I know this is tongue in cheek, but the proper phrase should be "insecure people should be held responsible for their insecure decisions, not security tools like Flipper or firearms."
The author's argument about SoC is not convincing. He: "is, in my polite opinion, completely wrong". The graybeards are right on this one.
For those of us who remember working with "DHTML" before libraries like jQuery proliferated, and then jQuery became ubiquitous for a few years - many of us recall the messes that the simplistic technique of using intrinsic events gave us.
When intrinsic events were introduced (e.g. the onclick attribute), they were meant to wire up some simple DOM behavior to Java Applets. Then somebody convinced the W3C people that it was a neat idea, and it needed to be in the HTML 4 spec.
1. "Did you mandate COVID-19 vaccines for employees?"
2. "Would you allow an employee who has acquired a concealed-carry license to arm herself on company property?"
3. "Do you donate to the Democrat party? How much? And what have you done to funnel company wealth to it?"
Rationale:
1. Coercing people to receive a medical treatment that they may not desire is a clear sign that the CEO lacks a moral compass - this is Nuremberg trials material. The groupthink in 2021 was: "the vaccines are effective and safe." Any skeptical CEO who resisted that groupthink, and respected an individual's right to remain in the control group for that medical experiment, demonstrated moral trustworthiness.
2. Respect for an individual's right to self defense is a clear sign of a moral compass. Individuals who have acquired CCLs must submit to background checks, complete a training course, and know the law on the use of lethal force in defending oneself - they as justified as police officers in carrying firearms. A CEO who has come to this understanding, and NOT established a policy contrary to it demonstrates moral trustworthiness.
3. The Democrat party has established itself as the party of moral erosion, for whom a consistent, universal morality does not exist. It is the party of moral relativism. And moral relativism is defined by it un-trustworthiness on morals. Soros and SBF are/were the two biggest donors to this party; they are walking examples of moral un-trustworthiness. We can probably nitpick, and ask a similar question about the Republican party, but those people are all about morality...right? That's a big reason why libs pick on them.
We're lying to ourselves if we believe anything Google claims about respecting privacy. Unless your data is encrypted when you give it to the monster, and you can know with certainty that it is, then it's not private. The monster will know what the data is, and it will sell it or trade it for power from governments, etc.
Who else has taken note that you can no longer create a Google account without a mobile phone? Google is linking accounts to individuals. Anonymity and privacy are no longer a reality when dealing with Google.
The cardinal virtues - prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance - help protect the "mind and character" from addiction or disordered attachment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues
I try to help my son understand and cultivate these virtues. He is 11, and is home-schooled.
Practically, right now we use several exercises specifically intended to combat screen attachment:
1) he is supposed to set a timer when getting on his iPad (totally up to him, but HE chooses to use it)
2) two regular days a week when he can Skype with his best friends (looks forward to the social time more than the game time)
3) typically a once-a-month screen detox for 3 to 7 days (no screen time, period.)
The most effective exercise is the screen detox. Within a day his attitude changes for the better: he practices his piano more eagerly, he acts sweeter, he finds "real" things to get into, and is more creative than usual. We're doing a detox right now; he learned backgammon from a friend at his chess club yesterday, made a backgammon board this morning before school, and taught me how to play when I got home from work. ...typical example of what happens during a detox. In the summer it was usually things like playing football or collecting bugs and lizards outside that happened when the iPad was put on the shelf.
I'm ashamed (and humbled) to say that I need a detox more than he does. But I grew up not being taught to develop virtue, and I have a lot of self-correction that I'm working through. Setting my son up to not have to deal with addiction in the first place is something I can give him that I wish I had been given. His generation also has (soon to be "Saint") Carlo Acutis as a role model.
I need to set up a Pi-hole, and filter out adult website URLs for our home internet.
Curious, do you tell him about your own struggles with it? It seems like that the both of you are learning it together, so what kind of reflections have you made with yourself, when you look at your son figuring it out?
I regret hearing the lies spoken during sex education when I was in fifth grade in 1987. The public school I was forced to attend brought in a sociologist to do the damage. She told us that we had to release our libido energy regularly - either by having sexual relations with another person or by masturbation, and that this was okay and healthy. Self control and abstinence were presented as being unrealistic.
This provided me with moral license from an expert (and indirectly from my parents, who had to sign the permission form to attend the lecture). One thing led to another, and it undoubtedly resulted in addiction; the endorphins and oxytocin produced by the human body and released during orgasm are worse than heroin. Bad habits form easily, and it's scary when you can't stop doing something that you believed would be just an experiment at age ten. The shame / guilt was hell.
If I could change anything anything about my past it would be to erase the immersion into that addiction at such an early, formative age. All other attachments of spirit have been easy to deal with - this one has not.
I don't know if that helps ... but I didn't that without the sociologist and only with the help of the Internet.
I took me sometimes, I am much better on that. But it takes a shitload of work and just removing the blaming you put on yourself everytime your relaspe.
It's weird to me that in my home country, Italy, "sex addition" is not seen as a problem at all, and I suspect this would be true for many other countries with similar cultural background (e.g. Mediterranean/Western cultures).
The first time I saw a movie where the protagonist was a "sex addict" and was going to group therapy, akin to AA, I couldn't believe it. At that point I was abroad, working for a US company. I eventually moved to the US a few years later.
At some point I realized that my bias towards this came from my cultural background, and it was actually hard to explain it to co-workers, or other Americans in general.
I have the same problem. In the sex education course I was given we were taught about abstinence and such, and there wasn't anything controversial as I recall. However I asked the counselor giving the lecture if it were possible to get an STD by masturbating. He said "no." For my adolescent brain, that was all the validation I needed to become addicted to this day.
Many factors have conspired to keep things this way:
- The only prerequisite to becoming addicted is having a body that is intact.
- There is practically nothing to prevent a curious teenager from masturbating at a young age, and the current literature regards this as normal, despite the fact that it can lead to addiction if it's not addressed. But teenagers are not about to let something that embarrassing be addressed by their family, especially for one as reticent as I was.
- Because the addiction is behavioral there is no physical substance to seek out and no seedy culture to involve oneself in, so there's no exposure that could lead to outside forces wanting to change you. You can obtain a limitless amount of porn anywhere for free and nobody would ever know.
- The physical consequences of using are mostly fatigue the next day, which can be mistaken as the result of anything. Mentioning sexual topics is taboo in comparison to admitting you are alcoholic, so nobody is going to guess correctly and intervene based on your appearance. It's an invisible addiction.
- When it's to the point that people online question if addiction to masturbation is even a thing, or if it's a puritanical argument in opposition to sexual freedom, it greatly diminishes the stances of people who actually have the condition and can't control themselves. Many are trying to decrease the shame around sexual things while the people that can't help themselves are left behind adding those movements to an ever-growing list of rationalizations.
- Being addicted to masturbating and/or porn is not as severe as being addicted to hard drugs or even alcohol. It gives you a sense that this is the "right" addiction to have if you're going to have an addiction at all, and makes quitting all but hopeless once it's taken hold.
- Admitting to this publicly opens yourself up to ridicule with the way the culture is set up. It's unlikely many would react positively to jokes about heroin users or binging alcoholics. Sexual humor on the other hand is practically embedded into every sitcom and countless memes and dick jokes. Addiction to masturbation is never going to be taken as seriously or at as large a scale as most other addictions.
The only good part is that the addiction is manageable for the most part and my lack of sociality has prevented me from going as far as casual sex. But I'm starting to have erectile dysfunction and a loss of satisfaction from physical overuse.
A part of me thinks that the way masturbation is meant to be a totally private activity closed off all routes for anyone to help me from a young age. It makes me wonder if trying to avoid all addictions would have been a hopeless endeavor from the start. Every time I admitted it to a counselor or therapist they either wouldn't take it seriously or didn't offer any routines that stuck.
Still, even though it is a rationalization for my own addiction, I am still glad I did not get addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or eating instead. It gives me pause to think how easily I could have started down that path with just a bit more openness to experience than I once had.
EDIT: And of course to prove my point about stigma I've been hellbanned for making this very post.
* Getting Real, by 37signals:
Gave me confidence to side-step a lot of the bs I saw in software development practice
* The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks:
Provided an argument against inexperienced managers who errantly assert that they need more developers to get projects done quicker; perhaps more importantly, it gives as a model for a programming team with a "chief programmer" to whom these managers need to report
* The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander:
Taught me the original (perhaps better) concept of design patterns, which helped in talking to colleagues about the parts of software we build and reuse
* JavaScript: the Good Parts, Douglas Crockford:
Led me to a solid understanding of how to make good use a crummy scripting language that was only really meant to glue DOM behavior to Java applets
The page has been removed from their website, but it's archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230927000839/https://www.cmglo...