>a Chinese president gets first dibs on naming Zuckerberg’s kids. That's pretty bizarre even by Zuck's standards
Think of it as a diplomatic move against straight up invasion.
The Silicon Oligarchy
91–96 of 96 posts
Re: The Silicon Oligarchy
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them At this point, it seems like a non-falsifiable hypothesis. I constantly see how in american politics anything Trump says gets interpreted in most bizzare way possible, rationalizing it that he's speaking in secret code for his white supremacist friends. What really got me whas the point where american media quoted Trump on praising General Lee, as…
You may already know this, but when people say "white supremacy" they might not mean what you think they mean. For a certain strand of activist, "white supremacy" doesn't just mean the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, apartheid, black slavery, all the other obvious and overt forms of white racism. It refers to a vaguely-defined sense of racism that supposedly is omnipresent in American (and more generally Western) society, a…
I have a personality trait of always playing devil's advocate, regardless of my final opinion on the matter, so don't be surprised, but I'll switch sides here a bit.
Don't we all have some implicit biases? I know I do. I have had (and probably, unfortunately still have) biases about women and non-binary people, biases about people from other ethnicities and countries, and although I try to work them out, it's not something that can be done completely.
However, I can't find a rational reason to name these biases "racism" or "white supremacy", words that for any sane person mean not some subconcious thought process, but a fully concious evil. Using these terms in such a way is a very dishonest moat and castle tactic.
Re: The Silicon Oligarchy
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's the same threat I'm thinking of, the phrase apparently has a history for americans, like "Лес рубят, щепки летят" might for russians (or maybe not? is the Stalin association a purely anglophone one?). "Racially charged" is a thing in the US. I read russia freed the serfs in 1861, does anyone beyond historians have an interest in cultural influences of serfdom now? The US military doctrine differs with you on…
> If it's the same threat I'm thinking of, the phrase apparently has a history for americans, like "Лес рубят, щепки летят" might for russians (or maybe not? is the Stalin association a purely anglophone one?). It has a Stalin association, yes - but in russian culture, this phrase would first and foremost judged in context and with intended meaning. I would never call someone a stalinist just because of the fact that…
Spasibo for the review. I'll have to watch it beyond the "is power money or truth?" scene now :) Incidentally, your last sentence reflects upon the US police problem, because some of them seem to have taken a comic-book anti-hero "The Punisher" as an inspiration, or at least someone whose symbology to wear.
I agree that bad ideas should be allowed in discussions[1]. If we're still talking about the same poor idea, it's probably a good idea if one quashes the ideas (whether poor or good) that run afoul of a platform's violence[2] policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification... "You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people" (maybe reword your poor ideas to avoid saying "the shooting starts" in a country that distinguishes between assault and battery?) before publishing on that platform. I believe Theodore Roosevelt found his office a bully pulpit (note: not a bully pulpit) despite his lack of FB and TWTR.
Thanks also for the clarification of russian culture[3]. That sounds more advanced than anglophone (I am guessing the UK is not significantly more advanced than the US on this front, as Orwell makes it abundantly clear in both his fiction and nonfiction that he is a product of the english middle class), but I have no good suggestions for anglophones beyond education, which takes time. (not to mention that in the world of unvaccinated coronavirus, a two-student schooldesk is unlikely to be introduced in the US), time which is probably beyond the US Buxton Index[4].
[1] an advantage earlier US politicians had is that journalists would routinely rewrite even their on-the-record spoken comments to be more palatable in print. ("more" is an important qualifier here; Earl Butz resigned despite the fact that his jokes had been edited for taste when being reported)
[2] one amusing thing comparing US and USSR 70's and 80's movies is the completely different censorship. On one side you get very little blood, on the other very few breasts. (as for beasts, they're either scary or befriended. both systems agreed pirates are always villains) I was surprised by the ending to White Sun of the Desert because it was the first I'd seen a soviet shoot-out.
[3] I've learned some russian from Lavrov's poetry. Does anyone have suggestions for which pieces of Pompeo I might improve my english with?
[4] I learned of the Buxton Index from Dijkstra. Something else that stuck with me is that he said, as a young dutchman, he was educated to never start speaking a sentence before one knows how one is going to finish it. Maybe the equivalent for twitter should be "don't start typing before you've thought through the 140th character?" More cynically, the old IBM slogan ought to be revived: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-f...
Re: The Silicon Oligarchy
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is a private company, which uses private servers and network switches, that communicates with ISPs and their private equipment, to send the information we're talking about. Radio and TV use public resources (EM waves), to which they have been granted a government license, to transmit information, so the government can ask them to do certain things at times.
And the phone company? Aren't they a private company that uses private wires?
Most phone companies (and cables) were granted local monopolies that allowed them to build out infrastructure and amortized the cost over decades. (Actually, in the US, there was only a phone company for a long time: AT&T.)
These were regulated monopolies.
Re: The Silicon Oligarchy
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the phone company? Aren't they a private company that uses private wires?
Most phone companies (and cables) were granted local monopolies that allowed them to build out infrastructure and amortized the cost over decades. (Actually, in the US, there was only a phone company for a long time: AT&T.) These were regulated monopolies.
Which came first, the monopoly or the regulatory capture?
Re: The Silicon Oligarchy
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When the looting starts, the shooting starts" is a phrase by Walter E. Headley, the police chief of Miami, Florida, who said it in response to an outbreak of violent crime during the 1967 Christmas holiday season. Donald Trump was already an adult in 1967 and even if he didn't know this was a dog-whistle for white supremacists.... Facebook doesn't have to amplify destructive ideologies just because the ones who rela…
Oh, please. Walter Headley is so obscure he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. The closest he's got is a page for the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts", which wasn't created until after Trump had made his Tweet. The idea that this is a well-known racist catchphrase which anybody had heard of a month ago is absurd, and you know it. (For the record, I despise Trump. All I ask is that we keep our cr…
I would tend to agree but him retweeting a video of someone yelling "White power", clearly and distinctively multiple times does tend to lower the tolerance for any type of catchphrase that has a racist past.