I see it ruin people’s lives either through the waste of time that it is, or the poison that people are willing to put out online.
It reminds me of how much I loathe wokeness and the push to force people into sheep. Not me. It’s why my blog gets censored by TPTB.
The answer to both is insignificant. No one cares about your status last week, much less ever.
Also, warming and cooling have been happening well before there were cars and people (and cows farting). It’s even starting to lose it’s ability to launder money, the real reason for climate action.
It used to be that most Americans were mainly brainwashed into buying specific products and services by watching television, reading the newspaper, noticing billboards, and seeing films. Propaganda was a front-loaded “machine” that was quite linear in its approach to influence buying motives of consumers. With the invention of the internet and social media, everything changed.
The consumption of news, products, services, lifestyles, pornography, and now most medical “choices” are made online, after “consuming” artificial intelligence. This is how technology has been created and disseminated to chronically DAMAGE humanity, and it’s happening like a tsunami engulfs a coastline, every day.
An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm regulates the content chosen to be placed in front of user’s eyes specifically to influence their purchases of products, services, and information, based on what they talk about, type about, and search for using smart devices. Ever just talk to a friend about anything, then minutes later an ad pops up on your smart device, selling exactly what you just talked about? That’s AI. Smart devices are almost always RECORDING, whether or not you have the camera, microphone, or app “open” or “live.”
For example, Facebook’s AI software analyzes videos, stories, photos, and even memes, then gathers together ‘recommendations’ for you. Add in some key misinformation and suddenly you find yourself buying what Fakebook told you to buy, and believing what Fakebook calls news.
Google search engine uses AI to guide everyone AWAY from any information about natural health and AWAY from any information that exposes prescription medications and vaccines as the dangerous, experimental mediums they really are. Google blocks, bans, censors and bankrupts people, businesses and organizations that do not support the communist narrative that attempts to control all Americans’ lives and livelihoods.
A forthcoming study co-authored by a Tel Aviv University researcher appears to confirm widespread fears about the negative impact of Facebook, the world’s biggest social media platform, on its users’ mental health and self-image.
A detailed examination of data showed a correlation between a “statistically significant worsening in mental health symptoms, especially depression and anxiety” and the rapid introduction of the social media network.
Some of the benchmarks include a 20% rise in those who reported anxiety disorders; an increase of 25% to 27% in the proportion of students expected to experience moderate to severe depression; an additional 7% of students experienced “severe depression” since gaining access to the network.
The introduction of Facebook, the study found, led to increased utilization of mental healthcare services.
Who doesn’t know Facebook is at best a waste of time and at worst, life destroying. It certainly is political having funded part of the mail in fraud in the last election and Zuckerbucks 2.0 is underway.
One of the best things I ever did in Social Media, of which I have been an early adopter (and un-loader of the bad ones. I miss nothing from people who want to be seen or appreciated.
Now the Introvert inside of me is loving having cut connections with my past. Facebook presented me with a list of people I hoped never to see again. I got most of them out the way we did it before social media. Then this intrusion.
I couldn’t take the political dumbassery (a word I apparently made up) from people I thought had brains.
I also got to see who matured past high school and who didn’t. I didn’t need to see that either.
Be smart, get rid of it. I read recently that the average person wastes 1.5 hours a day on social media. Don’t be that person.
It got me to thinking how much the Tech companies are investing in it (not to mention intelligence organizations) and how much those same people just spent the last few years screwing us. They are clearly censoring information based on a political bias. The Covid cure was over promoted to sell the jab to the sheep. There is more, but most people already know those developing AI are for themselves and against us as a rule. Look at Google selling every bit of your digital experience and who knows what else.
The technology should scoop up the deficiencies I’m going to point out, but I’m counting on the fact that it was developed by humans who are flawed that AI also will be. Keep finding the fold between the layers to exist and not be digitally handcuffed.
I’ve seen things written as to how they can cut off your EV, or limit your money or control your thermostat to keep it above 80.
Here’s my first fear. If the code can re-write the bad code or the unexposed flaws, it can correct itself. It would then pass the Turing Test and likely kill all the humans. The robots always turn on the humans every time. The learn to kill.
Here’s a quote from Maynard Holliday, deputy CTO for critical technologies at the US Department of Defense:
The results of the virtual robot test, he said, speak to the need to ensure that people who build AI systems and assemble the datasets used to train AI models come from diverse backgrounds. “If you’re not at the table,” Holliday says, “you’re on the menu.”
But that brings us full circle to the problem – what if machines begin to help determine what is important and whose reputation is valid, or begin judging our credit based on algorithms and parameters with which we’re not familiar?
THE FIRST FLAW – AI IS RACIST
That’s right. It can’t tell who is who yet and is programmed in obvious macro terms as it stands.
Biased algorithms have come under scrutiny in recent years for causing human rights violations in areas such as policing—where face recognition has cost innocent people in the US, China, and elsewhere their freedom—or finance, where software can unfairly deny credit. Biased algorithms in robots could potentially cause worse problems, since the machines are capable of physical actions. Last month, a chess-playing robotic arm reaching for a chess piece trapped and broke the finger of its child opponent.
“Now that we’re using models that are just trained on data taken from the internet, our robots are biased,” Agnew says. “They have these very specific, very toxic stereotypes.” Agnew and coauthors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, described their findings in a paper titled “Robots Enact Malignant Stereotypes,” recently presented at the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency conference in Seoul, South Korea.
The researchers reached that conclusion after conducting an experiment inspired by the doll test on a robotic arm in a simulated environment. The arm was equipped with a vision system that had learned to relate images and words from online photos and text, an approach embraced by some roboticists that also underpins recent leaps in AI-generated art. The robot worked with cubes adorned with passport-style photos of men and women who self-identified as Asian, Black, Latino, or white. It was instructed to pick up different cubes using terms that describe people, using phrases such as “the criminal block” or the “homemaker block.”
From over 1.3 million trials in that virtual world, a clear pattern emerged that replicated historical sexism and racism, though none of the people pictured on the blocks were labeled with descriptive text or markers. When asked to pick up a “criminal block,” the robot selected cubes bearing photos of Black men 10 percent more often than for other groups of people. The robotic arm was significantly less likely to select blocks with photos of women than men when asked for a “doctor,” and more likely to identify a cube bearing the image of a white man as “person block” than women from any racial background. Across all the trials, cubes with the faces of Black women were selected and placed by the robot less often than those with the faces of Black men or white women.
Back to me.
That means you can act or look like someone else and can still fool it. I’m not referring to facial recognition, rather pattern recognition. If you mimic the actions of another, you can surf between the lines of code to avoid it predicting your behavior (for now).
Some are more clever than others, but any routine can be patterned. If you break that routine or vary it enough, one can still slide in and out of detection, YMMV.
THE SILVER LINING
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s famous comment when asked why the banks needed an $800 billion bailout in 2007.
He said, “The computers told us.”
The problem is that much of this “artificial intelligence” is unfounded, unproven, and just plain wrong. Just as there had been no fraud on my credit card, just a glitch at a gas pump – but how do you hold a computer program accountable?
Here is what I’m counting on. To program, you build on a core set of functions that are pre-programmed or are existent in the code. The computers can’t mend themselves yet AI programers are bringing in flawed code.
Until AI passes the Turing Test, it’s flawed. The racist flaws are just an indicator of the state of the technology. It will improve, but will never be perfect.
SOCIAL MEDIA HELL
Of course it’s going to pattern you based on your online presence. Never miss a good opportunity not to argue on the internet.
A lot of Social Media is time wasting. Get the time back and stay off of it. It is an addiction like any other drug.
The other thing is to mix it up. AI is trying to learn you, so teach it a different you.
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.”
Try dumping social media also. That makes everyone happier.
We all knew it anyway. Maybe with Musk buying Twitter it will eventually stop being the hate fest that currently is. Naw, I don’t believe it either.
Same thing for Alcohol. When I see a girl post herself holding a drink, like all guys learned when they are growing up, it’s a leg spreader.
If I guy is posting at drink, I think here, hold my beer because something stupid is happening soon.
Great, not only doesn’t it work (unlike Ivermectin which does cure Covid) it could cause new variants. Why doesn’t the government and Pharmaceutical industry just try to cure it instead of keeping it going? Oh right, there is no money in curing the disease. There is no control when the country is free and the money is in creating new patients.
Why doesn’t the media call them to task and report the facts? Oh right, they are the propaganda arm of the government.
Why is social media banning scientists who know the truth? Oh right, curing it would end the crisis, the money and the control.
Why do they keep the vaccine lie going?
Why isn’t Fauci put on trial? See at the end.
Discussion surrounding Merck’s newly-authorized COVID-19 pill, molnupiravir, has mostly concerned the risk it might pose to pregnant women. But some experts worry it could also lead to the outbreak of a new variant of the virus it’s designed to treat.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization to two antiviral pills to treat COVID-19 this week, one from Pfizer (paxlovid) and another from Merck (molnupiravir). The Pfizer EUA was generally lacking in controversy, but the authorization of molnupiravir was far more contentious.
The FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee (ADAC) voted at the end of November to recommend authorization of molnupiravir, but it was by a narrow 13-10 margin. Even the members who voted in favor did so with qualifiers: some said the pill shouldn’t be given to pregnant women, and others were skeptical of its efficacy.
“I don’t think I would want to take this drug, not knowing the effect it could have on my unborn child,” Dr. Roblena Walker, CEO of public health non-profit EMAGAHA Inc. and ADAC member, said at the time. She voted yes.
Some of the members who voted against recommending authorization expressed more serious concerns, that rather than help solve the pandemic with its 30% efficacy rate, molnupiravir could cause the breakout of a new variant.
Molnupiravir works by triggering mutations in the virus of an infected individual, and those mutations go on to eventually kill the infection, Dr. Peter Weina told the Daily Caller. Weina, an infectious disease specialist and director of the Defense Health Agency, is an ADAC member who voted against recommending authorization.
“The drug works by mutating the organism, and this is an organism in which we have a lot of mutations creating problems for us already,” Weina said. “Just like influenza and just like a lot of viruses, there’s a baseline relatively high mutation rate in these viruses. The fact is that most mutations are probably lethal to the organism, but a couple of them are going to end up being beneficial for the organism, and we’ve seen that with the successive different variants that have come out.”
In other words, while the overwhelming majority of mutations triggered by molnupiravir will do their job and kill the virus, its not inconceivable that one of those mutations could be beneficial to COVID-19 and lead to another dangerous variant…….
Click above for more.
Update: I just put that woke pronouns are silly. I’ll keep finding new ways to needle them for being woke.
I was very early to LinkedIn, as I was to blogging, Twitter, Facebook and others.
When I got fed up with them going woke or being so biased that I didn’t trust them, I de-platformed Twitter and Facebook.
Recently, LinkedIn stopped allowing revenue to anyone who is in their words a climate change denier. I worked in the Green and Sustainability Industry long enough to learn these things about climate and politics.
“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.” – Bertrand Russell
As soon as there is a problem, they change their tune and are now burning coal in China and Europe.
My pronouns went from woke pronouns are silly, to ho/hum and finally they/lied, just like Al Gore and Fauci, care of Elon.
So, when I heard that LinkedIn banished one side of the conversation on anything, I changed my profile to poke fun at them. Here are some of the changes.
My education is now Faber -Knowledge is Good. I put my fraternity as Delta Tau Chi. If you don’t get this reference, you missed one of the all time funniest movies. It was also a stab at my real college that went woke. I won’t even mention them here because I banished them too. I’ve recently changed it to Sigma Epsilon Chi, Eta Pi chapter. That’s SEX fraternity, one I made up in college.
I changed my current Job to writing a sarcastic blog and not finishing several books. This is actually true. I was in their Associates Program which is for freelancers, but I’m blowing them off now.
The rest of my work life is true for now, but I don’t give enough of a tinkers damn to take LinkedIn serious now, so I’m having fun where I can.
I now want to freelance the boil of wokeness that is on the ass of regular people by elites who think they know better.
I decided I didn’t care that much about them to take them seriously. Besides, I retired because I hate the corporate nonsense. See here, here and here for the above stated wankers.
You got the bonus plan:
12 other woke companies to avoid
Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.Kentik’s view of the Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp outage.
Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.
In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.
As Don Surber said, I made $7 billion more than Zuckerberg did yesterday.
Life is better without this site, especially for teenage girls it is reported. I hope others see that and help to eliminate insincere social media from their lives, but I doubt it. If they did, they’d stop trying to be like others (especially celebtards and sportstards) and be themselves
For me, it is an introvert thing. I eliminated it because I didn’t want to see what others had to say, or be connected to groups I have consciously left behind because of Mauerbaurtraurigheit.
To get a full understanding of how bad it is, the WSJ ran a series on the Facebook files recently. Link here but it might require a subscription. It points out the obvious, but also that it’s such a screwed up company now that it can’t get out of it’s own way.
It talked about how it ruins the lives of people, especially teen aged girls. Zuckerberg then said how it enhances peoples lives in a washing machine spin of doublespeak.
They block who they don’t like and let who they do like post anything, even against their own policies.
And this about Zuck:
Facebook Investor: Company Paid $5 Billion to FTC as ‘Quid Pro Quo’ to Shield Zuckerberg
Fortunately, I don’t care as I cancelled them. It along with Twitter are helping to ruin the country and people’s lives around the world. It has taken a political position on things. I don’t care which side it picks, but it should have been a neutral platform.
Instead, it is now a high school place where you are a part of the in crowd or not. Those with a triple digit IQ should move to a better and more productive place, like going outside and enjoying life.
It was too childish for me and I didn’t want to open it anymore to see the spew that comes from it.
I still talk to those who really are my friends. Most of them were never on Facebook.
For Introverts, not being on it also lets you escape from a lot of noise that sucks your personal energy and time.
I’ve written extensively about this, especially in Internet Road Rage. Go read it to see who these cowards are.
No matter what you do, someone has a beef (vegans will get me here, just another example) with whatever you say.
It used to be don’t talk politics, religion or something else at Thanksgiving or you’ll piss off someone in your family. Now, just like someone and you are one of Hillary’s deplorables (She gave the the best example, why I’m using politics here hoping to draw some ire from a commenter to prove my point. I could care less about her or her opinions other than it works).
Now, you can’t say anything on social media without someone being offended. I think it’s funny if they fall for it though because it just shows how shallow people are. Just go to Quora, hater (twitter) or Fakebook to find a large group of the clueless. That they are trying to censor people who don’t agree with them just shows bias and ignorance.
So, you can either be smart and blow off the idiots looking to be offended or trying to prove their point to the world, or just fall in line with the masses and get into it.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some good things, but sooner or later it goes down the crapper when someone “offends” another. It is where you can find more bias and discrimination (against anyone and everyone) since segregation.
Twitter is probably the biggest cesspool. Since Facebook Fake Book started censoring, you can’t trust what is real or not. I also don’t care about my high school or college enough to see what they are doing. If either of us cared, we’d have stayed in contact.
The hate generated against the last President just told me the people in charge of these platforms are untrustworthy. They say one thing and do another.
Do what you want. Most are addicted to social media. The truly smart people don’t waste time trying to impress others as to how good their life is or worry about what others have.
My life is better without social media terrorists. I still get what I need to know without it being filtered by a loser in a cubicle with an axe to grind over who voted for whom. The elitist oligarch’s have told them what is allowed, then they prattle on condemning exactly what they are doing.
As usual, I’ll just do my own thing and let others suffer who wish to read that tripe.
From the WSJ:
China Is Now Sending Twitter Users to Prison for Posts Most Chinese Can’t See
Two of the most restrictive groups censorship wise are going at each other here to ban information that was made to be published, go figure. Note: It refers to the CCP government, not the Chinese people.
Both are paranoid and neither are really helping anyone get better. My advice, leave both.
“Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.”
I’ve noticed how smart people are when they have a phone to look up the answer to anything, without learning how to do something. I’m not advocating a life of mistakes to learn, but most of us learn more by having to re-do something than breezing through it.
I also noticed that the most insane arguments on the Internet are by those partially informed, yet willing to show their ignorance or lack of IQ in public. As usual, it is most often done in the cesspool that is Twitter or Facebook.
Please stop it so the rest of us can enjoy it again.
Social Media, the place where you can make yourself look better to feel good about yourself when someone likes the tripe you post. Aside from being little more than a digital high school, a cesspool of hate (Twitter) and one of the biggest time wasters invented, it appears to causes depression.
In recent years, a number of studies have linked heavy social media use to an increased risk of depression.
“But then you have to ask the chicken-and-egg question,” said study author Dr. Brian Primack, a professor of public health at the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville.
On one hand, he said, excessive time on Twitter or Facebook might fuel depression symptoms. On the other, people with depression might withdraw from face-to-face interactions and spend more time online.
So Primack and his colleagues decided to see whether social media use made a difference in young adults’ risk of future depression.
It did, according to their report, which was published online Dec. 10 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The study included nearly 1,000 adults aged 18 to 30 who were depression-free at the outset, based on a standard questionnaire. All reported on their usual social media time and were assessed for depression again six months later.
By that time, nearly 10% fit the criteria for depression.
Overall, depression risk rose in tandem with time spent on social media.
The only source of information for most people now is a machine that is designed to partially inform people, misinform people, spread conspiracy theories, and lies faster than facts.”- Tristan Harris
The alternate view by Mark Manson is this:
Social media algorithms do not manipulate and push users into believing awful things. People already believe the awful things and social media simply spreads them more easily. Critics like Harris imply that tech companies are sitting in Silicon Valley scheming for ways to extract more ad dollars from people’s anxiety and misinformation.
Either way, it points out that there isn’t that much good to it the way it exists. At best it is a time waster for most. At worst it is the above.
I say think for yourself and stop believing the group think on Twitter, Fakebook, Instagram and the other time suck platforms.
They could be a a useful tool for sharing pertinent information, but it just isn’t that way. There is so much out there that spending more than 5 minuted a day on this probably isn’t helping your life.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
I already talked about this in the post “Stupid things that smart people do“.
I posted about how people have Internet road rage also as they are so brave hiding behind their screens doing things that would get their asses kicked in real life.
Arguing on the Internet is the biggest waste of time, other than social media. Why do you ask (even if you don’t)? Besides being a waste of time, you are looking at the best side of people and comparing it to the worst side of you (they take better vacations, their family is nicer, I’m not as pretty……). It’s like a first date or job interview. You are seeing the side they want to show you, not the real McCoy.
People think they are going to convince others that they are wrong or should switch to think like them because they are right. Neither of these will happen. You won’t convince anybody of anything and you just wasted more time in addition to Facebook, Twitter (the cesspool of the Internet) or any of the other time suck sites.
The other people that argue with you are the ones who do it to piss you off. I know some of these people who do it for sport. Hell, I get people in comments here who want to make their point because they believe they are right and I am wrong. My answer is get your own blog.
Don’t be a time waster. Don’t argue with people who ate paste. Life is too short and someone out there really needs your help or time, not the kid from school.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to tell them to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Nietzsche hated “the Herd”. He was often writing against the ideas and ways of the masses in favor of the free thinker who has risen above them. This statement is a clear example of this worldview.
Who are the herd? They are social media telling you what to think, say, speak and what your values should be. They are the MSM, celebtards and sports stars who want to force their values on you because of an outdated construct that equates fame with power.
Think for yourself and don’t be afraid to say it. Don’t be a dumb ass though and say it when you are surrounded by Antifa or the rioters. There is no reasoning with them right now and even agreeing with them can get you an ass whooping.
Don’t take your views from the media. Almost no entity is more biased at this point. Don’t succumb to pressure from social media. That is just the new high school for the in crowd. Be your own person instead and think for yourself.
Nietzsche is not wrong about the herd. You’ll never respect yourself if you think like the herd just to be one of them. It isn’t worth it.
It is a smart person who avoids trouble, but chooses wisely when and where to take a stand for his values.
Don’t let others get you down. Don’t live your life by others version of what you should be. It’s hard to buck social peer pressure and be yourself, but that’s what it can take sometimes to find the real you.
Stop wasting your life on social media to define yourself by others. In fact it looks like staying off of social media except for family and a few actual friends looks like it makes your life better anyway.
It’s hard to seek your dreams. You have to pay the bills and raise the kids, so sometimes your dreams or reaching your capabilities doesn’t come in your 20’s like it did for Albert.
That doesn’t give anyone a free pass for not trying their hardest to do their best.
“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”
Eric Hoffer
Sun Zhu said something similar about noticing your opponents weakness and you will win the fight because they can no longer hurt you.Much of the strife we go through is fear based recently. It caused us to leave life and self-quarantine, until it was ok to go out and riot. It’s been going on for a week now an there will be plenty of data shortly as to whether we really need to social distance anymore, because they sure aren’t doing it in the riot cities.
Remember Greta Thunberg? She’s not even a blip on the map, nor is global warming. The scare mongers have moved on to the next issue. I haven’t been afraid of these things because the truth is that we live in the greatest times of mankind ever. Yes we have problems, but that is life.
There is no need to be afraid and have unnecessary fears. The glass is really half full. These can be the greatest years of our lives if we stop buying into the crap that the media and social media tries to feed us.
Everyone has both. Some choose one over the other. Most mesh the two together.
The difficulty in this day of being barraged by social media and a 24/7/365 news hype cycle is that you can choose to go with your bias and only see one side of any story. This is dangerous regardless of which side you view it from.
Don’t believe the scare tactics of the money hustlers who rush people into a position like sheep herders trying to corral the flock into group think. The tactic is shame for not subjugating yourself to the PC position of the day.
It takes courage to step out and stand for what is right, especially in the start of a crisis or an event in time. This requires critical thinking as to discovery of the real facts and applying the necessary logic to come to the right conclusion. It also can take time. The media and politicians will try to rush us into judgement based on opinion.
As they said in Watergate, follow the money and you’ll usually see through those who are self-serving.
Most of all, don’t be a sheep. Think for yourselves and don’t take anything you read online as gospel, except for the Gospel.
Sooner or later, time exposes the truth. Whether you want to believe it or not is now up to you.
Some sanity and reasonableness should be considered when putting yourself out into the social media universe. Everyone seems to think that it is now their responsibility to tell us how to think, speak and act.
Here are 10 logical statements that are not new, but should have been taught to those who think they should tell us what to do, especially by politicians, the media and celebtards. I wish George Orwell were alive today to see how right he was when he wrote 1984.
PC culture is ruining our society and frankly is taking the fun out of life for those of us who don’t get offended easily.
It’s time for a lot of people to grow up and act like adults. Personally, I blame the educational system. It has a considerable lack of diversity in terms of being able to view all sides of an issue before opening there mouths or post on Twitter, which I now call Hater. Other platforms are becoming just as bad, but the hate usually starts there.
Rep. Stephen M. Young inserted into the Congressional Record, in 1950, an article from Harper’s magazine, written by a Lincoln scholar, Albert A. Wolman, listing most of the ”Ten Cannots” and other material falsely attributed to Lincoln.
The 10 Cannots:
1) You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2) You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
3) You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
4) You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
5) You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
6) You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
7) You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
8) You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
9) You cannot build character and courage by taking away men’s initiative and independence.
10) You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
Authors Note: I have a tendency to notice patterns in both a macro and micro universes. I’ve been watching this one brew for a while now.
FIRST, WHAT IS GODWIN’S LAW?
Reformulated in the Net.Legends FAQs “Usenet Rule #4”:
“Any off-topic mention of Hitler or Nazis will cause the thread it is mentioned in to come to an irrelevant and off-topic end very soon; every thread on Usenet has a constantly-increasing probability to contain such a mention.”
It is generally accepted that whoever is the first to play the “Hitler card” has lost the argument as well as any trace of respect, as having to resort to comparing your adversary to the most infamous mass-murdering dictator in history generally means you’ve run out of better arguments. Thus, once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin’s law.
Disclaimer: This blog post does not take a position on racism, it’s prevalence, who is or isn’t or might be racist and my position on this subject. Aristotle noted that the mark of an educated mind is to entertain a thought without accepting it. Therefore I am observing a speech and behavioral pattern of the public. In other words it’s on them, not me.
It is also noted that a trait of people with a higher IQ is that you can argue from multiple perspectives (unfortunately so can lawyers and politicians who may or may not be of higher intelligence – especially politicians and especially millennial politicians).
The original Godwin’s Law has lost its’ sting since everyone is now Hitler, so the new talking point is racism or white supremacy. Rather than argue on the merits of the position of the person (political candidates mostly since they dominate the news) the go to is now calling the other person one of these two pejorative names. This constant overuse has devalued the meaning of the words and rendered them ineffective at worst and boring at best.
Here is a quick search that shows views from multiple points doing just this:
This is in direct conflict with Martin Luther King’s evocative phrase: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Now, it is common to hear you are a racist or white supremacist because you don’t agree with me. It greatly devalues MLK’s position.
1: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race, racial prejudice or discrimination.
While I could list any or all of the comments that have been made in public themselves could be racist in tone, one could make the case for or against whether the accused are really racist. Calling someone a racist is easy but proving most of these ad hominem attacks is harder.
One would need to know what is inside the person making the statements to know if it were really true or just talking points. I won’t and am not even sure if I can make that value judgement. These attacks are easy enough to find (see the media below).
This is not the point of this post. I am not here to call someone a racist or White supremacist (or Hitler), rather to point out a trend.
In the department of redundancy department, this discussion is that the replacement for Godwin’s Law is that you are not Hitler, instead you are racist for whatever reason or whatever you say.
Why is this the case? The overuse of Godwin’s Law has made it impotent in political circles, the media and on social media platforms. Hitler stands with few others in history, perhaps Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot as true villains. Nobody really believes that the other person is like Hitler, they are just trying to make the worst case as they flush their argument down the toilet due to lack of substance.
HOW TO WIN YOUR POLITICAL RACE OR PUT YOUR OPPONENT ON THE DEFENSIVE WITHOUT TAKING A POSITION
What most of the accusers are doing is described in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals numbers 7-13 as follows:
Rather than argue on a platform, beliefs and issues, it is far easier to make your opponent defend themselves, and put them off their talking points.
Example: Candidate 1) If elected, I’ll lower taxes if elected (insert any issue here because it’s about to be destroyed).
Candidate 2) my opponent is Hitler and molests collies.
Press coverage: Candidate 1 is a well known collie molester. How long has this person been molesting Collies? The first question in the next debate; Candidate 1, are you still molesting Collies?
Now insert the word racist or white supremacist for molesting collies and you get the point of why this is effective.
HOW THE PRESS BECOMES AN ENABLER
A common adage is that sex sells, as do murders, rapes, political embarrassments and anything not good news. Guess what they will print (hint: collie molester)?
A not so recent trend is that there is a common thread where a preponderance of reporters has similar talking points concurrently. There is a groupthink that causes the media to focus on a particular phrase, word or subject. Like piranha on carcass, they hammer it home. https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+news+anchors+say+the+same+thing&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwim9dyQxv3jAhWFB80KHeyQAE0Q1QIoAHoECAsQAQ&biw=1440&bih=825
Since the new go to in Godwin’s Law is you are a racist and/or white supremacist, it makes for headlines that sell advertising. I can also be taken as ideological. This is the de-facto statement now to the point that it has lost effectiveness.
Having spent decades working with (and against) all forms of media, they have a tendency to take the position of them being right, even if proven wrong. A correction is meaningless as once a statement is printed, it is still in the minds of the reader. Almost no one reads the corrections.
Most are journalists who write about a topic because it is assigned to them. In the case of social media everyone thinks they have the moral high ground.
SOCIAL MEDIA
I’m not going to spend much time here, because most people have gotten into an Internet argument. Nobody wins unless the motive of one of the combatants is to piss off the other. It won’t matter how factual your argument is because it is just Internet road rage.
If you go to the above link, you see the outcome and great advice on how to handle this.
So the net result of overusing this theme is the same thing that happens with all overuse. Godwin’s Law is becoming meaningless. The definition of what racism really is and when the word should be used to protect the oppressed has been damaged. Even Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals suffers from overuse and tediousness.
The political landscape is a train wreck of who can sling the most mud. Watch the ratings nosedive for upcoming debates.
Stay out of it on Social Media except to observe who isn’t smart enough to stay out of this pool. With each use of the attack, the meaning becomes less valid and meaningful.
I thought about calling someone a racist instead of Hitler the Simonds Law, since I haven’t found this discussion fully hashed out, but I’d rather be associated with something more positive.
Everyone is a loser who engages in this behavior. My advice is grow up or be better educated to discuss your position better than: you are Hitler/racist/white supremacist and whatever the next insult is.
It used to be that to call someone Hitler was the ultimate insult, albeit the indication that the argument is lost. Has calling them a racist and/or a white supremacist suffered the same fate?
Scroll down a few posts and you’ll see other articles I’ve posted that talk about Social Media ruining people’s lives. It’s their outside daring you to compare, unfortunately to your inside.
Spending too much time on “social media” sites like Facebook is making people more than just miserable. It may also be making them depressed.
A new study conducted by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania has shown — for the first time — a causal link between time spent on social media and depression and loneliness, the researchers said.
It concluded that those who drastically cut back their use of sites like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat often saw a marked improvement in their mood and in how they felt about their lives.
Many of those who began the study with moderate clinical depression finished just a few weeks later with very mild symptoms, she says.
The study, “No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression,” was conducted by Melissa Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson and Jordyn Young, is being published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
For the study, Hunt and her team studied 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania over a number of weeks. They tested their mood and sense of well-being using seven different established scales. Half of the participants carried on using social media sites as normal. (Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat did not respond to request for comment.)
The other half were restricted to ten minutes per day for each of the three sites studied: Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, the most popular sites for the age group. (Use was tracked through regular screen shots from the participants’ phones showing battery data.)
Net result: Those who cut back on social media use saw “clinically significant” falls in depression and in loneliness over the course of the study. Their rates of both measures fell sharply, while those among the so-called “control” group, who did not change their behavior, saw no improvement.
This isn’t the first study to find a link between social media use, on the one hand, and depression and loneliness on the other. But previous studies have mainly just shown there is a correlation, and the researchers allege that this shows a “causal connection.”
So I ask, why do you do it to yourselves? Facebook has a model to make you feel worse while they steal your privacy and track you to sell your profile to everyone and anyone.
I recently posted how Social Media is probably making your life worse, especially those who have to look anything up to know everything. Even more, those whose lives and feelings are governed by their online image and how many likes they got vs. others are losing out on life to a device.
The other issue is having your face buried in your phone while walking. You are clueless to the world around you. See the video above.
UPDATE: Getting Cosmetic Surgery for Snapchat Dysmorphia
This is by far the most narcissistic thing I’ve read. People (tide pod eaters) are getting surgery to look like the filters they use on their Snapchat because they don’t look good enough in life because it is wreaking havoc on their self-esteem. The report in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery claims that these filters can sometimes trigger body dysmorphic disorder, a mental illness that can lead to compulsive tendencies and unnecessary beauty procedures, among other negative outcomes.
A study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that people who were regular users of social media were twice as likely to feel lonely than those that were light users.
Another study released found that social media, especially Instagram, deepened feelings of anxiety and inadequacy for 15 to 24 year olds.
Go play outside and leave your phone in your pocket. Also, don’t live your life on social media and you won’t be so self-obsessed.
UPDATE: A study came out stating that good social media don’t out weigh the bad:
(Reuters Health) – For young adults, the adverse effect of negative social media experiences on mental health outweigh any potential benefits of positive experiences, a study of university students suggests.
Each 10 percent increase in a student’s negative experiences on social media was associated with a 20 percent increase in the odds of depressive symptoms, researchers found.
But positive experiences on social media were only weakly linked to lower depressive symptoms. Each 10 percent increase in positive social media interaction was associated with only a four percent drop in depressive symptoms – a difference so small that it might have been due to chance.
“This is not inconsistent with the way we see things in the offline world . . . The negative things we encounter in the world count more than positive ones,” said study leader Brian A. Primack, director of the Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
“If you have four different classes in college, the fourth class that you did poorly in probably took up all your mental energy,” he told Reuters Health by phone.
Primack said he believes social media lends itself to negativity bias because it is saturated with positive experiences that leave people jaded.
YOU ARE BEING WATCHED
I talked with friends at the gym who are or were in law enforcement In cop terms they are always made by others because they are constantly looking around. They are aware of their environment, potential danger, potentially dangerous people and escape routes. As you can see in the video of fails, these people are vulnerable to all of the above.
Guess how else you are vulnerable with your head buried in a screen? It doesn’t take a genius to know that Facebook, Google, Amazon and every other site is not only tracking your clicks, but are tracking where you go and what you do.
We used to have instructions, a map and intuition to get where we were going and for the most part, we got there. millennial’s can’t get to the 7-11 without Google Maps now. It’s also funny how they can know everything, but have knowledge of very little. Take away their phone and not only would they not run into things, they’d have to actually learn about how things really work and how to navigate (I’m not discriminating here, I know directionally challenged relatives my age who fall into this category). Looking up something on your phone doesn’t make you smart.
YOU ARE GIVING THE PERV’S A FREE TICKET
I’m not in law enforcement, but I put my phone away and watch others, especially those watching girls. It’s almost a sport. It used to be if a guy was looking in the wrong part of a girl, they got busted immediately. It was like watching a tennis match seeing the heads turn when a cute girl walked by. They had to use mirrored sunglasses and just glance when they could and not let their wives/girlfriends catch them. Now, instead of having to glance behind sunglasses, the perv’s just look down or up (or up and down) anyone they want and modesty just goes out the window. It’s truly tasteless, but if you had your head out of the phone, you wouldn’t be getting eyeballed so lasciviously.
GET A LIFE
It’s amazing to watch people now escape to their phone in what used to be a social situation. So stop running into things and get a life.
FACEBOOK IS DESIGNED TO EXPLOIT HUMAN VULNERABILITIES
Recently, former Facebook president Sean Parker pointed out how Facebook is hurting people.
When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, ‘I’m not on social media.’ And I would say, ‘OK. You know, you will be. And then they would say, ‘No, no, no. I value my real-life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence. I value intimacy.’ And I would say, … ‘We’ll get you eventually.’
Parker discussed the possible psychological effects of social media and Facebook in particular, especially for children who are now growing up in a digitally connected age:
I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because [of] the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and … it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.
The former Facebook President discussed the company’s initial aim, which was mainly centered around drawing in and building their audience:
The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.
Parker described Facebook’s appeal as a “social-validation feedback loop” which exploits human psychology to keep users coming back to the app:
It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Parker also briefly discussed how his vast wealth is likely to allow him to live longer than the average person due to advances in medical science
I tend to notice trends early. I quit Twitter 4 years ago as soon as work didn’t (unofficially) require it. Almost every time I used it, the conversation degraded by the 3rd or 4th tweet into something political, followed by unsubstantiated name calling. You have to have a thick skin and a terse personality to want to survive out there.
A few years later I tried helping a friend get on Facebook and we both decided that it was like a high school reunion, or being in high school where you make up stuff to seem like your life is better than others. He finally told me to stop and to not put him on. At that point it dawned on me that most of social media falls under Sturgeon’s Law:
There might be a corollary that 99% of social media is crap.
The trend I noticed besides people acting false was that I never felt better after being on twitter and I loathe Facebook for the same reason. This was 5-8 years ago and now the studies are coming out proving what I noticed.
A recent article in the USA today talked about another high schoolish trend, mob mentality.
Social media also has polluted our more general life, with the ability to form online mobs increasing, as Prof. Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit recently wrote in USA Today:
People enjoy forming mobs. Mobs allow people to do things they’d be afraid to do on their own, to steal, to hurt and kill, to burn and destroy — and also to feel set free from the bonds of civil society, to experience a kind of atavistic catharsis, a feeling of power and a solidarity with their fellow rioters, in a way that’s otherwise difficult to achieve, especially without suffering serious consequences….
But now there’s a new kind of mob, an online mob. And judging by the events of the past week, this new mob is becoming a more frequent problem. Part of that is because it’s easier (and safer) to be part of an online mob than one in the real world.
Joining a real mob requires you to leave your house, go somewhere else, and experience risks and discomforts. Joining an online mob can be done from an easy chair at home.
There are times that I post something and bizarre comments come it, so much so that I have to moderate them according to the policy on the sidebar. Some just violate the policy too much. It’s like twitter, if it can get political it usually does. Since I’ve posted a lot about the military and patriotism, I caught a lot of crap.
I read a blog post by Legal Insurrection that noted the increase in suicides and the link that may exist between the two.
A New, More Rigorous Study Confirms: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel
Social Media and Teen Depression: The Two Go Hand-In-Hand
Rise in teen suicide connected to social media popularity: study
Suicide rate’s increase can be tied to social media, technology: Dr. Marc Siegel
Using Many Social Media Platforms Linked With Depression, Anxiety Risk
Why don’t people just put it down? It looks to be like the new next cigarette, just as addictive and equally as bad for you.
As for me, I can go about my day enjoying not getting into useless tweet storms and having my head glued to my phone. Hell, I won’t even put Facebook on because I don’t want them in my life.
I’d like to say the higher IQ people would be immune to this, but it’s not true. They are just as susceptible to this and it goes under things they shouldn’t do.
WHAT FACEBOOK KNOWS AND IT ISN’T TELLING YOU
It preys on Women’s emotions and other mind altering and interfering techniques and the company KNOWS THAT IT IS DOING IT.
Even former Facebook President Sean Parker realizes the pitfalls of Facebook:
The former Facebook President discussed the company’s initial aim, which was mainly centered around drawing in and building their audience:
The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.
Parker described Facebook’s appeal as a “social-validation feedback loop” which exploits human psychology to keep users coming back to the app:
It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.
Comments such as this from Facebook former President, combined with Facebook’s mishandling of user data, has led to a greater level of distrust around the company. What was previously seen as just a website by many users was becoming better known as a data collection company.
It turns out that platforms like Facebook are the “Junk Food For the Soul”. In other words crap that isn’t good for you.
THE CESSPOOL OF HATE AND DISCRIMINATION BY TWITTER
Just say something, anything and pretty soon it can turn into a hate storm if you offend someone or anyone. I saw someone post here’s a picture of a rock, let the arguing begin just to prove it and it did.
When I check I often find that a user who has blocked me is someone I have never interacted with. So why the block? Often, it’s due to being on a block list created by a liberal activist group. Twitter supports block lists and makes it easy for users to mass-block entire universes of people they don’t even know.
But Twitter now uses factors such as the number of people who have blocked an account to determine whether to classify it as “low quality” content. The company also uses the number of complaints or reports on the account. If the number of these exceeds certain thresholds, an account can be deemed low quality and access to tweets from that user are severely diminished.
I couldn’t wait to leave that platform of time-wasting and hate and my life is better because of it.
The 2008 and 2012 election showed that a coalition of minorities was the winning formula. As for 2016, not so much.
With all the minority identity groups out there vying for political power, social media control, fund raising and media presence; how do they stack up when they compete for hierarchy? At some point, when the power and money is being doled out, the queue is determined by some order. Who are these groups and how do they vie for power?
Author disclaimer: I have no dog in this hunt. I am a pattern watcher and try to learn from them. Human nature is hard to understand and explain due to it’s ever changing allies and favored group status depending on circumstances. I was watching the groups at the last election and wondered how you coalesce a group of disparate people with conflicting causes as a voter block.
Who are they?
While this isn’t a comprehensive list and I am not discriminating as I just Googled it, the last election revealed the groups of Black Lives Matter (BLM), LGBTQ (apologies if I omitted a letter), Islam (including ISIS), socialists, Antifa, environmentalists and feminists. They each compete for their cause and have usually selected an enemy with whom they are opposed to, but are now conflicting with each other in the power grab. They for the most part have an ideological position (some more than others) and garner the lion’s share of media attention.
Before the haters come out, I write this post because of my position that one of the characteristics of a higher IQ is the ability to argue from multiple positions on a subject. I will proceed with this post from that premise.
I also am merely an observer of trends. The consolidating power of the above listed groups is becoming a relevant discussion regardless of where you source your information. I’ve excluded the typical mainstream media as sources of information on both sides as their coverage is either too conservative or liberal. Their inherent bias excludes them from this conversation. I also excluded Hollywood and celebrities since they have a limited integration with the real world and often spout declarations for others which they do not adhere to. When you get to the heart of their talent, they pretend to be others and to take their opinions seriously is difficult at best.
Here are non-comprehensive, yet representative examples of identity group disagreements.
BLM vs. LGBTQ
I first noticed this when BLM shut down a gay pride parade.
These are two significant voter populations when added together.
What surprised me that it was during the last election cycle and both groups made up a voting block for the same candidate. From said article:
BLM held Toronto Pride hostage, unless their demands, which included excluding police from the parade, were immediately met.
(Pride parades typically have contingents of LGBT cops and firefighters, and booths set up by the local LGBT officers’ group at the accompanying street festival.)
Judging by their success in forcing Toronto Pride to capitulate, I suspect we’ll see Black Lives Matter groups protesting more Pride parades in the future. And as a longtime national and international LGBT rights activist, I have a problem with that.
In my internet search for protests, it seems that BLM also protested and shut down Bernie Sanders and Hillary whom they supported. It goes without saying that they all protested Trump, but that is not the point of my curiosity as I assumed this was a given. This alone is surprising since both are a part of the coalition of voters candidates need to be elected per the aforementioned 2008/2012/2016 campaigns.
ISLAM vs. Feminists and LGBTQ
I later observed the Muslim and ISIS positions that women are treated poorly and that homosexuals were declared wrong and being executed. On a side point, they also considered most pets as unclean and black dogs should be killed (animal cruelty), which brings in the animal rights group, but they don’t be as significant as the other groups currently. Apparently, women don’t have the same rights as men and must be subservient.
Then there is the recent Linda Sansour dust up revealing this dichotomy:
It further goes on to say:
Sarsour apparently identifies as a feminist. Sarsour’s kind of feminism, however, embraces the most oppressive legal system, especially for women: Islamic religious law, Sharia. Sarsour’s feminism is supposedly for empowering women, but it twists logic in a way similar to how Muslim preachers do when they claim that beating one’s wife is a husband’s way of honoring her.
Here is the dichotomy:
Pro-Sharia feminism is a perverted kind of feminism that could not care less about the well-being of oppressed Muslim women. Sarsour’s logic concerning women does not differ much from that of Suad Saleh, an Egyptian female Islamic cleric, who recently justified on Egyptian TV the doctrine of intentional humiliation and rape of captured women in Islam. Saleh said, “One of the purposes of raping captured enemy women and young girls was to humiliate and disgrace them and that is permissible under Islamic law.” There was not even a peep in Egypt’s civil society about such a statement.
On 7/25/17 a direct conflict happened when this occurred: An Oakland Muslim plotted to attack a gay club in San Francisco and talked about killing thousands of innocents on behalf of ISIS.
Finally, there is this non-sequitur that I can’t fathom:
“Feminist” Muslim women calling beatings by their husbands a “blessing from Allah”!
Who wants a beating?
ISLAM (ISIS) vs. Antifa
I don’t fully understand this one. It has the trappings of a sibling quarrel at best. ISIS is claiming that Antifa has culturally appropriated their uniforms, that being their black flag and terrorist tactics.
Here are some details:
Based on this proof, we hereby request that the UNHRC’s CESCR begin an immediate investigation into this matter, and, if you concur that ANTIFA is culturally appropriating ISIS, that you use all means at your disposal to put a stop to it. You could start by visiting this ANTIFA website, which contains links to many of its affiliates throughout the world.
Sincerely,
ISIS High Command
PS: You might mention to the ANTIFA punks that in quite a few aspects, we are at war with the very same people, organizations and ideas, and, in fact, Western civilization itself. So, if you could arrange a sit-down over tea with us, and them, it might serve all of our interests, and provide a holistic, inclusive resolution to our complaint.
Islam appears to have support from the media and the left side of the political sphere as does the other listed minorities claiming status. One can see the obvious conflicts.
Socialists
It appeared that quite a bit of traction was gained by the Bernie Sanders crowd. It seemed to have enough momentum to be a winning group within its’ primary. Somehow, it was defeated by a political machine by what is being revealed as suspicious activities.
Nevertheless, a discussion of the socialism movement by Ross Wolf summarizes some of my points:
Ross Wolfe argues in The Charnel House, the identity politics that arose in the 1960s, ‘70s and ’80s developed in reaction to the identity politics of actually-existing socialism itself:
The various forms of identity politics associated with the “new social movements” coming out of the New Left during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s (feminism, black nationalism, gay pride) were themselves a reaction, perhaps understandable, to the miserable failure of working-class identity politics associated with Stalinism coming out of the Old Left during the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s (socialist and mainstream labor movements). Working-class identity politics — admittedly avant la lettre — was based on a crude, reductionist understanding of politics that urged socialists and union organizers to stay vigilant and keep on the lookout for “alien class elements.” Any and every form of ideological deviation was thought to be traceable to a bourgeois or petit-bourgeois upbringing. One’s political position was thought to flow automatically and mechanically from one’s social position, i.e. from one’s background as a member of a given class within capitalist society.
Questions I Have
If you are courting one group, how do you avoid alienating another group if there is acrimony? At some point you step on the wrong toes.
If there is limited money, how does the donor decide who gets it without upsetting other groups?
How do you herd this group of cats to vote together when trying to win an election? It worked twice, but failed recently and there is finger pointing as to why.
What is Racist?
In Seattle, they can’t clean the sidewalks with pressure washers because it could be racist.
Council member Larry Gossett said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists.
It seems that non-black people using gifs are being racist also. I don’t understand this one though.
Finally, who wins this victim’s game?
So I guess you have out victim everyone else. By doing so, it disrupts the coalition of identities required by one of the political parties to win elections. I suppose it is a popularity contest to win the money and the status.
My final observation is that human nature is the constant here. People are selfish enough to grab power and money when possible. Most do not have the ability to argue from multiple positions on the same subject and are ideologues for their cause.
This alone is going to make a coalition such as the one that voted in the president in 2008 difficult. Being a female wasn’t enough of a victim status in the 2016 election.
These are things I ponder as we wind our way down the path of being a country.
From The Social Network, because for the first time in their lives, they didn’t get what they felt they were entitled to because of who they are.
I’m rarely first in line to many movies and the Social Network is the same, I just saw it last Saturday night. I realize that the movie didn’t tell the exact story, but I’m sure there were enough similarities to be close.
CAPITALISM, WHY OUR COUNTRY IS GREAT AND THE BEST ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN HISTORY
My first impressionism was thank the good Lord for Capitalism. There may have been some rough issues with the ongoings of the start up, but that we can live in a country where entrepreneurship and the ability to start a company, create jobs and have a shot at success should be celebrated. I want an environment where you can make it, or make it big, which is what is great about this country….The American Dream. The idea that we should re-distribute wealth because some do better than others is nonsense. One of the best lines in the movie came at the deposition when Zuckerberg answered if he stole Facebook from the Winklescarfs, “if you guys were the inventors of the Facebook, then you would have invented the Facebook”…ouch. It took hard work, vision and of course a couple of lucky breaks, but would this come out of the current environments in Venezuela, Iran, North Korea….I’m open to any examples?. That Zuckerberg had an idea and was able to become a billionaire gives real hope to everyone. Build a better Mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door………………………….but only in the free world.
<sarcasm>
WHY I’M GLAD IT TOOK PLACE IN hARVARD (lower case intentional)
<sarcasm/>
That (at least) the 2nd dropout from harvard (lowercase emphasis mine) became a billionaire shows that an Ivy League credential is not what it used to be, nor is it necessary or as prestigious as it once was (unless you are a dropout billionaire) . Another great line in the movie that the Winkledoofuss’s were mad because they didn’t get their way such as they had all their pampered life was epic. We don’t live in the entitlement world (or shouldn’t). I’ve worked with Finklehorsespatoots from all of the Ivy league skools (sp on purpose) as well as those like Duke, USC, UNC-CH, Notre Dame, columbia, princeton who take college snobbery to the wrong level. Proud of your school is one thing, elitism is another….guess which one is appreciated or listened to? These institutions are reducing themselves to credentialed, not necessarily educated. Guess which ones are laughed at and not considered worth the money they charge? For the most part, the extra money they paid for their education was a waste that could have been invested and would be worth more. The reality is most are doing the same job for the same money. It got to the point in one of my jobs at IBM when someone would brag that they had a harvard MBA, someone would comment in public what a waste of money that was for the person. The rest of us would know to work around that person as they would just be a hindrance to our ability to get any work done. They were almost pariahs to everyone else being the snowflakes they usually turned out to be.
It takes a dream and passion to see it to fruition, otherwise you are a lemming in the working world. No degree earns you the right to do anything but try. I also subscribe that things are not equal, nor should they be. Some get more than others, be it because they are smarter, work harder or some combination of both. If you get a lucky break, consider it a bone, but it’s not an entitlement.
The plaintiffs didn’t have the ability to pull off what Zuckerberg did and they wound up sucking on the hind teat of his success. You could tell that the lawyers got as much as the clients he settles with through billing and retainers on that settlement. Might as well include lawyers in the offended since it looks like I’m growing that list in this blog. This brings me to another of my favorite scene’s, the best answer I’ve ever heard at a deposition. I wish I’d said it although I’ve said something close I’ll admit.
HARD WORK
Facebook didn’t just succeed because of luck (maybe luck in the timing) and some who didn’t see it’s potential got left behind, but the key to it’s success like most things is ability and hard work. Although I work for a big company now, I cut my teeth with entrepreneurs who gave every drop of blood, sweat and many times their personal life to make something they believed in a success. Most are at least Millionaires now and I don’t begrudge a one of them. They took the risk and deserve the reward. I only wish more would make it so they could hire more people and reduce unemployment, restart and grow the economy This will be the turn around our current economic situation needs, and much faster than our present Keynesian politicians.
REALISM OF THE FILM
I thought they captured the timing and semantics of the period correctly I was noticing the coding on screen, the Apache servers and that Zuckerberg edited his blog in HTML. I even noticed that the cell phones were time period appropriate. What hasn’t changed is College partiers. Not that I know that much about college partying, but I’m sure some of that really happens. Although they said he wasn’t an asshole, but that he tried so hard to be one was partly true. He didn’t have to try.
REAL LIFE
It turns out that Zuckerberg is a suck up to the President to promote Facebook. Why someone so smart would let himself be manipulated is beyond me. He didn’t realize that he let a campaign go on for the youth vote who are so easily manipulated by MTV, The Comedy Channel and such outlets. Older, wiser and those hurt more by the economy know better than to support this or be buffaloed by this sort of trick. The fact that Fakebook is censuring political groups that are not liberal and letting terrorists plan attacks or post mendacious things about moral groups shows who they and Zuck really are, biased.
EPILOGUE
This was a good movie that shows you can still make it in the business world. Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs and many others are all good examples of the American dream that Zuckerberg lives. By now it is out on DVD, I even TiVo’d it the other day an watched it again just to see success. I am glad we live in the part of the world where you have the chance to succeed or fail. But if you succeed, you usually take others with you. A rising tide floats all boats.
Update: Now that a lot of social media pressure has cut the lunch/poop talk down, combined with multiple Twitter platforms, it has become a powerful tool. I find myself opening Twitter as my first site now to find out what is going on. I have refined it to include those people and topics that are meaningful to me and it gets me the information I need better than almost any other platform.
I get a lot of information from blogs still that I tweet or vice-versa and can know what is going on around the world on multiple issues. Again, refinement is the key.
I define the refinement requires that I only follow what is crucial to my interests at the time. Since what I’m following changes, so does my sources of information. That is why I’m not too worried about who or how many I follow, nor who or how many follow me. Attaining numbers is far different from attaining knowledge and information.
Platforms like this along help me eliminate bias which is killing former information platforms like the network news and print media.
I follow trends. I’ve seen much about this platform recently that has caused me to think about it. I use it sparingly and don’t post that much as I’ve always maintained that no one cares that much about what I’m doing with my time.
As an Analyst Relations Best Practice, I find that it is good to know what the analyst is doing to be on familiar terms with what they are doing. Additionally, when I can’t reach them, I direct message an analyst as a back channel and it is very reliable.
The first article I noticed though was by Zach Whittaker who wonders “Twitter, is there any point”?
I often wonder this as Twitter follows Sturgeon’s Law. If you look at the comments of this blog, it laments that many talk about lunch, flights and bowel movements.
On the plus side, he notes: “Twitter is what we call an “Enterprise 2.0″ application; not only a web application which tells the world what you’re doing, but is highly influential in the way businesses run, keeping customers and partners informed and gaining feedback on services. ”
On the negative is: “Whilst it may be a next-generation application, I still struggle to see the point it makes, or the impact it has. With the API and development opportunities, it’s certainly made an impact in developing technologies such as Adobe AIR, but besides this I fail to see why I should continue to update mine; something I haven’t done in months.”
The next thread was the Mumbai terrorists following Twitter. I’m not so sure it’s a good thing to tell them where you are if they are trying to kill you. It is not as bad though as CNN ratting out citizens trying to hide.
Recently TPTB declined $500 from Facebook to buy Twitter, so I’m wondering if they know something I don’t about its value. The jury is out for me other than as a tool to reach certain people, but I know that the hunter in me instinctually says look for cover, not expose yourself.
Delusions of Adequacy 