It's like an attractive person telling the ugly that they just need to approach the world with a more positive attitude and good things will come in return. No honey, that's only because they want to have sex with you. Other people don't get shit for free.

As Warren Farrel said: men's facade of strength is their weakness, women's facade of weakness is their strength. When a man displays weakness, he forfeits his right to get help.

Two generations now have been utterly miseducated on gender by a feminized education system that treated masculinity as a condition to be medicated away and passive femininity as the role model, not realizing boys need adversity in their youth to prepare them for the complete heartlessness they'll receive as adults.

"But I love my husband!" Yes, until the marriage is over, after which he'll be devastated and pining for years, while you'll discard him like an old pair of shoes, still getting alimony, the house and the kids.

Wait no, sorry, I got that backwards. It's feminist women who do the female equivalent of this. And who find it deeply irritating if you only imply men do not exist to serve at their beck and call, and have zero obligation to them even if they damsel.

And no, not all women. But definitely even some who do have all the power, money and influence they could want. So who's fragile? Or perhaps more accurately: who succeeds in using their facade of weakness as a lever of power, time and time again?

I don't mind admitting the world is not fair, but it takes a special kind of obliviousness to look at women's position in the West in the 21st century and still see a class of victims and men as the ones who need to suck in their gut and soldier on for once.

A century ago millions of young white men were too busy dying in trenches and being gassed to death with mustard gas in a war none of them could vote on.

Children worked on the field, in factories, and in coal mines, like their fathers were expected to.

And yes, women stayed home and took care of the kids because without electricity, plumbing, appliances, refrigeration and cheap groceries, that was actually a laborious full time job, and people were poor. Not to mention that getting through child birth and infant mortality was a blessing for both mother and child.

None of them were given opportunities simply by existing. On the other hand, providing scholarships to specific ethnicities, or creating special women-only pathways to entry, that is exactly that.

What people like Damore have tried to point out is that expecting demographics and sentiment within a field to match the general population, or else the "playing field" is not level, is an unwarranted assumption. It also puts the blame for actually society wide issues on a small group of people who had nothing to do with it.

If you want more black people in tech, start by addressing the way the US school system is stratified entirely by social class. Maybe you'll see a difference, and maybe that IQ gap will shrink. Maybe it won't, and what new "leveling" policies will you want to introduce then? Don't push out or disadvantage others out of misplaced revenge, and don't cite your American tunnel vision as justification.

I don't know if this is solvable. A CMS is complex enough that each of its functionalities deserves the care of good product and technical designers. These pieces ought to then be integrated into a cohesive whole, a la carte. For desktop software, we were able to pull this off pretty well, with 2000s OS X as the most cohesive, successful attempt, dictated by strong design guidelines and solid enough tech... And note that they invisibly transitioned CPU architecture along the way! But when online collaboration and multi device access became a requirement, everyone flailed and forgot the lessons of the past.

I don't think the current software market is capable of something like that. Almost everyone is trying to make captive SaaS where compatibility only exists on a service-to-service basis, in a subordinate manner. Branding is more important than cohesion, and flexibility and interoperability has taken a back seat to dumbing down.

Recall that the Obama campaign got the explicit go ahead from FB to violate their privacy policy, and built up equally large databases. Heck, recall Obama explicitly endorsing Macron. Does that count as large scale meddling?

What's hilarious is that the same people worried about internet driven misinformation are now the ones jumping into action because the media told them to #deletefacebook.

The presumption of bad faith is both a lack of imagination and a lack of information. The person cannot imagine how a reasonable person might believe something, and why they might believe it.

The accusation of sexism is a perfectly good example, with James Damore as the case study. His words were twisted into things he didn't say, because his uncharitable opponents couldn't imagine that he was simply saying what he was saying. No, no, he must be dogwhistling something far worse, it cannot simply be that their own premises are too narrow, that their own value judgements are coloring their reading.

As for ethics in journalism, I'm one of those "deplorables" too, and you know why? Because there were 100x more people talking and emailing about that then were causing amok on Twitter. If the black bloc shows up at a protest, you don't suddenly dismiss everyone else as car torchers and bus stop smashers. But that's exactly what the press did to gamers, and that's why they were so pissed off. And the more they wanted to be heard, the more fringe behavior there was to point to to support the foregone conclusion. When the police does it at the G20 and calls it kettling, the progressives don't like it, but when they do it, it's just fine.

What's particularly galling is that none of this was new: the online harassment, the doxing, the stalking, that was pioneered on Something Awful's leftie forums like Helldump and LF. And lo and behold, those people ended up in media cliques like Weird Twitter. Pots calling kettles black is not a new concept, it's just amazing they fooled so many into defending their incestuous little circle. History has been rewritten, and now apparently online trolls never existed until 2014, when the fire nation attacked, and everyone of import got amnesia.

Here is what I saw. To change my mind, you'd have to prove that there was a massive invisible shadow campaign that could somehow eclipse hundreds of thousands of views, posts and tweets:

https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/gamergate-august-2014-revi...

Nobody forced them to chase clickbait or spend their days sourcing stories from Twitter and Tumblr. That's all on them.

And before you think that's an exaggeration, I'm talking about one of my (European) country's major national papers whose daily front page now consists of breathless American political drama, hashtags and gender politics. It's ridiculous, the children are running the show, the writing is atrocious, and their world view is about as sophisticated as a first year pol-sci major who's never held a real job.

Get those people to shut up and we'll be far better off. I look forward to their tears. If their content was worth it, they wouldn't be struggling.

Ok.

So let's look at what the worst teenage girls get up to...

- Queen Bee'ing and passive aggressive social dominance games.

- Whisper campaigns, slut shaming and going behind people's backs.

- Crab bucket mentality, obsession over relative status and appearances.

- Recruiting authority figures to whitewash cry-bullying and enact revenge.

Now, does that remind you of anything that's been happening on the internet in recent years? Consider this: the supposed plague of online harassment aimed at women, typified by anonymous sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwifarms... Does that sound like something angry teenage boys would do, or angry teenage girls?

The toxic femininity was coming from inside the house all along. And the fact that those two words are never uttered together by supposed gender specialists ought to tell you something too.

Yes, things are now so good for the average person that you can create mass hysteria over mean words. Not a satanic child murdering panic, not teenage violence, sex and substance abuse... just words.

Once you stop consuming the outrage crack pipe, it all goes away. It's all a big game of signaling and sophistry. Ask yourself why the average journalist is qualified to whip you into a frenzy on topics that should rightly require years of study to become authoritative on.

You can be trusted, you just gotta turn your brain back on. When there is a breakdown in the accepted mechanisms for spreading social consensus, you go back to primary sources. It shouldn't be a surprise: nature has told us that monocultures are eminently vulnerable. The solution is always diversity, the actual kind, not the ideological puritanism that has appropriated that concept for themselves.

Maybe we're already far more doomed than people realize.

When the good tribe does it, it's "remarkable insight into the political base and clever use of modern technology", when the bad tribe does it, it's "disturbingly sophisticated targeting and an automated violation of consent". Really, go read the write ups about previous democrat campaigns, the narrative was of tech savvy modern progressives leaving the conservative old timers in the dust.

Russel conjugation is the favorite trick or the press today as they hawk their narratives:

"I am trying to get an important message out. You are running a political campaign. They are spreading harmful propaganda."

But 99% of harvested data is gathered with only proxy consent of 1% of the users, and most of either group is unaware of what's happening. Ignoring this ratio in order to haggle about exactly how the 1% was or wasn't tricked is entirely beside the point.

The bigger problem with this whole affair is that people correctly diagnose a breakdown in the mechanisms for forming consensus reality, which makes a lot of information suspect. This should make you question your in-groups' world view as much as the out-group. But instead of going back to primary sources and reevaluating what they know, people only double down on it more, and use it to justify why the out group is even more clueless/insidious than before. But one of the biggest hallmarks of propaganda is that the enemy is both horribly inept and terrifyingly powerful at the same time, swapping between the two seamlessly to serve the current narrative.

Often it means you can refactor it so that there is only one of any "thing" so there is no need to clarify which version or role this "fooBarThing" is serving to disambiguate it from the other "bazBarThing".

Functional composition and well structured data is the key to this. It's basically halfway to point-free style.

Worse, the same media power that turned the election into a reality show is now aimed at tearing down its results, washing their hands in innocence and tagging it Resistance.

If they weren't upset before, then they're not upset now because it happened, they're upset the "bad" people used it to accomplish the "wrong" goals.

Reddit is not interested in being a neutral platform, and the constant scapegoating of the people they drive into containment subs as being the cause rather than the result is both tiresome and idiotic. If you don't want people to isolate themselves and radicalize, don't drive them away from mainstream channels.

One if my main gripes with the current American left is their inability to see themselves as agents who cause the things they hate.

Good questions ought to lead to better problem solving skills. Often they don't.