Joe McCarthy

@JeffAndDonkeys Thank you for sharing your story. I found myself thinking about Longfellow’s insight: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” I appreciate your posts, even when discomforting

I posted this recently. You can see from the comments how much people hate me for it. I'm used to it. I'm going to tell a story here, about my past. I sincerely hope this will be my last ever Xcreet. I keep checking back to suck up all the hate, but it's obviously stupid.

Distrust of election integrity, prioritizing precincts, paranoia as party organizing principles. “They’re after me. They’re after everybody like me. That’s what this is all about.” Inside the Michigan GOP’s MAGA Meltdown — ProPublica ⁦@AndyKroll⁩ propublica.org/article/michig…

"Ecological degradation .. benefits only a very few people .. [and] is arguably a major cause of climate change" Many climate change problems - flooding, droughts, wildfires, heat waves - are impacted by land misuse, not just fossil fuels. harthagan.substack.com/p/climate-scie… @hart_hagan

“if there is a definitive story of the past decade, it is how the net of oppression has widened. Whether through covid, climate change, or the loss of hard-won rights: we are all targets, we are all disposable.” @sarahkendzior sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/theres-a-sni…

@moniguzman @JonHaidt In a recent interview on @HiddenBrain, @JonHaidt talked about dividing lines, and considering different perspectives on morality, purity and autonomy without judgment, that reminded me of themes you often talk and write about hiddenbrain.org/podcast/escapi…

Been catching up on the debate around @JonHaidt’s new book “The Anxious Generation,” which I’ve been eager to read for months. And I’m surprised how little of the conversation I’ve seen is coming from parents. Or rather, people speaking from the parent role. Or even, the technology “user” role. So let me give it a shot. I’m an elder millennial. Social media and smartphones have transformed my life and career for the better in soooooo many ways AND led me to so many moments of addictive behavior, of losing myself and a healthy perspective on my world. Haidt has called smartphones “experience blockers.” I’ll admit: that resonates with me. The biggest change in my life that led me to notice what I was compromising when I was so tethered to my little screen was becoming a parent. Here are these tiny humans who live in every moment. Who see the whole universe in their mother’s face. And here’s their mother, turning away from them because a little black rectangle dinged in her pocket and became in that instant, in her mind, more important. More interesting. More valuable. The dissonance was devastating. Over the years I made changes, hard ones, to when and how I’d use my phone. I failed and restarted. Failed and restarted. Eventually, I found a new groove. I felt happier. I figured it out for myself, by myself, just trial and error and a constant battle with an ever-shrinking part of me that feared with all her heart that if I disconnected in the wrong ways from these things — after everything I’d done and built and felt I *was* on these platforms — I would cease to function. I would cease to matter. That part of me is wrong about that and was always wrong about that. But boy was she loud in my mind once. She makes no sense. I see that now. But boy was she loud in my mind… I know and have met a lot of people — including my husband, for example — who have never had any trouble managing their social media and smartphone use and how those solo digital things compete with social real-world things. It’s just not a big deal to him. And he never put much of his identity in it. Like I did. He’s always had a healthy relationship with it all. Which is awesome and encouraging. I’m sharing this slice of *my* experience not to make any grand claims about these technologies or to pretend that my experience with them is any more special or important than anyone else’s. I just want to offer my lens on it, which is this: that when I look at my 11 and 9 year old kids, and I look at smartphones, and I look at Instagram and TikTok, I don’t feel I need foolproof airtight studies to tell me that social media and smartphones *could* massively and perniciously influence my kids’ sense of who they are, and how they grow in and relate to the world and the people around them. I don’t need a mountain of 100% causal scientific evidence to suspect that they raise the challenge rating for discerning the answers to questions that were already tough to chew on before they came along, for young people especially — Do I belong? Am I enough? So I will not wait as my kids turn 12, 13, 14, to find my own way to be proactive as a parent about this stuff, stay up to date not about academic infighting but about resources and support, and guide my amazing little humans through this just as best as I can. So that’s the very incomplete, very spontaneous thing I want to offer here. Just my experience, my concern, and my conclusion for myself. No more, no less. Here’s to all of us being smarter together about these and all the questions that provoke and challenge us. 🍻 Thanks for listening.

I know y’all know this but it’s worth saying: the idea that immigrants are making things worse for US born workers is being used as an intentional distraction from things that are actually hurting working people. 10/

@brownecfm I wonder how much of the increase in excess deaths since 2020 is due to people avoiding healthcare settings, especially after mask mandates and other precautions were relaxed in many such settings

5. As such, and I cannot stress this enough, avoiding healthcare is a very bad idea. By mitigating your risk of getting Covid to the point of completely avoiding healthcare settings, people are creating a new and serious risk to their own health.

“Democrats are attached to media that does not want to be media for Democrats [e.g., CNN and NYTimes]. And Republicans are attached to media that wants to be media for Republicans. And that has created an asymmetry in the system.” @ezraklein nytimes.com/2024/01/16/opi…

“The Right is not interested in a public policy solution. They are interested in whipping up fear and anger .. entrenching white supremacy. This must lead to instability and dysfunction, constitutional crises, and, ultimately, violence.” @tzimmer_history thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-texas-bo…

@LauraJedeed I see different content when logged in to the same account on different devices, leading me to wonder if the content is determined more by cookie tracking keys than account ids

I have an alt account that is a common misspelling of my name -- Laura Jadeed -- that exists only to redirect people to this account It follows only this account and has exactly one post, which directs people to this account Her post-Musk timeline is WILD

@greglinden I find the explanations offered by @davetroy on the historical roots and motivations of Elon and his investors & friends in taking over - and taking down - Twitter to be the most compelling I’ve encountered. Here’s a thread containing a few references twitter.com/davetroy/statu…

@pomeranian99 I’m reminded of a few things @berkun has written about writing, such as “real writers” writing because they can’t not write, and the prevalence of [human] ghostwriters, acknowledged or not. I wonder how many articles in MSM are “helped” by Jasper

I had Jasper.ai write a blog post for me, and realized: Yowsa, the prose was *eerily* like the material I see on Medium all the time So, how many blog posts out there have already been written by AI, on the quiet? From my essay on this: clivethompson.medium.com/how-many-stori…

@jhagel RIP indeed. Interesting to read more about his life and accomplishments. Dee Hock’s 2000 essay on The Art of Chaordic Leadership remains the single most inspiring source of leadership wisdom I’ve ever encountered. griequity.com/resources/inte…

RIP Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, and someone who inspired me in so many ways, including helping me to expand my horizons beyond strategy to focus more on psychology bit.ly/3Q2HxQK

@sarahkendzior I was struck by “The spirit of unrest which seemed to pervade all classes and conditions” observation by the Baron. Seems as apt now as in 1910. Universal, persistent precarity .. perhaps by design

I was looking up information about a train robbery that happened outside St Louis in 1910, and I would 100% subscribe to the 1910 St Louis Post-Dispatch. Every story is batshit crazy. These were all on one page!

A thoroughly documented, compelling & disturbing illustration of accusations representing confessions. Disappointed in not seeing more about this in MSM. Grateful to @jennycohn1 for shining a glaring light on the widespread malfeasance. @jennycohn1/2016-the-attack-on-americas-election-infrastructure-e8f4f895d91c" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@jennycohn1/20…

Since the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, a number of not-quite-right claims have lingered about abortion. Here are seven claims, fact-checked. npr.org/2022/05/06/109…

@pomeranian99 I imagine you’ve already seen this, but sharing just in case twitter.com/emckean/status…

I'll often have 150 tabs open on my browser ... ... dozens of which have been open for *months.* Why? They're a sort of mental aid -- reminding me of research, helping me marinate things in my backbrain My essay on the benefits of tab-hoarding: medium.com/p/a47863725196

@berkun I know you are looking for book recommendations, but if you are open to other media, I think the Creating Passionate Users blog still stands out as a great and highly accessible resource for design thinking and doing. headrush.typepad.com

Book recommendation needed: if you had an engineering-led team with little experience with product management or UX design, what is the first book you'd have them read? Not *your* favorite book. But the one that is best written for this audience.

One antidote to allodoxaphobia (irrational fear of opinions): stop judging others. "To judge others is to acknowledge a belief that people can .. legitimately judge one another; thus, it is an implicit acceptance of others’ judgment of you" @arthurbrooks theatlantic.com/family/archive…

“To an extent that many people still don’t recognize, Fox News is a grinding, daily cesspool of white grievance, mistrust of deep-state government, and a belief that liberals are literally trying to destroy the country out of sheer malice” @kdrum motherjones.com/politics/2021/…