for the lacerating humor you used to cut through the same racism we're still fighting. https://t.co/z7D9gQ2ZIR
— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) August 20, 2017
RIP Dick Gregory. With #MLK and James Meredith during March Against Fear, Mississippi, June 1966. pic.twitter.com/LDKStwTuwd
— The '60s at 50 (@the_60s_at_50) August 20, 2017
The Hollywood Reporter:
… Gregory’s big break came in 1961 when he was booked into the Playboy Club in downtown Chicago as a one-night replacement for Prof. Irwin Corey, a white comic who didn’t want to work seven nights a week.
“When I started, a black comic couldn’t work a white nightclub. You could sing, you could dance, but you couldn’t stand flat-footed and talk — then the system would know how brilliant black folks was,” Gregory recalled in a 2016 interview.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner had spotted Gregory performing for a black audience, and he was paid $50 for the Playboy Club show — a huge payday for him at the time. One of Gregory’s jokes: “Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’ I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Being me a whole fried chicken.’”
The crowd during that first show, mostly white executives from a frozen-food company, loved him. He stayed on at the Playboy Club for three weeks (the gig turned into three years), and the attention got him a profile in Time magazine — “Dick Gregory, 28, has become the first Negro comedian to make his way into the nightclub big time.”
He was invited to perform on The Tonight Show in 1962, but Gregory said he wouldn’t go unless he was able to sit down next to host Jack Paar after his routine and be interviewed. A black performer had never done that before.
“I went in, and as I sat on the couch, talking about my children, so many people called the switchboard at NBC in New York that the circuits blew out,” he said. “And thousands of letters came in and folks were saying, ‘I didn’t know black children and white children were the same.’”…
"The most difficult thing to get people to do is to accept the obvious." — Dick Gregory #RIP pic.twitter.com/DhaiyjhiRe
— Tribeca (@Tribeca) August 20, 2017
Sunday Night Open Thread: Farewell, for Now, to the ‘People’s Convoy’
This post is in: domestic terrorists, Enhanced Protest Techniques, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Protest Is the New Brunch
After covering versions of the People’s Convoy for six months: today was the end of it. In the end, they accomplished absolutely nothing besides looping the Beltway, fighting each other, spamming the emergency line, badgering DC residents, & wasting fuel. — Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo) August 5, 2022 But the grift will never die… The People’s …
Sunday Night Open Thread: Farewell, for Now, to the ‘People’s Convoy’Post + Comments (42)
Many in the splinter group say they are anti-socialist and anti-big government and anti anything they think is anti-American. Their food and gas expenses are funded, they say, by other Americans who feel the same way they do. The group’s brochure solicits donations through Cash App, Venmo and Zelle. Riddell estimates the group has raised about $73,000 since forming.
They don’t believe mainstream news and get their information from far-right websites. They also follow each other’s live streams (there are lots of live streams). In their shared distrust of government and politicians and media, they found a community of like-minded souls…
If some of the group’s goals were philosophical and long-term, some of their needs were practical and immediate. When he first led his group into the District, Riddell said didn’t think he should need a permit to protest. “The Constitution is our permit,” he said defiantly. But protesters need port-a-potties. And port-a-potties need a permit. “The toilets is what broke me,” Riddell said, laughing.
For showers and to get a break from camping out in their cars, members occasionally headed to their base camp, a truck stop 83 miles away in Bunker Hill, W.Va., where their supplies of food, water, hygiene products, toilet paper and snacks are stored…
There have also been ongoing hostilities with members of another offshoot of the People’s Convoy who have accused the 1776 Restoration Movement of having members who are convicted sex offenders. Riddell said there was a former member of the group who had been convicted of child molestation in Indiana but that that person has left. That hasn’t stopped the bickering, online and in person, between the two groups.
On Monday, the group’s protest permit expires. By then, the last of the 1776 Restoration Movement protesters will have packed up their signs and flags and camp chairs and coolers and retreated to Bunker Hill, where they plan to regroup, reorganize, reread the Constitution and prepare to return in early September to seek redress of their grievances once more.
TBogg reportorial sighting:
These are some of the biggest losers in the entire universe. Complete idiots. Not even smart enough to be considered dumbasses. https://t.co/qC1hm0f0vf
— Jimmy Malone, Liberal & Ultra-Masker (@malonespeaking) August 7, 2022
The Canadian version was a lot more ‘successful’ in the short term, for reasons.
In Canada, the ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests amplified anti-government sentiment among Canadians angry at COVID restrictions and, less visibly, offered a hook for anti-establishment and far-right voices to draw a bigger audience https://t.co/l7hMamevID
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 4, 2022
Making chicken salad from… well, you know:
… Extremists used the convoy “as a pulpit to get their ideas across and, in that sense, it was a success,” said David Hofmann, associate professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, who has been researching extremism in Canada for about a decade.
They did that directly, with talk of deposing and prosecuting the heads of Canadian government during the protests, as the convoy’s organizers declared was their goal in a “Memorandum of Understanding” leading up to the blockade.
But they were also able to do that less directly, by talking up the merits of the convoy on social media and podcasts that also promoted more extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories…
Around 30% of Canadians agreed with the convoy’s message in February at the height of the protests, a number that has since shrunk to 25% in July, according to polling research firm Ekos Research Associates.
[Can we compromise on 27%?]
Though most COVID-19 restrictions on gatherings, wearing masks and vaccine requirements have been lifted in recent months, smaller anti-government protests have continued, with some held as recently as the national holiday on July 1…
With broad support for policies like universal healthcare and gun control, Canada has long been viewed as more moderate than its southern neighbor. But analysts say right-wing extremism has long had a home north of the U.S. border — and the “Freedom Convoy” movement and related anti-government protests against COVID-19 restrictions have given it new momentum.
A 2015 study identified about 100 far-right extremist groups. The number has tripled since then, Hofmann said.
Larger groups have splintered but the overall number of participants has also grown, Hofmann said.
He and his colleagues have identified about 1,200 visibly active participants who have either had contact with police or the media or have been active on social media, he said.
This is up from previous counts but changing methodologies make comparisons difficult, he said…
Late Night Open Thread: I’m Hoping Hakeem Jeffries Is Our Next Majority Leader
This post is in: Enhanced Protest Techniques, Open Threads, Politics, Proud To Be A Democrat!, Vote Like Your Country Depends On It, Vote Like Your Life Depends On It
Since Rep. Jeffries is considered Not A Fan of Performative Outrage, I checked his twitter feed. He’s also too busy doing his job to waste time on time-wasters, I guess… Senate Republicans stole two Supreme Court seats from Democratic Presidents. Then express fake outrage when the legitimacy of the Court’s extreme majority is questioned. Get …
Late Night Open Thread: I’m Hoping Hakeem Jeffries Is Our Next Majority LeaderPost + Comments (57)
I truly believe that many don’t understand just how often Speaker Pelosi has willingly, and even cheerfully, taken the hits from both the left *and* the right to protect her caucus. Not to mention that she fundraises for the DCCC at something like twice the level of any Dem.??
— Alexandra?? (@nycbubbles) July 2, 2022
‘Brooklyn voter / podcaster’ stereotype:
(Konami code: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. It’s called the Konami Code, and it often meant the difference between life and death in a video game back in the 1980s. Perform those button presses in the right sequence, and you’ll unlock cheats that help you win…. )
Sensible, upbeat closer:
Opinion by Paul Waldman: Don’t get mad at ‘weak’ Democrats. Instead, get organized.https://t.co/FIBk1zy4j6
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 28, 2022
… But now liberals and progressives have to ask themselves: What are we going to do with our anger?
There’s a lot they can do. But the worst response — one that is common in some quarters of the left — is to say that because congressional Democrats are feckless and weak, there’s no point in voting for them.
This is a moment when the left has to look at the success the right just achieved, and learn some lessons from it.
Here’s the first lesson: You know who never stopped voting? Those antiabortion activists who are now celebrating, and planning new legislation to make abortion illegal nationally, to ruthlessly punish any woman (or girl) who tries to get one, and anyone who helps her.
That’s not because they had faith in Republican officeholders. They didn’t. They knew they had to push them and prod them and threaten them. And a lot of the time, those politicians held their movement at arm’s length. Until Donald Trump, a succession of Republican presidents refused to appear in person at the annual March for Life in Washington, because they worried about the optics of seeming too close to the antiabortion cause…
Yet the antiabortion base never stopped voting. These activists and voters knew it was the minimum they had to do — absolutely necessary, but not nearly sufficient…
It’s because of all this that Republicans achieved this extraordinary victory even though they never succeeded in persuading the public to agree with them. While they would certainly like to have most Americans on their side, their strategy was constructed such that it isn’t actually necessary.
Liberals have to learn from this history. When you lose, you have to ask why and how it happened. And if you’re angry at weak Democrats, figure out how to make them stronger. If a Democrat says, “Give us two more Senate seats and we can pass a bill codifying abortion rights nationally,” they’re not wrong — so make them do it.
To repeat, voting is the absolute minimum liberals have to do, and they absolutely must. Not only that, a huge number of races up and down the ballot bear directly on abortion rights: governors, attorneys general, state representatives, prosecutors, judges, county councils, referendums — almost too many to mention.
So yes, you have to keep voting if you want to restore abortion rights. And if you don’t think Democratic leaders are getting the job done? Just remember, it’s not up to them alone. It’s up to you, too.
Staying Safe While Protesting Redux
by Adam L Silverman| 33 Comments
This post is in: Balloon Juice, Civil Rights, Commentary, Domestic Politics, Gay Rights Are human Rights, Open Threads, Organizing & Resistance, Our Failed Political Establishment, Politics, Silverman on Security, The War On Women, Women's Rights
I have been informed that a number of you all were asking if we could repost my suggestions for staying safe while protesting. Watergirl was good enough to proactively go and dig at least one of the versions/reposts of the original post from December 2018. We’ll resume our war updates tomorrow night. I’ve made an …
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