Quotulatiousness

July 25, 2021

The Line editors clearly loved crafting their “Dicks in space!” headline

Filed under: Business, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a fellow space nerd, I welcome the editors of The Line to our number:

You’ve probably noticed by now that your Line editors are space enthusiasts. It’s been an interesting few weeks on that front. Sir Richard Branson flew out of the atmosphere, into free-fall (not zero-G, you scientific illiterates!), on a Virgin Galactic space plane. That said, he didn’t get high enough to cross the Kármán line, which, in the absence of any real international agreement on where the Earth ends and space begins, is as close as we come to a functional definition of the edge of space. (It’s an altitude of 100 km, for those wondering.) Jeff Bezos, of Amazon wealth and fame, did cross that line this week, along with three passengers, including Wally Funk, which was cool, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We are.) Bezos was riding a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket; Blue Origin is a company he founded and funded with his own gigantic wealth.

Look, let’s face facts — your Line editors are into space. We just are. But yeah, we agree that space policy is important enough and complicated enough to warrant debate. Reasonable people can have different views on this stuff. And we also agree that there are important debates to have about the accumulated wealth of billionaires, and the distorting effects that wealth can have on politics and society.

But unlike a bunch of ya’ll, we don’t get confused about a debate over income inequality and a debate over space travel. You can despise Bezos, Amazon and everything he’s done there, and still recognize that what he is doing on the space front is important. Everyone rolling their eyes at Bezos matching space flight capabilities that the Soviets and Americans achieved literally 60 years ago is allowing their desire to rack up some sweet Twitter likes with a snarky dunk blind themselves to the fact that Bezos (and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is way ahead of Blue Origin) aren’t just recreating earlier capabilities, they are massively improving on them.

So yeah, Blue Origin can now do what the Soviets and U.S. could do 60 years ago, but they’re doing it more safely, more efficiently and much, much more sustainably than national space agencies did. Reusability isn’t a frill, it’s a massive game-changer. And as much fun as it is to snort when these private-sector companies recreate an existing capability, do you really think they’re going to stop there?

Branson’s company could be written off as a tourism play for the affluent. Fair enough. Except that making space flight economically viable is the first step to ensuring that capability is both sustainable and more broadly accessible in the long run. Further, Bezos and especially Musk are inventing new and transformative space-flight capabilities. They are materially pushing back against the final frontier in ways that we simply have not before. It won’t matter unless we choose to do anything with these new capabilities, and your guess is as good as ours as to whether or not we will. But we could. That’s huge.

As huge as the gigantic dick-shaped rocket Bezos rode up. Yeah, yeah. We snorted, too. But, like, seriously, folks — making penis jokes about the shape of an object dictated by aerodynamic considerations isn’t quite as witty as you think: the rockets are shaped like penises because they literally have to be in order to work. Having a giggle is fine, but if you actually think you’re making a real point about misogyny and fragile male egos when you get snippy (ahem) about a schlong-shaped rocket, well, we’d love to see what happens when your very emotionally vigorous and feminist vagina-shaped space vehicle hits max Q. So long as we aren’t aboard it or in the landing area for its hurtling debris.

Our main point still stands: don’t let your cynicism and even revulsion at these guys blind you to what they’re doing. Bezos isn’t gonna stop at Yuri Gagarin-vintage accomplishments. Musk sure hasn’t. This’ll matter. It’s time to get serious. They are.

Wehrmacht Conquers 250 Miles of Nothing – WW2 – 152a – July 24, 1942

Filed under: Africa, Australia, Germany, History, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Jul 2021

The Soviets keep withdrawing from the advancing Axis forces, and Hitler keeps issuing contrary orders to try and stop that, with the results that logistics are getting screwed up and the mobile units are bogged down in huge traffic jams. The Allies have decided not to open a second front in Europe in 1942, but do choose another spot to begin the long counter offensive.
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July 24, 2021

Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt (feat. InRangeTV)

Filed under: Americas, History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 22 Jul 2021

I highly recommend visiting the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House during your next trip to the New Orleans area! https://www.1811kidoryhistorichouse.com/

Karl from @InRangeTV was recently in town, and we visited the plantation house where the 1811 Slave Revolt began. In this video, we examine the uprising primarily from a military perspective, discussing the weaponry the enslaved army used, the tactics they employed, and the likelihood of the rebels’ long-term success if their battle with the local planter militia had gone a little bit differently.

The 1811 Revolt, despite being the largest rebellion of enslaved people in American history, has not been the subject of much scholarship, and in many ways is still poorly understood. Regardless, we were surprised how much our visit forced us to rethink the conventional historical narrative. In Karl’s companion video, we discuss alternative perspectives of the revolt and speculate about what truths may have been lost to history. Watch Karl’s video [embedded below].

Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms

Leave a Tip via Paypal ► https://www.paypal.me/atunsheifilms

Buy Merch ► teespring.com/stores/atun-shei-films

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Original Music by Dillon DeRosa ► http://dillonderosa.com/
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~FURTHER READING/VIEWING~

Daniel Rasmussen. American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (2011). Harper Perennial

“Freedom or Death: The Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811” (2019). Atun-Shei Films https://youtu.be/1zUPNtP3Yn0

“Creoles, Kaintucks, and the Culture War of Early New Orleans” (2020). Atun-Shei Films https://youtu.be/i0mDwK47Qq0

1811 Slave Revolt – An Alternative Perspective (feat. Atun-Shei)

InRangeTV
Published 22 Jul 2021

InRange is entirely viewer supported:
https://www.patreon.com/inrangetv

First off, I must give very special thanks to John McCusker for his gracious hospitality for allowing us to film, as well as for his research and candid approach to the history, and the social ramifications of this topic that resonate still to this day.

If you’re in New Orleans, or visiting, make sure you take time to go see the 1811 Kid Ory House and say hi to John from InRange & Atun-Shei:
https://www.1811kidoryhistorichouse.com/

On one of my more recent trips to New Orleans, I got together with Atun-Shei and we visited the Andry plantation house where the 1811 Slave Revolt began. In this video, we re-examine the uprising with fresh perspectives on what actually may have happened and contrast it to the relatively tiny amount of academic research done in relation to the actual significance of this important American revolt for freedom.

The 1811 Revolt, despite being the largest rebellion of enslaved people in American history, has not been the source of much scholarship, and in many ways is still poorly understood. Regardless, we were surprised how much our visit forced us to rethink the conventional historical narrative. In Atun-Shei’s companion video, we examine the uprising primarily from a military perspective, discussing the weaponry the rebels used, the tactics they employed, and the likelihood of the rebels’ long-term success if their battle with the local planter militia had gone a little bit differently.

~FURTHER READING/VIEWING~

Daniel Rasmussen.
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt (2011). Harper Perennial

July 23, 2021

FDR Knew about Pearl Harbor?! – WW2 – Reading Comments

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 22 Jul 2021

Here is another installment of Across the Airwaves where Indy and Sparty take the opportunity to directly address some of the comments left by our community. In this episode, we take a look at some of the more controversial comments left on our videos.
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Panic is infectious, and the dying media are a primary vector

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, John Tierney looks at the two lethal waves of contagion the world has suffered since 2019, the Wuhan Coronavirus itself and the media-driven panic that almost certainly resulted in far more deaths than the disease that triggered it:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Instead of keeping calm and carrying on, the American elite flouted the norms of governance, journalism, academic freedom — and, worst of all, science. They misled the public about the origins of the virus and the true risk that it posed. Ignoring their own carefully prepared plans for a pandemic, they claimed unprecedented powers to impose untested strategies, with terrible collateral damage. As evidence of their mistakes mounted, they stifled debate by vilifying dissenters, censoring criticism, and suppressing scientific research.

If, as seems increasingly plausible, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, it is the costliest blunder ever committed by scientists. Whatever the pandemic’s origin, the response to it is the worst mistake in the history of the public-health profession. We still have no convincing evidence that the lockdowns saved lives, but lots of evidence that they have already cost lives and will prove deadlier in the long run than the virus itself.

One in three people worldwide lost a job or a business during the lockdowns, and half saw their earnings drop, according to a Gallup poll. Children, never at risk from the virus, in many places essentially lost a year of school. The economic and health consequences were felt most acutely among the less affluent in America and in the rest of the world, where the World Bank estimates that more than 100 million have been pushed into extreme poverty.

The leaders responsible for these disasters continue to pretend that their policies worked and assume that they can keep fooling the public. They’ve promised to deploy these strategies again in the future, and they might even succeed in doing so — unless we begin to understand what went wrong.

The panic was started, as usual, by journalists. As the virus spread early last year, they highlighted the most alarming statistics and the scariest images: the estimates of a fatality rate ten to 50 times higher than the flu, the chaotic scenes at hospitals in Italy and New York City, the predictions that national health-care systems were about to collapse. The full-scale panic was set off by the release in March 2020 of a computer model at the Imperial College in London, which projected that — unless drastic measures were taken — intensive-care units would have 30 Covid patients for every available bed and that America would see 2.2 million deaths by the end of the summer. The British researchers announced that the “only viable strategy” was to impose draconian restrictions on businesses, schools, and social gatherings until a vaccine arrived.

This extraordinary project was swiftly declared the “consensus” among public-health officials, politicians, journalists, and academics. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, endorsed it and became the unassailable authority for those purporting to “follow the science”. What had originally been a limited lockdown — “15 days to slow the spread” — became long-term policy across much of the United States and the world. A few scientists and public-health experts objected, noting that an extended lockdown was a novel strategy of unknown effectiveness that had been rejected in previous plans for a pandemic. It was a dangerous experiment being conducted without knowing the answer to the most basic question: Just how lethal is this virus?

The most prominent early critic was John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford, who published an essay for STAT headlined “A Fiasco in the Making? As the Coronavirus Pandemic Takes Hold, We Are Making Decisions Without Reliable Data.” While a short-term lockdown made sense, he argued, an extended lockdown could prove worse than the disease, and scientists needed to do more intensive testing to determine the risk. The article offered common-sense advice from one of the world’s most frequently cited authorities on the credibility of medical research, but it provoked a furious backlash on Twitter from scientists and journalists.

‘Armoured’ and ‘Unarmoured’ Carriers – Survivability vs Strike Power

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 2 Jan 2019

In which we try to unpick the somewhat thorny issue of armoured vs unarmoured flight decks in WW2 carrier design.

Want to support the channel? – https://www.patreon.com/Drachinifel​

Want to talk about ships? https://discord.gg/TYu88mt​

Music – https://www.youtube.com/c/NCMEpicMusic

July 22, 2021

Conservative cancel culture?

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

Kurt Schlichter addresses the notion that “cancel culture” is alive and well among conservatives as much as it is among progressives:

“A little Black Rifle Coffee pour over this morning.” by jonmrogers is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Is there a conservative cancel culture? No. What there is now is a consensus among conservatives that we will refuse to subsidize institutions and entities that hate us. “Cancel culture,” properly understood – in this time of words meaning whatever they need to mean at any given moment, I’m going to have to insist on fixed definitions – is the attempt to use formal and informal sanctions to stop people from expressing dissenting views. But conservatives don’t care what the conservatives who cry about it when they are caught shafting us – hi Kristi! – think; conservatives care about what these people do or don’t do. Labeling our rejection of squishes and RINOs as “cancel culture” is a cheesy attempt to stop us from insisting that conservatives actually conserve. If the left, and the GOPuffballs, want to call this act of self-preservation “cancel culture” and shame us into unilateral disarmament in the name of some sort of pseudo-consistency, let them try. We’re not tying ourselves up with alleged “principles” anymore; ideological bondage is not our scene.

[…]

There was a certain coffee company created by vets that embraced a kind of vet-bro/gun vibe and it worked hard to cultivate a following in the conservative community. And then they stamped their combat boots hard on their own tender beans. Black Rifle Coffee Company’s problem provides an important lesson not just for companies seeking to operate on the conservative tip, but for GOP politicians as well.

What happened? BRCC gave an interview to The New York Times that many cons saw as taking sides against us conservatives. Did it or didn’t it take sides against us? The company denies it and is trying to repair the damage, but the facts of the case are not the point we are discussing here – the point is how conservatives, the cheated-on wives of American politics, reacted when they felt, rightly or wrongly, betrayed.

The conservatives went nuclear. Here’s the thing a lot of people seem to not understand. No faction has been screwed over by its own side more than conservatives. How many politicians, when they had the power to do the conservative things they ran on, opted for favorable WaPo coverage over keeping their promises? The incentives to cooperate are huge … like coverage in the DC paper of record explaining how one has “grown”. But we’re done with the bait-and-switch. We’re super-sensitive and super-suspicious, because we’ve been burned before.

So, conservatives have a hair trigger for perceived betrayal – if they even suspect it, they go off. Those seeking our support should act accordingly, as cons have been serially betrayed for decades. Take W, please, back to his ranch to paint his paintings. But before you do, remember what he did to all of us who defended him when he refused to defend himself – he talked smack about us as he partied with his new pals the Clintons and Obamas.

The Ahoy Crew used to at least pretend to be with us – Cap’n Bill Kristol, David Aptly-Named French, Jonah Heavy G Goldberg, and the rest turned on us the second they perceived their sinecures were in peril due to our swelling demand for actual victory.

Them or us. Pick one. But you can’t choose both, or neither.

Update: The CEO of the company is either in desperate damage control mode or genuinely upset at the misrepresentation of his views by the New York Times:

Let’s get the air cleared right away. Black Rifle Coffee’s founder and CEO has spoken out and is disputing how his comments were presented by the New York Times and represented by those reacting to the article, who were led to believe that Black Rifle Coffee bashed conservatives.

Evan Hafer decided to set the record straight regarding the “significant amount of misinformation being put out on the internet” about Black Rifle Coffee and about statements that he has made.

Hafer quickly debunked the notion that he made derogatory remarks about BRCC’s customers or conservatives and then proceeded to explain how the New York Times deliberately twisted his words and took them out of context. According to Hafer, his conversation with the NYT Magazine reporter was in the context of racism and anti-Semitism in America in light of Hafer being the target of an organized attack last year because of “my last name and my heritage.”

“We were purely discussing that,” Hafer says, and he was not conflating those groups with conservatives.

“The New York Times, as we know, the chances of them being objective were fairly slim, but we gave them the opportunity,” he added. He went on to mention veterans issues he hoped to bring attention to. But, unfortunately, the New York Times chose to go with “the salacious headline” about the company instead.

Hafer reiterated that racists and anti-Semites have no place in his company.

Bourbon, almost an accidental hit

Filed under: Business, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At TownHall, Salena Zito discusses the way Bourbon became a popular modern beverage from a none-too-promising eighteenth century beginning:

“Bourbon Bottles” by larryjh1234 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

About 250 years ago, farmers looking for a way to make their surplus corn crop profitable decided to distill it. Today, that leftover grain has become a billion-dollar industry and a symbol of the Bluegrass State’s identity, economy and culture.

“How bourbon came about is (what) … the American spirit looks like: business, independence, freedom, a little bit of luck and a lot of perseverance,” said Justin Thompson.

Thompson and his colleague Justin Sloan are the proprietors of The House of Bourbon, the world’s largest bourbon store, located on West Main Street in Lexington right across from Mary Todd Lincoln’s childhood home.

And right now, business is booming.

Thompson and Sloan started collecting rare and vintage bottles of bourbon 20 years ago, when the drink was out of favor. Then, four years ago, the state passed a law allowing the resale of distilled spirits and the duo opened their store, selling not just their stockpile but the history of the drink itself.

Bourbon is concocted from a strict formula. “By law it has to be made with a minimum of 51% corn, aged in charred new oak barrels and stored at no more than 125 proof and bottled at no less than 80 proof,” Thompson said.

But its sweet, rich flavor was actually born out of happenstance. In the early days, the best market for bourbon was on the East Coast, so farmers had to ship their barrels down the Mississippi to Louisiana then around Florida and up the coast. The trip took months but also allowed the whiskey to age beautifully.

“When merchants along the East Coast started marveling about this red whiskey with its unique flavor, that marked the beginning of the bourbon industry,” said Thompson.

In 1964, Congress deemed bourbon the nation’s native spirit, and there’s nothing more American than enjoying a sip of the brown stuff in a classic cocktail like a mint julep or an Old-Fashioned on the Fourth of July weekend.

July 20, 2021

Does Facebook have a war on history?

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published 19 Jul 2021

Does Facebook have a war on history? The answer is a simple no but the story is complicated.

In this episode I am joined by author and reporter Peter Suciu on his article “On Facebook, History Can Violate Community Standards”.

To quote the article * One thing that is often taught to students of history is that “history” didn’t happen. Events happened in the past, but history is just our way of chronicling those events. There is also a saying that history is written by the winners, but that too isn’t entirely accurate – if history were only written by the winners we’d never hear of the setbacks, mistakes made by generals or losses incurred by said winners. History, to put it bluntly, is written by historians and those with knowledge of past events.

On Facebook it now seems that merely writing about – and then sharing those writings – could violate community standards. Even in this era of “fake news” it isn’t so easy to understand why the social network has taken this stance – end quote.

Recently an incident on Facebook lead me to create this video … while scrolling through my Roman themed history groups I noticed a post by a member showing that their history post had been taken down by Facebook for violating community standards. The post was a picture of the Roman Eagle with SPQR under its feet. This particular illustration was actually from the Rome Total War Gaming Franchise and that lead me to wonder more about how and why Facebook targets certain posts?

Is there confusion among Facebook employees and its algorithms involving not just Ancient History but specifically Roman History?

Why are Third Reich posts and photos censored? And why are they censored even if there are no violent images or symbols of hate shown?

Why are militaria groups coming under fire for trading, buying and selling Third Reich memorabilia when other memorabilia such as relating to the USSR or the CCP are deemed acceptable?

Why is Facebook warning me that the history groups I’m in may be exposing me to extremist content?

These are questions that I pondered while making this episode and so I hosted a fellow history buff and militaria collector on whether or not history can violate Facebooks Community Standards?

Support our great guest at all these links below!

On Facebook, History Can Violate Community Standards
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuc…

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterSuciu

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuc…

National Interest: https://nationalinterest.org/profile/…

His awesome history store: https://www.plundererpete.com/

Reference Links Below!

Facebook warns users they may have been exposed to ‘harmful’ extremists.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/faceboo…

Facebook bans historical St. Augustine groups, pages: Is the word ‘militia’ to blame?
https://www.firstcoastnews.com/articl…

History-themed Facebook groups have become a magnet for racist content.
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-…

An article involving Channel host Nick Barksdale and Facebook.
https://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/202…

Inside “Facebook Jail”: The Secret Rules That Put Users in the Doghouse.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-f…

July 19, 2021

Talk is cheap, as a pizza chain CEO demonstrates brilliantly

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Miltimore examines the claims of the CEO of the &pizza chain in the Washington DC area that his stores have no problem getting staff because he pays them a “living wage”:

As far as PR goes, Lastoria gets an A+. He was profiled by Business Insider, CBS News, and other media outlets. His economics grade, however, is another story.

First, the notion that &pizza’s wages are uniquely generous is wrong. The minimum wage in the nation’s capital, after all, is $15.20. Considering that Washington, DC has one of the highest costs of living in the US, it’s not unreasonable to assume that &pizza is paying workers what amounts to the market wage of their labor (i.e. the price they’d get in the absence of a wage floor). This is a stark contrast to other parts of the United States. Fifteen dollars in DC translates to roughly $24 in Florida, $25 in Alabama and Tennessee, $26 in New Mexico, and $27 in Louisiana.

Second, Lastoria decries the alleged “shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage.” But it should be pointed out that &pizza is one of those businesses.

While there is no objective standard to determine what a living wage actually is, MIT has a Living Wage Calculator that allows readers to compute living wages based on the formula created by Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier.

To say that &pizza doesn’t pay its employees a “living wage” is an understatement. The living wage for a single mom with one child is $38.48 in Washington DC. For a single mother with two children, it’s $47.89. Indeed, even for a married couple with just one child, the living wage is $20.69 — nearly $5 an hour more than the average pay of Lastoria’s workers. (It’s unclear why Lastoria is having fewer problems hiring workers than other businesses, but it’s most likely attributable to local factors, such as the fact that he’s servicing nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in America.)

Finally, Lastoria’s claim that higher wages increase productivity enough to improve a company’s bottom line — the efficiency wage hypothesis — has problems logically and empirically. First, it implies that companies not currently paying an efficiency wage are willing to take less profit simply to make workers poorer. Moreover, efficiency wages have been shown to reduce employment, similar to minimum wage laws.

Lastoria might see the $16 an hour average wage as exceedingly generous — especially when he compares it to lower nominal wages paid in other parts of the country — but it’s a far cry from a “living wage”, according to the model used by living wage advocates.

I asked Lastoria how he’d respond to those who say restaurants like his should be required to pay each worker a living wage. He didn’t respond.

Luxembourg FN49 Semiauto Sniper Rifle

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Jan 2019

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons​

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…​

After World War Two, Luxembourg was one of the nations which opted to purchase new FN-49 rifles. It bought a total of 6,203 of them for the military — an initial purchase of 4,000 semiauto SAFN rifles and a followup purchase of 2,000 AFN select-fire rifles and 203 semiauto rifles fitted with Belgian OIP telescopic sights. The scope mounts were commercial Echo mounts, designed and manufactured by an American engineer named Herkner, in Boise Idaho.

When Luxembourg replaced its FN49 rifles with the newer FN FAL type, the snipers were either scrapped or sold as surplus, but the scopes were kept and reused on FALs. However, the Luxembourg rifles used the same pattern OIP scopes as the Belgian military, and these are often found mounted to surviving Luxembourg rifles.

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754

QotD: Antifa

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As noted here many times, it helps if you think of Antifa not as a political movement but as a metastasising personality disorder, a Cluster B contagion. An attempt to dominate by deranged and spiteful egos, rendered in shattered glass and burning livelihoods. They will never be satisfied and can never be appeased, merely encouraged and emboldened by any concession, any excuse, any hesitation.

They destroy and burn and intimidate, and beat people senseless, because they enjoy it. It’s something they wish to do, and choose to do, repeatedly. It makes them feel powerful. Everything else is a pretext, a rationalisation, a lie:

    This is us taking the high road. This is us trying to create a world filled with love.

David Thompson, commenting on “Files of the Severely Educated”, DavidThompson, 2021-04-18.

July 18, 2021

“Yes, we know Facebook is not the only harmful corporation on Earth, but sweet-jeepers-boy-howdy it is a blood-curdling fart in the elevator of existence”

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

At Damn Interesting, Alan Bellows bids an unfond farewell to Facebook:

For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago. These fans are typically delighted to hear that a) we are still writing and podcasting; and b) there is a wealth of new content since they last visited. When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.

I never had anything like the number of contacts on Facebook that Damn Interesting had, but I had the same experience with people contacting me to ask if I’d given up blogging because none of my posts were showing up in their timelines any more. As more information came out about just how creepy Facebook’s activities are, I stopped even trying to share to that site and eventually stopped linking to any content hosted there. For video credits where the only link for a creator is their FB page, I choose not to make it an active link (although I don’t remove the text). The only use I had after that was for keeping in touch with a few family members who only use that platform, and even that went away after I got locked out of my personal account anyway.

This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.

[…] In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.

We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent.

This bit of belated information prompted me to check the settings on the Share This plug-in I’ve been using for several years and yes, all this time I’ve been inadvertently enabling FB to track anyone on my blog who uses that button (and possibly any other sharing button — that isn’t quite clear). I’ve eliminated that plug-in just in case.

Our reasons for leaving are not entirely abstract. We’re sure many of you, like us, have experienced first-hand how Facebook gives people license to be their worst selves. It can elevate mere differences of political opinion into anger and hostility, pushing friends and family into extreme views, turning loved ones into ugly caricatures of their former selves. Perhaps you have even regretted some of your own posts there; the Facebook interface is designed to make it difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements. It gives undeserved forum to misinformation, disinformation, and hate. Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression. Facebook subtracts from the quality of the world at a magnitude seldom seen in history, and we’ll all be better off when it goes away.

H/T to Robert Swanson (@WWI) on Gab for the link.

A different kind of “tone policing”

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John McWhorter on a recent study on interactions between the police and the general population:

“Police stop” by San Diego Shooter is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

A fascinating, and depressing, new study will be celebrated as revealing the subtle but powerful operations of racism. It also reveals, however, the pitfalls in the way we are taught to address that racism these days.

The study shows that police officers tend to talk in a less friendly way to black people they stop than white ones. People were played slivers of body-cam audio of the officers talking to citizens, with the content of the exchange disguised. People could tell with dismaying regularity what color person the officer was speaking to simply by the tone of voice. It wasn’t that officers outright sneer at black people. Rather, their tone with whites tends to be more pleasant, to have a hint of cheer, whereas with black people it is more impersonal, flat, unwarm.

The study also shows how these things fashion a vicious cycle. People tested who had negative experiences with cops and/or less trust in them processed even the exchanges the cops had with white citizens as less positive than other people tested did. That is, their life experience has implanted in them a distrust of the cops, that can anticipate actual interactions with them – and certainly, of course, unintentionally pollute them.

* * *

This study reminds me of something else that goes in the other direction. To whites, subtle things about black communication, including vocal tone, can come off as threatening when no threat is intended.

I once happened to hear two 30-something black men talking about a misunderstanding one of them had had at work. They were just unwinding, but there was what many might process as a tinge of impending battle in their voices, inflections and gestures. “Man, I wanted to ‘Mmmph!’ [jab of the arm, click of the tongue] Gimme a break! An’ I was like … [putting on a challenging glare] don’t even start.”

No black listener would assume these guys actually meant the hints at violence literally. However, outside listeners can hear this way of talking as edgy. Kelefa Sanneh’s term for this twenty years ago, writing about rap and its lyrics, was perfect: a certain “confrontational cadence”.

Yes, all people trash-talk. But this particular way of talking has a special place in black American culture. No, that’s not stereotyping: sympathetic black academics have documented it. CUNY’s Arthur Spears, today one of the deans of the academic study of black American speech, has written about what he calls “directness”. Speech “that may appear to outsiders to be abusive or insulting is not necessarily intended to be nor is it taken that way by audiences and addressees,” Spears noted. He then quoted a father-child exchange: Father: “Go to bed!” Little boy: “Aw, Daddy, we’re playing dominoes.” Father: “I’m gonna domino your ass if you don’t go to bed now.” Notice how awkwardly this, or Eddie Murphy’s routine about the mother throwing the shoe in Delirious, would translate into the world of Modern Family.

This “confrontational cadence” can inflect even casual exchanges between black and white people. Aspects of black intonation, steeped in a lifetime’s experience in a language culture that values performative aggression as a kind of communal élan, can sound cranky, disrepectful, and even aggressive to a white person. It is all but impossible that this does not color encounters between black people and white cops; I highly suspect a study like the first one I mentioned would reveal it.

July 17, 2021

“Now I am become Twitter, the destroyer of worlds”

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

In UnHerd, Douglas Murray remembers what it was like before Twitter ruined everything:

Fifteen years ago today, an innovation was unveiled that has probably changed our lives as much as any other this century. It was on 15 July 2006 that software developer Jack Dorsey and his team launched an online platform where text messages of 140 characters could be shared in a group; six days later Dorsey sent his first tweet, launching a new age of reasoned debate and engagement.

There are some who want to celebrate today — principally Dorsey, along with the small number of other people who have become unimaginably rich off the platform. But for everybody else on the planet, I suspect we should welcome the anniversary with roughly the same enthusiasm that we would the emergence of the Ebola virus. For the further away we have come from Twitter’s birth, the clearer it has become that the platform is a source of unimaginable harm to almost every aspect of society.

In the early days, it didn’t feel like this. Like Facebook, Amazon, Google and the other Big Tech monoliths, it all started out so well. Twitter was actually fun back then. People said whacky things. There were cat videos. There was Follow Friday and friendships were made. As professional and amateur newshounds took to the platform, it became the fastest way to learn about any developing story.

If something was going on, Twitter was there first, certainly ahead of the BBC or any of the other news establishments who had to lumber through the old legal and editorial hurdles, rather than enjoying the lightning-quick response time of social media. Politics is a drug, and the most successful drugs provide an instant hit. But they are also the most dangerous, and the downsides soon started to assert themselves.

Soon many started using the site in a game of competitive grievance, or competitive sanctimony. They took obvious glee in targeting victims who had transgressed some moral code; the obvious righteousness of these online crusaders meant they rarely recognised themselves as the aggressors or bullies.

And soon it became apparent that, while everyone was on the site, everyone also hated it. Those on the ideological Left began to turn against the platform when it became clear that it allowed their opponents on the Right to spread “hate”, a scourge which they defined generously. Just as they used it themselves to spread their message.

This all reached its nadir with Donald Trump, whose presidency is to many people the most concrete result of Twitter. The world watched aghast as Trump was able to say often the craziest of things to millions upon millions of followers, speaking unfiltered and directly — in a way the old news media would never have allowed. When he won the presidency and then thanked Twitter for the helping him to get it, many of these natural Twitter followers lost their faith in the platform. How could they have let it happen? It was their platform, after all, this noisy minority of the American and British electorate. Indeed, if you had read UK Twitter ahead of the 2019 election, you would have been absolute certain of a Jeremy Corbyn landslide. Where were these millions of Tory voters who didn’t like Jeremy?

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