Linked List: November 30, 2015

Monday, 30 November 2015

The Talk Show: ‘Peak Rumor Season’ 

This week’s episode of my podcast, The Talk Show, with first-time guest John Moltz. Topics include rumors about the iPhone 7 not having a standard headphone jack and purported new MacBook Airs.

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Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs. Orwell 

Apt in light of my earlier item on Trump and the outright rejection of the truth is this comic by Stuart McMillen, illustrating the opening of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I don’t agree, though, that this means “Huxley, not Orwell, was right.” I’d simply say that Huxley was remarkably prescient regarding what could go wrong in an open, free society.

Hacker Obtained Childrens’ Headshots and Chat Logs From Toymaker VTech 

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, reporting for Motherboard:

If storing the personal data of almost 5 million parents and more than 200,000 kids wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that hacked toymaker VTech also left thousands of pictures of parents and kids and a year’s worth of chat logs stored online in a way easily accessible to hackers.

Why in the world was VTech storing these things in the first place?

An Ode to Kobe Bryant, in Two Charts 

In the chart showing his remarkable scoring efficiency during the 2005-06 season, it’s interesting to me how much more accurate he was shooting threes from the right baseline than the left.

Donald Trump Still Says He Saw Muslims in New Jersey Celebrate 9/11 

The whole Trump phenomenon has been bizarre, but this particular incident strikes me as a genuine turning point in U.S. politics. I’m appalled by much of Trump’s rhetoric, but I’m not surprised that 20-30 percent of Republican voters support it. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am surprised by this, though. He insists he saw something truly dreadful on TV — “thousands” of American Muslims “dancing in the streets” — that never happened, and he isn’t suffering in the polls for it. Video footage broadcast on TV doesn’t just disappear — not in today’s day and age. It’s unadulterated demagoguery.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.” —Thomas Jefferson

In totalitarian states, there is no free and open news media to inform the citizenry. I’m not sure anyone ever imagined something like this, where the news media has laid bare the fact that what Trump says he saw with own eyes never happened, showing that he’s either lying or delusional, and a scarily large slice of the electorate still supports his campaign to become the ostensible leader of the free world.

It’s like the climate change debate writ small. In a democracy, good truthful journalism is difficult to suppress — but simply denying the truth, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, appears to be an effective political strategy.

Update: I am reminded that someone did predict this sort of situation. It really only could have been predicted through satire.

Chris Ware’s Animated Cover for The New Yorker 

Wonderful collaboration between Ware, Ira Glass, animator John Kuramoto, and others.