I wanna surface this to my main timeline because it's kinda important to say out loud from time to time:

Businesses do NOT "have to" focus exclusively on their return to shareholders. Not legally, not morally.

That is the misguided OPINION of a 1970 essay by Milton Friedman, and the fact that everyone seemed to just hop on board that opinion is a significant reason why we switched gears into hyper-hell-capitaliam since then.

Push back on this every time you see it.

This isn't a subtoot of anyone, I'm just responding to something I read earlier and immediately forgot the source of:

The reason that queer and trans people are so afraid right now is not because it's necessarily *worse* for us than it was in the 1990s.

For me, it's worse now because it represents such an incredible backslide from the very recent past. It's also worse now because of how violent, specific, and individual the threats are.

There is a sense that the gloves are off, and hurting us is overtly the point - the veneer of civility is gone. The fact that most people (off the Fediverse, largely) are not responding uniquely to this unique level of hostility is worrying, to me!

There's also a demographic problem happening right now that was never present before: As we come out, and as we choose to be visible, our true number becomes more apparent. The other side doesn't seem very chill about the fact that like three queer or trans people could simultaneously citizen's-arrest every cop in the US!

The transphobes are responding to the actuality of trans people now, not the fictional idea that someone, somewhere, was transgender. That is new, and I think it's dangerous.

#trans #queer

I have been writing about Fox and what makes it different for 20 years. http://archive.pressthink.org/2003/10/21/oreilly_voice.html

Two days ago, Josh Marshall wrote about Fox the best short form description and analysis I have ever read.

Marshall has a history PhD. As he says, "it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it
was a part of..."

No essay I know of puts it all together like his.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-deep-archeology-of-fox-news/sharetoken/WKLM5YQ0yue5

#uspol #journalism

Widening Highways Doesn’t Fix Traffic. So Why Do We Keep Doing It?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/widen-highways-traffic.html

#BlackMastodon
#urbanism
#uspolitics

RT @[email protected]

Oops! I did again, @[email protected]:

I created a Twitter account pretending to be @[email protected] (with his permission) and applied for Blue “verification.”

And once again, Twitter took my $8, asked zero questions and gave the fake account a blue checkmark.

https://wapo.st/3VHo2Qg

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/geoffreyfowler/status/1611018186962653193

Talk about taking self-promo(?) too far:
Writer's family announced she'd killed herself due to bullying, asked readers to buy her final book.
Author friends put together an anthology of anti-bullying stories, proceeds to her family.
2 years later, writer admits that she's alive.

RT @[email protected]

Author Susan Meachen died from suicide 2 years ago. Except it turns out she didn’t. What an absolute piece of shit #authors #MentalHealthMatters

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/Draggerofliars/status/1610491152091717632

BIG NEWS: Pawoo.net, the world's 2nd biggest Mastodon instance, has just been acquired.

The entity acquiring them is the Mask Group, a business that also runs mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud. They are also active in the so-called "Web 3.0" space.

If you haven't heard of pawoo.net, it's because many instances have de-federated from it.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mask-network-acquires-pawoo-net-070000858.html