@Alon I don’t know how I can persuade you of how unpopular Israel has become beyond a pretty hard political right in the United States, and how difficult a task even liberal Zionists accustomed to defending Israel face not just because others are raucous or antisemitic, but because it is hard not to concede that it is an exercise in defending the indefensible. It is a message you are extremely reluctant to hear, but it is true nevertheless.
“What has Biden asked from Israel?” #KevinDrum https://jabberwocking.com/what-has-biden-asked-from-israel/
Via @damonlinker, via #JohnGanz, these essays by #SamuelFrancis are a fascinating gateway into strands of the right (and sometimes small-is-beautiful left) that prefigure Trumpism.
“Beautiful Losers” https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/beautiful-losers/
“Nationalism, Old and New” https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/nationalism-old-and-new/
Both linked from this @damonlinker piece: https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/trumpisms-prophet (paywalled, i’ve only read the free intro.)
@phillmv “wag the dog” seems quaint. at this point all that’s left is the tail.
@phillmv (meanwhile, Israel attacking Iran, which NPR had been willing to confirm nearly an hour prior, didn’t merit a mention.)
@Alon i don’t think that’s informative. USians don’t have positive views of a cause they associate with Islamist terrorism. the issue isn’t Americans supporting the Palestinian national project or God forbid Hamas. of course we support Israel more. but we don’t support bombing trapped civilians or starving children, even for a cause we’d otherwise feel warmly towards. we increasingly resent becoming at best “complicit” in the moral catastrophe Israel has allowed itself to become.
i am greatly relieved by how restrained the Israeli counterstrike appears to have been.
i do hope that the matter can now be deemed concluded.
@peter i’d really like to see it clean a gas station bathroom.
@scottjenson the future is bright, if it weren’t for those darned naysayers.
do your kids know how to use a command line?
if so, at what age did they learn?
@drahardja it shouldn’t be prerequisite, sure. but it’s desirable. so UIs should invite it, encourage it, enable it even unconsciously.
when URLs are there, you see them and learn things about them, maybe even copy and paste them to form links, without even knowing you are making an effort. when they are not there, you don’t.
@drahardja when I was my kids’ age, i knew a lot about how computers work, because to do the cool stuff computers let you do you had to learn a bit. it was, in that sense, prerequisite. with touchscreens and GUIs that don’t expose a hierarchical file system even as folder icons in a finder, my kid knows none of that. i have to work to make the most basic things visible beneath the slickness, not magic. 1/
@drahardja computers (maybe masquerading as “phones” and other devices) are ever more essential now, shape our world so much more, and to most people they will always be just magic, with choices made that constrain and guide, of which they cannot be aware let alone resist. 2/
@drahardja that is what it means to infantilize. when very few people have agency within and sometimes against our technical infrastructure, we are collectively infantilized, disenfranchised.
not everybody will understand the web, sure, and that’s okay.
but if it’s one in ten and everyone has reasonably adept friends, or one in a thousand paid by and so often ideologically captured by a corporate employer, makes a big difference to the character of our society. /fin
@drahardja the reason to show URLs is not so people can examine them for scams.
the reason to show URLs is so people can know what a URL is, what it means to be at a location on the web, can see and maybe begin to think about a host and a path and a protocol, and different ways paths that are not intentional dark patterns get constructed. 1/
@drahardja most people should not be web “consumers”. the web is not a product. it is a public space. as much as possible we want citizens there who actively participate, not passive recipients of other peoples’ products.
or perhaps it’s on this we disagree. /fin
@drahardja how do you find it? how do you even know to look? where?
perhaps you think my phrasing was descriptively “infantilizing”, but i am obviously not infantilizing people in the sense of placing them in a position where they are left largely at the mercy of more powerful or knowledgeable actors, the sense i mean, the sense that so much contemporary software excels at.
front page of nytimes.com right now. remarkable.
Image of nytimes.com front page. It's 10:46 pm EDT Thursday 4/18/2024. NPR confirmed at 10:00 pm that Israel is bombing targets in Iran in retaliation for Iran's weekend (also retaliatory) strike. Financial markets clearly reflected this by 9:30 pm. The nytimes.com front page has nothing about it.
@drahardja how do novice users become advanced users? that’s the issue. the web at its start was explicitly designed to invite even casual users to learn and explore. newer practices hide every next step. you either choose to “become a web developer” or you stay at the surface.
that’s bad, ethically. the original ethos, rendering transparent the tools needed to incrementally grow into knowledge and creative capacity was good. 1/
@drahardja if you want, like firefox, to highlight the hostname for novice users, great. but if novices can only learn more by going into conplicated browser settings, you’ve created a cliff. 2/
@drahardja you can’t “empower” users. as soon as you say that, you’ve lied to yourself. users can only empower themselves. the commodity they are increasingly depleted of is agency. you can tell them more or less clearly security related information. that’s fine, and more clearly is better. but if you want an ethical web, made of participants and citizens rather than users and consumers, then you want an infrastructure that instructs and unfurls as people spend time. /fin
@djc apartment communities sometimes offer lower intro rates to new tenants, then increase at renewal. (this idea only really makes sense for apartment communities, where there are standard, pretty much apples-to-apples floor plans.) basically the proposed reg wld prevent that practice, either give renewals at the intro rates or prevent straight up intro rates. (landlords might substitute with “first two months free” for new tenants, but that at least makes clear the longer term resident price.)
@ben of course most users don’t understand URLs. most users don’t view source either. the point is that deeper information should be more accessible, and becoming more deeply informed should always be encouraged. if “broad adoption” is your *sole* lodestar, then whatever. this is ultimately an ethical stance, consistent with broad adoption, but not remotely motivated by it.
@khleedril URLs are more elementary than request and response headers. one should learn how to share a link, even without a little button. familiarity with URLs is not mostly about observing "nasty shit". it's understanding the most basic physics of the information systems that structure our world.