It was funny when I was 12 or 13 or so and adults telling me that books were “too old” for me that I’d read four or five years before.
That happened frequently.
Read Moby Dick when I was in third grade. That was one of the books that I recall.
I never minded being underestimated. It’s very useful, most of the time.
This is true, and applies to me too:
A lot of what folks are now referring to as resistance is really just basic civic engagement.
— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) January 27, 2017
I use one of those extensions. More than half of the extensions I use (and all of the most important ones) will no longer work after Firefox 57 is released.
I plan to switch to Chrome then as it’s faster in most ways and has fewer strange issues. Most people will do the same since the reason most continue to use Firefox is because of the extensions model.
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is bad idea traps and the inability to see them. It’s a multiscalar problem — it happens at every societal level as with the housing boom and crash of 2008 down to the relatively-minor issue of the Mozilla organization clearly determined to exterminate itself, but failing to understand how it’s now just baked in.
I find it interesting that as with army ants driven by pheromones circling until they die, humans and their organizations can do the same, despite the fact that to anyone standing outside it’s immediately obvious what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.
If you want to see some really excellent acoustic guitar playing, you should watch this.
Reminds me of Deb Talan’s playing.
Kevin Drum claims that NAFTA is not really a big deal.
Not really a big deal — unless your job was shipped off or you were forced to work for starvation-level wages.
And read all of this, but particularly the middle section about the effects of NAFTA on Mexican farmers.
Contrary to what you might believe from reading what I write here, I am for trade deals and open trade — but only in the rubric of full protection of worker’s rights, the environment (NAFTA also caused devastation here) and quite a lot of redistribution of the shared gains. Without this, all “free” trade does is to make some corporations and individual richer and impoverishes everyone else.
By the way, these treaties are designed to do this. It’s not some side effect.
Drum’s typical blithe dismissal of the fortunes of millions of Americans’ and Mexicans’ plights angers me to no end.
The problem — or at least the main one — with Drum’s “not really a big deal” is that he’s looking at a spreadsheet. Some numbers on a graph.
The real world does not give a fuck about a graph produced in some think tank from bogus data provided by an economist trained to cogitate exactly in the prescribed ways that guarantees his or her salary gets paid.
Don’t get me wrong — having real data is important. What Drum cites probably is not, most of the time. But the data doesn’t actually tell you in many cases what you need to know even if it is accurate. Drum seems to think that having some numbers is as good as knowing the truth, when the truth is a completely separate entity. (The liberal version of truthiness or “alternative facts” if you will is that the numbers work out, the math looks good.)
As I observed the other day, one in the chamber during Russian roulette. On average, I am alive. This is Kevin Drum’s spreadsheet reality. It is also completely beside the point.
Obama might have had good intentions. I don’t know. “Might have” doesn’t matter. Hell, good intentions in many cases don’t matter.
For years, people like me warned everyone about supposedly-innocuous Obama initiatives like strengthening the CFAA and how that would only cause harm.
But no. Obama is a cool cat, he’s alright. It’s all good.
Until it ain’t.
This is why it matters what an administration does, even if it’s “on your side.” Sides are meaningless in the context of politics. Actions matter, because those actions can be built on and abused by the next person or party in power.
Some Americans are about to learn a hard lesson. Unfortunately, not nearly all those learning the lesson will deserve it.
“Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.”
-Shoshana Zuboff
If the universe is completely deterministic as scientists insist (and it may well be), then causality doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. No “choice” means no causality. The concept just doesn’t work and can’t work with complete determinism assumed.
Leibniz in the 1700s was arguing essentially the same thing with his concept of monads.
Science and its religion of complete determinism only reinforces this, not refutes it, a trap sprung on itself.
One major problem with science as we conceive it is that it attempts to sweep problems like this under the rug and deny they exist, when in fact they are foundational problems.
She really is.
What kind of brain injury does Nate Silver have, exactly?
But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.
On average is worthless. Just worthless. This is simply the geek tendency to proclaim, “Even though I was wrong, I was actually right!”
The only value of site like 538 is that it’s supposed to have better predictive power than me engaging in some tasseography or haruspicy. If it doesn’t do better than that it’s simply pointless intellectual ostentation. As I pointed out a while ago, many of the polls where it was most important were drastically wrong no matter what Silver says, or even Andrew Gelman claims (whom I usually like).
Think about it this way. I’m playing Russian Roulette. One in the chamber; six chambers. On average, I am alive.
Now wouldn’t you like to know which chamber that fucking round is in before you pull the trigger?
The first 10 on today’s playlist:
Now I will address the moronic parts of Lance Mannion’s piece, specifically those about neoliberalism.
During the Clinton campaign because she was and is in fact a staunch neoliberal, it became fashionable among the really-Republican but nominally-Democratic set to claim that that neoliberalism doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s used incorrectly by anyone who ever says it (no true Scotsman), and to the extent that it does exist, it’s actually good except when it isn’t.
Well, economists, sociologists and political scientists recognize that neoliberalism is a pretty defined and identifiable ideology, so what’s the deal with these assclowns?
“Go, team, go!” mainly is what’s wrong.
Anyway, it’d be really convenient if one of the dominant forces of our time that has caused such great harm had no appellation, no way to call it out, no entry on a dichotomous key, no method of pointing at it definitively. It’s an Orwellian move done for crass aims that was perpetuated mainly in support of a poor candidate in a terrible election.
As the Wikipedia article itself points out, the entire goal of delegitimizing the term “neoliberal” is to remove its power as an analytical frame. Effectively censoring the word is designed to prevent thought about it, thus strengthening it. Amazing how many people get cognitively conned and cheer it on as it’s happening.
Again: good job, folks. You really showed us all.
Mainly showed us how debilitatingly shit-for-brains you are.
This election will surely go down in history as the one where not only did we lose our democracy, but demonstrated that we didn’t deserve it in the first place.
About the Mannion piece I linked to earlier, I mostly agree that teaching most people math beyond fifth grade or so is a net loss to society. Wastes a lot of time that could be put to far better use. And it is a myth that it makes you a better thinker.
Math education is in other words a huge deadweight loss to society, that ends up making many people (who are otherwise intellectually capable) just utterly despise school.
My partner who is actually good at math (hell, she took and passed a general relativity class) absolutely loathed nearly all of her math classes.
So many better and more useful things that could be taught instead, and evidence also shows that it doesn’t take years of education for most people to catch up (since most math education is just re-hashing the same thing year after year). Those who are truly interested could catch up in a year or so if they want to do something math-heavy later on.
For the rest, it is worse than useless — it is actively harmful.
Have to get out of the mode of thinking about the abject stupidity enveloping both sides right now in the US. This will help.
And this is great. Miley’s voice is amazing without autotune. So much better.
The only thing worse than the ACA is no ACA.
Pitiful no matter how you look at it.