Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Adjective Is Subjective

    *Adjective* is influenced by personal opinions (is subjective a.k.a. is personal). *Objective* is not influenced by personal opinions (is objects a.k.a. is physical).

• Politics and World Events

  • Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions

    I have been inspired by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, not because I agree with their goals, quite the contrary, but because their methods are highly effective.

    I no longer wish to support, even tacitly, the kind of companies and social movements that work tirelessly against the kind of values for which I stand.

  • Is Trump a liar? If only.

    Donald Trump is often called a liar, but such a judgment is facile, both far too generous and gravely mistaken, underestimating the enormity of the shit that’s coming down from the president and his administration. Politicians lie. But Trump is not a politician, he’s a shyster businessman, and the shyster businessman ("shyster”, possibly from the German scheisser, “one who defecates”) doesn’t lie, he bullshits. Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains “the crux of the distinction” in his little masterpiece On Bullshit (2005):

    “Both [the bullshitter] and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality … The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central concern to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. This does not mean that his speech is anarchically impulsive, but that the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are.” Frankfurt chillingly concludes: “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • About That Crunchie Bar

    Probably the weirdest thing about this is that, via the miracle of OCR, full text search, Dropbox, and steely paperwork discipline, I still have a copy of the receipt from when I bought this. It was actually back in 2012. 2013 was just the expiry date.

    I know it's this one because the receipt is from a Tesco near an office I used to visit, and the Crunchie was found in a satchel I used to use while visiting that office, before they issued laptops (causing me to switch away from the satchel to a laptop bag, stashing the satchel - and, unknowingly, its Crunchie - in the loft, where it remained).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Walled Gardens

      I've been thinking recently about the concept of "walled gardens" with regard to online spaces and something definitely clicked. Despite the fact that the Facebook guy used that term a while ago, it is sort of how the Internet was before the advent of the big "town squares," and it's how certain parts of it still work. Gemini and Gopher are a lot like this (though Gemini seems to have its "town squares," like Station and the BBS) and spaces like Telegram are as well, where channels link to channels which link to channels etc etc etc and most of it is utterly inaccessible from the surface.