Yesterday, I managed to get trash and recyclables out to the carts, and then the carts out to the curb, all before sunset. Of course sunset is later now than it has been the last few times I didn’t manage to get everything out until after dark, but I still impressed myself. A note about the first short take – I could have put it in the video thread, but wanted to make sure Pat saw it – and wanted to use this particular FFT with it. And there is transcript, so if the video doesn’t work for you, you’ll still get the facts.
Daily Beast – Trump’s Fake Georgia Electors Are Now Ratting on Each Other
Quote – According to the memo, prosecutors in July last year dangled immunity deals for “alternate electors” who were willing to cooperate with the investigation—but their defense lawyer is now accused of never telling them about the potential deal. Following a special purpose grand jury recommendation in December that the DA seek indictments against some people involved in the fraudulent scheme, investigators have turned up the pressure. It turns out, these Republican officials and political operatives are now starting to squirm, identifying illegal behavior by their colleagues while trying to save their own skin—a sudden pivot that came when Willis’ investigators met with these fake electors last week. Click through for details. Good.
Yesterday, when I turned on Colorado Public Radio on the computer, what was playing wa Alan Hovhaness’s Symphony #50, which has the subtitle “Mount St. Helens,” and yes, he wrote it literally during the 1980 eruption – he was living within view of it. CPR – both the news side and the music side – are going all out for Earth Day. Today’s newsletter from Mother Jones included a few pointed paragraphs on people who are progressive enough to vote for Biden but not progressive enough to support a housing project of the kind needed to make replacing fossil fuels actually work, because NIMBY (“Not in my backyard.”) I can’t give you a link, since those remarks are in the newsletter only, but I can link to the lead story by a different author with the same theme. It made me think that maybe part of the problem of getting a strong progressive political majority is a kind of Catch-22 – really good education and money tend to go together. But people without money need a really good education in order to see the quakity of and the need for progressive policies. And for those who have both the educatin and the money, the money tends to corrupt. Here’s one ver short quote from the newsletter – “Some on the left continue to be quite acrobatic in their defense of blocking housing, ignoring all evidence that this mostly benefits rich homeowners.”
In other news, Fox and Dominion settled for about $785 milliom. For anyone who (like me) is disappointed by this, I have ne word – Smartmatic.
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CPR News – Gov. Jared Polis signs bills protecting access to abortion and gender-affirming care in Colorado
Quote – Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday signed a set of health care bills enshrining access to abortion and gender-affirming procedures and medications, as the Democrat-led state tries to make itself a safe haven for its neighbors, whose Republican leaders are restricting care. The goal of the legislation is to ensure people in surrounding states and beyond can come to Colorado to have an abortion, begin puberty blockers or receive gender-affirming surgery without fear of prosecution. Bordering states of Wyoming and Oklahoma have passed abortion bans and Utah has severely restricted transgender care for minors. Click through for details. This is the right thing yo do, but it can’t be denied that it will also strengthen Colorado’s medical community, and also bring dollars to the state. It makes me proud of my state and my Governor. But…
CPR News – Colorado Catholic health clinic joins forces with D.C. law firm to challenge state’s new abortion-access law
Quote – In a lawsuit, Bella Health argues that the new law targets religious clinics’ duty to help pregnant women in need — which they say is a violation of their constitutional rights. They say those duties include helping women continue their pregnancies after they take mifepristone, a pharmaceutical drug used in medication abortion, and later change their mind. “We opened [the lawsuit] because of our belief that life is a precious gift from God, worthy of protection at all stages,” said Dede Chism, a nurse practitioner and co-founder and CEO at Bella Health and Wellness, in a release. “When a woman seeks our help to reverse the effects of the abortion pill, we have a religious obligation to offer every available option for her and her child.” Click tthrough for the other side of the story. I don’t normally use the same source twice, but in this case, the story is not complete without both. This part makes me ashamed of the misogyny and stupidity of – some of us – some people, and no state can claim not to have them.
Glenn Kirschner – Dominion v. Fox defamation trial begins: could this lawsuit signal the end of Fox “News”?
Thom Hartmann – You Won’t BELIEVE What the NRA Is Up To Now…!
Ring of Fire – Ted Cruz Runs For Reelection On Platform That He Shouldn’t Be Allowed To Hold Office (I don’t agree with Farron. Term limits in practice hurt Democrats – if not every single time, still more than 2/3 – enough to dislike them.
Scared Kitten Learns How To Be A Happy Cat
PUPPET REGIME – Putin’s pep talk for Trump
Beau – Let’s talk about Jordan falling into a trap….
Yesterday, I received a “Damn-Giver Dispatch” email from John Pavlovitz. Some of y’all probably did also. But, in case you didn’t, or in case you did but missed this column, I want to link to it: “Yes, I’m A ‘Hateful’ Human Being.” I really like the way he turns things around. It’s the closest we can come to holding a mirror up to the deluded. Some, of course, will never see anything but what they want to see. But – sometimes – we have to try.
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Daily Beast – Black Teen Shot in the Head After Ringing the Wrong Doorbell: Family
Quote – The alleged gunman, who has not been identified [to the media], was taken into custody and brought to a police station to give a statement. Placed on a 24-hour hold, he was released pending further investigation, something the chief of the Kansas City Police Department spent much of a short Sunday press conference justifying. “The vast majority of cases to include violent crime involve the suspect being released pending further investigation,” Chief Stacey Graves said. “In this case, the prosecutor requires more information from investigators that would take more than 24 hours to compile throughout the weekend.” Click through for story. You may have seen it. The killer opened the main door, and there was a glass door which he shot through. There is video of him calmly sweeping up the broken glass. The “right” house was one block over, on a street with the same name except “Terrace” instead of “Street.” The victim is still alive, miraculously. Virgil was 21 when he survived major head injuries (from a car crash). No one ever fully gets back everything lost from injuries like that.
The 19th – A Black Texas couple chose their midwife’s care over a hospital. Now their newborn is in foster care.
Quote – A custody case currently unfolding in Texas has separated a newborn from her parents and highlighted two systemic realities in the United States: the policing of Black families by child welfare systems and the disregard of midwifery expertise by many doctors. It has been 20 days since infant Mila Jackson was taken from her parents by Child Protective Services in Texas after they sought guidance from their licensed midwife to treat a common infant condition rather than following a directive from their pediatrician. Now a court will decide if she’ll be returned to their custody. Click through for details. With good prenatal care and no complications, a trained midwife is at least as competent as a doctor. Women were having babies assisted by midwives for centuries while doctors thought it was a waste of time to wash their hands between patients and were killing people thereby. Some of these child welfare people need to be tied down and forced to watch all the seasons of PBS’s “Call the Midwife.”
Yesterday, it was pretty quiet (she said thankfully.) I”ve been working on some doll clothes latelt, which has the advantages that the pieces are small (therefore light), they go fast (compared to human-sized sweaters), and they can be done with small amounts of yarn (with the caveat that, if I overestimate the amount of yarn I have, I may have to do some emergency re-designing.) Another disadvantage is that the stitches are so small they can be hard to see. That is less of a problem when the yarn is smooth and more of problem when it is fuzzy, of course, but the fuzzy yarns can be so effective in those little projects that I can’t resist using them sometimes.
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NM Political Report – Homeless shelters aren’t equipped to deal with New Mexico’s most troubled foster kids. Police see it for themselves.
Quote – More than 1,100 times from January 2019 through June 2022, someone at a shelter housing foster kids in New Mexico called emergency dispatchers for help with runaways, violent outbursts, disorderly conduct or mental health crises. Many of the kids placed in these shelters by CYFD have severe mental health or behavioral problems, including PTSD and depression, but shelters don’t provide psychiatric services. Kids break down, get into fights, destroy property, threaten staff or run away. Sometimes they say they want to kill themselves or try to. In these moments of crisis, it’s police and paramedics, not mental health professionals, who intervene. Click through for full report, which is a joint product of ProPublican and a BGO called “Searchlight New Mexico.” If this is happening in New Moxico, you can bet it is also happening elsewhere. One word: priorities.
npr – Swimming pools and lavish gardens of the rich are driving water shortages, study says
Quote – More than 80 metropolitan areas around the world have faced severe shortages in the last two decades, a figure that’s only projected to rise, impacting more than one billion people in the next few decades. And the threat doesn’t discriminate between hemispheres or climates. Moscow, Miami and Melbourne, Australia, were among the most impacted in the last decade. For the purposes of the study, researchers zeroed in on just one location, Cape Town, South Africa. Click through for full study. They used Cape Town because it was easy (for less than admirable reasons.) Humanity has known since before there was English to say it in that the love of money is the root of all evil (Radix malorum est cupditas, if anyone cares.) Beau of the Fifth Column (who appears regularly in the Video Thread) prefers to call it “power coupons.” Maybe we all should.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Starting tomorrow at sunset and running through Tuesday is Yom HaShoah (“Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day,”) and I was planning on sharing an article on it today. But tomorrow and Tuesday are also the last two days of tax season, and what I had in mind deserves more time and more attention than is likely to be available this weekend. So it will run next week. Instead, I’m sharing an article looking at the platform “Discord,” a (presumably unwitting) player in the most recent classified document scandal to hit the news.
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What is Discord? An internet researcher explains the social media platform at the center of Pentagon leak of top-secret intelligence
Some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets were posted to a small online gaming community. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Since the early 2000s, mass-appeal social media platforms have collected these small spaces into bigger ones, letting people find their own little corners of the internet, but only with interconnections to others. This allows social media sites to suggest new spaces users might join, whether it’s a local neighborhood discussion or a group with the same hobby, and sell specifically targeted advertising. But the small-group niche community is making a comeback with adults, and with kids and teens.
When Discord was initially released in 2015, many video games did not provide players with live voice chat to talk to one another while playing the game – or required them to pay premium prices to do so. Discord was an app that enabled real-time voice and text chatting, so friends could team up to conquer an obstacle, or just chat while exploring a game world. People do still use Discord for that, but these days most of the activity on the service is part of wider communities than just a couple of friends meeting up to play.
Examining Discord is part of my research into how scholars, developers and policymakers might design and maintain healthy online spaces.
A little bit old school
Discord first came onto my radar in 2017 when an acquaintance asked me to join a writer’s support group. Discord users can set up their own communities, called servers, with shareable links to join and choices about whether the server is public or private.
The writer’s group server felt like an old-school chat room, but with multiple channels segmenting out different conversations that folks were having. It reminded me of descriptions of early online chat and forum-based communities that hosted lengthy conversations between people all over the world.
The people in the writers’ server quickly realized that a few of our community members were teenagers under the age of 18. While the server owner had kept the space invite-only, he avoided saying “no” to anyone who requested access. It was supposed to be a supportive community for people working on writing projects, after all. Why would he want to exclude anyone?
He didn’t want to kick the teens out, but was able to make some adjustments using Discord’s server moderation system. Community members had to disclose their age, and anyone under 18 was given a special “role” that tagged them as a minor. That role prevented them from accessing channels that we marked as “not safe for work,” or “NSFW.” Some of the writers were working on explicit romance novels and didn’t want to solicit feedback from teenagers. And sometimes, adults just wanted to have their own space.
While we took care in constructing an online space safe for teens, there are still dangers present with an app like Discord. The platform is criticized for lacking parental controls. The terms of service state that no one under 13 should sign up for Discord, but many young people use the platform regardless.
Additionally, there are people who have used Discord to organize and encourage hateful rhetoric, including neo-Nazi ideologies. Others have used the platform to traffic child pornography.
However, Discord does maintain that these sorts of activities are illegal and unwelcome on its platform, and the company regularly bans serversand users it says perpetuate harm.
Options for safety
Every Discord server I’ve joined since then has had some safeguard around young people and inappropriate content. Whether it’s age-restricted channels or simply refusing to allow minors to join certain servers, the Discord communities I’m in share a heightened concern for keeping young people on the internet safe.
This does not mean that every Discord server will be safe at all times for its members, however. Parents should still take the time to talk with their kids about what they’re doing in their online spaces. Even something as innocuous as the popular children’s gaming environment Roblox can turn bad in the right setting.
And while the servers I’ve been involved in have been managed with care, not all Discord servers are regulated this way. In addition to servers lacking uniform regulation, account owners are able to lie about their age and identity when signing up for an account. And there are new ways for users to misbehave or annoy others on Discord, like spamming loud and inappropriate audio.
But, as with other modern social media platforms, there are safeguards to help administrators keep online communities safe for young people if they want to. Server members can label an entire server “NSFW,” going beyond single channel labels and locking minor accounts out of entire communities. But if they don’t, company officials can do it themselves. When accessing Discord on an iOS device, NSFW servers are not visible to anyone, even accounts belonging to adults. Additionally, Discord runs a Moderator Academy to support training up volunteer moderators who can appropriately handle a wide range of situations.
Discord is another way for people to gather and communicate online. Discord
Stronger controls
Unlike many other current popular social media platforms, Discord servers often function as closed communities, with invitations required to join. There are also large open servers flooded with millions of users, but Discord’s design integrates content moderation tools to maintain order.
For example, a server creator has tight control over who has access to what, and what permissions each server member can have to send, delete or manage messages. In addition, Discord allows community members to add automations to a server, continuously monitoring activity to enforce moderation standards.
With these protections, people use servers to form tight-knit, closed spaces safe from chaotic public squares like Twitter and less visible to the wider online world. This can be positive, keeping spaces safer from bullies, trolls and disinformation spreaders. In my own research, young people have mentioned their Discord servers as the safe, private space they have online in contrast to messy public platforms.
However, moving online activity to more private spaces also means that those well-regulated, healthy communities are less discoverable for vulnerable groups that might need them. For example, new fathers looking for social support are sometimes more inclined to access it through open subreddits rather than Facebook groups.
Discord’s servers are not the first closed communities on the internet. They are, essentially, the same as old-school chat rooms, private blogs and curated mailing lists. They will have the same problems and opportunities as previous online communities.
Discussion about self-protection
In my view, the solution to this particular problem is not necessarily banning particular practices or regulating internet companies. Research into youth safety online finds that government regulation aimed at protecting minors on social media rarely has the desired outcome, and more often results in disempowering and isolating youth instead.
Just as parents and caring adults tell the kids in their lives about recognizing dangerous situations in the physical world, talking about healthy online interactions can help young people protect themselves in the online world. Many youth-focused organizations, and many internet companies, have internet safety information aimed at kids of all ages.
Whenever young people hop onto the next technology fad, there will inevitably be panic over how the adults, companies and society may or may not be keeping young people safe. What is most important in these situations is to remember that talking to young people about how they use those technologies, and what to do in difficult situations, can be an effective way to help them avoid serious harm online.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 15, 2022.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I am a firm believer that there is nothing wrong with the Internet which a race of humans smarter, better educated, and more conscientious than we are couldn’t handle. Unfortunately, that race is not what we have. And figuring out how to operate and regulate the Internet in such a way that those of us who are educated and conscientious have all the access we need nd want, while those who – are not – are protected from it (and we from them), and still fulfill the promise of the First Amendment – well, that is a nightmare. In fact, we need to protect ourselves, since there is really no one doing it for us.
