I’ve generally been pretty supportive/ forgiving of Biden. Even his support for Israel, not because I agree with the policy, but I can’t imagine him temperamentally or politically doing anything else.
But linking the border bill and Ukraine aid has been an utter debacle. Truly a failure of political skill and a massive strategic unforced error.
“Republicans as a whole aren’t a viable negotiating partner because any one Republican, including any Republican at the negotiating table, can be quickly outflanked on the right and lose any bargaining power.
Democrats participate anyway because, to give it the most most favorable interpretation I can, they believe that they will come out looking better having tried and having exposed GOP bad faith. No matter that this has failed to come to fruition countless times in the past decade.”
I don't know who needs to hear this but make your draft/submission as easy as you can for a reader to follow. Have a friend or peer read it first, not for specialized meaning, but for follow-ability. I try extremely hard to be a generous reviewer but if I can't tell what you mean, over and over, I can't even offer a constructive critique.
I suspect that the introduction of moveable type to Germany greatly contributed to both witchcraft panics and anti-Jewish pogroms.
Even before the first actual, regular newspaper was published in 1604, Germany was rife with "news sheets" that printed all sorts of lurid and fantastical tales in order to increase sales. Think of modern-day tabloids or FOX News at their worst. And all those tales must be true, or else they wouldn't have been printed, right?
Some of the tales are rather amusing (like the Sankt Andreasberg cat that gave birth to 300 kittens and a goat in a single night while under the influence of a comet). But then there's a tale of a Jew who supposedly tried to "torture" blessed altar bread and, when he could not destroy it "with fire or water", he tried to "bake it into a cake". And then the dough became red, and he beheld a vision of Baby Jesus within the oven...
Such tales took on lives of their own, and helped keep all sorts of bigotries alive. Just like modern-day social media do...
(By the way, if anyone can give me some recommendations for scholarly works on the early era of mass printing, I am all ears - so far, I've mainly picked up individual anecdotes.) #printing#witchcraft#antisemitism#history
@juergen_hubert Elizabeth Eisenstein is the go to writer in this topic in English. Adrian Johns has written the rebuttal to EE and @jeffjarvis has also written about this.
It is unspeakably grim that this (really long) HR training module (that I am still doing) has a suicide prevention hotline number plastered across the bottom. I'm not even sure how to parse this but WTAF.
Mastodon periods of activity posting really come and go, and right now it feels like we're mostly in a lull. Outside of the handful of regular accounts I can count on, it feels sleepy around here.
@Zeb_Larson I felt like there was a major drop off last year around the winter holidays.
It’s a bit different this year with social media platform competition, so maybe not applicable, but I got the sense that without an algorithm generating engagement people just got busy doing other stuff - on or offline.
@inquiline@Zeb_Larson it’s funny that this is literally the exact problem we ran into in 2005 with the NYC indymedia open publishing newswire. We tried to solve it by designing a … kind of algorithm😂
I appreciate it when someone posts over here that “they are doing most of their posting at BlueSky these days so follow me there” so I can then unfollow them here.
Oh I see the blah ranch house in my neighborhood that sold for $2M in June 2022 and was relisted after they "upgraded" it into vulgar fanciness for $3.9M in April 2023 has still not sold and they've had to successively drop the ask price down to $2.8M now.