This is a bug-fix release that fixes a long-standing problem with
Pod::Text on EBCDIC systems. The code to handle non-breaking spaces and
soft hyphens hard-coded the ASCII code points and deleted the open bracket
character on EBCDIC systems.
The fix here adopts the same fix that was done in Pod::Simple (but with
backward compatibility to older versions of Pod::Simple).
I also made a bit more progress on modernizing the test suite. All of the
Pod::Man tests now use a modern coding style, and most of them have been
moved to separate snippets, which makes it easier to look at the intended
input and output and to create new tests.
I apparently am not going to get anything done today until I write this.
Some thoughts, in no particular order.
The most heart-breaking thing for me this morning, and last night, is
the reactions from people I know who are not white, not male. Who are
LGBT, or immigrants, or Muslim. They're hurt, and they're scared, and
they feel like the United States just slammed the door in their faces.
A lot of Trump supporters will be offended by this, or dismissive of
it. A lot of Trump supporters don't feel like that was what the
campaign was about at all. And I strongly believe that many, many
people voted for Trump for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do
with sexism or racism. But whether or not you believe Trump supported
the alt-right, the alt-right supported Trump, and a lot of people are
really scared this morning. That feeling is real.
To all of those people, all I can say is this: the most meaningful
inclusiveness is how we all treat each other on a day-to-day basis.
How we, as individuals, act towards other individuals. Governments
can change a lot of things that matter a great deal in terms of legal
recognitions and legal protections, but they can't take away our
individual determination to see each other as fellow humans and to
treat every person with respect and open-hearted welcome.
If you believe, as I do, in welcoming and supporting every single
person, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexuality, or any other
such distinction, now is a really good time to say so, and to act like
it. To your friends, to your co-workers, to the people you meet in
stores, to the people you see on the street. Whoever you voted for.
People are scared. People are hurt. People need to hear that they're
not alone, that the world didn't turn on them last night.
As a well-off white man, a member of, supposedly, the winning
demographic class of this election last night, I want to say to
everyone in the US who is angry and scared and despairing today: I
have your back. Nothing has changed for me. Nothing has changed in
how I'm going to see you. To the extent that I can contribute to
this, the US will continue to become more inclusive, more welcoming,
and more supportive at the level of day-to-day interactions between
all of us. Workplaces that have a true ethical committment to
diversity will continue to support that. Multicultural, diverse
cities that have welcomed everyone in all their wonderful variety will
continue to do so.
An election can cause a lot of damage. I'm scared too. But no matter
what, I believe in tolerance, I believe in diversity, I believe love
wins, and there are a lot of people out there like me. A lot. And
we'll continue to act in accordance with those principles no matter
what government is elected.
There is going to be a lot of ink spilled over the next few days
dissecting this election, and a lot of theories put forward for why it
went the way it did. A lot of that is going to come in the form of
blaming people, and a lot of that analysis is going to be more of the
same insider political horse race analysis. I think we should
question that. Sharply.
Going all the way back to the US primaries, and also looking at votes
in other countries like Brexit in the UK, a much more foundational
theme leaps out at me.
The status quo is not working for people.
Technocratic government by political elites is not working for people.
Business as usual is not working for people. Minor tweaks to
increasingly arcane systems is not working for people. People are
feeling lost in bureaucracy, disaffected by elections that do not
present a clear alternate vision, and depressed by a slow slide into
increasingly dismal circumstances.
Government is not doing what we want it to do for us. And people are
getting left behind. The left in the United States (of which I'm
part) has for many years been very concerned about the way blacks and
other racial minorities are systematically pushed to the margins of
our economy, and how women are pushed out of leadership roles. Those
problems are real. But the loss of jobs in the industrial heartland,
the inability of a white, rural, working-class man to support his
family the way his father supported him, the collapse of once-vibrant
communities into poverty and despair: those problems are real too.
The status quo is not working for anyone except for a few
lucky, highly-educated people on the coasts. People, honestly, like
me, and like many of the other (primarily white and male) people who
work in tech. We are one of the few beneficiaries of a system that is
failing the vast majority of people in this country.
I don't think right now is the best time to talk about the solutions I
favor. For good or bad, the US just asked Trump to try his approach.
We'll see how that goes. But I think it's very important to see how
important this failure of our institutions and our economy was in the
outcome of this election, and to see the echoes of that in Sanders's
campaign on the Democratic side, and to think hard about what that
means.
This is something that unites us as a country. The status quo
is not working for the vast majority of people in this country,
whether black or white or Latinx, whether urban or rural, of any
gender.
Let me talk for a moment to the left in the US. The temptation in
human psychology, when one is scared and angry, is to fall back on
zero-sum thinking. To try to get back what we feel like was stolen
from us by "those people." The left has been criticizing the right in
the US for that type of thinking for years now. But you will see the
same style of thinking on the left this morning because it's just
human psychology. So here's the test. Do we really believe in
inclusiveness and in finding a way to escape the zero-sum trap? If
so, the way forward isn't to write off half the country as racist, or
ignorant, or duped, or otherwise to react out of anger and create more
divisions. It's to regroup and rebuild on top of something that
unites us.
The status quo isn't working. We all need something better
than incremental tweaks of a broken system by elitist technocrats
funded by inherited money and multinational corporations.
The result of this election was a huge surprise largely because the
voices of a substantial portion of Americans were not heard by the
polls. If you talk to those Americans, you will quickly find that
they're unsurprised, because they don't feel heard by anything else in
our society either.
This sort of failure is possible because we're not talking to each
other. Many Clinton voters do not know a single Trump voter. Many
Trump voters do not know a single Clinton voter.
There are many causes for this, but as someone who works in tech, I
think we have to own a large part of this failure. We, as the people
who write modern communication tools, have failed our country, and are
failing the world.
The two communication mediums on the rise, the ones that are replacing
traditional newspapers and TV news as the source of information for a
vast number of Americans, are Facebook and Twitter. Both of them,
whatever their merits for other uses, are absolutely awful for our
political discussions, for our understanding of each other, and for
our democracy.
Facebook is a closed bubble of people who think like you. It is
optimized and designed to expose you to your people: to the people you
are the most connected to, to the people you therefore probably agree
with, to the people who think the same way and react to the same
things. Everything from reactions by your friends down to the news
you see on Facebook is filtered to align with your implicit biases as
best as Facebook's algorithms can determine them. It isolates you
from disagreement by design. You can, of course, reach out
intentionally, and families will always cut across political divides
to some extent, but Facebook will default you into a bubble in
which you are not having thoughtful, intelligent discussions with
people who disagree with you.
Twitter, by contrast, is a public screaming match. To express any
controversial political opinion on Twitter, left or right, is
to invite an onslaught by a raging mob. A small number of people can
manage to heavily filter that environment and have some semblance of a
conversation. Almost no one is going to bother. It feels profoundly
dangerous. It's terrifying to say something that might attract real
attention. Only very unusual people are able to risk opening up their
heart and mind on Twitter and being vulnerable enough to possibly
change their minds.
We have to do better than this.
I don't know how to do better than this. I don't have any grand plan.
I'm not the person to start a project. I don't have a start-up idea,
or a free software concept. But if we, as programmers and designers
and free software developers, cannot do better than this, who will?
We have to have a way to enable thoughtful conversations
between people with real and profound political disagreements in an
environment where there is some mutual respect, some foundation of
politeness, and a sufficiently supportive environment that people are
willing to risk being convinced. And it has to somehow bypass the
filter bubble and allow us to come into contact with people who do not
think like us, do not come from the same walk of life, the same
region, the same race, the same religion, the same economic
circumstances.
This is a profound challenge. But the news media is not going to
suddenly revive. TV news is not going to magically become a venue for
intelligent and thoughtful discussion. And people largely do not
change their minds through being preached at by "thought leaders."
People change their minds through contact with other people, through
having their assumptions and conclusions questioned in an environment
that supports enough of a foundational level of decency that they can
get out of the trap of being afraid and defensive.
We don't have that platform. We need it. Or I fear we're in for a
continual whipsaw of zero-sum voting, as factions with no
communication channels to each other whip up xenophobia in an attempt
to outvote each other.
I don't have any profound conclusions. I'm honestly pretty upset. And
pretty scared. But we have to talk to each other. And we have to
listen to each other. And we have to persaude each other. And we
have to be willing to be persuaded.
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