Published on 16 Jul 2015
The German-Austrian offensive on the Eastern Front had undone all of Russia’s territorial gains in the last weeks. Lemberg had fallen and the German troops were at the gates of Warsaw. The Russian casualties were in the millions, especially equipment and officers were becoming scarce. And exactly now, the German high command (OHL) prepared an all-out offensive along the entire frontline. At the same time in Gallipoli, one failure followed the other. How long would the Entente be able to continue this exercise in butchery?
July 17, 2015
The Tumbling Giant – Russia’s Army On The Verge Of Collapse I THE GREAT WAR Week 51
Comments Off on The Tumbling Giant – Russia’s Army On The Verge Of Collapse I THE GREAT WAR Week 51
Minnesota comes in at #5 on the NFL pain ranking
This is, sadly, pretty much right:
The Minnesota Vikings are a franchise committed to family: They have pain to share for all generations. For decades, they’ve bonded the people of the Upper Midwest with their ability to lift you up, then throw you down like a Prince thunder jam from the banks of Lake Minnetonka. Remember when the Metrodome roof collapsed a few years back? That’s what being a Vikings fan is like. Everything looks safe … beautiful even. And then … whoooooooooooooooosh.
To understand the Vikings’ pain is to know their history. No team that we’ll study on the Pain Rankings has been as routinely competitive through the years. Since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, the Vikes have qualified for the postseason 25 times. Twenty-five! Only the Cowboys and Steelers (27 each) have advanced more often. Dallas and Pittsburgh have 11 championships to show for those admissions to the dance. The Vikings? Four Super Bowl losses and a near-lethal serving of concentrated heartbreak.
This is the franchise that gave us the Purple People Eaters, Fran Tarkenton, Cris Carter, early-period Randy Moss, late-period Brett Favre, and Adrian Peterson. They gave us both Denny Green and Mike Tice’s ear pencil! How have the Football Gods not returned the favor with a few Lombardis?
The Vikings were destined for NFL royalty, but never received the crown. If they went to the Football Gods accounting department and asked why — with their abundance of gifts — they’ve never won it all, they’d receive an apology and the acknowledgement of an “unfortunate oversight.” Restitution comes in the form of a one-drink voucher at the holiday party and admission as the No. 5 team on the Pain Rankings.
Comments Off on Minnesota comes in at #5 on the NFL pain ranking
The case for encryption – “Encryption should be enabled for everything by default”
Bruce Schneier explains why you should care (a lot) about having your data encrypted:
Encryption protects our data. It protects our data when it’s sitting on our computers and in data centers, and it protects it when it’s being transmitted around the Internet. It protects our conversations, whether video, voice, or text. It protects our privacy. It protects our anonymity. And sometimes, it protects our lives.
This protection is important for everyone. It’s easy to see how encryption protects journalists, human rights defenders, and political activists in authoritarian countries. But encryption protects the rest of us as well. It protects our data from criminals. It protects it from competitors, neighbors, and family members. It protects it from malicious attackers, and it protects it from accidents.
Encryption works best if it’s ubiquitous and automatic. The two forms of encryption you use most often — https URLs on your browser, and the handset-to-tower link for your cell phone calls — work so well because you don’t even know they’re there.
Encryption should be enabled for everything by default, not a feature you turn on only if you’re doing something you consider worth protecting.
This is important. If we only use encryption when we’re working with important data, then encryption signals that data’s importance. If only dissidents use encryption in a country, that country’s authorities have an easy way of identifying them. But if everyone uses it all of the time, encryption ceases to be a signal. No one can distinguish simple chatting from deeply private conversation. The government can’t tell the dissidents from the rest of the population. Every time you use encryption, you’re protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive.
Comments Off on The case for encryption – “Encryption should be enabled for everything by default”
India’s wavering devotion to tolerance
Shikha Dalmia looks at India’s changing views on other religions:
If there were ever a religion readymade for liberal democracy — and its commitment to religious freedom — Hinduism would be it. Unlike Christianity (and other monotheistic faiths), Hinduism has no one true doctrine handed down by the one true God to be spread and enforced through the one true Church. It’s a loose, amorphous, and ecumenical faith that accepts that all religions are valid and it doesn’t matter which one you follow, as long as you are going to the same place. Hence, it made sense when Hindu-dominated India, after gaining independence from the British in 1947, enshrined secularism and religious pluralism in its constitution — rather than going through a three-century-long process from the Reformation through the Enlightenment that the West did to pry open space for religious tolerance in Christianity.
However, India’s commitment to religious freedom and toleration has been under serious challenge for a couple of decades with the rise of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism. This ideology, that boasts Prime Minister Narendra Modi among its adherents, has always resented the special space that India’s constitution extends its minority religions — like letting Muslims use sharia in their civil matters. But now it has started openly attacking even their right to exist in India because, it maintains, India belongs only to those that can claim it as their fatherland and holy land — a rather hypocritical requirement given that the rapidly spreading Hindu diaspora enjoys strong religious protections in countries such as America and England that aren’t its “holy land and fatherland.”
That a historically tolerant faith could take such an intolerant turn suggests that a religion’s relationship to liberal values might have less to do with its own inner character and more to do with the existential insecurities of its adherents in a given time.
Comments Off on India’s wavering devotion to tolerance
QotD: Feminism’s uneasy attitudes to motherhood
Last week a person named Amy Glass wrote a breathtakingly honest — and breathless — rejection of traditional motherhood:
I hear women talk about how “hard” it is to raise kids and manage a household all the time. I never hear men talk about this. It’s because women secretly like to talk about how hard managing a household is so they don’t have to explain their lack of real accomplishments. Men don’t care to “manage a household.” They aren’t conditioned to think stupid things like that are “important.”
Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.
First, a few small points.
I hear men talk about how hard it is to manage a household and raise kids all the time. (We may not talk about it in terms Glass can recognize, but as a subscriber to the Happy Wife, Happy Life school of marriage, it’s my experience that husbands who don’t recognize and appreciate how hard it is to run a home soon become ex-husbands or miserable husbands.) Glass also may only be hearing what she wants to hear. Or, she may know only asinine men. Who knows? Frankly I don’t care which one is right because I don’t put a lot of stock in what Glass has to say.
Second, this is truly shabby work:
Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.
Talk about word play! You see the sleight of hand, right? “Doing laundry” is a single, discrete task, a subset of a vast realm of responsibilities that often come with running a household and being a mother. Being a doctor, engineer, or business-builder are total careers or vocations. In other words, it’s a false analogy. Like saying being a chef isn’t as worthwhile as being a truck driver because chefs “cut vegetables.” Every career or calling involves unpleasant or tedious tasks.
Just in case you still don’t get it, another illustration. Raising kids involves taking the barbarian clay of a baby and through the alchemy of love and the application of intellect turning it into an emotionally, spiritually, and physically healthy human being and citizen. Meanwhile, doctors put their fingers in old men’s butts. So, to sum up: “Putting fingers in old men’s butts will never be as important as raising children. The word play is holding us back.”
Third (as a reader flagged for me), Glass is not exactly a rigorous thinker. On January 15 she writes:
Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit.
On January 17 she writes:
The great thing about Feminism is that it means that women can do anything. You can be a working woman or a stay at home mother and both choices are equally valid. There is no “wrong way” to do feminism.
This means that as good feminists, we never judge the choices of other women.
Assuming there isn’t a technical explanation for what’s going on here (a false byline, a prank, or maybe an angry capuchin monkey loose in the IT department) this is the kind of inconsistency that doesn’t invite refutation so much as medication.
Jonah Goldberg, “It’s Still Only Two Cheers for Capitalism”, The Goldberg File, 2014-01-31
Comments Off on QotD: Feminism’s uneasy attitudes to motherhood
