2022-12-30

etc

Southwest passengers stuck in a “free for all” baggage claim nightmare
Ex-Pope failing health presents difficult decisions for Vatican
US prepares to drop the survey foot measurement

NIST and NOAA are retiring the U.S. survey foot and standardizing on the international foot. A U.S. survey foot is expressed as a fraction — 1200/3937 meters — while an international foot is expressed as a decimal, exactly 0.3048 meters. That’s a difference of only one one-hundredth of a foot per mile.

Opinion | Jack Dorsey and the Dangers of Privacy At All Costs - The New York Times
FBI Office Probing Hunter Requested Pre-Election Censorship
In 2023, Let’s Rediscover Wrongness - by Jesse Singal

In 2023, I hope we can rediscover wrongness. Mere wrongness. Wrongness untethered from other accusations. Not everything that is wrong is dangerous or evil or bigoted. Sometimes people are just wrong. A big part of human life is arguing over who is wrong and attempting to nudge this whole ungainly human enterprise toward rightness, a few painstaking microns at a time. It’s harder to do that when the pitch of everything is so shrill.
FBI Cointelpro is Back and Worse Than Ever.

Nearly 50% of participants in ‘Monkeypox in women’ study were biological men.
'Tradwives' promote a lifestyle that evokes the 1950s
- HN comments
(2007) Racists didn't expose “grooming gangs”, they capitalised on cultural relativism

I wanted to re-publish this piece, so many years on, because much of the story of the Rochdale, Rotherham and other so-called grooming gangs scandals has been rewritten, in a way that renders invisible the survivors, mothers, and many other feminist campaigners that fought to get this widespread atrocity firmly on the map. I am sick of hearing about how only white nationalists were “brave” enough to speak out about it. Many of us, including feminists of Pakistani and Indian origin, as well as other women of colour shouted very loudly for a number of years until the authorities were forced to take notice.

MIT faculty adopt free expression statement that protects ‘offensive’ speech.
It's a Festivus Debunking! - by Adrian Daub

I should say that none of what I am about to write should be taken as an endorsement of the (Stanford bad language) list this story is about — I simply don’t know enough to say for sure what its authors intended and what I think about their goals and their way of going about achieving those goals. My point is a much simpler one: the people freaking out about the “blacklist” know even less than I do, and maybe they should have bothered to find out before, as Michael Hobbes put it on Twitter, “repackaging Fox News outrage bait”.