Social Stream | Chris Aldrich

📺 “Face the Nation” on February 10, 2019 | CBS News

Watched "Face the Nation" on February 10, 2019 from CBS News

On this "Face the Nation" broadcast moderated by Margaret Brennan:

Gov. Ralph Northam, D-Va. (read more)

Rep. Jennifer Wexton, D-Va. (read more)

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va. (read more)

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C. (read more)

Adel Al-Jubeir, Saudi minister of state for foreign affairs (read more) (full interview)

Panelists: Jamelle Bouie, Jonah Goldberg, Margaret Talev, and Ed O'Keefe (watch)

The biggest and growing problem here, which started with Donald Trump on the Republican side and perhaps Senator Al Franken on the Democratic side, is the idea of political purity. While all sides want their teams to be politically pure from a game theoretical stance–an issue which also tends to prevent any type of badly needed consensus–the rift between what each side deems “pure enough” is going to kill both. While the racism in this case is decried by Democrats, particularly among leaders who have generally been deemed to have been doing an excellent job otherwise, the Republicans only seem to shout it down for the expediency it creates for unseating what they view as an opponent, rather than for the bad act itself. If both parties aren’t going to play by the same societal rules, then the rift between them is going to accelerate the problems we face as a country.

In this vein, then perhaps we should all be crying for the ouster of Donald Trump who has been actively working on inflaming racial tensions and implementing a racist agenda in the present day instead of worrying about the political purity of a governor who did something decades ago when society was quietly much worse. Let’s work on this first and then worry if the governor of Virginia should step down. If we can’t solve the major aggressions then how are we to address the microaggressions? I’ll agree that we can do both at once, but we certainly shouldn’t be doing this.

I also can’t help but think about politicians being ruined in the 90’s because they employed illegal aliens, and yet here we have a president who not only decries these same illegal aliens, but who has tacitly exploited them to an extreme in his own personal and business life. Let’s get rid of the double standards on both sides and hold people accountable in general.

Perhaps the Christians and the moral majority should be saying before we begin throwing stones, “we should make sure that ‘first we have not sinned ourselves'”?

I couldn’t manage to make myself watch the Saudi minister’s interview. Brennan couldn’t easily hold his feet to the fire on the assassination and there was no way that he was going to stray from his talking points. Better would have been if she asked the question, presented the facts as they’re known and then interviewed him on any other subject or even not at all. They may as well have interviewed Hiltler and allowed him to say that the Holocaust didn’t happen and then let him prance merrily on his way. How can CBS give this guy this much air time in good conscience?

As if to underline my point about the rift in societal mores between Republicans and Democrats, even Jonah Goldberg says essentially “Donald will be Donald” (aka boys will be boys) because he can’t manage to call him out on national television.

👓 Groupware Bad

Read Groupware Bad (jwz.org)

Greetings, people of the future!

This piece has gotten a lot of attention over the years. I have heard a lot of people saying that they had been "inspired" by it. I fear that what they meant was that they were inspired by the one pull-quote that people tend to quote from it, and ignored the rest. So if someone has linked you to this page, or if you've googled that pull-quote and ended up here, let me give you some context. I wrote this in 2005, which was was more than a year before Facebook was open to the general public.

The world was different then.

When I hear people say that they were "inspired" by this, I fear that the result of such inspiration was most likely to cause them to participate in the construction of the Public-Private Surveillance Partnership. These people told themselves that they were building tools to "bring people together" when in fact what they were doing was constructing and enabling the information-broker business models used by companies like Facebook and Equifax, where people are not the customers but rather are the raw materials whose personal details are the product.

I was talking about decentralization and empowerment of the individual. They went and build the exact opposite.

It's not a great feeling to think that someone may have read your words and then gone on to construct the dystopian hellscape that we're now living in, where Twitter is the prime enabler of actual Nazis and Facebook's greatest accomplishment has been to put a racist rapist in the White House.

If all the people who claimed to have been "inspired" by this piece hadn't been, and had just kept writing middleware for banks or whatever, the world might have been a slightly better place.

I wish I had never published this.

- jwz, 24-Nov-2017

Replied to Joe’s Syndicated Links Considered ‘Spam’ By Some Mastodon Instance by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

I actually kind of understand this—only because I think Mastodon is at odds with the Indieweb.

I don’t think that what Joe is seeing is an anti-IndieWeb thing. It is something we’ve seen before from a handful of instances and will assuredly see again.

The other example of this behavior I’ve seen was when Greg McVerry, a college professor and member of the IndieWeb community, tried to join a Mastodon instance that was specific to researchers and professors in higher education. Sadly he found out, like Joe, that syndicating content from other locations was not acceptable there. As I recall, they also required an automatic content warning on almost everything posted to that particular instance which seemed an additional travesty to me. I think he ultimately joined mastodon.social and found he didn’t have any similar issues there and anyone who wanted to follow him from any other instances still could. I’m sure he can provide some additional details and may have posted about it sometime in the summer of 2018 when it happened.

The tough part is that each instance, though federated among many others, can have its own terms of service and set up. Some instances can be and certainly are run by their own tyrannical administrators, and I suppose that it’s their right since they’re paying for the server and the overhead. The solution is to do some research into some instances and find one that isn’t going to ban you for what would otherwise seem like average use to most. I’ve found mastodon.social to be relatively simple in its terms and its massive size also tends to cover up a lot of edge cases, so you’re unlikely to run into the same problems there. (It is also run by the creator of Mastodon, who has generally been IndieWeb friendly.)

The issue Joe has run into also points out a flaw of the overall Fediverse in that just like each real-world country can have its own laws and there is a broader general international law, the international laws aren’t as well codified or respected by each individual country. When you’re operating in someone else’s country, you’re bound to follow their local laws and even customs. Fortunately if you don’t like them there are lots of other places to live. And this is one of the bigger, mostly unseen, benefits of the IndieWeb: if you have your own website, you can create your own rules/laws and do as you please without necessarily relying as heavily on the rules of others.

I’ll note that some in the IndieWeb (Aaron Parecki, Ryan Barrett, Mathias Pfefferle, Jacky Alcine, et al.) have been playing around with or thinking about adding the ActivityPub protocols so that their own websites act as stand-alone members of the Fediverse. Since I know Joe has recently moved to WordPress, I’ll mention that there are two separate projects to help WordPress sites federate:
* ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from Mathias Pfefferle
* Bridgy Fed from Ryan Barrett

Naturally neither of these (yet) supports all of the protocols so some functionality one would find on Mastodon won’t necessarily work, but I suspect that over time that they eventually will. It’s been a while since I tried out BridgyFed, but I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin set up for a bit and have noticed a lot of recent work by Mathias Pfefferle to use it for himself. I still have to tweak around with some of my settings, but so far it provides some relatively useful results. The best part is that I don’t need to syndicate content to Mastodon, but users there can subscribe to me at @chrisaldrich, for example, instead of @chrisaldrich. The results and functionality aren’t perfect yet, but with some work we’ll get there I think.

Good luck finding (or creating) an instance that works for you!

👓 Technology and Distracted Students: A Modest Proposal | The Tattooed Professor

Read Technology and Distracted Students: A Modest Proposal by

Kevin (The Tattooed Professor)

A few days ago, news broke in the higher-ed sphere about a new paper in the Educational Psychology Review, “How Much Mightier Is the Pen Than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014),” which seemed to undercut a study that’s become the go-to ...

📺 Gretta — Demo Day Pitch (Matter) | YouTube

Watched Gretta — Demo Day Pitch (Matter) from YouTube

Gretta is an podcast player with interactive transcripts at it's core.

👓 Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play | Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Read Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play by Ben Thompson (Stratechery)

Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.

An interesting take on Spotify’s recent acquisitions. I’m worried what a more active aggregator play in the podcast space will look like, particularly with most of the players (by this I mean companies) in the audio game using players (by this I mean the actual JavaScript interfaces that play online audio) hiding the actual audio files.