Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Yahoo Groups is largely shutting down; the business model arguments are troubling
Last night, I learned (belatedly) that Yahoo Groups is
shutting down most of its functionality, including the ability to publish, and
will revert to privatized corporate service (a little bit analogous to Google’s
shutting down most of Google-plus). The service did give a one-week extension
until Oct 28 on the right to publish on it.
Users were even confronted with a clumsy way to save
their work.
I found out which Elliot Harmon, an activism director
at Electronic Frontier Foundation, tweeted the question as to whether this was
inspired by FOSTA?
Maybe partially, but this seems to be a business model
issue. The India Times seems to have the
best explanation. The competition with Facebook Groups is said
to be a factor.
We’ve seem other shutdowns. America Online terminated its Hometown
content publishing in 2007, but facilitated a conversion to Blogger. I had used it as a “backup” to my own
doaskdotell and previously hppub sites.
Geocities apparently terminated in 2009.
The Paul Rosenfels Community (e.g. Ninth Street Center in NYC) used to be on Geocities
and I believe Yahoo Groups. Some
libertarian groups existed on Yahoo! I think
the Libertarian Party of Minnesota had one when I lived there (1997-2003). I believe I at one time had tree or four
articles on these groups (around the year 2000) which I did not maintain.
But today the Internet business models of big
platforms are coming under fire, based on whether you buy the narrative that the
models facilitate radicalization. I
think that’s overblown, unless you mean by radicalization a merely dismissive
attitude toward identity and intersectional groups as such.
Richard Stengel argued in the Washington Post “Why America needs a hate speech law”, seeking to weaken the First Amendment, which he sees as an outlier in the civilized world; and he seems dismissive that the world can really work on an idea of
individualized “personal responsibility” when groups are so unequal. It’s true that radicalization follows
nihilism, which can occur if people think they don’t matter and have nothing to
lose.
My own business model (mostly stuff that is free and is
supported by past accumulated assets) can certainly come into question, and I
have grown increasingly concerned about its tolerability in the past eighteen
months (with my “announcement” of termination of most stuff at the end of 2021,
when my main domain name registration would expire). There is a growing sense (not often discussed openly) that individualized speech following my own model weakens the incentive for "moderates" to join others in participating in politics in the usual way (outside of simply voting), inviting extremism and authoritarianism. It’s actually very hard to make “objectivity”
in content support itself, and claims one can do so forever will seem
pretentious and predicated on unearned advantage and inequality. But in baseball, unearned runs count.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Zuckerberg seems to separate political ads from free speech
Common Dreams, among others, reports on Facebook
employee resistance to Zuckerberg’s decision to exempt paid political
advertising from the same standards of fact checking as other ads.
There is also the conundrum “paid speech is not the same
thing as free speech”.
I had a taste of this in the fall of 2018 when Facebook
did not want to “boost” my formal page drawing attention to power grid security
(rather relevant in California now) unless I sold things and had advertisers
vouch for my identity.
The site common dream offers a CA3.0 republish
license. I have to note that many sites without
advertising are constantly prodding for money.
I do donate to a few YouTube channels that I like, and I probably should
donate to sites to whom I hyperlink a lot, but I don’t respond to panicky email
“save us” campaign (Truthout threatens to go out of business almost every
week.) I don’t want to do that (and it
might be a legal problem if I did because of my trust setup). Yet it means, as I have noted before, that
the sustainability of how I publish comes under question, especially at the end
of 2021.
Update: Oct 31
Jack Dorsey has announced that Twitter will not allow any paid political ads. Here is the policy in a twitter thread.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Americans want to weaken First Amendment, limit independent speakers, to conform to social norms and make life easier for minorities, think tank reports
The UK Daily Mail reports on a study, by Matthew
Wright, from the Washington DC think tank “The Campaign for Free Speech” that more
Americans, especially under age 38, think that the First Amendment should be
changed to ban hate speech and that “alternative media sources” outside of
licensed media should be regulated.
However, the findings are not as striking statistically
as the tone of the article would suggest. For example, hate crimes can in many
states (and sometimes in federal law) draw stiffer sentences.
The Campaign for Free Speech has a summary page which
is disturbing. Many Americans don’t
understand that the First Amendment applies only to government, not to what private
companies including social media or even hosting platforms can do in establishing
their own terms of service.
There was also a curious reference to “current social norms”. It is difficult to delineate what this
means? Misgendering trans people with
pronouns? It is difficult at this level
to determine if this is about political threats or security threats (from the “radical
right” and white supremacy) or more about the hyper-competitiveness that leaves
many people with disadvantaged backgrounds behind.
The Campaign for Free Speech doesn’t seem to be the
same group as New America, which held an interesting forum “The Future of Free
Expression” which I attended in July.
That group seemed to have very interesting people working there.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Will blockchain-driven P2P replace the world-wide web? Also, Zuckerberg on "harmful" inauthentic free speech
Paul Vigna has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal
today that explains a new P2P-more-or-less model to “replace” the Web. That is, when you post something on social
media, the content (especially an image or video) would come from your own “usb-like”
private device, and companies couldn’t use it to sell your data.
The title of the article is “Tech Giants Have Hijacked
the Web. It’s Time for a Reboot”.
The proposed platform model is called “Elixxir”, for
the blockchain, by David Chaum. Of
course, we had P2P before the blockchain (like Napster).
I am not sure how this would affect conventional
blogging or hosted sites. It would raise
questions about photography in public and maybe how copyright is interpreted.
Today I had a situation, at a public fundraiser (an
AIDSWalk) where someone told me he came to raise money but didn’t want to be
photographed. That contradicts the
normal notion of fundraising and speech in public (although three decades ago,
before the Internet, gay people went to the trouble not to be filmed at gay
events by major television media).
Distantly related to this is Ryan Tracy’s coverage of
Mark Zuckerberg’s recent speech at Georgetown University in Washington.
Zuckerberg says there is obvious tension between
allowing people to say publicly whatever they want about an issue and winding
up with the political result a particular group wants.. But he says that only a
very small percentage of legitimate users (as opposed to fakes or bots) want to
radicalize others.
This speech will need more discussion later.
Labels:
blockchain,
Facebook-specific issues,
fake news,
P2P
Friday, October 25, 2019
Young men show a tremendous cognition gap (after the top tier) and wind up staying at home with parents and not working
A couple days ago Tim Pool posted a video “Millennial
Men are Unmarried Losers Because Their Parents Won’t Cut Them Off”.
Well, this is a loaded thing. The basic problem has always been that girls
are more verbal than boys, mature faster as children, and will naturally do
better in school unless compared to “exceptional” boys (especially computer
nerds today). So, as Tim points out, after the gender equality movement, going
all the way back to the late 1950s with Betty Friedan, there are more women
today in “superordinate” positions at work, as Markovits points out in his book
on meritocracy. You can read Vox’s latest pieces on meritocracy, such as Roge Karma’s,
and some interviews with the author, here.
There is also the problem with “men and work”, which
Cato had a book forum (“Men Without Work” by Nicholas Eberstadt) about just
before Trump’s inauguration in 2017. And there seems to be a breakpoint among
young men with cognition.
Young men who indeed do well in school and who can
motivate themselves really stand out from the rest of the pack. There is a tremendous cognition gap among men
in our country on the ability to think in abstraction, reason, compare, and
evaluate media input (as in social media) critically. David Pakman has also mentioned this problem
many times, as does (ironically) Jordan Peterson. With women the gaps are narrower and there is
more continuity.
So the outstanding counterexample for Pool’s video is
John Fish, who recently decided to take a gap year after two years at Harvard and
work (in high tech) in Montreal and pay his own way in life and live by himself
in his own apartment for a year, and become a full adult at age 20. He talks about this. Once you leave the nest, it changes you, for
the better.
When I was growing up, there was a tacit understanding
that men needed to be able to support women so that women could bear children
and stay at home with them earlier in adulthood. This is still a major element in culture overseas,
especially in countries otherwise challenged economically (including
Russia). The women’s movement, and later
the gay movement and now the gender “equity” movement if you can call it that
(wokeness), have all created their own internal contradictions, which seem to
be beyond intellectual resolution.
Welcome to tribalism.
Labels:
hyperindividualism,
personal ethics,
Timcasts
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Gizmodo offers op-ed on the CASE Act, which indicates the media establishment has contempt for amateur speakers who don't have to make a living from their work
Whitney Kimball writes a commentary for Gizmodo discussing
the danger of the CASE Act, that it could attract trolls, and that frivolous claims
could be sent to amateur speakers who don’t respond to them.
The title of the article is startling enough,
“How those Memes You Just Posted Could Cost You $30000.”
Various lawyers commented on the troll threat, and
frankly some of them in Hollywood seem to think that amateurs who don’t need to
publish things to earn a living shouldn’t.
The real concerns aren’t about “piracy”, they are about lowballing. And this truly endangers user-generated
content as we move into the 2020’s.
The floor vote hasn’t happened yet (identical bills
did pass the judiciary committees), and it would take about a year to implement.
Will the Copyright Office have sufficient safeguards against trolling in its
administrative procedures? Their own
lawyers need to look at this quickly.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Trump threatens to "terminate" two big media outlets (Pakman)
The David Pakman show is reporting on a Trump
interview with Sean Hannity where he says he will terminate the press
credentials of the Washington Post and New York Times. (CNN?)
There are various media reports about Trump’s “terminating”
these papers from the White House, like on Yahoo. That normally means no press access to the WH.
I checked Tim Pool’s channels and I don’t see a
similar concern yet. David and Tim
should be closer on this.
I know I have kept a distance from conventional activism
and I don’t have anyone’s back (and vice versa), and I’m aware of the position
this can put me in. I don’t have more
details now.
I have to note that Trump's Twitter habits would have violated my own "conflict of interest" ideas as I have discussed them in the past.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
New California law slams independent journalists, trying to force them to work for just one place (and get unionized); political activism on the ground is still needed
I talked about AB-5 in California on the IT Jobs blog
Sept. 15, but Saturday Tim Pool pointed out that freelance journalists who live
in California are now panicking over passing the law. Legacy publications are unlikely to take
contributions from freelancers who can quickly reach the 35-per-year limit and
will go out of state, as Tim Pool explains.
Democrats wanted to see writers able to organize (and
feel inclined to do so) and get full benefits.
They didn’t want to see “real journalists” have to compete with very low
cost independent competition.
It’s the old lowballing problem in the workplace. Similar to right to work.
Pool also notes Sunday that Laura Loomer has raised
money the old fashioned way (door-to-door and mail) for a seat in the Florida legislature
despite being de-platformed by all the major social media.
Then that raises questions about people “like me” who
right now don’t play ball with the political system the old-fashioned way. That’s a topic for another day.
Pool also has some advice for Milo Yiannopoulos, and
it is a lot more surprising than youthink. He also has some ideas for
de-radicalization. Call it “cognitive awakening” and an environment that allows
it.
So, no, Carlos Maza, de-platforming may not work as
well as “you” think.
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Washington Post looks at how people with disabilities run YouTube channels
Jessica Chiu has a comprehensive discussion of how
people with disabilities benefit from running YouTube channels on Oct 6 (Oct 8 on
Health & Science in print).
The discussion tends to bypass all the controversies
over polarization and deplatforming (which you wouldn’t expect) but does explain
that deciding to monetize can be a touch issue (it requires minimum subscriber
volumes).
But this also connects to my post yesterday on autism and
particularly Asperger’s – the latter may not even be perceived as a disability,
and viewers may not perceive the speaker this way.
Likewise, it would be hard to make generalizations
about some parts of the LGBTQ community.
The article discusses a blind YouTuber Tommy Edison,
who discontinued his channel in 2018.
I did want to notice that since the end of 2018, a few
people I know have left social media, or greatly reduced their
participation. The polarization, censorship
and coercion to work with groups coming from the far Left could be one of the
reasons.
Friday, October 18, 2019
I've been told that I have Asperger's Syndrome
I haven’t talked about it much on the blogs, Asperger’s
syndrome, and its clumping by the DSM as an autism spectrum disorder.
This video presents Adam, a freshman at Penn State, to
introduce the idea that many people (mostly men) function “normally” and tend
to prefer solitary occupations, especially tech.
It is hard to say why, as he presents, it is a “developmental
disorder” at all. James Damore presents
himself as having Asperger’s.
Such persons are highly individualistic and tend to
interpret situations and behavioral expectations of others in a narrow fashion.
They may tend to be contemptuous of identarian or tribal concerns about tie
implications of certain political or social ideas. They tend to be more conservative or libertarian politically.
The late filmmaker Gode David told me he had Aspergers
when I first met him on New Years Day in Providence, RI in 2003. He said that I
also have it.
But it would be necessary to segregate it from “schizoid
personality”.
Picture: Cardboard, wood, and wire toy baseball stadiums we made as kids in the summers in the 1950s (often in Ohio)
Picture: Cardboard, wood, and wire toy baseball stadiums we made as kids in the summers in the 1950s (often in Ohio)
Thursday, October 17, 2019
OK, I understand this platform offers "the New Blogger"
I’ve just tried the “New Blogger”, and it does look
like it gives much more up-to-date stats as to what is going on daily.
“Peggyktc’ has an article about it.
I started Blogger in January 2006. I had sixteen blogs created and running by
summer 2006.
I started using Wordpress on Bluehost with two blogs at
the start of 2014, anticipating the publication of my DADT III book in February.
The “media reviews” blog is a bit of a misnomer now, but it mainly concerns my
own creative projects in music and the novel, as well as news video that I take
myself. The “Do Ask Do Tell Notes” blog adds footnotes to the books, discusses
my trust and the way I handle certain business issues and the controversies
they might generate.
I added my “News Commentary” blogs to contemplate the
eleven news blogs on Blogger, and “Media Commentary” to supplement the five
content review blogs. The legacy Movie
reviews blog became mainly dedicate to short films, often topical, and to some
reviews of older films.
There were some problems with Blogger. It has been very stable over the years. Only once (in May 2011) has the ability to update
been down (then for about 16 hours one time). But there was a problem early on
with the mistaken taking down of some supposed “spam blogs”, especially in the
summer of 2008. On May 30, 2008, about
four of my blogs (including TV) would not load, but they came back in a few
hours. Very early, Blogger sometimes required a Captcha to log on to add new
posts to blogs that automated systems thought were suspicious. These had gone away for me by the end of
2008. Some of my own best statistics
(including with Adsense) occurred in the fall of 2008 after the financial crisis.
I still do not understand how Google makes money on the product, whose
visibility is less these days now that Facebook and Twitter are so
prominent. It’s interesting that
Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook more ephermal, which could make Blogger more
useful. It’s also disturbing that Google-plus was shut down with relatively
short notice (a few months) on April 2, 2019.
Earlier, Hometown AOL had been shut down in 2007, with
the opportunity offered to move the content to Blogger.
I realize that my blogging setup has been set up over time with respect to available technology and has some redundancy, and is not as transparent as it could be. Comparatively, Tim Pool recently explained why he has two video channels and channels on many other products sides YouTube.
Wordpress has a reputation as a more polished and
intricate and professional blogging platform than Blogger, and easier to configure
into a versatile business site. So far,
Google has not chosen to do that with Blogger, and connect it to hosting
services, as far as I know. Google does
offer the opportunity to connect custom domain names to blogs. But once this is done, some workplace filters
will screen them out and some website security rating services don’t rate them
for a long time.
Here's an article on how to interpret Blogger statistics, which may report higher numbers than Google analytics.
Here's an article on how to interpret Blogger statistics, which may report higher numbers than Google analytics.
The first picture is a model of a Dyson sphere in a Marriott hotel lobby near downtown Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The second is a similar model in a gay bar in downtown Ottawa.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
EFF director has major op-ed about Section 230 in New York Times
Elliot Harmon, activism director for the New York Times,
has a big op-ed in the New York Times today, to the effect that changing (or
largely eliminating) Section 230 would cater to the big tech companies.
It’s true, just as with the EU Copyright Directive,
that the big tech companies have the scale to adjust. But probably they would not allow a lot of
people to continue posting non-ephemeral or self-branding content, and would
impose some sort of informal social credit system as to whom they would invite
to “publish” – they would become publishers and be frank about that’s how it is
now and that this is not for everyone, you would have to earn the right to be
heard for yourself if you didn’t want to pick a mob to join and obey.
Tim Pool explains why he has multiple channels, in a
way that similar to my having multiple blogs. He is talking about “social
engineering” from the corporatized Left
-- which I personally think has something to do with wanting to compel
people to join groups and take sides rather than act on their own – it’s easier
to deal with groups, but the alternative could be social credit systems.
Monday, October 14, 2019
Reprise: Should journalists (be allowed to) protest in public -- "join in", chant, carry signs, even get arrested?
I’m going to be looking at this question again in the
near future, particularly on Wordpress.
Should journalists march in protests and carry
signs? Should they be allowed to?
Here’s Poynter’s take on the question back in 2017.
Columbia Journalism review had taken up this question
especially with respect to the Women’s March the day after Inauguration Day in
2017. This argument was more based on equality.
Turn this around, does a blogger become a journalist
by calling himself one? Would op-ed
writers follow different rules? What
about independent journalists with big YouTube channels where they interview
people or analyze news stories?
It doesn’t take much to see that his is a big deal
overseas.
In the US, activists (mainly on the Left) could
reasonably argue that independent vloggers who call themselves “journalists”
and who don’t protest, weaken group solidarity and hollow out normal political
processes.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Time magazine makes a radical proposal to bring back low-level conscription, and offers curious parallels to arguments in my own DADT books and blog posts
Time Magazine has a “Special Report” Oct. 21-28, 2019,
which I could cover on my legacy “book reviews” blog, but today’s issue brings
up something I want to mention on this one, my main “legacy” blog on this
platform.
The report starts on p. 40 with “Trump and the Troops”,
but I wanted to call attention tonight to a special subchapter by Elliot
Ackerman that starts on p. 44, photographs by Gillian Laub, “Born into War”,
with the tagline “The way to end America’s forever wars is to bring back the
draft.” The report is quite lengthy an runs to page 57.
It recommends a “reverse engineered draft” (including women) which, if I
understand right, would be very small and only children of higher income
parents would be “eligible.” Draftees, “unlucky”
enough to be picked, could go only into combat arms. He argues that this works now because women are eligible for combat arms. Coincidentally, Lisa Lang happens to be covering women in Marine Basic Training at Camp Pendleton, CA on Sunday night on CNN.
There are other proposals for universal national
service, and Pete Buttigieg has even proposed them. Some proposals would call
for intermittent service even in retirement (maybe related to eligibility for Social
Security benefits).
But this proposal is particularly aimed at changing
the political calculus that leads to protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and even the political dishonesty that seems to have been responsible for the
start of the Iraq war in 2003.
Wealthier parents will demand a much more careful
stance of getting into wars.
This may be harder to imagine with complicated
situations like Syria.
This story catches my eye right now because recently I
have been in some phone conversations with my POS publisher (Oct 8 post) and one
of the issues is whether an older non-fiction book (back to 1997-2000) can sell
again. There is a lot of material in my first book on Vietnam era conscription
and deferments (which would not exist in Ackerman’s proposal) and some unusual
application to the issue of gays in the military as it was under “don’t ask don’t
tell” until 2011. Ackerman is delving into the same viewpoints I examined twenty
years ago, and again after 9/11 (with correspondence with the now late Charles
Moskos).
There has been recent discussion of whether women
should be required to register for Selective Service and likewise whether the
Selective Service System should be abolished.
Were that to surface as a political issue in the 2020 election year,
that could give me more visibility, for better or for worse.
I seem to recall David Hogg (from March
for our Lives and the gun issue) mentioning Selective Service in a tweet last
year after he had turned 18. Ironically, the "real David Hogg",
an industrious "conservative" college student in North Carolina talks
about veterans issues a lot on Twitter.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Does "GoFundMe" really work? Does it provide a good way to "take action" and help others?
The November 2019 issue of The Atlantic arrived in my
business mailbox, and for me the most telling article (as to personal values)
was on p. 84, by Rachel Monroe, “GoFundMe Nation” , or “When GoFundMe Gets Ugly”. The tagline is “The largest crowdfunding site
in the world puts up a mirror to who we are and what matters most for us. The
reflection isn’t always pretty.”
Yet the concept has sometimes come across as a moral
justification for social media. It gives
you a way to “take action” to help specific other people rather than just talk
and become known.
I personally rarely contribute to them (I do contribute to kickstarter film fundraisers). I’m also reminded of Facebook’s practice of putting an “add a donate button” in your stream (even actual business page) when you make a political post. That’s part of a modern theory (“Madison’s music”) that free speech is supposed to be paired with a willingness to take action for others when appropriate.
She gives an opening take of how a well-off Memphis
businessman found “God” after an incident and took up a project of raising
money for an impoverished black teen.
The tale seems to bridge the communication gap we have with people other,
less fortunate, stations of life.
But, Rachel argues, this kind of faith seems like the exception
and seems naïve. Most GoFundMe’s fail,
apparently.
Then, there are those which may be inappropriate (for
abortions).
I’ve noticed the use of them (or of crowdsourcing) for
organ transplantation needs. This was an
idea that would have been unthinkable when I was growing up because medicine was
not advanced enough to provide them. In earlier
times, it was more about “taking care of your own”, a Trumpian value.
Update: Oct 13.
Page 58 of Time Magazine's Oct 21 issue "America's Forever War" has a story by W.J. Hennigan and North Ogden on help for families who lose parents in war, and this story relates a GoFundMe that worked well. See the next post Sunday on this problem.
Update: Oct 13.
Page 58 of Time Magazine's Oct 21 issue "America's Forever War" has a story by W.J. Hennigan and North Ogden on help for families who lose parents in war, and this story relates a GoFundMe that worked well. See the next post Sunday on this problem.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Trump's rally apparently inspires random Antifa-style violence of spectators near Target Center in downtown Minneapolis
Zach Roberts provides ample (at least 20 minutes) of
footage of protest, for Subverse News, outside Trump’s rally in Minneapolis at the Target Center
Wednesday.
Ian Schwartz reports for Real Clear Politics on the
burning of MAGA hats.
There is disturbing material about how Trump had promised
to limit Somali immigration, which is quite significant to the Twin Cities
area.
Andy Ngo and others reported random attacks on persons
in the area who weren’t necessarily attending the rally.
The Target Center is on First Ave., near the Twins’
baseball park, the Loon Café, and, on Hennepin, the Gay 90s and Saloon gay
bars.
I was in Minneapolis on Sept 28 and visited the bars
on Hennepin, and again on Oct. 3 on Lake Street.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Another law professor seems to mix words and bullets for collective responsibility
Mart Ann
Franks, a law professor, writes in a NYTimes op-ed “Our collective
responsibility for mass shootings”. The subtitle “For far too long, online
forums and marketplaces have been granted near-total immunity when they
contribute to gun violence.”
Well,
marketplaces can be forced (by law) to do background checks, and then it
becomes a real world thing, and it’s no longer just about speech. And it’s true,
stores can be held liable when a customer is injured in a store (this happened
to me in Minneapolis in 1998). But that’s
really not about speech.
Nor is the idea
that a swimming pool owner needs to keep it fenced and gate-locked.
But the
radicalization that led to Christchurch and El Paso does have something to do
with Internet business models, and even with a system that drops too many young
men on the floor, while others have no “skin in the game”.
The writer
needs to be very careful, however, with limiting Section 230. After all, we
could easily imagine most user generated content as gratuitous and imagine
turning speech back to the way it was before the WWW and search engines and
social media.
Update: Oct. 11
It's a little odd to see Tim Lee write a piece like this, and I wonder how it would fit into the FOSTA litigation.
Update: Oct. 11
It's a little odd to see Tim Lee write a piece like this, and I wonder how it would fit into the FOSTA litigation.
Wednesday, October 09, 2019
I have to respond to criticism that I don't "sell" things
One aspect of all of my blogs (there are 20 of them)
is that some of my own activity uncovers problems, especially in the free
speech and “personal autonomy” areas that amount to news that often gets
overlooked, even by other independent video channels and blogs that I follow as
well as mainstream. Some of these issues have the somewhat unpredictable risk
of blowing up and becoming important for a lot of speakers.
Recently, I’ve gotten some marketing calls from my POD
publisher for my books. I’ve gone into
more detail in a Wordpress post last Saturday, which leads to another legacy
post of mine on the Trademark blog here (on Blogger).
I’ve gotten some calls, ever since 2012, asking me why
the older books are not selling. A
couple of them have sounded a little threatening, as if I were doing something
wrong by migrating to my own format of online blogging and not being totally
100% dedicated to wholesaling and retailing hardcopy books as a consumer-oriented
business laced with offers and volume-oriented deals. OK, there would be benefits, like literacy
programs. Community engagement through
local bookstores, and the like. I’ve
talked about some of those on the Book Reviews blog here.
I had a long conversation Monday evening, and I won’t
go into sensitive details, but I did manage to convince the caller that “cookie
cutter” marketing assistance packages from publicity films don’t work equally for
all kinds of books (here's a perspective). It is normally a lot
easier to sell a children’s book or a recipe cookbook (as a consumer “commodity”
in volumes of “instances”) or perhaps any “how to” book (like in tech) than
political non-fiction laced with personal accounts.
Fiction is a little different: if an author has become
known, he/she can make the consumer angle work.
When I first published my DADT-1 book as a print-run
in 1997, the novelty of my individualistic arguments regarding gays in the military
(I talked a lot about my own experience with conscription, especially) did
catch on by word-of-mouth and for eighteen months or so (my having moved to
Minneapolis to do a corporate transfer to avoid a conflict of interest), and my
first printing of a few hundred did sell out, more or less before 9/11.
Since then, as I’ve often explained, I’ve depended on
search engines to remain known. That has
worked relatively well in terms of influencing policy (yup, some politicians,
judges, and various media figures do know me) but in a way that is probably not
very transparent to the public. And I
agree that my Internet presence, which added components as technology changed,
is not very transparent to the “average consumer”, the way many book marketing
sites are supposed to be. And I have
indeed promised to simplify all of this by the end of 2021 (after the next
election).
I do get the idea that many people see a problem with
an operation that offers most stuff “free” without asking for anything. This is different from the algorithm-clickbait
problem which, we have seen in the past two years, seems to contribute, however
unintentionally, a lot to radicalization (especially on the “alt-right”). Free content (even if not radical by itself)
from someone who doesn’t seem to have other people to be responsible for (“skin
in the game” -- and the "upward affiliation problem") could also be seen as a radicalization ploy or an unpredictable
security risk for others. A bigger practical concern is that my style of self-publication dilutes conventional group or "identity centered" activism with "solidarity". I could arguably be "doing something else" that helps "my own oppressed peoples" more than I do now.
Soon, I’ll give more specifics on just how these blogs
do benefit users. I owe it.
Monday, October 07, 2019
Case in First Circuit regarding Massachusetts law and recording the police may be important
Electronic Frontier Foundation has a story (Oct. 7) by
Sophia Cope and Adam Schwartz about an amicus brief it wrote before the First
Circuit in Boston for the case Martin v. Rollins. The case had been brought by the ACLU to challenge
the Massachusetts anti-eavesdropping statue which would outlaw the secret
recording of all conversations, even in public.
The First Circuit has previously upheld a First
Amendment right to record police officers’ audio, and that did not override the
state’s anti-eavesdropping statute.
Five appellate jurisdictions have upheld a right of
citizens to record police activity, including audio.
Video: Ford Fischer from the Defending Freedom Action
Summit, Arlington, VA, Jan. 2019, on the right to film the police, News2Share.
Friday, October 04, 2019
Another assessment of YouTube's winners and losers
Mark Ledwich has a valuable Medium article today “The
Winners and Losers of YouTube’s Conspiracy Crackdown”.
The title says it, purveyors of conspiracy theories
are the losers. (Yup – David Hogg – both
of them as I follow two of them – were born on terra firma. Although Alex Jones and even Laura Ingraham
were paying David Hogg #1 a compliment by spreading the idea that everybody
needed to fear him as if he were a god.)
Well, it’s mostly deep-state theories (Steve Bannon)
that lost out.
The left-center-right balance seems to be about correct,
Lewich says, if you factor out extremism. But he notes that some individual
creators (David Pakman particularly) seem more objective in their commentary
than the corporate media that advertisers trust – Pakman, Tim Pool, etc are
losing out to MSNBC and Fox.
Thursday, October 03, 2019
EU starts to try to order some content takedowns to apply worldwide, even the US, challenging sovereignty
Foo Yun Chee of Reuters News reports today that the EU
Supreme Court has told Facebook it must remove some content worldwide, even if
only illegal in one EU country.
The ruling could apply to other social media companies
and theoretically even to hosting providers.
There was some concern immediately
that it could apply to “the right to be forgotten.”
Yet, curiously, a case in French resulted in a
different judge deciding that the “right to be forgotten” would only apply in
the country affected in Google cases.
The Facebook case just reported today started in Austria
with a particular green party politician seeking to squash criticism. It’s obvious
that politicians or dictators anywhere could use this ruling to squash dissent.
As with the Article 13 controversy and Copyright
Directive, here is a case where European law could be in a position to force
Internet companies to scale back user generated content worldwide.
There is also an obvious question about national
sovereignty, which Donald Trump uses to play both sides of any issue against
each other.
Tuesday, October 01, 2019
Event at a college in Ontario shows intolerance of any elitism or individualism from the far Left
Lauren Chen, on Blaze TV’s Pseudo Intellectual
channel, covered the protests at the event in Hamilton Ontario where Maxime
Bernier and David Rubin were to speak, at Mohawk college.
As everyone has heard, there was a lot of
controversy. David Rubin offered to foot
the ten-fold increase in security. Maxime
represents the People’s Party, which in Canada is said to be center-right and
libertarian, no relation to the old People’s Party in the US in the 1970s
associated with Benjamin Spock.
One of the protesters said “an injury to one is an
injury to all”.
But there was little intellectual logic in what the
people said, a lot of feelings.
Outside the event, an elderly woman was harassed by
protesters and called a “neo-Nazi” as she crossed the street (Timcast account). She had nothing to do with the event. That
seems to be part of combative Far Left strategy, to call everyone an “enemy” of
their own solidarity indeed something very bad, with no regard to facts. David
Rubin says in another long video that we need “bravery” to fight cancel
culture.
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