Today in Labor History November 5, 1916: The Everett Massacre occurred in Everett, Washington. 300 IWW members arrived by boat in Everett to help support the shingle workers’ strike that had been going on for the past 5 months. Prior attempts to support the strikers were met with vigilante beatings with axe handles. As the boat pulled in, Sheriff McRae called out, “Who’s your leader?” The Wobblies answered, “We’re all leaders!” The sheriff pulled his gun and said, “You can’t land.” A Wobbly yelled back, “Like hell we can’t.” Gunfire erupted, most of it from the 200 vigilantes on the dock. When the smoke cleared, two of the sheriff’s deputies were dead, shot in the back by their own men, along with 5-12 Wobblies on the boat. Dozens more were wounded. The authorities arrested 74 Wobblies. After a trial, all charges were dropped against the IWW members. The event was mentioned in John Dos Passos’s “USA Trilogy.”
Welcome to the inaugural #FediBookFair. #authors and #publishers are invited to post about their #books, offer signed copies, etc, using the #FediBookFair hashtag.
#Readers can watch or follow the hashtag to find books to buy, and interesting authors to follow.
Today in Labor History November 3, 1793: French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror (1793–1794) for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists. Her writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in many different countries. She was also an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality.
I'm still looking for authors who have completed NaNoWriMo to come on my #WriteTalkWednesday show and discuss their writing (promo a book or two) and how they made it through #NaNoWriMo
Will need to be avail 6pm CST (central time) on Wedesdays in November.
@NickEast@writers@writingcommunity@writing@humour We're watching an anime and we're like, "it's about time to lose somebody, isn't it?" and a character says something and we're all "Oh, no! Flag! Flag!!" and, yep, the music turns ominous.
@NickEast@writers@writingcommunity@writing@humour Believe it or not, they used to make the cards for solitaire out of, well, cardboard. 😉 Writers were known for the flapping sounds that came from their desks.
Today in Labor History October 2, 1937: Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the border region of the Dominican Republic, resulting in the genocidal Parsley massacre of up to 35,000 Haitians. Trujillo was obsessed with race. He’d use pancake make-up to lighten his skin color and hide his Haitian roots. And even so, the wealthy Dominicans still snubbed him for his working-class family origins. One week prior to the massacre, he publicly accepted a gift of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, whose racial theories he clearly embraced. He used racism to distract Dominicans from their poverty, which had been exacerbated by the Great Depression, and by Trujillo’s corrupt rule.
Edwidge Danticat’s historical fiction, “The Farming of Bones,” takes place during the time of the massacre.
@MikeDunnAuthor@bookstadon The very same guy, Rafael Trujillo, was tolerated by US governments until his execution in 1961.
Then in 1966, after inciting a military coup against the democratic elected socialist Juan Bosch, Trujillo's close adviser Joaquín Balaguer was put to govern the Dominican Republic, of course backed by the US.
Balaguer was yet another racist and caudillo who governed for a long period.
AI is a problem for editors and authors – and it's serious.
There is a dark side to this technology, with major long-term consequences for authorship and editorial work that we're only just beginning to discover – not least copyright theft.
IIRC the difference between Bing's integrated AI and others is that it cites actual sources from the search engine, so it's less prone to inaccuracy/hallucination?
Is there currently any facility within search engines to opt out or deactivate AI, or is it built-in as standard, requiring consent to use it?
And does it train itself from searches? Happy for more info!
Today in Labor History September 30, 1912: The Lawrence, Massachusetts “Bread and Roses” textile strike was in full swing. On this date, 12,000 textile workers walked out of mills to protest the arrests of two leaders of the strike. Police clubbed strikers and arrested many, while the bosses fired 1,500. IWW co-founder Big Bill Haywood threatened another general strike to get the workers reinstated. Strike leaders Arturo Giovannitti and Joe Ettor were eventually acquitted 58 days later. During the strike, IWW organizers Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn came up with the plan of sending hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to live with sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont, a move that drew widespread sympathy for the strikers. Nearly 300 workers were arrested during the strike; three were killed. After the strike was over, IWW co-founder and socialist candidate for president, Eugene Debs, said "The Victory at Lawrence was the most decisive and far-reaching ever won by organized labor."
Several novels have been written against the backdrop of this famous strike: The Cry of the Street (1913), by Mabel Farnum; Fighting for Bread and Roses (2005), by Lynn A. Coleman; Bread and Roses, Too (2006), by Katherine Paterson
Our final mystery #author is pulling back the veil with before and after pictures – a writer's desk as it was, and a writer's desk as it aspires to be.
Well, what did you expect from a writer of #fiction?