Fraternity Atmosphere Can Make State Capitols Hotbeds of Sexual Harassment →
USA Today is injecting itself into the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but not without gifts like this story of Republican corruption.
State capitols are sometimes hotbeds of sexual harassment. Most legislatures are largely male, part-time and require members to travel away from home, creating a fraternity atmosphere.
Exhibit A is Tennessee, which is reeling from the case of state Rep. Jeremy Durham, who was found in a report by state Attorney General Herbert Slatery to have preyed on 22 women during his four years in office.
Dunham, the former Republican Whip of the Tennessee House was known as “Pants Candy.”
Outside the Everyday Frames
I’ve never been a regular Gawker reader and I don’t think it’s a great idea to publish sex videos without permission, but I’m still sad for what we are losing and for the shape of things news to come.
You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.
If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money.
– Tom Scocca, executive features editor of Gawker Media
The moment will come soon enough when you need a Gawker, and you’ll be furious that you no longer have one.
– Choire Sicha, former co-editor of Gawker
Founder Nick Denton’s farewell, How Things Work, is particularly powerful:
Mockery, of course, is the cheapest and most available tool that the powerless have against the powerful; it has historically been the one thing that they can’t silence.
…
[A]t Gawker’s founding there was a sense that the internet was a free space, where anything can be said.... As our experience has shown, that freedom was illusory. The system is still there. It pushed back. The power structure remains. There are just some new people at the apex, prime among them the techlords flush with monopoly profits. They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class, but with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.
You should read Denton’s whole post and let’s all hope that Peter Thiel hasn’t set off a First They Came cascade for journalism. Speaking truth-to-power almost certainly requires some rudeness, some ugliness, the ability to survive mistakes or an occasional ethical slip-up, and a team that’s actually outside the power structure it’s assessing. No small lift.
Anyways, the gawkering. It’s only a matter of time.
Update: 10:25pm That was quick: Lawyer for Melania Trump Threatens Defamation Suits Against News Outlets.
There Is No “Technology Industry” →
Anil Dash:
[T]he major players in what’s called the “tech industry” are enormous conglomerates that regularly encompass everything from semiconductor factories to high-end retail stores to Hollywood-style production studios. The upstarts of the business can work on anything from cleaning your laundry to creating drones. There’s no way to put all these different kinds of products and services into any one coherent bucket now that they encompass the entire world of business.
Happy to see more people realizing how problematic it is to ascribe coherence to “tech.”
That’s the Plan
The Great Natural Experiment of This Election Cycle
Dan Drezner is excited for science. Quoting Jeff Fecke, “Thought: Hillary has a great ground game, Trump literally doesn’t have one at all. Hillary is likely to overperform her excellent polling.”
Drezner:
If there was ever a time when the effect of field operations should be observable, it’s this election. Clinton should outperform her polling aggregates in states where she has a significant get-out-the-vote operation while Trump does not. To be sure, there are always possible confounding explanations for the absence of such a gap. This case is such an extreme one, however, that if we don’t see evidence here, it’s telling.
Yeah, hopefully political scientists will learn some stuff. But the cost of the lesson seems likely to be way too high or huge as they say.
Undoing the Neutrality of Big Data →
The mythology surrounding “big data” rests on the notion that technical systems can increase efficiency and decrease bias. Such “neutral” systems are supposedly good for implementing legal logic because, like these systems, law relies on binaries in decision-making, removing the gray and fuzzy from the equation. The problem with this formulation is that efficiency is not necessarily desirable, bias is baked into the data sets and reified technically as well as through interpretation, and legal binaries are neither socially productive nor logically sound.
Facebook Will Force Advertising on Ad-Blocking Users →
One more reason not to sign up.
There’s No Such Thing As A Protest Vote →
No one gets what they want in a democracy; two-party systems simply rub voters’ noses in that fact.
– Clay Shirky
I DM with Former Students
Stranger Things (2016) ★★★★★