Category: Politics

The stupidity to which American citizenship condemns us all.

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No Better Time than Now to Revisit the No Asshole Rule

It has been about 15 years since Robert Sutton, currently at Stanford, published his seminal work on workplace behavior, The No Asshole Rule, detailing how assholes cost companies huge sums of money and make detrimental contributions to the bottom line. He has since followed it up with The Asshole Survival Guide and Good Boss, Bad Boss because, apparently, assholes are exceptionally tenacious at keeping their positions.

This Reddit survey, by way of Gizmodo, reminds us that the no asshole rule must be extended to all personal relationships because being a rude asshole has gained substantial cachet and purchase globally and in American society, in particular, since 2015 for reasons that are obvious to you if you’re not a member of the offending crew.

Please, distribute this widely so that–perhaps, just perhaps–rude people may find the awareness, mindfulness and motivation to exercise tact.

We can dream, no?

Whatever your age, gender, or background, you’ve probably talked like a jerk at least once in your life.

Source: 13 Things Only Assholes Say, According to Reddit

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A Critical Reminder of How Far Humans Can Go

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen provides a great summary of the means by which Jews and minorities were executed by Nazi squads in his tour de force book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Although concentration camps receive the lion’s share of shrift and attention in popular accounts of the Holocaust, Goldhagen reminds the reader repeatedly that the method of choice during the holocaust was the bullet. Execution at gunpoint was the fastest, cheapest and, consequently, the most prevalent means by which victims were executed by Nazi murder squads. The practice was so prevalent and enormous that archeological discoveries serve as reminders and documentation of the practice. Mass graves were, of course, a deliberate strategy employed to prevent discovery and the erection of any memorial. The responsibility has thus fallen on the shoulders of physical anthropologists (i.e., archeologists) to uncover the details of history’s greatest crime. At a time when hate groups are organized, armed and dedicated to this outcome, it is important to remember the price of silence.

The Polish team who discovered the Nazi era mass grave in Poland.

Bullets, wedding rings pinpoint World War II execution grounds

Source: Archaeologists unearth Nazi-era massacre in Poland’s ‘Death Valley’

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The FAANG Wars Escalate

The war between Apple and Microsoft on one side, and Amazon, Facebook and Google on the other officially started in September of last year, and they just escalated with Apple’s release of iOS 14.5. Apple’s declaration that it will end app tracking–the practice of allowing the developer of one mobile phone application to be able to use your mobile device to track your activity in other applications you use on the mobile phone and to correlate your activity with your browsing habits on your computer and phone–is a major pillar of the business model of companies like Facebook and Google who collect this information in order to target ads at you specifically.

The practice goes much further, however. Both companies build “psychographical” profiles of users with such tracking information and use these models to control what each user sees. App tracking is thus one of the many elements of control through which Google and Facebook control the total user experience: they tailor the content they place before you in order to elicit the emotional response that will trigger you to click the ads they have included in the content they place before you. This is why, for example, Google is estimated to collect 20 times as much data as Apple does. It sounds sinister, and it is. (In the case of Amazon, this information is used to display search results that will maximize Amazon’s profit on the sale, not the value for the customer.)

Continue reading “The FAANG Wars Escalate”
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Pink seesaws at US-Mexico

The elegance with which a symbol of division and incipient racism is shattered by a favorite children’s playground toy is truly staggering. The design award is well earned.

The installation allowed children to play together from both sides of the US-Mexico border.

Source: Pink seesaws at US-Mexico wall win design award – BBC News

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Will American Politics Ever Be Civil Again?

The juxtaposition could not be starker. The Dutch government quit over a scandal comprised of the government accused poor people of theft over welfare funds they had legitimately received. It is hard to imagine any politician in the United States facing any consequences for stiffing poor people for welfare. It is even harder to imagine any member of Congress riding his or her bicycle (see picture below) in public in order to deliver an urgent message to the White House (since we don’t have a king).

Mark Rutte’s cabinet resigns after families were wrongly accused and many faced financial problems.

After the insurrection of January 6, 2020, it is impossible to imagine that any American politician will ever hold a public forum long enough to be shamed for not doing her or his job. This juxtaposition of Dutch civil life with American civil life begs so many depressing questions. Is American civil life doomed to become extinct? How do we regain civility and equanimity in the general American populace? Does any will exist to effect this change? This is one of the toughest times ever to be optimistic.

Source: Dutch Rutte government resigns over child welfare fraud scandal

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Requiem for Truth

Not too long ago, I wrote about how Facebook’s flagship products, Facebook and WhatsApp, have been usurped by malicious actors to decimate the truth and to instigate mass action bordering on genocide. Now, as the article linked below demonstrates, we may have the first quantitative measure of how successful such disinformation campaigns are on US soil. If it is correct that 40% of Republicans are as gullible as Burmese, then it is a sad day for the USA: we were done in by our own technologies.

A survey finds a false conspiracy theory about vaccines implanting tracking microchips is popular among Fox News viewers, Republicans and Trump voters.

Source: Over 40% of Republicans wrongly believe conspiracy theory about Bill Gates and COVID-19 vaccines – CNET

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Applying a Band-Aid to a Mortal Wound

Source: WhatsApp imposes even stricter limits on message forwarding

The speed with which social media have been hijacked by malicious forces to achieve ghastly ends is disconcerting. WhatsApp alone has been used to instigate lynchings in India and possibly a genocide in Burma. It is a sign of Facebook’s profound cowardice that it is acting only when a pandemic that affects the entire world–especially Facebook’s country of incorporation, the United States–is in full effect. Even so, the measures they are taking are much too paltry compared to the challenge to be of any use or effect. The quote below from WhatsApp constitutes the epitome of cynicism, the apogee of hypocrisy: after destroying truth, aiding the incitement of genocide and empowering propaganda machines, FaceBook is making a trivial gesture that effects little change beyond the actor making the statement below.

Caveat emptor! If you are getting your news from WhatsApp or Facebook, you are likely an ignoramus.

“We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation,” the company added.

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Universal Healthcare is Risk Reduction

www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-10/germany-and-coronavirus

As the asinine, primordial debate about whether universal healthcare is “socialism” or “capitalism” continues in the United States, it is important to emphasize the fact that it reduces risk to the economy and to the live of people who create the economy. Let’s be as cynical as we can possible get. If the only purpose people serve is to be participants in the marketplace, then health care reduces the risks that contagion like COVID-19 poses to the marketplace, to the economy. Germany seems to get it. Will the US?

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Fed Rate Cuts: Beware What You Ask for

Stocks Fall When Fed Cuts Rates

Trump insisted that the Federal Reserve Bank needs to cut interest rates because Trump thinks US economy is not doing well. The Fed demurred for the longest time because no data supports Trump’s point of view. Consequently, when Fed finally gave in to the awful businessman, the market saw it as a sign that the economy is not doing well and started a huge sell off.

This is a clear case of the blind leading the the acutely sighted. (Or blind ambition overpowering clear vision.) Trump may get the failing economy he has been projecting after all.

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Darwin Awards II: Suicide by Facebook

Louisiana police officers fired over post suggesting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be shot

Like it or not, the evolution of humans seems to be marked by the migration of a substantial portion of human existence into cyberspace. The Darwin awards, consequently, need to evolve–or perhaps they have–to account for the new follies therein. The two officers in this story are certainly not the first nominees or laureates of the cyber edition of Darwin awards, but perhaps this blog post can serve as the nomination that elevates them to the models to avoid during this brief period when the dire consequences of digital public stupidity persists in the public’s vanishingly brief short term memory.

Perhaps more puzzling than the fact that two police officers can’t grasp the impropriety of publicly joking about killing a politician is the fact that they target a politician who champions the cause of public servants, which is what police officers are. It is a remarkable feat of marketing that has convinced the great masses that they are better off with busted unions and underfunded pensions than they are with them. So far, only teachers have spoken up against this status quo. These cops don’t seem to have learned much from teachers.