bct
15d ago
Purity spirals are driven by individuals taking an opportunity to improve their own position.
Say there's somebody in your volunteer radical labour union who is an excellent organizer: he's likeable, outgoing, genuinely committed to the cause, and works a blue collar job where he actually puts into practice the organization's techniques and principles. (This is in direct contrast with most of the membership, who are grad students LARPing as workers.)
This guy is accused of mild sexual misconduct. Is the organization best served by a. immediately expelling him, b. investigating the incident then deciding what to do, or c. trying to find a compromise that ensures he can continue to do his good work?
Answer: what's best for the organization is totally irrelevant. Somebody is going to take position A. They're going to win, because the organization has no defenses against it - this is a question of good and evil, not of tradeoffs. Anybody on side A wins and gains a crumb of status and maybe power; anybody on side B or C loses.
Part of the reason that the radical left is so susceptible to this is that everybody has the authority to start this process, but there is often nobody with the authority to say "we're not doing that".
bct
3mo ago
Downtown Edmonton's Liberal MP has put up posters advertising the GST holiday. Not billboards, posters - right next to ones advertising tattoo parlours, car enthusiast clubs, and metal shows. I've never seen a major party do that before, it strikes me as desperate.
bct
11mo ago
That seems to have fixed it, thanks.
BTW your get_token.py didn't work for me - I think the JSON braces need to be escaped. I modified it to fix that, and to take the username & password on stdin: https://github.com/bct/unshittify.nix/blob/master/scripts/nitter-get-token.py
bct
11mo ago
Thanks for describing this! I've written a nix flake for deploying it - it's incomplete & rough & undocumented, but maybe it will be of use to someone: https://github.com/bct/unshittify.nix
I've added 14 nitter feeds to my instance, but most of them are failing with "Miniflux generated too many requests to this website. Please, try again later or change the application configuration.". I wonder if I need to tweak the Miniflux configuration to avoid polling all the feeds at the same time?
Tangentially, a non-obvious feature of nitter is that you can put a comma separated list of usernames in the URL, e.g. https://nitter.privacydev.net/FromKulak,TraceWoodgrains/rss. I haven't experimented to see if this helps with rate limiting.
Often the offense is something less consequential, like "is not fully up-to-date with pronoun etiquette" or "works with fossil fuels".
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