deathmtn

Yesterday, on my social distancing walk with Alex, I found out that there’s a pedestrian walkway next to Route 2, which is a highway. We walked next to this off-ramp. It had never occurred to me that you could walk on it.

I have to respect the Mass Department of Transportation for bothering to put these walkways in.

I watched parts of game of cricket that happened across the street from the park the guy was playing at. It was entertaining, but I think it might have been only because I didn’t know the rules. There was a mystery.

10-4-4-4-4-10 while Big Breakfast was cooking.

On how Facebook justifies itself:

“Focusing on hate speech and other types of harmful content on social media is necessary and understandable, but it is worth remembering that the vast majority of those billions of conversations are positive,” the former UK deputy prime minister wrote.

…

Heyer’s killer has been convicted and sent to prison, but how does Facebook evaluate its role in the event? Does the calculation change at all when you consider that just a few weeks before Charlottesville, I sent Facebook a spreadsheet with links to 175 neo-Nazi, white nationalist and neo-Confederate hate groups that were using its platform to recruit and organize? And that Facebook had declined to take any action against the vast majority of them until after Heyer’s murder, when it belatedly cleaned house?

How many sewing circles or bird watching groups or kickball teams using Facebook tools does it take to make up for that?

I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook some spreadsheet that, under some oblique term, defines the cost to them of a Nazi murder that they facilitated.

Window Swap is genuinely relaxing.

Usual run, 10 pull-ups. Legs were leaden at the start; good thing I did not take today off, though I wanted to finish an annoying household project instead.

A kind of boring mystery, but one that I had to live through, nonetheless.

Forgot to work out today. Got in 10 pull-ups. Stupidly, I've been trying to get a script that runs rsync working in cron. And yet, I can't do a lot of the other stuff I want to do unless I do this.

An interesting interview with a retiring professor of constitutional law. There's a lot that pops out in it, but here's the blockquote for me, given that he's seen so much:

A: This time feels even more tumultuous than the late 1960s. Even though that was the time of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and there were riots in the streets, things felt so much more normal then. Maybe it was because I was younger, but this seems scarier to me. I think more things were still taken for granted then. There was right, and there was wrong. The idea that somebody who was an inveterate, nonstop liar could become president of the United States just didn’t seem to figure. Nixon was not a great guy, but still, compared to this fellow, he was splendid.

I spent most of the day with the guy, reading, painting, picking up library books, which he was really excited about. (I had today off from work.) It's nice to be reminded that it's fun to hang out with a kid if you don't have a bunch of other things to do, too.

I listened to this episode of the Daily with the southeast regional director of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers.

It was interesting in that it seemed like there was this small chance that this was a reasonable police union leader, or at least one that realized what the problem was with the police. And then around thirty minutes in, it took this wild swerve.

He started by saying that he "does not see race". Then, after some discussion of what that means, he tried to assert that statistics do not bear out the claim that police behave differently toward Black people than they do toward White people and the problem is actually that Black people perceive the police as racist.

Amazing.

The host, Michael Barbaro, cited several well-known statistics that that prove that the police do, in fact, discriminate against Black people. Champion, the police union leader, then said, listen, "we can all go back to our corners" and get the statistics each side wants and walked back to the idea that it's a problem of perception.

So, this is their stance: They just need better PR and communications, not an actual change in behavior, despite all of these police killing of Black people and all of the documented brutality against protestors. We definitely need to keep at defunding the police.

34-minute run on an easier route with no hills. 10 pull-ups.