Whatever Parler's role or responsibility in recent events, it's doubly so for Facebook and Twitter. Parler has a comparatively minuscule user base.
The demo was also organized via email and was explicitly intended to be peaceful — what unfolded on 1/6 cannot be read at face value, and certainly what the media is portraying(both the corporate and alternative media) can't be read at face value.
Not sure what you're saying with that second sentence. There is legitimate reason to have some zip ties, yes. I don't know the US traditions that well, but I doubt molotov cocktails or pipe bombs are usually required for a peaceful demo? Now most people probably not even had guns, but attacking the Capitol? Come on. That's a direct, violent attack on the democratic processes.
You're right that Facebook and Twitter should have acted sooner. Free speech doesn't mean a platform has no other option than to tolerate hate, violence and lies.
The reason for the lack of guns is most likely that the attackers had come directly from a Trump rally where there was security at the entrance including metal detectors. Had that not been the case there would likely have been a lot more weapons.
Parler has (had) ten million accounts, over half of which were considered active, that’s hardly a small number. And the big and obvious difference between Parler and Facebook is that Parler wilfully ignored disgusting and credible calls to violence, including direct threats against elected representatives and ordinary voters alike. Attempting to draw a parallel between them is disingenuous at best.
If you're open to being pissed off and want to go exploring beyond the SF / SV / liberal / rationalist / techie / IDW / iNtElLeckshualLY sTiMUlAtING hivemind, I'd recommend the following, all hosted by academics radioactive in one circle or another:
What's Left
What's Left? is a podcast hosted by Aimee Terese and Benjamin Studebaker, discussing political theory, philosophy, and current affairs from a [editor's note: materialist / marxist] left wing perspective.
The Classicist is the weekly podcast of Victor Davis Hanson, an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Hoover fellows Richard Epstein and Adam White discuss major legal and policy issues and debate points of disagreement between their libertarian and conservative perspectives.
> (they hope) is closely related to, or correlated with one's ability to perform the job. The idea is that if one can do these sorts of problems, one can probably do the actual job at hand
This is a claim about the intentions behind these practices.
Intentions aside, the whole point of this perennially recurring discourse is about effectiveness — that certain overused methods of filtering job candidates are ineffective on their own terms — and negative side effects — that they're biased against people with non-traditional / from underrepresented backgrounds.
The "board game interview" is a spectacularly clueless display of net-negative cultural and gender bias. Not to mention just juvenile and unprofessional (my bias, sure).
> A relatively recent demographic survey that elicited 3,427 responses among a publisher’s subscribers that found 91.7 percent of respondents were male and 8.1 percent were female.18 Another 2016 table-top gamer demographic survey of 2,397 respondents that found 24 percent of board gamers were women, 1.1 percent non binary and 0.6 percent were trans, while the remainder—74.3 percent—identify as male.19 The overwhelming majority of survey respondents were also white, with survey reporting that 2.1 percent were Chinese, 2.7 percent were Latin American, 0.6 percent were Aboriginal and 0.7 percent were Filipino.
I don't disagree that the board games are stupid, but to call it gender biased is ridiculous. Women and minorities are just as capable of playing board games as everyone else, even if they don't do it as regularly as men.
> women and minorities are just as capable of playing board games
Quite beside the point. Even leaving aside the implicit claims here that
(1) the board-game filter measures capability of playing board games rather than fluency with the social scripts involved in board-game playing, and
(2) that it does so without introducing any behavioral artifacts such that this measure would be a reliable predictor of on-the-job behavior,
the question is: What are the outcomes generated by the board-game filter? (reeeee equality of outcome)
If an assessment produces an adverse impact on groups already underrepresented in tech, at a minimum it ought to generate scrutiny.
In the case of leetcode-type hiring filters, I can suspend judgment or reach some kind of nuanced position.
In the case of using Settlers of Catan as a hiring filter, all I can do is chuckle.
That said, heterogeneity in hiring practices is a good thing. Presumably in the long run people sort themselves out and some kind of equilibrium is reached.
I look forward to experimenting with feats of strength and athletic prowess as a hiring filter in order to gauge tenacity, equanimity in the face of adversity, and general team-spiritedness.
Some people prefer to contemplate and accept. Some people prefer to fight hard until the end. Who are we to decide how people are supposed to live, or die?
Indeed—it's a personal decision that every patient and family have to make based on their individual situation. (Just as mine had to.)
That's why a categorical claim that there's no harm to having fighting attitude is patently wrong...not to mention harmful because it contributes to the stigmatization of accepting and preparing for impending death.
> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare.
This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.
I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I make are to the body's fight with the disease, not the patient's actions.
In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.
>This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.
That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live. So it's as much of a fight as a non-combat situation can be. And there is literally a battle between the cancer and your body going on.
>In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.
And I'm not even american. I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to live and get rid of a fairly "unfair" disease. Because cancer can indeed be unfair in many cases. An e.g. smoker knows it's probably coming. But the very nature of cancer as a probabilistic disease means some people get the sort end of the stick without bringing it on themselves.
Done properly, the flipped classroom + MOOC format would allow for more personal interaction than the traditional university setting currently does for all but the best students at the most elite schools.
That they haven't succeeded says less about MOOCs than about the distribution of institutional power in traditional universities, where your typical administrator will see MOOCs merely as an opportunity to cut costs that wouldn't have to be cut if administrative bloat weren't crowding out everything else.
Compare D2L and Blackboard on one hand and the edX platform and Coursera on the other. Are they all LMSs? Absolutely. Is there some buzzword-mongering out there. Undoubtedly. But if you can't see (or, as a user, feel) any significant differences between those two groups of products, I'd suspect your faculties of discernment have been stunted.
Also, universities have failure and money-wasting baked into their institutional DNA. That they've failed at delivering content electronically (and almost everything else that's socially valuable) doesn't mean MOOCs can't be successful.
The demo was also organized via email and was explicitly intended to be peaceful — what unfolded on 1/6 cannot be read at face value, and certainly what the media is portraying(both the corporate and alternative media) can't be read at face value.