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cosmiccartel

231 karma · joined August 4, 2017

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cosmiccartel··on Ask HN: Can you legally deny selling software to someone on ethical grounds?
This sounds like the worst of both worlds. Vehemently pro-choice employees are unlikely to be placated, and pro-lifers are going to boycott the company anyway.
cosmiccartel··on Dev.to is now open source
It's cool that it's open-sourced, but I've never been impressed with the content. Even when an article is about a topic I'm interested in, it's hard to get past the Buzzfeed-style "How do you do, fellow kids?" tone.
cosmiccartel··on “Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape (2008)
That's a good point. Most likely that would have been the work of some low-level employee at a regional office trying to boost their numbers.
cosmiccartel··on “Single?” Lawn Signs Conquer the American Landscape (2008)
I remember seeing one of these signs in 2013. I was immediately intrigued since, outside of facebook and craigslist, there was very little web activity in my state, much less my impoverished hometown of 4000. The fact that the town's name was misspelled in the URL was even more interesting.

I also tracked the source down to NuStar Solutions. After a bit of digging, I found that just before the signs went up, a Craigslist ad was posted looking for a local to place signs around town. Not long after, there was a "response" ad posted by the person who had placed the signs, warning others that it was a scam and that they hadn't received payment for it.

cosmiccartel··on Everyone Has an Accent
You have the theory reversed. It's that hookworms caused lethargy, which was perceived as laziness. As a result, the southern accent has become associated with laziness.

Personally, I think it's more related to negative opinions about the South following the Civil War, which is why even upper-class southern accents face the same stigma.

cosmiccartel··on Twitter to Face Claims by ‘White Advocate’ Over Banned Accounts
It used to.

> Generally, we remain neutral as to the content because our general council and CEO like to say that we are the free speech wing of the free speech party.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...

cosmiccartel··on Real profanity and disease on the internet is untouched while you police decorum
You're confusing the First Amendment with the principle of Free Speech.

When it comes to privately owned forums, they may have absolute control over what is acceptable to say, but those who disagree with their policies are perfectly justified in criticizing them for violating the principle of free speech.

But it isn't even as black and white as you say from a legal standpoint. There is precedent (Marsh v. Alabama) for the owners of a publicly-used, privately-owned space to have their rights limited in order to protect the constitutional rights of persons using the space. The same principle could apply to sites as large as Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit.

cosmiccartel··on Why the Intellectual Dark Web Exists
It is presently endemic among the left rather than the right. That doesn't mean it's intrinsically related to the other ideas associated with the left.

> Rejection of the mainstream as an ideology just leads to the acceptance of an alternative mainstream and alternative orthodoxy. There is no true "free" thought, everyone is bound to some framework of prejudice and bias.

I agree, but that's not relevant.

cosmiccartel··on Why the Intellectual Dark Web Exists
> Identity politics flying the flag of "free thought, only so long as you reject the mainstream and the left" still seems to me to be identity politics.

The rebuke here is aimed at the left's hostility to dissenting political opinions, not against the left's political opinions as such. That's the distinction.

cosmiccartel··on Why the Intellectual Dark Web Exists
To your first point, all I can say is that I doubt it. I see a lot of moderate liberals becoming more conservative. It's anecdotal, of course, but it's everywhere.

> the best way to describe what you call conversion of liberals is radicalization of the youth

That might be accurate if Shapiro or Peterson were radical conservatives. Both fall squarely into the "social liberal" category.

cosmiccartel··on Why the Intellectual Dark Web Exists
> It's not like these members of the inaccurately titled "Intellectual Dark Web" are actually interested in changing anyone's mind.

This is incredibly disingenous. That is exactly what they're trying to do, and quite successfully. Peterson's book sales are skyrocketing, and not among convinced rightists. Browse any conservative forum and you'll find that the vast majority of the new wave of conservatives are former liberals who were convinced by these people.

cosmiccartel··on Why the Intellectual Dark Web Exists
In other words, several diverse groups of people, engaging in respectful disagreement, are complaining about another group for being disrespectful in its disagreement.

It sounds like your Model-T reference is being applied in the wrong direction.

cosmiccartel··on [dead]
Am I missing the racial component here? It just sounds like a very religious woman who was concerned about them wearing metal shirts. I've had people freak out over the same thing, as have my metalhead friends. All white.
cosmiccartel··on Are interruptions worse for programmers than for other knowledge workers?
> Lately, I've had a text editor opened up separate from my code editor where I kind of document my train of thought - especially on fuzzy, complex stuff.

I do something similar. I have a dedicated to-do app, but I like having a more freeform text log as well. On a Mac, https://github.com/glushchenko/fsnotes works well.

cosmiccartel··on VPN leaks users’ IPs via WebRTC
Just want to point anyone looking to test their own VPN to https://ipleak.net/. That's been my go-to, and it seems more comprehensive than the linked service.
cosmiccartel··on The Perfect Birth Control for Men Is Here. Why Can't We Use It? (2015)
In a study on rabbits, all seven were successfully reversed after 14 months.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-04/pf-sro033117...

cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
> There's a difference between advancing your political beliefs and not accepting the current status, and participating in antisocial behaviour in response

I'm a little unclear on what you're talking about here. What antisocial behavior in particular? I'm part of that 20%, and wondering at what point does expressing my opinion become "antisocial".

For reference, roughly 6% of the population is vegan[1]. Are they antisocial for protesting what is, in their opinion, murder?

[1] https://www.reportbuyer.com/product/4959853/top-trends-in-pr...

cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
I actually agree with a lot of this. If I thought that 15 random wild-west fantasists could pull of a coup, I'd see more of an issue with the right to own guns.

But the point isn't that when the government comes for me in particular, I can stop them. It's that when the government does something so horrific that the citizenry as a whole decides to do something, they can. Local, ad-hoc militias across the country could definitely get the job done.

cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
I have a racially ambiguous look and jarringly foreign name, and haven't experienced much other than innocent "what [race] are you" and "what country are you from" questions. The biggest issues I had when moving to the country were cultural.

I grew up in Texas, then Mississippi, for reference.

cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
> There are very few high paying jobs > There is limited access to medical care > Local government ineptitude has a very real daily impact > Small tax base means surprisingly high taxes, but real struggle to maintain infrastructure (especially schools)

Sounds like poor white and poor black Americans face fairly similar issues.

> “Traditional” upbringing, often religious based, that breed skepticism toward anything “foreign” - which means everything from non-white people to AirBnB.

The xenophobia of rural whites is vastly oversold. I've never heard of anyone around here afraid of AirBnB. The level of racism I've seen in white communities is on par with the level I've seen in black communities. Which is to say that there's an undercurrent, but not a hysteria.

> A fear that Washington DC really is a threat to their freedoms.

Do urban Americans really not feel this way? It certainly seemed otherwise during the summer of surveillance.

> For example, there is a view that gun laws aren’t really about guns, so much as a perception of a slippery slope toward totalitarianism.

It's not that gun laws aren't about guns. It's that the rights of citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government _should one arise_ is important enough to be included in our Bill of Rights. I still don't understand how those who believe that our current president is a totalitarian monster can't sympathize.

cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
If you actually listen to conservatives, we are continuously, clearly saying that we care about _illegal_ immigration. We want to vet who we allow into our home.
cosmiccartel··on Why rural Americans are so pissed off
> It is quite another to have "outdated" (for lack of a better word) moral beliefs

There are plenty of better words. "Unfashionable" works.

> anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-<whatever>

I find it interesting that the left think of the right as the "anti" crowd, while the right think the same of the left.

> to _know_ that the majority of the country does not agree, and still somehow _expect_ that these views to be enforced in their little part of the world. It's a kind of selfishness that is not unique to small towns or their people by any means, but it is there.

First, the assumption that social conservatives are a clear minority and reside in a "small part of the world" doesn't really hold up. Second, minority or not, since when is a political group advancing their own interests "selfish"?

cosmiccartel··on 16 year old app developer: Plagiarist or Prodigy?
The point is that, in the South, sweetie isn't a gendered term. I'm a man and get called sweetie every day in a non-demeaning sense. When used pejoratively, it's essentially "bless your heart" condensed into a noun.

Interestingly, at least in my area, it's generally only used by women and effeminate gay men. As a result, actually using the term does imply effeminacy, so a straight man using it to insult a woman may be unknowingly implying something about himself which he'd find embarrassing.

cosmiccartel··on Ask HN: How to hire if you don't believe in working for someone
On the topic of people just being there for the money:

Obviously, that's the primary reason for just about any job, but I think I get what you mean. Your team treats your project, which you've sunk a lot into, like a chore to work on.

If you want more of a sense of community, that's doable. It's just harder with a remote team. With an on-site team, it's easy to take everyone out for coffee on Mondays, occasionally show a movie in the conference room, or just shoot the shit on a break. With a remote team, it's more difficult but doable. Add a few off-topic Slack channels to encourage less formal and strictly work-oriented conversations between team members (within reason of course). Topics like games, programming languages people are interested in learning, etc.

And on the topic of learning languages, a lot of devs want two things out of a job: money and learning opportunities. No, you probably can't integrate every new language or framework someone is interested in into your stack. You can still encourage learning for its own sake. Let's say I'm really into Elixir, but my employer is a Ruby shop. If they encourage me to better myself for my own sake, I have a lot more incentive to stay on, and make sure I'm hitting the targets I need to. If I have a place to talk about my side projects with my coworkers, it feels much less like my interests are at odds with the company's interests.

---

The other big thing here is that it sounds like you have a lot of stress which nobody else in the company really feels. It's hard for me to give concrete advice here. The two things I can think of are delegating some of your responsibilities to a qualified dev on your team, and spending more time talking with other technical founders at other companies. You need to vent somewhere.

cosmiccartel··on Cyclist Lost Her Job After Raising Middle Finger at Trump’s Motorcade
I can guess your meaning of "free speech folks", and I'm one of them. I don't think she should have lost her job.

All along, our central argument has been that the pendulum swings both ways. The same means which are used to silence the one side will work just as well against the other. That is free speech's raison d'être.

cosmiccartel··on Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign
For anyone interested, "Cultural Marxism" refers to the application of Marxist critical theory to the social sciences, particularly issues of race, gender, culture, and identity.

Current mainstream leftist memes, with a focus on issues like "white privilege", and the systematic inversion of this supposed privilege, cannot be described as anything but Cultural Marxism.

Somewhat related, and highly recommended, is the article Gramscian Damage by ESR (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260).

And if anyone like eli_gottlieb wants to smear you as an antisemite for speaking out against Marxism, this is why: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=125

cosmiccartel··on Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign
> "Cultural Marxist" means "Jewish" -- https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism

Association fallacy -- https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

As your page admits, it has another, original meaning. One which is conveniently downplayed. This is another example of "unthinging". Don't complain about the rampant Cultural Marxism, or you're just a dirty antisemite!

> As a matter of fact, mass purges are more extreme than individual crimes.

One large segment of the population singling out another for physical harm based on political ideology is a mass purge.

cosmiccartel··on Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign
> No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media.

This both true and irrelevant to my point. Quick history lesson of the term:

It was originally coined by white nationalists. Later, when the new right came about, they billed themselves as an alternative to the neocons. Some of them began referring to themselves as alt-right in that sense, as did some outsiders. When made clear that the term originally referred to white nationalism, most of the new "alt-right" distanced themselves from the term, because they were not white nationalists. Some do still use the term in the sense of "alternative to the mainstream right". But, as said before, the vast majority have distanced themselves from it.

Bannon himself denounced the ethno-nationalists using the term "alt-right" multiple times. Furthermore, Bannon and Breitbart are not the new right. Many of us don't read or particularly like Breitbard. What one media outlet decides to call itself has nothing to do with a movement as a whole. Nobody that I know personally, as an active member of the new right, refers to themself as alt-right.

> There are really three problems here.

I'll address those one by one:

> The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state.

You're muddying the waters here. Given that ardent National Socialists, while economically liberal, are considered far-right, we're obviously not talking about economics. Given that authoritarian communist regimes are considered far-left, we're obviously not talking about authoritarianism and libertarianism.

The new right is, for the most part, ardently anti-authoritarian.

And, in the sense of social conservatism, the current center is extreme left historically.

> * Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy.

Many, sure. And yet there are many of us who are being lumped into the "alt-right" for our social views, myself included, who would not react that way.

> Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants.

Simply false. We have no issue with people of color or immigrants. We simply disagree with poisonous Cultural Marxist policies on such issues becoming law.

> * The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1]

This is not a view shared by most of the new right, only certain more authoritariam elements. It certainly isn't any more extreme than the leftist craze for punching "Nazis".

> When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism.

> Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on?

This actually made me laugh.

cosmiccartel··on Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign
> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right".

No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism.

> They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes.

No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right. It's a smear campaign.

Your statement is a perfect example. In your eyes, anyone on the right not engaging in Nazi fantasies is really just "hiding it". You're "unthinging" the views of the vast majority of them to pretend that they are uniform in ideology.

cosmiccartel··on I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise
> In day to day life there are 0.21 homicides by gunfire for 100k inhabitants per year in France and 3.6 in the US (source: wikipedia).

This is missing the point of the comment you're replying to. You're comparing homicide by gunfire, not homicide.

It is true that Europe has a lower homicide rate in general, but there are exceptions. Lithuania is a European country with restrictive gun laws and a substantially higher rate of intentional homicide than the U.S. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...)

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