Alternate realities in the every day: extremism, the internet, and the death of truth
The majority of people read headlines and go no further, ignoring the substance by which they could create a developed worldview. A few words without context or explanation, and people genuinely believe that they are informed about the workings of complex political, economic, and psychological systems. Constantly awash in facts, propaganda has taken on a new form. Those with destructive agendae don’t have to lie to you to get you to believe what they want.
They are comfortable doing so, and a society with atrophied critical thinking skills will make such falsehoods easy to buy, but far easier than fabricating facts is using extremely selective presentation of those facts to push people towards a philosophy. Barraging people with events, which they can understand, rather than context and interpretation, which requires more effort, you can effortlessly make the world seem however you want. If you want to demonize a group of people, highlight every time a member of that group commits a crime.
John Farrell
More Schiller
Since I’ve been working a lot lately on Hoshi (updates will follow later) and there is no better music to listen to, while working, than Schiller, I’ve been thinking a lot about their different live albums, the people behind Schiller and how they influenced the music.
Sehnsucht
Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Mickey Meinert (guitar), Tissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).
Heavy electrock (a term I “might” have invented) sounds. Mickey Meinert is very good, Petra Marklund (September) does really nice vocals on “Breathe”. I love this album!
Atemlos
Band components: Ralf Gustke (drums), Cliff Hewitt (electronic drums), Andreas Binder (guitar), Thissy Thiers (bass guitar), Christian Kretschmar (synthesizer) and Christopher von Deylen (keyboards).
Cliff Hewitt with long hair! Andreas Binder is ok, not bad but nothing to remember. Amazing drumming by both Ralf and Cliff. Very good “Salton Sea”.
The Propaganda Multiplier
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording. In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles were based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews were in favor of a US and NATO intervention, while propaganda was attributed exclusively to the opposite side.
Swiss Policy Research
Before/After effect in Javascript using jQuery
Sometimes you need a simple tool to visually show the difference between two images and a basic jQuery plugin is quite suited for that (if you can stomach ~89KB just for jQuery, ~30KB if you gzip it but you probably already have it on your site, especially if you’re running Wordpress ). There are better ways to implement this, someone might suggest React or Vue or Angular or assembler or running it on the blockchain or in the bootloader but this is how I did it.
A jQuery-less version would be quite easy to implement too, perhaps in a future post.
How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time
One common trait I’ve observed in all great engineers is their sense of adventure. People who pigeonhole themselves into a specialty and do the exact same job for years tend to grow complacent. The problem is that stability is an innate human instinct. So you need to deliberately counterbalance this tendency. Taking risks and being uncomfortable is a muscle you have to train.
A friend of mine told me this story about wild ducks — Wild ducks migrate in the winter not because of the cold but because of the food. If you feed them, they won’t migrate. Keep feeding them for a few years in a row, still won’t migrate. Then stop all of a sudden, they won’t migrate, and they’ll die. The moral is that you can tame wild ducks, but you can’t wildify tamed ducks (that’s why there isn’t even such a word as wildify). So you have to be careful not to lose that hustle.
Apoorva Govind