Narrator: Stalin Sent Actual Rebel Girls Straight to the Gulag

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Our Amazon Product du Jour is part of a publishing empire. I didn't count, but many products can be purchased to be read by your local pre-teen person currently identifying as female.

I see one of the 25 "powerful women" in the book is Melinda Gates. Whose route to power and (I guess) rebelliousness was solely due to getting married to, and divorced from, Bill. Truly an inspirational route for your little girl to follow!

But here in New Hampshire, Damien Fisher says: Goodbye Rebel Girl! Concord's Communist Marker Removed.

The historic marker in Concord commemorating unrepentant Communist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn got sent to the ash heap of history as the Sununu administration finally stepped up and removed it from state property.

People griped, of course.

If you were intrigued by my headline above, there's a website: Women of the GULAG.

Also of note:

  • Today's versions of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Mary Anastasia O’Grady describes How Americans Betray the Cuban People.

    The New York Times report on Cuba’s attempt at a Covid-19 vaccine was laughable. Toilet paper is scarce in the socialist paradise. But in February 2021 the Times breathlessly hyped—in language dripping with contempt for the U.S.—the Havana line that a breakthrough was looming. “The vaccine heading for a final phase of trials is called Sovereign 2, in a nod to the pride the island takes in its autonomy, despite decades of hostility from its neighbor to the north. Already, Cuba is floating the idea of enticing tourists to its shores with the irresistible cocktail of sun, sand and a shot of Sovereign 2.”

    Lots of Cubans were given a shot, but who knows what was in it? In August 2022, the Economist tallied excess-mortality data on the island to estimate the Covid-19 death toll per capita. It found Cuba’s rate to be “among the 20 worst” across the globe and far above the country average in the region.

    Cuba’s revolutionary pact was that the regime would guarantee food and medicine and, in return, Cubans would surrender their liberty. Now that they have none of the above, they’re angry.

    Are the ghosts of Walter Duranty and Herbert Matthews guiding the NYT coverage of Cuba?

  • Embracing the malarkey. The NR editors seem disdainful of Joe Biden’s 14th Amendment Folly.

    Joe Biden is musing aloud about violating his oath of office and seizing powers not granted him by the Constitution in order to avoid negotiating with the House of Representatives. This is a shameful way for the president of a constitutional republic to act.

    The so-called 14th Amendment option — to have the president issue debt not approved by Congress — doesn’t actually exist. Until 2023, nobody in the executive branch has ever pretended that it does. “I have talked to my lawyers,” Barack Obama said in 2011, and “they are not persuaded that that is a winning argument.” Left-leaning legal scholars such as Laurence Tribe once agreed. Nothing has changed but the intensity of partisanship.

    The Constitution is quite explicit: Congress, and only Congress, has the power “to borrow Money on the credit of the United States.” Congress, and only Congress, has the power to raise revenue, and all bills to do so must start in the House. The Framers were quite open in designing this system to give Congress the power of the purse so that it could bring the executive to heel.

    I want to ask my CongressCritter (Democrat Chris Pappas): If you don't think this would be grounds for impeachment, what would?

  • I didn't miss it, but in case you did: Jon Miltimore points out The Moral Lesson in ‘Office Space' Everyone Misses. If you haven't seen the movie: (a) what's wrong with you? (b) go and watch it, then come back.

    This is what Peter Gibbons ultimately learns: how to take control of his own life and stop blaming his unhappiness on [his boss Bill] Lumbergh and [employer] Initech.

    This is the lesson many people, particularly younger ones who see America as a “capitalist hellscape,” can take from Office Space. It’s not that Lumbergh and Initech weren’t awful. But the truth is, you’re going to encounter awful people in life. What’s important is to not give one’s power and agency over to others by seeing oneself as a victim of external forces beyond one’s control.

    "Capitalist hellscapes". A phrase used by folks never having lived in a socialist hellscape.

  • I was intrigued by the headline. It's from WIRED's Rose Eveleth: The Fanfic Sex Trope That Caught a Plundering AI Red-Handed.

    These days, so-called generative AI can (allegedly) make art, write books, and compose poetry. Systems like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and ChatGPT are seemingly quite good at it. But for some artists, this creates problems. Namely, determining what legal rights they have when their work is scraped by these tools.

    Faced by the rise in these systems, authors and artists are pushing back. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is striking in part over the potential use of AI to write scripts, referring to such systems as “plagiarism machines.” Visual artists have penned open letters denouncing the use of AI to replace illustrators, calling it “the greatest art heist in history.” Getty sued Stability AI in January for copyright infringement.

    But what if your work exists in a kind of in-between space—not work that you make a living doing, but still something you spent hours crafting, in a community that you care deeply about? And what if, within that community, there was a specific sex trope that would inadvertently unmask how models like ChatGPT scrape the web—and how that scraping impacts the writers who created it.

    You forgot to copyright your "specific sex trope". Tsk.


Last Modified 2024-01-13 10:57 AM EDT