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Congressional efforts to advance Afghan Special Immigrant Visa reforms were stalled by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky. from C-SPAN.org
SENATOR FROM KENTUCKY. MR. PAUL: RESERVING THE RIGHT TO OBJECT. IN THE FIRST TWO DECADES AFTER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR, AMERICA WAS UNDER SIEGE. OUR CAPITOL WAS RANSACKED BUT I DON'T RECALL IN READING HISTORY THAT ANY OF OUR FOUNDING FATHERS SAID THEY WOULD FLEE THE COUNTRY OR LEAVE AND GIVE UP ON THE QUEST FOR LIBERTY. THE QUEST FOR LIBERTY REQUIRES FIGHTING BY THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN GIVEN THEIR LIQUIDITY, THE PEOPLE WHO -- THEIR LIBERTY, THE PEOPLE WHO WE HAVE HELPED TO GET THEIR LIBERTY. YOU CAN SAY THE PEOPLE IN AFGHANISTAN HELPED US BUT YOU CAN ALSO SAY WE HELPED LIBERATE THEM AS WELL. THEY'VE BEEN FREE FOR 20 YEARS. IT SEEMS LIKE IT MIGHT PRECIPITATE THE OVERCOMING OF THE TALIBAN IF YOU TAKE 18,000 OF THE MOST WESTERNIZED, THOSE WHO SPEAK ENGLISH AND YOU SAY FLEE, FLEE, FLEE, THE END IS COMING. GUESS WHAT, THE END COMES QUICKER IF THEY ALL LEAVE. SO I WOULD ENCOURAGE THEM RATHER TO STAY AND FIGHT. I THINK IT WOULD BE GOOD TO HAVE MANY ENGLISH SPEAKERS IN AFGHANISTAN. THE FUTURE OF AN BEGAN STAN COULD BE A BRIGHT -- AFGHANISTAN COULD BE A BRIGHT FUTURE BUT THEY'RE GOING TO HAVE TO FIGHT FOR IT AND ULTIMATELY IT'S THEIR FIGHT. IF WE OFFER EASY ESCAPE AND PLANS TO LEAVE THE COUNTRY, WE'RE ENSURING THE DEFEAT OF THE PEOPLE WHO ARE OUR FRIENDS IN AFGHANISTAN. SO I OBJECT TO THIS PIECE
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This is an incredibly glib response to the issue of why people or products haven’t jumped on the Gutenberg bandwagon.

I’m sure I’ve already raised several objections to this strawman explanation but I’ll continue to do so every time it gets raised by Matt.

Speaking for myself, I’ve been using computers since before there were true screen readers. I’ve adapted with every single change to that piece of software alone, to say nothing of operating system changes and application changes and even WordPress changes since 2005. I promise you, this is not about being afraid of change. And I seriously doubt “afraid of change” is the case for even half of the rest who haaven’t aadopted Gutenberg.

As of June 9, 2021, Gutenberg is still an efficiency and useability nightmare, despite the technical accessibility improvements that have happened over the last two years or so. I see this every day with my own usage, John’s own usage, (and he’s got just as much or even slightly more experience with computer usage than I do), with clients who use assistive technology of any kind, and even with clients without any disability who don’t spend all their time living in their WordPress dashboards.

I have a single client who truly does enjoy Gutenberg, and that’s because their only familiarity with using WordPress was through visual composer.

I’m not saying, and I’ve never said, that WordPress should never change. I get that WordPress needs to adapt, I get that it needs to modernize, and I have no problem with any of this.

What I have a problem with is that adaptation being poorly thought through and poorly managed, the complete disregard for tons of completely avoidable problems having been created during almost the entire development cycle of Gutenberg, the prioritization of dreams at the expense of technical realities, (see that whole discussion on GitHub about how Gutenberg is never going to be Microsoft Word on the web no matter how much that’s wanted by product designers), and then the pretense that none of this has happened and that everything is just peachy and it’s all about people just being afraid to change.

If this were really about being afraid of change or unwillingness to evolve, I would have quit using computers cerca 1995 around the time of quite literally a seismic shift in the way screen readers work under the hood and the way they present information to users. Or that other seismic shift in 1998/9 or so when MSAA became a thing. Or that other one in 2006 when Web 2.0 became a thing.

But I didn’t. And that should tell you something.

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Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media by Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow
In William Gibson's 1992 novel "Idoru," a media executive describes her company's core audience: "Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections." It's an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune. It's also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV's role in a societal "dumbing down," that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK's ideas, but to Nixon's terrible TV manner.
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I must have missed the part where racist Karen who filed a false police report became a protected class.

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$100 says this attempt at a new ghetto for people with disabilities is merely an aggregator for sites loading their script.

Another $100 says that, if they actually approached any people with disabilities to inquire about any problems we might have with using search engines, the Chief Vision Officer is the only person with a disability they asked.

I suppose it’s easy to say you’ll make the web accessible by 2025 when you can just build yourself a safe space and then pretend it’s the web. But AccessiBe’s self-constructed safe space isn’t the web any more than Facebook is.

I’ll stick with the open web, thanks.

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The total collapse of Jewish and Israeli PR by SHMULEY BOTEACH
From the beginning of my rabbinic career, I focused mightily on public relations and disseminating the Jewish message to the world. I was accused of being publicity-hungry and of shallowness. But I knew that the one area where we Jews have so significantly failed was in public relations. And this has been true throughout the centuries.

I don’t know Rabbi, did it ever occur to you that maybe the reason so many have accused you of being publicity-hungry and shallow is because you’ve spent the last 40 years or so co-opting the worst excesses of the self-help genre to do your bit to strip Judaism down to its cheapest parts so you could make it a pop culture sensation?