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permalink #76 of 468: Virtual Sea Monkey (karish) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:18
permalink #76 of 468: Virtual Sea Monkey (karish) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:18
At home we had a sense that society was irretrievably divided that was as strong as what we feel now, divided across lines that weren't all the same as now. Some people really believed in the rationale for the Vietnam War, blocking the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. The observation that the US was directly continuing French imperialism never gained much traction, largely because the US never stood to receive much imperial benefit from the war. For most Americans all the wars in the Middle East have been more distant and more abstract.
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permalink #77 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:28
permalink #77 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:28
On covid: February 26 of 2000 - nearly two years ago - I estimated about a million covid deaths in America. Vinay @leashless https://twitter.com/leashless/status/1232750570668199942 #CoronaVirusPandemic Here's what to expect. 1) >50% of people will catch the virus at some point 2) <1% of those people will die In America, that means about a million deaths. Sounds a lot? Same as 4 months of normal rate mortality. 50/50 you won't know anyone who dies of it. ===== Don't believe anybody who tells you we didn't know it was coming. We've known something like this, probably a lot worse, was coming for decades. Why the governments didn't get on top of it properly I do not know. It's been an absolute farce.
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permalink #78 of 468: Angie Coiro (coiro) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:30
permalink #78 of 468: Angie Coiro (coiro) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:30
(A moment's interruption to request that, if you tweet about this conversation, please tag it #SotW2022. Thanks! We now return you to our regular Welling ... )
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permalink #79 of 468: Virtual Sea Monkey (karish) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:33
permalink #79 of 468: Virtual Sea Monkey (karish) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:33
That's an EXTRA burden of four months' worth of normal mortality.
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permalink #80 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:52
permalink #80 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 15:52
"Amway for incels" is cute, but a note on incels. Autism. A very serious percentage of the incel population are on the autism spectrum: they're wailing in pain about lacking the capability to interface with society or find partners who will accept them as they are. It is, in short, generally ableism of the worst kind. Sure, there may be some neurotypical incels who are simply assholes but if instead of "incel" you think "bitter, fucked up autistic people who can't function in society because of their disabilities, and are held up for public ridicule by people who have no fear of being made accountable for their actions" you would be closer to the mark. It's pretty obvious when you see it. I don't know whether ASD is 10% of incels or 90%, but it's a culture absolutely rooted in autism and their own jokes and memes make that abundantly clear. https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/radical-online-communities-and -their-toxic-allure-for-autistic-men/ Mocking people on the spectrum should not be tolerated, and the incel discourse has to change to reflect that a lot of them are struggling very, very hard to socialize in this society, without the neurological advantages that most of us have when attempting it. And I'm sure their suicide rates are massively elevate - if anybody cared enough about them to check.
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permalink #81 of 468: Peter Meuleners (pjm) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:09
permalink #81 of 468: Peter Meuleners (pjm) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:09
I'm on the autism spectrum and I take exception to a lot of that post.
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permalink #82 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:11
permalink #82 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:11
Interested in hearing your thoughts. Obviously many incels are on the autism spectrum does not mean that many people on the autism spectrum are incels.
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permalink #83 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:20
permalink #83 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:20
Self-identifying incels have murdered at least 61 people in the last few years but tell us more about how this is ableist.
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permalink #84 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:25
permalink #84 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:25
How many of those incels were on the autism spectrum?
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permalink #85 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:26
permalink #85 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:26
Good conversation, all. and thanks again to Jon for roping me into the State of the World again. I just returned from Cyprus 2 days ago, where I just curated the latest exhibition at Neme Art Center, called "Through the Mesh: Media, Borders, and Firewalls" with Wade Wallerstein of Transfer Gallery, Geert Lovink as our keynote speaker, and Negin Ehtesabian as our guest artist, live from Iran (we had to fight the Cultural ministry to get her in the travel ban). We saw the Eschelon facility in Akrotiri, the Green Line in Nicosia, and the St. Nicholas of the Cats Monastery. Seems they had a snake infestation and St. Helen of Byzantium sent St. Nicholas with cats to cure the infestation. Didn't see a single snake. Lots of cats. Cutest monastery on the planet. And we were on the beach. Too cold to go in, but beautiful nonetheless. And hello to Vinay, who I've spent copious time at conferences and in Dubai, and Bruce, who would ask "What'd ya find cool this year?" at Jon's. BTw, I'm back in America. Took a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, for family reasons. I miss Dubai, though, especially with the expo running. That'll be a topic. I've actually spent a lot of time in Kazakhstan, and did workshops for the US Embassy there. Weird place; Almaty varies from nice post-Soviet to proto-Borat near the bus station, traffic control is optional, and the notions of identity are just odd to me. (The indigenous Kazakhs identify with BLM instead of US Indigenous discourses, and vary between post soviet atheist, Muslim, Shamanic Tengrist, and batshit crazy at times) Did you know it's the 9th largest country by landmass, but only 15+ million... So, what do I think is going on there? The gas prices are a pretense, fueled by frustration with the Tokayev administration's policies. KZ is fairly comfortable if you are rich or connected. But there have been frequent lockdowns and repressions, and I see colleagues getting arrested who I've known in my time there. Vigorous protest scene. Energy shortages linked to crypto? If so, it isn't Kazakh, but likely Chinese. I do know that the Tehran outages were due in part to Chinese crypto farms leeching energy off the grids in south Iran, and I would not be surprised with the One Road plan that China might have mega coin farms there too. Don't take any of this stuff at face value. The truth is that the Qazaqs have been bristling at the social problems there, and this isn't about gas at all. They want a Western-style parliamentary democracy. And interesting that a lot of the topics have been Western, lots more to discuss. Musk, Don't Look Up, and the Starlink/Chinese controversy, Bruce's comments on Wired. Much more.
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permalink #86 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:29
permalink #86 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:29
And how many incels have taken their own lives in that period? What are their suicide rates like? https://www.vox.com/2018/6/20/17314846/incel-support-group-therapy-black-pill- mental-health Some very very bad stuff is happening here. Stopping it is not going to come from further demonizing these people: a lot of them probably need professional help, and their subculture is going to have to be dismantled very carefully indeed if more people aren't going to kill others or themselves as it gets done. I don't even know which agency would do it. Homeland security? The FBI?
This is fascinating. I have to wonder if empathy/sympathy/understanding/tolerance comes more easily to men, as they're not the targets of the hatred and even violence generated by that community. As a journalist of many years, I've got a fairly well-controlled gag reflex. But skimming those sites for research - well, let's just say there aren't enough showers in the world. And the idea that we could "demonize" people spewing that stuff is hard to swallow. I don't know that drawing a connection between those "communities" (hellholes) and those with autism helps the causes of understanding and tolerance, ultimately. Autistic or not, it takes a certain kind of wiring, and a vile hatred of half the people on the planet, to find any of that acceptable. I don't have autism. I think if I were on the high-functioning end of that spectrum*, my reaction to an assertion that I'm over-represented among incels would hit me in a very bad way. I'd like to hear more from Peter about how that post strikes him. *I'm working to be careful and respectful in my language here. If I'm mistaken in my choice of words, please correct me.
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permalink #88 of 468: Angie Coiro (coiro) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:54
permalink #88 of 468: Angie Coiro (coiro) Thu 6 Jan 22 16:54
Addendum: I'm off to read the article Vinay linked, and will weigh in with any changes to the above.
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permalink #89 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:03
permalink #89 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:03
Mozilla backed off their crypto nonsense. Well, they are "reviewing" it. <https://twitter.com/mozilla/status/1479143342495744009>
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permalink #90 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:12
permalink #90 of 468: Vinay Gupta (hexayurt) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:12
This is a worthwhile topic while we're at it: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5qhwjo/eli5_how_come_we_ha ve_twice_as_many_female/ Basically about 60% of the men who ever existed didn't succeed in passing on their genes to the present generation. Most of them just didn't have kids. Hard to find stats on non-paternity in America but it seems to be that 10% to 20% of men have zero children. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/nov/17/male-childlessness-not-re producing-what-am-i My suggestion is that the incels are the first large group of people (remember: there are a fair number of female incels, they are not all men - I think?) who are actually reckoning with these kinds of facts in a collective way. We've gone from "a couple of folks in the village who didn't marry because nobody would have them" through to vast numbers of people talking about their feelings of total rejection online together. I think a parallel case *might* be the "pro-ana" communities where young women (mostly, I'm sure there are men too) herd each-other into the jaws of suicide by voluntary starvation. Same general degree of toxicity, but with an absence of violent murder as an outcome: mostly women rather than mostly men, I guess. Fewer guns. An awful lot of people who feel broken and mal-adapted in ways which they think, sometimes with good reason, will never get better, talking about what life is for and what life is worth... It's not that surprising that a few percent conclude it is worth nothing. I don't have a solution for this, but I know that demonization and stigmatization will make it worse rather than better, and push the "less radicalized" towards the horrible extremes.
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permalink #91 of 468: Andrew Alden (alden) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:40
permalink #91 of 468: Andrew Alden (alden) Thu 6 Jan 22 17:40
Thanks, all for your points. <axon>'s quip started this side loop and can we close it now?
Ok, I will change the subject. I am becoming worried (I guess you could call it) that the people who planned the "Green Bay Sweep" stuff where a bunch of GOP Congresspeople would work with Pence to de-certify the electoral count and remand it all to the states, where they control more state houses and thus would win the Presidency, will not be found by the DOJ to have committed a prosecutable crime with their coy explanation that they were interpreting the wording of the Constitution differently, but legitimately, and that they never planned for the mob to go violent. Thus none of them pay any legal price while all the shock troops go down,though they will stand back and stand by wearing that badge of martyrdom for the next time. So, then it remains to be made clear whether or not Trump, gleefully watching TV while it was all going down, in his "supreme dereliction of duty" did in fact commit a crime by doing nothing, given that he said "peacefully" and all that other BS in his speech at the rally. This to me is their path into the clear. Coupled with the Supreme Court keeping it hands off of stopping these voter suppression laws in the state, or nullifying or neutering whatever this year's Congress passes relating to voter suppression - which I think they will do if it assume too much authority over the states to their liking. Some of us here well remember Watergate and its details and how it unfolded. It was the GOP turning on Nixon that changed it all. Yes the tapes made it easier for them. But fast forward to today: will whatever is equivalent that, when it comes out from the January 6 Congressional Panel, cause the GOP to change because the principle is just too big to ignore?
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permalink #93 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 21:31
permalink #93 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Thu 6 Jan 22 21:31
"Principle? I'm not familiar with this term." - every Republican
Two points for possible expansion <58> Is China/Taiwan parallel to, or extremely different from Russia/Ukraine? ( Comments welcome. ) <74> I gets the debt chain and thence VISA, SWIFT, banking ( including but not limited to fractional reserve ), consumer finance. I wouldn't mind, on the other hand, a post breaking out / unpacking / elaborating on "how IPOs work and the stock market in general." Bonus: shining the light upon pension funds & State pension systems, and the shadows that might cast on State of the World This year's State of the World may be starting off better than the state of the world in and of itself: may it continue. Thank you, one and all
just a regular middle aged fellow here. I don't get cryptocurrency I don't get NFTs I don't get FB Meta I really don't see any utility in blockchain *at all*. Feel like my declining cognitive dexterity takes a bad hit every time I mentally process some tiny aspect of the implications of it. complexity for complexity's sake seems not just pointless, but actively hostile/destructive. Not everything requires more orders of magnitude of abstraction to be useful. yet still another case of 'less is more'.
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permalink #96 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 05:23
permalink #96 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 05:23
Re: Politics, Jan. 6th, etc. Having been outside of the USA for the whole tenure of the Evil Carrot, my take is that Americans (myself not considering himself one, but a hybrid, as half my family is Iranian) were building this situation for a long, long time. The value of the US-built from WWII has been sucked out but the plutocrats, sent overseas; the distrust of the government has been eroding since Nixon, Neoliberalist destruction of the middle class since Reagan (freezing of wages, reconfiguring of the educational system for minimum critical thinking, privatization, post 9/11 militarization of police and populist culture). But Americans just have this idea that America is unassailable, and Fortress America will never fall. Such is the way of American Exceptionalism. For all its issues, I often have a better quality of life in places like Turkey, Bulgaria, and I won't say the UAE, as that was a posh life, but at least they had their shit together in regards to vaccination and organization. Watching from afar, I watched Predators lazily sailing out to the Gulf, and every time Trump didn't get to touch the glowing orb F-22's roared over my apartment in Abu Dhabi. My wife said, "At least there was;t a bomb...", as she was bombed by Saddam for the first 10 years of her life. My point is that in the 5 years I was overseas, I saw an absolute power vacuum in the US, the world stopped caring about us for leadership, and American politics became The Apprentice. I don't think Jan. 6th is being taken a tenth as seriously as it should. It was a Domestic 9/11, and articles like yesterday's 5 ways to clean up the mess might need a little more toughness, like taking a German approach to hate speech and fake news (making them jailable offenses), and mad gods like Musk, Bezos, etc. who haven't the basic inkling of martian geodynamics (no magnetosphere [solar wind would rip an atmosphere off] and maximum .34 atmosphere density) - No planet B discourse is spot on. I for one loved Don't Look Up. I also loved the criticisms that it "wasn't fun enough", which was just Inception-esque. Bravo to DeCaprio for being brave enough for invoking Network's "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore" speeches are a real application of the trope. Also, the lunatic billionaire and the "acceptable risk" of 40-odd percent of people not surviving in the Ark (sorry, spoilers), shows Musk's utter madness in his recent tweet that he's willing to coup any country not willing to give him lithium. Not to mention that few are talking about the Twaites Ice Sheet in Antarctica, which, _when_ it goes, will raise global seas by 10 feet. Sorry to be a downer (the American way of eternal "awesomeness" being thrown to the side a minute), but while I enjoyed Biden's speech, I thought he should have gone Network, and walked up to the camera lens and told America to get it together or else we risk everything. But in the end, America has become amazingly irrelevant after Trump. I mean, the Dubai Expo has its pageants about incredibly unsustainable futures. I hope the world can clean up our mess for us. Yikes.
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permalink #97 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 05:52
permalink #97 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 05:52
Regarding Wired (with best respects to Bruce, who I hope I can consider at least a collegial breakfast partner) I was a columnist for Artbyte Magazine (as part of the activist collective RTMark) and editor of Intelligent Agent at the Whitney for 10 years, as well as part of the cometary clouds of 21C and Mondo 2000, which I regret fell to Wired. I also got to know Jon a little through Fringeware Review, back in the day. Bravo to Mark Frauenfelder, Cory Doctorow, and so on for keeping their stuff running. There's a point to this. Wired and boingBOING.com are generally the survivors, which is great. I also read WIRED and MIT Technology Review, and I'm grateful for Bruce's stalwart contributions, which I feel constitute a lot of the "heart" of that magazine. WIRED has also had great interviews with thinkers like Paul Virilio and introduced concepts like "The Long Tail" which I find immensely useful to this day. This issue that I have with Wired, and I hope this does not fall on dead ears, is that likely in wanting to satisfy CondeNast, there has been a lot of the "VC/CEO of the month club" or the "Isn't this cool, and we really aren't thinking about how this will cause the digging up of Cameroon" articles. I realize I might be too critical, but I have to swallow WIRED's corporate reprinting of tech press releases along with the incisive bits. I look at it like Playboy, I read it for the cultural articles. But in the Meta hypercapital age is there a place for a cultural magazine dealing with tech, or are Hyperallergic, boingBOING, and so on the places for this? Or, in the age of plutocratic nation-states and oligarchic platforms, is culture stripped of a voice unless it bows to the Stacks? With diversity and equity being a key conversation, what about cultural equity? Even though the exhibition I curated last month featured largely privileged artists, I intentionally included a few non-western emerging artists, and we need to not always worry about the behemoths. As I can ramble, I'll summarize. I appreciate bruce's repost of the WIRED editorial mission, and I get it. Personally, I think that there is a world involving technology that is far, far cooler than what they publish, and thanks again to Bruce for being part of that. But Wired might be more interesting if it had an article or two of the Mondo vein (Updated, as we are not in the Tragically Hip '90s of the Johnny Mnemonic MTV Amp or Matrix era). I swear that I will make a few posts that are not screeds, but this conversation seems to be pussyfooting around far too much. I wish Barlow was still alive to jump in, but he'd be far more nuanced. I'm swinging a baseball bat, if only to break some ice.
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permalink #98 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Fri 7 Jan 22 06:49
permalink #98 of 468: Jef Poskanzer (jef) Fri 7 Jan 22 06:49
Any truth to the story that the revolt in Kazakhstan is due to bitcoin mining there using so much energy that prices rose? Looks like it's true that Kazakhstan does 18% of all bitcoin mining, and that the revolt started over energy prices, but connecting those two dots is more iffy.
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permalink #99 of 468: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 7 Jan 22 06:57
permalink #99 of 468: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Fri 7 Jan 22 06:57
Screeds are welcome here, Pat, and you're probably right that we're pussyfooting around. And perhaps hoping/expecting for some authority or other to fix the world so that it's suddenly better again, vs the brutality we see in the daily infotainment reports. I just read an E.O. Wilson quote, saying that we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology. h/t Prem Chandavarkar via Nettime. We see politicians du jour leveraging angry and brutal emotions, emotions they've manipulated into being, like small children playing with sticks of dynamite. We saw an explosion on January 6, 2021, and since then some have pretended that the deadly dynamite was a mere fireworks show for the tourists. I don't know what Barlow would do, exactly, but we have to do it without him. In fact, we have a dearth of great souls to guide us from the brink; I keep looking... and hoping... for cooler heads to combine with the kind of toughness it will take to prevail over the chaos and misery of the moment.
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permalink #100 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 07:35
permalink #100 of 468: Patrick Lichty (plichty1) Fri 7 Jan 22 07:35
Re: "Any truth to the story that the revolt in Kazakhstan is due to bitcoin mining there using so much energy that prices rose?" it's a pretense. If anything, sparks to the tinder. Kazakj=hstan has been fighting oppressive regimes for a long time. No one is telling the real story, possibly due to petropolitics, as Kazakhstan is a petropower. And there's a general helplessness in light of nation-state platforms, mad Westphalian dinosaurs panicking about their irrelevance,and godlike oligarchs. Mammon rules these days, while Rome burns. As someone who has been involved with The Yes Men, resistance is essential, but even the Facebook Papers didn't seem to dent that behemoth. My take is that there is a possibility of the beasts to collapse under their own weight. We'll try to fix things when they look too broken, but the question is whether it'll be too late or not. BTW, Musk is just a mad god. Mars is not terraformable, and cobalt, lithium, and tantalum already are subjects for war. He's a rich autistic convinced with his own genius. HOWEVER, I do like discussions about green hydrogen and using gravity as a battery system for hydrogeneration. super interesting.
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