Also the whole Russian empire. Still a thing, as grey and generally tired and silly as it is.
The tech industry is inherently very pro capitalist, predominantly white male dominated, and never a leader in championing social causes. I call that conservatism.
U.S. Exceptionalism is a lie. Putin exposes that lie and people get defensive. These Russia vs. US debates are an outgrowth of this denial.
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Thatâs not what I addressed in your comment. Boingboing is, if anything, a reaction against what you are trying to smear the site with.
I still donât believe that boingboing has very left leaning sensibilities. Some posts champion individual privacy rights and mock republican kooks, but otherwise the majority of posts focus on frivolous pop-nerd-culture and gee-wiz technology with the occasional rubbernecking video post of some tragedy couched in a veneer of concern. This is not to say that people here are not concerned or individually do not hold more authentic views, but the generalized view (much like Wired) of the tiny bit of political leaning on boingboing presents a pro tech industry libertarianism and is hardly a strong champion of human rights (it is difficult to condemn your employer) nor a harsh critic of the bay area tech industry that plays an essential role in the worst aspects of our current governmentsâs wrongdoing. (Why all the happy-go-lucky drone videos? Please start showing video of the evils done with weaponized drones developed by the same tech industry!) When you take a sample of the overall postings on this site these themes I have mentioned repeat. I am making some corollary opinions about what I am seeing as the overall climate and focus of the posters and readers at boingboing. In many ways I am a troll here, but to see tech society avoid addressing the real issues of the day, and refusing to admit culpability nor engage in direct communication to facilitate changes to this defensive and avoidant cultural posture, disturbs me a great deal.
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i donât think itâs necessarily reasonable to expect total consistency from a cooperative endeavor like boingboing. hell, it isnât even reasonable to expect total consistency from an individual if their interests range widely enough. the main contributors to the site have a deep and abiding interest in the things you dismiss as frivolous but they back that with a humanistic libertarianism that comes through very clearly. iâm not sure what youâre hoping to provoke in this thread. i donât read boingboing looking for in-depth expositions on the state of global politics and its ramifications. i think itâs interesting when a thread like this comes up because the views i read here represent a much different perspective from those that get expressed at sites and in journals that focus on those issues more exclusively. i suspect that you and i may agree on more things than we disagree on with respect to world politics but i find your approach to conversation needlessly confrontational. still, if thatâs your shtick i guess you should go with it.
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Enough of those elsewhere. The world is depressing enough as-is.
Not everybody wants to get involved in your pet causes. You do not want to get involved in many othersâ pet causes. In a hashtag, #notmywar.
Notmywar? It is our war. We are the most militarized country on this planet, we have colonial outpost in most countries, or we have annexed independent nations to maintain our military presence. We are currently engaged in 2 ground wars and multiple other military incursions. Our military and police kill people DAILY. So this pet cause as you call it is the cause of most of the world not living in our very enthralling, but detrimentally self-centered media bubble. The percentage of people who live in safety and leasure globally is very small, with most of the world dealing with basic needs like maintaining sources of freshwater and adequate food supplies. US ignorance and avoidance of âdepressing issuesâ is a failure to care about others and is part of the break down of community both domestically and internationally. There is an entitled, white privelaged mindset that pervades boingboing even as people here maintain that they are not the bad guys. It is easy to dismiss the fringe groups, it is the complacancy of the status quo that lets evil persist. It is not politics, this is about spiritual world views and the future of humanity. It isnât fun thinking about these issues, but growth is more important than pleasure and distraction.
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And Corey Robin says that conservatism is a counterrevolutionary movement. Itâs not an apathetic movement.
âCitizens!â exclaims Maistre at the end of Considerations on France. âThis is how counterrevolutions are made.â Under the old re- gime, monarchyâlike patriarchy, like Jim Crowâisnât made. It just is. It would be difficult to imagine a Loyseau or Bossuet declaring, âMenââmuch less âCitizensâââthis is how a monarchy is made.â But once the old regime is threatened or toppled, the conservative is forced to the realization that it is human agency, the willed imposi- tion of intellect and imagination upon the world, that generates and maintains inequality across time. Coming out of his confrontation with the revolution, the conservative voices the kind of affirmation of agency one finds in this 1957 editorial from William F. Buckleyâs National Review: âThe central question that emergesâ from the civil rights movement âis whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerical- ly? The sobering answer is Yesâthe White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.â
The revolutionary declares the Year I, and in response the con- servative declares the Year Negative I. From the revolution, the con- servative develops a particular attitude toward political time, a belief in the power of men and women to shape history, to propel it forward or backward, and by virtue of that belief, he comes to adopt the future as his preferred tense. Ronald Reagan offered the perfect dis- tillation of this phenomenon when he invoked, repeatedly, Thomas Paineâs dictum that âwe have it in our power to begin the world over again.â Even when the conservative claims to be preserving a present thatâs threatened or recovering a past thatâs lost, he is impelled by his own activism and agency to confess that heâs making a new beginning and creating the future.
I just spotted this story in the times:
Putinâs Friend Profits in Purge of Schoolbooks
The remaking of Russiaâs textbook industry features a murky trail of transactions that dead-ends in the opaque offshore tax haven of Cyprus, and a cast of characters including a federal lawmaker from the party loyal to Mr. Putin and the software giant Microsoft, which recently signed an agreement with Enlightenment to help it provide Windows-based tablets to Russian schools. That deal came after Mr. Rotenberg, though not Enlightenment specifically, had been targeted along with other close Putin friends by international sanctions stemming from Russiaâs annexation of Crimea.
Enlightenmentâs story also traces, in miniature, the arc of the Russian economy over the last quarter-century, from Soviet state ownership, to privatization, to what might be called the theater of state-sponsored private enterprise that flourishes today under Mr. Putin. In theory, market competition exists. In reality, the Kremlin and its functionaries have divvied up the nationâs strategic industries among a small and malleable circle of allies. They command some of the nationâs largest energy companies, control banks and much of the news media, and, increasingly, have a footprint in smaller sectors, like book publishing, that are nonetheless important to Mr. Putinâs political control.
Yes, but âthe tech industryâ isnât BoingBoing.
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Badump-bump, Tsshhh.
Which you are putting forward as inherently anti-left and pro-corporate. I disagree with the âinherentlyâ part. The âinherentâ root of corporate propaganda is about preserving market power at the expense of the human needs and (democratic) concerns of others. Focus on the market power and less on your vague âsniff testâ. You are practicing here a kind of surfacey tribalism. The site you wish was boingboing would be a pretty sterile place with ideological tests overriding pretty much any other criteria for submissions. It would be fucking tiny and irrelevant.
In which case I am tempted to suggest you trolley Slashdot or Reddit, which have become the sort of techie version of the The Blaze which you seem to want to attack. But you arenât in those places at this moment for a reason, which is that this community isnât full of libretardant children who bury threads in walls of text and vitriol and derailing, etc. We get close to it on occasions which arenât consumed by The Draggon, but only from self-declared trollies like @TrollsOpinion who are very careful about walking right down the community boundary. Thereâs a line drawn in the communityâs tolerance for such tactics. It seems to work okay generally and in TOâs case thereâs some tolerance due to honesty and relative politeness or double-secret-recursive-driving trollies or whatever which seems to be entertaining to the powers above.
But I would point you toward the heavy ratio of submissions about corporate power in markets, government, and society, and say, flat out, that you are wrong about the âdefensive and avoidant cultural postureâ. @doctorow has been flogging his free-for-download-eventually book on a subset of these issues for months. And you know what the community gets? A steady trickle of concern driving trollies from outsiders nitpicking every single one of these submissions. And now youâre concern-driving trollies from the other direction, attempting to smear the site as a whole rather than just trying to split up the crew that runs it.
What you will find out is that BBS is not your monkey.
and for the @craigyferg fans, we like it just fine in Germany, even with the new Austrian accent Iâve received from my loving Germa⌠ah, Cherman family, and zhe marching up and down and things. Herr Bieber, du bist ein schnickelkopf.
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Fantastic link!
The GI that fought the germans was still a racist at home. The coder/programmer in his cubicle is still complacent and enjoying the fruits of inequality even if he is not actively hurting minorities. It is a ruse to hate the obvious villains while looking the other way when the man down the block is murdered for being black. The blinders need to come off. BoingBoing has an opportunity to contribute to direct action as members of a more affluent economic group, who have greater access to those in power than do the remainder of oppressed peoples. Instead there is a surface acknowledgement of the most obvious ills, yet the greater and easier choice is to say âbut never-mind -lets get back to our star wars distractionsâ yet still finding time to be self-congratulatory because there was a post about Snowden or some link related to Ferguson, MO.
It is this level of exclusionary neoliberalism that is so sickening. BoingBoing is the cultural face of a fairly affluent technology-minded socioeconomic class. But has become the internet equivalent of a People magazine, paying lip service to social justice issues and offering distractions for those with the time and economic freedom to afford to be distracted. This is a very mainstream website ideologically. I feel that to deny how white privilege provides the leisure time and excess wealth necessary to maintain geek culture is dishonest and harmful.
Itâs fascinating how people get all irked when other people donât want to get recruited for their pet causes.
If you arenât part of the solution, you are part of the precipitate.
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Well said!
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Oh, hey Andy! Whats going on?
trolley⌠please. As near as I can tell @Tropicalweasel will fit well into this community.
If I donât engage with you, itâs because I donât find what you say to be interesting. Trying to be fake friends with me isnât going to change that. Change the content and creepiness level of your posts if you have such a need for my sugar.
We need the boundary walkers. We donât have to like them but they are those who keep the Overton windows open.
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I really hope youâre not getting ideas about politics from Glenn Beck
