Tag: technology

Relativity and the ideological spectrum

I’ve designed a nine-point ideological scale for reasons that will be readily apparent soon, and I’m in need of some clarifying examples. Here is what I have so far, but I feel as if there could be better examples. Ideally, the more famous the individual, the better; accuracy is far less important than familiarity.

One is extreme left, nine is extreme right. The goal is to clarify, not obscure or start arguments, so leave Hitler and anyone else likely to spark debate out of it.

  1. Vladimir Lenin
  2. Karl Marx
  3. Angela Merkel
  4. Bill Clinton
  5. John F. Kennedy
  6. George W. Bush
  7. Ronald Reagan
  8. Thomas Jefferson
  9. Ayn Rand

Another idea would be to provide multiple examples from different fields, from economics, from politics, and from philosophy. I’m entirely open to suggestion here, with one caveat: I am not at all open to suggestions of multiple axes or anything more complicated than a single 9-point scale.

And if you know what this is concerning, please resist the urge to demonstrate as much. When I want to make an announcement, I will make an announcement. In the meantime, keep an eye on your emails tomorrow.

The more things change….

It’s interesting to see how the new media, particularly Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook, are blithely walking in the footsteps of the old media:

When Bill Kovach decided circa 1987 that the Atlanta papers needed a bureau in Nairobi, he could afford to do it, because the paper was making a handsome profit from advertising revenue. The fact that advertising ultimately paid the bills — the source of revenue, whereas the salaries of the newsroom staff were an expense — was an aspect of journalism that a lot of Good for Democracy types never really figured out. Bottom-line considerations were far from the minds of most people in our nation’s newsrooms 25 years ago, before Al Gore invented the Internet, and then some guy named Matt Drudge became America’s Editor-in-Chief.

Oh, the pages and pages of classified ads — help wanted, real estate,
used cars, whatever — that were once such a magnificent revenue
generator for newspaper publishers. Oh, the display ads from department
stores, and the full-color advertising inserts stuffed inside that thick
Sunday paper. Nearly all gone now — gone with the wind, along with the
fat profit margins that allowed Bill Kovach the luxury of force-feeding
readers in Atlanta their journalistic broccoli about the famine in
Sudan. Gone, those glory days when newsrooms were so crowded, and every
major metropolitan paper had an “investigative journalism” team of a
half-dozen hotshots whose bylines rarely appeared in print except on
those tedious five-part series written for the eyes of the Pulitzer
Prize judges.

Yeah, once upon a time, every newspaper in every state capital in
America — from Tallahassee to Juneau, from Augusta, Maine, to Honolulu,
Hawaii — had its own local crew of would-be Woodward and Bernsteins who
believed they were producing journalism that was Good for Democracy.

Gone! All gone now!

In the same way the old media chased off its readers with what McCain calls “broccoli journalism”, the new media is chasing off its readers by telling them what they can and cannot say. In both cases, it is because the media wrongly believes it, and not its readers, are in control.

And that is only going to be of benefit to what we might call the next media, or if you prefer, the Alt Right media.

More entryism in Open Source

This is both pathetic and a naked attempt to inspire the useless entryists by giving them credit for trying to impose a Code of Conduct on a project. Techno-virtue-signaling at its finest:

Recognize all contributors, not just the ones who push code

This is a specification for recognizing contributors to a project in a way that rewards any and every contribution
whether or not it be code. The basic idea is this:

Use the project README (the most public part of most projects) to
recognize the contributions of members of the project community.

People are giving of themselves and their free time to contribute to open source projects in so many ways. It can be a real
time sink sometimes and so they should be praised for all their contributions (code or not). Use this project as an example implementation of the all-contributors specification (see the Contributors section below.

After all, where will we be if the contributors who don’t contribute anything feel bad about themselves? That would be like the Holocaust! You know who else didn’t give proper credit to non-coders? That’s right, Hitler.

    Literally Wu proves SJWAL

    Because SJWs always lie.

     [Larry Correia] and other conservative figures like Adam Baldwin are claiming that Twitter is breaking down on “free speech” and capitulating to the “SJWs,” which I guess means people like me. I have spent much of the last year asking Twitter and other tech companies to improve their harassment policies. There is one problem with Mr. Correria’s claim.

    There is no evidence whatsoever for it.

    None, zilch, zero. It’s a fantasy. A similar lie is going around that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian in charge of their Trust and Safety council, which is similarly baseless. I’ve spoken with a lot of tech companies in the last year and I have never heard anyone propose shadowbanning.

    The only “proof” that Twitter is shadowbanning people comes from a disreputable conservative blog, that is so disreputable it cannot even be used as sourcing on Wikipedia. That blog used anonymous sourcing, and was written by someone with a personal axe to grind against Twitter.

    The truth is, companies like Twitter are finally enforcing their own TOS if you threaten someone, dox someone, or set up an account specifically created to harass someone. That has led to some people being banned, and some accounts that perpetually break Twitter harassment rules to become deverified.

    The backlash against Twitter is by people that prefer these system to remain as they are – a place where the women in your life will get rape threats, where anyone can have their private information posted, and where swarms of vicious mobs are destroying people’s reputation with slander.

    The last I checked, almost 100 people have spread Mr. Correria’s baseless claim – and even more with Adam Baldwin. This is an important thing to fact check, and I hope you’ll share this to set the record straight.

    Remember, Literally Wu is so stupid and dishonest that in addition to claiming that he is really a pretty, pretty girl despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, he once harassed himself without forgetting to log out of his other account first. He is as in complete denial of Twitter’s actions as he is of his own sex.

    There is copious documentary and testimonial evidence that Twitter is shadowbanning various individuals on Twitter, among them me. Here is additional proof:

    Samuel B Roberts @SBRoberts10 Feb 22
    He’s so “boorish”! BTW, did the shadow ban thing end? I saw this on my feed.

    ConantheCimmerian ‏@ConanTCimmerian Feb 21
    Even though I follow him, I haven’t seen a direct tweet from @voxday in 2 weeks.

    Taxi Driver ‏@northofdoom Feb 20
    I never see direct @voxday tweets, despite following

    ChateauEmissary Feb 20
    Same here. No direct tweets from vox.

    Some fantasy. It is telling that Twitter’s Committee of Public Safety isn’t saying anything, but has stalking horses running around publicly denying what Twitter is observably doing. Notice that the dates mentioned above just happen to correspond with the otherwise inexplicable decline and subsequent recovery of my impressions despite the number of my tweets being flat and the numbers of my followers increasing during the same period.

    And if you weren’t already convinced that File 770 commenters are literal cretins, here is the relentlessly stupid Tasha Turner again:

    15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER
    A voice of reason

    That, in a nutshell, is why I am more concerned about what my dogs think about the upcoming US presidential election than about anything an SJW might “think”. Any connection between what they say and objective reality is purely accidental.

    Mailvox: why turn your back on conservatives

    Doc Rampage doesn’t understand why I’m not courting conservatives in building a new social media alternative:

    The words in parenthesis are not inherent characteristics of the group, but are prominent in the current environment.

        Left: envy, greed, (hatred)
        Conservatives: justice, propriety, (resentment)
        libertarians: pride, rationality
        Alt-right: clannishness, loyalty, (spite)

    The Left is always talking egalitarian, but a Leftist never passes up a chance to get ahead of his fellows and they are always trying to create hierarchies with themselves on top. This is because they only want egalitarianism due to envy–they don’t want anyone to have an advantage they don’t have.

    Everyone hates conservatives for being unreliable political partners. The reason is that their primary loyalty is not to a group but to abstract principles like justice, and they will follow their idea of justice even at the group’s expense, or even at their own expense.

    Libertarians are drawn to their beliefs in large part because they think that starting on a completely level playing field, they would come out near the top. Many of them are right–they tend to be intelligent and well-educated. But their pride in their own ability makes them unable to sympathize with the fact that most people need social support of various kinds.

    As to the alt-right, it is clannishness and spite that drives someone on the alt-right to capriciously insult conservatives in a message where they might instead be finding common ground and help in a common cause, driving them away instead of inviting them to help.

    It’s interesting to see how Doc Rampage’s observations are so perspicacious while his conclusions about the alt-right are so wrong. It’s not spite that causes me to turn my back on conservatives, but rather, the very conservative unreliability he points out that is why I have no interest in finding common ground with them. They are worse than useless; it would be a tremendous mistake to rely upon them because they are unreliable.

    Moreover, as Red Eagle and I showed in Cuckservative, conservatives don’t actually have any principles. They think they do, but what they really have is an attitude; one can hardly call it a philosophy. That’s why conservatives are forever going on about who is “electable” or which candidate is “serious”; those are not the words of abstract thinkers who reject pragmatism in the name of principle.

    Even their oft-proclaimed self-definitions are unreliable.

    If there are conservatives who want to help because what I’m doing will better serve their abstract principles than the alternatives, that’s great, but I’m not going to depend upon their support because I don’t trust them one little bit. I will place my trust in those who have repeatedly shown they have my back, in those who will not bug out the first time they get called names by SJWs or decide they don’t completely approve of my every word or action.

    What are the VFM? What are the Dread Ilk? Are they conservative? Are they libertarian? Are they alt-right? I neither know nor care. What I know is that they will be there when called. They will show up when needed. They are implacably opposed to my ideological enemies. And that’s all I need to know.

    Conservapedia is a good demonstration of what a social media project that relies upon conservatives looks like.

    “We need alternatives”

    Melampus the Seer sees the future:

    We need alternative platforms. Deplatforming is the very basis of SJW institutional tactics, and it works. Let’s use it ourselves, on our own platforms.

    A related question: why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? I’ve worked for a number of startups. They were all hard left to the core. Why so few conservative entrepreneurs?

    We do. And literally scores of VFM and Dread Ilk are in the process of making it happen. You will be called on to help in various ways soon. Be ready.

    Why haven’t conservatives built their own platforms? Because conservatives are conservative. I could have built a search engine back when Yahoo was just getting started, but I could see why people would pay to play games. I couldn’t see how one could make money simply by collecting free traffic, and in fact, one can’t do so unless one can a) rely on an unending supply of free labor or b) find investors who are either 1) willing to lose it all in order to be ideologically supportive or 2) are only buying in long enough to flip the company to the public.

    Guess what sort of people are happy to work for free, lose vast quantities of money to further their ideological goals, or work for predatory investment banks? Hint: they’re not conservatives.

    Conservatives are much more likely to build up their businesses organically, often by bootstrapping themselves. They would rather be building up their business than running around trying to play the flim-flam game of “raising money”. And that’s now how any of the social media giants were constructed.

    In the rare instance a conservative is involved in a project like this, he’s often pushed out by his former partners. One of the reasons Wikipedia has been going nowhere for years is because the guy with the actual vision, Larry Sanger, was pushed out by an SJW flim-flam artist, Jimmy Wales, who promptly surrounded himself with mediocrities who don’t know how to do anything but continue what they’ve been doing from the start while begging for money they don’t actually need to not do what they aren’t doing.

    And finally, conservatives tend to be paralyzed by the fear that someone, somewhere, might make money from their efforts. For leftists and SJWs, donating publicly is a form of virtue-signaling. They love to give both time and money and will do so at the drop of a hat if they think doing so is going to generate social credit for them.

    A conservative, on the other hand, doesn’t value that sort of social credit, and has historically been much happier giving to a charity that will buy Rolls Royces and hookers for its executives or a church that will use his money to house illegal aliens next door than to a prospective techno-magnate, because at least the former won’t make any profits off his donation.

    This is beginning to change, of course, now that conservatives realize they have been totally outflanked and lost the techno-cultural high ground. How much it has changed, we will see in the next six months.

    Twitter takes out McCain

    The thought police at Twitter are ramping up their activity:

    Robert Stacy McCain is an American success story. He has built a nationwide, dare I say worldwide following presenting his viewpoint and highlighting the public viewpoints of others who would rather keep their actual words and opinions under the radar because Robert Stacy McCain is loyal to his family, his God, his friends and the Truth.

    I know this because I’m proud to say he is my friend. I’ve learned an awful lot from him the most important thing being there is no substitute for actually being there, gathering factual evidence, seeing for yourself and reporting the truth.

    I guess that’s why Twitter’s new Star Chamber has decided to Suspend him sometime yesterday evening:

        I’m Robert Stacy McCain. I’ve been a journalist since 1986. My account @rsmccain was suspended tonight. #FreeStacy #tcot @ToniMZ81

        — Sex Trouble (@SexTroubleBook) February 20, 2016

        “@citznsoldier: This account suspension stuff is getting stupid. @twitter @rsmccain pic.twitter.com/dlckr17fsw” Very stupid

        — headnev (@headnev) February 20, 2016

    Ironically this caused the hashtag #freestacy to trend on twitter overnight until it suddenly no longer was able to autocomplete

        The hashtag associated with McCain’s suspension (#FreeStacy) was actually allowed to trend, at one point, but as Mike Cernovich points out, now it won’t even autocomplete. That’s one of the tools Twitter has been using to slow down hashtags, as of late. GamerGate no longer autocompletes, either, even though several anti-GG hashtags do.

        #FreeStacy is trending. @instapundit pic.twitter.com/y4C2azmWzr

        — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) February 20, 2016

    Now in fairness Twitter is a private company and they do have the right to run their business as they see fit.

    But I submit and suggest to twitter & their investors that the way to success is not to alienate half of your potential customer base particularly in an election year, furthermore as anyone who knows anything about tech can tell you today’s popular site can become tomorrow’s AOL & Compuserve in a heartbeat.

    Glenn Reynolds is not the only one losing patience with Twitter.

    Matz slaps down Typhoid Coraline

    The successful defense of Ruby against SJW infiltrators demonstrates the importance of having a strong project leader rather than a committee, or worse, a democracy, running an open source software project:

    The Ruby Community Conduct Guideline

    We have picked the following conduct guideline based on an early draft of the PostgreSQL CoC, for Ruby developers community for safe, productive collaboration. Each Ruby related community (conference etc.) may pick their own Code of Conduct.

    This document provides community guidelines for a safe, respectful, productive, and collaborative place for any person who is willing to contribute to the Ruby community. It applies to all “collaborative space”, which is defined as community communications channels (such as mailing lists, submitted patches, commit comments, etc.).

    • Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
    • Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
    • When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
    • Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.

    It’s worth noting that this not only defeats the primary, secondary, and tertiary purposes of the Code of Conduct that Typhoid Coraline was attempting to install in order to unseat Matz, but it can obviously be used effectively against SJW entryists.

    No wonder Typhoid is so upset. It’s a superficial victory of absolutely no utility for him.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    This is very disappointing. No one to report abuse to. No recourse for victims of harassment. Poor showing, Ruby.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    Sad that Ruby still doesn’t have a code of conduct. I don’t know what to call that thing.

    Coraline Ada Ehmke ‏@CoralineAda
    Unfortunately I fear that it will take a nasty incident for Matz to change his mind
    about a code of conduct. I feel bad about this.

    Shadowbanned by SJWs

    Twitter knows the SJWs can’t win on a level playing field, which is why they are attempting to silence the influential voices of the social media Right:

    Rumours that Twitter has begun ‘shadowbanning’ politically inconvenient users have been confirmed by a source inside the company, who spoke exclusively to Breitbart Tech. His claim was corroborated by a senior editor at a major publisher.

    According to the source, Twitter maintains a ‘whitelist’ of favoured Twitter accounts and a ‘blacklist’ of unfavoured accounts. Accounts on the whitelist are prioritised in search results, even if they’re not the most popular among users. Meanwhile, accounts on the blacklist have their posts hidden from both search results and other users’ timelines.

    Our source was backed up by a senior editor at a major digital publisher, who told Breitbart that Twitter told him it deliberately whitelists and blacklists users. He added that he was afraid of the site’s power, noting that his tweets could disappear from users’ timelines if he got on the wrong side of the company.

    Shadowbanning, sometimes known as “Stealth Banning” or “Hell Banning,” is commonly used by online community managers to block content posted by spammers. Instead of banning a user directly (which would alert the spammer to their status, prompting them to create a new account), their content is merely hidden from public view.

    For site owners, the ideal shadowban is when a user never realizes he’s been shadowbanned.

    However, Twitter isn’t merely targeting spammers. For weeks, users have been reporting that tweets from populist conservatives, members of the alternative right, cultural libertarians, and other anti-PC dissidents have disappeared from their timelines.

    Among the users complaining of shadowbans are sci-fi author and alt-right figurehead Vox Day, geek culture blogger “Daddy Warpig,” and the popular pro-Trump account Ricky Vaughn. League of Gamers founder and former World of Warcraft team lead Mark Kern, as well as adult actress and anti-censorship activist Mercedes Carrera, have also reported that their tweets are not appearing on the timelines of their followers.

    It’s pretty easy to tell when you’re being shadowbanned because your notifications decline dramatically. It’s also easy to see it in the 28-day profile.

    Notice how despite the number of tweets being flat and the number of followers increasing, the number of impressions and profile visits dropped significantly at precisely the same time. As it happens, that’s right when I noticed my notifications declining and people began letting me know that they weren’t seeing my tweets.

    The reason mentions don’t drop as heavily is because for an account with less than 10,000 followers, many of my mentions are not made in response to my tweets and are therefore not affectived by the shadowban.

    But never fear. Alternatives are on the way.

    SJWAL: an epiphany

    Bryan has been contemplating SJWs Always Lie and a second reading inspired him to a deeper understanding of SJW objectives.

    Having twice read this book, and having for a while now been digesting its contents, I’ve come to a sudden and clarifying realization –

    SJWs are not out to stop abuse — they are out to obtain a monopoly on it.

    This explains why they so fervently and universally seek positions of power and to manipulate procedure to empower themselves. From gutting the right to due process in academia to making it impossible to obtain the identity of your accuser in the workplace, SJWs in academic administration and corporate HR are exercising ill-gotten power to destroy the livelihoods and lives of those who oppose their world view and odious conduct.

    The organization they have captured such as Yahoo!, Twitter, and OSS communities are slowly dying deaths of a thousand distractions. Their specialty seems to spin narratives and organize against important developers who won’t carry their ideological water, or who oppose their encroachment. The best engineers in the world are leaving in droves due to maltreatment at the hands of politically-appointed executives and HR departments growing ever more vicious and unrestrained against employees. An SJW HR department, having gained enough momentum, will even strong arm the very CEOs and CTOs for who they are supposed to, at a minimum function.

    He’s correct. In fact, they are out to obtain a monopoly on more than abuse, they are out to obtain a monopoly on power through the means of controlling information flow.

    This was always true of Wikipedia, but it has become increasingly obvious through the actions of Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, and even Google. They are attempting to police the public’s thoughts through controlling the information accessible to it. It’s a soft form of intellectual totalitarianism imposed through seduction rather than force.

    This is why projects like Brave and Big Fork are so vitally important and should be supported by everyone who values freedom, including the freedoms of speech, expression, and thought. And speaking of the latter project, we are approximately 2-3 weeks away from early access. Don’t ask for it now, because if you’re on the list, you already know what’s going on. If you’re not sure, then you’re not on the list and will need to be patient.