What are my group identities?

I don't think anyone who knows me would consider me apathetic. Have you read my posts? 🤣

I try to avoid the hypocrisy, by simply not caring about whatever package-deal fallacy of ideas and beliefs that people might tend to associate with me based on whatever subset of things they've heard or read me say or write.

Alas, thou hast pierced by beating and bleeding heart with your discompassionate jousts. Et tú Brute?

I never sin, I do unproductive, disingenuous, and destructive actions sometimes, but never is it a sin.

It requires that you hold certain conclusions as a condition of the group membership. It is unacceptable to challenge orthodoxy. Even if you say, disagree with a subset of policies, you are expected to keep it to yourself for the good of the group and to stay united. It demands hypocrisy of you.

Do you think this is because extremism in general requires that sound logic and scientific validation be eschewed for emotional fervor and pseudoscience?

Yeah. I disagree with that. I mean, I think there are shades of truth to it. But what I would say is we don't really have many centrists or moderates in the political class anymore.

I agree that these people lack a *meaningful* identity. As a result, they advocate on behalf of the “expert” class with whom they wish to identify and by whom they are directed. The priest caste who deliver the evidence to the enlightened centrists for their righteous consideration. This is an identity group.

Disagree. I think you tend to see a lot less identity-idea connection in a lot more centrist and moderate forms of politics, where there tends to be a greater emphasis on seeking evidence-based policy, compromise and affordance for accepting disagreement and loss.

The weird thing I notice about some of the people who state they are most opposed to identity politics, is how ironically -- and seemingly unknowingly -- they are enmeshed in extreme forms of it.

If your personal identity is tied to a belief system of any kind, and you consider attacks on that belief system to be a personal attack. And, you tend to constrain your personal relationships to people who share that belief system, you are simply part of identity politics. That is what identity politics is.

It doesn't really matter what the belief system is: if it's progressive or "woke" politics. Or right-wing populist politics. Or even if it's categories like bitcoiner vs nocoiner -- if your personal behavior, and community behaviors fit the definition I laid out in the second paragraph, then you are participating in identity politics.

And yes, identity politics is pretty bad for anything resembling a functioning pluralistic society.

I respect that, it’s just that there is no web without basic privacy.

Yeah I wrote about that this morning

nostr:note14j7zuvhmghrk5d32766q39nr47xewz89ra9pzp7pd805kf3vx33q2pcg5f

Seems like a lot of HN users are getting hung up in the use of bitcoin on nostr, as if it’s a required part in the protocol.

Me neither, it’s a breach of privacy.

Using open source code in compliance with the license assigned by the author is entirely reasonable and good. I really don't get the "Coldcard side" of this argument.

1. Coldcard was FOSS and bootstrapped - nvk and peter denied interested VC investors.

2. Foundation cloned code, announced slightly different hardware, raised money from those same VCs pre-product.

3. Coldcard changed software license to allow everything but that. No longer FOSS.

Coldcard source code is verifiable and reproducible. It can be modified and built but not sold. You can even add your own entropy during seed generation. I personally disagreed with their decision to change the license but it does not change the security of the product.

NVK is a friend. Coinkite is a sponsor of RHR. Ten31 is an investor in Coinkite. I have used and recommended their products before all of that but transparency is important.

I am personally grateful their team continues to build robust bitcoin hardware. My family relies on it.