loggedinmyphone

When people adopt a behavior, no matter how damaging, it's because they get something out of it. What might people be getting out of such a polarized worldview? Maybe they'd rather ally themselves with half the world, and be the enemy of the other half, instead of feeling vaguely indifferent about everyone.

Very cool, I've been wanting to try Tumbleweed as it looks like the most noob-friendly rolling-release distro. Glad to hear the positive reports.

The "culture war" isn't about beliefs; it's about satisfying the human need to blame (scapegoat) someone else for your problems, meanwhile not becoming the target of blame yourself (or at least, being blamed by anyone you care about). The solution that's been devised is to designate two groups to mutually scapegoat each other.

Isn't there some kind of DKMS package to automate this?

There's a joke about a guy who gets a phone call because his son used "the S-word" at school. "I'm so sorry, I don't know where he picked that up; I'll have a stern talk with him." "Good," the teacher says, "we can't have children calling each other 'stupid' here."

"Wait, stupid? Ok I thought..."

"And another thing, he called Susie the B-word." "Really? I've always taught him to be respectful to women." "Well, I heard him say 'bozo' with my own ears."

"Oh, that B-word... Well, if there's nothing else..."

"In fact there is, I hate to say this but your son also used the M-word." "Hrm, yes, and what do you mean by the M-word?"

Here the teller is invited to concoct the most utterly obscene, vile, and ridiculous phrase imaginable, suitably taboo and vivid to evoke surprised involuntary laughter in the audience (I like to start with "mouth-breathing", delivered with nervousness and ill-concealed delight).

> We live in houses with yards and fences and don't talk to each other.

Yes, ironically, putting more people together creates more isolation. People live in extremely dense apartment housing in cities - and still don't know their neighbors, or want to know them.

We think of the world as moving in the direction of coming together; of connecting. Yet "belonging" and "apartness" are duals of each other. Without a sense of separate and exclusive group identities, we are all equally alone.

Consider that starvation was not a major cause of human death before the development of cities. In the hunter-gatherer days, a band would perish or survive together. Only when settlement and agriculture became the norm would we sit and watch our neighbors die of starvation.

When I hear Zuckerberg say he believes in connecting people, it makes me cringe. We're already over-connected. When you're connected to everyone, you're connected to no one. Isolation and ultimately self-absorption come from a loss of the clearly defined ingroup vs outgroup rivalry we thrive on.

We strive for universal human brotherhood; yet "kindness for all means coldness to your neighbor." There may be a way forward past both tribalism and contemporary nihilism, but we won't get there on the thin gruel of rational morality.

How do you feel about Disneyland making a ride out of Pirates of the Caribbean?

People are so impressed now with predictive models based on any kind of correlation. Like: "we predict what kind of wine you will like based on your favorite candy bar" or "how long you'll live based on what you eat for breakfast". Only thing is, it's hard to find any two variables that aren't correlated, to some degree. Actuarial mathematicians have been doing this long enough to know how limited the "predictive power" really is.

The technical problems I work on are interesting to me personally because I enjoy getting good at the particular subfield I am in. I don't think they're necessarily "interesting" in the sense of "advance the state of the art and publish a paper" but really that's a question for other people.

I (perhaps mis-)read the subtext as being that violence is a historical, hence tolerable and perhaps even inextricable, part of reform movements. The literal point seemed obvious, so it didn't occur to me as a possible topic of discussion. In retrospect it's not obvious, as leaders of movements are regularly blamed for the shortcomings of a few followers.

I do have specifically marginalized groups of people who I try to help. But my most important project is being a decent human to those around me every day. It's not as easy as it sounds. It's second nature for all of us to pass on our past trauma and frustrations. In some ways it's easier to make a heroic and noble effort for some great cause than to put in the sustained effort every day to help the people around us. That's what I'm trying to do, certainly failing much of the time but trying to get back on my horse each time.

What I am betting on is precisely that reluctance of the populace to stomach brutality. Whatever political victories are achieved through escalating violence are ultimately empty until a fundamental rejection of brutality is achieved.

Self hosted social networking and email platform that runs on Digital Ocean, OpenStack, etc. Total cost to user is around $5/mo hosting and $1/mo DNS for ad-free privacy-invasion-free Internet.

Ironic that you mention hosting resources, because in my view getting independent from those hosting services is itself the fundamental challenge.