The looming Trump presidency is their legacy, launched largely via backlash against their pseudo-religion of political correctness. Not to mention all their dumb colleagues that have wreaked havoc in our inner cities, presided over the systemic collapse of the nuclear family, and turned our schools into self-esteem parlors for the criminally mind-numbed.
For when you mistake, misconstrue, or malign your so-called countrymen with condescending labels of “ill-equipped” and “systematic racism,” simply because of the color of their skin, the only system that needs changing is yours.
I’ve continued to see my liberal Facebook friends call all those in flyover country racist, bigoted, misogynists. Maybe it didn’t sting as much when I lived within an hour of Chicago. While still a conservative, maybe they weren’t talking about me. But the condescending elite has even forced me to get behind much of Trump’s rhetoric. I’m sick of it.
When we, erroneously, stereotype the urbanites, we get reamed by the mainstream media, but shouting racist, bigot, and worse today is praised and honored.
A bully is a bully. No matter if it’s President-elect Trump or Derrick Rollins Jr.
Joanna and I have personal convictions. One of them is this: we care about you for the simple fact that you are a person, our neighbor on planet earth. […] We are not about to get in the nasty business of throwing stones at each other, don’t ask us to cause we won’t play that way.
I think we are all here for a reason. […] Jo and I feel called to be bridge builders. We want to help initiate conversations between people that don’t think alike. Listen to me, we do not all have to agree with each other. Disagreement is not the same thing as hate, don’t believe that lie.
Disagreement is not the same thing as hate. One of the most revolutionary statements today. We can agree to disagree. I can think that you are wrong. That doesn’t have to involve any hate from either side. We can respectfully disagree. Right?
If I misjudge people and am wrong, I want to be wrong having assumed the best about them. The bottom line is, I would rather be loving than be right.
This line here, Chip Gaines’s bottom line, is where I’ll leave this. I would rather be loving than be right. I don’t get into arguments to win them. I used to. It damaged many things in my life. I get into arguments to win souls to Jesus. I would rather lose an argument than lose a soul. Let’s readjust our point-of-views this year and fight for Jesus.
Personal sites, our blogs, these were once our playgrounds. My own site was the first place I added rollover images, CSS for fonts, tried out a “table free” design. I wrote about the web, surrounded by my own experiments with the web. We all did, and it was only in reading those words from 1999 that I realised there was more to owning your own content than simply not publishing your words elsewhere.
My first blog was called Cochon d’Vol, butchered French for the Flying Pig. It was on a blogging system I built in PHP called Blog Wizard. I put a lot of work into that blogging system. Even had a logo. Never intended to release it. But it was mine. And the site went through a redesign every few months. Because that’s what we did back then.
That was a lot of work. Sites like MySpace were much easier for publishing content. And MySpace, unlike its predecessors, allowed for custom CSS to be injected by users, making each MySpace profile an experience. Usually a gaudy experience with animated backgrounds and poorly chosen colors. And then came Facebook. More refined, less targetted at children. Just publishing.
We lost sight of the importance of our own domains. Photos went up to Instagram. Every thought that came to mind went up to Twitter. But our oasis, our experimental island, was lost. Over the last year or two many of my favorite writers in web development have returned to their blogs. I have done my best to do the same. The temptation of tweeting is hard. Look at President-Elect Trump. Finding a happy medium— a pattern of what goes to those centralized networks and what goes to my own site— takes time and intentionality.
But here I can play. A refresh of this site will be coming soon, something I started working towards right after New Years. After a tumultuous 2016, I finally updated Ghost to the latest and greatest version, gaining a lot of functionality that I hadn’t had before and started planning around an updated look. Let’s return to writing refined, thoughtful articles instead of spontaneous, haphazard thoughts. Let’s return to our playgrounds.
If you look at this like a sport. If you look at this like a battle against your neighbor, you’ll choose anything as a knife against the other side. And that itself is a—what’s the opposite of a virtue? … That’s a vice. Political divisiveness is a vice. But like a lot of vices, it’s super seductive. So you indulge in it, until it bites you. And then you go, oh, darn, the wages of sin is death. And it makes you question having indulged in a vice … Picking sides is a vice rather than picking ideas.
I have to say that Stephen Colbert has been a guilty pleasure of mine for some time. As a conservative, I have often been in the sights of his jokes. But, his humility and willingness to quote Scripture and scriptural concepts rank him highly in my book. This interview, all of it, is a great way to spend your Friday morning. I could share a half dozen quotes from this, but instead, I’ll tell you to watch it too, as his delivery of those quotes is just as important.
I’ll start with the hard part: As of today, we are reducing our team by about one third — eliminating 50 jobs, mostly in sales, support, and other business functions. We are also changing our business model to more directly drive the mission we set out on originally.
I prefer to control my content for many reasons. Medium has seen some great content published on their platform, but apparently, they have also seen issues monetizing it in a way they find suitable. So time to pivot. Hopefully, they survive.
"Although they are adults, they're 18. Kids make stupid decisions -- I shouldn't call them kids; they're legally adults, but they're young adults, and they make stupid decisions," Duffin said.
What are these “stupid decisions” that Cmdr. Kevin Duffin is referring to? Kidnapping an 18-year-old man with special needs. Holding him for at least 24-48 hours. Physically assaulting him. Cutting his face and scalp. And streaming it live on Facebook.
The disturbing 30-minute video shows a man tied up and his mouth covered, cowering in the corner of a room. His attackers laugh and shout "f*ck Donald Trump" and "f*ck white people" as they kick and punch him.
The video shows someone cutting into his scalp with a knife, leaving a visibly bald patch.
Right, I didn’t mention that part about Donald Trump and white people. Specifically “fucking” them. The attackers were black and victim was white. Ordinarily, I would encourage that this doesn’t matter. See Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, both cases where race didn’t matter. But here, we have a video where these assailants are shouting “fuck Donald Trump” and “fuck white people.”
So this is clearly a racially and politically motivated attack: a hate crime. And as the media has so loudly defended the victims of prior such hate crimes, we can expect them to very loudly defend the victim here, right?
"That certainly will be part of whether or not ... we seek a hate crime, to determine whether or not this is sincere or just stupid ranting and raving."
It's possible the racially charged statements were little more than people "ranting about something they think might make a headline," Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said.
He said he did not believe the attack was politically motivated.
It makes sense. Dylan Roof, a young and stupid-decision-making 21-year-old, most certainly thought that his racially charged murder of nine black churchgoers would “make a headline.”
That was hard to type.
These animalistic, inhuman attackers livestream themselves beating and cutting a man, screaming hate speech and not one report from the mainstream media is editorializing this. Not one. It’s barely front-page news. You could claim it was localized gang violence and not necessarily national news, but I would say that Trayvon Martin, a man that President Obama said could be his son, didn’t deserve national attention either. Or any number of the hate crimes committed by supposed Republican, Alt-Right wackos against Hillary Clinton supporters and minorities.
This case— involving two black men and two black women kidnapping, binding, and assaulting a white man— is the clearest cut hate crime since President-Elect Trump won in November. Video evidence and all. Yet the media has shown reservation unlike anything involving black victims.
This is, yet again, one of many reasons that Trump won.
For many, “it’s crazy at work” has become their normal. But why so crazy?
At the root is an onslaught of physical and virtual real-time distractions slicing work days into a series of fleeting work moments.
Tie that together with a trend of over-collaboration, plus an unhealthy obsession with growth at any cost, and you’ve got the building blocks for an anxious, crazy mess.
It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends, and whenever they have a spare moment. People can’t get work done at work anymore.
I love 37signals, now Basecamp, and still reference Rework frequently. Now they are back to address the insanity that has become the American workplace in The Calm Company.
Sometime in November, as things now stand, the "Christmas season" begins. The streets are hung with lights, the stores are decorated with red and green, and you can't turn on the radio without hearing songs about the spirit of the season and the glories of Santa Claus. The excitement builds to a climax on the morning of December 25, and then it stops, abruptly. Christmas is over, the New Year begins, and people go back to their normal lives.
The traditional Christian celebration of Christmas is exactly the opposite. The season of Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and for nearly a month Christians await the coming of Christ in a spirit of expectation, singing hymns of longing. Then, on December 25, Christmas Day itself ushers in 12 days of celebration, ending only on January 6 with the feast of the Epiphany.
Many think it begins twelve days before Christmas? Nope, the time before Christmas is called Advent. The 12 Days start on Christmas day and continue until Epiphany. That is why my desk is still decorated.
The codebase on big sites isn’t impenetrable because developers slavishly followed arbitrary best practices. The codebase is broken because developers don’t talk to each other and don’t make style guides or pattern libraries. And they don’t do those things because the people who hire them force them to work faster instead of better. It starts at the top.
Must read for front-end developers. No, seriously. Don’t, please don’t let the speed at which you write code influence the future maintainability of your code.
