The Sales department in any company drives a lot of technical and other change because they are the loudest/most extroverted, have the ear of management, and are not afraid to advocate for something because they are used to doing that in the course of their day-to-day job.

The changes aren’t always good, but just how much tech change is driven by sales is something I think that’s underappreciated when we discuss exactly how technical change occurs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the liberal desire to take away features and conveniences of modern life from everyone. Ostensibly, this is to achieve some sort of imagined equity and to beat back the forces of capitalism while ever-so-graciously “saving the planet.” Of course, that the only way they seem to imagine being able to achieve that is by rolling back our lives 50 or 100 years indicates it’s really about something else altogether.

This is just a blog post and as such I will not spend a lot of time building up an extensive case. You are welcome to do your own thinking and research, though I know most of you won’t. However, while insulting my own readers, there is a general lack of understanding in those types in specific and people in general of how systems work, and why their pseudo-solution of “just take away everything” is not one that’d even achieve the goals they pretend to champion. First, their methods of solving the problems that they’ve also misrecognized are themselves reflections and amplifications of capitalistic imperatives because they spring from the Thatcherian TINA. The “removers” are quite incapable of imagining that any system other than capitalism could exist and that such a system could provide the same or nearly the same boons and services that a capitalistic system could supply. This is not by far the only — or perhaps even the main — flaw in their thinking, if thinking it can be called, but it is nevertheless a fatal one. As should be obvious, once you adopt the methods of thought of those you are nominally opposed to, your opposition has already and irreversibly won.

Second, I also made above a little dig that read “if thinking it can be called.” And here I want to expand on that a bit because of course it is not “thinking” as I mean it and as should be meant. Their direction of semi-thought is a version of mood affiliation amplified by identity authentication in internet platforms, but it’s more than that, too. Earlier, I made some quips about the sexual thrill those people get out of the idea of diminishing and debasing other people’s lives. To some that might’ve seemed to have been in jest. But about that, I was and am completely serious. I think the sexual thrill is an enormous part of what they get out of it. Sure, most of them might not be (most of the time) “furiously masturbating” as they ponder how they want to harm others. That part was an exaggeration. However, the way they discuss their ideas about rolling back society and taking away so many good things is very akin to the way new lovers talk about one another — the same semi-obsessive focus, the same repetition of juicy details others are more than tired of hearing, the same non sequitirs. It’s all just right there in evidence.

The harm of course is that these “removers” whip themselves into a frenzy online, just like the January 6 insurrectionists, and then actually cause substantial harm in the real world. I think there is significant risk of this and that is why I am already in my own way working to resist them. A lot of what they are doing of course is just stotting for one another on Twitter or wherever else they congregate. But often, such extremism has consequences outside of Twitter or other internet grottoes. The time to forestall their asinine ideas is now, before they make all of our lives worse than they already have done just by existing.

All this ascetic nonsense makes me want to hop a flight to Germany and go watch a Jennifer Rostock concert. Dang, you people are wild.

#sciencehottakesfor200lavar https://t.co/pukjGNf5lk

— Drug Monkey (@drugmonkeyblog) October 11, 2021

Ah, bullshit. Totally.

I love talks in the flesh. The experience of being there and listening to someone in person is so fucking totally different than some Zoom glitchy poor-audio squawkbox experience. I’m really tired already of this neo-puritan monastic busted-ass nonsense. Next, these mooks will be telling me that concerts are terrible and that drooling and watching YouTube is just as good. I think so.

I mean, what the fuck. What the hell is wrong with these people? Do they really love sitting on their asses at home so much, and conclude that everyone else is just pretending not to enjoy this cursed existence?

Need to get to some conferences soon because I enjoy them and because it pisses off the right people. And do more travel, too, for the same reasons.

I got no interest in Hamilton, but exactly:

No way. The exact same talk is much more boring on zoom than it is in person. It's the difference between seeing Hamilton live on Broadway and seeing a grainy version on a little window in youtube from someone who filmed it with their phone.

— Neuro Polarbear (@NeuroPolarbear) October 11, 2021

Wow this person sounds vile and also mentally ill.

Glad I haven’t read any of her novels and now I deifnitely plan to avoid them. I think this is not satire? I don’t think it is but it’s just so hard to tell these days.

The whole jumbled jeremiad conflates all sorts of unrelated experiences and events that basically amount to: if someone finds it fun, it’s bad. Very, very bad. This matches the modern liberal anchorite ascetic tendencies perfectly, and the overarching desire to take away things from people. These neo-puritan urges are worrying because it leads to be atrocious decision-making that harms everyone and any possibility of a better future.

This is one of those “smart people” essays where the vocabulary is capacious but the actual content is lacking; it impresses simpletons but leaves anyone with a few brain cells to rub together wondering what all the fuss is about.

“We could just stay home and listen to Scarlatti….”

Oh shut up. Just shut up. You aren’t impressing anyone. And it’s not even good essay writing. What’s that phrase connected to, what does it have to do with anything that follows? The essay is an unstructured mess of lists of items the author personally hates, two dollar words that are unnecessary and add nothing, and has the repetitiveness of a 1950s pop song. If I were teaching English 101, I’d grade it an “F” apart from the content itself

My brain regrets that it has any part of this utter trash now encoded within it. Need a delete function.

Another significant cache of documents related to coronavirus work at Wuhan Institute of Virology and EcoHealth has just been unearthed—again, by the same group of internet sleuths. Regardless of what you think of the content, this pattern is troubling. https://t.co/lo0MAxzZlu pic.twitter.com/nYMSTBU88g

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) September 25, 2021

Great thread by Zeynep. I like how she discusses yet again how when people say the WIV was so very high security, blah blah blah, that in fact their certification level was irrelevant because they were doing bat coronavirus research at BSL-2 (about the same BSL as a dentist office).

So much good info in that thread.

The first ten on today’s playlist: