Facebook was used as a political propaganda device years before this kerfuffle, with FB's approval, but they and the press didn't mind until it had an outcome they didn't like.
Really, there is a supreme irony in whipping the upper echelons into a frenzy about a propaganda crisis itself manufactured into social consensus.
Any time you find yourself a nice loophole that allows you to justify any effort, no matter how harsh, against a group, you're not fighting fascism, you are fascism.
You don't sacrifice the principles of free society to save free society, otherwise you don't really believe in it. It's just a pretense for the currently reigning zeitgeist to present itself as being timelessly right and universal.
If only there was some sort of mechanism to decouple the content from the design. Some sort of "sheet" of styles, that different users could choose according to their own preferences. It could even be targeted to specific dimensions and devices.
Exactly. They spend all this effort on a font that Joe Average can't tell apart from Arial or Helvetica, and which only a typographer would think is a "distinct typeface" with unique characteristics, seeing as it very closely resembles the existing font they use on this blog.
"We love typography because we see it as a building block for creating meaningful connections around the world." is the kind of word salad that only an art school grad could come up with.
The only substantial point is that they need to support a lot of languages and have readable text for all... So why are they already launching this font with only Latin character support? Because it's a pointless marketing excercise and nobody will care or notice the difference, or the fallback font they'll have included.
This is what happens when you give your design department their own domain name: like birds on the Galapagos islands, they evolve to compete in bizarre and non functional ways, unbothered by external selection pressure.
Yep. For an ideology that seems extremely concerned about how words like "chairman" or "craftsmanship" are perpetuating harmful gender biases, feminists sure never seem to notice that "creep" and "coward" are implicitly male.
More nuanced take: men are finally acting like women have told them to act for decades: talk about your feelings, open up, be in touch with your inner self... not realizing that only works for women because women's feelings matter and verbalizing them often enough will cause others to take action sooner or later. The reason men had the "irritating" habit of offering solutions is because it was inconceivable to most that you'd complain and expect that to actually accomplish anything.
It's like an attractive person telling the ugly that they just need to approach the world with a more positive attitude and good things will come in return. No honey, that's only because they want to have sex with you. Other people don't get shit for free.
As Warren Farrel said: men's facade of strength is their weakness, women's facade of weakness is their strength. When a man displays weakness, he forfeits his right to get help.
Two generations now have been utterly miseducated on gender by a feminized education system that treated masculinity as a condition to be medicated away and passive femininity as the role model, not realizing boys need adversity in their youth to prepare them for the complete heartlessness they'll receive as adults.
"But I love my husband!" Yes, until the marriage is over, after which he'll be devastated and pining for years, while you'll discard him like an old pair of shoes, still getting alimony, the house and the kids.
You're right. Just look at all those men telling us they don't feel safe because of what someone wrote, that the work place needs to be more welcoming to them, that being told they're bossy or domineering is insulting, that having to defend themselves in public debate is unacceptable, that they shouldn't be expected to choose between career and family, and that male hygiene products should be paid for by the government because having a dick and balls is just such a burden.
Wait no, sorry, I got that backwards. It's feminist women who do the female equivalent of this. And who find it deeply irritating if you only imply men do not exist to serve at their beck and call, and have zero obligation to them even if they damsel.
And no, not all women. But definitely even some who do have all the power, money and influence they could want. So who's fragile? Or perhaps more accurately: who succeeds in using their facade of weakness as a lever of power, time and time again?
I don't mind admitting the world is not fair, but it takes a special kind of obliviousness to look at women's position in the West in the 21st century and still see a class of victims and men as the ones who need to suck in their gut and soldier on for once.
"Centuries of privilege" is the kind of idiocy only a sheltered American suburbanite could come up with.
A century ago millions of young white men were too busy dying in trenches and being gassed to death with mustard gas in a war none of them could vote on.
Children worked on the field, in factories, and in coal mines, like their fathers were expected to.
And yes, women stayed home and took care of the kids because without electricity, plumbing, appliances, refrigeration and cheap groceries, that was actually a laborious full time job, and people were poor. Not to mention that getting through child birth and infant mortality was a blessing for both mother and child.
None of them were given opportunities simply by existing. On the other hand, providing scholarships to specific ethnicities, or creating special women-only pathways to entry, that is exactly that.
What people like Damore have tried to point out is that expecting demographics and sentiment within a field to match the general population, or else the "playing field" is not level, is an unwarranted assumption. It also puts the blame for actually society wide issues on a small group of people who had nothing to do with it.
If you want more black people in tech, start by addressing the way the US school system is stratified entirely by social class. Maybe you'll see a difference, and maybe that IQ gap will shrink. Maybe it won't, and what new "leveling" policies will you want to introduce then? Don't push out or disadvantage others out of misplaced revenge, and don't cite your American tunnel vision as justification.
People keep trying to make it so you can build complex sites and applications without coding, and in the end, what you end up with is far more complicated, fragile and inflexible than if you had just stuck with a normal development pipeline. Drupal's insistence on being both a product and a platform out of the box is what got them into this mess in the first place. They overestimated how much different use cases have in common, so they had to bolt on late-binding and lazy evaluation all the way up into the presentation layer.
I don't know if this is solvable. A CMS is complex enough that each of its functionalities deserves the care of good product and technical designers. These pieces ought to then be integrated into a cohesive whole, a la carte. For desktop software, we were able to pull this off pretty well, with 2000s OS X as the most cohesive, successful attempt, dictated by strong design guidelines and solid enough tech... And note that they invisibly transitioned CPU architecture along the way! But when online collaboration and multi device access became a requirement, everyone flailed and forgot the lessons of the past.
I don't think the current software market is capable of something like that. Almost everyone is trying to make captive SaaS where compatibility only exists on a service-to-service basis, in a subordinate manner. Branding is more important than cohesion, and flexibility and interoperability has taken a back seat to dumbing down.
Alternative explanation: if they actually go after Facebook all the previous shady shit US politicians have done would also come into question. So they'll stick to emotive appeals like "when elections are meddled with" instead of specific, measurable outcomes.
Recall that the Obama campaign got the explicit go ahead from FB to violate their privacy policy, and built up equally large databases. Heck, recall Obama explicitly endorsing Macron. Does that count as large scale meddling?
What's hilarious is that the same people worried about internet driven misinformation are now the ones jumping into action because the media told them to #deletefacebook.
The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.
The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.
As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.
What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.
Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:
Mozilla is like a modern American university. There is a parasitic growth attached that is only concerned with funneling more resources to itself in the form of bureaucrats and intersectional evangelists.
Democracy is in danger because publishers, large and small, lack the discipline and expertise to produce objective, quality reporting, and give a voice to people with something interesting to say.
Nobody forced them to chase clickbait or spend their days sourcing stories from Twitter and Tumblr. That's all on them.
And before you think that's an exaggeration, I'm talking about one of my (European) country's major national papers whose daily front page now consists of breathless American political drama, hashtags and gender politics. It's ridiculous, the children are running the show, the writing is atrocious, and their world view is about as sophisticated as a first year pol-sci major who's never held a real job.
Get those people to shut up and we'll be far better off. I look forward to their tears. If their content was worth it, they wouldn't be struggling.
Your Honour, the courtroom is a crucible. In it we burn away irrelevancies until we are left with a pure product, the truth for all time. Now, sooner or later, this man or others like him will succeed in replicating Commander Data. And the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be. It will reach far beyond this courtroom and this one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom, expanding them for some, savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him to servitude and slavery? Your Honour, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits. Waiting. You wanted a chance to make law. Well, here it is. Make a good one.
There is a noticeable gap in all this chatter about toxic masculinity. We're told that it's adolescent and immature male behavior, the worst of a roomful of teenage boys.
Ok.
So let's look at what the worst teenage girls get up to...
- Queen Bee'ing and passive aggressive social dominance games.
- Whisper campaigns, slut shaming and going behind people's backs.
- Crab bucket mentality, obsession over relative status and appearances.
- Recruiting authority figures to whitewash cry-bullying and enact revenge.
Now, does that remind you of anything that's been happening on the internet in recent years? Consider this: the supposed plague of online harassment aimed at women, typified by anonymous sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwifarms... Does that sound like something angry teenage boys would do, or angry teenage girls?
The toxic femininity was coming from inside the house all along. And the fact that those two words are never uttered together by supposed gender specialists ought to tell you something too.
Yes, things are now so good for the average person that you can create mass hysteria over mean words. Not a satanic child murdering panic, not teenage violence, sex and substance abuse... just words.
Once you stop consuming the outrage crack pipe, it all goes away. It's all a big game of signaling and sophistry. Ask yourself why the average journalist is qualified to whip you into a frenzy on topics that should rightly require years of study to become authoritative on.
You can be trusted, you just gotta turn your brain back on. When there is a breakdown in the accepted mechanisms for spreading social consensus, you go back to primary sources. It shouldn't be a surprise: nature has told us that monocultures are eminently vulnerable. The solution is always diversity, the actual kind, not the ideological puritanism that has appropriated that concept for themselves.
Really, there is a supreme irony in whipping the upper echelons into a frenzy about a propaganda crisis itself manufactured into social consensus.