#net history

[ukgk]

Gogo Audio codec & encoder with nise-Haruna (/someone also known as Sakura) by ＠ＭＡＲＩＮＥＣＡＴ - ✧DOWNLOAD✧ - guide publication date: 2000-12-30 Winter 2000 edition

Gogo Audio codec & encoder with nise-Haruna, this version was sold as a floppy disk at Winter Comiket 59, 2000 

GOGO.DLL / gogo-no-coda / AudioGogo is a free mp3 encoder based on LAME3.88 that was popular during the early 2000s for it's lightning fast encoding speeds

this version is compatible with Ukagaka and features cute art of Sakura/nise-Haruna and unyu on the UI

MARINECAT's final software release to end off the 20th century, this is an add-on for gogo.dll (can be downloaded separately)

it's had multiple names due to the copyright scandals of Personaware VS Ukagaka, a listing I've seen online has a label over the top of the original text 'with someone also known as Sakura'/ a.k.a Sakura) / 午後のこ～だ with 偽春菜さくらとも呼ばれるひと, but mine has the older label on the disk of 'with nise-Haruna' despite the web pages having it crossed out, some of the folders and files still have the older title of 'with nise-Haruna' as well

(this is for the sake of archival, I can't guarantee that this software will be compatible with modern versions of Windows but feel free to try! please let me know in the tags or replies if it works in a VM or how to use it because I need a better mp3 encoder )

[marzipanandminutiae]

thoughts on "tradwives" as a 19th-century social historian

It's great until it's not.

It's great until he develops an addiction and starts spending all the money on it.

It's great until you realize he's abusive and hid it long enough to get you totally in his power (happened to my great-great-aunt Irene).

It's great until he gets injured and can't work anymore.

It's great until he dies and your options are "learn a marketable skill fast" or "marry the first eligible man you can find."

It's great until he wants child #7 and your body just can't take another pregnancy, but you can't leave or risk desertion because he's your meal ticket.

It's great until he tries to make you run a brothel as a get-rich-quick scheme and deserts you when you refuse, leaving your sisters to desperately fundraise so your house doesn't get foreclosed on (happened to my great-great-aunt Mamie).

It's great until you want to leave but you can't. It's great until you want to do something else with your life but you can't. It's great. Until. It's. Not.

I won't lie to you and say nobody was ever happy that way. Plenty of women have been, and part of feminism is acknowledging that women have the right to choose that sort of life if they want to.

But flinging yourself into it wholeheartedly with no sort of safety net whatsoever, especially in a period where it's EXTREMELY easy for him to leave you- as it should be; no-fault divorce saves lives -is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Have your own means of support. Keep your own bank account; we fought hard enough to be allowed them. Gods willing, you never need that safety net, but too many women have suffered because they needed it and it wasn't there.

[fashionsfromhistory]

Evening Dress

House of Worth (Paris, France)

c.1910

Victoria & Albert Museum (Accession Number: T.57-1961)

[sumire-no-nikki]

Karl Cauer, Hexe (1874) at Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

[thatshowthingstarted]

"The Release from Deception,"

Carved from a single block of marble, it depicts a fisherman being released from netting by an angel, allegorical to the man being liberated from his sins.

So intricate was the work that 18th-century philosopher Giangiuseppe Origlia described it as “the last and most trying test to which sculpture in marble can aspire.”

Queirolo worked alone on his magnum opus, without an assistant or even a workshop. Even other sculptors refused to touch the delicate net in case it broke into pieces in their hands.

The masterpiece is housed at the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, with several other miracles of marble. Namely, "The Veiled Christ" (1753) by Giuseppe Sanmartino and "The Veiled Truth" (1750) by Antonio Corradini.

Francesco Queirolo (1752-1759)

Credit: @Culture_Crit

[coolwitchaunt]

fun fact: grover was a mod because Goons In Platoons (the armed forces subforum) complained for months that one mod wasn't enough for their subforum and they needed another, and eventually the admins said "mod whichever regular GiP poster will annoy them the most"

We can say in hindsight that maybe that wasn't the best criteria but you can't say they didn't pick correctly based on it.

???? that groverhaus post is fucking terrible. calling grover "some guy on some forum" severely undersells how infamously he was on something awful, the website for stupid morons.

[aworldofpattern]

Miley Cyrus at the Grammys 2024, wearing Ancient Egypt-inspired net dress by John Galliano for Maison Margiela, constructed entirely from safety pins.

It took 675 hours of craftsmanship, using 14,000 safety pins.

This dress refers back to one from Galliano's Fall 1997 ready-to-wear collection.

[easternmind]

International standards being what they are, the majority of consoles created in or imported to Japan, including those targeting uniquely domestic audiences, employ names or acronyms based on the English language. For the sixty odd years that Japan has been producing electromechanic and electronic game systems there is but a literal handful of systems named in the Japanese language that, I'd wager, even the most seasoned players know little or nothing about. Your curiosity may be rewarded if you continue reading.

1982 - Contrary to what you may have heard or read, Tomy was the first Japanese toy company to develop a computer. Styled after the Texas Instruments TI-99/4 and manufactured by Matsushita, the Pyūta was purposely designed to sit on toy store shelf space as hinted at by its name, a childish diminutive of the word Konpyūtā.

1983 - John Ross's Mini-Arcade project was sold world over under the sweet-sounding name Vectrex. The Japanese distributor, Bandai, was not so enamoured with it. Believing that a Japanese name would do better at retail, it was commercialized as Kōsoku-Sen - The Lightspeed Ship!

1988 - Bandai's history as a console maker is quite unlike any other. Terebikko is a VHS-based gaming system that uses the TV audio output to play sound via its phone receiver and quiz players with multiple response questions. The console produces a sound output that informs the player if the answer was correct or not. Tapes include animated films starring Mario, Anpanman and the characters from Dragon Ball, some even fetching quite the high price at auctions these days.

1990 - Sharp is seldom given due recognition for creating some of Nintendo's finest and durable consoles. The Sūpā Famikon Naizou Terebi SF1 TV perfectly mirrors the concept of their 1983 C1 NES TV, in spite of the technological leap. Its Japanese name describes its built-in console function. Nintendo fanboys would pounce on me were I to snub it.

1995 - Further proof of Bandai's unorthodox approach to console design is found in their unsuccessful Denshi Manga Juku - lit. Electronic Manga Tutor. The first ever stylus-based console - once again, contrary to what many may yet hold to be true - some of the games in its miniscule library allowed the player to design and animate characters or scenes; while others presented a blank canvas for the user to draw the game's protagonist.

1996 - A retail development kit, but a console all the same, Sony's Netto Yarōze was an ambitious project resulting in dozens of homebrewed independent titles. The name matches its vision: a network of creators coming together to realize their individual game design aspirations. Of all the systems in its restricted category, it was by far the most successful.

Unreleased - It's a beautiful fact that the first arcade game and globally successful console had a Japanese word stamped on them - Atari. Mirai, meaning Future, is a prototype found in the mid-1990s, about which nothing can be said authoritatively apart it from being a cartridge-based system. Given the more or less overt resemblances to the Atari XEGS, it is possible that it was designed by Ira Velinsky, in which case it could date from the late 1980s. Though not a made-in-Japan product, its borrowing of a Japanese word makes its presence in this list mandatory.

[coolwitchaunt]

"troon" was used on SA itself with varying degrees of negative and non-negative connotations depending on which subforums it was being used in ("neutral-to-mildly-negative connotations" I would say is a good overall characterization, although obviously that shifted a lot over time). A lot of the various anti-SA/SA exiles/banned nazis offsite forums in the latter half of the 10s had a particular hate on for transgender people and "troons" became a favored subject for five-minutes-of-hate style rants in those places, which is probably the specific vector by which it passed into 4chan. kiwifarms was (is, I assume) very obsessive on the subject as well, which probably also influenced some particularly online segments of terfs directly.

youve probably got a hundred messages about this already but "troon" is a transphobic slur i see used by terfs almost exclusively. i also happen to know that there are a lot of teenagers that identify as terfs and use such language. so that anon is most likely a terf that saw the pics of you going girl mode and went "ewwww"

damn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

oh well, mystery solved. sorry everyone, it was the obvious answer after all :^(

[ukgk]

At around 5:40 p.m. on August 7, 2002 a guerrilla live performance by “Nini Radio” was held on a pedestrian road in front of the Messe Sanoh game store (now Trader) on Chuo-dori in Akihabara Electric Town, Tokyo, with a packed crowd of fans blocking off half of the roadway. According to discussion boards and news outlets, at least 1000 fans of Ukagaka gathered in the streets illegally and screamed “ｷﾀ━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━( ﾟ∀)━( 　ﾟ)━(　　)━(ﾟ 　)━(∀ﾟ )━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━!!!!!” and sung along to the opening themesong until a full police car arrived and a small riot broke out, people began to quickly pack up and disperse, the live performance was stopped early at 5:55.

(source - ☆、☆)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkfrump Linkdump

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Welcome to the seventeenth Pluralistic linkdump, a collection of all the miscellany that didn't make it into the week's newsletter, cunningly wrought together in a single edition that ranges from the first ISP to AI nonsense to labor organizing victories to the obituary of a brilliant scientist you should know a lot more about! Here's the other 16 dumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

If you're reading this (and you are!), it was delivered to you by an internet service provider. Today, the ISP industry is calcified, controlled by a handful of telcos and cable companies. But the idea of an "ISP" didn't come out of a giant telecommunications firm – it was created, in living memory, by excellent nerds who are still around.

Depending on how you reckon, The Little Garden was either the first or the second ISP in America. It was named after a Palo Alto Chinese restaurant frequented by its founders. To get a sense of that founding, read these excellent recollections by Tom Jennings, whose contributions include the seminal zine Homocore, the seminal networking protocol Fidonet, and the seminal third-party PC ROM, whence came Dell, Gateway, Compaq, and every other "PC clone" company.

The first installment describes how an informal co-op to network a few friends turned into a business almost by accident, with thousands of dollars flowing in and out of Jennings' bank account:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/TLG.html

And it describes how that ISP set a standard for neutrality, boldly declaring that "TLGnet exercises no control whatsoever over the content of the information." They introduced an idea of radical transparency, documenting their router configurations and other technical details and making them available to the public. They hired unskilled punk and queer kids from their communities and trained them to operate the network equipment they'd invented, customized or improvised.

In part two, Jennings talks about the evolution of TLG's radical business-plan: to offer unrestricted service, encouraging their customers to resell that service to people in their communities, having no lock-in, unbundling extra services including installation charges – the whole anti-enshittification enchilada:

https://www.sensitiveresearch.com/Archive/TLG/

I love Jennings and his work. I even gave him a little cameo in Picks and Shovels, the third Martin Hench novel, which will be out next winter. He's as lyrical a writer about technology as you could ask for, and he's also a brilliant engineer and thinker.

The Little Garden's founders and early power-users have all fleshed out Jennings' account of the birth of ISPs. Writing on his blog, David "DSHR" Rosenthal rounds up other histories from the likes of EFF co-founder John Gilmore and Tim Pozar:

https://blog.dshr.org/2024/04/the-little-garden.html

Rosenthal describes some of the more exotic shenanigans TLG got up to in order to do end-runs around the Bell system's onerous policies, hacking in the purest sense of the word, for example, by daisy-chaining together modems in regions with free local calling and then making "permanent local calls," with the modems staying online 24/7.

Enshittification came to the ISP business early and hit it hard. The cartel that controls your access to the internet today is a billion light-years away from the principled technologists who invented the industry with an ethos of care, access and fairness. Today's ISPs are bitterly opposed to Net Neutrality, the straightforward proposition that if you request some data, your ISP should send it to you as quickly and reliably as it can.

Instead, ISPs want to offer "slow-lanes" where they will relegate the whole internet, except for those companies that bribe the ISP to be delivered at normal speed. ISPs have a laughably transparent way of describing this: they say that they're allowing services to pay for "fast lanes" with priority access. This is the same as the giant grocery store that charges you extra unless you surrender your privacy with a "loyalty card" – and then says that they're offering a "discount" for loyal customers, rather than charging a premium to customers who don't want to be spied on.

The American business lobby loves this arrangement, and hates Net Neutrality. Having monopolized every sector of our economy, they are extremely fond of "winner take all" dynamics, and that's what a non-neutral ISP delivers: the biggest services with the deepest pockets get the most reliable delivery, which means that smaller services don't just have to be better than the big guys, they also have to be able to outbid them for "priority carriage."

If everything you get from your ISP is slow and janky, except for the dominant services, then the dominant services can skimp on quality and pocket the difference. That's the goal of every monopolist – not just to be too big to fail, but also too big to care.

Under the Trump administration, FCC chair Ajit Pai dismantled the Net Neutrality rule, colluding with American big business to rig the process. They accepted millions of obviously fake anti-Net Neutrality comments (one million identical comments from @pornhub.com addresses, comments from dead people, comments from sitting US Senators who support Net Neutrality) and declared open season on American internet users:

https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-issues-report-detailing-millions-fake-comments-revealing

Now, Biden's FCC is set to reinstate Net Neutrality – but with a "compromise" that will make mobile internet (which nearly all of use sometimes, and the poorest of us are reliant on) a swamp of anticompetitive practices:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2024/04/harmful-5g-fast-lanes-are-coming-fcc-needs-stop-them

Under the proposed rule, mobile carriers will be able to put traffic to and from apps in the slow lane, and then extort bribes from preferred apps for normal speed and delivery. They'll rely on parts of the 5G standard to pull off this trick.

The ISP cartel and the FCC insist that this is fine because web traffic won't be degraded, but of course, every service is hellbent on pushing you into using apps instead of the web. That's because the web is an open platform, which means you can install ad- and privacy-blockers. More than half of web users have installed a blocker, making it the largest boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But reverse-engineering and modding an app is a legal minefield. Just removing the encryption from an app can trigger criminal penalties under Section 1201 of the DMCA, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP that it's a felony to mod it.

Apps are enshittification's vanguard, and the fact that the FCC has found a way to make them even worse is perversely impressive. They're voting on this on April 25, and they have until April 24 to fix this. They should. They really should:

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf

In a just world, cheating ripoff ISPs would the top tech policy story. The operational practices of ISPs effect every single one us. We literally can't talk about tech policy without ISPs in the middle. But Net Neutrality is an also-ran in tech policy discourse, while AI – ugh ugh ugh – is the thing none of us can shut up about.

This, despite the fact that the most consequential AI applications sum up to serving as a kind of moral crumple-zone for shitty business practices. The point of AI isn't to replace customer service and other low-paid workers who have taken to demanding higher wages and better conditions – it's to fire those workers and replace them with chatbots that can't do their jobs. An AI salesdroid can't sell your boss a bot that can replace you, but they don't need to. They only have to convince your boss that the bot can do your job, even if it can't.

SF writer Karl Schroeder is one of the rare sf practitioners who grapples seriously with the future, a "strategic foresight" guy who somehow skirts the bullshit that is the field's hallmark:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Writing on his blog, Schroeder describes the AI debates roiling the Association of Professional Futurists, and how it's sucking him into being an unwilling participant in the AI hype cycle:

https://kschroeder.substack.com/p/dragged-into-the-ai-hype-cycle

Schroeder's piece is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship of SF's thought-experiments and parables about AI to the promises of AI hucksters, who promise that a) "general artificial intelligence" is just around the corner and that b) it will be worth trillions of dollars.

Schroeder – like other sf writers including Ted Chiang and Charlie Stross (and me) – comes to the conclusion that AI panic isn't about AI, it's about power. The artificial life-form devouring the planet and murdering our species is the limited liability corporation, and its substrate isn't silicon, it's us, human bodies:

What’s lying underneath all our anxieties about AGI is an anxiety that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence. Instead, it’s a manifestation of our growing awareness that our world is being stolen from under us. Last year’s estimate put the amount of wealth currently being transferred from the people who made it to an idle billionaire class at $5.2 trillion. Artificial General Intelligence whose environment is the server farms and sweatshops of this class is frightening only because of its capacity to accelerate this greatest of all heists.

After all, the business-case for AI is so very thin that the industry can only survive on a torrent of hype and nonsense – like claims that Amazon's "Grab and Go" stores used "AI" to monitor shoppers and automatically bill them for their purchases. In reality, the stores used thousands of low-paid Indian workers to monitor cameras and manually charge your card. This happens so often that Indian technologists joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Isn't it funny how all the really promising AI applications are in domains that most of us aren't qualified to assess? Like the claim that Google's AI was producing millions of novel materials that will shortly revolutionize all forms of production, from construction to electronics to medical implants:

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

That's what Google's press-release claimed, anyway. But when two groups of experts actually pulled a representative sample of these "new materials" from the Deep Mind database, they found that none of these materials qualified as "credible, useful and novel":

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.4c00643

Writing about the researchers' findings for 404 Media, Jason Koebler cites Berkeley researchers who concluded that "no new materials have been discovered":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

The researchers say that AI data-mining for new materials is promising, but falls well short of Google's claim to be so transformative that it constitutes the "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge" and "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity."

AI hype keeps the bubble inflating, and for so long as it keeps blowing up, all those investors who've sunk their money into AI can tell themselves that they're rich. This is the essence of "a bezzle": "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

Among the best debezzlers of AI are the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy's Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, who edit the "AI Snake Oil" blog. Now, they've sold a book with the same title:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-snake-oil-is-now-available-to

Obviously, books move a lot more slowly than blogs, and so Narayanan and Kapoor say their book will focus on the timeless elements of identifying and understanding AI snake oil:

In the book, we explain the crucial differences between types of AI, why people, companies, and governments are falling for AI snake oil, why AI can’t fix social media, and why we should be far more worried about what people will do with AI than about anything AI will do on its own. While generative AI is what drives press, predictive AI used in criminal justice, finance, healthcare, and other domains remains far more consequential in people’s lives. We discuss in depth how predictive AI can go wrong. We also warn of the dangers of a world where AI continues to be controlled by largely unaccountable big tech companies.

The book's out in September and it's up for pre-order now:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/ai-snake-oil-what-artificial-intelligence-can-do-what-it-can-t-and-how-to-tell-the-difference-arvind-narayanan/21324674

One of the weirder and worst side-effects of the AI hype bubble is that it has revived the belief that it's somehow possible for giant platforms to monitor all their users' speech and remove "harmful" speech. We've tried this for years, and when humans do it, it always ends with disfavored groups being censored, while dedicated trolls, harassers and monsters evade punishment:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

AI hype has led policy-makers to believe that we can deputize online services to spy on all their customers and block the bad ones without falling into this trap. Canada is on the verge of adopting Bill C-63, a "harmful content" regulation modeled on examples from the UK and Australia.

Writing on his blog, Canadian lawyer/activist/journalist Dimitri Lascaris describes the dire speech implications for C-63:

https://dimitrilascaris.org/2024/04/08/trudeaus-online-harms-bill-threatens-free-speech/

It's an excellent legal breakdown of the bill's provisions, but also a excellent analysis of how those provisions are likely to play out in the lives of Canadians, especially those advocating against genocide and taking other positions the that oppose the agenda of the government of the day.

Even if you like the Trudeau government and its policies, these powers will accrue to every Canadian government, including the presumptive (and inevitably, totally unhinged) near-future Conservative majority government of Pierre Poilievre.

It's been ten years since Martin Gilens and Benjamin I Page published their paper that concluded that governments make policies that are popular among elites, no matter how unpopular they are among the public:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

Now, this is obviously depressing, but when you see it in action, it's kind of wild. The Biden administration has declared war on junk fees, from "resort fees" charged by hotels to the dozens of line-items added to your plane ticket, rental car, or even your rent check. In response, Republican politicians are climbing to their rear haunches and, using their actual human mouths, defending junk fees:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-12-republicans-objectively-pro-junk-fee/

Congressional Republicans are hell-bent on destroying the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit-card late-fees. Trump's presumptive running-mate Tim Scott is making this a campaign plank: "Vote for me and I will protect your credit-card company's right to screw you on fees!" He boasts about the lobbyists who asked him to take this position: champions of the public interest from the Consumer Bankers Association to the US Chamber of Commerce.

Banks stand to lose $10b/year from this rule (which means Americans stand to gain $10b/year from this rule). What's more, Scott's attempt to kill the rule is doomed to fail – there's just no procedural way it will fly. As David Dayen writes, "Not only does this vote put Republicans on the spot over junk fees, it’s a doomed vote, completely initiated by their own possible VP nominee."

This is an hilarious own-goal, one that only brings attention to a largely ignored – but extremely good – aspect of the Biden administration. As Adam Green of Bold Progressives told Dayen, "What’s been missing is opponents smoking themselves out and raising the volume of this fight so the public knows who is on their side."

The CFPB is a major bright spot in the Biden administration's record. They're doing all kind of innovative things, like making it easy for you to figure out which bank will give you the best deal and then letting you transfer your account and all its associated data, records and payments with a single click:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

And now, CFPB chair Rohit Chopra has given a speech laying out the agency's plan to outlaw data-brokers:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/prepared-remarks-of-cfpb-director-rohit-chopra-at-the-white-house-on-data-protection-and-national-security/

Yes, this is some good news! There is, in fact, good news in the world, bright spots amidst all the misery and terror. One of those bright spots? Labor.

Unions are back, baby. Not only do the vast majority of Americans favor unions, not only are new shops being unionized at rates not seen in generations, but also the largest unions are undergoing revolutions, with control being wrestled away from corrupt union bosses and given to the rank-and-file.

Many of us have heard about the high-profile victories to take back the UAW and Teamsters, but I hadn't heard about the internal struggles at the United Food and Commercial Workers, not until I read Hamilton Nolan's gripping account for In These Times:

https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union

Nolan profiles Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000 and her successful and effective fight to bring a militant spirit back to the union, which represents a million grocery workers. Nolan describes the fight as "every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones," and he's not wrong. This is an inspiring tale of working people taking power away from scumbag monopoly bosses and sellout fatcat leaders – and, in so doing, creating a institution that gets better wages, better working conditions, and a better economy, by helping to block giant grocery mergers like Kroger/Albertsons.

I like to end these linkdumps on an up note, so it feels weird to be closing out with an obituary, but I'd argue that any celebration of the long life and many accomplishments of my friend and mentor Anne Innis Dagg is an "up note."

I last wrote about Anne in 2020, on the release of a documentary about her work, "The Woman Who Loved Giraffes":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

As you might have guessed from the title of that doc, Anne was a biologist. She was the first woman scientist to do field-work on giraffes, and that work was so brilliant and fascinating that it kicked off the modern field of giraffology, which remains a woman-dominated specialty thanks to her tireless mentoring and support for the scientists that followed her.

Anne was also the world's most fearsome slayer of junk-science "evolutionary psychology," in which "scientists" invent unfalsifiable just-so stories that prove that some odious human characteristic is actually "natural" because it can be found somewhere in the animal kingdom (i.e., "Darling, please, it's not my fault that I'm fucking my grad students, it's the bonobos!").

Anne wrote a classic – and sadly out of print – book about this that I absolutely adore, not least for having one of the best titles I've ever encountered: "Love of Shopping" Is Not a Gene:

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/11/04/love-of-shopping-is-not-a-gene-exposing-junk-science-and-ideology-in-darwinian-psychology/

Anne was my advisor at the University of Waterloo, an institution that denied her tenure for fifty years, despite a brilliant academic career that rivaled that of her storied father, Harold Innis ("the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan"). The fact that Waterloo never recognized Anne is doubly shameful when you consider that she was awarded the Order of Canada:

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/queen-of-giraffes-among-new-order-of-canada-recipients-with-global-influence

Anne lived a brilliant live, struggling through adversity, never compromising on her principles, inspiring a vast number of students and colleagues. She lived to ninety one, and died earlier this month. Her ashes will be spread "on the breeding grounds of her beloved giraffes" in South Africa this summer:

https://obituaries.therecord.com/obituary/anne-innis-dagg-1089534658

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/13/goulash/#material-misstatement

Image: Valeva1010 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_Goulash_Recipe.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[tacit-semantics]

Continuing adventures in filet lace- this is my favorite size for the net so far and I’ve got a pretty good handle on the embroidery process by this point so what I’m going to try to figure out next is how to improve the net itself, because a) it is in fact a little lopsided which I think is in part inevitable as I’m handmaking it but it can definitely be refined a bit and b) I’m worried about it falling out of shape over time which again, I feel like is inevitable to some degree, but like. There are steps to be taken to avoid that. Etc.

[fashionsfromhistory]

Day Dress

c.1913

England

Victoria & Albert Museum (Accession Number: T.288&A-1973)

[blastofsports]

[darkwhimsycreations]

This is about the 7 mountains mandate and dominion theology. One of the biggest reason why what is happening now is happening, child labor laws being loosened, no reproductive rights, no gun control, increased violence on BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities. On top of that the government is actively funding climate change at this point. List of some of the extremist groups with known affiliation to the government: Proud boys, The Heritage Foundation, ALEC, ADF, Council for National Policy, Patriot Mobile, Florida Citizens Alliance, Moms for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity

[poseidonsbitch]

hi i'm gonna smack the hornet's nest real quick and ask a question about opinions on US politics, specifically kamala harris:

i've seen a mixed bag of opinions here in regards to harris. some people say she's our only hope, others say she's a do-nothing centrist. i think she's incredibly centered and playing everything as safe as possible, which is not my favorite thing... but i also understand what she's doing; while she doesn't set my leftist heart alight, she seems to be casting as wide a net as she can. she's not my favorite, but i guess the question is what other choice do we have?

if you're very much not rooting for harris (which i get) to the point that you're not going to vote (and this is where i get lost), what are you waiting for? what's the ideal here? i really don't want to come off antagonistically here, this is not being asked in a safe, holier-than-thou liberal way. i see posts fairly criticizing harris, and i guess i just wonder that if you're not voting for her, what's the ideal action that you would like to take? what do we want? what do we think will be the most effective way to make progress?

i really would love discussion here, please let me know!