LikeAFox's recent activity
-
Comment on Dan Souza and Andrew Rea make pancakes with a robot | What's Eating Dan in ~food
-
Comment on Three years of misery inside Google, the happiest company in tech in ~tech
LikeAFox Link ParentI also heard bits and pieces of this through the grapevine. To me, this article was somewhat less about Google's inherent organizational morality, and more about how vulnerable social structures...I also heard bits and pieces of this through the grapevine. To me, this article was somewhat less about Google's inherent organizational morality, and more about how vulnerable social structures are to a breakdown of trust. I don't know that I read Google's executive team as doing 'Evil' - trying to balance the business requirements of being a very large public company, with the requirement of fostering a complex, dissent tolerant culture is a non-trivial and I suspect not achievable objective.
During the first stages of the Damore fiasco it's hard for me to say that it was leadership themselves had made a fatal error. The section about Google security being handcuffed by their counsel when matters of “protected concerted activity” were occurring is something I either hadn't heard or hadn't processed before, that seems to me the pivotal moment at which the closed eco-system that was Google's internal social network became unsustainable. At that point the options were to either admit that having massive scale internal social communication was impermissible, or open the company up to dozens or hundreds of potential lawsuits. And once that sense of privacy and camaraderie were weakened by tamping down those communication channels, all other trust fell away with them.
To me, this article is about the weaknesses of large social systems when exposed to malicious forces.
-
Comment on What’s left of liberalism?: Why the left and right both seem to agree that liberalism has failed us. in ~humanities
LikeAFox Link ParentThat is not the same as being driven by religious motivation. This is a new, different movement and pretending it's the same as what came before is a failure to recognize the new challenges we're...They, like a lot of us, feel isolated and with little sense of community or belonging thanks to a bunch of aspects of modern society.
That is not the same as being driven by religious motivation. This is a new, different movement and pretending it's the same as what came before is a failure to recognize the new challenges we're going to face.
Maybe this is rhetorical too, but I'd say both religious and secular conservatives want order and hierarchy, where they as white men are above women, people of color, and LGBT people.
To suggest that most branches of modern conservatism favor order and authority is reasonable, to suggest that they desire a a society ordered in accordance with God’s law is not accurate or descriptive of what is driving these movements in our present reality. If these were the Evangelical backed religious-right that had come before, they would not be attracting the new audience that they've been given.
We don't have 30 years to completely phase out emissions and yet that's the best we're getting in a lot of cases right now.
That could be the case - I'm not a fortune teller nor do I have a PhD in any environmental science. But I do know that any response to the causes and symptoms of climate change will require massive state - and almost always international state - scale response. And I know that for an effective state response, you need a strong and stable nation state environment. And I know for certain that any 'revolution' that breaks down the lawful institutions established in the United States will absolutely under no circumstances create a stable enough state to tackle these issues at this scale within thirty years. To throw our hands to the heavens and pray for revolution is to pray for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people at very least, and to pray for a fractured and ineffective United States that will not be able to participate in the global community at the scale that would be necessary to negotiate co-operation towards mitigating the causes and impact of climate change.
And I know that the kinds of people who are most fiercely advocating for an abandonment of electoralism in favor of violent overthrow are a) not the most likely parties to win a violent revolution b) not the kinds of people I would trust to lead a stable nation state.
We are facing very real problems right now. We can't succumb to nihilistic behavior because the apocalypse might be starting in thirty years. We have to do the best we are able legislatively. And to have stronger legislative impact, the left needs to become more compelling, more convincing, to the groups that have either abandoned them or been purposefully driven out of the liberal-left coalition.
-
Comment on What’s left of liberalism?: Why the left and right both seem to agree that liberalism has failed us. in ~humanities
LikeAFox LinkThe nihilistic frustration of the class essentialist left continues to bubble up in articles like these, and it has gone from an annoyance to rage inducing. Articles like this are unmasked...The nihilistic frustration of the class essentialist left continues to bubble up in articles like these, and it has gone from an annoyance to rage inducing. Articles like this are unmasked accelerationist flailing.
But so do our opponents believe liberalism is a poor tool for achieving their aim — a society ordered in accordance with God’s law.
For a writer who claims to be an expert on his ideological opponents, this seems to me an insanely and perversely bad read of the modern conservative movement. The American liberal-left alliance proudly proclaimed for years that a generational shift would occur as the baby-boomer generation slowly began to pass, and that the capability of American conservative coalition to replenish itself had been diminished. It was hubris - there is an entire new generation of young conservatives flourishing in our country, breathing new life into culture-war flash points I thought for certain we would never need re-litigate. How does the author explain the growth of young, irreligious social-conservative movements like Gamer-Gate? How does the author read the Trump era - which both polling and a pair of eyeballs can attribute to anti-immigrant sentiment - as a push towards religiously ordered society? The GOP's consultant class had once dreamed that new Latin-American families might be persuaded to join their cause in service their imagined common traditionalist values. Instead, their party is now commanded by a president who on a good day can muster a taco bowl as a show of good faith to the South and Central American immigrants he spends much if not most of his hours maligning.
Articles like this serve as masturbatory fuel to a progressive ideologue class that is increasingly interested in framing daily politics as an irrelevant distraction until The Hour of Revolution inevitably arrives. These people are frustrated because the collapse of the conservative coalition that was promised to them appears to have drifted out of their reach - the things they imagined would be inevitable are not coming to pass. And so, they must preach not to the huge portion of the electorate that has moved away from their view and back towards conservatism, not to the still present and loud baby-boomer generation who views progressivism with contempt. They have turned inward so that they can assure their faithful that though The Prophecy did not come to pass when expected, it will come eventually - just perhaps not peacefully.
It’s possible (likely) the world we want can only be achieved outside liberal institutions — that is, beyond the ballot box —
This person is not interested in changing the world we have. The world we live in. This person is only interested in assuring the faithful. One day, the wicked will be punished, and utopia will be ushered in.
-
Comment on Explaining a novel to Pakistani intelligence in ~misc
LikeAFox LinkVery interesting column from Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif in Columbia Journalism Review. The intersection of art and state intelligence services in the west has a long history. State actors are...Very interesting column from Pakistani author Mohammed Hanif in Columbia Journalism Review. The intersection of art and state intelligence services in the west has a long history. State actors are often tempted to use movies or novels as a form of PR, in a world in which their opaque craft is viewed with suspicion or contempt - but it would be rare for an author or filmmaker to be at risk of detainment or death for an unflattering portrayal. This article examines the ways in which Pakistani journalism is facing crisis, and the process through which artists may be asked to condense their art into a form palatable to the powerful.
-
Explaining a novel to Pakistani intelligence
6 votes -
Comment on Life lessons from a lifestyle business - An interview with Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter in ~tech
LikeAFox LinkI haven't been participating on tildes very much for the past couple months, but a couple of posts on reddit this week had me thinking about the community here, why I haven't been checking in very...I haven't been participating on tildes very much for the past couple months, but a couple of posts on reddit this week had me thinking about the community here, why I haven't been checking in very much, and the primordial ooze from which sites like reddit and tildes sprung. I was a user of metafilter for a number of years, and still check in there at least several times a month - often finding myself frustrated that the community seems to have stagnated and become more dominated by an ever smaller number of legacy users (especially on the blue). I recalled a keynote talk by the sites' founder Matt Haughey on the challenges of balancing growth and community - which I did not find - but this 2016 interview with him seems to cover much of the same ground.
-
Life lessons from a lifestyle business - An interview with Matt Haughey, founder of MetaFilter
8 votes -
Comment on Reddit Experimenting with Community Points & Polls in ~tech
LikeAFox Link ParentThe idea of having weighted voting within the reddit platform is appealing and exciting to me. Weighting by activity could have drawbacks but it could potentially be the least bad of several...The idea of having weighted voting within the reddit platform is appealing and exciting to me. Weighting by activity could have drawbacks but it could potentially be the least bad of several options.
In fact, the idea of weighted 'trust' within Tildes, along with attenuation of trust over time were some of the things I was most excited to see in action over here. Reddit's primary voting structure - which has been copied everywhere from hackernews to the ubiquitous Discus platform - has proven to be one of its greatest weaknesses. Competing vote economy systems are something to encourage, not complain about IMO.
-
Comment on What are your favourite podcasts? in ~talk
LikeAFox LinkI'm surprised to see only a couple of Radiotopia podcasts mentioned. 99% Invisible is a very solid podcast about how design can impact our lives - often the stories are shaped through an...I'm surprised to see only a couple of Radiotopia podcasts mentioned.
99% Invisible is a very solid podcast about how design can impact our lives - often the stories are shaped through an architectural / built environment lens, but the show goes many other places as well.
Planet Money is mentioned above but it deserves an additional shout out due to how consistently excellent the show is.
On the Media by WNYC is a podcast about the way that the media and news environment shapes our world. I think the show often manages to highlight weak points in the reporting of mainstream media sources, and point listeners towards a better triage of information and news.
Crime Town was an incredible one season podcast done for Gimlet media, produced by the creators of the HBO documentary The Jinx. It's an in depth oral history and documentary of Providence Rhode Island, organized crime and the reign of republican mayor Buddy Cianci.
If you're into US politics, I do enjoy the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. There are a lot of fine options in this space, but I appreciate getting into the heads of the 538 team, and I appreciate that their show is often focused on discussing and critiquing the media narrative itself, rather than repeating or rehashing the same coverage that everyone else may be focusing on.
I've been subscribed to Babish since near the beginning of his channel - I think the timpano from Big Night was the first video I saw posted somewhere unless I'm mis-remembering. I think his channel has matured fairly nicely for someone who had near overnight success, but I hope it doesn't go too off the rails. Largely I've found the ones with special guests to be among the least watchable of his work, and that second travelling oriented project he started almost unwatchable for me.