Political labeling considered harmful
Journalist Mike Masnick at Techdirt avoids naming politicians' party affiliation unless it’s essential to the story, because, he says, everybody then starts arguing on the basis of team rather than issues.
Maybe it makes sense for all of us to do the same in political discussions: avoid labels like Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, progressive, MAGA, lefist, and so on. It’s just a lot of tribalism and name-calling.
Clearly, you often have to use labels. For example, right now, there’s already a lot of talk about the 2024 Presidential election, and if you’re talking about a particular candidate, you often need to say which party nomination he’s seeking, especially if the candidate is not well known on the national stage.
But much of the time, the labeling is just alienating–especially when you’re not talking about a politician or influencer, and you’re just regular citizens interacting.
I think about this kind of thing a bit. I think two existential threats facing the US today are the Republican Party and partisanship, and I am very aware of the inherent contradiction in that belief. Maybe taking a minimalist approach to labeling is a good step toward reconciling that contradiction.
Microsoft is offering unlimited time off for US staff.
Not always a great deal for employees, who might feel precarious about taking time off, and also don’t get paid for unused time off if they get laid off, fired, or leave of their own volition.
An indigenous tech group asked the Apache Foundation to change its name.
Brian Behlendorf, a co-creator of the popular web server, said in 2020 that he chose the name out of a romantic image of the Apache tribe having fought nobly against a conquering aggressor. The problem, says Natives in Tech is that there isn’t just one Apache tribe, there are eight. And they’re not extinct—they’re still around.
Notably, a stereotypical “pure, reverent, and simple” depiction (i.e., a “noble savage”) “distances Indigenous people from modern technology, the very thing the [Apache] foundation represents,” Natives in Tech writes.
Gentleman logs every slice of New York pizza he’s eaten since 2014, including photos on an Instagram account.
New York pizza is the best pizza.
We just started watching this show “Jellystone” with Kevin Costner and we’re still waiting for Yogi Bear to put in an appearance. Maybe in a later season?
A couple of weeks from now, I’m taking my first business trip since December, 2019. It’s more than 400 miles. Given the state of air travel lately, I believe I will walk.
WINDOWS: Your fingerprint couldn’t be recognized. Try again with a different finger.
ME: Yeah, sure, I’ll just dig around in my serial killer souvenir box and see if I have a spare.
12,000 California seniors went to the emergency room in 2019, reporting cannabis-related problems. [7 San Diego/Eric S. Page]
I was going to make a joke about this but then I remembered that people needing to go to the emergency room isn’t funny.
Laid-Off Workers Are Flooded With Fake Job Offers.
“Virtual hiring and remote work have made it easier to swindle job seekers."
Here are scam warning signs, according to author Imani Moise at The New York Times:
- Misspellings and others errors in recruitment sites.
- Interviewers who won’t do video or even phone calls—they insist on text chat.
- Employers who want you to pay upfront for computers and other equipment, and promise reimbursement.
- Scam employers will ask for your bank account and social security numbers during the interview. The time to give out your bank account number is AFTER you’ve been hired, for direct deposit of your paycheck.
The Social Security number is a tricky one for me—I can maybe see legit reasons to ask that during the job interview process. Indeed, I can’t remember whether I’ve been asked that before being hired on any jobs I’ve had—maybe I have been, and gave it out.
Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man? “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott was actually a trans man, though applying 20th/21st Century concepts like “transgender” to historical figures is tricky and controversial, says Peyton Thomas at The New York Times.
Exit.
Libertarians such as Peter Thiel dream of escaping society, and they’re tearing society apart to do it.
Hari Kunzru at Harpers:
If freedom is to be found through an exit from politics, then it follows that the degradation of the political process in all its forms—the integrity of the voting system, standards in public life, trust in institutions, the peaceful transfer of power—is a worthy project. If Thiel, the elite Stanford technocrat, is funding disruptive populists in American elections, it’s not necessarily because he believes in the wisdom of their policy prescriptions. They are the tribunes of the “unthinking demos.” If the masses want their Jesus and a few intellectuals to string up, it’s no skin off Charles Koch’s nose. Populism is useful to elite libertarians because applying centrifugal force to the political system creates exit opportunities. But for whom?
…
Fueled by the pandemic and the crypto boom, such exit schemes have multiplied. Bitcoiners look for an escape from financial oversight and transhumanists look to escape their bodies, while rich preppers design personal lifeboats to escape from social collapse. Some exit evangelists, such as the investor Balaji S. Srinivasan, are still touting the project of a new nation of “cloud first, land last.” Others are just making sure that in the great supermarket sweep of life, they get to fill their shopping carts before their neighbors do.
A lot of rain today here in San Diego. Flooding hundreds of miles north of us in Santa Cruz and south to Santa Barbara.
Montecito, a community in Santa Barbara about 200 miles north of us, was evacuated.
No significant damage here so far, but a lot of rain.
The learned helplessness of Pete Buttigieg [Cory Doctorow]
Obama and Trump were patsies for the airlines, Biden is worse. Holiday snafus involving Southwest and other airlines are just the latest example of a dysfunctional industry and regulators.
Buttigieg is the Secretary of a powerful administrative agency, and as such, he has broad powers. Neither he nor his predecessors have had the courage to wield that power, all of them evincing a kind of learned helplessness in the face of industry lobbying.
Contrast Buttigieg’s Transportation Department with the muscular FTC under Lina Khan, who knows the law and uses it for the American people.
Why The American Radical Right Is Powerful And The American Left Is Meaningless.
Ian Welsh:
You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.
Also:
[The radical right] have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.
I don’t know how Welsh feels about the phrase “virtue signaling,” but it comes to mind here.
Independent Reporting Shows Cops Are Still Killing People At An Alarming Rate [Techdirt/Tim Cushing]. Despite calls for police reform, police are killing more people than ever. Neither local governments nor the federal Department of Justice are even keeping track.
Microsoft’s new AI can simulate anyone’s voice with 3 seconds of audio. [Ars Technica/Benji Edwards] I can think of no possible mischief involving this technology.
On the cutting edge of insurrectionist terrorism
Brazil riots weren’t a repeat of Jan. 6. They were an escalation, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day.
Broderick, an American who usually writes about internet culture, lives part of the year in Brazil.
Broderick:
Trump supporters dream of bringing America back to a vague fictitious past, some combination of the Reaganite 80s and a 1950s America that only existed in magazine ads. Bolsominions are much more specific. They want to bring back a military dictatorship and they’re not afraid to say it.
Also:
It feels like America is actually the country least prepared for the existential fight against authoritarianism that lies ahead.
For instance, Brazil’s current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or “Lula,” reacted quite differently yesterday than the US government did two years ago. Lula declared that the rioters were terrorists and triggered a state of emergency and arrested over 1,000 of them immediately. I told a few Brazilian friends this morning that we let our insurrectionists go home afterwards and they looked at me like I had just grown a second head.