Essays
Freedom For Whom
I am reading Thomas Zimmer’s essay about Russell Vought that I think correctly states what is happening in the United States. The MAGA project is the destruction of the United States that they view as already been destroyed. In their view this is the third American Revolution, the second American Revolution started with the New Deal and culminated in Obama’s election. I think in order to fight against this I think more attention needs to be put on the question of what comes after the U.S. government is entirely destroyed.
Rooted in this question is the reality that these people only place value in freedom for themselves, freedom is not for their opponents. Democracy, including the U.S. Republican one, allows the possibility of one’s opponents gaining power and therefore impeding upon their freedom. Consequently, Democracy is flawed and the only way to assure their freedom is a dictator. The form of what is in place may have the appearance all one thinks of about the United States, a Congress, President, Supreme Court, but for that structure to remain there must be guarantee the opposition can never gain power.
Consider the current government shutdown, doesn’t it feel different to you? The difference is that the current Republicans behind the shutdown do not fear the voters, they don’t fear not being re-elected, because they believe so long as the fall in line with the MAGA project they will continue to have a share of power.
Of course, anyone who understands what is going on ought to be sober enough to know that when everything relies on human feelings rather than laws sooner or later you can, and likely will, become the opposition to that person. Marjorie Taylor Green might being finding this out right now.
The Viwoods AIPaper Mini
Reading The Web
Today I finished reading Stephanie Booth’s three series posts on “Rebooting The Blogosphere” cited by others who I follow. In general I agree with Stephanie’s points and her description of a web reading tool that easily provides a way to create blog posts based on another post being read, create new blog posts from scratch, and convert a comment you are writing on another’s blog into a full post for your own blog. Her suggestion assumes one is reading within a RSS reader app like NetNewsWire.
Like Stephanie I would prefer less friction between reading and posting about what I am reading to my blog. The problem, however, is that most RSS feeds that I follow do not include the full content of a post. The sites that rely on advertising usually include just a link to their site or a snippet only so that you must end up going to the site to read the entire post.
Anti-social Web?
I know there is a lot of writing lately about blogging and rebooting the “social web.” The core of this thought has to do with breaking free from the corporate silos, and I get that and agree with that idea. However, at least for me, I think the situation might be a bit more nuanced than one might think and that is driven by what motivates people to do any of this stuff.
What exactly does “social” mean in the context of the web? For example, does “social” require comments? Likes? Follows? What if “social” simply means sharing?
Wild Card Game 1
The Cubs won the first wild card game today against the San Diego Padres. I do believe it might be their first ever wild card game win. The 3-1 win was due to the pitching staff, in fact as I watch the other games played today, the old adage of good pitching beating good hitting seems to hold. The sharpest example was in Cleveland where the hottest team in baseball the Cleveland Guardians was beat by the coldest Detroit Tigers thanks to the game’s best pitcher, the Tiger’s Tarik Skull.
I see the Cub’s have announced they are starting tomorrow’s game with an opener as recent closer Andrew Kittredge will start the game. My guess is that Shota Imanga will follow Kittredge but I wouldn’t be surprised if Shota only pitches one time through the Padres line up. Counsell can’t blow out pitching because there might be a game three if they don’t win, but the Cub’s want to win this next one while they have the advantage of elimination game pressure on their opponent.
Foldable Phone Or Tablet
Personal Computing Using Tablets
Engineers and Lawyers
I am reading this interview of Dan Wang by Russ Douthat of the New York Times and find it fascinating how Wang describes the difference between China in terms of engineers and lawyers. Wang says the current China is founded by engineers, who in my experience put great value on efficiency. I think Elon Musk’s DODGE was/is very much a rise of engineers in the United States who believe they know better about running a country than lawyers. Whenever you have a group of people who are dominated by ego to think they alone are the smart people and therefore know all the answers to all the problems, you have a high potential for tyranny. Democracy and liberty is not about efficiency, it’s about peaceful co-existence. If one insists upon efficiency you end up being like the other countries, such as the old USSR and China, who likewise make efficiency a prime directive.
Here is the money quote of Dan Wang in the article:
The game goes to he who outlasts the adversary. But what the Chinese want to do is to just keep things really, really stable and just wait for the Western countries to collapse.
China plays the long game while the U.S. plays the short game.
Will WordLand Be A Posting Switchboard?
I listened to Dave’s podcast in which he starts to describe what he is doing with WordLand and FeedLand, and that sounds a lot like what I said that I want in practically my first post on micro.blog. Right now I am writing this using Drummer and it will be published to my Daynotes blog. If I want to also publish this on my micro.blog I need to copy and paste it in to another outline from which posts to micro.blog are published.
Copy and paste is a lot of work, what if for every post I could specify which publishing destination that post goes to simply by selecting the destination locations via a checkbox? What if I could later add a destination by simply going back to that post and checking another box, or clear a checkbox and it is removed. When I edit the item the changes are automatically re-published. BTW, the last item probably won’t work to social network destinations because they generally don’t allow editing.
The key is the per item control over the publishing destination and continual ability to edit the item. For now micro.blog’s ability to cross post items I publish to it to Mastodon and Bluesky come closest to my vision, but that is not on a per post basis, it’s all items published to my micro.blog that are published to those other destinations.
Accidental Middle Class
A question came to mind last night. Was the middle class in the United States intentionally created or simply the happy result of the post World War 2 reconstruction? I was raised in what I consider to be middle class and as Gen X I was taught how good the middle class was, but for all its importance I don’t think it was something intentionally created.
A problem today in the United States is that the middle class is eroding, and I think that is because it was never really intended to exist and thus there has been no real effort to retain it. The middle class is a target of our politics but not our policies.
I think the destruction of the middle class matters because it provides for two important societal concepts. One is the idea of enough, but which I mean having the means for a good life. The second is a reason for hope that one can have as good a life as their parents if not better. An important corollary to the idea of enough is that one does not have to be the wealthiest person in terms of money to have a good life.
Without realistic hope of a good life, everything feels pointless to the point that life doesn’t matter. If then in a search for an answer to why one’s life is pointless a person becomes convinced it is because of the other now there is a target for their rage that is amplified by the Internet.