And accept that there’s a good chance this will accomplish nothing but getting you on their naysayers list.
People can continue behavior where all they really need to do is stop actively harming themselves for no gain at all for years. It’s bizarre to watch from the outside. In the best cases they haven’t roped anyone else into their delusion-bubble.
People breaking the first rule wasn’t enough for me to crack into the scene. The weird two-paid-services thing required to use it effectively—a search service of some kind, and your actual content provider—and the jankiness of the software and sites involved were enough to get me to give up, after spending some money but making no meaningful progress toward pirating anything.
I started my piracy journey on Napster. I’ve done all the other biggies. I’ve done off-the-beaten-path stuff like IRC piracy channels. Private trackers. I have a soft spot for Windowmaker and was dumb enough to run Gentoo so long that I got kinda good at the “scary” deep parts of Linux sysadmin. I can deal with fiddliness and allegedly-ugly UI.
I think every time I’ve been (or even been moving toward) excellent at something, it’s because I found very little or none of it boring. Even very-focused drilling and such, or studying “boring” material (it wasn’t, to me—I didn’t have to deal with boredom to progress!)
Office work and dealing with bureaucracy stands out as something that lots of people find themselves doing and almost all of them find unpleasant, including experiencing tons of it as very boring.
No personalized feed driven by anything other than user selections. User identities downplayed. Profiles, but barely. Can’t “follow” people.
If HN is social media, the term’s being used so broadly we’ll need something other term to refer to the kind of thing that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et c, are.
- not owned by US adversary (this is X, Facebook, TikTok (current and new one after the “sale”…) all are owned by people who do not care about Americans and work actively to destroy it)
- no personal shit like “look at my life, I won’t have money for milk but here is a picture from Hawaii
Those two things already barely exist. I’m skeptical it’s possible, in a nation of hundreds of millions, to get them much closer to not existing than they already are.
So if those are the parts really bothering people… it sure seems like a case of looking for something to be upset about, in which case attempting to address their grievances won’t help. Or, a case of being told by people who are exaggerating the situation that these are actually really big deals, then not bothering to check whether that’s true. And in that second scenario, I don’t think making reality even closer to what they prefer than it already is will convince them of anything, so again, why bother to try to address their concerns?
Their perception is out of phase with what’s actually going on, that needs to be fixed before any useful discussion about some nugget of a point they may hypothetically have or helpful nuance their perspective might provide can meaningfully be engaged with.
It is more like "outrageous things dominate the news cycle". It is not even a new thing; on a similar note, already in the 1990s, people started believing widely that child abduction from the street was a real danger in their own communities.
That said, the politicians meet the demand, sometimes to their own detriment. The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money.
Is that a thing? No, as far as we know, 0 prisoners asked for a taxpayer-funded gender change surgery before or after, and there was probably no risk for Kamala in 2020 if she brushed that question aside as marginal and irrelevant.
But she wanted to prove her progressive credentials on a thing that barely existed, and the thing that barely existed turned viciously against her four years later.
Maybe it would be better if politicians just didn't chase barely existing things in EITHER DIRECTION.
> The Trump campaign could only deploy the "Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them" slogan because Kamala herself, in 2020, felt the need to conform to then-prevailing winds and declare that she would fund gender-change surgeries for prisoners from taxpayers money.
She was asked a question about it once by Fox, because Trump had brought it up, and answered that yes, she would follow the law and not deny medically necessary gender affirming care, and noted that the Trump administration had also followed the law in the same way. It was a response to an unfounded fact-free attack, prompted by a question from an unfriendly network. She didn’t bring it up again.
You have not found an example of a leftist politician chasing barely-existing things in this example—the opposite, in fact, she was playing defense to right wingers trying to make something out of nothing at all.
Do prominent democrats do this, on some topics? Probably! But they don’t have a media machine and strategy structured around that as a core activity.
[edit] I mean, they do this because it works, of course. Look at the thread on PG’s piece, and this one. It’s clearly working to get people riled up and shift the zeitgeist, reality be damned. “Welfare queens”, that was a fun one, and so successful that I bet 35+% of Americans who’ve heard the term still think it was an actual problem. Some fizzle (“they’re eating the pets!”) but they’re not punished for those instances, so why not endlessly throw out BS and see what sticks? Some of it does, and then we’re all talking about a bunch of basically-fake grievances instead of anything that matters, and they may even use the BS to advance positions that do affect things that matter. It’s so very tedious to deal with.
The ACLU had her fill out a form where she agreed to that position in 2020. That’s why it was a topic that Fox could ask about. This is absolutely a case of a tiny minority making a point of making the candidate take a fringe position, or be bullied by the activist class.
This is not how politics works. Politics is about spectacle, not facts. In order to turn people pro-trans the movement needs to come out emphatically against those two things. Make a spectacle out of it. “We’re just like you” consistently works
Is there some kind of reader-mode filtering site one can put a URL in to get a version that undoes this extra effort to remove capital letters? From what I’ve gotten of this piece I think it’s up my alley, but reading it is unpleasant.
[edit] incidentally, if this fad doesn’t burn out soon we’re going to need a setting to fix it under the heading of accessibility. I expect there are several categories of people for whom this is even more annoying than for most of us, and who can’t just get over it or re-train their brain to do better without the very-useful cues provided by capital letters, notably dyslexics.
>'The Art of Asking Your Boss For A Raise' by French experimental author Georges Perec is best read aloud. It’s a theatrical piece with dazzling, recursive language that evokes laughter and pity at 'your' plight as you tackle the practical and emotional burden of asking for a much needed (if not deserved) pay increase while in the employ of one of France’s largest companies.
>The entirety of the book's 80 pages are one sentence, without punctuation, capitalization or spatial breaks.
I suspect much of the reaction is that it seems a little pretentious, like a faux optimization along the lines of "Oh I'm soooo busy, no time for caps", etc.
Couldn’t read it & didn’t want to make the extra effort required to. Every message, paragraph, article, blog post or company missive I’ve ever read that deliberately went the extra mile to remove capitalisation was written by the type of “change for the sake of change is always better” numpty who is not yet mature enough to have any insights worth sharing.
Reading that helped me come to terms with how most of the time when I read PG essays I was a lot less impressed than everyone else seemed to be, and often (any time the topic wasn’t narrowly tech or maaaybe business) his writing struck me as actually bad—not well-reasoned, not convincing, and giving an impression of his being poorly-informed.
When I experience an author everyone else is praising that way, I wonder if I’m the moron. But, sometimes, maybe I’m not…
> Ironically the Wokeness article does what most people accuse "wokeness" of doing, predetermining its conclusion, and then shoehorning in a bunch of loosely connected facts and phenomena to support that assertion.
This basic approach underpins the pop-business and some of the pop-science industry. Plus much of self-help. And a good chunk of popular political books, of course.
It’s a winning approach, lots of folks read that kind of thing and nod along, are glad they paid money for it, and recommend that others do the same.
Even the “good” books in those genres are often guilty of it :-/
Motivated reasoning, cheap rhetorical tricks, and half-fake but digestible and uncomplicated history/facts are how you “win” the war of ideas.
This one’s footnote #2 addresses PG’s definition of “woke”, which I agree is useless (I’d go further: that kind’s so inconsequential that it’s nonsense to bring it up unless you’re using those complaints to attack other actions that do maybe have some justification, using the definition as cover to retreat to if called out; if that’s actually the only part you’re complaining about, just don’t write the piece, everyone already dislikes that kind for the same reasons you do)
What is “that kind” referring to? That kind of essay? The first essay? The response essay? That kind of definition? The author? Which author? That kind of person who is aggressively performative? If by “that kind” you mean that last definition, then let’s take one example in that happened recently and address your claim that “that kind” is inconsequential.
Undemocratically, performatively, anointing behind closed doors a weak but social justice signaling candidate to run on the democratic ticket in the recent US election, seems to have been just a wee bit consequential.
Worse, it’s an attempt to get us to agree that humans only do things for profit, in order to advance an ideology and make our thought more malleable when an author turns around and starts writing about public policy and ethics applied to things that actually are about profit.
At least that’s what is going on when the schools of “thought” this kind of stuff comes from attempt it. This particular poster might not be. But usually it’s a cheap rhetorical trick, coming from folks who present themselves as simply following logic. Gross.
People can continue behavior where all they really need to do is stop actively harming themselves for no gain at all for years. It’s bizarre to watch from the outside. In the best cases they haven’t roped anyone else into their delusion-bubble.