The wider public in America more or less blocks out the risks involved. "They're not actually going to blow up the power grid."
Hell, just look at the tech industry. Endless whining about not needing to be regulated, and what have they done? Built an enormous surveilance machine, lead by executives who preemptively kowtow to any authoritarian leader. Europe's attempt to regulate this is still angrily opposed by heaps, even on this very site.
Normalcy bias — it's an absolute killer. The same cognitive failure that has people in a fire thinking it's "just part of the show", or "just something in the kitchen", until it is too late, and panic overtakes everyone. I've never seen a story of a fire where someone in the situation said "I wasn't sure what was going on, but it didn't seem good so I left early, I'm alive because I did!".
Normalcy bias can kill us all if we aren't careful.
Until now I would have said this is an extreme minority view, even though it's quite obvious and aligns with the core values I've seen on this site over the last 15 years, and thus presumed were tech in general's view.
Maybe I just need to get off X, the Everything App™, 90% of my news consumption and commentary is through there.
Or is it so addictive like social networks seem to be?
But.... I am no longer there. Too much noise and distraction drowns the sane voices. And I can't stand Musk any longer.
I tink it totally depends what your niche is. What bugged me about Twitter is that after Musk took over it was no longer mostly RSS feed-like but all the politics came in. That all ranked higher even when not from accounts I don't follow (now I get notifications from Musk even after muting him)
> Or is it so addictive
why switch one megacorp for another?
People think they need Facebook, X, whatever to stay up to date. Not so. I have a few online newspapers/sites I scan a few times a week, and that's it.
IMHO (and it's really just MO), Twitter, Facebook and alike are a 100% useless waste of time. (Maybe Facebook had some use in the beginning for staying in contact with more "friends" than I could have by other means.)
I feel better for it. And as I said, I will guarantee you that won't miss anything important going on.
I made a decade long transition from dropout waiter => startup founder => exit => Google thanks to getting to soak in all the tech stuff on Twitter, without having the formal education.
It's hard to say without being reductive, but TL;DR it's turned into a very know-nothing atmosphere, to the point it certainly swamps the prior positive effects.
Good example yesterday: OP is excited about Elon newly announcing a new interest in non-regretted user-seconds.
Elon's talked about it a bunch, so some people gently correct OP.
Some other people gently point out this...isn't something you can metric.
Everyone's being polite and pointing out indirectly the excitement is irrational: it's an old idea, and not an actual metric you can optimize for
OP half-rolls-back that its a new idea, but is still excited about the implications.
Someone tells him directly "non-user-regretted-seconds" isn't a metric, he doubles down and says its standard in industry.
I reply saying it's Elon-invented, not a good or bad thing, but certainly not a traditional metric.
OP replies saying that's not true, OP saw it in use at Google a decade ago.
It's a day later and it's completely unclear to me: A) if this is an actual phrase that was used prior to Elon B) if it is a phrase, how it could be a metric and C) if OP is right that it was in use before Elon, given our time at google overlapped by 7 years and I've never, ever, heard of anyone having a metric like that (could someone have used it as a term of art in a meeting? sure! but generic "amount of time people enjoy using our thing" isn't worth noting as a distinct term, unless you actually collect info on it)
The only way I can think of to even engage is to say pretty much the above, but it's too aggro and "cares too much" for the level of current discourse, especially since the premise is we should be excited Elon cares about this.
A more factual approach, like trying to find the first instance of "unregretted user-seconds" isn't convincing. I'm not sure how you'd prove the first use was after a certain date.
Even if I try searching for refs between 2000 and 2020 only, there's ~3 pages of obviously re-dated results, i.e. referring to Elon as Twitter owner with a date of "2013"
Then, just because it wasn't on the internet at a certain date, doesn't mean it wasn't in use regularly at Google before that date.
Then, the clunky pseudo-scientific phrasing makes it impossible to debunk there wasn't another form of "unregretted user-seconds" I should be checking.
There's only 8 pages of results for "unregretted user-seconds", all tied to Elon/Twitter, but that means nothing because again, clunky phrasing means maybe there's another form I should be checking, and maybe it was a phrase that had been locked inside companies until Elon used it publicly.
So what was the point of even reading, thinking, replying about this?
Nothing. Waste of time.
I found your writing useful.
Hopefully the landscape will improve.
There's no shortage of street gangs, kill rappers, cartels,ethnic crime families, ransomware groups, terrorist etc that are actively killing people or committing wide scale crimes. Go join them and you could have a compelling story. Join the Nuwabian Moors and get to work on infiltrating the SuperMax.
Even corny ass biker gangs with their name on their "cut" occasionally get in shoot outs and have more interesting things going on then what is basically a middle aged version of the boy scouts.
It reminds me of how the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. Oh, that was scary, well, whatever, the dudes in jail, shrugs. Because it failed to bring the building down. For me, I was like, holy crap people are trying to blow up the WTC arent they going to....keep trying? but that's just not how people think. Super scary thing that failed == ho hum.
And WTC and OKC were (at least somewhat) successful attacks! J6 caused damage but failed. We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.
From overdoses, right? Sort of different from terrorism in many meaningful ways.
Still not terrorism. Left-wing militias are a problem in some parts of the world. They aren’t in America.
Our domestic terrorism comes almost exclusively from radical Islam and right-wing nutjobs. (Who, somewhat hilariously, see eye to eye on more than they realise.)
No. Of course we've had left-wing terrorism. It's just not been as prevalent, organised or present as the right-wing form. (And I'm aware of zero currently-operating left-wing militias anyone considers a threat in America.)
Is your impression that “right-wing” should designate a hive mind within which there is no conflict?
Because that's not what right-wing (or left-wing) has ever meant. The political universe isn't divided into two teams that conflict with each other but lack internal conflict.
Alternatively, I guess you might accept divisions within the Right but think that the term right-wing is defined in terms of proximity to Trump's cult of personality, but, no, while Trump is a right-wing figure (or perhaps an opportunist leveraging a right-wing base) loyalty to Trump is not what defines someone as being ”right-wing”. In either case, being violently opposed to Trump is not inconsistent with being right-wing.
But in this case jumpcrisscross is identifying political violence as an almost exclusively religious (technically muslim which seems a bit off to me, but whatever) or right-wing phenomenon - presumably including political violence against leftists and rightists as perpetrated under the banner of the right wing (although note in another comment he has clarified his position somewhat). If leftists declaring autonomy and militantly seizing a chunk of Seattle isn't terrorism to him then there are some interesting meaning-of-words questions to resolve here - like what he think "right wing" means. It might be that political violence is by definition right-wing to him.
Extremism isn't something that has been accepted as a right-wing position, historically speaking. The right wingers - like everyone - prefer to enact policy from government. Anti-government vigilantism is one of those highly ineffective strategies that nobody really lays claim to.
It’s really not. It may be extremism, but it’s not threatening or using violence against civilians for political means.
> political violence is by definition right-wing
Wat? Left-wing guerillas are all over the Americas, Africa and Asia. We just don’t have a lot of them right now in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest#...
Call me old school, but it sounds like there were threats of violence for political purposes. I'm not sure how an armed and ideological group can seize an area and block the police for any interesting length of time without being a terrorist group. If not political purposes, why are they doing it? If not violence, why do they need guns (there were a few shootings) and how are they holding the police off?
And you aren't really addressing the point I was challenging you on - how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
Then every bridge protest, any strike that gets contentious and/or gang activity is terrorism. They’re not. What you describe is an attempt to consolidate power; not sow terror.
The definition of terrorism is famously ambiguous. But if we expand its definition to include Seattle then must also include armed marches and counter-protests. That still leaves us with a domestic terrorism problem that is overly concentrated amidst right-wing extremists.
> how are you identifying 'right wing' and 'left-wing' here?
Broadly, by partisan orientation. More loosely: by authoritarian and individualist manifestos versus collectivist and anti-capitalist ones. The closest we’ve had to left-wing terrorism since the ecoterrorism era is Luigi, and that’s partly because he’s almost impossible to fit on a one-dimensional metric.
as an independent i have a different perspective, the left are the violent ones and consistently push us towards a civil war with their bigotry and inability to stop attempting forced “progress”.
If you meant to respond to me, and not roenxi, nobody is forgetting the riots. They were a menace. But they weren’t terrorism and wouldn’t respond to antiterrorism tactics; they’re mass lawlessness. Same as Seattle. The solution is enforcing the laws on the books against flagrant rulebreakinh. That doesn’t work for terrorists.
For the record, and this is true for all humans, speaking words that you've INDEPENDENTLY thought of and come up with all on your own - they leave your mouth differently than words you've heard another say and now your just repeating... it's instantly and immediately identifiable - it's like an advertisement came on, totally different tone, incantation and inflection.
Your comment was the text version of that.
(I live just up the street from the police station at the center of the whole thing, so I paid close attention to all this stuff while it was happening.)
And a piece with the increase in homicides, Mayor Durkan reported that SPD had received a 525% increase in reported crimes in the area when compared to the previous June. Obviously not all of the crime was committed by protestors, but the protestors were the ones that drove out the police presence and the city tolerated the situation created by the protestors for nearly a month. Regardless of whether the situation is best described as domestic terrorism or not, it's clear that public officials were willing to tolerate violence enabled by left wing protestors "letting off steam" too.
It was quite a spectacle.
I do feel like "reclaiming a public street" is slightly different from "attempted coup d'état" though.
Dismiss them at your own peril. The FBI did
It’s still not going to work. When will the left learn that changing peoples mind by lying will not work?
The only reason anyone thinks otherwise is because they were completely incompetent. But being bad at overthrowing the government doesn’t mean you didn’t try.
Even if it was a spur-of-the-moment mob action, something like that was always coming due to inaction in addressing the increased violence from the different right-wing groups.
> We’re really bad at taking failed attempts seriously.
To that point, Osama bin Laden had multiple attempts attacking the WTC. They realized that it was going to take a lot more than a car bomb to take down those buildings and made improved plans from a car bomb. Which is just some of the data pointed to by those that are unbelieving that a truck bomb was the sole cause of OKC.
The amazing thing is how the right was able to essentially rewrite the history of Jan 6 over the last 4 years. Right after the incident even many Republican politicians in DC were calling for Trump's resignation and impeachment (or at least some resolution that would not allow him to run again). There was a huge amount of alarm in the immediate aftermath. But then the narrative about the events of that day slowly started to turn into "it was just a peaceful protest where a few bad apples got a bit out of hand" (that came right after the "it was antifa" stage which didn't last too long when it was clear that these folks were Trump supporters). Trump certainly minimized Jan 6 (to his benefit) and the rest of the GOP began to go along just as they've gone along with the idea that the 2020 election was "stolen" from Trump (and if they actually believe it was stolen then they can come to the conclusion that Jan 6 was justified as some of them do).
Of course the Democrats call it an insurrection - that’s what their base wants to hear and benefits them at the polls.
But look at what they do in totality - after calling him Hitler the Democratic leadership was wishing Trump a speedy recovery after the assignation attempt.
You don’t wish Hitler a “speedy recovery”.
It’s mostly political theatre. J6 was a riot, but the republic was not able to topple.
They might have incentive, but that's irrelevant to whether it was an insurrection. And it was, it was textbook.
https://acoup.blog/2021/01/15/miscellanea-insurrections-anci...
>No ancient Greek would have had any trouble in understanding what happened on the 6th or that it was a serious attempt (albeit an incompetent one) to seize power. Having a leader or a political faction move with a mob (often armed, but not always so) to try to disperse the normal civic assemblies of a Greek polis and occupy their normal meeting place was a standard maneuver to try to seize power during stasis. As Dr. Roel Konijnendijk, an ancient Greek history specialist, noted in this excellent discussion on the r/AskHistorians reddit (where he posts as Iphikrates), “In the Greek world, most attempts to seize power by force tended to take the same form: the seditious party would contrive an opportunity to gather in arms while their opponents were unarmed and off-guard, and seize control of all public spaces.”
(The link author has a PhD in ancient history)
(the "acoup" name is incidental, it stands for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantries)
And while yes, the Dems have flip-flopped between calling Trump Hitler and wishing him a speedy recovery, that's because they're spineless slaves to proceduralism who won't break decorum if the fate of US's democracy depends on it.
The crowd was unarmed. Its actions were mostly wondering around (respecting the ropes!) and taking funny pictures.
At no point was the republic at risk of falling.
so when the left literally changed wikipedia entries, what was that? not rewriting history?
to put it bluntly, it’s hard to have sympathy for your case when the left does the same. when will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?
when will the rest of you figure out that parties are the problem?
Thank you for saying something that has me opening my mouth and getting in trouble.
Given that I am a Lockean liberal at heart, I object to describing the entire left as doing the same thing as the right. There is still a portion of the left (admittedly shrinking) whose foundation is based on science, math, logic, and history.
However, that said, I see a lot of similarities between progressives and MAGAs in their denial of facts, shouting down others who disagree with them, and preferring conspiracies and truthiness because it feels better. Magas do carry it one step further in making up case law, inventing legal theories out of whole cloth (textualism), and making choices that degrade the function of socicity that make things better for everyone except stockholders
> When will the left stop complaining that the right is doing things they are also doing?
progressives, not the left. when the right stops being a bunch of snowflakes.
They won't as long as they get a molecule of attention.
It's because just accepting a prepackaged story like this from a single source would completely fail to meet the standards of journalism.
He just up and joined a bunch of radical militias that he strongly disagrees with? I mean... maybe. But you'd of course be very suspicious of everything he says and his motives for coming forward.
Genuinely asking: what other evidence are you looking for?
This is an important side-light on the concept that media sources are 'grifting' and only interested in what will make them money. It's surprisingly common for media sources to turn away from stories that could be sensational and give them money, but at the expense of a cause (such as these paramilitaries) which someone at the media source supports.
In that case, the person at the media source making decisions will understand that the story is sensational and attention-getting, but will quash it because to run the story would be hurting the paramilitaries…
Unclear. Depends on how supportive of it Trump is. He might legitimize it by pardoning the Jan. 6 attackers. Many of them thought they were acting on Trump's orders, after all. There was one platoon-sized Proud Boys unit on Jan. 6th that showed military organization and discipline. The rest were just a mob.
Having a private army of goons can be useful. That's what the SA was in the Nazi era. The SA was a big organization, 20x the size of the German army at peak. Eventually, it was put down once Hitler was firmly in power. See "Night of the Long Knives".[1] Other countries have been through this. Sometimes the goons ended up in charge, or at least as a large faction to be kept happy.
This is often seen after internal unrest that yields a large, restless, armed group. Germany got there by losing WWI, but not being crushed. Haiti is a classic example. Afghanistan seems to have gone down this road - all those former "fighters" have to be fed and kept busy.
The closest the US came was the "Bonus Army" camped out on the Mall after WWI, demanding a bonus for veterans.[2] The Bonus Army had 17,000 veteran soldiers, and some political and police support. Eventually they were forcibly dispersed.
US militias don't match any of those classic situations. They're mostly wannabees. If you encounter militia types, ask them if all their members use the same ammo. If not, they're a rabble, not an army.
Do we get to see the actual documents the original author talks about?
Sure, but there's plenty of opportunity for asymmetric warfare. Several power stations have been attacked in various parts of the US over the last few years. They could be probing the power system for vulnerabilities (and there are plenty of those). Also, look at how lowish-cost drones are coming to dominate the Ukraine war.
Sometimes, some token investigative journalism is allowed. (So long as those revelations do not challenge the status quo, natch.) Maintaining the charade of being the Forth Estate. Less so over time, as the "infotainment" biz model pioneered by USA Today transformed the industry. What kids today would call "enshitification."
FWIW, Propublica is a member of the so-called Fifth Estate, explaining why they can do what actual journalism.
The cops I've seen in those meetings talking about how the communities they are policing are "subhuman animals" that "just need a bullet" are still in Seattle PD, as well.
They also had connections with some state legislature members, such as Matt Shea.
I wasn’t impressed. They do the same thing the major news outlets do - craft a narrative then selectively use findings to support it.
Their expose on tax records is a good example - they calculated billionaires tax rates based not on income (as everyone thinks of) but rather total wealth to arrive at shockingly small numbers (intentionally).
Maybe they do a better job of in depth articles but the overall quality isn’t that impressive.