DCUM Weblog

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Massive pentagon leak re Ukraine conflict" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. This thread was started back on April 6 after the New York Times reported about a leak of secret US military documents regarding Ukraine. The thread gained interest yesterday due to the arrest of the alleged leaker. This story, and as a result the thread, has had an interesting trajectory. When the leak first occurred, it was portrayed as being bad for the Biden administration because it allegedly documented that that Ukraine-Russian war was going worse for the Ukrainians than it was being portrayed. When it was shown that some of the leaked documents had been doctored, many concluded that this was a Russian disinformation operation. As is true of almost everything these days, posters reacted based mostly on their political leanings. Biden supporters blamed the leaks on MAGA supporters aligned with Russia and downplayed the importance of the leaked information. Anti-Biden posters claimed that the leaks undermined public statements about the war and demonstrated that Biden was a liar. Much of the discusion focused on the origin of the documents. The New York Times article noted that the documents were circulating on Twitter and Telegram, but posters soon learned that prior to reaching those networks, the documents had surfaced in various discussion groups on Discord. The trail eventually led to a Discord group that had been disbanded. Many posters were convinced that the leaker must be member of Congress and there was quite a bit of discussion about which Member of Congress or which party might be behind the leak. Those suspicions eventually proved unfounded. The New York Times, working with an investigator from Bellingcat, was able to identify and interview a member of the now disbanded group and provide information about the leaker whose name the newspaper revealed yesterday. The leaker turned out to be a member of the Air National Guard who allegedly only intended to use the documents to educate members of the small Discord group about world affairs. Liberal posters were quick to claim vindication for predicting a conservative was behind the leak. Conservative posters were not able to respond with a cohesive message. Some tried to portray the leaker as a libertarian rather than a conservative. Posters who followed Donald Trump's lead and insisted that this was the most damaging leak in the history of leaks suddenly saw this as the brave act of an anti-war patriot. Some of the more conspiratorial-minded theorized that the airman was a fall guy for higher ups and urged posters not to trust the New York Times or Washington Post who are — according to these posters — in Biden's pocket.

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Prince Harry to attend coronation without Meghan" and posted in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. I locked this thread less than 6 hours after it was posted because it was basically nothing more than 18 pages of Meghan bashing, much of it quite bizarre. I am no longer surprised that threads involving Meghan turn out like this, but I still find the fanaticism regarding her to be very strange. Both her haters and her supporters are way too obsessed. The numbers speak for themselves. In the few hours this thread was open, it reached 18 pages of posts, becoming the most active thread of the day. At least 11 posters managed to post in the double digits before I locked it. All of this because it was announced that Harry would attend the coronation of King Charles without his family. The irony is if the announcement had been that Meghan would be joining him, the thread would have been equally long and equality acrimonious. All that is required is a mention of Meghan. It doesn't matter what she does or doesn't do. All of this on DCUM where most of those involved know that I am hostile to these threads and will likely lock or delete them. Can you imagine the sort of traffic that sites that welcome such discussion must be observing? Their servers were probably melting down. If due to some incredible and extremely unlikely series of events Meghan ever manages to become Queen, I will convert DCUM to the DC Urban Meghan Forum. I would never read the forum, but no descendent of mine would ever have to work a day in their life thanks to the ad revenue that would produce.

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "Are privates that don’t offer merit aid still enrolling the best students?" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster says that her child is turning down an Ivy League acceptance due to the cost of the university and, instead, will attend a state flagship school. The original poster wonders if this is an indication that many of the best students may be avoiding top private schools that don't provide merit aid. Many of the threads I've discussed in these blog posts have touched on similar topics. The rising cost of college has resulted in many students/ families earning too much to be eligible for need-based financial assistance but not enough to afford $85k a year colleges. One result is that students turn toward less prestigious, but still very good, schools that offer merit aid. Several of those who responded agreed that this is a trend with many of those saying that they noticed it themselves. On other other hand, others argue that this is not a new development and that students have always turned down Ivy League schools due to cost. The discussion in this thread goes in a couple of different directions. Many of the posts question whether Ivy League schools still have the prestige that they once had. Some posters suggest that in addition to the cost, other factors such as holistic admissions policies, have led to demographic changes that no longer make these universities as elite as they once were. Similarly, many posters argue that state universities that were traditionally not considered academic powerhouses now attract top students. The other direction the discusion takes is continued focuse on the cost issue. Many posters stress the existence of "donut hole" families such as those described above who make too much for need-based aid but not enough to pay for expensive schools. While just about everyone acknowledges that many families are in this situation, there are differences about what to do about it. At least one poster expresses hope that families will begin to save for education at an earlier age. Others argue that many families can't save the amount required for today's college costs. In response to that, a poster suggests that those families have not made paying for college their number 1 priority and that they should take out loans. That, of course, leads to a discusion about loan forgiveness.

The most active thread yesterday was titled, "If you are still masking children indoors for Covid" and posted in the "Health and Medicine" forum. It has been a while since I've discussed a thread about masks so I guess it is time. The original poster says that she lives abroad but sees in pictures of her child's friends that many still wear masks indoors. In the country in which she is in now, almost nobody other than the elderly masks and she is curious why some children are still masking. Masks are one of those topics is which both the pro and anti-maskers have complete confidence in their position and each side thinks the other is completely off their rockers. As such, any thread like this is guaranteed to be a dumpster fire. The pro-mask side's attitude is reflected in the very first response which states, "Because we have common sense". Similarly, a couple of posts later an anti-masker writes, "A very sad thing that parents are making their children still do this." Neither evinces the slightest doubt or leaves any room for nuance. Happily, the same cannot be said about all of those who respond, many of whom make an effort offer detailed explanations. Some point out that the children may have or suspect that they have COVID and don't want to expose others. Other posters point out the many other communicable diseases that children many pass to each other and suggest that masks many help prevent the spread of those as well. An interesting point that was raised is that, in Europe, parents have significantly more paid sick leave and doctors and medicine are free. So, having a sick child or family member is much less of a burden. The pro-masking side is not without its prejudices against anti-maskers, but anti-maskers seem less cautious with their disparagements. As is common, many posts in this thread accuse those who favor masks of being anxious, being insane, or requiring therapy. I can understand those who believe that masks protect them feeling negatively about those they think are threatening their health, but I really struggle to understand why anti-maskers are so concerned about maskers. What harm are they presenting? While teachers in the thread seem to be generally supportive of masking, one teacher comes under fire for telling children, "It's nice to see your face" if a child comes in without a mask. This is portrayed by a pro-masker as evidence of an evil political agenda that should require the teacher to seek a different line of work. Another normal feature of such threads is posters arguing about the benefits or detriments of masks. Again, this seems to be an all or nothing issue where each side is firmly planted in thinking that their belief is right. Ultimately, this thread, like most others on the topic, devolves to nothing more than angry posters being angry. If that is your thing, you are in luck.

Because I took the weekend off from writing blog posts, today I'll review the most active threads since Friday. The most active thread during that period was titled, "Mother of 2 from VERY prominent Richmond family arrested by FBI for child p@rn, exploitation, etc" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum. In brief, the thread discusses the arrest of Eleanor Hunton Hoppe for distributing child pornography and charges related to child sexual abuse. Hoppe is a member of a prominent family in Richmond, Virginia and known by the original poster and several other posters in the thread. In addition to being horrified by the charges, many posters are concerned about the lack of media attention to this case. There appears to have been no news about the case for three weeks after the arrest and then very little. This led several posters to conclude that Hoppe's prominent family was suppressing information. The original poster linked to court documents about the case, including a "Statement of Facts" which is quite explicit. The document details how an FBI undercover officer corresponded with Hoppe to arrange a meeting at which Hope was planning to participate with a purported father while the father sexually abused his 8-year-old daughter. Hoppe was arrested when she arrived at the planned meeting. Several posters noted that it is unusual for women to be involved in such offenses and there are many posts seeking to understand what might have led to Hoppe's actions. There is a quite a bit of speculation, much of it informed by posters who claim to know Hoppe personally (at least two posters even claim to have had sexual relations with her). While I understand the interest in this thread, I am concerned about how long it will be able to remain on the site. Google has already flagged several pages and I am doing my best to keep it within the advertising terms of service. But the nature of the topic makes that difficult. Several posters are convinced that Hoppe's family are applying financial and/or legal pressure to suppress the story and would likely blame the family for the thread's demise. But, in the eventually that I remove the thread, it will likely to be due to advertisers.

Yesterday's most active threads had a notable political slant to them. The most active thread of the day was titled, "The Fascist Part of the US strikes again in Tennessee" and posted in the "Political Discussion" forum. The thread focuses on a protest at the Tennessee state Capitol building in which students demanding that something be done about school shootings briefly took over the building. During the protest, three Democratic legislators took to the floor of the chamber to encourage and support the protesters. In response, Republican lawmakers who dominate the assembly proposed bills to expel the three Democrats. Subsequently, two of them — both young Black men — were expelled while the third — an older White woman — was not. This is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory at best for the Republicans because both the members will probably be back soon to fill the seats from which they were just expelled. Liberal posters in this thread see the expulsions as anti-democratic acts to squelch free speech and pointed out that the legislature rarely expelled anyone, not even admitted sex offenders. Conservative posters compared the protest to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and supported the expulsions as deserved for such behavior. A similar split occurred over the racial connotations of the expulsions with liberals pointing to the poor optics of expelling two Black legislator while excusing their White colleague. In response, conservatives contorted themselves to contrive differences in the behavior of the three who had acted in unison. A conservative poster insisted that Americans are tired of the race card being played and would be happy that the legislators were being punished for their "bad behavior". Without missing a beat, the same poster suggested that liberals would be gleeful if white men were being expelled. Given the implication that the real victims of racism are white men, I suspect this poster's complaint is not about "race" cards, but the wrong race card. The protests that led to the expulsions were in response to gun violence, specifically the recent school shooting in Nashville. Many posters compared the legislature's failure to take action in regard to school shootings to its determination to remove the legislators, saying that this clearly demonstrated Republican-dominated body's priorities. One poster pointed to a proposal by the Tennessee governor for armed guards in schools. I'm not sure this was as strong an argument as the poster believes as it simply highlights that the Republican response has been nothing more than a proposal that has not been acted upon. But, of course, the response now includes racially-charged expulsions.

The thread I discussed yesterday about white women and beauty standards and the thread about Trump's indictment I discussed earlier this week held the top two spots on the most active list yesterday. So, I'll skip to the third most active thread which was titled "How to talk to 14yo about waiting to have sex" and posted in the "Tweens and Teens" forum. The original poster says that her 14 year old daughter has had a boyfriend for about six months and while she has discussed birth control and other topics related to sexual activity, she would like advice about additional things to say to encourage her daughter to wait for sex. I am not really going to discuss this thread because I assume that I will be forced to delete it due to Google's terms of service. As such, I'll take this opportunity to talk about Google and it's impact on DCUM discussions. For advertising, we rely on several ad networks, but manage all of them through Google's Ad Manager product. We also use Google's Adsense and Ad Exchange advertising services. Google has robots that scan our site looking for content that violates their terms of service. When such content is identified, it is flagged in Ad Manager's Policy Center. Google provides very little information about why the content violates their TOS, but in our case it is almost always labeled as "Adult: Sexual content". There are two types of violations: 1) the regular violation that restricts advertising on the page with the content; and, 2) "must fix" which cause advertising to be restricted across the entire site. We receive anywhere from 10-30 violations a day. The problem we face is that Google doesn't identify the specific content that triggered the violation. The Policy Center has links to the pages, but a page in a DCUM thread likely has 15 different posts and identifying which post is the culprit can be a challenge. Moreover, Google's system is completely braindead. Repeated mentions of the word "sex" are often enough to cause a thread to be flagged. Because this thread has "sex" in the subject line, it is repeated at least 16 times per page (once in the title and as part of each individual message). It is probably mentioned many additional times in the text of posts. To be clear, there is probably nothing sexually explicit in the thread but that is enough. The thread is currently 8 pages long and Google has already flagged 5 of the pages. I imagine the remaining 3 will eventually be flagged as well, Currently all of the violations are in the normal category rather than being "must fix". As such, I am willing to leave the thread for a while, but will eventually have to remove it. If the classification changes to "must fix", I will have to remove it immediately. One strange thing is that despite being flagged and subject to restricted advertising, there are still plenty of ads on those pages. This is just another oddity of Google's system. In short, we are subject to an arbitrary system that does not function in a coherent manner. But because nearly all of our revenue depends on it, we have to attempt to comply. As a result, many interesting and useful discussions are removed for no other reason than because of Google.

The top three most active threads yesterday were all threads that I've covered in the last couple of days. So, I'm starting with the thread that was actually the fourth most active yesterday. Titled, "Women's NCAA championship game" and posted in the "Sports General Discussion" forum, I believe this may be the first thread from the sports forum that I've discussed in these blog posts. If you have had even the slightest contact with news about the women's college basketball championship game, you will probably be aware that most of the discussion is not about buckets, blocks, or rebounds, but rather hand gestures. More specifically, hand gestures by Louisiana State University's Angel Reese. As soon as the game was over, Reese was inundated with allegations of being unsporting, classless, and even "ghetto" for a hand gesture that imitated one made by an opposing player, Caitlin Clark of the University of Iowa. Much of the discussion in this thread focuses on the disparate reactions to the same gesture being made by the two players. Whereas Reese, who is black, was generally criticized and described in negative terms, Clark, who is white, was generally described positively such as "having swagger" or being a "fierce competitor". The original poster of the thread drew attention to this racial divide which was repeatedly demonstrated throughout the thread. Just about the only thing to distract from the debates over Reese and Clark was the fashion choices of LSU coach Kim Mulkey. Jill Biden also became a topic of discussion after she suggested inviting both teams to the White House. This reinforced the view of those who felt that Reese and LSU were receiving unfair treatment. Traditionally only the winning team received such an invitation and LSU supporters viewed this as just another case of double standards. When Reese rejected Biden's suggestion, some posters doubled-down on complaints that she lacked class. But, eventually Biden backed off of her suggestion and even Clark rejected the idea. Clearly, however, there were posters prepared to interpret everything about Reese in the most negative light possible. These racial divisions continued later in the thread with posters complaining that Reese said that she hoped to inspire girls that looked like her. Other posters pointed out that Clark had made similar statements about inspiring girls in Iowa and again asked why similar behavior was treated differently. To be sure, Reese has her defenders in the thread and she may be proving the expression that "there's no such thing as bad publicity" true. As several of her supporters point out, her popularity has only grown and her earning potential has increased.

Today I'm back to looking at the most active threads from the previous day. The most active thread yesterday was one I've already covered so I'll move on to a thread titled, "White women try to ‘reclaim power’ through #vanillagirl and #cleangirl beauty posts??" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum. The original poster discusses an interview on NPR with Buzzfeed News reporter Steffi Cao about an article she has written arguing that certain fashion styles such as "the clean girl, coastal grandmother and – most importantly – the vanilla girl trends" are efforts by white women to reclaim "soft power". I have no clue what any of those fashion trends entail and I don't recall ever even hearing about them until just now. I was all set to ridicule this thread as a giant waste of time. But, it only took reading a couple of posts to change my mind. It is actually a quite intriguing topic. Cao's contention is that in recent years Black women seized the initiative in setting beauty trends and cites examples ranging from the Kardashians to Miley Cyrus of White women adopting, some would say appropriating, from Black beauty ideals. In Cao's telling, the "vanilla girl" and other trends are efforts by White women to regain influence over fashion and with it, the "soft power" associated with beauty. Enough of the responses on the first page of this thread were interesting enough to compel me to read Cao's article. I thought she made some interesting points, but overall I think she is unconvincing. I get the impression that she believes that White women somehow got together to plan their retaking of the beauty industry. I'm sure almost all of the female DCUM users will attest to having missed that meeting. Moreover, as posters in the thread point out, White women never controlled the the beauty industry which is primarily owned or controlled by White men. This is emblematic of much of the discussion in this thread which centers on differing views of the status of White women. In the perception of some, White women have been victims of misogyny and prevented from having a fully equal role in society. Moreover, any attempts to assert themselves provoke negative reactions and criticism. Others, including Cao, view White women as exploiting their alleged victimhood to wield power over others, the classic example being Amy Cooper who famously called police on a Black bird watcher in New York's Central Park. Whereas Cao provides "balletcore" (no, I have no idea what that is) as an example of a beauty trend fixated on "whiteness", some posters argue that the most popular ballet figure today is a Black women. In response, others argue acting like ballet is diverse because of one start is similar to suggesting that the presidency of Barack Obama means that US presidents have been diverse. In response to that, posters argue the lack of diversity of ballet is related to age and at the younger ages is actually is diverse. So, point, counterpoint, counterpoint, etc., before we even get to the issue of whether ballet-influenced styles are an effort to reassert white supremacy. Beyond the substantive disputes in this thread, which I admit much to my chagrin, fascinate me, there are several arguments about whether this is a real issue or a media-driven contrivance aimed at generating controversy and, hence, clicks. I think that this can both be a media-driven hyping and also touch on some real issues. At any rate, very much contrary to my initial reaction, I think this is a great topic for DCUM discussion.

Because I took the weekend off from writing blog posts, today I'll look at the most active threads over the last three days. The most active thread during that period was titled, "Big 3 Nightmare" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster laments that it has been a difficult year in terms of college acceptances for the top students at the "Big 3" private schools in the DC Metro area. I guess I should start off by noting that the term "Big 3" is controversial on DCUM with posters unable to agree on what schools should be included in the group, or even if "3" is the proper number with some arguing for a "Big 5" or another designation. At any rate, you can be sure that Sidwell Friends and Georgetown Day School will be included in any discussion of this sort and St. Albans is also repeatedly mentioned in the thread. But, it can be assumed that this discussion is not limited to those three schools. Beyond that, this thread is a perfect illustration of what I've coined as the "DCUM Paradox" in which parents choose schools or neighborhoods on the assumption that their choices will enhance their children's college acceptance opportunities. But, at least since I've been following this topic, it turns out that they end up competing with their classmates and students at similar schools who all have roughly the same qualifications, actually making acceptance more challenging as colleges seek diverse student bodies. As I have written before, no Ivy League school is going to accept the entire Sidwell senior class, so simply graduating from Sidwell is not going to be enough for an Ivy acceptance. Posters in this thread report that this year has been especially difficult with essentially only "hooked" students (i.e. athletes, underrepresented minorities, legacies, big donors, etc.) being accepted. Some posters say that even legacy status has not been enough. Several posters in this thread take a certain amount of joy in the idea that students privileged enough to attend these pricey schools are finding that their privilege has limits. Other posters argue that while the opportunities at the very top universities may be limited, these students still have very good chances at other highly-ranked universities. There is quite a bit of discussion about how much college admission opportunties figured into parent's choices of private schools. Some posters concede that was part of their calculus while others point to broader goals. Inevitably, the discussion leads to comparisons with local public schools with some posters suggesting some area public high schools have similar college acceptance records without the financial outlay. It is safe to say that argument was not universally accepted. However, some posters tell stories — possibly apocryphal — of parents switching their children to public schools for their final years or even enrolling in rural schools in order to improve their admissions chances. The bottom line is that while the top area private schools may have a lot going for them, they are clearly not guaranteed paths to the top universities.