Yes, Dylann Roof is racist, but where does this racism come from?

David Niose says anti-intellectualism:

And even though it may seem counter-intuitive, anti-intellectualism has little to do with intelligence. We know little about the raw intellectual abilities of Dylann Roof, but we do know that he is an ignorant racist who willfully allowed irrational hatred of an entire demographic to dictate his actions. Whatever his IQ, to some extent he is a product of a culture driven by fear and emotion, not rational thinking, and his actions reflect the paranoid mentality of one who fails to grasp basic notions of what it means to be human.

What Americans rarely acknowledge is that many of their social problems are rooted in the rejection of critical thinking or, conversely, the glorification of the emotional and irrational. What else could explain the hyper-patriotism (link is external) that has many accepting an outlandish notion that America is far superior to the rest of the world? Love of one’s country is fine, but many Americans seem to honestly believe that their country both invented and perfected the idea of freedom, that the quality of life here far surpasses everywhere else in the world.

The whole article is worth a read.

via this is nthappiness

Apparently the people at Pebble were ‘trolling’ Apple on Twitter while the Apple Keynote was happening.

Unlike BGR, it looks a little desperate to me, not hilarious.

Especially considering how Pebble stooped to Samsung-ing Apple’s product designs on Kickstarter.

Evan Williams, founder of Medium, on Medium:

I was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit. As quoted:

If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter – important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.

Of course, I am trivializing what Instagram is to many people. It’s a beautifully executed app that enables the creation and enjoyment of art, as well as human connection, which is often a good thing. But my rant had very little to do with it (or with Twitter). My rant was the result of increasing frustration with the one-dimensionality that those who report on, invest in, and build consumer Internet services talk about success.
via Daring Fireball

Re/code: This Is the Unofficial Brothel of CES:

When new women arrive to work at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about 65 miles west of Las Vegas, they have to be taught a lot of new techniques. Social media is one of the most important of them.

During this week’s sprawling International CES gadget show, which ends tomorrow and draws more than 150,000 people each year to the Las Vegas Convention Center, the sharing-savvy brothel sees some of its busiest nights. Sheri’s Ranch calls itself “the unofficial brothel of CES” — and says that business is up about 70 percent this week.

Brothel matron Dena, who uses humorously bawdy social media to attract CES attendees, also trains the ranch’s rotating roster of 75 to 100 on-site sex workers to create online personas and unique voices, which Dena says makes the women feel more empowered, and helps skirt the legal ban against advertising their services.

Andrew Watts, a 19-year-old at the University of Texas, posted an interesting piece on Medium titled, A Teenager’s View on Social Media.
He breaks down the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Tumblr and YikYak in the “highly coveted” demographic of which he is a part.
Most interesting to me are his views on Facebook:

In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.
This makes total sense. Mom, Dad and all your and all your aunts and uncles are on Facebook. LAME-O. But, wait:
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off.
And:
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren’t really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
So, despite being “dead” to the kids, they continue to use Facebook a lot. I’m willing to bet they use it potentially as much as other, more cool social networks like Instagram. What’s interesting is Andrew seems to define “using” a website/app as posting content to it. Simply “checking in” on it—like teens do on Facebook—doesn’t count. Server logs and analytics tools would beg to differ.
It also seems Facebook’s move to decouple messaging from the core Facebook product was a smart move. Facebook is perceived as a crazy, loud, public zoo (because it is), but Facebook Messenger is a discreet way to talk to someone.

From the Editorial Board of The New York Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric.

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops.

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero.
Perhaps doctors should stop attending to injured police officers and their families when they have problems with something their bosses say. That’s fair, right?

NY Post: Arrests plummet 66% with NYPD in virtual work stoppage:

It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage.

NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety, The Post has learned.

The dramatic drop comes as Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio plan to hold an emergency summit on Tuesday with the heads of the five police unions to try to close the widening rift between cops and the administration.
Putting the lives of the public in danger because of something the mayor said.
They should be ashamed of themselves.

Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots:

A crackdown on spam Instagram accounts has triggered a cataclysm in the world of low-grade social media celebrities. The event, which began today after the photo-sharing service made good on its promise to start deleting millions of fake accounts, has been dubbed the “Instagram Rapture” after the follower counts of apparently popular Instagrammers were savaged. Rapper Tyga saw his followers drop from 5.5 million to 2.2 million, while Ma$e committed Instagram’s version of seppuku, deleting his account after freefalling from 1.6 million followers to around 100,000.
Where’s the fucking problem?

Twitter

Former Tic Tock Diner manager to be sentenced in murder-for-hire plot

The former manager of a northern New Jersey diner faces sentencing in what authorities say was a foiled plot to kill the co-owner of the restaurant, who is his uncle by marriage.

Georgios Spyropoulos will appear before a judge in Paterson today. The Clifton resident faces up to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder.
The Tick Tock Diner is a legendary New Jersey Diner. When I was growing up in the suburbs of northwestern New Jersey, I remember passing the Tick Tock on Rt 3 on our way to the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan.
In the last season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld sits down at the Tick Tock with John Stewart.

—humansofny

As much as I love Macworld, I have to say that the one indispensable website in our community is Daring Fireball — an indie website.

As cool as Twitter is, its early success in our community was due entirely to Twitterrific. And it took The Iconfactory to come up with the word “tweet” and the bird logo for Twitter.

It took Loren Brichter to invent pull-to-refresh in Tweetie.

It took Marco Arment to invent the entire read-later category with Instapaper.
Amen.
via Bombtune

Om Malik on Big Data:

Facebook’s emotion-driven-engagement experiments are tiny glimpse of what really awaits us: a data-driven and alogrithmic future, where machines make decisions on our behalf, nudging us into making decisions. As I pointed out in my recent FastCompany magazine column, the new machine age is already underway, unseen by us. “It is not really just a human world,” said Sean Gourley, cofounder and CTO of Quid who points out that our connected world is producing so much data that it is beyond human cognitive abilities and machines are going to be part of making sense of it all. So the real question is what will we do and what should we — the technology industry and we the people do? From my perspective, we need to start with the raw material of this algorithmic future: data. Whether it is a billions of photos that carry a payload of emotions, relationships and location data, or status updates announcing the arrival of a new one or those searches for discount Prada shoes or a look-up about a medical condition — there is someone somewhere vacuuming our data droppings and turning them into fodder for their money machine.
And:
Automation of our society is going to cause displacement, no different than mechanization of our society in the past. There were no protections then, but hopefully a century later we should be smarter about dealing with pending change. People look at Uber and the issues around it as specific to a single company. It is not true — drones, driverless cars, dynamic pricing of vital services, privatization of vital civic services are all part of the change driven by automation, and computer driven efficiencies. Just as computers made corporations efficient — euphemism for employed fewer people and made more money — our society is getting more “efficient,” thanks to the machines.
We live in a post now, ask questions later world.