I’m no Trumper. This prediction has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with how social media actually works. Following the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6th, President Trump was bumped from nearly all social media, even YouTube, with many of those changes subsequently made permanent. These moves led to speculation that Trump would be hobbled without his beloved accounts, his immediate impact on public discourse muted without the ability to tweet. While this may be true in the very immediate sense, it won’t last. Even Trump, the technical luddite, will figure it out and roar back shortly with or without those accounts.
This prediction is very similar in thinking to a column I wrote last August — President Trump thinks he can shut down WeChat: It won’t work. That column made the simple point that such bans are hard to make stick, even for a U.S. President, simply because of the international nature and foreign hosting of the WeChat service.
Today’s prediction, ironically, looks in precisely the opposite direction. President Trump is being very effectively banned from these services, but that won’t work, either.
It won’t work for two reasons. First, while Twitter or Facebook can close Trump’s accounts, the service they can’t ban him from is HTML — HyperText Markup Language — the very lingua franca of the World Wide Web. Nobody can be banned from using HTML. The second reason why it won’t work dumping Trump from Twitter, etc. is because the soon to be ex-President is already a global brand and what he has to say is already important to at least the 70-odd million people who voted for him.
All Trump has to do to get back on the air, so to speak, is to start a WordPress blog like this one, for example. It doesn’t have to be WordPress — any similar platform would do.
What won’t work for Trump is shifting toward encrypted platforms like Signal and Telegram, which is what some other pundits have been saying. Those pundits have it exactly wrong. Signal and Telegram are perfect for, say, plotting a revolution, but useless for bloviating and generally insulting the world. Connecting at all through Signal and Telegram is too difficult. It’s a multi-step process that would have to be done 70 million times over. That difficulty is why Trump has no following on LinkedIn, for example. And LinkedIn is way easier to use than Signal or Telegram.
To do the kind of snarky messaging he did on Twitter and Facebook, Trump needs it to be easier to reach him, not harder.
In contrast, switching-over all those MAGAheads to a new Trump blog is just a matter of issuing a press release with the new URL, making clear that this is where the faithful can find him. Within two weeks the followers who really matter will be visiting the blog daily and Twitter will be forgotten as the Trump medium of choice. This is not to say that Twitter will be harmed by Trump’s departure, just that Trump has alternatives.
Platforms like Twitter and Facebook are key for those who don’t have a following. The hope in those cases is that the many will discover the one. But in Trump’s case he already has a huge following that will come looking for him anywhere he’s discoverable. In that regard, then, I suppose Trump also needs search engines like Google, at least for awhile, and there’s no way Google is going to ban Trump searches.
So President Trump isn’t gone at all as a social media brand and will soon be back in force and pretty much uncontrollable.
For those who are upset at my pointing this out, grow-up: Trump already knows. I had to make this my first prediction, in fact, to get it out a few hours before it becomes patently obvious.
“…and there’s no way Google is going to ban Trump searches.”
Bullshit. Google is run by people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. “Trump” will cease to appear anywhere in the top 100 results for any conceivable associated keyword. Then, of course, they will team up with Fakebook and Twatter to get whatever hosting provider he is using to either dump his site under threat of losing any connection to the Internet.
@Howard L Harkness Goodness. What are the symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome? Asking for a friend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
A friend of mine used to say, “English is a tricky language; you’ll get the hang of it someday!”
The tyranny of words. Go figure.
Howard, you appear to be the deranged one. Google, Twitter, and others aren’t out to do the Left’s bidding. They are looking to protect the most basic tenets of democracy by preventing a president from gaslighting his millions of incredibly gullible followers. All well within their rights as private companies, just as other companies have the right to cease doing business with Trump properties. No ban on all things Trump will be forthcoming.
You are a very basic bitch cuck.
Says the Kluless Kucks Klan!
Google, Twitter, Facebook all banned an article in the New York Post that detailed the Biden’s connections to China and selling White House access to Chinese and other interests, as revealed on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Cringley, age hasn’t been kind to you. In approximately 3-2-1 others are going to descend on your post with insults (probably justified) about your Mineserver betrayal. You lost these people, not with your NeverTrump BS, but with your STEALING their money. Those “70 odd million” American, actually 75+ MILLION Americans (including me) support President Trump and are actually informed about his policies and positions. Whether or not you know or acknowledge, people and businesses are FLEEING the lockdown cities and states, believing that on/around January 20 the COVIDIANS will fade but the PSYOP run against the sheep will command a repeat performance. How do I know? I live in Florida. My social presence reaches 10.8M/month (and yes I can prove my voice w/ my reach). Every client with whom I worked in 2020 cited Covid and draconian lockdowns and high taxes as reasoning for accelerating their escape plans. During your PBS years, I found your tech voice insightful. For nostalgic reasons, I’ve continued reading your blog. In the last few years, it sounds as if you’ve turned in to a bitter older man, with most comments appearing to come from other retired people who are reminiscing about the “good ole days.” I mean no disrespect to anyone. I wish you all the best. I really hope you make right with the people who trusted you with their money on the MS project. I taught HS kids for nearly 20 years. Making right this situation will send another powerful, positive message to your boys.
74.2 million
And in case you haven’t kept up, 82 million is > 74.2 million.
The all-caps writing is only the first red flag.
There is this thing called class and dignity. You’ll be surprised what it actually is and how many of those 75 million are lacking. Google it.
There is also this thing called common sense, which included such adages as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_ain't_no_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch
IMO I think you’ve got this one wrong.
The Beaty of all the social media apps is that they provide a platform to create and disseminate content.
It’s all in one easy to use app which notifies subscribers immediately their subscription choice has said something. And, it provides all of that in an easy to acquire, easy to use and easy to consume package.
It’s not the same for a blogging service, nor is it the same for a website, And… it’s all too easy for any service of any knid to banTrump. About the only way he could circumvent a ban is by setting up his own servers in his own facility. But… even then an ISP could cut him off or DNS could delist him. All in all, Trump is going to find it very difficult to establish anywhere near the kind of reach he had when Titter and Facebook allowed him free access to their platforms,
hm, interesting. i was thinking about it also. iunderstand your point about using a blog to communicate with the faithfull but, this way it is no fun anymore. the fun was in the sharing and resharing and commenting and trolling in all of that, what is provided by social media and magnified by the millions of followers. this is where it got its impact. i am not sure a wordpress blog will keep the spell.
The link sharing for review and positive reinforcement by peers as they potentially do the same, that’s a terribly addicting behaviour pattern. Sure.
But the Blog is just the copy, the writing. Trump-pets will take the copy, warts and all, and share those links on their platform of choice. The blog just serves to anchor the hate to a particular source.
Thank you for another insightful, but minor, prediction. It did provide me with one other insight.
I now suspect there’s a high correlation between Minecraft complainers and Trump supporters. They all fall into the “sore losers” category, and they apparently also don’t read, since it is well documented that Kickstarts sometimes fail. I’ll bet that most of the Kickstarter supporters, OTOH, voted for someone other than Trump.
Keep up the good work.
Whew! I was afraid it was going to be only Trump fans who didn’t like Bob, even though he was telling Trump exactly how to get back in touch with his fans.
It seems that people get really attached to certain sources of data, and then they start to believe that only that source is trustworthy. Is it merely a lack of critical thinking? Are such people easily hypnotized and would join any old cult that presented itself? They are not all stupid, and there are plenty of stupid people who are just as rabidly devoted to Bernie Sanders and AOC, though they seem less prone to violence.
Is it a problem with data or is it a problem with processing the data? That is the underlying question we need to answer first.
The problem here is that the Mineserver complainers aren’t really complaining about the Mineserver failure. They are upset that Cringely doesn’t bother to communicate the failure. Sure, there’s an occasional update here. But the last update to actual Mineserver backers on Kickstarter was in 2016. Just admit that it didn’t work out and move on. Does anybody even want a personal server for a game they used to play 5 years ago? Probably not. The whole thing is ridiculous but also completely in character. (See: Plane Crazy) At this point either he suffers from a debilitating fear of failure, or he’s just messing with us all, or possibly both.
All Trump has to do to get back on the air, so to speak, is to start a WordPress blog like this one, for example. It doesn’t have to be WordPress — any similar platform would do.
Yes, like the discredited former journalist Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) has the world beating a path. The fact is mainstream platforms and mainstream media aren’t just about publishing but about access and influence. It’s about removing a contaminent. If Trump is blackballed and has the eyes of law enforcement and security services and advocacy groups watching his every moment his best ploy is to STFU really. Every single one of the people visiting his blog will light up like a torch on a moonless night as much as if they were using Tor and instantly put themselves on a “must watch” list. It will be a real boon for every “Prevent programme” and anti-terrorist squad and anti-fascist person out there all in glorious rewind-o-vision courtesy of GCHQ/NSA “time machine” servers.
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Mark Stephens claiming he’s not a Trumper? Then why does he have such an obsssion and hard-on for the guy? Like, what kind of idiot boosts Trumps mayhem and state of disgrace like it’s some kind of achievement?
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As for Trump being a global brand so is Hitler. Fat lot of good that did him.
If I worked for a content platform like Netflix or Amazon Prime, I would be in negotiations with Donald Trump on creating a media channel on their sites for exclusive Trump content. I don’t appreciate his politics, but I see their value. He could easily start a talk show, a new version of the Apprentice and do a series of documentaries and specials about how things work as the President and he would bring tens of millions of followers to that service. I am not sure all 70 million who voted for him would come, but enough that it would be a huge boost to the subscriber base. It would also be much easier than trying to set up a “Trump Channel” because he only has to negotiate with one entity. If he was doing a cable channel, there is a lot more effort and I don’t see him doing that.
Trump amassed some $200+ million from his “stop the steal” campaign since November, so he knows there’s plenty of money for him to make in politics. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him or his family.
And what will be the content of that channel ??????????
Trump has several lines that he repeats over and over and over and that is it. Even diehard Trumpers would be bored soon.
I won’t even mention to ask for how long would people want to pay for that ?
Remember when Sarah Palin started her own online paid channel and she shut it down within a month or two because nobody wanted to pay for it.
Trump supporters do not have much disposable income – rallies and other Trump pageantry are all free.
Trump is just too lazy to be talk show host. Even 1 hour show requires 2-3 hours of preparations for the show where producers brief you on the guests etc. etc. + meetings with advertisers etc. etc.
Trump never worked 4 hours a days in his whole life. From the day he was born he had other people working jobs for him.
Exactly. Trump is too lazy to do anything more than show up and spout his garbage.
Read about what it took to get episodes of The Apprentice into something suitable for
airing. Lots of editing. People in the industry know he would be difficult to work with.
Apart from that, the Trump brand is toxic now. Mainstream channels and content
producers will want nothing to do with him. The fringe outlets will not generate
enough revenue to satisfy his demands.
And besides, why should he bother? He’ll be able to pick up the telephone and get
on Fox or OANN just about anytime he wants. Again, this fits right in with his laziness.
Anyone who boosts Trump and is so easily swayed by money is a fucking cretin. Christ oh mighty the Trumpsters and apologists in here need their brains seeing to. I can’t figure out if you’re genuinely stupid or misinformed. The backwards rationalising and projecting not to mention the out of touch American-centric worldview is painful to watch. Mind you not unexpected for a nation of overblown brainwashed fatty cry-babies.
I’m gonna call this a bit right yet wrong.
What’s right? He’ll get a bit of his old audience and a bit of the applause he craves.
What’s wrong? So long as he isn’t encouraging sedition, it doesn’t matter what he says. Seriously, it doesn’t matter anymore. It never will. When he was President, whatever crap he tweeted was policy: a million government workers had to figure out if he meant it (remember your discussion about Gates’s control over Microsoft in your book) and how to implement it. Everybody else HAD to talk about it because he was the frackin’ president.
He isn’t anymore. He has no control over policy. And while 75,000,000 voted for him, many voted for the party, not him. The GOP is still going to have to deal with this now 3-way split within (the old states rights types, the austerity-driven libertarians, and the social/religious authoritarians), but Trump really only spoke for the 3rd. Thus, why he’s been disappointed in the courts of late, because the judges are all the old states rights types.
He craves an audience larger than those that applaud him. He craves the power in MAKING us all have to read what he’s saying. But we don’t have to anymore, so we won’t. Sites like right-wing-watch will keep us informed of when he or his followers are crossing a line, but without the ability to make ALL of us read his crap, he’ll start to get bored from it.
We don’t need to read “witch hunt” for the thousandth time, which is all he’s going to say as the prosecutors and auditors from multiple states and multiple countries all start digging in.
So we won’t read it and we won’t care. We won’t miss it. He’ll stop being page 1 news real fast, no matter what social media platform he’s on. What he says is not policy that will change the world. It just the ramblings of an narcissistic ex-President trying to keep some level of relevance as the combined forces of apathy and legal responsibility close in on him.
That right there is a nice comment and as likely right as anything else I’ve read.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/02/for-donald-trump-sarah-palins-fall-shows-the-limits-of-media-obsession
@Joseph
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Yeah, basically that. There’s mroe like the idiot media sanitising hsi shit becaus ehe was prez and all the gerbils hitting their food peals who amplified this nonsense but Trump is otherwise dead in the water. I for one got sick of hearing about the fat mushroom cock mentalist a long time ago.
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Most politicians who lose office get whacked by pretty bad depression and a sense of purposeless as the second they leave office they become irrelevant. Some politicians get to believe everyone wants to talk to them or cheer them because they’re wonderful when for a lot probably the majority the only reason they are given the time of day is because they won a lottery and people have no chocie but to engage with them. There’s academic papers on this if anyone wants to follow up with their local political science or sociology or psychology department. We know Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) isn’t a real journalist and his relationship with science is hazy at best so I bet the thought never crossed his mind before he wrote this drivel.
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Another nasty peice of work is Lachlan Murdoch who has taken over the everyday running of Newscorp from the turtle without a shell Rupert Murdoch. (Jerry, how could you?) Without the torrent of evil from Newscorp the world would be a different place.
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How long before Trumps hooker deserts him or is she going down with the ship too?
Donald who?
Donald Duck
Rumsfeld.
Donald Duck is the ultimate Donald
You may be right. I may be crazy.
@ mike
“I mean no disrespect to anyone.”
I’m unclear about who the sheep are. Trump supporters? Or everybody else?
” I taught HS kids for nearly 20 years.”
Does that make you one of the sheep? Or just a shepherd?
And, oh, yeah, who explained his policies and positions to you.
Am I the only one who thinks Trump Derangement Syndrome refers to persons who support Trump?
Trump could easily command a huge following on any platform he chooses if he would just publish the “Pee Pee Tapes”, even if he has to ask his pal Vlad for a copy …..
It seems more than a few of Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) readers don’t know about his history fo fraud and lies. One editor in particular at Slashdot has a stiffy for Mark Stephens so does an editor on Wikipedia who has been pushing reputation washing of Mark Stephens “Cringely” wiki page. Maybe they are chums of Mark Stephens and were on his pedo Christmas card list?
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As an escort (aka sex worker, prostitute, hooker) I have no interest whatsoever in Trump or the alleged kompromat. Pretty much everything Trump did only happened because he was enabled by weak politicians and corrupt lawyers and a media who were desperate to “sanitise” and repeat his drivel simply because he held public office. The fact Trump is a wife beater, a known bully who uses bribes to get his way including getting a visa for his Slovine whore, and who scammed his inheritance and who got his sister (a judge) to sanitise his finances, and a bankrupt who acted as a laundromat for the mob, and who got third parties to issue death threats to the hookers he atacked and didn’t want to pay are all known.
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Trump is no Paris Hilton or Tom Cruise. He’s just a sad sack of shit who used daddies money to buy his way into bit part cameos and lifestyle magazines. The politicians hate him. Wall Street hate him. The media hate him. Most decent thinking people hate him. Who the fuck want to see mushroom cock pissing on a Russian hotel bed other than to laugh at him?
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Maybe Mark Stephens is just a has been wannabe Trump. That would explain his obsessive clickbait about subjects he knows fuck all about.
While I understand that there are alternatives, and Trump supporters will go there, I am concerned with the more general problems with the tech companies making themselves the arbiter of right and wrong. Reasonable people can disagree on many things; but the tech companies seem bound and determined to shut down any speech they control that disagrees with their positions. This is something I really would like to see Bob comment on.
Here’s where I think you may be wrong: If Twitter, Facebook and Google can cancel Donald Trump, so can Amazon Web Services, or GoDaddy, or RackSpace, or Ionos, or even AT&T. This is why the Twitter ban is so insidious. If a private company that is operating as a public service can selectively ban any point of view, it can silence the dialog that makes us engage each other, consider other points of view, and perhaps modify our own thoughts. This locks in a single message, leading the way to authoritarianism. This is an extremely dangerous precedent, and I’m worried where this leads not only our nation, but the world.
No shirt. No shoes. No service. Have you tried the free lunch?
Bob got this one wrong. The public discourse is happening on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. That’s the public square today and being denied access means your voice is marginalized. Trump should have switched to Gab or Parler a couple years ago when he had Presidential clout and help build up one of those platforms as a pillar of the public discourse. But he didn’t, and now he’ll be effectively silenced on the sidelines. For the next few years, the neoliberal uni-party will erase him from history and bury him in legal proceedings. In the meantime, the US will continue its descent into a cesspool of corporate-controlled cultural incoherence and social entropy. We’ll see how Biden manages the steep decline of the US as his corporate backers control and dominate the discourse.
It’s interesting reading the American free speech tards rolling up for this topic. The fact is the biggest advocates of free speech forget there is a such a thing as hate crime and incitement and other bad stuff which isn’t protected in law. Another thing is twats like Trump were only allowed to get away with what they did because they held public office. All the ones complaining about tech monopolies passing judgement are almost always the same twats who like to lord it over other peoples bodies or project their malcontent with the world on someone else. You’re ignorant and polarised. From my side of the Atlantic you look like big headed mouthy assholes with an empathy bypass.
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Don’t like common decency? Fuck off to Breitbart or Infowars or all those hypocritical shithole “free speech” platforms full of pedos and terrorists grooming gullible fuckwits. Also take those billionaires like the Kochs and others of their ilk who fund most of your thinktanks and marketing and lobbying shit with you. Don’t like the fact you’re being sidelined and ignored? Take it up with market forces. Hahahahahahaah.
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Most of us outside the US are in all honesty fed the fuck up with you.
I’m on the other side of the Atlantic as well, and can tell you that your view is not the majority opinion except with the snobby moneyed and ivory tower classes. Working class Europeans support Trump because he stood against unbridled immigration and diversity that they know destroys culture and values, and crowds out the few available jobs. Diversity is a weakness, and always has been throughout history. The root of the word diversity is divide. And the jobs situation is only going to get worse with AI and automation. Then these diverse tribes in close proximity will fight. You’d do better to move your Guardian and BBC programmed head to alternative news sources like Zero Hedge and the Federalist for a truer perspective of the US and world. But it’s probably too late as so many are already thoroughly brainwashed with TDS. Just let the West collapse, China and Islam will sort it out for the better.
My experience here in the UK is exactly the opposite. Here in a fairly diverse part of London identity is barely a topic of conversation. Everyone’s kids mix freely at school, diverse groups of children on the street or visiting each other’s homes is the norm and it barely goes with any comment. Meanwhile out in rural Worcestershire where my parents and brother live, if you ask anybody you’d think immigration was the end of civilisation.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/white-people-become-less-racist-just-moving-more-diverse-areas-study-finds-9166506.html
You can see it to extremes in the US. White rural regions like Kentucky or Kansas are MAGA bastions, while white people in diverse cities like New York mostly couldn’t care less about race, and this replicates across most of the country.
My oldest sister lives in western Kentucky. She votes and proudly wears a bumper sticker on her vehicle which reads DITCH MITCH!
I keep asking her to let me know when her house is FIREBOMBED!
While Trump can hop on any other social media site and have his supporters follow him, he won’t have the same political power in an echo chamber as he would across the social networks that are populated by partisans from both sides. His rhetoric simply won’t have the same bite without triggering outrage in his detractors.
So that is to say, on whatever partisan platform Trump migrates to, if there isn’t an almost realtime transmission to twitter or FB or what have you, Trump’s ability to shape public discourse will be greatly muted.
Thanks for the article.
@W Smith
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Sorry but you’ve been suckered by the far right narrative. They almost always go for soft targets with poorer education and self-education and play on your gripes. You don’t know any better outside of your resentful polarised bubble. You do know the neo-con right wing are responsible for public policy and business practices which shit all over you and cause the unemployment and cause lowering standards and cause bogus immigrant hysteria? According to the latest research (conducted by real scientists) your attitude is actually a minority and only amplified by hard right politicians and blown up by mass social media platforms. If you believe anything else you are deluded or misinformed.
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As for the BBC most of the management and most of the News and Current Affairs department are Tories who very much are tilting the scales! Right wing complaints about being marginalised or no-platformed are complete guff. The sources you promote reading are right wing comic books.
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I’m not a fan of multiculturalism but for you to claim diversity wrecks economies is complete hogwash. Again, the science, REAL SCIENCE not right wing thinktank funded horseshit, has proven that countries and organisations which embrace diversity and equality perform better not just economically but across a range of measures.
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Sigh. Why Mark Stephens (aka cringely) panders to the neo-Nazi right wing I have no idea but creating excuses for them to gob off and attract their ilk shows how utterly dumb he is and perhaps where his true colours lie in spite of his protests to the contrary. It’s the same shit with Joe Rogan – another nasty piece of work.
I used to be like you, hopelessly brainwashed by the globalist corporate media, and a virtue signaler calling everyone that disagrees with a cultural leftist paradigm a nutsi. But if you think about it even a little then it’s obvious that diversity is a nonsensical and destructive lie. Diversity has never worked in history. There is no study that shows that diversity works in communities or workplaces. The biggest study ever done on diversity was by Robert Putnam at Harvard in 2007 that clearly showed the more diverse a neighborhood then the less social trust and community. Even in-groups distrusted fellow in-groups more in diverse neighborhoods. This is obvious as one only needs to look around the world at the failure of diversity: Yugoslavia, Malaysia, Guyana, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. It doesn’t work. If diversity is such a strength then why do leftist academics cite the European drawing of borders in Africa that placed different tribes together in one country as a poison pill for those new states? By leftist logic, the colonizers enriched Africans with diversity by mixing them all up into ethnically and religiously diverse countries. The US had months of riots and violence last year due to diversity. It will never work in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, Star Trek is just a TV show. People with alike values and cultures should be allowed to live together and form coherent and cohesive communities and nations. Everyone can then respect each other‘s ways and beliefs from afar. Those like you who want to continue to believe the diversity myth can go ahead and live in failed and failing states (UK, Sweden, Belgium, France, etc.) wracked by division, riots, and looting within a leftist racial and gender orthodoxy. Let the rest of us realists live in our non-diverse countries while watching you fail in racial, ethnic, and religious strife from afar.
@W Smith
You have no clue about the difference between diversity and tribalism and culture. None whatsoever. Science doesn’t care whether you are left, right, or up, or down. Learn to differentiate between science and opinion. Failed and failing states? You mean pre-fascism egged on by the far right?
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Who the fuck is Robert Putman and what the fuck has he to do with Harvard? He sounds like a quack riding off somebody else’s name. Reality? Peer reviewed science shows diverse nighbourhoods are actually more vibrant and tolerant neighbourhoods.
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What’s this “leftist” shit? You mean anyone who hasn’t bought into your Nazi cult? And what, pray tell, “none diverse country” do you herald from oh Obi Wan. Poland? Hungary? Russia? Or are you just a random Nazi cult member mouthing off? Hired shill of the Kochs and living in Chigaco? A skinny Indian making a few rupees off some shady call centre sweatshop? White? Black? You provide no information. Don’t tell me you’re an effing Saudi… And what’s with this you used to think as I did? I think how I bloody well want thank you without you or anyone else butting your nosey nose judgementalism in
where it doesn’t belong.
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But what do I know? I’m just a hooker and sell my body for money.
FWIW, Robert Putnam is legit. W Smith’s self-serving mischaracterization of his work less so.
OFF TOPIC
Bob’s buddy who is editor on Slashdot posted article
Robert Cringley Predicted ‘The Death of IT’ in 2020. Was He Right?
Link :
https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/16/1745216/robert-cringley-predicted-the-death-of-it-in-2020-was-he-right
@wwwpirate
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Yeah, read that. Notice the anonymous posting a Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) bio got +% informative? Lots of other comments too pointing out the record of bullshit and none delivery. If it wasn’t for EditorDavid having a hardon for Mark Stephens I doubt they would look twice. Mark Stephens has been “deplatformed” by mainstream media both for his work conduct and embarassing exaggerations and/or lying in articles, and his plans to turn this blog into a money spinner and his “sure thing” youtube channel pretty much flatlined so all very Trump-lite.
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Also note these two posted by numbnuts EditorDavid doing a u-turn.
Online Misinformation Dropped Dramatically After Twitter Banned Trump
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/16/2130236/online-misinformation-dropped-dramatically-after-twitter-banned-trump
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Are Tech Companies Ducking Responsibility For The Need to De-Platform?
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/16/2111224/are-tech-companies-ducking-responsibility-for-the-need-to-de-platform
How funny is it that conservatives think liberals are organized enough to steal an election and let some of the conservatives win to throw everyone off the scent?
How funny is it that people who oppose regulation are now upset that they missed an opportunity 35 years ago to start working on keeping technology in its playpen where it belongs?
Virgin Orbit did what?
Thanks for bringing it to our attention:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/17/virgin-orbit-reaches-orbit-for-the-first-time/
This isn’t the only article in US media this week exposing a corrosive web of nutters and Nazis. The far right is very pernicious. There are many who wouldn’t consider themselves to be far right but given half a chance to get away with being little shits don’t decline the opportunity.
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https://www.wired.com/story/america-civilian-tactical-training-industry/#intcid=_wired-homepage-right-rail_50c5acbd-6522-4497-bd97-ce362ce9dc9d_popular4-1
Hi Cringely. Happy 2021. While I agree with your cynicism, I have a different breakdown.
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Corporations deplatforming Trump are forfeiting ad revenue in hopes of starching their brands and forestalling sanctions. Neither will work. The sole benefit will be breaking the current virality feedback loops. Maybe corporate media will cease to use Twitter to write their headlines, which would be a positive outcome.
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This deplatforming serves Trump Inc, allowing him to capture that ad revenue and patronage directly. This grift strategy is time proven by Rush Limbaugh and many others. Resulting in a smaller, more hard core audience.
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The incubators of hate speech will continue to spawn ever more ridiculous memes.
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In other words, a reversion to pre-Twitter normality.
When I was a younger man, I used to say, “You can’t legislate equality!”
I’m not sure what I meant by that statement.
I also used to say, “Fear is the primary motivational factor behind all human behavior!”
If we can’t agree what we mean when we say “Equality”, then we’ll never know how close or how far we are from it.
A gentleman (probably a former school teacher) said to me, “What does ‘all men are created equal’ even mean?”
I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.
But, most human beings come into the world in the same way. So do most mammals. They pass through their mother’s pelvis. (C-sections are the exception!) So, perhaps, equality means we start at the same place. And we end at the same place. And what happens between those two events is entirely up to us, given the limitations of available reality.
All things considered . . . human characteristics average out across the entire population. But still, some will insist they are better or that someone else is lesser. Mostly people who are terrified of being thought ordinary.
Deep thoughts, thank you for sharing. Younger me was tortured with objectivist rhetoric. Downside of being a geek surrounded by geeks. “Personal responsibility” never made sense to me. As though any of us can act without consequence. Until I find something better, I now prefer “Shared responsibility”. Which feels more in line with my Judeo-Christian indoctrination. And instead of equality, or the convoluted logic of “equal opportunity”, I’m trying out “egalitarian” rhetoric, to see if the fit is better. Provisionally, of course.
The problem with Trump starting up a blog is that 1) He probably doesn’t know how to start up a blog and 2) He’d have at best a fraction of the readership.
Even if someone started the blog for him, that still means he has to be able to use it. Twitter is easy. Open the app. Post something. It’s also super easy to share content. Literally retweet something. He can do it on the toilet. And it’s great for the kind of short, non-substantive content he likes to produce. A blog doesn’t work for this. He can’t just fire up an app and post a random thought. And even if he could, that’s not the kind of content you read a blog for. Trump was the sixth most popular Twitter user in the world when they shut his account down. He had 88 million followers. When he posted, it immediately grabbed the attention of millions of people.
Now compare that to a blog. How often do you visit a blog? I have blogs I visit daily. Others, like this one, I might visit once every few weeks. Trump would be lucky to get 1 percent of his former followers to follow him to a blog, and their access to what he said would be limited to whenever they felt like visiting, not whenever he pushed out new content.
Hopefully he will start a blog because I’m in the process of patenting a new printer that will print blog postings on toilet paper. The problem is that if Trump starts a blog then it will be easy to hack, the password will be MAGA2024.
Just print a caricature of the man on TP. The marketing angle? Take a dump on Donald before he takes a dump on you!
Prediction #2: Richard Branson destroys Bob’s make-believe business plan:
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https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/18/richard-bransons-virgin-orbit-blasts-satellites-into-space-from-747.html
@Jason Osgood
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The Robert Putman hasn’t produced any work which agrees with the science I have read. I’m big on due diligence and doing backgroudn research but in all honesty given the complete laziness of most people to even bother to follow most of these topics will throw it back on them and go “citation please!” because I’m not chasing off doing lazy men’s work for them. I have zero idea what Robert Putman’s starting point is or how he conducted his work then there are issues of comparative studies and there may be a whole load of US biases in there which effect the conclusions. While the current UK regime is dodgy to say the least the UK is much much better with this kind of work both academically and in practice, as is Europe on average. The hard numbers on economic equality bear this out. The US is better on some things but again I will not know until I have reviewed the material.
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@Gnarfle @Jason Osgood
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imho your positions are pretty much where they should be at as a starting point. “Equality” is a field which has been used and abused very badly. You have policy makers, administrators, lawyers, and every other vested interest and subjective opinion you can think of pushing their snout into the topic and a lot of misinformation and bad communciation floating about.
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The problem with the UK is the incredibly persistent class system and polarisation caused by a rotten constitition and established practcies and old farts not wanting to let go. It’s now extremely difficult to get anyone to listen unless you have a job title, celebrity status, or money. The gatekeeping is fierce. You find a lot of UK people who can quite frankly get out of the UK (England especially) and Post-Brexit this is even worse. Do not be confused by the Savile Row suits and chummy well cultured tones. The country is a shithole. All nicey nicey on the surface but sociopathically cruel if you have even a whiff of an opinion which challenges the imperial right wing rhetoric. The UK is not a money hungry country like the US. It’s all about power. Money (and title with regard to inherited title both land and money) get power and you need just enough and no more. The attitude of the English elite is they would rather be in power and poor than rich and have equality. Beign in the EU kept things on the straight and level – just. Now the UK is out of the EU the threat of unravelling decades of progress in spite of Thatcherism is very very real.
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All of the above why in the UK equality is going backwards not forwards.
The real value of what the billionaire oligarchs at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon did with impunity was that they open demonstrated that they control the U.S. Democratic Party, your free speech, the news you’re allowed to see, and that they can wipe out any potential competitors in the marketplace (Hi, Parler!), if they collude and use their oligopolies to do it. And they learned it all from the Chinese Communist Politburo while helping the CCP to identify, track, imprison, and execute political dissidents.
ALL of these companies need to be busted up by the DOJ in the fashion of Standard Oil… or Ma Bell… or even Microsoft (going back to the days of Bill Clinton, who never followed through on it). But good luck with any of that, considering who will be running the DOJ now and which party the Leftist billionaire oligarchs in “Big Tech” are protecting… and otherwise applying what they learned in Beijing from the CCP.
You are dumb azz who does not know what free speech means/is and here is the link where you can educate yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States
From the article:
The First Amendment’s constitutional right of free speech, which is applicable to state and local governments under the incorporation doctrine, prevents only government restrictions on speech, not restrictions imposed by private individuals or businesses unless they are acting on behalf of the government.
@Beijing Biden (aka sockuppet W Smith)
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Piss off.
Being off Twitter won’t stop Trump posting content, but it hurts him in several ways. It limits his algorithmic reach to potential new followers, and it limits his circulation through re-tweets. It will silo him in an echo chamber consisting largely of his more ardent current supporters, but also make it hard for him to grow his base or refresh it as people drift away though natural attrition.
Trump is going to be too busy fighting for his financial survival, and to stay out of prison, to do much rabble rousing or worry about social media.
$340 million in debt is coming due soon, guaranteed by him personally. He has been dumped by three major banks, and nobody else is likely to roll over a loan of that kind of money.
His hotels are losing money, and several of them face closure. He’s been dumped by the real-estate firm that handled many of his leasing agreements. The PGA Championship has dumped him.
His brand is trashed after the Capitol riots, and nobody serious wants to be seen doing business with him.
He has two defamation suits pending.
New York State has two separate investigations in progress for tax fraud, both with serious prison sentences possible. And presidential pardons don’t cover state-level crimes.
If he finds some lawyers better than Giuliani (not hard to do, except that major law firms won’t take him on as a client now), he may be able to spin this out for couple of years, but all his karma is coming due the moment he leaves office, and all his energy will be spent fighting it.
Just to add, there will probably also be compensation suits for deaths and injuries in the Capitol riot.
Trump himself knows well enough what a bad situation he’s in financially and in terms of criminal indictments. That’s the reason he was so desperate to hang on to the presidency to protect himself.
Not to mention that all he really wanted was to keep the air space above Mar-A-Lago free from conventional aircraft.
Another thought. Trump incited a rabble of useful idiots to win the presidency. He tried to use them to overthrow a democratic election in order to retain the presidency.
Now that he has lost, those dimwits and hangers-on are not useful to him any more (or only marginally). He will dump them without a second thought, the same way he has always dumped everyone who ceased to be of use to him personally.
Surely his followers aren’t so stupid as to think he actually cares about them, or their causes? He has never cared about another human being in his entire life, and politics was only ever useful to him to inflate his ego and his finances.
He doesn’t need them any more, so he won’t waste his time building up a social media following again.
Reporting for a friend . . .
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/01/what-motivates-the-motivated-reasoning-of-pro-trump-conspiracists/
There’s another reason why, it’s why I’m here and why Jeremy did a bunch of deep dives. People like solving puzzles. It tickles the brain in a way that things really don’t. Like I was here for awhile and then I saw this guy who I remember from TV when I was a kid setting his reputation on fire over about $30,000. Why would he do that? And then you find he’s actually been lying a lot, and for a long time, there just wasn’t this free searchable index of words and access to videos that enabled you to prove that “I was Apple Employee #12” or “I was an investigator for the Three Mile Island presidential commission” weren’t true, and were actually deliberately false.
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I’ve seen people use the term “gamify” to discuss this particular conspiracy theory, but it’s not really accurate. They’re using people’s innate desire to solve puzzles against them. Notice that many puzzles and things like treasure hunts are often centered around a total irrationality. Why would a pirate spend so long traveling to an isolated place and then more time burying treasure there when he could instead bring a hammer and an anvil and pound gold flat and otherwise un-identifiable? Why does an antiquities dealer bury millions in the desert and write a book with clues on how to locate it? Why does Goldfinger set up elaborate executions when he could just shoot Bond in the face over and over again? For some reason, knowing the puzzle has been done by a crazy person makes it more interesting!
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It’s been known for hundreds of years since before Marshall McLuhan said it that the medium is the message. A highly relevant example is Nostradamus’ quatrains. If he wrote predictions of the future in plain language you never would have heard of him because he would have been exposed as a charlatan centuries ago. The few times that “Q” has spoken plainly about future events he’s been totally wrong and it’s damaged its reputation. Example: The “red wave” of the 2018 mid-terms which were crucial in the Quniverse but was never mentioned again when it turned out to be false. Now it’s back to “Don’t read what the message says. Research each capitalized letter.”
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Now as for why people will believe it, I mean this is a field of lifelong study and you’ll never be done.
This goes even deeper than granville’s [really excellent] synopsis.
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One of the ‘most damaging’ characteristics of pathological liars is how — almost like quasi-abusers — they eventually warp the habits + psyches of those around them. For example, friends and family start rationalizing (“(s)he must have been in a rush and didn’t get all the facts straight”) (“(s)he must have been having a bad day, didn’t feel good about life, told a fib”), then dig deeper (“wait, if these things were lies, does this mean the earlier things were also lies, I need to prove or disprove them”), and finally spiral into instinctual distrust + fact-finding (“I can’t believe what anyone tells me, I need to doubt + validate by default”).
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We can sort of translate this into pseudo-monetary terms. How many opportunities (or business partnerships) (or media/publishing deals) has Cringe landed by claiming he was “a Stanford doctorate degreeholder,” or “Apple Employee #12,” or “a lead TMI meltdown investigator” or “a Silicon Valley tech pundit with lifelong 70% prediction accuracy” or “a victim of the Santa Rosa fires” ? And how many business relationships has he subsequently burnt when the lies and facades inevitably come crumbling down?
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How many decades + ex-friends + ex-jobs + angry creditors did it take to banish him to the land of crowdsourcing fraud and self-aggrandizing blogs and all-schooling-sucks-except-my-household-method? And what does it say that, after that years-long downfall, he’s still spinning yarns about satellites and supersonic jets and maker startups? I say again: a liar ‘hurts’ his audiences as much as he does himself.
That is such an excellent point.
Ooooh. I’m being moderated. Struck a nerve?
@trashtslk
“ Ooooh. I’m being moderated. Struck a nerve?” Thanks for the laugh!
You may find this article interesting.
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2020/05/falling-interest-rates-capitalism-economic-downturn-future-solutions
Testing 1…2…3.. As I was saying. Trump and his little (I’m not a Trumper but…) little helper Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) have been scienced.
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Let’s play hunt the moderation trigger.
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https://theconversation.com/covid-19-misinformation-scientists-create-a-psychological-vaccine-to-protect-against-fake-news-153024
@Christopher Pearman
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Interesting article. The list reads like a list of hobbyhorses but the basic challenge is there. I believe it’s solvable and the future is a social democratic future not more of the same austerity led capitalism. In the UK I know that’s not going to come from the nasty party!
Read some of these posts, skimmed even more and what I surmise is the same I think about when they show massive street protests in Islamabad or Kabul….doesn’t anyone have a job? Is there someone still running the country?
Yup. Exactly my thoughts. My company deploys thousands of WordPress websites and the WordPress’ creator’s tagline is “democratizing the web”. However it also has the side effect of arming conspiracy touting, gaslighting, disinformation, authoritarians. Given some of the sites I’ve seen deployed in the last four years; my sleep has never been the same. QAnon itself is powered by WordPress. It’s a great, scalable platform. The ease of use, the SEO optimization tools, and the very nature of the web ensure that this won’t be going away anytime soon. Even when social media organizations cutoff the head, another takes its place. The funny thing about the new age of where anyone can take part in “trusted” information-self-determination; folks have yet to catch up and understand what “trust” means; what all it entails. Thanks to HTML over SSL, we know the data can be “trusted” to be coming from its original source to our eyes untainted… but the data itself may not be ***trustworthy***.
We are domain/information trust illiterate.
Doesn’t matter if FB or twitter cuts off a domain; registering a new one is easy. But the kicker is that WordPress had a solution to that too; enter XFN. This was supposed to answer how a given WordPress site/domain had a relationship with others. With XFN, one could be ‘judgy’ and build a web of personal validity; stepping stones to good journalism. It had potential to be the “klout” mechanism (remember now de-funct “klout.com”?) needed to make or break a site’s credibility. As of 2021, the code that drives XFN is still very much apart of WordPress; but I have yet to see anyone utilize it.
@Steveorevo,
The people who are been misled, by what they read on the internet, are probably not the generation who have come-of-age using the internet in their daily lives. It is a generational-thing. The ‘Internet Generation’(IG) knows not to take things at face-value. It is the older-generations that have a problem with the ‘Fake News’. This is a new-world, and anyone who is not part of the “IG” can not really function that well in it without getting overwrought on a daily basis. “XFN”sounds wonderful. I wonder why it has not been used to improve the quality of ”WordPress” websites?
That’s an excellent point. What you don’t see at alt-right riots and rallies is young people. You see older tech-illiterate people and trailer trash.
The younger internet-savvy generation is becoming more and more progressive all the time. That’s the best source of hope for the future.
One would think that someone who purports to be as enlightened as you . . .
Speaking as the son of the daughter of a sharecropper, you might find you’re not all that far from “trailer trash” yourself. My oldest sister was born in Kentucky but was raised elsewhere. She ran back to KY as soon as she was old enough to know there was a difference. She spent most of the 1980’s griping about not having cable TV. And then along came satellite. She lived in several different trailer parks from about 1971 until about 1983. She was a registered nurse and specialized in coronary care. She married an incredibly nice man and convinced him to live near town. After about 6 weeks, she came home to find him missing. She called everyone she knew and finally, in desperation, called the old homestead. He answered on the first ring. “I just cain’t live with all that noise.” They did live fairly close to the main drag.
She packed up, sold the house, and has lived in the middle of nowhere since about 1985. The first time I visited them I kept asking if they’d seen the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Never locked their front door. Still don’t.
Just because someone lives in low income housing doesn’t mean they’re trash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kim
File under believe but cannot prove:
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Lead poisoning. We now know violent crime tracks with the use of leaded gasoline. What about everyone else? Where other people impacted too?
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I think Yes.
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We complain about our Boomer relatives getting captured (brain washed) by Fox News, talk radio, social media. I think boomers are far more susceptible to outrage, have diminished skepticism. Not just because they’re aging. Not just because they’re new to social media. But made worse because they’re cognitively and emotionally impaired due to lead poisoning.
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Boomers have always been more conservative, more reactionary than their parents or their children. Reagan Democrats ffs.
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Millennials and younger aren’t any more liberal, progressive than one would predict. All the surveys and polling show the same variety and diversity as any other cohort. Their views on race and gender simply reflect the times, so more status quo and liberal. Views on economics (swinging back towards collectivism) is just a return to the mean (pre Boomer). And other beliefs are definitely conservative.
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But the younguns are definitely more discerning than their boomer relatives.
The best source of hope for the future?
Trailer trash!
Jesus said, “The trailer trash shall inherit the earth!”
There’s some technical illiteracy and ageism creeping in to this topic. First: knowledge of technical systems doesn’t mean they are udnerstood and people know how to weild them. This whole trust and social values thing indicates that which leads to the second point: Don’t start picking on older people and ignore younger people who troll liek the dickens on dodgy forums and turn up in colourful shirts at protests. You’re missing out on a number of specialities and data skews. Don’t forget old people were young once and history goes around in circles. Among the young people of today are some evil shits too.
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The post WWII and post Cold War world hasn’t been perfect but a lot of lessons were learned and this helped the line hold. Don’t diss everything just because it’s old and not a shiny tech toy. Now we have the environmental challenge. This is the next big thing and it’s not all gloom and doom.
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As always I don’t wait on Mark Stephens (aka Cringely) questionable content for reasons some of you stated in this and earlier topics.
Old folks know more about being young than young folks know about being old. It was true 45 years ago when I saw it hanging on the wall during Bible study. As I grew older, I noticed that each generation of young people seem to think they invented sex. Which is why they can’t imagine their parents doing anything like that!
Where do babies come from? Storks, of course
Where do babies come from? Bad choices.
WordPress would block Donald Trump’s blog as well. They already removed Conservative Treehouse.
@Gnarfle
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Yes and we’re all guilty of ageism in both directions to some degree or another! I also read something else interesting yesterday. Physicists use quantum theory and they know it works but they don’t know why. We basically have similar issues of different perspectives and limits to understandings creeping in. I think it’s important to know this.
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There’s a topic on Slashdot which kind of replicates what I said on environmental issues. A bit like sex and not what you have but how you use it (or in my cause how you flaunt it lol) it’s not just what you think but how you think:
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https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/01/23/2210236/are-we-slowing-global-warming
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I notice Mark Spehens (aka Cringely) doesn’t cover topics like this. He usually writes “idiot tests” i.e. something half plausible to the gullible. The thinking in this topic is much more solid and nuanced i.e. the kind of view a real journalist would be looking for.
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One interesting thing about all this (and older people will remember) is how much the world has changed and how critical things have become in one lifetime. There was also the idea that renewables and nuclear were too expensive or a political dead end. The investment was put in some years ago and more is being put in and attention is shifting and we’re seeing some quite fantastic progress. This is really confidence inspiring and makes more of the right kind of change a lot easier. It may also mean that better healthcare and social programs and universal benefits and different lifestyles and a generally better consumer loop become the new normal. I hope so. The vision is there and people are seeing more and more of this is possible.
Am also a qualified (guarded) optimist. You wrote:
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“This is really confidence inspiring and makes more of the right kind of change a lot easier.”
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I like to ask other people “What are you excited about?” Long time friends, family, people at the dog park, neighbors, etc.
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I get the best answers. And sometimes I hear about emerging tech and trends, long before they get traction. That whole Diffusion of Innovations thing.
OFF TOPIC!
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/us/schools-coronavirus.html
@Gnarfle
I didn’t intend to be derogatory about poor people in general. I grew up very poor myself, and even though I’m highly qualified and experienced, I’m not in a good financial situation now due to long-term health problems.
But there are poor people, there are people who prefer to live in outlying areas rather than suburbs or cities – and then there’s trash.
I’m not American, so I may be missing some nuances, but here’s the Urban Dictionary entry for trailer trash. As one of the definitions says, “You don’t need to live in a trailer to be trailer trash, and only a small percentage of ppl who actually do live in a trailer are considered trailer trash”.
It’s more a type of person, or a state of mind.
@GreenWyvern
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Personally I’ve stopped using the term “trailer trash”. The UK equivalent is “council estate” and that’s unfair too. As we’ve seen from the cretins who pushed through Brexit an Eton education and money doesn’t mean you’re not trash. What do I know? I’m a hooker. lol
One might examine one’s premises. The late Neil Postman wrote a book which was published in 1992 titled Technopoly. He defines technology as a tool. A hammer is a technology for driving nails. School is a technology for educating (or indoctrinating) large numbers of people. Automobiles are tools of transportation. A tool is useful, but eventually you become a tool of the technology. He covers a lot of ground but that was the part I remember. Cars are great but they can’t repair themselves. Same with computers. I referenced James Kim because I felt his tech bona fides misled him into thinking he was capable of solving almost any problem. More experience can lead to better understanding of more domains. This might seem obvious but things are only obvious after they bitten you a few times. If he had only back-tracked and stuck to the main roads . . . his children might not have had to grow up without him.
+1. Technopoly completely changed my trajectory. Ditto Norman’s Design of Everyday Things. I’ve been slowly rereading these and other seminal books which influenced me so much. You won’t be surprised by their continued relevancy. Maybe the people who lived thru the transitions (disruptions), experiencing them firsthand, were simply better able to see them more clearly. eg I’m in awe of Huxley and McLuhan.
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Similarly: While my geek cohort was devouring whackadoodles like Ayn Rand, I somehow got onto the humanist path reading Peter Drucker and Buckminister Fuller and the like. As a kid, I determined I was whatever the left wing version of libertarian is, but had no idea what that could be. I just started reading David Graeber last year. I feel like I finally find my home, my people.
People who “grow up poor” and take every opportunity to denigrate their origins are a special kind of garbage themselves.
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As trashtalk can attest, for years in the UK they lampooned “chavs,” lower class, tasteless people. Its original meaning wasn’t great but it slowly spread to reference any person who was poor then — like GreenWyvern’s attempt to backpedal, it became “a state of mind.” You could be rich and a chav… but nobody was really fooled, it inherited the sense that the poor are somewhat less than the high-born. It took a major shift in the culture to point out that this was the worst kind of High Tory propaganda, that people who have a bit less than us are somehow a different creature.
@narfle @granville
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Yeah… Reading around a bit does help give you a mind where you can understand things or be more creative. Myself I’m kind of tired of it all. I’ve read so many books and heard the arguments and whole load of static from politicians and media and random drive-bys I’m exhausted with it all. January is a shit time of year for escorts anyway without a pandemic or brexit. A fair few are taking time out gettig on with sorting things out and looking after their mental health along with trying to “keep the bed warm” for when some kind of normality returns. I don’t do camming or phone chats but even this is flagging according to some escorts. Everything will bounce back just not yet.
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I’m so bored I reactivated a social media account to pass the time away and created a payment account for clients who wish to buy me nice things or make donations to my cosmetic surgery fund. I could do with my own website and maybe even a youtube channel but that’s a bit of a leap at the moment. It’s all a bit “never mind the quality, feel the width” for me but hey ho.
Can I get a gravatar to work? Can I heck…
I can’t think of the last time I read one of Mark’s posts, but I try to never miss a chance to read the comments. Re the “trailer trash” commentary… I just try to stick with on-topic descriptives like “mean spirited people,” “greedy people,” or “untrustworthy people.” It really does avoid a lot of the incidental/accidental or dog whistling connotations that come with such as “chavs” or “trailer trash.”
@Jason Osgood
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C Northcote Parkinson, Peter Drucker, and Ogilvy (the advertising guru) good. They are of a generation which lived through it and built something out of nothing. They make a good trio to give you a good roundtrip of economcis and society, and management and achievement, and communciation and ethics. Infinitely preferable to that wanky libertarian Ayan Rand nonsense.
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Most libertarians and the Alt-Right have a few insecure echo chamber pseudo-intellectual masturbation issues. I agree with people who say social media amplified and magnifies this stuff. They wouldn’t get away with it with a more federated internet which is how things used to be nor would the brainwashing misinformation nonsense get as far. I would also throw 24 hour news with its ten minute news cycle into the mix most of whom have cut back on experts and analysis before rushing to publish.
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In my own job I can pretty much instantly tell the difference between a man who is used to real sex versus a man who has spent too much time browsing porn or paying cam girls. I’ve also had the odd virgin or two. Seriously, those guys don’t last two minutes. We don’t get as far as clothes off 99% of the time.
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I’ve had a handful of clients who fit somewhere along th Trump/Alt-Right/cleverdick spectrum and they are mostly a bit thick or have an ego. It’s not that they are especially different from comparable clients. It’s just they have swallowed the bullshit or been on the receiving end of right wing marketing or nonsense their mates are yapping. Can they be reasoned with? Not without a lot of work. They’re not my favourite type of client so I rarely if ever see them again.
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@Jason Osgood
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That’s a good question. I’ll have to pinch that. One of the ones I use to get men to open up and start talking and settle in is “How do you spoend your life?” I find asking what a man does for work is very limiting. Everything gets framed through work and some men can be very guarded. It also discriminates against men who have shit jobs or sometimes no jobs. These questions open things up more and they can talk more about what interests and motivates them. It creates a halo and more bonding. I find men who clam up or have a negative attitude even when I do this tend not to go anywhere and the sex is terrible. I have a marking and tag system so I can tell at a glance who is calling before I clock their name. Unless there is some potential there I mark them down as two stars out of five which is basically never answer their call unless I’m desperate for money and not even then. Would you stay at a two star hotel? No. And I wouldn’t want to be with a two star client.
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Pretty sharp comment. I think you can filter out the US-centric stuff and the stuff about lead poisoning and Fox television. The US has a lot of cultural issues which need analysis and unpacking. imho any “lead poisoning” or the likes of Murdoch media only exploit and amplify weakness and failings which is already there.
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I’m eclectic and am running my own none scientific study on peoples reactions based on what I wear. I wear stuff from smart skirtsuit to urban to sexy to posh to causal at different times and in different parts of town and different places as well as with my own clients to see what the reaction is. There very definately is a reaction and it is very often very stereotyped. It really shows up preconceptions and bluff and herd mentalities and so on.
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This week in one UK newspaper there was some feminist whining about sex and also some television industry comment about having more and more varied sex in television shows. This newspaper behind the scene obviously had some campaign going and was recycling its information to get two stories but there is a lot more going on than just this. You can see the ignorant closed off sex war not to mention invisible sex workers being sidelined. Most of the shit surrounding the sex industry comes from the media and porn websites (and politcians) and all the sexist ding-dong and nonsense in the media which indirectly reflects the poor state of politics and the country. But can you tell these Oxbridge educated blowhards are flying a desk. They only care about monitization and empire building. So much for “the young” but really this is more “the young” employed by print and television media not necessarily broader society. This is what happens when you have “media people” producing stuff without input from experts or people at the coalface or the actual end users.
I’m not sure Trump will “do fine”. I think he can get around Social Media using other people and group’s accounts. The real hope we have is that we have “enough” censorship to close down hate speech and organizing attempts of radical groups. That being said, these faction groups will go to other platforms, but even these are having trouble, like the quick rise and fall of Parlor.
Trump is bleeding cash these days, reeling from losing contract after contract at this resorts, and his NYC operating contracts for some of the city’s landmarks. He still is “acting” as the GodFather of the Republican Party, but I’m predicting a 2022 Rout of Republican Candidates, with the Democrats gaining solid control of the Senate and House.
The Republican Party is in a world of hurt. McConnell is trying to “walk the line” trying to keep Moderate Republicans (like me), who mostly already left when Trump was elected the first time in 2016. My loyalties have shifted and as long as the Democrats don’t go hard left with permanent UBI, or slave reparations, or defunding the police, I’ll probably stay there. Many moderate Republicans will leave for the Democrats, much like Reagan pulled over the “blue dog” Democrats in the early 1980’s. I would prefer to see a new “moderate” Party formed with many of the Moderates signing up. At the other end are the Radical Evangelical Gun-toting Nut Jobs who follow Trump like Caeser and believe Trump will cross the Rubicon and usher in a new 1950’s in the 2020’s. Fat Chance! The US military is already being purged of the members of the more radical groups in an effort to keep the military from going Trump.
My hope is that Trump will be prosecuted by states for Election Tampering, will lose so much business that he has to sell assets, and rapidly loses his capability to be the GodFather of the Republican party. That would be my hope.
Thank you for helping people get the information they need. Great stuff as usual. Keep up the good work.
Special Appearance Attorney California
Puke.
Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!
Well, we’re less than halfway through 2021, and Cringely’s #1 prediction has already been proven wrong.
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https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/donald-trump-blog-shuttered
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Trump’s blog has been shut down after less than a month. Why? People made fun of it and it had a paltry readership:
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“Trump rolled out the blog last month after being absent from social media since January, but his effort to regain some of the attention he received with his headline-grabbing tweets largely failed. An adviser told The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey that the former president wanted to open a new “platform” and didn’t like that this platform was being mocked and had so few readers. The individual spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about Trump’s plans.”
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“According to Washington Post analysis published last month, posts “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” as of mid-May, had been shared to Facebook “on average fewer than 2,000 times a day—a staggering drop from last year, when his Facebook page fielded tens of millions of comments, shares and other interactions every week.” In other words, his blog was a “stone-cold loser,” which you might have thought would translate to hate-clicks but apparently didn’t even do that.”
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Apparently he now has plans to launch a brand-new social media platform, which will be even more hilarious when it fails.
Apparently the theory that you don’t need social media to get insane popularity is wrong. I’m a bit sad about this, personally, as I prefer blogs and I think that social media is mostly deranged ranting and desperate attention-seeking that hurts people’s sense of well-being. Oh well.