Guidelines

There are two phrases that made a strong impression on me years ago, and that I continually think about a lot.

• First, do no harm.
• ... to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable

Respectively, they are a caution for doctors and a statement of the responsibility for newspapers. 

I am not in either of those professions, but I have a strong interest in healing and in information. I think they can go together well.

Those are thoughts that I keep in mind. I believe they should be applied to how we resist.

I do think it is completely possible that some of these protests could irritate Donald Trump. I would be fine with that, in theory, but it does seem worth remembering that he is petty and vindictive and has access to troops and weapons and courts. 

That doesn't mean that we should coddle his feelings either, but I would hope that the irritating things we might do would also accomplish some good beyond that irritation. 

Back when I wrote about boycotting, it is true that I mentioned the possibility of hurting Bezos' ego. The real goal was for economic impact and Bezos does not have the same military options.

Boycotting from your homes also does not collect you all into easy targets.

I am sure the protests irritate law enforcement, and I remain appalled by how easily Portland Police will declare a riot. Here's the thing: racism runs deep in our country and especially in our policing.

A Portland protest is going to involve hundreds of white people, just based on our population breakdown. Some of them might get hurt, and some of them have. However, there is a level that is not even necessarily conscious where abuse -- whether at the protest or a little while later when the officers are still irritated -- is going to be targeted at people with darker skins. Their complaints are then more likely to be ignored by investigators and by medical staff.

I know I bring up race a lot. It's necessary that we remember. There are people who don't get the option to forget.

Also, if we are causing disruptions, whom are we disrupting? The comfortable or already afflicted?

It's way easier to add more affliction to those who already have it.

You can't prevent everything. Boycotts can contribute to job losses for people who need the money and you wouldn't necessarily know that. There are things we can think about and know, though.

It might be worth disrupting traffic when ordinary people are on their way to work, but all that might do is ruin many days without affecting anyone who has any power to change anything.

Protesting outside a company that provides weapons to Israel might be worth something. 

Protesting on a campus after asking the administration to divest might be worth something.

It can be hard to make real change, which is a source of deep frustration to me.

That is not a reason to give up analysis and strategy about what kind of changes we want and how we might get there. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/06/i-protest.html 

These protests

It turns out that I wrote about protesting about a year ago and I have the links to prove it.  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/06/i-protest.html

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/06/protest-planning.html 

I know there have been other posts going further back. I also know the frustrating thing about me is that I generally don't find protests effective. People that I agree with in so many ways and care about are there, and they feel good about it -- maybe they even invite me -- and I get cranky about it.

Sorry.

In this case, I do not see much purpose in the protests except announcing that "I am angry".

I know that some protests have scheduled speakers on workers' rights or some people will set up voter registration, but mostly it appears to be about expressing anger.

It is a very privileged thing to think that announcing your anger will do anything.

By "privileged" I mean it seems pretty white, so seeing people complaining about various Black people not participating... yeah, that tracks. 

I get that protesting may bring emotional relief and some sense of solidarity when you see others out there too. I suspect that could be even greater with actions that had a clear goal.

Previously I have written about how the visual demonstrations were associated with political demands and economic pressure so that it was a multi-pronged approach.

What I have been remembering lately is that it was rarely just a protest. Often it was a march, which may not seem that different, but the destination of that march generally delivered a petition or an address to congress or something. 

There were sit-ins and bus rides for the purpose of integration.  

There have been strikes.

When I think the use of protest and signs for resistance I primarily associate that with the anti-war movement during Vietnam. I am not sure that had nearly as big an impact on the eventual withdrawal from Vietnam as the release of the Pentagon Papers and how the news covered it.

I think one thing to address is different forms of resistance. Historically there has been a much wider variety that we seem to be forgetting.

Before that, I want to go over some concepts that guide me. 

Reels

This post is still about my media consumption, though it was not as planned out as my reading lists or daily songs. 

Speaking of Facebook's attempts to maintain engagement, no matter how consciously I try to spend my time, I do periodically fall for the attempts.  

I guess it was a few months ago where there started being these short video clips presenting dramatic morality tales. A racist would unwittingly offended the person who could most impact their career because they didn't think there was any way a Black person could have power, or someone would be late meeting the new boss to help a stranded elderly person who just happened to be the mother of said new boss.  

I have a strong compulsion to know full stories and was generally only getting a segment, so that tempted me to watch more. There was also a kind of morbid fascination with how cartoonish the portrayals were. 

Then there started being longer stories with long-lost relations and more fabulously wealthy people, slowly turning into romance stories, a few with werewolves and mafia, though I haven't seen any with a werewolf mafia.

Also, I have not seen many of the werewolf ones, but I have never seen a wolf in them. They talk about wolves, but they don't seem to have any costumes or effects to show the wolf phase. I'm not saying wolves would make me watch more, but the quality and stupidity is leading to me giving up on them, which is probably the best outcome for my brain and my time management.

I may have watched more because I was trying to figure out the point. Obviously the main point was to keep you watching, combining over the top drama with dreams of fantasy and wealth, though not with a lot of budget for scripts or talent.

Actually, I would have expected the morality plays and the romance stories to come from different producers since they seemed to be going down different tracks. The same faces keep showing up. I might just think that meant these were really cheap actors, but there are other similarities.

Still, there were other things psychologically that seemed off and I was trying to figure them out. 

Part of what seemed weird is that there were a lot of ex-husbands who had been really disrespectful. Then they were still jerks, but they really did love the heroine and they just had not known that she was secretly rich or brilliant or had a baby (lots of secret identities), with everything made worse by another scheming woman or perhaps a snobby family member.

I didn't think I would want a jerk like that back, but I could see how a woman scorned could get a sense of vindication to finally get that recognition. She would certainly want him to stop being a jerk, though if all it takes is one dramatic revelation, I would question that conversion into truly kind person.

I started putting it together when they started getting violent. They weren't extremely violent, but there was a lot of slapping and shoving, and also kind of a weird fetish where there is always talk about people kneeling down and kissing feet, though it rarely seems to happen.

The bad people -- again, just cartoonishly evil -- would always be slapping or attempting to slap or throwing drinks or or what have you with the heroine, but then their comeuppance would also often involve slapping and spilled drinks and the same kind of humiliation. You were supposed to like it then, because they had it coming.

Apparently, abuse is only wrong if you direct it at the wrong person.

I often write about concern with this team mindset, where the people you like can never be wrong, and the people you hate can never be write.

I found entertainment made for that. 

I guess it suddenly makes sense that the best people were always the true billionaires, while the abusing people were social climbers with access to some luxury but hunger for more. 

If you can believe in ethical billionaires, it makes sense that everything else is corrupt. 

Personal update

In previous posts I have referenced a school issue I was having.

My school uses a third party to proctor tests. I understand the need for them to have ways of making sure that no other software is running and to see the whole room so they can guard against cheating. Getting through that and the identity verification with whoever comes up in a large center is a stressful process even when it works, but it frequently doesn't work, which seems to be strongly related to luck.

I have been very unlucky. 

It is also not really their fault that webcams are often a kind of flimsy technology, but still, if you meet the stated technical requirements... getting into everything wrong with that would be a kind of long tangent. I think I am going to want to submit some detailed feedback soon, though.

Anyway, I started school in July, almost a year ago.

It's a process getting back into being a student. I agonized too much over assignments and time management and figuring things out.

As I was starting to hit my stride, I had a scheduled test and could not connect. That happened in December.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of it was that was going to be my last proctored test. Everything else is going to be papers or presentations or submissions like that. 

I could not get this test done.

I got various suggestions about what the problem might be, but none of them really worked. I kept getting different answers about my options.

Technically the classes are sequential, so it would have been easy for me to not progress at all. I was allowed to take some other classes, but it was never guaranteed. There was one alternative option that was only allowed to students near graduation, so the question of whether I was going to be able to get closer to graduation was a big one.

Even with the opportunity to take additional classes, I could never only think about that class; there was always the test issue and scheduling the next attempt and failing and growing ever more frantic and discouraged.

Yesterday I was able to connect through the alternate service and I passed the test.

Previously I had been sure I could pass, but I was so stressed out yesterday I started having doubts. I was afraid to (and therefore did not) scratch an itch, just in case that would mess something up.

Having it done is a huge relief.

It is also not the end of the frustration. 

Now I can concentrate on moving forward, but I am behind schedule by two classes. There is a good chance I will not graduate when I intended, even though my original intention was at a slightly accelerated pace.

On the other hand, if I have actually hit my stride and I now have a clear path forward, who knows what I can do? 

Onward! 

Wrong; start again

I know I said I was going to start on protests this week. It seemed like a reasonable plan, but before that I found a different, recently stated plan wasn't working at all.

This particular plan was that in addition to not using AI myself (and writing about it to try and discourage other people from doing it), I would delete uses of AI from my feed.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/06/rejecting-ai-as-much-as-possible.html 

This went wrong in two ways.

The first is that when you ex out a post on Facebook, it assumes that the issue is the poster, not the content. I was getting options to snooze various people for 30 days, or to report the post. 

There is an option to select preferences, but that is whether you want to see political or sensitive content, and you have a chance to look at your snoozes and designate some people as favorites so they come up.

Also, that doesn't work with ads. If you ex out an ad, it will tell you that you won't see that particular ad again, but you don't get any additional choices.

Therefore, instead of meaning that I got to see the non-AI stuff that my friends posted, it just meant some people were less likely to come up, even without the snooze.  

Even worse, the algorithmic pursuit of engagement started flooding my timeline with movie and television content instead of friends!

I am not quite ready to adopt replying to friends' posts encouraging them to quit sharing AI. Frankly, I don't think a lot of them even realize that's how the images in their shared item were generated. When you think about it a lot, you kind of develop an eye for it and you realize how ubiquitous it is, but a lot of people aren't thinking about it.

So, yeah, that didn't work out; that's life and you try again.

Right now my plan involves having Facebook closed a lot more often, even when I am on the computer. I will still post my songs, articles, blogs, and selfies, and wish people happy birthdays, and do a check then, but I can't keep scrolling through movie and television content and get anything done or stay in touch with people.

There is probably a later segment of that plan where when I tune in I will look up specific people's pages and see how they are doing, perhaps getting a rotation of some kind going. 

My goals are not changing, but my methods must and so they will.  

Science reading list

This actually starts with some books related to the environment that I have been meaning to get to for a while, but I like to combine things.

Books that seemed like they could accompany the environmental books well included...

The Science Class You Wish You Had by David and Arnold Brody
Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever by Hal Hellman
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren 

The Science Class was more of a historical chronicle, going by seven discoveries and the context that led to them. As many of the discoveries were related to the feuds, there was quite a bit of repetition between the two.

If you want to read one, I recommend Liveliest Disputes for two reasons. In addition to having ten feuds instead of seven discoveries -- so, three additional sciences -- there is more of a unified voice, with one enthusiast sharing his interests. 

In The Science Class, two magazine writers talked to a lot of academics and then felt smart about putting it together. What they do really well, though, is in giving that context. 

They do reference Isaac Newton's quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants" but that applied to many before and after Newton. The existing body of knowledge is what you have to build on. 

That is not only how some discoveries get made, but how some are arrived at individually around the same time period, like with Newton and Liebniz and calculus (there was a feud) or similar thoughts on natural selection between Darwin and Wallace (not a feud).

One interesting point made in The Science Class is that the era of big science names is probably over. When things happen like CRISPR or a new COVID vaccine, there is usually not a single name associated with it, unless that is a company name.

Of course, with those particular examples, you could come up with specific names, like Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for CRISPR or June Almeida identifying the first coronavirus. 

It is certainly true that there is not as much of a sense of foundational knowledge with these fairly recent discoveries, compared to what you would feel with Newton or Einstein, when there were still very new concepts. 

There is also a much greater specialization now, which is going to mean more people along the way and more specific (and perhaps limited) applications. If Charpentier, Doudna, and Almeida's names are less known, it's not necessarily because of sexism. 

Still, sexism in science's track record is not great.

Lab Girl has some examples. It's not the focus, but I am afraid I have already seen so many examples that when a few more appear, it's not at all surprising.

However, if we think about how many contributors were needed to get to where we are, and about how much further we need to go, we can't afford to lose anyone's contributions.  

If we are throwing good minds away for reasons of sexism or racism -- not even acknowledging the possibility of these being good minds for those reasons -- it is stupidly tragic. 

People needing people

I had thought that I would essentially move on from AI to capitalism, but with current events was feeling the need to spend some time on protesting. 

Today's post could work as a transition, or as its own thing.

https://x.com/CoraCHarrington/status/1933188476213571990 

I’ve felt this since folks went all in on Grammarly, like it wasn’t flattening everyone’s voice. Going from letting software automatically check everything and going along with its edits to letting software just write the thing for you, may not be so large a gap to many people.

I saw this because I follow Cora, and also it is goes along with what I have been writing about, but the thread she is responding to has its own points:

https://x.com/roryisconfused/status/1933050364103962815 

A big divide in attitudes towards AI, I think, is in whether you can easily write better than it and it all reads like stilted, inauthentic kitsch; or whether you’re amazed by it because it makes you seem more articulate than you’ve ever sounded in your life

The second post in that thread, where kids may not feel the need to develop their own skills, is a big concern, but there is another point here that may just be my common thread through everything.

I don't worry about expressing myself, mostly. I mean, I do worry about getting things in the exact right order so that it is all logical and coherent, but I feel like I have a good sense of myself, I know whether I understand a topic or not, and I am confident in my ability to use words (if not in my ability to pronounce words correctly when I only know them from reading). 

That combination of things helps me now, but they didn't come automatically. 

There was a lot of reading and looking things up, and lots of writing spent trying to understand myself, and quite a bit of connecting with people and nature, and there was growth. I value that for the experiences along the way and where they have led me.

There are so many things that can get in the way of reaching that level of comfort. 

Right now the more obvious problem is people who seem to believe in their own expertise without any logical base for it (is there a level where they do know?), but there are people who do not value themselves enough. It would be easier for them to feel the allure of AI.

It's not about whether they have good grammar skills or good emotional intelligence; those things can be learned. It's that there is a beating heart behind it, with unique experiences and a point of view. That's a wonderful starting place.

Maybe the point of having people with no regard for study or research is that it diminishes effort in general. It shouldn't. People can learn, they can innovate, they can grow, and they are valuable even before all of that.

If I care about you, I want to hear from you, not an artificial intelligence that quite often has been influenced by terrible people.

There were also some interesting things in Rory's thread about how a lot of writing well comes from reading well, which is sad given recent stories about Generation Z not wanting to read to their kids and not liking reading in the third person. I can't help but wonder if this is related to No Child Left Behind and Teaching to the Test and sucking all of the fun out of reading.

There are problems there, though I don't believe they are insurmountable.

Regardless, whether I am worrying about the environment or politics or technology, the thing that keeps coming back is whether we care about and value people. 

We aren't going to be able to fix anything else if we don't fix that.