The Society Pages

> Gen Z is also more diverse and broadly anti-American (or “anti-imperialist”) so they’re less willing to blindly support US foreign policy and feel less connected to European conflicts than previous generations.

I don't think it's accurate to say they're "broadly anti-American" because they're "more diverse." The increased diversity in the younger generation is due to Hispanic and Asian immigrants and their kids.[1] First and second generation immigrants are equally or more patriotic than native born Americans, and are significantly less likely to say they are “ashamed” of any aspect of America: https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/immigrants-recognize-american-greatness-immigrants.

All else being equal, immigration-driven population change is driving down "anti-American" sentiment. Indeed, the only political group where a majority say they’re “ashamed to be American,” progressives, is also amongst the whitest: https://hiddentribes.us/profiles.

I think what you see amongst immigrants is a less ideological view of foreign policy. They have often seen first hand that American has done a lot of harmful things abroad. At the same time, they compartmentalize that because they don't view foreign policy in terms of "good and evil." They may also feel less ownership of America's role and status as world "lawgiver."

I also think immigrants are more cynical than Americans. I'd describe my dad and myself as "pro America," but neither of us care about…

I think you're pretty close on this point. I share most of the views from the post above you, but I'd like to expand on them a bit.

First of all, I don't think people like flaws. If you take someone who has never listened to a vinyl record and ask them to listen to one and compare it with a CD recording, I'd bet they would cite the CD as being the better experience.

What people like is what they are comfortable with, and not just because of habit: distinctive patterns, especially in highly emotionally charged areas such as movies and music, generate emotional connections and attachment. Those who grew up listening to vinyl associate it's "fuzzy/scratchy" sound with the moments they spent listening to them. There's very potent emotional attachment to those flaws, and that's why people are attracted to them. When I hear the warbly sound and see the poor quality visuals of old VHS's, I'm taken back to watching Disney movies as a child.

As explained in this article[0], these emotional attachments are the reason why people enjoy Instagram to the degree that they do. The washed out, blurry, grainy photos generated by Instagram hit on the emotional connections to old photographs of our parents and of our childhoods.

Similarly, I think the same follows for 24 fps vs 48 fps movies; think of all the intense moments you've had while watching a movie in your lifetime. How many times have you laughed or cried or gasped at something happening in a movie shot in 24 fps? Given that any…

> it seems like when you get to use a free service or website that costs many millions of dollars to develop, giving the company access to your data is a fairly small price to pay.

Unfortunately, using Facebook is hardly a free choice anymore. I personally don't use it, but I have no delusions about the cost that comes with resisting. You miss out on events, news and connections. And because of Facebook's ubiquity, no other social network is a complete substitute. Some employers and dating advice columnists even find it "suspicious" when someone isn't on Facebook:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/08/06/beware-tech-abandoners-people-without-facebook-accounts-are-suspicious/

So there's a lot of pressure to use it. And while you can choose not to have an account, you can't choose to live in a world where Facebook doesn't exist. Even if you never touch the site, people can take photos of you and write status updates about you and post them there, and that affects your privacy. A sociologist I follow has written a good (slightly more theoretical) analysis of this problem:

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/05/21/a-new-privacy-pt-i-distributed-agency-the-myth-of-autonomy/

As for giving away your data being a "small price to pay", we'll have to disagree on that. Some people value their privacy more than others. And due to the above, we're limited in our ability to make an individual decision to preserve that privacy. Hence, I applaud the strict EU privacy…

I also heartedly recommend Jacques Ellul. From his wiki page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Ellul):

> Jacques Ellul (French: [ɛlyl]; January 6, 1912 – May 19, 1994) was a French philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and professor who was a noted Christian anarchist. (...) The dominant theme of his work proved to be the threat to human freedom and religion created by modern technology. Among his most influential books are The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

I’ve just finished reading his “Illusion of politics”, where he explained (back in the 1960s) how the West lives in a technocratic world only focused on efficiency and why this causes politicians and political decisions (and ultimately democracy itself) to become sort of obsolete, because all the decisions taken by them (the politicians) should ultimately answer to only one and most important criteria: they should be efficient. And as only the technocrats can tell/approximate which decisions may or may not be efficient, the politicians end up being just “puppets” rubber-stamping the decisions actually taken by the technocrats.

I’m now just about to start reading his “Le bluff technologique” (it’s in French) and I’m very, very excited because of it. Again, I recommend Ellul to all those interested about us, humans, and about how we function, reading him reminded me of when I first read Hobbes, Rousseau or Tolstoy, i.e. other great literary and philosophical figures…

I'm a black guy working in IT at a company in the top 5 of the Fortune 500. This is complicated issue. There have been experiment that show having a "black" name lowers your job prospects [1]. Other studies that show:

"...race actually turned out to be more significant than a criminal background. Notice that employers were more likely to call Whites with a criminal record (17% were offered an interview) than Blacks without a criminal record (14%). [2]"

So all the people acting as though our society is some meritocratic, utopia can keep that bullsh*t to themselves.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that blacks under-perform relative to whites when it comes to academics. There are obvious reason for this, but those reasons don't change the truth. Companies that are heavy on the engineering are going to use academic markers to try and select the best of the best. There aren't enough blacks >= white peers in the top percentiles of CS to give us proportional representation.

[1] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
[2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2015/04/03/race-criminal-background-and-employment/

Most likely, yes.

In a previous century: https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/07/26/nietzsches-transformative-typewriter/ Nietzsche’s Transformative Typewriter and http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-author-signal-nietzsches-typewriter.html The Author Signal: Nietzsche’s Typewriter and Medium Theory.

But then:

> The case of Henry James’s move from handwriting (typewriting) to dictation in the middle of What Maisie Knew has been studied by Hoover (2009). Yet, according to the NYU professor, the author of The Ambassadors took this sudden change in his stride and, despite the fact that we know exactly where the switch occurred, stylometry has been helpless in this case; or, rather, can show no sudden shift in James’s stylistic evolution that continues throughout his career (Hoover 2009).