I don’t mean a lack of security in tech or otherwise infosec/opsec. That’s probably well on its way, mind, but that’s Marcus’s beat more than mine.
I mean the dudebro insecurity apocalypse, which has become increasingly hard to ignore, no matter how much the particular dudebros wish it could be and tell their cult-flavored followings it isn’t happening. [Read more…]
I recall reading something a while back that I couldn’t find when I went to write this, about a Christian flavor of atheism. Not the actual sorta-religion “Christian atheism“, but rather the position “I’m an atheist, but the God I don’t believe in is Jehovah.” To those of us who grew up in Europe or places colonized by Europe, this is to some extent unavoidable: to varying degrees, we’re soaked in an assumption of Christian faith and if we have to outright reject a religion we had before, it’s almost always some flavor of that one.
Similarly, there’s a lot of people who are agnostics or just secular in their daily lives to the point that even if they have a faith it doesn’t really have anything to do with them except the occasional big holiday observances or family functions. These people aren’t atheist per se atheist, but are still passively steeped in a Chritianity-saturated environment.
There are effects of this. It affects our values and our language – and with them, our marketing. It tells us what a hero is, and thereby what to do to look like one. It tells us that being the underdog looks good, that fighting an inhuman – dare I say, demonic – enemy looks good, and that the ultimate image to make people love you is to become a martyr. It tells us, in point of fact, what “cancel culture” really is. [Read more…]
I like Jessie Gender. I will heartily recommend her videos in general (though admittedly, I don’t much care for the strictly Star Trek content). She is a kind and forgiving voice with a flair for intellectually dissecting conflicts. Sometimes, however, too kind and forgiving, as with her recent video on the too-much-discussed Dave Chappelle.
The “audit” in Arizona has not gone to wingnut plan.
The final report was set to be released Friday, the result of a monthslong partisan review funded partly by taxpayers. The draft circulated Thursday night, showing the results of the review’s chaotic hand-count of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix. The tally in the draft document showed a net gain of 360 votes for Biden over the official results.
Over on our Discord server, user “Hemi” was struggling to decipher the illustrious Jordan Peterson’s book, “Beyond Order” (which, as an aside… isn’t that just a chilling title?). [Read more…]
Oh how I have been anticipating releasing this! Other than the music, this video is all me, from the writing to the voice work to the animation to even the custom software that actually runs the animations!
I am especially interested in what the locals might think of this, as it seems like it might be the sort of cynical humor that slots nicely into the worldview around here.
You might remember the old saw “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” Even if it wasn’t pretty obvious who benefits from that one, it’s never been true in practice anyway. I don’t think I need to list extremely smart people who are liberal or lefter than that, nor the shall we say less gifted out there who use their conservatism as counterfactual proof of their intellect. I will simply say that I have reason to believe I am not a moron, and as time goes by and the injustices produced by our various (but not terribly varied) current systems become harder and harder to miss it pushes me further into the guillotine-sharpening camp – and that is from someone who did an MBA so any claims that I do not understand business or capitalism in general are not going to hold a lot of water. [Read more…]
So, the Great American Satan alerted us here on FtB to the existence of a brief “Youtube Walkout”. For the next four days, until the 14th, we encourage you not to watch, embed, or especially upload content to YouTube. This is in response to their new terms of service which include the chilling clause saying that they reserve to right to “delete any account they deem commercially unviable”. That’s laying the groundwork to kick out anything they don’t deem to be pulling in ad revenue for them, which of course disproportionately affects small channels and marginalized voices. See Marcus Ranum’s analysis of this for more details and some useful links.
I agree with everything Marcus said there, but in fact… he didn’t go far enough. You see, it’s not just a matter of Youtube being even worse youtubery garbage than usual, which is saying something for a company that so egregiously polices, demonetizes, and hides queer content that they’re being sued for it. Twitter just announced new restrictions on content. Last December, Tumblr banned NSFW content and thereby took a chainsaw to their userbase and traffic. Facebook (and therefore Instagram) has always been shitty about queer content but now they’re willing to delete anything that even HINTS at queerness or sexuality.
One thing I have absolutely been through the wringer over is mental health.
I half wonder if it would somehow be interesting to collect my comments on this very site, because I have been here long enough that for most of the time – everything but the last two years, in honesty – my issues were uncontrolled. They were uncontrolled because they were unidentified; and they were unidentified because, by and large, nobody bothered to look beyond the first ideas. It’s one thing to go by “if you hear hoofbeats, assume horses, not zebras” but to keep saying ‘horse’ when you’re staring at a stripy black and white walking barcode is taking it much too far.
To be clear: I disagree heavily with Marcus (whose blog I follow assiduously) on this one topic. I believe that psychology and psychiatry very much are scientific disciplines. Empirically, there are hordes of people out there whose lives have been improved immeasurably by psychological techniques and psychoactive medication, so something must be working. But there are also hordes of people (smaller ones I hope and believe, albeit an anecdotal opinion) who aren’t helped.