Reflections From a Murky Pond

My default or “go to” web browser is Firefox and has been so for quite a number of years…pretty much since Netscape went away.

Why Do I Use Firefox?

I could discuss the technical issue w/ Chrome or Internet Explorer, or I could frame it in sociopolitical activist terms…but, really! What better reason is there than the trope shown above?

Apple has always excelled at marketing and advertisements. Even their choice of “White” as the color scheme for their devices was a masterstroke, as anyone can attest who’s seen the sea of people walking around with Apple’s pale earbud cords dangling from their heads.

Apple’s iTit – Best Product Placement Ever!

Now, with their new iTit, they’ve raised the bar once again. And, as a added benefit, this Apple offering may be the first new technology in decades that actually brings people together instead of isolating them in individual worlds of personal distraction. 😛

Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, two young, White entrepreneurs, co-founded  SketchFactor, which is an iTunes app for locating and avoiding “sketchy” or dangerous areas.

It uses a combination of publicly available data, e.g., crime statistics, and crowd sourcing to tag or flag areas according to various metrics for “sketchiness.”

SketchFactor, like all previous apps for location-based public safety was instantly decried as racist by both Liberals and Progressives and their minority tenants.

Essentially, according to Liberals and Progressives, if you try to actively try to avoid “sketchy” areas of a city – the first and most important step in any self-defense regimen – and you’re White, you’re a racist. Be a potential victim or be a racist; those are the only two choices allowed to you by America’s domestic enemies.

Yes, Twitter is good. It’s popularity is well-deserved. What’s very much not good, however, is #hashtaggery, which for the purposes of this post I define as using twitter hashtags as some means of political or societal protest medium. This recent and growing phenomenon is not good. In fact, it is worse than useless.

Domestically, where it might be though to have some value, it devolves to people seeing or hearing of something they don’t like, such as specific crimes, and tweeting about it using a hashtag as an identifier. Sometimes this causes a trend and rises in popularity and visibility. Yet, at the end of the day, it doesn’t go beyond Twitter. Nothing comes of it, in part because people feel that they’ve done something about the problem.

#Hashtaggery At Home

You really want to #StandWithHer or be #United4Her? You want to #DoSomething? Get off your ass and do something real. Don’t stand with her, stand before her in full readiness to do whatever it takes to stop what is about to happen.

The only way your #hashtags are going to have any effect upon the real world is if you carve them into carcasses of the offenders that you’ve exterminated or left it at the remains of one of their nests that’ve burned down or blown up.

And foreign policy and relations? Please! Does anyone really believe that twitter bombing a foreign government or group of terrorists is going to do anything at all? Apparently so. The ability of people to descend into self-serving self-delusion seems to know no bounds.

#Hashtaggery Abroad

Carve #FreeOurGirls into the carcasses of Nigerian Muslim boys that have been exterminated in reprisal for Boko Haram’s action and you might get results. Burn your hashtag in the mutilated corpses of Sudanese Muslims and you might #FreeMeriamIbrahim. Cut into the bodies of Mexicans and you might help #FreeOurMarine.

Alternately, wave your hashtag as a banner when you storm and take the foreign nations’ consulates or embassies and put their personnel to death.

Anything else is just useless #Hashtaggery and serves only to make yourself feel good without actually having to or risk anything, especially your precious comforts.

It’s an old axiom that a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. A corollary to this would be that a sufficiently advanced scientist is indistinguishable from a magician or other magical entity.

There are, in the latter case, ways to distinguish the scientist from the magician or other magical entity…
 

Yep! The only magic scientists and researchers have is mendicant magic in that many of them do seem to be able to conjure funding out of the aether…as long as they are practicing orthodox, “white magic” at least. Those following a purer path don’t do so well at all.