💬 Quotes
“Spending less money and making more would’ve been something I would’ve worked on.”
💬 Ben Smith
… Ben is the founder of Semaphor, a new publication with a stable of great writers that I presume cost a lot of money to run. The countless newsletters that come out of Semaphor .. daily … are totally free.
Anyone else confused?
“The fallout from our cultural obsession with personal rights is that we too easily forget about personal responsibility. If I demand my rights and you demand yours, we end up butting heads again and again and again.”
💬 Yonason Goldson
“Google searches for ’VPN’ have skyrocketed in Utah this week for one reason: You can no longer visit Pornhub from a Utah IP address.”
💬 Morning Brew
What if Amazon offered used readers, in bulk, to people in states that are banning books, and in school districts that are limiting what kids can read? What if it offered special deals on banned books, and brought titles to young people some of their “betters” are forbidding for them, to encourage reading?
💬 Dana Blankenhorn
Popped up in my archives today …
”If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
💬 Harry S Truman
At the risk of repeating something about repetition ….
“History doesn’t repeat - but it sure does rhyme.”
Not to mention
- TRUMan
- TRUMp
💬 Hate Speech On Core Intuition
🔗 Just finished listening to the latest Core Intuition.
At one point in the conversation @manton and @danielpunkass were talking about community guidelines, social norms et al. Hate speech on Bluesky was specifically brought up. Apparently they have a way to add tags to posts so that posts can be marked as ‘hatespeech’, ‘not safe for work’, etc.
Sounded a pretty neat solution to me - but apparently someone over on @mastodon suggested that this meant BlueSky was allowing hate speech.
Have to say, one of the common threads running through a lot of Mastodians I observe is the ‘superior’, ‘better than thou’, ‘my way or the highway’ attitude … even down to comments like ‘if you don’t ‘alt text’ your images - I will unfollow you'.1
But, ‘allowing’ hate speech? There is no agreement what constitutes hate speech, so I guess this individual is judge and jury? Don’t get me wrong … I think most ‘decent people’ can bucket up the obvious extremes … it’s when it gets to the grey areas it becomes difficult. Like art - we can’t define it - we just ‘know it when we see it’.
I was reminded of a well used amorphism
“One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”
This also ties into something I wrote just yesterday
1] I wonder if Mastodon is filling up with ‘snowflakes’. (Back when my mum was alive she used to rail on ‘do gooders’ … a term that seems to have fallen out of use these days - but the sentiment remain in these ‘behavioural vigilantes’.
2] I wonder whether the meek have inherited the earth … at least in terms of public discourse?
3] Has the pendulum swung too far? Satire and parody has lost meaning and too many people are cancelling themselves for fear of public admonishment and worse - retribution from the herd.
What do you think?
-
Too late - I have already unfollowed you. (Not that I disagree with the need to do it - and I try - but it doesn’t always happen and life is too short.) ↩︎
“I’ve been mithered over a novel for months. I wrote a 100,000-word one over COVID and then threw the lot away immediately afterwards because it was, in technical terms, utter shite altogether.”
💬 William Gallagher
100,000 words ‘binned’ … would we all had that kind of courage.
🖋️ The Largest Project In The World That You MIGHT Not Have Heard Of
Quotes from Galloway talking about NEOM.
🪦 RIP Cable News
Cable News (1980-2023) by Dana F. Blankenhorn has a very relevant 🎵 track that opens the post.. You can find the 🔗 lyrics here.
Who “wins,” i.e., who is the last one standing? Probably NBC. Comcast has cash flow. NBC has learned how to segment the market with MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Now, NBC News and Local Now. That’s five bites at the remaining cable apple, five channels they can sell to the “skinny bundle” boys like YouTube Plus. And the cost is nominal – a few sets at the NYSE and 30 Rock. Reporters are no longer stars at any of those shops. CNN and Fox are out in the cold. Their owners are going to squeeze all the juice out for profit until there’s nothing left, then throw the remaining goodwill at one of the big boys.
💬 Dana Blankenhorn
Count me in the camp of ‘well now - there’s some new news’ ….
”The prevalence of Vin Diesel’s exposed upper arms may be associated with box office and critical success. According to this really important analysis from a Reddit user, the movies in which Vin Diesel wears four sleeveless shirts and spends 14–15% of the film wearing them are better liked by critics and make more money than movies in which he wears fewer sleeveless shirts for less time. Vin Diesel averages 1.95 sleeveless shirts per film and wears one in 16 of his 23 films, the analysis claims. Reddit is undefeated.”
💬 Morning Brew
“All of this is to say, Mastodon has its flaws and Twitter has its flaws. And, as I read in Dan Diamond’s newsletter, leaving Twitter also has its flaws. But you know what? I’m on Substack RIGHT NOW! And Substack has just introduced “Notes”. Why not investigate ITS flaws?”
💬 Mike Pesca
There’s a lot of similarities between writing music and building websites ….
“Music making is like progressive enhancement in that you start with your drums (HTML), add the bass guitar (CSS), and then sprinkle screaming and synths and solos on top it all (Javascript).”
💬 Robin Rendle
I’m glad to see these companies defending end-to-end encryption, but this letter dances around the repercussions of this proposed legislation in the U.K. What they mean in the third paragraph quoted above is that if the legislation passes, people in the U.K. won’t be able to use WhatsApp or Signal or any other end-to-end encrypted service. Apple isn’t a signatory of the letter, but I think iMessage would be banned too.
💬 John Gruber
There is so much idiocy in the UK government these days.