Quotulatiousness

January 29, 2015

How a positive, welcoming community changed for the worse in a short period of time

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Nation last year, Michelle Goldberg recounts the sad tale of a well-intentioned group of women whose message to the feminist online community blew up in their faces, becoming a focus for vitriol, hatred, and anger … from other feminists:

The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at least some of their conclusions. They weren’t prepared, though, for the wave of coruscating anger and contempt that greeted their work. Online, the Barnard group — nine of whom were women of color — was savaged as a cabal of white opportunists. People were upset that the meeting had excluded those who don’t live in New York (Martin and Valenti had no travel budget). There was fury expressed on behalf of everyone — indigenous women, feminist mothers, veterans — whose concerns were not explicitly addressed. Some were outraged that tweets were quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters. Others were incensed that a report about online feminism left out women who aren’t online. “Where is the space in all of these #femfuture movements for people who don’t have internet access?” tweeted Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer who, months later, would come up with the influential hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

Martin was floored. She’s long believed that it’s incumbent on feminists to be open to critique — but the response was so vitriolic, so full of bad faith and stubborn misinformation, that it felt like some sort of Maoist hazing. Kendall, for example, compared #Femfuture to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a viciously racist Southern suffragist who supported lynching because she said it protected white women from rape. “It was really hard to engage in processing real critique because so much of it was couched in an absolute disavowal of my intentions and my person,” Martin says.

[…]

Just a few years ago, the feminist blogosphere seemed an insouciant, freewheeling place, revivifying women’s liberation for a new generation. “It felt like there was fun and possibility…a momentum or excitement that was building,” says Anna Holmes, who founded Jezebel, Gawker Media’s influential women’s website, in 2007. In 2011, critic Emily Nussbaum celebrated the feminist blogosphere in New York magazine: “Freed from the boundaries of print, writers could blur the lines between formal and casual writing; between a call to arms, a confession, and a stand-up routine — and this new looseness of form in turn emboldened readers to join in, to take risks in the safety of the shared spotlight.”

The Internet also became a crucial place for feminist organizing. When the breast cancer organization Komen for the Cure decided to defund Planned Parenthood in 2012, the overwhelming online backlash led to a reversal of the policy and the departure of the executive who had pushed it. Last year, Women, Action & the Media and the Everyday Sexism Project spearheaded a successful online campaign to get Facebook to ban pro-rape content.

Yet even as online feminism has proved itself a real force for change, many of the most avid digital feminists will tell you that it’s become toxic. Indeed, there’s a nascent genre of essays by people who feel emotionally savaged by their involvement in it — not because of sexist trolls, but because of the slashing righteousness of other feminists. On January 3, for example, Katherine Cross, a Puerto Rican trans woman working on a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center, wrote about how often she hesitates to publish articles or blog posts out of fear of inadvertently stepping on an ideological land mine and bringing down the wrath of the online enforcers. “I fear being cast suddenly as one of the ‘bad guys’ for being insufficiently radical, too nuanced or too forgiving, or for simply writing something whose offensive dimensions would be unknown to me at the time of publication,” she wrote.

[…]

Further, as Cross says, “this goes to the heart of the efficacy of radical movements.” After all, this is hardly the first time that feminism — to say nothing of other left-wing movements — has been racked by furious contentions over ideological purity. Many second-wave feminist groups tore themselves apart by denouncing and ostracizing members who demonstrated too much ambition or presumed to act as leaders. As the radical second-waver Ti-Grace Atkinson famously put it: “Sisterhood is powerful. It kills. Mostly sisters.”

H/T to Jim Geraghty for the link.

xkcd’s guide to screws

Filed under: Humour, Technology, Tools — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Browning’s solution to the handgun problem

Filed under: Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Tam saluted John Moses Browning on the occasion of his birthday, and celebrated the problem he solved:

So, the problem with a self-loading pistol is keeping the action closed until the bullet has left the muzzle and pressure in the chamber has dropped low enough that the brass case will be ejected neatly, as opposed to being transformed into a spray of shrapnel in the shooter’s face.

Early autopistols relied on complex mechanical setups, like the well-known Borchardt/Luger mechanism derived from Maxim’s toggle joint, to provide mechanical disadvantage against which the recoil had to work.

Luger pistol toggle action

It would not shock me to learn that the two main parts of that toggle required more separate machining steps than an entire modern pistol slide. Further, the entire works were exposed to the great outdoors. Friend Marko once jokingly called it “The perfect handgun for a gunfight in a computer clean room.”

So, what are our choices to hold the breech closed for that crucial fraction of a second? Well, there’s spring pressure, but you can only add so much of that before the action can’t be worked by human hands. You can also add weight to the breechblock.

Mocking “old fashioned” security systems

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Christopher Taylor points out that the folks who advised Comcast on their recent home security advertising campaign rather missed the mark:

Comcast is trying to act like using any other security system is old fashioned; its actually a tag line in some of their ads “don’t be old fashioned.” They’re using the old knight in armor to stand in for any other security system which, not being “in the cloud” and accessible “anywhere” from your smart phone is thus dated and old.

But consider; which would be preferable?

  • An internet based system which, by its own advertising notes that you can turn it off “from anywhere” using only a phone, and look at cameras anywhere in your home, just by using the phone.
  • An armored knight with a broadsword.

Now, perhaps you’re new to the internet and aren’t aware of this, but it gets hacked pretty much every minute of the day. Passwords are stolen and sold on Chinese and Russian websites. Your smart phone is not secure.
I once found a website (now gone) that had live feeds of people’s homes from around the world by clicking on various names. All they did was use commonly used passwords and logged into the security systems. It was like this weird voyeuristic show, but really boring because it was all empty rooms and darkness — people turn on their security when they leave, not when they do fun stuff to watch.

What I’m saying is what should be abundantly obvious to everyone who has a television to watch Comcast ads: this is a really stupid, bad idea. You’re making it easier for burglars to turn off your security system and watch for when you aren’t home. You’re making it easier for evil sexual predators and monsters to know your patterns and when you’re home or alone. Get it?

This is like publishing your daily activities and living in a glass building all day long. It seems cool and high tech and new and fancy, but its just really stupid.

But an armored knight? Unless he goes to sleep, he’s a physical, combat-ready soldier that acts as a physical deterrent to intruders.

And its not even old fashioned. It’s so old an image, it doesn’t even feel old fashioned, it feels beyond vintage to a fantasy era. Which is cooler to you, being guarded by a knight in shining armor with a sword, or your smart phone?

These ads have a viral feel to them, like some hip college dude with a fancy business card came up with it for Comcast, but they don’t make sense. I doubt they even get people to want to buy the product.

QotD: Coping with beer experts

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Beer is a far dodgier subject in these post-real-ale days — there are experts everywhere. Safest to adopt the generic Amis Defence Against Knowledge and treat the whole subject as an eccentric fad. If forced to drink beer say, “A glass of any old lager, please, if it’s there. I’m sure all this business about top fermentation and CO2 is quite fascinating, but life’s too short.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

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