Reddit is a dumpster fire. At least the r/all or whatever the front page is now, plus some major subreddits where dissent from the correct opinion is buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa.
For now, it's still highly useful for very specific and obscure things, such as many of the smaller passionate subreddits filled with skilled amateurs and professionals. For example, when Googling "Oregon vacation" you get 2 pages of ads, questionable travel sites, and a laundry list of other corporate sites.
Go to reddit, search for the same thing, find a thread with a lot of comments and you'll usually get a lot of good info, including the good, bad, and the ugly. Corporate site would have you believe there are no such things as bad and ugly, except perhaps in regard to their competitors.
Google sucks, Bing sucks, DuckCensorGo sucks, and we're living in the suck era of the internet. Gone are the days of the free, un-curated, uncensored wild west internet. The inventive, talented, & entrepreneurial should all start working together to prevent the rent seekers from destroying all the nice things, as they are doing to the internet. Please stop handing over your legacy to thugs!
The above partly contributed to my becoming perpetually skeptical of every single article of news I read. I still need to work on being more skeptical of "news" that fits my worldview, as I'm sure many of us do, but it very much feels like there is a mental cost involved in not letting your brain absorb new information without critically questioning the new information. Especially if you take the time to dig deeper. Who has that kind of time--especially if you have a full-time job and a family? So most of the time I read something, I end up putting it in one of the mental categories of "possibly true, but don't bet on it" or "possibly true, but probably missing valuable details/context." Or the increasingly popular category, "clickbaity headline, probably untrue." These are all subcategories belonging to the larger, "garbage news" category.
This has led me to increasingly avoid reading major news outlets. And since I don't really have much time to verify the credibility of new sources, I am ultimately getting less and less news.
It's clickbaity even without the racial descriptor. So I am intrigued, appropriately horrified, and also skeptical because clickbait and race. I did only a little digging, and several of the other outlets are saying the same thing, most relying on this St. Louis Post-Dispatch article or this one from Newsweek.
The incident happened last year, but is in the news now because of newly released video. The video shows the kidney patient being tackled and not much else. It does not reflect well upon the hospital/security staff, however. But still, the whole context we are getting is from the kidney patient's family and a short video. This is partly because the hospital is reportedly not saying anything about it right now.
Suspiciously, there is more video, but it is not released. Said video includes an interrogation where security allegedly says and does horrible things, but not released. Shit like this makes me trust the news like I trust Joe Biden to keep inflation low.
If everything being reported and claimed in the lawsuit is 100% factual, and there is no important missing context, then yes, obviously the hospital should pay and the security staff involved be replaced and their replacements better trained.
But the world I have become more aware of in recent years rarely provides 100% factual information, and rarely provides all the important context. If you can't clear these hurdles convincingly, you are in the "garbage news" category.
The kidney patient story is but a drop in the ocean. It might even be mostly true, but I can't turn off the Always Skeptical switch in my brain. Even if I wanted to, I don't think it's a great idea. But it is taxing, and I find myself reading more and knowing less. I think I need to change some habits. Maybe something along the lines of less internet, more books. Devote some time to discovering a few new credible, nonpartisan, and respected-but-not-part-of-the-establishment journalists.
Like many, I think our smart, totally-has-it-together, superlatively cognitively-abled president said something really stupid the other day (such an improvement over Trump!), and I'll just quote from Instapundit, who quotes Larry Correia:
This is bold talk from a military, and a government, that hasn’t won a
war in my lifetime. Not even the War On Poverty . . . But the
Transgender Awareness Training is up-to-date, I’m sure.
Seriously, this kind of threat is not just absurd and unseemly, but a
disqualification for public office. One of many, I realize.
And I guess the ammo shortage will be back on.
ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Larry Correia: So you want to nuke Omaha?
“For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a novelist now, but I retired
from the Evil Military Industrial Complex, where I helped maintain
those various advanced weapon systems you expect to bomb me with. Before
that I was a gun dealer and firearms instructor. So basically I sold
guns to the people you expect the people I trained to take them from.”
Plus: “In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had
this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the
example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because ‘we kept the gloves on’, whereas
fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing
held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people
who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign
country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas. You really hate
us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns?”
In a U.S. civil war, the first targets would be politicians, and
media figures, and they’re all soft targets. Which is odd, because they
seem the most eager to get things started.
It's nearly 2016. The endless tentacles of javascript and hordes of third party crap NEED TO DIE (I have a soft spot for flash, but that really needs to die as well)
HotAir is just an example, and yes, it is pretty bad, but it's hardly the worst offender. A lot of seemingly reputable sites are chock full of this kind of shit, not to mention what the more shady sites are like.
I was guilty myself, but I'm rectifying it by deleting most of the ad scripts here--don't care about a few potential bucks anymore--and pointless, obsolete javascript, but some of it is baked in embedded media (of which I'll be more careful about).
Recommended and related links*: Ghostery Adblock Edge Apparently Adblock Edge was discontinued and has since stopped working. For now Adblock Plus will do for that extra layer of security and ad-free browsing, just be sure to uncheck "Allow some non-intrusive advertising" in the filter preferences if you're so inclined. NoScript
*I don't know if any of these work in non-Firefox browsers, likely not. Firefox-based browsers are better anyways, in certain important ways, such as if you like total control of your browser (old, but relevant article here).
Note: This is a long post and it is not about gardening.
I could probably start anywhere: The Baltimore riots, #Gamergate, the Sad Puppies and the Hugo-versy, human nature, ingroups and outgroups, social media activists, etcetera, and on and on, and so forth.
I suppose I'll start with Through the Worhmhole, season 6, episode 1: Are We All Bigots? This episode is suspiciously and fantastically salient right now.
It was particularly cringe-inducing for me at first, because I remembered a conversation cut short that I initiated with an African-American.
Having been a poli-sci major I tend to have politics and topics of national debate not far from the front of my mind. It's all too easy to reach into that well of poison in an attempt to be topical and raconteur. Years ago, during this conversation I said, "you know, on some level, I think we are all a little bit racist or prejudiced." I was thinking about human history and its tribalist nature, but I see how it could be interpreted very differently. My undiplomatic mouth and the resulting angry stare I got ended what was an otherwise interesting and cordial dialogue. Every time I think about that moment I cringe.
Then this show, hosted by Morgan Freeman no less, comes on and asks (and answers) the same damn thing. Short answer: yes, we are all racist scumbags.
Longer answer: A lot of it is subconscious, and is both learned through cultural exposure and a part of human, even mammalian, nature. This seems obvious to me. But we're not talking about the KKK or making a minority sit in the back of the bus, we're talking about non-overt stuff in modern civilization from millions of people adding up over time where we end up with huge disparities. And it's not just race, it's religion, nationality, sports teams; it's all tribalism. Ingroup vs. outgroup stuff. It's how humans behave. It's how monkeys behave. It's how rats behave!
We have a lot of groups in Western civilization. Western civilization itself is a group. I am a member of that group. I am also a member of the U.S. group, the white group, the male group, the dogs-lover group, the right-handed group, the sci-fi geeky fan group, etc. I am a member of a lot of different groups mostly with parallel, complimentary, and/or non-conflicting interests. Rarely do those interests conflict; more often, obviously, groups with demographically distinct memberships and different interests conflict. I guess you could try to stay out of it, but typically people get at least emotionally invested in a conflict their group is engaged in. Because human mammalian nature.
A relatively harmless example can be the airing of eSports on ESPN. Traditionally, ESPN has aired mostly athletic sports competitions. Although they have on occasion aired poker championships. There's nothing athletic about poker, but it is a sport that a lot of people are interested in. It's a good bet that many fans of athletic competitions (ACF for short) are also poker game enthusiasts (PGE). For ESPN to air a poker game is like Michael Jordan going golfing. No big thing.
But times, they are a changin'. The other day ESPN aired teams competing against each other in the video game, Heroes of the Storm, on one of its channels and I'd venture to guess that the older ACFs and PGEs are generally not fans of this new video game, nor any competitions in it. Which prompted such people to say, "It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers
is a competition…. Mostly, I’m interested in doing real sports." That was ESPN president John Skipper. And one of ESPN's hosts, Colin Cowherd had more colorful things to say about covering eSports. Ingroup vs. outgroup.
While I don't care much about Heroes of the Storm or MOBA competitions personally, I do like games and the idea of watching intense video game competitions by pro-gamers. So, not only am I in agreement with TotalBiscuit's sentiment in his video below, but with his specific point--that it doesn't matter whether or not it's called a sport. What matters is that eSports/gamers already has a lot of people in its group, and that group pays the bills by watching.
So yeah, I'm a member of the eSports/gamers group. I was a member of the more traditional ACF group in my youth, paying close attention to my favorite NBA teams, as well as playing Mario and Zelda as often as I could. While I still can identify with the ACF group, I felt the urge to take a side in this little conflict. Go eSports coverage! Yay more-relevant-to-me ingroup!
We tend to think of tribalism as inherently bad, but I don't think it is. I think tribalism is more like gravity. It's amoral. It just is. What we do with tribalism can be either good or bad. Lately it seems, as some of us intend to promote a kind of civility with the tools and weapons of tribalism, we're becoming demonstrably uncivil.
Enter the Prussian, speaking on the recent Hugo awards controversy, who is simultaneously upset and dismissive of SJWs:
Author Larry Correia (not read
him, yet) attended one of their cons when he was starting out, and what
he found was what he described as a whispering campaign against one of
his books. Not because of the book, mind you, but because of his
politics. Hence he was smeared as racist, misogynist, homophobe and all
the rest of I – to the point that his wife started getting concerned
phone calls from people worried that she was living with a wife beater.
All of this is drearily familiar to anyone who has experienced the
tolerance and fairness of the western left, above all the American
left. The bad faith, the vicious insults, the attitude of throw
anything at all and hope some of it sticks – it’s boring and routine at
this point. Forget those of us who are loud and proud rightists, we’ve
seen this guff dished out against such bona fide lefties as Sam Harris,
Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens…
In effect, anyone who didn’t toe the extremely thin and boring line
of the US center-left was being ostracized and kept out of the awards –
there were apparently organized cliques getting together to work out
what books to nominate and put forward, and that decision was strongly
driven by politics . . .
. . . Despite all their viciousness, SJWs are paper tigers. . . . if you are relying on SJWs to defend issues that actually matter –
anti-racialism, women’s emancipation, free speech, the defense of
civilization – you are relying on people who cannot even rig an award
competently.
I sort of both agree and disagree with him. They're not very good people for using the blunt tools of tribalism like shaming, name-calling, harassment, and general thuggish outgrouping just because they disagree with their victims' ideas. And to some extent, they are paper tigers. But in the internet age, even a small group of paper tigers can make a loud voice and cause a lot of problems.
The Hugo thing was about leftists vs. the at-least-not-overtly-left-enough. Or from the perspective of the SJWs: Decent human beings who happen to be good authors vs. racist/sexist/bigoted people who may or may not be good authors. In the world of tribalism and ingroups vs. outgroups, the sci-fi/fantasy fan group was beset and torn by other warring groups who happened to have members in the sci-fi/fantasy fan group (much like #gamergate). The Worldcon and Hugo award group, for good or ill, deliberately or not, was commandeered for other sociopolitical interests. Rightist and non-leftist members of the group took notice and responded in kind with the Puppies. Whether or not the Sad and Rabid Puppies were justified (I tend to think they were), the Hugo awards will never be the same and will always have that stink of corruption.
Suffice it to say that the leftists occupying other groups use the tools of tribalism to prod those other groups in a direction they want it to go. Don't get me wrong, everybody engages in tribalism. The problem is that the relatively recent prodding isn't so gentle, or civil; it might be even be quiet and secret. It's not always a rightist group that reacts and fights the prodding, it can be any group content with the way their group is/was. Sometimes rightist groups will take notice and join forces with the prodded group. Other times the prodded will surrender.
And the prodding is Oh-my-God-freaking everywhere. It's the outrage of the day, it's the national shame campaign. But why is it a bad thing? It's taking peoples reputations and ruining them, it's destroying careers. You can't have an old-fashioned opinion and say it out loud anymore. You can't think outside the sociopolitical box without the shame campaign threatening your job. And these are over little more than social faux pas! The ingroups and outgroups will clash, the rhetoric and tactics get sharper with every use. What's next?
Whatever it is, it can't be good. Indeed, the logical leap to the next level has already been mentally considered and accepted by at least one of the prodding leftists.
That post [the one debunking false rape statistics]
is exactly my problem with Scott. He seems to honestly think that it’s a
worthwhile use of his time, energy and mental effort to download evil
people’s evil worldviews into his mind and try to analytically debate
them with statistics and cost-benefit analyses.
He gets *mad* at people whom he detachedly intellectually agrees with
but who are willing to back up their beliefs with war and fire rather
than pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense.
It honestly makes me kind of sick. It is exactly the kind
of thing that “social justice” activists like me *intend* to attack and
“trigger” when we use “triggery” catchphrases about the mewling
pusillanimity of privileged white allies.
In other words, if a fight is important to you, fight nasty. If that
means lying, lie. If that means insults, insult. If that means silencing
people, silence. . . .
Compare to the following two critiques: “The Catholic Church wastes so much energy getting upset about heretics who believe mostly the same things as they do, when there are literally millions of Hindus over in India who don’t believe in Catholicism at all! What dumb priorities!”
Or “How could Joseph McCarthy get angry about a couple of people who might have been Communists in the US movie industry, when over in Moscow there were thousands of people who were openly super Communist all the time?”
There might be foot-long giant centipedes in the Amazon, but I am a lot more worried about boll weevils in my walled garden.
Creationists lie. Homeopaths lie. Anti-vaxxers lie. This is part of
the Great Circle of Life. It is not necessary to call out every lie by a
creationist, because the sort of person who is still listening to
creationists is not the sort of person who is likely to be moved by
call-outs. There is a role for organized action against
creationists, like preventing them from getting their opinions taught in
schools, but the marginal blog post “debunking” a creationist something
something is a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things
rationally has already formed a walled garden and locked the
creationists outside of it.
Anti-Semites fight nasty. The Ku Klux Klan fights nasty. Neo-Nazis
fight nasty. We dismiss them with equanamity, in accordance with the
ancient proverb: “Haters gonna hate”. There is a role for organized
opposition to these groups, like making sure they can’t actually
terrorize anyone, but the marginal blog post condemning Nazism is a
waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things charitably and
compassionately has already formed a walled garden and locked the Nazis
outside of it.
People who want to discuss things rationally and charitably have not yet locked Charles Clymer out of their walled garden.
He is not a heathen, he is a heretic. He is not a foreigner, he is a
traitor. He comes in talking all liberalism and statistics, and then he
betrays the signals he has just sent. He is not just some guy who
defects in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He is the guy who defects while
wearing the “I COOPERATE IN PRISONERS DILEMMAS” t-shirt.
What really, really bothered me wasn’t Clymer at all: it was that rationalists
were taking him seriously. Smart people, kind people! I even said so in
my article. Boll weevils in our beautiful walled garden!
Why am I always harping on feminism? I feel like we’ve got a good
thing going, we’ve ratified our Platonic contract to be intellectually
honest and charitable to each other, we are going about
perma-cooperating in the Prisoner’s Dilemma and reaping gains from
trade.
And then someone says “Except that of course regardless of all that I
reserve the right to still use lies and insults and harassment and dark epistemology
to spread feminism”. Sometimes they do this explicitly, like Andrew
did. Other times they use a more nuanced argument like “Surely you
didn’t think the same rules against lies and insults and harassment
should apply to oppressed and privileged people, did you?” And other
times they don’t say anything, but just show their true colors by
reblogging an awful article with false statistics.
. . .
But then someone else says “Well, if they get their exception, I
deserve my exception,” and then someone else says “Well, if those two
get exceptions, I’m out”, and you have no idea how difficult it is to
successfully renegotiate the terms of a timeless Platonic contract that
doesn’t literally exist.
No! I am Exception Nazi! NO EXCEPTION FOR YOU! Civilization didn’t conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless
they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all.
Liberals didn’t give their lives in the battle against tyranny to end
discrimination against all religions except Jansenism because seriously fuck Jansenists. Here we have built our Schelling fence and here we are defending it to the bitter end. [Emphasis mine]
Scott uses the apt metaphor of the walled garden (a group/tribe/community), and the uncivil tribalists as boll weevils. As both supporters of a classically liberal society, Scott and I might disagree on the finer points in its execution and the occasional issue here and there, but I feel we're a part of a polite and healthy garden where disagreement on many things are acceptable provided both parties remain civil, which includes intellectual honesty.
(At risk of mixing metaphors I'll continue using "gardens.")
There are many overlapping gardens, but some gardeners don't seem to mind the boll weevils, and even assist them at times.
So far, I've mostly discussed shaming and what basically amounts to ad hominem attacks as the methods of which the uncivil prodding tribalists employ. Mostly to punish mildly sexist, racist, or anti-gay marriage opinions. But there are boll weevils and there are BOLL WEEVILS.
This comes sharply into focus when you look at the two biggest feuding tribes in America, the Republicans and the Democrats, or more broadly the liberal/progressive left and the conservative right.
When a conflict takes on a political characteristic, whether real or imagined, things get out of control and your garden becomes untenable:
Pizzerias and sundry being legislated into the outgroup.
It's getting harder and harder to maintain a civil garden because Everything is Political. Video games are now politicized. Glorified book clubs. Wedding cakes. Commencement speeches. Bad jokes. innocuous-looking T-shirts are politicized.
And where does that leave real, dyed-in-the-wool, actual politics? Are the loyal opposition members safe? You might think so, given our robust constitutional political protections. But I wouldn't be so sure:
Don’t call your lawyer.
Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends.
The entire neighborhood could see the police around their house, but
they had to remain silent. This was not the “right to remain silent” as
uttered by every cop on every legal drama on television — the right
against self-incrimination. They couldn’t mount a public defense if they
wanted — or even offer an explanation to family and friends. . . .
Most Americans have never heard of these raids, or of the lengthy
criminal investigations of Wisconsin conservatives. For good reason.
Bound by comprehensive secrecy orders, conservatives were left to suffer
in silence as leaks ruined their reputations, as neighbors, looking
through windows and dismayed at the massive police presence, the lights
shining down on targets’ homes, wondered, no doubt, What on earth did
that family do?
This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe
investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly
targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott
Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative
reform.
Largely hidden from the public eye, this traumatic process, however,
is now heading toward a legal climax, with two key rulings expected in
the late spring or early summer. The first ruling, from the Wisconsin
supreme court, could halt the investigations for good, in part by
declaring that the “misconduct” being investigated isn’t misconduct at
all but the simple exercise of First Amendment rights.
That, along with the IRS scandal, are extreme examples of what happens when powerful people with different opinions use the weapons of tribalism to punish the outgroup. The prosecutor behind the Wisconsin raids, John Chisholm is just ahead of his time. Maybe. But that's escalation, that is the next logical step.
So it doesn't surprise me that people want to avoid all this nastiness they see in the not-so-distant future and request a divorce. The blogger Ace, tweeted the rationale behind his idea:
there is a pragmatic value to liberalism-- liberalism permits strongly-disagreeing peoples to live among each other peacefully.
if we no longer have this sort of liberalism--if the left is determined
to simply "win"--then we shall no longer live together peacefully
that's not a threat, that's just an obvious observation.
I think it's pretty clear the left no longer wishes to live peacefully among us, and, for my part: The sentiment is shared.
i think we're beyond electoral matters.
...
notice the lack of "that's crazy-talk" responses
I don't see this working, geographically or otherwise.
Even if there were a smooth way to secede, conflicts will still arise, the differences are still there. It's just that now there's a bunch of innocent bystanders who are no longer considered innocent nor bystanders. While that may be good for political participation, it would be bad for civility. The boll weevils, or the prodding tribalists would be in charge, unencumbered by considerations for outgroup feelings, emboldened by their newfound situation and ripe for group polarization.
But we already live in our own ideological gardensanctuaries. We may wish the walls held up better with fewer shame campaigns and less name-calling, we don't want to suffer the externalities nor direct attacks from discordant groups.
And so we often just sort of excommunicate the people who're mucking it all up:
What the video doesn't show is what happens after everyone catches on to the repeat takers. The sharers move to another table eventually becoming a big table full of sharers, and the takers are left to themselves. This is the ideal walled garden where everyone reaps the rewards from cooperation. It's the divine grace Scott references.
Yes, we must be kind and civil, especially in disagreement. And when the boll weevils or the prodding tribalists don't cooperate, well, just ignore them.
But if we can't ignore them, everybody loses and it's time to start creating new countries and breaking up families and watch out for thought police and our gardens go to crap.
A 250-strong meetup of GamerGate supporters, which included game
developers, journalists and think-tank scholars were evacuated from a
bar in Washington D.C on Friday after an anonymous bomb threat was made
against the gathering.
Is it possible the uncivil activists fail to realize that the double-edged sword they insist upon using does, in fact, cut both ways? Do they expect by starting a war, the other side just quietly goes away?
Is a terrible combination. I honestly don't think it could ever be emphasized enough.
Stupidity alone is just awful, but give it some authority: a badge, a title, a position of influence, and that isolated case of awful just became a rabid werewolf with smallpox.
I just thought I'd lob a pebble against the roaring tsunami of stupid, at the very least, as a symbol of protest.
I'll start out with my somewhat mundane example: A whole lot of people on the internet well and truly believe that violating a company's terms of service is illegal. Often criminal. As in you're risking prison time if you don't do exactly as the fine print on some website tells you.
I think a lot of otherwise semi-intelligent people conflate the law and TOS because not only do they not think about it, the TOS often reiterates the law.
So a website tells you not to steal their stuff or you will be prosecuted. That's a no-brainer. Stealing is illegal and nobody likes to be stolen from.
After a few of these reiterations of the law, they slip in some of their own rules: You may not download any content on this website unless otherwise noted. Or you may not view this content without the provided functionality, or something similar.
Such TOS are, of course, all in legalese, making it sound all law-ish.
Theft is illegal and against many TOS, but viewing a website in your custom-built browser, is NOT illegal. Also, once you initially view online content in whatever browser, you are in fact downloading it, regardless of whatever the legal definition of "download" is. If your device couldn't download content, you would never be able to see or hear that content. I'm no IT expert, but I believe most online content you experience is stored in some temp file, browser cache, or both.
With the right knowledge, you could store and access this temporary memory, permanently. Businesses don't own your personal device, nor the memory on it. But I'm getting off track.
Say someone views some private, exclusive content, without signing an NDA, and they want to tell their friends about it. But they did read a very scary TOS. According to an alarming number of forum mods and commenters, you'll get 20 years in rape-prison for blabbing your mouth. You might even get scary Cease and Desist letters from soulless lawyers, even though the act of free speech is, for the moment, theoretically perfectly legal.
Hell, I'm sure ad-blocking software is against a plethora of TOS, but that doesn't stop millions of web surfers and Stupids with Authority from ad-free surfing.
What it boils down to is that TOS are not the law of the land (nor cyberspace). If you don't break the law, you're legally safe to break the shit out of any TOS you want. Businesses might try to sue you, especially if you caused them harm, but they can't tell the Sheriff to arrest you.
Despite what Captain Badass McForum Mod tells you. Do a google search and shut that stupid down. Or show him this link. But I fear stating the simple common sense that private companies do not make laws probably won't shake the stupid, because they don't think, and any repudiation diminishes their "authority."
So please, throw your pebbles at this kind, or any kind, of Stupid with Authority. It has far-reaching, hard-to-see chilling effects, and just sucks for everyone. Fight the good fight, friend.
Does this sound like legal advice? It kinda does, so take it to the bank despite the fact that I may or may not be a lawyer, despite every fucking lawyer and non-lawyer on the planet putting up an idiot warning disclaimer saying it's not legal advice. In other words, use your brain and fight the stupid.
I never read nor cared much about the hacking and various leaks. From what I understand, it paints Sony leadership in a very bad light. I still don't care.
But I do like the idea of having movie companies able to operate without fear of some douchebag dictator, much less without fear of getting people blown up. Even if it's making awful turd sandwiches like what The Interview appears to be.
A month or so ago I watched the trailer and I was mildly intrigued. There aren't many movies about North Korea you know. But after watching the red band trailer it became painfully obvious that the movie relies far too heavily on idiotic teenage ribaldry. No thanks.
Then the #GOP (Guardians of Peace)--not to be confused with the GOP (Republican party), or the GOP (Gross Old People), or the oft underrated GOP (Grizzly Owl People)--threatened violence on the scale of 9/11 over a stupid movie.
Maybe Sony really went there and portrayed a petty dictator as a petty dictator. Or maybe it's just a red herring or convenient excuse for the hackers to hurt Sony. Or maybe Sony's got the most convoluted marketing campaign ever! Whatever it is, it kind of makes me want to see the movie now.
The Popular Science website/webzine whatever decided that the solution to bad speech is more speech. Just kidding, they're stomping down dissent because they don't like it.
What do you say when you ban something you don't like? You say it's for the greater good, especially since that bad thing is poisoning the water supply!
Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off. . . .
Another, similarly designed study found that even just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers'
perception of science.
If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. [emphasis mine]
What the hell is a "scientifically validated topic"? I was under the impression a topic was a subject or range of similar subjects up for discussion or observation--basically everything under the sun, including the sun. I wonder if they meant to say scientifically validated hypotheses or better yet, popular areas of research? Popular in the sense that it's an easy pretense to suckle Uncle Sam's tit.
If you guys are having a difficult time finding some tax-and-spend Democrats to throw some money your way on the Holy Grail of celebrated lefty causes, then you're doing something horribly wrong. And it aint the goddamned comments on your amateurish articles.
I used to visit PopSci on a somewhat regular basis. The comments were occasionally childish, but often informative. I think the real problem was that a significant portion of their articles were poorly written, like they were straight from the mouth of a troubled adolescent communist with daddy issues. One of their regular contributors felt the need to continually blame Republicans for what happened to be wrong in the world that day. That guy always got raped in the comment sections, and rightly so.
I could say something about heat and a kitchen, but no. They have every right to piss on their commenters. I was not a commenter there, and now I'm not a reader.
So I've decided to take this blog in a new direction, focusing on the few random issues, events, and other annoying things that spur me to rant. Constant politics burns me out; and frankly, it's only interesting and/or newsworthy about once a week if not less. And I can't talk about gun control and fiscal issues everyday for a month when it's all been said before.
So this will be a place where I will talk to myself about things of which I have no expertise.
One such example is Blogger's new posting system, which sucks compared to the simplicity and intuitive design that have graced the years past. May it rest in peace. I'm not really liking the whole web 2.0 thing where users have absolutely no say in how they spread their profit-generating content.
Facebook is (or was*) notorious at this: "Hey, lets completely change the way facebook looks and acts. It will be wonderful for the millions of users who just got comfortable with the way things are. Oh and by the way, let's make it mandatory for everyone. Also let's make it a surprise. What a great idea! We should do this every six to nine months too because it's so awesome."
I suppose the good thing about all this web evolution, is that someone will eventually hit the user-friendly jackpot, making lives easier and generally more enjoyable. Until they change it 7 months later.
*Maybe they're better at things now, but it was one of the many reasons I quit facebook and haven't looked back.
I'm not your average news or political junkie. When something significant occurs the atmosphere seems to get acutely partisan, and the predictable hacks come out peddling their pet causes complete with rehearsed rhetoric, I get burned out.
I'm turning off the television, I've had enough of the blogs and tweets, and the endless articles. The Aurora victims deserve better.
It's not like there are any trade secrets lying about where athletes can do damage merely by talking, it's just about making the most money while avoiding the most lawsuits.
According to the IOC 2012 guidelines, volunteers and athletes are allowed to use social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. However, any comments or postings must be in a "first-person, diary-type format" and not come close to emulating the "role of a journalist" by commenting on separate events.
In any of their postings, they must also avoid mentioning:
Details of their specific location,
Media of backstage areas
Breaking news
Information about participants
Detailed online discussions
There's more:
Personal photographs can posted to these sites, but cannot be commercially distributed elsewhere. A caveat to this is that any pictures taken in the Olympic Village must be vetted first by those pictured.
Videos can be shot but cannot be posted online or elsewhere in any form. Once in the stadium, only official sponsors are allowed to take video and still shots.
I guess it's good I'm no Olympic athlete, otherwise I'd be a walking broadcast network--spilling the beans on top secret stuff like the weather, the Russians' chances of winning, and what everyone had for lunch.
It's sad really: Citizen-journalists are encouraged by social media and the internet in general today; athlete-journalists are another story.
Kentucky senator Rand and his father Ron Paul, who has not yet formally conceded the Republican presidential nomination, will throw their weight behind a new online manifesto set to be released today by the Paul-founded Campaign for Liberty. The new push, Paul aides say, will in some ways displace what has been their movement's long-running top priority, shutting down the Federal Reserve Bank. The move is an attempt to stake a libertarian claim to a central public issue of the next decade, and to move from the esoteric terrain of high finance to the everyday world of cable modems and Facebook...
The document is intended to serve as a conservative counterpoint to a Declaration of Internet Freedom released this week and hosted by the group FreePress, though the two share some goals...
The language of the document tries to reclaim the issue of Internet freedom from the strange bedfellows that have staked a claim to it: progressives and tech companies on one hand, and more traditional conservative politicians like California Rep. Darrell Issa.
Hey Buzzfeed idiots, this is more libertarian than conservative. But I hope this gets the support it deserves. It's always so refreshing to see bold libertarian ideas put into what seems like "a line in the sand" moment.
