The definition of insanity

The definition of insanity, of course, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So we are told by Albert Einstein, who was a marvelously smart man, although I'm not aware of any particular credentials he held in the field of mental health. Still, let's accept that as at least a valid definition of insanity.

And has there been any better example of such repetitive insanity in the last 50 years than American policy toward Cuba?

Let me state upfront that I'm not a fan of the Castros. They appear to have been brutal thugs when they took over 50 years ago, and they continue to be brutal thugs today. Their removal from power in Cuba is a worthy goal, both on behalf of the Cuban people and in terms of American regional interests. I believe that this motivation was a significant portion of the reasoning behind the American embargo that was put in place after our catastrophe at Bay of Pigs and remains in place to this day. (If I'm feeling generous, I'll say that it was the primary motivation, although other motivations definitely played a large role, i.e. 'showing the Soviets that our penis is bigger than theirs' and 'protecting the economic interests of American companies and businessmen who have been using Cuba as their private fiefdom with our political support for a generation.')

There's only one problem. It hasn't worked.

From the trenches of #GamerGate

EDIT: I thought the argument was over, but it's flared up again, so I've added some more of the arguments below.

Republished from an argument with a friend-of-a-friend on said friend's facebook wall. The person with whom I was arguing professed not to be a member or supporter of GamerGate, but held some very GamerGate-ish views of Anita Sarkeesian, including, in the preceding posts, arguing that the reason she 'attacked' video games was to intentionally draw hate with which to increase her own popularity and victimhood.

My response after the jump:

Thoughts on the election

Well, that's over and done with. I'm mildly disgruntled about the results, on both a state and national level. It's not like the Democrats particularly deserved to win either, but the number of positions shifted to the GOP, as well as the overall strength of their victory, means the crap that won't get done over the next few years will be slightly more unpalatable than the crap that wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.

As a copy editor, I get to follow election news whether I like it or not. As such, here are a few of my takeaways from Democalypse 2014:

There's a definite downside to being a gamer these days

I realized something the other day. All my life, I have self-identified first and foremost as a reader. I took an obscure pride in being the kid from whom the teachers always had to confiscate books in class, and even after I stopped doing that, I still majored in English in large part because that's what someone who loves to read ought to do. So it was disconcerting to realize that I spend considerably more time and energy playing video games, reading about video games and thinking about video games than I do reading (even counting reading news stories online, which I do), thinking about reading or following the publishing industry.

On its own, that's a little sad. While there definitely are video games of such richness and artistry to elevate the player's perception of the world in the same way that a good book will do, they are few and far between in the game industry, and the vast majority of my gaming time is spent on games with much lower culture capital to offer: MMOs, match-based multiplayer games and single player games with stories that exist to get you to the next gameplay objective. These games have their own sort of value - in particular, the social aspect of these online games is a big part of my life these days - but it's not the same value I'd be getting from intentionally seeking out and exposing myself to the best stories told by the best thinkers.

So that's a cause for regret, but a relatively small one. A bigger issue is that if there was ever a time not to want to think of oneself as a gamer, this is it.

(Unhappy words about GamerGate after the jump.)

A deeply unappealing decision

Busy couple of weeks, including moving to a new apartment. Good to be back.

So, Wisconsin politics are less fraught than they were when I first started this blog, but only because I started the blog during a time of quite unprecedented fraughtitude; things remain less than collegial in the halls of Madison, the moreso now that the governor's race is heating up for round 3: this time not with Tom Barrett!

There are a number of things going on that could affect that race (in particular, the long-simmering John Doe investigation which has been tied up in highly technical procedural knots for weeks, resulting in some supremely uninteresting wire stories. My take: I think Walker and co. truly believe that their reciprocal backscratching with 3rd parties like club for growth met the letter of the law, and that they wouldn't recognize the spirit of the law if it attempted to gnaw off their sexual organs of preference). While there are ongoing sideshows regarding reproductive rights and gay marriage, the main thrust of this election seems to be economic. The Walker camp argues that they have balanced the budget and made life easier for local governments to do the same and that the state has added 100K+ jobs under his tenure. The camp of his opponent, Mary Burke, counters that he balanced the budget on the backs of public workers and recklessly cut tax revenues, that Wisconsin lags all the surrounding states in job creation, and that in any case, he had promised 250K+ jobs in his first term. The Walker camp counters that she was commerce secretary under previous Democratic governor Jim Doyle and therefore must be responsible for the crushing deficits and highly unpopular chicanery undertaken to resolve them seen during his tenure. The Burke camp counters that he's a doo-doo head, etc., etc.

Anyone who was around when I first started blogging knows my feelings about Walker. They've not changed. But despite my pronounced antipathy toward him and his, I'm finding it hard to get a lot of enthusiasm built up for this election, because Burke is an abysmal candidate, with no more integrity, decorum or competence than Walker.

Keep on keepin' on

Not much to say; I was out of town most of the holiday weekend and didn't get the itch to write anything extensive. I'm also looking forward to some upcoming changes: after a year living in the hallway/closet I grew up in, I'm soon to start looking into apartments with a wee bit more space, along with making certain other changes in my schedule and goings on. If it proves interesting or thought provoking, I might blog about it; otherwise, it'll just happen. Have a good week, and look forward to me revisiting and finishing off one of my several unfinished drafts the next time I have a day off. o7

Do I work for Facebook, or does Facebook work for me?

Here's a thought I've been having.

One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.