Intellectual property is a social justice issue.

Latest guest post on official blog of far right Gab platform could have been a Latter-day Saint General Conference sermon. Sure, rejecting truth and embracing evil sounds bad, but there are a lot of assumptions that need to be surfaced and interrogated about what both terms mean.

I do not always have praise for the local Republican supermajority, but I’m glad to see this goes beyond Ukraine to provide support for all kinds of refugees. Tentative optimism here.

Yemen has been on my mind a lot since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but mostly because I’m belatedly realizing I haven’t been paying attention. It’s not that Ukraine doesn’t deserve our attention, it’s that Yemen has long deserved just as much. There, we’re the ones complicit in civilian deaths, and we need to own up to that.

I missed most of this yesterday, but Masnick sums up my thoughts so much better than I could.

I will only accept complaints about gas prices from people who also bemoan our failure to invest in public and alternative transportation.

The Onion speaks uncomfortable truth. Americans must hold Putin accountable, but we meed to turn our attention inward, too.

KONY 2012 has been on my mind a lot lately, and this is a good read. It doesn’t bring up why I’ve had it on the mind, though. I’m afraid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could turn into a sequel of sorts: Something important and meaningful that people glom onto because they see something oversimplified on social media.

Interesting if disconcerting story. The idea of whataboutism as misinformation is particularly disturbing, and it’s important to remember that misinformation is a non-partisan phenomenon (even if the GOP is particularly keen on it). The worst part from a personal angle is how this relates to my own struggling to balance calling out the invasion of Ukraine with knowing that I haven’t been as attentive to other conflicts that deserve my brainspace.

Textbook example of why it is never enough to say you didn’t mean any harm. This is shameful and gross.

On one hand, this is actual social media censorship, not what bad actors in the U.S. complain about. On the other, it is a reminder that even the best intentioned laws against misinformation, etc. could have unintended effects. We need to tread carefully when figuring out legal responses to social media problems.

Lots of thoughts about this. As someone with an education PhD who teaches and researches outside traditionally education topics, I want to emphasize that the prevalence of education PhDs is a symptom, not the actual problem. In my teaching and research outside my home discipline, I work hard to learn the content and communities that I’m branching into. The disdain for those content and communities at BYU Religious Education is the real problem here and therefore what I’m really worried about.

We can support Ukraine generally and still be concerned about the integration of the far-right into their armed forces.

So very gross. What’s happening in Ukraine is terrible, but terrible things are happening all over the world, and we shouldn’t make Ukraine more terrible out of some kind of chauvinism.

Proud of Lexington for hosting this. Also wondering if I should check the Lexington groups on Gab to see if the local far-right is cranky about it.

Tremendously worrying stuff. Taxes are the price we pay for democratic society.

Because the Web feels new to us, it’s easy to forget how important it is to preserve it for the future.

Oh no no no. This hadn’t crossed my mind as a possibility, but how terrible.

Eurovision is not supposed to be political, but it always sneaks in. My money is on a lot of sympathy votes for Ukraine’s entry, and a very low score for Russia.

Lots of important reminders in here. I also feel ashamed that I have not protested my country’s wars in the way these Russians are doing so now.

Greene is repeatedly awful, and the GOP’s refusal to do anything substantial about it is telling.

Hits too close to home for me. I have work to do.

Amazon already has too big a footprint here. Don’t feel great about this.

Putin has outwitted every U.S. President since W, not necessarily because he’s smarter, but because he doesn’t operate with the same constraints U.S. presidents do. To blame this on Biden is moronic. We obviously shouldn’t let this episode of the culture war overshadow the more important crisis happening in Ukraine itself, but this appropriation of the crisis really worries me in the context of U.S. politics. These stances are largely indefensible.

Remembering the time that the only person at church who understood my dissertation research was the one who worked for the state of Michigan doing social media surveillance of social justice movements.

There is no denying that Putin is smart and strategic, but expressing awe instead of concern is typically Trump in its idiocy.

Worrying stuff here. Right-wing media consumption appears to be the big predictor for QAnon beliefs.

Happy that my much cheaper bike does not rely on servers to function properly.

Kentucky has taken some bad steps in this direction lately, but this is horrific.

Bellingcat does good work. It gives me hope to see people using the internet to fight back against disinformation spread by the internet, but I’m also glad the article touches on the dangers involved.

The students in my fundamentals of computers class have repeatedly heard me bring up this story to explain that technology is never just technical.

This has been around long enough that I used to show it to my FREN 102 students, but very glad to see it cross my radar again via Boing Boing. The whole show is fantastic, but this bet might be the best. Great, nerdy deployment of mostly-right French.

City council member responded to my concerned email by basically telling me I should have spoken up before the vote happened. Feels harsh but fair—want to do better about showing up and speaking up.

Can we please refrain from electing the alleged Q to Congress?

A long but important read.

This is terrifying on so many levels. Besides the possibility of war, the thing I’m most spooked by is the sheer cynicism of Russian efforts here. It doesn’t matter how bad the disinformation is if you can count on enough people to believe it. Trumpian, but turned up to 14.