clutchingstraws

It's a convenient result in the short term for those of us on the left who think that Alex Jones' views are utterly repugnant, but ultimately these sorts of deplatforming actions are counterproductive. Alex Jones' fans will no longer be exposed to rational arguments from non-fans on the same platform. They'll instead become increasingly trapped in their own filter bubbles, and now have even more of a martyr complex. The cure for bad speech is good speech in an open forum.

>When it first appeared it seemed fairly neutral, but that neutrality appears to have vanished somewhere along the line.

Wikileaks has always been as neutral as reasonably possible, given that it consists of human journalists and their human sources, not emotionless impartial machines. They have an excellent accuracy rate. The only thing that changed is that their honest reporting became embarrassing to wealthy and powerful people closely associated with the Democratic party. The DNC leadership loved Wikileaks' reporting on governmental malfeasance prior to late 2008. What changed in late 2008 was not Wikileaks' demonstrated neutrality towards reporting on governmental malfeasance, but the color of the lawn signs of the victorious president.

I suspect there's also some deep resentment from the traditional J-school cohort, who have spent over a decade being embarrassed by outsider Assange and his colleagues. Wikileaks has consistently make them look like obedient stenographers to the powerful, not principled journalists willing to speak truth to power. Wikileaks has publicly exposed many in the media as being too afraid to break real stories for fear of government legal pressure and a reduction in corporate advertising dollars. Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing don't advertise their military hardware on the cable news networks because they're trying to sell cruise missiles and fighter jets to the folks at home. They do it to hold something over the cable news networks' execs' heads when embarrassing stories might come to light.

Combine the collective resentment of the leadership of both major American political parties and their connected donors, the national security apparatus, the military-industrial complex, and every mainstream journalist who's getting scooped by an Australian ex-black-hat and his friends who (gasp!) never even attended Columbia, and we end up with a vicious and unfounded anti-wikileaks narrative festering within the politically-acceptable conversation today.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the detail. Better to lose a booster than both lose a booster and cripple a droneship.

On that topic, I've always been impressed at how tough those droneships are. They've taken a lot of punishment but they've never lost one at sea yet. I'd love to have been a fly on the wall of the first meeting between reps from SpaceX and McDonough Marine.

"So, you folks make big rockets. I'm guessing you're going to need these barges to transport them around to avoid roads. And there's likely some insurance implications here."

"In that order: yes, technically yes, and definitely yes."

Oh man, don't I know it. I work for a small business whose long-neglected Wordpress site (nothing e-commerce-ey, almost no plugins, just a glorified billboard/contact-info type site for a non-tech company that no-one had updated in literally years) had been exploited in uncountable ways. It had probably been owned long before I was even hired a year ago. A few months ago it just broke, it was too riddled with problems to salvage.

I was able to convince the bosses to let me take on the fixing-the-site project solo, even though my job has little do with IT. I replaced it all with a static site generator I wrote in Go. No logins, no PHP, no database, nothing to exploit in the first place. Anyone in the office can update it by copying images into arbitrary subfolders in the generator's images folders, and double-clicking the update executable. It builds and uploads a fresh site in a couple of minutes with nice gallery carousels. And as a bonus it loads basically instantly on even the bargain-basement shared hosting we're on.

I do wish that IE compatibility wasn't one of the bosses' firm requirements, due to a lot of our clients not being tech people and still using IE on decade-old computers. Life would be so much simpler if I could just use CSS grids for layout. I f'ing love grids.