> "Some groupings have icons and get inset, while other groupings don’t have icons and don’t get inset. Interesting…again I wonder what the rationale is here? How do you choose? It’s not clear to me."
The rationale is clear, they are choosing to use icons only when a widely-recognized icon is available. This makes sense, and it answers the author's concerns perfectly about icons being used arbitrarily when they don't convey anything.
To be honest I find the whole motion of this blog post quite confusing. The user starts with a bad example, people using icons randomly that nobody could recognize without the text, which is evidence of the fact that the icon itself doesn't convey much information.
Then he shows an example where someone doesn't do the thing he complained about, they actually did use icons with a rationale. At which point he asks the question, "What is the rationale" but does not actually attempt to answer it..
To me though, there is a much more interesting paradox beneath all this. If we grant that it only makes sense to show an icon when it's meaning is widely known. How are new icons ever going to be introduced? Presumably every well known went through a period where it was used with text because it was still not well known. So while it might be bad UX to use an icon that is unfamiliar to users, over the long term using such icons has the benefit of creating a shared visual language that we all understand. I guess the litmus test for when to put an icon should then become: Is this functionality widespread enough in other applications that I can imagine this icon becoming standard in the future?
The demands only seem inconsistent if you don't look at the actual principle underlying them. Political discourse tends to present opposing ideologies as being about principles like "free speech" or "free markets" - it's really all about power, who has it, and who wants it.
In this case its strengthening particular social and economic hierarchies - america vs the rest of the world, and white christians over non-whites or non-christian.
What's interesting is that this is not necessarily a struggle between the top of a hierarchy vs the bottom of one, but between two different hierarchies. The democrats support cultural non racial and economic hierarchies, while the republicans support racial international and the same economic hierarchies. So while they both support the rich over the working class, there is a struggle over whether to support racial and international hierarchies. Democrats tend to support globalization, i.e unifying of the power of the top of the economic hierarchy across international boundaries, while eliminating racial and sexual hierarchies as they are seen as "inefficient" from a neoliberal perspective. Republicans are more focused on the "national elite", the rich people that depend on america being a global hegemon specifically, energy industry, military industira-complex, etc..
Plenty of Democratic voters are on board with taxing the rich and flattening those economic hierarchies.
The problem has been that the Democratic party is the neoliberal wing of the establishment. Its purpose has been to create the illusion that economic progress is possible while working hard to maintain the economic status quo. Cultural diversity was the distraction and consolation prize.
Now the establishment wants full, unquestioned, totalitarian control now and no longer cares about maintaining the illusion of choice.
Ultimately it wants a country run on plantation lines with voting rights restricted to wealthy white male property owners, a "Christian" moral narrative (really just racism, greed, supremacism, and sexual opportunism dressed up in bible rags) and no independent sources of intellectual dissent.
Which means the bare minimum of public education, no science, no difficult or non-commercial art, no free thought in universities or academia, and as little free travel and contact with the outside world as possible.
The most comparable country is North Korea. So the likely end will be a heavily militarised and even more heavily propagandised country, run as a pampered inherited monarchy which tolerates a certain amount of education when it's useful, but is violently hostile to all dissent.
It's quite hard to get there from here. The shock-and-awe of the last few months were supposed to establish dominance, but it's not going to happen without resistance. Harvard is one example. There will be more.
Ultimately the military will be used to force compliance, and - absent a not entirely unexpected medical event - they'll decide which way this goes.
I find it genuinely hilarious that we need to consult with a psychologist to create a place with a comforting atmosphere. As if what makes a place feel nice and comfortable is some kind of theoretical knowledge we just don't have access too. It's a miracle we regular old people avoid creating horrible and uncomfortable living spaces for ourselves.
I'm not saying this is definitely intended, but it kind of bothers me that this title seems to imply "Saying no to almost everything might make you successful".
