Monday, October 11, 2021
Saturday, October 09, 2021
On Patriarchy: It's A Man's World Until It Isn't So Much Anymore
Here's Arwa Mahdawi's weekly column that appears in The Guardian
Stop calling Joe Manchin ‘moderate’ – he’s just a greedy reactionary
Contrary to what the senator says, there’s absolutely nothing ‘entitled’ about expecting a government to care about the people it represents
Last modified on Sat 9 Oct 2021 09.01 EDT
Arwa Mahdawi: "Rich politicians have a very strange definition of ‘entitlement’.
Joe Manchin is on a mission to save the United States from becoming an “entitlement society”. The West Virginia senator has become a household name thanks to his attempts to ensure the Democrats achieve absolutely nothing whatsoever in the next few years; in particular, he’s been fighting to shrink the price tag of the Biden administration’s 10-year social spending package from $3.5tn to $1.5tn. He’s been very vague about what policies he wants to cut from the Build Back Better bill, he just keeps repeating the fact that he doesn’t want Americans to become entitled.
“I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality,” Manchin explained last week. “That you’re entitled, OK? I’m more of a rewarding, because I can help those that really need help.”
Judging from that soundbite, Manchin really needs a little help formulating his sentences in a way that actually makes sense. Still, I think we all get the gist of it: Manchin doesn’t want Americans to get spoiled by unhinged socialist policies like affordable childcare, an expanded child tax credit and paid family leave. I mean, imagine if fewer kids grew up in poverty? Imagine if the US stopped being the only rich country in the world without paid family leave and, subsequently, parents got to spend a little time with their newborns instead of being forced to rush back into work? Imagine if women didn’t have to drop out of the workforce because childcare is so damn expensive? What sort of society would that lead to, eh? It’s so deeply un-American that it doesn’t bear thinking about.
> Instead of people expecting handouts from the government, everyone should just strive to be more like hard-working, completely unentitled Manchin. Before getting into politics, Manchin started a coal company called Enersystems, Inc. He now makes around half a million dollars a year in dividends from the millions of dollars in stock he owns. A really great lesson there for lazy socialists: instead of demanding the government provide a basic social safety net, people should just invest millions of dollars in the stock market and make passive income via dividends that way. That’s what real American work ethic looks like!
Manchin, by the way, has handed over the reins of his coal companies to his son, Joe Manchin IV. Which provides another great lesson in how you build an entitlement-less society: be born into a family where your dad just hands you a job. It’s a genius life hack, I don’t know why more people don’t try it. . .
> Anyway, you know what’s most depressing about all this? The fact that Manchin is routinely referred to as a “moderate” Democrat. People who want the US to spend less money on weapons and more money in childhood education and healthcare, however? We’re the “radicals”. The media needs to stop reinforcing this warped worldview; it needs to stop participating in the delusion that greedy reactionaries like Manchin are in anyway “moderate”. There’s nothing “moderate” about the fact that the richest 1% of Americans have taken $50tn from the bottom 90% over the past several decades. There’s nothing radical in wanting to lift children out of poverty. And there’s absolutely nothing entitled about expecting a government to care about the people it supposedly represents.
War is being waged against China’s ‘dancing grannies’
In China, older women frequently get exercise by gathering together to dance in public parks. Wholesome, right? Not for neighbours who don’t like the loud music they’re bopping along to. Or the turf wars the grannies occasionally engage in. Some fed-up vigilantes are now using hi-tech tools to disable the grannies’ speaker systems. Maybe they ought to try gifting the women some headphones instead.
The US has 11 times more monuments to mermaids than congresswomen
According to a recent audit of US monuments, you’re also “far more likely to run into a symbol of war and conquest than you are to community building, public health, or education”.
Someone needs to tell Dominic Raab what ‘misogyny’ means
Britain’s justice secretary (who has previously said he is not a feminist) recently said that “misogyny is absolutely wrong, whether it’s a man against a woman or a woman against a man”. Of course Raab doesn’t know what misogyny means. He’s never had to worry about it, ergo it’s not important.
Geico might need to pay millions to woman who allegedly caught HPV having sex in car
Mel Magazine wins headline of the week with this intriguing tale of insurance policies and enterprising lawyers.
Looking for a queer memoir to read during LGBT History Month?
The author Maggie Nelson recommends Grace Lavery’s Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis, which is “full of originality and verve”.
American men are now more likely to be single than women
These men are faring much worse economically than partnered men, according to a new study by Pew Research.
Soccer has a misogyny problem
Professional women’s soccer players in Australia and Venezuela have come forward with sexual misconduct allegations.
Your latest depressing reminder that the police don’t listen to women
Khalil Wheeler-Weaver has been sentenced to 160 years for brutally raping and murdering three women. One of his victims managed to get away and immediately called the police. “They didn’t believe me,” she told Northjersey.com. “They thought I was lying.” Wheeler-Weaver went on to kill again. Imagine how much more effective the police would be if they actually believed women?
The week in pet-riarchy
Twitter is generally awful but sometimes a viral tweet blesses you with some unexpectedly delightful knowledge. This week it resurfaced an amazing story about a homicidal white-necked crane called Walnut who is suspected of killing two (bird) husbands so she could court the (human) zookeeper who looks after her. His name? Chris Crowe.
WIRED ALL WEEK - Click on the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there!
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Plus: Twitch hack fallout, Russian phishing, and more of the week’s top security news.
"Well, it was a very bad, no good, week for Twitch. The Amazon-owned streaming service suffered a devastating hack, with Twitch source code, streamer payouts, internal security tools, and more all dumped on 4chan.
It's about as thorough a data dump as you'll see. Among the many repercussions: Twitch streamers experienced sudden, forced pay transparency, which quickly became a meme on social media and Twitch itself.
> Twitch wasn't the only unlucky tech titan this week. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all got knocked out of service for several hours on Monday. No, it wasn't hackers. Instead, Facebook accidentally withdrew its BGP route, effectively making it impossible for the rest of the internet to find it. Not only that, but it knocked Facebook's own networks off the internet's maps, meaning its engineers couldn't fix the problem remotely. A real mess! The company experienced down time Friday afternoon as well, but not nearly as extensive an outage.
Are you using a password manager yet? And while we're at it, is the rest of your family? They should be! If you're having a hard time convincing them, we've put together a few suggestions that might help get them to buy in.
> A simple bug leaves AirTag users potentially vulnerable.
> And a judge found that the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare isn't responsible for copyright-infringing sites that use its services.
And there's more! Each week we round up all the security news WIRED didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.
Everything’s fine now, it's resolved; the Navy has its Facebook page back. But sometime Sunday night, someone managed to break into the account of the USS Kidd, a US Navy destroyer, and used that access to, well, stream the real-time strategy game Age of Empires. A Navy spokesperson confirmed that someone gained "unauthorized access" to the Facebook page for the military-focused news site Task & Purpose on Wednesday. The streams were accompanied by brief messages like "hi guys" and "play game" and "ffffffffffff." The likeliest culprit seems to be a family member of someone who has the keys to the USS Kidd’s social media account.
Firefox is a great browser for the privacy-minded, but maybe not in this specific instance? In the latest version, when you type into the address bar you'll get "new, relevant suggestions from our trusted partners based on what you're searching for." In other words, a type of ad in an unexpected place. You can turn the feature off by heading to Settings, then Privacy & Security, then uncheck Contextual suggestions down under Address Bar — Firefox Suggest. But c'mon—you shouldn't have to do this in the first place, and you definitely should have a better heads-up about where the URL prompts in your address bar are coming from.
A very big hack that did not get nearly enough attention was quietly disclosed in an SEC filing by Syniverse, a telecom infrastructure company. As Motherboard first reported, hackers managed to stay in Syniverse systems for years, and they would have had access to all manner of phone records, potentially including text messages. It's unclear if there's been any fallout yet from the prolonged incident, but it's a potential treasure trove for international espionage.
Speaking of international espionage! Google this week sounded the alarm that Russia's Fancy Bear hackers had unleashed a broad, sophisticated phishing campaign that targeted 14,000 Gmail users last month. Individual accounts that were targeted received alerts, and the group appears to have included journalists and security researchers along with people in a variety of other industries. Google said all of the attempts were caught by spam filters, but the scale of the effort was still notable.
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