Notes

Here is a remarkably thoughtful rebuttal to the remarks made by Sacha Baron Cohen in the video I posted previously.

One interesting quote:

Earlier this year, we discussed Yochai Benkler’s new book, the excellent Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, which is filled with charts and data showing something pretty damn clearly: most of the disinformation and misinformation didn’t go very far until it was “validated” by a mainstream news source, namely: Fox News. Yes, the lies and shams did start out on social media, but they were mostly ignored. Until Fox News validated them, then they spread like wildfire.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191122/00412943432/sacha-baron-cohen-is-wrong-about-social-media-wrong-about-section-230-even-wrong-about-his-own-comedy.shtml

I find it increasingly hard to disagree with many of the points Sacha Baron Cohen brings up here

This is amazing. A mashup of Brahms and Radiohead

“The Church is in one of its deepest moments of crisis—not because of some election result or not, but because of what has been exposed to be the poverty of the American Church in its capacity to be able to see and love and serve and engage in ways in which we simply fail to do. And that vocation is the vocation that must be recovered and must be made real in tangible action”

The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity

There is so much negative news around “Deepfakes” that this video genuinely caught me off guard. It’s a little promo for the Dali museum, which created an interactive screen to help visitors experience Dali in a completely new and novel way. It’s marvelous!

😊My favorite email newsletter has been writing about personal websites and linked to mine! Woot! Check our their latest

I’m shocked and saddened by Rachel Held Evens death. This is a fitting tribute: Rachel Held Evans Knew There Was Always Room for More In the Church - RELEVANT Magazine

I’m doing a bit of an experiment with auto-posting to twitter/mastodon items from the Notes section of my website. Let me know if it’s neat or super annoying.

I love how thoughtfully designed this apartment is and how beautifully he expresses his reasoning for each decision.

I’m going to spend the next couple months giving Bullet Journaling a try. I’m curious if switching completely to a more manual paper system will help with my awareness and memory. To experiments!

I must admin that I was uneasy when I read about the news about how much was donated and how quickly it was donated. The thought never rose above a loosely understood feeling. This essay articulates it precisely.

It would be incredibly cheap to suggest that it is in some way wrong to give money for the restoration. There is a value that transcends simple economics in restoring testaments to civilisation. Better that Notre Dame remains a symbol of European history than €300 million rests in a billionaire’s bank account.

But the immediacy and magnitude of their response tells us something very important about the society we live in.

If two men in a world of more than 7 billion people can provide €300million to restore Notre Dame, within six hours, then there is enough money in the world to feed every mouth, shelter every family and educate every child. The failure to do so is a matter of will, and a matter of system.

The failure to do so comes from our failure to recognise the mundane emergencies that claims lives all around us every single day. Works of art and architectural history and beauty rely on the ingenuity of people, and it is people who must be protected above all else.

I planted 5 willow saplings this weekend. After the week that we all just lived through, I needed to engage in a rebellious act of hope to put despair in it’s place.

As faith deepens, and as communion deepens with it, it becomes more and more intensive and at the same time reaches out to affect everything else we think and do. I do not mean merely that now all our thoughts are couched in certain fideist or pietistic formulas, but rather that faith gives a dimension of simplicity and depth to all our apprehensions and to all our experiences.

What is this dimension of depth? It is the incorporation of the unknown and of the unconscious into our daily life. Faith brings together the known and the unknown so that they overlap: or rather, so that we are aware of their overlapping. Actually, our whole life is a mystery of which very little comes to our conscious understanding. But when we accept only what we can consciously rationalize, our life is actually reduced to the most pitiful limitations, though we may think quite otherwise.

Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation (pp. 138-139).

This is a colorful critique of Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, and how he’s handled the prevelance of hate speach and misinformation on his platform. I’m consistently torn between the need to stop hate speech and our over eagerness to censor opinions we disagree with. There point where it pivots from one to the other can be more fuzzy than we’d like to admit. I find the perspective in this article clear and compelling.

“The correct 1935 reply to Streicher or Goebbels asserting that Jews secretly drink the blood of baptized Christian babies was not, “We have looked into this claim and found that there is no evidence to support the lie that Jews drink Christian baby blood.” For fuck’s sake, Jack, don’t you understand? Whether such a refutation comes on Twitter or from a mainstream news organization, it succeeds only in granting rhetorical equanimity and status to any and every vile assertion that evil sees fit to utter.”

A Fuckbonnet For Our Time by David Simon

I’ve always enjoyed sushi, but after watching this video, I realized I never truly appreciated it.

Do you use Atom and develop Ember.js apps? I just published 3.0 of atom-ember-snippets. There are lots of new goodies!

” We can’t have it both ways. We can’t say that we can change the world and pretend it’s not our fault when we do.”

Anil Dash

My micropub endpoint is now hit when I “like” an article in instapaper. I have an applet setup on IFTTT that uses their webhook action. Exciting! Next up, auto posting instapaper highlights