@BenRossTransit it’d perhaps be better if we could go back!
use of citation counts to rank academic work definitely contributed to the change. that’s often lamented but unlikely to be reversed. extending and automating the practice was the core of Google PageRank.
then citations became roads across which eyeballs predictably roll, when the web made them links. eyeballs become influence and ad money. so whether or not it is intended, a link functions as a degree of endorsement.
does the first amendment protect shouting fire in a crowded firing squad?
@admitsWrongIfProven @lunch no. i suspect the awkwardness of the word reservation tempts that interpretation, so it’s fine to have a dialogue that clarifies it.
@admitsWrongIfProven @lunch “reservation” is an artifact of that awkward nation-within-a-nation status. it is not a location of confinement. it reflects a continuing aspiration, in theory backed by legal force, to a degree of self determination and autonomy that is often bitterly unmet in practice. nevertheless, no individual is detained on a reservation. only a desire to maintain + live among a distinct community, or the pull of history and family, might bind a person there.
@admitsWrongIfProven @lunch lots to discuss about indigenous affairs in both the US and Canada, but nothing remotely resembling concentration camps for them in either place. there are unwelcome correlations of socioeconomic status, and disputes that emerge from the strange netherworld of working to maintain distinct nations within nations. (so things like water rights, heavily contested across the West, carry a more sinister valence.)
@admitsWrongIfProven @lunch things aren’t always golden for migrants there (some trying to transit to the US) either. but i don’t think that’s my friend’s main source of dissatisfaction with the Mexican state.
ones relationship with software should leave one informed, not bewildered or dependent.
map apps should make it easy to learn and revisit the geographies you travel, not just each time anew tell you where to turn according to their own mysterious devices.
one should be able to access straightforward logs of calls and texts, like with a 2005 Nokia phone, rather than a predigested sort mapped to contacts where new calls occlude old ones and which of several numbers were involved is ambiguous.
@lunch but my Mexican friend says “not Mexico!” and as an American, i can’t at the moment recommend our state…
Suppose (inspired by recent Trumpery) that Canada, Mexico, and the United States were going to merge. One of the three existing Federal governments would incorporate the other countries states or provinces. The other two governments would be unwound. Which government would you favor to govern the combined territory?
The progressivity of the United States' Federal income tax system was forged during wartime.
@chrisp compares that experience to Ukraine, which began with and has so far retained flat income taxation throughout it's war.
@jawnsy finally things make sense!
What if we could distinguish, when we link or quote, between citation and specimen?
The default that hypertext is built around is citation: We are engaged together a collaborative exercise to construct some approximation of truth. 1/
As humans, we frequently err. So much of our conversation is necessarily, and constructively, critique. Critique can be dry and civil. It can be cutting, bitter, hilarious. We may be naughty, we may be nice. But we understand ourselves as speaking to one another, critic, critiqued, audience. 2/
But sometimes that presumed relationship is just not accurate, is not what we intend. Sometimes we are not in conversation at all. Sometimes a piece of text is a mere artifact, a specimen we are conversing about but not at all with.
Even bitter critique implies a modicum of good faith on the part of author critiqued. There is a mind which, however biased by virtue of position or commitments, has given the matter some thought, and believes what it has written. 3/
If we think that behind the document we are addressing there is no such good faith, citation — inclusion in our collaborative project of truth production — is not the appropriate relationship.
If a document is pure propaganda, if it has been tailored instrumentally to affect or manipulate, represents no coauthor's imperfect but sincere yearning towards an edifice we might productively settle upon as truth, then we should not cite it. 4/
But we might still wish to refer to it, to converse about (rather than with) it. We should be able to quote or link it in a way that makes the specimen relationship explicit, and imposes informative friction (e.g. some interstitial) to people who might naively follow it as citation. 5/
Our scheme should prevent naive indexers (e.g. "page rank") from following such links as citations. (Indexers sophisticated enough to work around the block would have an opportunity to choose how they want to interpret such very distinct links.) 6/
Screenshotting but not linking a source is the closest approximation of this in current practice, I think. There's also HTML's rel="nofollow" attribute. Neither sufficiently expresses and fully enables what we should want of a specimen link. I think there's some scope for innovation here! /fin
is doing the wordle still crossing a picket line?
you say you are for treating everyone fairly, regardless of their identity. yet you also say we must punish the wicked while entirely exempting the good?
the bankruptcy of your philosophy is obvious.
@admitsWrongIfProven Server Containment Failure
Internal Server Error
@admitsWrongIfProven in theory, it’s supposed to describe a kind of pneumonia so mild you tend to mistake it for an ordinary cold, “walk around” with it. in practice, well, i don’t think i’d make that mistake.
personalism is the antithesis of democracy, never an expression of democracy, no matter how popular the person may be.
@isomorphismes (it was a subtweet of Trump naming Charles Kushner his soon-to-be ambassador to France. Kushner has his, um, peccadillos!)
