r/altmpls

I run spskyway.com (the skyway map with directions, hours, what's in each building, etc). This week I added a map style editor. There's a palette button on the map that lets you change the lighting (dawn/day/dusk/night), the base style, and the colors of pretty much everything - skyway lines, bridges, buildings, even the little entrance dots. It updates live while you mess with it.

So we're doing a contest. If you make a theme you like, hit "submit to contest." Submissions run through Aug 3, then finalists go to a vote in the app for two weeks. Whatever wins becomes the actual default look of the map for everyone, and the legend will permanently say "Default theme by [your name]".

That's the whole prize btw, there's no money in it. Just your design on the map every downtown worker uses to find lunch.

You don't need an account to play with it, only to save or submit (email or google both work).

calling homeless encampments "open air drug markets" with a high enforcement mandate , and being funneled through some unnamed "programs" and a very vague "enforce all laws" mention.... (presumably vagrancy or adjacent )
things are getting dark....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_hGEhO9EnQ
this is a Palantir project , check the verbage used and the wright up from joe lonsdale's think tank
https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/drug-free-homeless-service-zones/ it might as well be verbatium

The South Minneapolis restaurant Post Modern Times is drawing in hundreds of unhoused people to its residential neighborhood each day with the promise of free food. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though. After getting their food many of those unhoused people are then entering the nearby alleys and trespassing on to private properties to do hard drugs, defecate, and steal. They litter their drug paraphernalia and burned pieces of tinfoil containing trace amounts of drugs along with their to-go containers from the restaurant.

Many neighbors in this area have also reported that their garages are being broken into and their packages are being stolen. Neighbors have been complaining to the restaurant and to the city, but they have seen little improvement. Frustratingly, many neighbors have reported that the restaurant owner, Dylan Alverson, is being combative and dismissive toward their concerns.

A community meeting took place on June 15 facilitated by “Confluence Studio”. After many of the impacted neighbors were allowed to speak there were a number of anti-neighbor Post Modern Times supporters (who don’t live in the directly impacted neighborhood) who said some pretty telling things:

 - - One person insisted that the neighbors “NEED to be inconvenienced” by the unhoused people.
 - - Another person stated without hesitation that the children in the neighborhood do NOT deserve safety. 
 - - And another person argued that the neighbors are racist and that their opposition to the negative impacts of Post Modern Time's new model is “bitch made”.

Meanwhile, on the Confluence Studio instagram page (@confluencestudio), a commenter stated “Tell your children to stop being so soft”  in response to a comment describing the negative impacts on children in the neighborhood.

Helping the unhoused is great and all that, but Dylan Alverson of Post Modern Times rushed into this and didn’t pause to consider the negative impacts that his new business model would have on this neighborhood, leaving the neighbors to deal with the consequences of his decisions.

Alverson is showing that he cares more about the unhoused people and appearing virtuous than showing basic respect to the neighborhood in which his business resides. He could’ve approached this differently in order to ensure that families and their properties wouldn’t be threatened by the huge increase of unhoused people streaming through the neighborhood. Of course this neighborhood has experienced wandering unhoused people in the past, but never anything to this degree. There’s a parade of unhoused people all day long going to and from the restaurant and they use the neighborhood as their drug use site and toilet.

Does political polarization exist because people "live in different worlds" with different sets of facts? Dan Williams, a British philosopher, calls that "factual polarisation" but says "interpretive polarisation" is really the bigger problem and uses George Floyd as an example:

>Interpretive polarisation is not primarily disagreement over narrow, verifiable facts, nor disagreement over the values or high-level ideologies citizens bring to politics. It involves competing systems of interpretation that determine which facts citizens attend to, how they understand them, and how they connect their values and ideologies to political action...

>Among liberals and progressives...[George] Floyd’s death was imbued with maximal political salience. It was not an isolated or unrepresentative murder and tragedy but the cause for a national reckoning...

>The core narrative frame here was racism—not just Chauvin’s racism, but also the deeper, even more insidious forms of racism (structural, systemic, implicit) that had long poisoned Western cultures and institutions, which Floyd’s death was an awful symptom of...

>Most generally, the events were narrated through a story of victims and villains in which Floyd’s direct victimhood both demonstrated and reflected the broader oppression of all [black people] and other non-white groups around the Western world, who now depended on the heroic actions of progressive, anti-racist activists awake to the reality of such oppression.

>Conservatives and right-wing populists viewed the events through a very different interpretive framework.

>Most obviously, they resisted any treatment of what they deemed a rare and unrepresentative act of police misconduct as the basis for a broader condemnation of American policing, let alone Western societies as a whole.

>They emphasised the specific facts of the case, including Floyd’s criminal record and behaviour. They expressed agnosticism or outright scepticism about the relevance of racism to the events, and often made efforts to publicise similar cases in which white victims were killed by police without receiving comparable media or political attention.

>Finally, this media and political attention was itself explained in terms of a broader, familiar pattern: the left’s cynical exploitation of isolated, unrepresentative incidents to advance its hysterical ideological agenda...

>For liberals and progressives, this very narrative is itself further confirmation that the right inhabits a deranged fantasyland. Floyd’s death reflected the extreme, well-documented historical oppression of Black people, which contrasts with the delusional victim complex of deplorable, racist white citizens today.

>This is what interpretive polarisation looks like....To understand what is going on...focusing on narrow disagreements over verifiable facts won’t get us very far. That’s not to say that there are no such disagreements, or that nobody is deluded or lying about basic facts. The point is rather that we need a richer account of how such facts become selected, ignored, and narrated in the minds of those who identify with different political tribes.

Williams then provides a different framework for "how facts become selected, ignored, and narrated..." (via Walter Lippmann). It's a too long to share here in full but I think it's worth reading if you find "interpretive polarization" interesting.

Is "interpretive polarization" a useful idea? Does it have better explanatory power than "factual polarization"?