Thread by @erinscafe: “that is a Burger King…inside an old transformer station that provided power to the Zeppelinfeld at the Reichsparteitagsgelände, the Nazi P […]”

Source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1004364664120045569.html

«Speer’s attempts to paint himself as an essentially moral man who was simply doing his patriotic duty for the country he loved, while ignorant of the horrific consequences, allowed many Germans to rationalize their own “ignorance” of the Holocaust.

Anyway, I’d watch the hell out of a biopic about the stories we tell ourselves to rationalize turning a blind eye to atrocities in the name of patriotism. Feels relevant.»

(https://twitter.com/erinscafe/status/1004364664120045569)

Just Say It’s Racist – The Atlantic

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/just-say-its-racist/561962/

«The framing of the piece illustrates how the American discourse concerning racism remains largely about hurt feelings, rather than discriminatory policy…. This ostensibly neutral framing is centered around a white audience more concerned with being called racist than facing racial discrimination, and one that experiences racism as naughty words rather than as policies that affect whether and how people live their lives.

….

An era in which Americans are supposedly exhausted with political correctness is thus defined by the acute political sensitivities and persecution complexes of white voters who object if things they do and say are described as racist, even as the bodies pile up in the background.»

Hacker News comment on Stripe is building a Ruby typechecker

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17224121

«Now that we’ve learned our collective lesson [again — John] that naive dynamic types are too slow for big projects, I am glad to see Ruby-thinkers begin to explore the type system space and search for something that will benefit all Ruby hackers.»

Standard pattern:

“System X is too complicated; it just gets in my way. I can code faster in System Y, which is much simpler. I know what I’m doing and I don’t need the restrictions of System X.”

Years later:

“System Y has serious problems with performance or predictability. We need to add more structure to it, and here it is, look at this spiffy add-on for System Y I wrote.”

And System Y now starts to look like System X, except about a decade or so later.

“Pascal strong typing is stupid; it just gets in my way. I know what I’m doing when I write C code, so I’ll use that.”

“Oh, look, we added strong typing to C.”

“Javascript just lets me write code without the heavy formality of something like Java.”

“Oh, look, we added strong typing to Javascript and called it TypeScript.”

“XML is way too complicated, all we really need is JSON.”

“Oh, look, we’re adding type info to JSON, plus verifiable schemas.”