After sleeping on it, I think my posts were guilty of both “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining,” but have no idea what prompted @LadyMenopause’s response.
As far as “mansplaining,” the tweet that prompted by response by @LadyMenopause was not about protest tactics, targeting, the best ways to engage oppressors or anything of the sort. (I really need to start archiving my timeline.) So my initial response, suggesting better targeting for Republican majority areas, was off-topic and hijacking her thread, for a topic of no evidence interest to her.
Another aspect of “mansplaining” was my dismissal of her view of Republican areas as guarded by “rednecks with all their artillery in front of them….” Whatever I or you may think about that view of Republican areas in Minneapolis, it is her view. I continued to err in treating the topic as one about tactics and strategies, which were not her focus.
On “whitesplaining,” I am a child of a violent white culture and assume that resources and tactics can be whistled up with little or no difficulty. My perspective also does not account for members of the Black community, their hopes and desires, to say nothing of their interest (or lack thereof) in wading in their oppressors blood. Unlike some white people, I don’t think I can evaluate or even properly consider the hopes and desires of the Black community. To suggestion action anyway, is a form of “whitesplaining.”
I’m utterly convinced that Black people, women, and others have been, are and likely will be oppressed by the white male capitalist patriarchy. I have had no doubts on that score for decades. I try to not speak the language of the Empire but as you can see, I can and do fail. Apologies to anyone who was offended and should you be called out for either “mansplaining” or “whitesplaining,” perhaps this will be a good starting point to discover your error.
PS: When you see me falling into “mansplaining” or “whitesplaining,” I’d appreciate a comment, here or on Twitter. Thanks!
You know the gist of the game from its similarity to six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but where would you find information for McConnell? He has no known movie credits for constructing degrees of separation.
That’s easy enough to fix. Let’s do a short list and see what others add to it:
Other sources? Put your thinking hats on!
BTW, I should mention that completing your Six Degrees of Corona – Mitch McConnell edition by reducing the degrees of separation, say by becoming a waiter or busser is cheating. Complete the six degrees of separation.
]]>The game, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, requires players to link celebrities to Bacon, in as few steps as possible, via the movies they have in common. The more odd or random the celebrity, the better. For example, O.J. Simpson was in “The Naked Gun 33⅓” with Olympia Dukakis, who was in “Picture Perfect” with Kevin Bacon.
Kevin Bacon on ‘Six Degrees’ game: ‘I was horrified’ by Brandon Griggs. March 12, 2014.
The more general case, “six degrees of separation” between any two people in the world is usually shown as:
Kevin Bacon is interesting for trivia purposes but he returns only 49K mentions on Twitter today. Compare President Trump grosses ~3.2 million and Joe Biden at ~2.6 million (both exact phrases so didn’t capture nicknames or obcenities).
To make an OSINT game, who are the people you can identify with either Donald Trump or Joe Biden? Those go between #5 and #6, then proceeding from them, who should go between #4 and #5? As you proceed right to left, it requires more digging to fish up people who can provide the bridge.
You will need all your OSINT skills as you compete against others to find the best path to people more popular, or should I say more notorious than Kevin Bacon?
Here are two templates, depending upon your political persuasion to get you started with the Six Degrees of Corona:
Some wag is going to gift us with their deep legal knowledge to proclaim that intentional transmission of a disease is illegal. It’s also a violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. It’s also likely a battery (civil and criminal) in most jurisdictions. None of which is relevant to an OSINT game to sharpen your skills. The choices of images (you can supply your own) is only a matter of motivation.
Feel free to circulate these images or to create your own Six Degrees of Corona OSINT game, substituting other images as you deem appropriate.
PS: My money is on Jared being #5 for Trump. No data science for that opinion but he reeks of the closeness that would transmit most diseases.
One of the more popular images from protests at the Michagan State House seems to support the “storming” of the building by armed white folks.
The “storming” narrative is sweeping social media, driven by people who are soliciting your money, either now or soon. The problem is none, repeat none of the “storming” narratives is true. They are completely and utterly false! NBC captures what happened in a single paragraph:
As the protests moved indoors from the rainy steps of the Capitol, police took the temperatures of those entering the building using forehead thermometers, according to NBC affiliate WOOD of Grand Rapids.
Hundreds of protesters, some carrying guns in the state Capitol, demonstrate against Michigan’s emergency measures April 30, 2020 by Dartunorro Clark.
Armed white cosplayers, came in out of the rain in Michigan, after having their temperatures checked by the police. Not my idea of “storming” a state capital. Yours?
PS: Yes, police have reacted with extreme violence against unarmed Black Children (Children’s Crusade, Birmingham, AL May 2-3, 1963) and peaceful Native Americans (Standing Rock, for example, 2016-2017), but not against these armed white people. Your point? Over 500 years, white settlers have practiced and refined racism into the warp and woof of North America. Shaming it for being the society they built, one injustice at a time isn’t a winning strategy.
One persistent question, charge or comment that I get on Facebook and Twitter to some of my bolder suggestions is: That’s illegal! So far as I know, “legal” depends on who you are, not the act in question.
Take “terrorist” bombing for example. Every US president in my lifetime (let’s just say 60+ years) with one exception, Carter, has engaged in the murder of civilians in foreign countries, by bombing. By extension, so have the troops under their commands engaged in terrorist bombings/attacks.
The same is true for both CIA and other agency operatives who engage in acts most of us would describe as murder, torture, etc. We can conclude from the lack of consequences for their acts, someone thought their actions were legal.
But if I describe how to weaponize data in order to, in theory at least, to interfere with oil or gas pipelines, refineries, airports, some wag will interject: That’s illegal! As though that is meaningful in the face of crimes that will blight the lives of millions, or worse.
True enough, some act might be “illegal” in the eyes of a system rigged to benefit the wealthy and destroy the ecosphere, but isn’t that just a caution to not be apprehended? The “property rights” of oil and gas companies that are destroying this planet have no strings that tug at my heart. Especially when compared to the rights of children to grow up in healthy, sustainable environments.
That’s illegal! most often originates from people who, having secured privileges in the present system, are loathe to see it change. If Martin Luther King were alive today and in jail in Birmingham for protesting environmental crimes, they would be named addressees. (It’s sad that letter is most often reprinted sans the addressees names. We really should know who the moral cowards of previous generations were.)
Do some acts have more consequences than others? Sure, mugging for TV cameras to “draw attention” to an issue has consequences. Using IEDs or the threat of IEDs, punching holes in pipelines not yet in use, making pipelines fail under pressure, all of those increase costs and deter investors. Given the pathological greed of capitalism, do you think drawing attention or increasing construction costs on an exponential scale are more likely to be effective?
I freely concede if you want to preserve your present privileges, by all means, listen to those who want to sustain present exploitation of people and the environment. If you want to take a chance on having a meaningful impact for the better, treat cries of That’s illegal!, as booterism for a foul present.
That said, as always, consider your present status, CIA, FBI, NSA agent, contractor (Whitey Bolger?), US military, etc., and local laws, along with your appetite for risk, when evaluating whether you should or should not use techniques described herein.
PS: I may revisit/update some old classics like Steal This Book by Abbie Hoffman that has this great passage:
A special metallic bonding glue available from Eastman-Kodak will form a permanent bond in only 45 seconds. Gluing up locks of all the office buildings in your town is a great way to dramatize the fact that our brothers and sisters are being jailed all the time.
Of course you know this “special metallic bonding glue from Eastman-Kodak” by the more familiar name: Cyanoacrylate, no, sorry, “Super Glue.”
While honoring the source as Abbie Hoffman, be imaginative! Some random places where Super Glue could be appropriately applied: gas caps, lug nuts (esp. if caltrops are likely), suitcases, home/hotel/motel doors, laptops, traffic arms, anywhere with two surfaces in contact. (Be sure to check your status as a US mercenary before undertaking such uses.)
]]>More than 100 cities of the U. S. have been hit by Negro violence this year. At least 177 persons have been killed, thousands injured. Property damage has approached 1 billion dollars.
I remember the summer the cities burned. I was puzzled at the time, being 13 years old, why the rioters didn’t attack wealthy sections of town, instead of burning their own?
One explanation of the riots identified this recurrent pattern:
A particular pattern emerged: What usually ignited the powder keg of resentments was police brutality or abuse. Triggering the rioting in Newark was an incident on the hot summer night of July 12 in which police arrested John Smith, an African-American taxi driver, pulling him roughly from his cab during a traffic stop. The cops beat Smith and dragged him into the nearby Fourth Precinct station. Hundreds of residents watched from a large public housing project and an angry crowd quickly gathered outside the police building. A false rumor swirled through the streets that Smith had been killed, adding to the outrage.
The location of riots looks like happenstance, people riot where they are located when a triggering event takes place. In the 1967 riots, those locations were the ghettos where so many Black Americans were imprisoned and remain so to this day.
Data question: What if oppressed people assembled (not marched to) at locations frequented by the owners of government? Say gated communities for instance. If those assemblies were met with police brutality or abuse, would people riot? Any empirical evidence on that question? Asking for a friend.
]]>That inability to assume a role in a marginalized community extends across all marginalized communities and in between them. To understand the impact of oppressive algorithms, such as Google’s search algorithms, we must:
Enpowering everyone to participate in testing Google’s algorithms avoids relying on reports about the experiences of marginalized communities. We will be listening to members of those communities.
In it’s simplest form, your black boxing of Google start with a Google search box, then:
your search terms site:website OR site:website
That search string states your search terms and is then followed by an OR list of websites you want searched. The results are Google’s ranking of your search against specified websites.
Here’s an example ran while working on this post:
terrorism trump IS site:nytimes.com OR site:fox.com OR site:wsj.com
Without running the search yourself, what distribution of articles to you expect to see? (I also tested this using Tor to make sure my search history wasn’t creating an issue.)
By count of the results: nytimes.com 87, fox.com 0, wsj.com 18.
Suprised? I was. I wonder how the Washington Post stacks up against the New York Times? Same terms: nytimes 49, washingtonpost.com 52.
Do you think those differences are accidental? (I don’t.)
I’m not competent to create a list of Black websites for testing Google’s algorithm of oppression but the African American Literature Book Club has a list of the top 50 Black-Owned Websites. In addition, they offer a list of 300 Black-owned websites and host the search engine Huria Search, which only searches Black-owned websites.
To save you the extraction work, here are the top 50 Black-owned websites ready for testing against each other and other sites in the bowels of Google:
essence.com OR howard.edu OR blackenterprise.com OR thesource.com OR ebony.com OR blackplanet.com OR sohh.com OR blackamericaweb.com OR hellobeautiful.com OR allhiphop.com OR worldstarhiphop.com OR eurweb.com OR rollingout.com OR thegrio.com OR atlantablackstar.com OR bossip.com OR blackdoctor.org OR blackpast.org OR lipstickalley.com OR newsone.com OR madamenoire.com OR morehouse.edu OR diversityinc.com OR spelman.edu OR theybf.com OR hiphopwired.com OR aalbc.com OR stlamerican.com OR afro.com OR phillytrib.com OR finalcall.com OR mediatakeout.com OR lasentinel.net OR blacknews.com OR blavity.com OR cassiuslife.com OR jetmag.com OR blacklivesmatter.com OR amsterdamnews.com OR diverseeducation.com OR deltasigmatheta.org OR curlynikki.com OR atlantadailyworld.com OR apa1906.net OR theshaderoom.com OR notjustok.com OR travelnoire.com OR thecurvyfashionista.com OR dallasblack.com OR forharriet.com
Please spread the word to “young Black girls” to use Noble’s phrase, Black women in general, all marginalized communities, they need not wait for experts with programming staffs to detect marginalization at Google. Experts have agendas, discover your own and tell the rest of us about it.
]]>TLP:GREEN:
This PIN has been released TLP:GREEN: The information in this product is useful for the awareness of all participating organizations within their sector or community, but should not be shared via publicly accessible channels.
Do you think Forbes.com qualifies as a “publicly accessible channel?”
I ask just to highlight the absurdity of information restriction that has taken over government and cybersecurity in general. Notice that the evils doers in this scenario are already informed and the only people left uninformed, are members of the public.
I’m sure someone at the FBI has the authority to assign TPL:GREEN classification, but not anything lower or higher, plus they have auditing routines to check their work, monthly reports, etc. Now imagine all the turf protection and routines that must go on for other security classifications. All to hide information from the voting public.
Ask your 2020 candidates to sweep away all but launch code and location of nuclear submarine secrecy. It’s not like a modern army can conceal its intentions to invade. Think of all the classification staff that will become availabe to fill the front ranks.
]]>The key lesson here is that hours and hours of practice are required. There’s no shortcut to avoid putting in the time to learning your tools and the weaknesses they are best at detecting.
Reminder, as of October 7, 2019, there are 270 working days left until the 2020 elections in the United States. Use your time wisely!
]]>Abstract: Automatic news comment generation is beneficial for real applications but has not attracted enough attention from the research community. In this paper, we propose a “read-attend-comment” procedure for news comment generation and formalize the procedure with a reading network and a generation network. The reading network comprehends a news article and distills some important points from it, then the generation network creates a comment by attending to the extracted discrete points and the news title. We optimize the model in an end-to-end manner by maximizing a variational lower bound of the true objective using the back-propagation algorithm. Experimental results on two public datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform existing methods in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.
A tweet said this was a “dangerous” paper, so I had to follow the link.
This research could be abused, but how many news comments have you read lately? The comments made by this approach would have to degrade a lot to approach the average human comment.
Anyone who is interested in abusive and/or inane comments, can scrape comments on Facebook or Twitter, set up a cron file and pop off the next comment for posting. Several orders of magnitude less effort that the approach of this paper.
Wondering, would coherence of comments over a large number of articles be an indicator that a bot is involved?