> The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
I didn't know that Santa Claus was a religious symbol, I celebrate with Santa and I do not affiliate with any religion. But the status quo is to accommodate every single person. People believe they are entitled to it: "Make it your top priority" -- OK boss! There needs to be a balance. Complete stubbornness is not good. Bending over to every single request, regardless of its merit, is not good either.
> The guy isn't real. A quick reverse image search would have shown this guy is also known as "David Shiffer" based in Norway, apparently a CEO of ServiceLayer, yet no mention of him anywhere else on the internet - including LinkedIn (strange for a CEO) and another profile of his linking to a dating site.
Really? That's a bit surprising to me. I mean, Santa Claus is specifically part of a celebration of a Christian holiday, how could it not be a religious symbol?
(This is kind of assuming we're talking about the American-style conception of Santa Claus, I believe other regions use really do use it in a non-religious way, so that could totally be the disconnect.)
Note: the original ticket is ridiculous, or at least the way it is framed. And it seems that it's a troll in the first place, which makes sense.
So, is Santa Claus a religious figure? In as much as traditions, myths and customs often have relations to religion he might be but that is taking the term 'religious figure' too far. The modern-day Santa Claus generally appears at Christmas but even that does not link him to a single religion since the Christmas holiday itself comes from the Germanic Yule - in Swedish Christmas is called 'Jul' and still retains several links to the older Yuletide.
In short, calling Santa Claus 'a religious figure' is incorrect, he is a mythological figure who was assimilated into different traditions over the span of centuries. The American version of Santa Claus - the jolly fat man in red - is more of a commercial figure than anything else.
But I'm not sure that that history is really relevant. Every religious figure or ritual that exists comes from somewhere - most "modern" religions have pagan ancestors. That fact alone doesn't make something a religious figure or not, or we'd basically have to say that almost no figure is a religious.
What matters is the symbol as seen and interacted with today. Just look at the first line of Wikipedia describing Santa Claus (aka Father Christmas in some places):
> Santa Claus, also known as Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, or simply Santa, is a legendary character originating in Western Christian culture who is said to bring gifts to the homes of well-behaved children on the night of Christmas Eve (24 December) or during the early morning hours of Christmas Day (25 December).
You can't really say that that isn't tied to Christianity, at least in the US and England.
The entire industry of TV and film has been turned to shit as an endless appeal to that mob that can never be sated on social media.
Advertising plays this shit too
I've thought for a while that non-religiousneess is becoming a religion in its own right.
Certain people on the Internet keep trying to convince me I am right :-)
Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.
But canceling everybody is problematically increasing the number of unreasonable bosses.
I agree that Twitter cancel culture is well out of hand; in fact, I'll go further still and say that the behavior is often not meaningfully distinguishable from 4chan brigading of old. But there should still be a better option for dealing with unreasonable but not actively criminal bosses than getting fired anyway, with the chance of a bare minimum consolation prize.
This said, I totally recognize I'm quite privileged in regard that the industry I'm working in, where business tend to generally value people and such senseless human resource management is typically misaligned with both employee and employers goals (putting it simple, being an asshole doesn't bring any profits). In such circumstances, my personal perception of at-will employment is positive - it makes sense to me that we (employee and employer) cooperate because we like each other, and there's nothing that binds us but our will for a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yet, unfortunately, I know this is not the case for many people but I have no idea what could to be done to fix this. But I suspect that legal protections that prevent firing people at-will are not helping the core issue here.
Also much stricter regulations and norms around when you can leave. In the US, two weeks notice is customary but not legally required in the EU its often a three month contractual obligation. I can't help but think that may contribute to the generally lower salaries in the EU vs the US.
I don't know where this is but in my country it's 1 month and most of the time the person leaving still has vacation days to use so they leave much earlier.
Most people just give advanced notice to their employer though, it's just polite.
In which country is this? In most places I worked at it's been 4 weeks (and even this is often waived).
> to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences
0: 103% of statistics on the internet are made up.
1: 2+49+245049.
That's assuming the spammers can't figure out how to effectively troll the people who came for the rage bait into propagating their spam, but they can, because spammers are Turing-complete.
Obviously the people who came for the legitimate content will be destroyed. Or take up spamming.
They haven't stopped swimming because of some better alternative. They stopped swimming because swimming conditions have changed and now it is a bad idea.
This story is directly analogous to the scenario described in the comment that started this entire sub-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23743161
If section 230 is repealed and social media becomes too toxic for most people to use, of course people would not stop communicating. The vast majority of human communication doesn't even occur on social media.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion when in the preceding paragraph you accurately portray the mainstream media as the actual manipulators. The media loves to televise drama, it's what sells. When there's no actual drama to be had, they manufacture it by highlight nonsense on social media or other means.
It's all so contrived now. "X say Y on Twitter! Here's a 5 minute diatribe about why that's outrageous with sarcastic analogies and something about true <insert country> values!"
I am a human and I don't love mobs. This article is all about incorrect assumptions. If I am not mistaken, the parent comment just made another one.
The part about the media amplifying what is on social media I absolutely agree with. I have always thought there is some strange irony in news outlets writing about something that is, at least in the case of newspapers, killing their own business.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-to...
Humans love to feel like they belong and they like to feel validated in their opinions. This doesn't always play out in the form of a mob. Even just "ganging up" on a friend in a group conversation is a result of these traits. Mob mentality shows itself in many ways. Perhaps I should've been clearer about mob mentality vs. the classic "mob". What we see happening on social media is I think a result of the majority of humans being susceptible to some form and some degree of mob mentality (groupthink, if you will).
If we think of humans as variable tribalism waveform propagators, then a mob is simply an incidence of intense constructive interference.
Perhaps you emit less tribalism energy than the average human, but it's still possible that in certain scenarios you, like any of us, would contribute to the constructive interference :)
Edit: Hmmm... I think we can actually extend this model by describing social media as a transform on these tribalism emissions that tends to heavily normalize, distort and exaggerate the signal into one of a relatively small set of outputs, thus greatly increasing the odds of constructive interference.
In an internet mob you can remain anonymous, you don't need to actually carry out any of the threats you make (others may do it for you, eg calling for somebody to be fired), and you aren't risk any of your own reputation.
I absolutely loath seeing mainstream media write about what happens on twitter/social media. It magnifies the mob far beyond reason. "Twttier in an outrage", "Internet blows up" it's just insane. Not only does it give the impression that vast majority of users on a platform are on the same side (they're not), it gives them pseudo-credibility. And unfortunately, the next step is for corporations to take them seriously.
The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. It was fun at first. But the dark side of humanity has been given a power it should never have had.