Month: November 2016

Fair Elections

I keep thinking about this tweet from Garry Kasparov:

Saying that fair elections are rigged is as much a crime against democracy as saying that rigged elections are fair.

It’s an odd twist that Trump is casting doubt on an election that he legally won (even if it was with a national minority). I attribute that to a strategy of working the ref. The lie of voter fraud is groundwork on propaganda that will be needed in future efforts to suppress voting rights.

It also made me think the same idea applies to the news: Saying that fair journalism is biased is as much a crime against truth as saying that biased journalism is fair.

iTunes Visualizer

I just realized the iTunes visualizer is still there. I remember Steve Jobs getting up and demonstrating this in a keynote. Does anybody still use this? The only way I would possibly use this is if it were on the AppleTV. As far as I know, it’s not.

The Case for Identity Politics

There has been lots of ink spilled on the evils of identitly politics and how the Democrats have to embrace the color-blind notion of class. Here are a couple of articles that push back on that.

Michelle Goldberg, in Slate:

The focus of left-of-center politics in the dark years to come must be on protecting the groups of people who are targets precisely because of their identities. To sideline their interests is to accede to a backlash that has just begun and will only get worse. If Democrats standing up for diversity makes Trump voters feel disrespected, the best response is a slogan popular among enemies of political correctness at Trump rallies: Fuck your feelings.

Rebecca Traister, in New York Magazine:

But what’s not funny about all this is that we are in a moment of national crisis, in which the developmental stage of the Dirtbag Left might be mistaken for a flash of political wisdom, when prioritization of the (yes, systemic) approaches to reducing racial, gender, and class inequality is most likely to be walked back in the name of distancing the party from the women and people of color who lost the election.

Laborious Autoposting

I spent the better part of the evening reading up on the Facebook Graph API and writing a tool that can do my auto-posting for me. Right now it only works with Facebook. It can post images, status updates, and links in their native format. It’s not too smart about interpreting which of those formats it should use. Also, it’s comically inept at getting an authentication token. Long-lived tokens last about 60 days, so I have a while to fix it.

If you see this, and it says that it was posted by “Emposter,” then it works.

Trump Appointments and Transparency

From the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

The Senate can [demand transparency] by refusing to confirm any nominations until Trump takes the following steps to promote faith that a Trump presidency will not enrich himself and his family:

  1. Releases his tax returns;

  2. Releases a detailed and current financial disclosure that includes beneficial ownership information on all “shell companies” that are part of the Trump Organization;

  3. Follows the advice of the The Wall Street Journal editorial page that “Mr. Trump’s best option is to liquidate his stake in the company” via “a leveraged buyout or an initial public offering";