Reading.am | Chris Aldrich

👓 What I believe II (ft. Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery) | Shtetl-Optimized

Read What I believe II (ft. Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery) (Shtetl-Optimized)

In my post “The Kolmogorov Option,” I tried to step back from current controversies, and use history to reflect on the broader question of how nerds should behave when their penchant for speaking unpopular truths collides head-on with their desire to be kind and decent and charitable, and to be judged as such by their culture. I was gratified to get positive feedback about this approach from men and women all over the ideological spectrum. However, a few people who I like and respect accused me of “dogwhistling.” They warned, in particular, that if I wouldn’t just come out and say what I thought about the James Damore Google memo thing, then people would assume the very worst—even though, of course, my friends themselves knew better. So in this post, I’ll come out and say what I think. But first, I’ll do something even better: I’ll hand the podium over to two friends, Sarah Constantin and Stacey Jeffery, both of whom were kind enough to email me detailed thoughts in response to my Kolmogorov post.

👓 U.S. vs. North Korea: The Winner? China | The American Prospect

Read U.S. vs. North Korea: The Winner? China by Robert Kuttner (The American Prospect)

China has no reason to restrain Kim too soon, or for too modest a price. I keep thinking of the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis. This terrifying episode was a very complicated game of diplomatic maneuvering and military posturing, with a thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the USSR as the consequence of a misstep. But that apocalyptic situation had one big advantage over the present one: John Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev, and Fidel Castro were all sane, rational beings. The same cannot be said about the two protagonists to the Korea crisis, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. In Kim, Trump has met his match.

This is apparently the article that began Bannon’s ouster from the administration.

👓 Why We Terminated Daily Stormer | Cloudflare

Read Why We Terminated Daily Stormer by Matthew Prince (Cloudflare)

Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology. Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare. Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.

Some interesting implications for how the internet works as a result of this piece.