ames Kelly on Alba NEC
James Kelly (of Scot Goes Pop) has been elected to the Alba NEC:
I'm really honoured to say that I've been elected as one of the eight ordinary members of the Alba Party's National Executive Committee. The successful candidates are:
Female ballot: Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, Michelle Ferns, Denise Findlay, Suzanne Blackley
Male ballot: Roddy MacLeod, Josh Robertson, James Kelly, Hamish Vernal
Scott Alexander on Narendra Modi
Scott Alexander reviews a biography of Narendra Modi:
Modi accuses the Congress Party of being the descendants of those Indians who did well under British colonialism, liked British colonialism a little too much, and basically Europeanized - including a European-style semi-racist contempt for ordinary Indians. They're the kind of people who would happily force-sterilize eight milion of their countrymen because Western powers called India "backwards" for having too high population growth. The sort of people who would declare an Emergency dictatorship, happily kill or imprison hundreds of thousands of Indians without moral compunction, then immediately back down when Western media said they looked bad. They dominate the media, academia, and NGOs (all of which Modi accuses of being sycophantic and complicit in Emergency atrocities and everything else bad that Congress has ever done, while coming up with ways to make the most neutral actions by Congress' opponents look like dastardly acts of villainy). Their policies, insofar as they have any, involve whatever forms of socialism don't really help the poor but do ensure that anything that anyone wants to do requires permission from elites first, eg the "License Raj".
The impression I get is Narendra Modi is what Donald Trump would have been, if Trump was intelligent, competent and actually interested in politics.
Gillard contra Big Tech surveillance
Detroit community college professor Chris Gillard is fighting Big Tech surveillance:
Gilliard began calling attention to Ring’s discriminatory potential soon after Amazon acquired it in 2018. He grew so preoccupied with the camera that he changed his Twitter name to “One Ring (Doorbell) to Surveil Them All,” a play on a line from “The Lord of the Rings.” He made himself available as an expert source to Vice, USA Today and the Associated Press, explaining how consumer surveillance tools such as Ring, along with social “neighborhood watch” apps such as Neighbors and Nextdoor, feed on people’s fears and amplify their biases.
Facebook internal memos reveal they know their products are harmful
The Guardian reports:
Facebook’s own researchers had documented the psychological dangers that Instagram, which Facebook owns, poses to teenagers, especially teen girls.
Here’s how Facebook’s internal documents and presentations put it: “We [Instagram] make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” and “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.” Internal studies showed that, among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram.
Apple contra Facebook
Apple's anti-tracking initiative hurts Facebook:
Apple is indeed doing more damage to Facebook than any of its rolling series of scandals so far. The changes Apple made in iOS 14.5 — asking people if they wanted to opt-out of apps tracking them across the web — is causing tumult for advertisers who rely on Facebook to sustain their businesses. Performance marketers, i.e., those who want you to buy immediately after clicking, are particularly struggling. The masses, they believe, have opted out of letting Facebook track off of Facebook, so they can’t be sure if people are buying their products after seeing their ads. Facebook expects them to spend less money as a result.
This is good. What needs to happen now is that governments around the wold mandate that:
all web browsers contain options for whether the user wants tracking
these options all default to OFF
these options are sent to websites on every http GET request
the websites have to obey the user's options
no website is allowed to use dark patterns or other incentives to get people to turn tracking on
any company that won't obey these rules is banned from doing business in that jurisdiction
Cherry contra SNP
SNP MP Joanna Cherry accuses the SNP of "abuse, threats, bullying and smears":
A senior SNP MP has accused her own party of “abuse, threats, bullying and smears” and claimed she may not be in the job for much longer.
Joanna Cherry made the explosive allegations during a bitter acceptance speech after winning an award on Thursday, September 16.
Cherry, the MP for Edinburgh South West since 2015, is an ally of former SNP First Minister Alex Salmond.
The QC is not close to Nicola Sturgeon and was fired by SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford from his frontbench earlier this year.
Psychologists learn from religion
Wired notes that, stripped of supernatural doctrine, there's a lot in religion for psychologists to learn from:
Science and religion have often been at odds. But if we remove the theology—views about the nature of God, the creation of the universe, and the like—from the day-to-day practice of religious faith, the animosity in the debate evaporates. What we’re left with is a series of rituals, customs, and sentiments that are themselves the results of experiments of sorts. Over thousands of years, these experiments, carried out in the messy thick of life as opposed to sterile labs, have led to the design of what we might call spiritual technologies—tools and processes meant to sooth, move, convince, or otherwise tweak the mind. And studying these technologies has revealed that certain parts of religious practices, even when removed from a spiritual context, are able to influence people’s minds in the measurable ways psychologists often seek.
Doctorow wants internet interoperability
Cory Doctorow thinks wants mandated interoperability for social media:
rather than fixing tech companies, we can fix the internet. We can empower communities and individuals to escape monopoly platforms, through interoperability.
If you don't like how FB moderates its platform, interop would let you leave – and still stay connected to the family, community and customers you leave behind.
My article sets out a taxonomy of interoperability:
Cooperative: When you interoperate through an API or a standard (like web browsers and servers)
Indifferent: When a company takes no steps to help or block interop (like when you plug a USB adapter into a car lighter)
Adversarial: Interop against the wishes of the interoper-ee, overcoming whatever defenses they put up to prevent interop. This has a long and honorable tradition – Apple reverse-engineering Microsoft Office for Iwork, say.
This makes a lot of sense.