Tag: Things Having Nothing to do with Anything

It’s Tough Having a Conduct Policy in the Music Industry

Spotify announced that it was going to implement a conduct policy, which would punish musicians who behaved poorly. Spotify is now backing away from that decision:

That didn’t take long. After Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said it was working with civil rights groups and folks within the music industry to retool its “bad behavior” framework this week, the streaming service has scrapped it wholesale. “While we believe our intentions were good, the language was too vague, we created confusion and concern, and didn’t spend enough time getting input from our own team and key partners before sharing new guidelines,” a statement from the company reads.

When your business model is build on selling products produced by a group of individuals who have a higher than average tendency to act outlandishly in public, having a content policy is bad for business. Your customers aren’t going to be happy with your service when you remove their favorite artist’s discography after they were involved in a hookers and blow party that ended in a hotel burning to the ground.

There Is No Winning with Community Rules

Facebook has had a rough year. As a service with over two billion active users, it has been receiving a constant stream of mutually exclusive demands. Unfortunately, there is no way to please everybody when they want mutually exclusive things. For example, a lot of Facebook’s users want the service to be a place that upholds the ideals of free speech while a lot of its other users want the service to regulate various forms of speech.

Facebook responded to these demands by enforcing “community standards.” However, its enforcement of these “community standards” have seemed arbitrary because they’ve never actually been published. But the age of being punished for violating a secret set of rules is over. Facebook has finally publishing its community standards:

Facebook has released a lengthy 22-point document that explains more fully what its “community standards” are—in short, what is and isn’t allowed on the platform.

Now that the age of being punished for violating a secret set of rules is over, the age of having to interpret the published rules can being!

There is no winning condition when it comes to community rules. If you enforce a secret set of rules, your users become upset because they feel arbitrarily punished. If you enforce a public set of rules, your users still become upset because they feel arbitrarily punished whenever their interpretation of the rules differs from an enforcer’s interpretation.

Anybody who has had the task of enforcing rules in a community knows that the devil is in the details. A rule that states, “racism is prohibited,” may seem straight forward but it’s not. Race isn’t a concrete idea. Americans generally tie race to external appearances. Judaism, for example, wouldn’t normally be considered a race by American standards. However, Judaism is considered a race by Nazism. If somebody posts something anti-Semitic, does the rule against racism apply? If you decide it does and ban the user, they will likely argue that the rule doesn’t apply because Judaism isn’t a race, it’s a religion. Simple enough, just create a rule against religious discrimination, right? Discrimination, like race, also lacks a concrete definition. For example, if I call Christianity barbaric because most sects of Christianity oppose same-sex marriage, am I being discriminatory? Some may interpret my statement as discriminatory, others may interpret my statement to be a valid criticism.

There is no way to satisfy 2.2 billion users. For most communities, being unable to satisfy everybody usually leads to a healthy split. For a service like Facebook that relies on having billions of users to make itself appealing to advertisement buyers, a community split is dangerous. However, it is also unavoidable because there is literally no way to win.

Is There No Low to Which the Republicans Won’t Sink

First the Republicans threw grandma off of a cliff. Now they’re running people down with trains:

A train carrying Republican lawmakers to a retreat hit a lorry on the track in Virginia, killing the driver of the truck, says the White House.

Six people were injured, including another truck passenger who was airlifted out with critical injures.

Is there now low to which the Republicans won’t sink?

Firebirds

Humanity has enjoyed its position as an apex predator for only a brief period of Earth’s history. And while this time at the top was fun, the time to hail our avian overlords will soon be at hand:

The claim is that the birds pick up burning twigs from existing fires and drop them elsewhere to start new blazes. This would flush out prey hidden in the brush.

It starts with them using fire to flush our prey but it will end in them using fire to flush humans out of their cities!

The Sordid State of Conspiracy Theories

Remember when conspiracy theories involved shadowy organizations pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to advance plots so complex that they made James Bond villains look like simpletons by comparison?

Now we get mundane plots like George Soros paying some leftist militant to attack Rand Paul in order to send a message. I blame the degraded literacy rates. Nobody appears capable of crafting complex plots like those found in many novels. Instead people today seem to only be capable of concocting straight forward storytelling of the likes found in most Marvel movies.

Posing for Rockets and Bombs

Football season has started. I only know this because a bunch of people were once again arguing about the proper way to pose when that Rockets and Bombs song plays before the gladiatorial event commences.

How is this still a thing? How can people bring themselves to care deeply about how somebody else poses for a song? If you want to standup for Rockets and Bombs, then by all means do so. If you want to sit down, then do so. If somebody else doesn’t want to do the same thing as you, it won’t impact your life in any way whatsoever so don’t concern yourself with them.

Do You Even Lift, Brah

I can finally say that my proposal to help people cultivate their ego in order to spread freedom is backed up by SCIENCE!

A recent study showed that weak men are more likely to be socialist. Since the site requires you to register to read the entire article, I’ll include this image of the physically printed story:

As you know, one of the activities I mentioned to help bolster an individual’s ego is working out so this study is right up my alley. While I don’t have access to the research paper and therefore I don’t know what methodologies were used to determine how strong or socialist a subject was, how the subjects were chosen, or whether there was a control group, the study confirms my bias so it’s SCIENCE and you can’t argue against it!

Humble Water Filter Salesman Apparently Offered White House Press Credentials

Granted, a majority of what Alex Jones says is bullshit but he claims that he’s been offered White House press credentials:

Here’s the deal, I know I get White House credentials, we’ve already been offered them, we’re going to get them, but I’ve just got to spend the money to send somebody there. I want to make sure it’s even worth it. I don’t want to just sit there up there like ‘m in the media, look our people are there.’ People don’t understand this paradigm, we’re devolving in a good way, power from the federal government back to the people, back from the centralized MSM to the people, just like Trump said in his speech.

I couldn’t write comedy of this quality if I had a year to do so!

The fact that an organization like InfoWars has apparently received White House press credentials is hilarious enough. But Alex seems genuinely excited about it! He has finally won the victory over himself. He loves Big Brother.