Blogging

Strange Comparison, Dangerous Conclusion

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About a week ago, the WSJ ran an article titled Mark Zuckerberg is No James Madison.  The article argues that a constitution is similar to a block of computer code—a valid point, although I would argue it is also true of legislation and contracts in general…both the code, and the constitution/law/contract must be sufficiently clear and unambiguous to be executable without reference to their originators.

Then the article goes on to say that ‘the Constitution understands human nature.  Facebook, dangerously at times does not.  In designing the Constitution, Madison managed to appeal to people’s better angels while at the same time calculating man’s capacity to harm and behave badly. Facebook’s designers, on the other hand, appear to have assumed the best about people. They apparently expected users to connect with friends only in benign ways. While the site features plenty of baby and puppy photos, it has also become a place where ISIS brags about beheadings and Russians peddling misinformation seek to undermine the institutions of a free society.’

The attempt to create a parallel between Zuckerberg and Madison is a strange one, IMO, given the completely different nature of the work the two men were doing. Madison was attempting to create a new model for a self-governing country, Zuckerberg was attempting to make money for himself and his investors, and maybe to provide a little fun and value for his users along the way.

What I find especially problematic is the ‘therefore’ that the author draws:

Facebook insists it is not a media company. Maybe so. But unless it takes on the responsibilities of an editor and publisher by verifying the identities of users, filtering content that runs on its platform, and addressing the incentives to post specious or inflammatory “facts,” Facebook should expect to be policed externally.

But is Facebook really a publisher, or it is it more of a printer?  If someone..Ben Franklin in the mid-1700s or some corporation today…is running a printing shop, running printing jobs for all who will pay, should he or it be held accountable for validating the truth of the material printed and verifying the identities of the customers?

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With a Pillow

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In Iowahawk’s deathless phrase regarding the establishment press, “Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving.” Here it is a weekend and a couple of working days after the release of the notorious and long-awaited FISA memo, and the relatively conservative side of the blogosphere is still happily chewing it over. Doubtless the professional national media wishes the whole matter would just go away already, just because. Frankly, the whole matter reminds me of the swiftboat veterans and the matter of John Kerry’s service in Vietnam.

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Their Own Worst Enemy

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A discussion at According to Hoyt this last week developed from a long look the recent so-called “woman’s march”; an event which appeared to really be an open-air scream therapy session for a certain subset of the human population. They had the opportunity to mingle with others of their ilk, dress up in pink hats and vagina costumes and inform the rest of the world (yet again) of their acute unhappiness that Hillary, the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua, formerly known as Her Inevitableness had not been able to win an election rigged in her favor, and that Donald Trump was currently the President of the United States. MS Hoyt speculated on what, exactly, the protesters were on about; what rights were imperiled, exactly? What did all the feel-good, content-free slogans have to do with anything in the lives of real, live women and men working for a living? And how did dressing up as an anatomically sort-of-correct vagina have to do with anything, in the real world. And in the long run, weren’t such pointless demonstrations of hysteria actually counter-productive, in that genuine misogynists would point to them as proof positive that women were too flighty, too emotional, too damn silly to manage anything, let alone their own lives.

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Neptunus Lex – The Epilogue

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After the Neptunus Lex website went down, shortly after his fatal accident, it very fortunately turned out that someone had saved most of the posts offline.  For the last several years, Bill Brandt has been posting these restored posts, on an almost daily basis, at The Lexicans.

Sadly but inevitably, Bill has now come to the end of the saved posts.  He has some eloquently-written concluding thoughts here.

Great job Bill, I’m really glad you’ve done this.

We can hope that perhaps some additional Lex posts will show up somewhere in the odd corners of the Internet.

CP-1 Diamond Anniversary Meetup(s)

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“We are great and we are grand, we make bombs beneath our stands!”

 

I have decided to attend various events around the 75th anniversary of Chicago Pile-1 and will therefore be in Hyde Park for about 48 hours, from late afternoon Thursday 30 November to late afternoon Saturday 2 December. As of now, the one known gathering is lunch at Valois, 1518 E 53rd (Harper Court, just west of Lake Park and the Metra Electric tracks), at 1 PM on Saturday.

Others are possible, however. I will be at the physics colloquium on Thursday afternoon in Kersten (SW corner of 57th & Ellis) and was thinking vaguely of pizza at Giordano’s (on Blackstone just south of 53rd) afterward, which means 6-ish. I expect to spend much of both Friday and Saturday mornings prowling the bookstores on 57th, and should also be free after around 7 Friday evening, when what seems to be the main event wraps up at Mandel Hall.

In general, respond in comments, and graze (Midwesterners don’t surf) around here for official events.