Quotulatiousness

January 16, 2024

“Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray plays the “for the sake of argument” game about the Bad Orange Man:

Let’s pretend. I’m going to accept a bunch of arguments that I don’t believe, for the sake of argument, and see where they take us. For the next two minutes, it’s all true: Donald Trump is a vicious racist, an unspeakably cruel man, and the figure whose ascension to power ends American democracy and turns the country into a fascist dictatorship. All of that is perfectly obvious, for the purposes of our exercise, and only a fool or a fellow traveling fascist could pretend not to see it.

Now: If all of that is true, why can’t America stop him? A thoroughly established constitutional republic, nearing its 250th year, with a deep well of legal and political tradition and thoroughly entrenched institutions, can’t stop a vulgar Nazi thug, who keeps winning and advancing. Right? Distinguished statesmen like Joe Biden and Jerrold Nadler can’t hold the line against the death of the republic, despite their decades of accumulated wisdom. This is already making me feel like an idiot, but I’m committed.

The problem is that, if the prevailing “mainstream” argument about Donald Trump is true, it condemns all of the important political norms that Trump’s critics say they’re protecting. Immune systems that can’t stop a virulent infection are failed immune systems. If Trump is what Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney say he is, then they’ve condemned … everything else. Everything else. The emergence of a Hitler figure, the implosion of the rule of law, the collapse of political institutions, and on and on: None of that happens in a healthy country.

So if you want to argue that this is what’s happening, you must argue that America is in a state of ruin. You have no choice. No Weimar republic, no Nazis. Failure comes from failure. Hitler figures don’t arise from healthy societies.

Turning well to my left, Christopher Hedges has been making this argument for years:

    The parting gift, I expect, of the bankrupt liberalism of the Democratic Party will be a Christianized fascist state. The liberal class, a creature of corporate power, captive to the war industry and the security state, unable or unwilling to ameliorate the prolonged economic insecurity and misery of the working class, blinded by a self-righteous woke ideology that reeks of hypocrisy and disingenuousness and bereft of any political vision, is the bedrock on which the Christian fascists, who have coalesced in cult-like mobs around Donald Trump, have built their terrifying movement.

Taking off my Daily Kos hat, let’s reformulate. Donald Trump is an unusual political figure, and both his election to the presidency and his continued political importance are signs of an unusual moment. But outsider attacks on the supposed mainstream are not uncommon, and we have a long line of outsider figures who’ve played this role in various forms: William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, George Wallace, Ross Perot. Thomas Jefferson attacked the Federalist mainstream, and the existence of the Republican Party grew from exhaustion with a broken center. A schoolhouse in Ripon was our Trump Tower, the place where people broke with the available choices. And then, you know, the Civil War, but still.

The ridiculousness of the current manufactured crisis is found precisely in the inability of existing institutions to fend off the challenge. To deliver the kind of sophisticated analysis that makes bartenders enjoy our conversations so much, it’s because our existing institutions suck. I roll my eyes at the “Orange Hitler” part, but I see the failed Weimar republic part that Trump’s critics (other than Hedges) often imply without noticing. The common refrain on social media in the face of institutional failure: “You want more Trump? This is how you get more Trump.” A healthy politics would already have seen off the moment, instead of deepening a completely unnecessary societal wildfire with a long series of increasingly insane overreactions: WELL LET’S ARREST HIM AND IMPRISON SOME OF HIS SUPPORTERS AND THROW HIM OFF THE BALLOT THAT SHOULD PRODUCE CALM AND RESTORE ORDER.

Flatly, if you think Trump is horrible, it’s time to think about where he comes from and why he isn’t going away quietly.

Mark Twain’s Huck Finn

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Tim DeRoche re-reads Huck Finn after finally engaging with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and finds the two books are not in opposition but should be read as complementing each other:

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Twain scholar Laura Trombley (now the President of Southwestern University in Texas) once told me that Huck Finn isn’t about slavery. “It’s about an abused boy looking for a safe haven,” she said. It was daring for Twain to give a voice to the untutored, unwashed son of the town drunk.

    You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another …

Huck’s voice, often described as “realistic”, is actually a highly stylized literary device and a brilliant riff on how real boys talk. In these first few sentences, Twain inserts himself into the story and sets his protagonist up to be an unreliable narrator, as Huck admits that there will be “stretchers” of his own along the way.

Huck Finn is our national epic, much like The Odyssey is for Greece or the Nibelungenlied is for Germany. Like those older epics, Huck Finn can be read as version of a Jungian myth, in which the hero descends into the Underworld, undergoes trials and tribulations, and returns to us reborn. This story of two travelers on an epic journey is an archetype of our culture, which is why it is retold with such frequency. It’s possible to read every American road novel or movie as a reworking of Huck Finn.

Twain may not have written in verse, but Huck’s narration is beautiful and lyrical and so distinctively American that it has influenced generations of American writers, both popular and literary. That indelible voice, at once innocent and highly perceptive, is the fixed moral point from which Twain can then satirize so many different segments of his beloved country — preachers, con men, politicians, actors, and ordinary gullible Americans.

The book has been criticized as one of the first “white savior” narratives, but this gets it exactly backwards. Huck doesn’t save anyone in the novel. (One of Jane Smiley’s criticisms, in fact, is that Huck doesn’t “act” to save his friend.) It is actually Jim, the slave, who saves Huck — both literally and figuratively. It is Jim who provides Huck with a safe haven, and it is Jim who calls Huck to account when Huck treats him as less than human: “En all you wuz thinkin ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash, en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er de fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.”

Huck eventually humbles himself before Jim and tells us, “I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.” Huck may be the protagonist of this story, but the slave Jim is its moral hero. It is Jim who reveals himself to be a fugitive slave so that Tom Sawyer can get medical attention for his gunshot wound. And after he is freed from slavery, Jim heads home to assume his responsibilities as a husband and father.

In contrast to Jim, Huck yearns for adventure and escape. Forced to live with the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson at the start of the book, he resents their attempts to “sivilize” him. He feels “all cramped up” by the clothes they make him wear, and he dismisses their Biblical teaching because he “don’t take no stock in dead people”. Instead of returning home with Jim, Huck tells us that he intends to “light out for the territory”. He represents one aspect of the American spirit — ironic, secular, individualistic.

Why Real Dijon Mustard Is So Expensive | So Expensive Food | Business Insider

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, France — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Insider Business
Published 12 Jul 2022

Dijon mustard has a tangier, sharper, and spicier flavor compared to other types of mustard. It takes its name from the town of Dijon in Burgundy, France, where it originated. But despite its name, the majority of Dijon mustard that is sold all over the world doesn’t come from France. The few jars that do will cost you up to six times more than regular Dijon mustard (or double if we want to compare it to Grey Poupon). So how is real Dijon mustard different? And why is it so expensive?

Editor’s Note: In this video, the translations at 2:10 and 3:16 are incorrect. The rind of the mustard seed is wrongly referred to as “sound of mustard”. The correct translation is mustard bran. Insider regrets the error.
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QotD: Children and transgenderism

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And then there is the disturbing “social justice” response to gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Increasingly, girly boys and tomboys are being told that gender trumps sex, and if a boy is effeminate or bookish or freaked out by team sports, he may actually be a girl, and if a girl is rough and tumble, sporty, and plays with boys, she may actually be a boy.

In the last few years in Western societies, as these notions have spread, the number of children identifying as trans has skyrocketed. In Sweden, the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a phenomenon stable and rare for decades, has, from 2013 to 2016, increased almost tenfold. In New Zealand, the rate of girls identifying as boys has quadrupled in the same period of time; in Britain, where one NHS clinic is dedicated to trans kids, there were around a hundred girls being treated in 2011; by 2017, there were 1,400.

Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both. But one reason to worry about the new explosion in gender dysphoria is that it seems recently to be driven by girls identifying as boys rather than the other way round. Female sexuality is more fluid and complex than male sexuality, so perhaps girls are more susceptible to ideological suggestion, especially when they are also taught that being a woman means being oppressed.

In the case of merely confused or less informed kids, the consequences of treatment can be permanent. Many of these prepubescent trans-identifying children are put on puberty blockers, drugs that suppress a child’s normal hormonal development, and were originally designed for prostate cancer and premature puberty. The use of these drugs for gender dysphoria is off-label, unapproved by the FDA; there have been no long-term trials to gauge the safety or effectiveness of them for gender dysphoria, and the evidence we have of the side effects of these drugs in FDA-approved treatment is horrifying. Among adults, the FDA has received 24,000 reports of adverse reactions, over half of which it deemed serious. Parents are pressured into giving these drugs to their kids on the grounds that the alternative could be their child’s suicide. Imagine the toll of making a decision about your child like that?

Eighty-five percent of gender-dysphoric children grow out of the condition — and most turn out to be gay. Yes, some are genuinely trans and can and should benefit from treatment. And social transition is fine. But children cannot know for certain who they are sexually or emotionally until they have matured past puberty. Fixing their “gender identity” when they’re 7 or 8, or even earlier, administering puberty blockers to kids as young as 12, is a huge leap in the dark in a short period of time. It cannot be transphobic to believe that no child’s body should be irreparably altered until they are of an age and a certainty to make that decision themselves.

I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

Adults are increasingly forced to obey the new norms of “social justice” or be fired, demoted, ostracized, or canceled. Many resist; many stay quiet; a few succumb and convert. Children have no such options.

Indoctrinate yourselves as much as you want to, guys. It’s a free country. But hey, teacher — leave those kids alone.

Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.

January 15, 2024

An alternative recruiting strategy for the US military

Filed under: Americas, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theophilus Chilton suggests there’s a deeper plan for the US federal government’s blatant encouragement of mass illegal immigration across the US-Mexican border, and if true it might indicate that things are about to “get spicy”:

It genuinely is a mystery …

This move by Texas [using state resources to enforce federal border control against the will of the federal government] represents a ratcheting up of our collapse phase trend towards decentralisation. At least for now (and let’s hope Abbott has the fortitude to follow through), a state is openly defying FedGov in a non-Regime approved way that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Even if FedGov wins this standoff, it presages more and more movement in that direction. The Regime is bleeding power and everyone knows it, even if they can’t afford to let on to that fact. Either way, the Regime is going to have to stop this quickly before other states start getting ideas. If they can’t, their already tarnished reputation will take a further massive hit.

So in light of this news, we saw something else on Thursday that ought to be of interest. A very odd bill has been proposed in the House of Representatives by two Democratic representatives – a bill that would ban “private military activity“. On its face this seems strange since every state in the union already does this. However, the bill, as written, is so vague that it could be interpreted to outlaw organised range shooting activities or even paintball games as “combat training”. This bill reeks of desperation because the Regime knows that its path to collapse is further along than a lot of people think and they know that “private military activity” is a very real possibility. The Regime has been accelerating to the point of no return and is trying to stifle any potential serious opposition.

Opposition to what? Well, that’s a good question. Let’s put some pieces together.

It’s no secret that the US military is facing a serious recruiting shortfall. Obviously, the current Regime has little use for the American military as it has traditionally been constituted. This is shown by the absolutely disrespectful way in which our troops are routinely treated by their own government and chain of command. Especially driving this recruitment deficiency is the huge drop in enlistment by the military’s traditional recruiting stock – rural and suburban White men from the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West. In other words, exactly the kind of people being demonised by the new military with its DIE initiatives, rainbow flags, and trooned officer corps.

So who is going to fill the ranks? Fortuitously, we seem to have a huge flow of military aged males from all over the world crossing our border for whom the Regime has been rolling out the figurative red carpet. These are guys who probably have a lot of time on their hands. Wouldn’t it be a swell idea if we inducted all these guys into the military to make up for the lack of Heritage American interest? Indeed, history repeatedly shows that unpopular regimes typically do exactly this. They start to rely on foreign mercenary forces for a number of purposes.

Certainly, as GAE struggles to keep its steam, there may be a need to send Guatemalans and Nigerians into various Middle Eastern sandboxes to take shrapnel that Americans won’t take. After all, there will still be the vain and desperate attempts to shore up American globohomo empire in that (and other) regions. But historical, one of the main uses of foreign troops has been to try to keep your own potentially rebellious natives in line. Foreign troops have no real connexion with those whom they are suppressing and thus are willing to follow almost any orders that their paymasters give them.

However, unlike many first world countries that are under the Regime’s heel, the USA has a large body of well-armed citizens, many of whom have military training and combat experience. These guys – plus any other patriotic citizens they may be willing to help train – probably won’t take too kindly to being suppressed by foreign hirelings, something that will quickly make a lot of people’s patience run out. Say, wouldn’t it be a shame if all of these armed, trained and trainable people started organising to protect their homes, families, states, and country?

Despite all of the bravado from left-wing Twitter X keyboard warriors about “YoU’rE aR-15 vS. tAnKs AnD f-15s!!1!” the Regime knows that this armed Heritage-American populace is a potential threat, hence the effort to stifle its organising. And on some level, these people must know that they aren’t really a legitimate government and that they exercise power solely through police powers and the force of arms. Even if they don’t, an increasing number of real Americans DO know this. The Regime has lost the mandate of heaven, and history abundantly attests to what happens to regimes to which this has happened.

The radical anti-state agenda of Argentina’s Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jon Miltimore compares the Venezuelan experience after electing Hugo Chavez in 2007 to Argentina’s radically opposed choice to elect Javier Milei as President late in 2023:

Javier Milei, 8 October 2022.
Photo attributed to Vox España via Wikimedia Commons.

In November, the country elected libertarian Javier Milei as its new president. And whereas Hugo Chavez said, “All that was privatized, let it be nationalized”, Milei is essentially saying the opposite: All that was nationalized, let it be privatized.

Milei started by cutting in half the number of federal ministries in Argentina, reducing them from 18 to nine. This was followed by a massive currency devaluation.

Milei did not stop there. In a recent televised announcement, he said he would “repeal rules that impede the privatization of state companies”.

Those words were backed up by a 300-measure order designed to deregulate internet services, eliminate various government price controls, repeal laws that discourage foreign capital investment, abolish the Economy Ministry’s price observatory, and “prepare all state-owned companies to be privatized”.

Milei capped it off on Wednesday with a 351-page omnibus bill that takes aim at Argentina’s regulatory state and would grant Milei emergency powers “until December 31, 2025”.

Giving any president emergency powers is no small thing, even during a genuine crisis. Though Milei’s bill is designed to curb state power, not to expand it — a notable contrast to the typical crisis response paradigm — history and recent events in El Salvador show how emergency powers can be abused and used to violate human rights and liberty.

Whether Milei can get his full agenda through is unclear, but there’s reason for optimism.

His stunning election is itself evidence that Argentines are hungry for change. He’s already shown an impressive pragmatism to wed to his undeniable political flair, surrounding himself with a slew of talented policy experts. This includes Federico Sturzenegger, a former chief economist of Argentina’s central bank who two decades ago managed to turn around the failing Bank of the City of Buenos Aires. Sturzenegger’s reforms were so effective they became a Harvard case study.

Success is by no means certain, of course.

Recovering from decades of Peronism — a blend of socialism, nationalism, and fascism, which dominated Argentina’s political system for years — will not happen overnight. And Argentina’s political class has spent the last few years making a bad situation worse.

Still, the great economist Adam Smith once observed that the key to economic prosperity is surprisingly simple.

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice,” the Wealth of Nations author said.

Milei knows this. He has not just read Smith (in addition to Austrian school economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises). In a 2017 profile, he dubbed himself “Adam Smith’s heir.”

A heavy dose of Adam Smith is precisely what Argentina needs, and Milei has correctly diagnosed the affliction of Argentina’s once-prosperous economy.

“The state doesn’t create wealth; it only destroys it,” Milei said in a widely viewed 2023 interview.

Grave Error

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte calls our attention to an important book on a major Canadian topic … that has been ignored by the Canadian media establishment (as one would expect if it contravenes the official narrative):

Have you read Grave Error? Have you seen it on the shelves in your local bookstore? At the library, perhaps? Did you notice coverage of it in the Globe or hear someone talking about it on CBC?

I’d bet ninety-eight out of a hundred SHuSH readers would answer “no” to all those questions.

The full title of the book is Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Its authors are former University of Calgary political scientist and Harper aide Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion, editor of the Dorchester Review. The book takes strong exception to commentary by media, politicians, and Indigenous leaders on the subject of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I first noticed it over the holidays, several weeks after publication, when it was the overall #1 bestseller on Amazon.

It’s not easy to become the top-selling book on Amazon. You’re competing against Colleen Hoover and Prince Harry and the entire world of books, published and self-published. Grave Error was the only Canadian book, fiction or nonfiction, in Amazon’s top fifty when I came across it. It’s rare to see more than two or three Canadian books in Amazon’s top fifty at any given time.

You won’t have noticed Grave Error in your local bookstore because Amazon is the only outlet that’s selling the book. You won’t have seen coverage of it because no mainstream Canadian media outlet has paid attention to it. Nor does any public library stock it. It has not appeared on any conventional bestseller list, although it has to be a Canadian bestseller — Amazon sells well over half of all books in Canada. Most Amazon sales don’t register on our bestseller lists because Amazon doesn’t cooperate with the organizations that produce the lists.

Grave Error is published by True North, a conservative news website and public policy organization. It is run by Candace Malcolm, who founded True North with her husband, Kaz Nejatian, a former Jason Kenney staffer, now COO of Spotify. It’s published a half dozen hits in recent years, several written by Malcolm herself.

SS77: South Africa Builds a GPMG on the Shoulders of Giants

Filed under: Africa, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2023

In the 1970s, South Africa began looking for a domestic-production GMPG to replace its inventory of FN MAG machine guns. The MAG was an excellent weapon, but the ones in South Africa were getting old and worn out, and with the country under international embargo over Apartheid, new guns and parts were not available from FN.

The SS-77 (named for its two designers, Richard Joseph Smith and Lazlo Soregi) began development in 1977, with initially prototypes built by Lyttleton Engineering Works in 1978. The design took elements from several other excellent machine guns — the side-locking action form the SG43 Goryunov, the barrel release and feed mechanism from the MAG, and the gas system from the PK. After an extensive series of testing and tweaking, the gun was formally adopted by the South African Defence Forces in 1986, and went into serial production. Despite the development cycle, the guns still proved to have significant problems in the field. The gas piston was liable to break, along with problems of broken extractors, loose pins, and other issues. The guns were actually recalled from military service and rebuilt in the early 1990s. Following that redesign program, the gun has proven very reliable and successful in service.

A Mini-SS design was also adopted, essentially the same gun scaled down to 5.56mm. Initial plans were to produce a conversion kit to allow the regular SS-77 to use either caliber, but these were never actually produced.
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QotD: Beyond mere superstition, moderns believe in literal magic

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Stern’s “intellectual Luddites” wrote a whole lot of supercharged, Sturm und Drang hooey about “national souls” and “blood spirits” and whatnot, but even their most Romantic fantasies about the Aryan Übermenschen of yore paled in comparison to stuff like “Critical Race Theory”. Heinrich Himmler may have been the spiritual heir of Stern’s “intellectual Luddites”, but even he, playing with his live-action Castle Wolfenstein playset while the world burned, was a paragon of reason compared to people like Robin DeAngelo. Himmler thought “Nordic” runes were spiritual conduits to the mythic past, but our modern Elites believe, quite literally, in magic.

Magic dirt: There’s something about the Rio Grande, or the Ellis Island ferry, such that crossing it transforms 70-IQ campesinos into bourgie app developers. Magic shapes: Mold plastic into something that looks like a Glock, and anyone who sees it will be compelled to start shooting people. And of course the granddaddy of them all, magic words: Race, sex, these are all “social constructions”, such that a persyn who says xzhey are a woman really IS a woman, physiology be damned. Within the space of a generation, the same people who were smugly slapping Darwin fish on the bumpers of their Subaru Outbacks have declared the very basics of biology rank heresy.

Everyone knows that Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the masses”. It’s a fun quote, but it wasn’t particularly effective rhetoric back in the 19th century, since drug addiction wasn’t really a thing back then.1 Far more effective was David Hume’s description — “sick men’s dreams” — but even that paled in comparison to the 19th century’s go-to tactic: Implied infancy. If religious belief developed naturally, in a predictable pattern — and who could deny it, having read the formidable logic of E.B. Tylor? — then anyone who still clung to his belief in a Magic Sky Fairy must belong, despite his physical presence here in this best of all possible worlds, to Mankind’s intellectual infancy. Of course we’re not saying that the religion of Aquinas and Galileo, of Newton and Boyle, was all piffle … but come now, old sock, you must admit that the Thirty Nine Articles can only be understood “in a non-natural sense”, as Cardinal Newman (of all people!) put it. Are we not, in the face of all-triumphing science, all Robert Elsmere? Surely no one as obviously intelligent as yourself could possibly still …

Marx had that other quote that fits this situation much better, the one about “second time as farce”. Our Postmodern Elite, the I-Fucking-Love-Science crowd, has gone way past intellectual Luddism. They’re digital infants, chanting their hosannas to magic dirt, watching the same cartoon play out over and over again in Minnesota, in Chicago, soon enough in a neighborhood near you (infants love repetition). Tantrums, nom noms, and whee! A shiny!!

Such are the fruits of rationalism.

Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.

    1. Despite the easy availability of all kinds of highly addictive shit like opium and cocaine. Ponder that in the dark watches of the night, if you ever feel like giving yourself insomnia.

January 14, 2024

Tristin Hopper imagines the thoughts of the Toronto Police Service

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of Toronto’s police department:

The Toronto police have not had a good week. After receiving widespread criticism for refusing to disperse an anti-Israel blockade targeting a north Toronto Jewish neighbourhood, video emerged this week of officers delivering coffee and donuts to the blockaders.

And so, only after a cross-section of local politicians and Jewish leaders had expressed bafflement at police inaction, did Toronto police announce plans on Thursday to actually put a stop to protests at the Avenue Road bridge. They even charged one protester with incitement of hatred for allegedly carrying a hate group’s flag at a protest in downtown Toronto.

Monday
I’m sorry — is that the sound of people wanting us to enforce the law? As in, “hey there, sworn peace officer, get in your car, go identify some criminality and use force to stop it?”

Are you sure about that, Toronto? You sure you don’t want us to instead try fixing this with a solidarity flag raising? Or maybe this is something that could be diffused with one of those equity roundtables you keep forcing us to attend.

After all, enforcing the law is a messy business. People could get hurt. This isn’t like handing out a traffic ticket or a jaywalking citation: You’re asking us to confront people who may not care that their actions are illegal, and may employ additional illegal methods to dispute that.

Tuesday
I’m still trying to get my head around this new paradigm. So to refresh: when people break laws, you want us to stop that? The Criminal Code. The Highway Traffic Act. The Controlled Substances Act. You want our officers to read up on contemporary legislation, seek out violators of said legislation, and then apply appropriate sanctions?

This is a minefield, frankly. We’re talking raised voices. Mean tweets. People in handcuffs. Unflattering videos. Outraged Toronto Star columns. This is how we board an escalator that may soon make us pine for the days when our only problems were an easily ignored minority demographic having their overpass shut down.

Wednesday
When we’re enforcing these laws, are you absolutely sure you want us to do this without first checking if they’re politically acceptable? I mean, it would obviously streamline everything if roadways were only ever blockaded by white supremacist cannibal pedophiles, but that’s rarely the case.

And what if they’re doing an illegal thing that is tangentially related to something you like? I had our legal guy look into it and he said that any laws broken as a result of a public protest are still illegal – the right to protest only covers legal things, it turns out. So bear with me; this could result in a city in which graffiti, blockades and vandalism OF ANY KIND could end up banned. It’s a slippery slope.

Soviet and American Massive Attacks – Week 281 – January 13, 1945

Filed under: Asia, Britain, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 13 Jan 2024

In the East, the Soviets launch a massive series of new offensives. In the West, Monty holds an ill-judged press conference about the Battle of the Bulge. Operation Nordwind, the German offensive in Alsace, continues. In Hungary, there’s house to house fighting as the Red Army besieges Budapest. In Asia, the Allies wrestle with the Kamikazes, begin their landings on Luzon, and advance in Burma.

00:54 Intro
01:12 Recap
01:22 Montgomery’s Press Conference
05:53 Operation Nordwind
07:07 The battle for Hungary
09:38 The huge Soviet offensive begins!
12:22 American landings on Luzon
15:29 Anti-Kamikaze tactics
18:11 Slim’s advance in Burma
21:11 Conclusion
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The insane miscarriage of justice in Britain’s Post Office and the courts

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The British Post Office (formerly the Royal Mail) has spent the last several years prosecuting many of its own staff for financial skulduggery uncovered by the Post Office’s computer system. Many people have been convicted and punished, yet it now comes to light that the real culprit is the faulty accounting methods used in the Post Office’s Horizon software:

“Atten-SHUN! EIIR Red Pillar Boxes” by drivethr? is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

What went wrong at the Post Office over that Horizon computer system is being described as very difficult, complicated, we’ll never really find out and Whocouddaknowed?

This is not correct. The Post Office knowed, ICL knowed, Fujitsu knowed.

Therefore and thus, as I’ve said before, just Jail Them All. There will be some who will be able to argue their way out on the basis of their innocence and that’s fine, even great. But let’s start with everyone on the right side of the bars.

It’s long been — as I’ve said — common gossip among programmers that the base problem really was pretty base. The Horizon system counted incompletes as a transaction. So, a transaction is going through and it doesn’t quite make it. Communication problems, something. A sensible system looks at incompletes and ignores them. Only completes, fully handshaken and agreed, change the accounting ledgers. Horizon did not do this. It would count the incomplete as one transaction, then when the full one came through count that as an additional, extra, transaction.

This is how a branch thought it had one number, the centre another. Because the branch regarded the incomplete and the resend as only the one transaction, the centre as two.

But common gossip among programmers isn’t enough, obviously.

It’s bad enough that glitchy software could cause such human tragedy, but it’s worse: Post Office management knew and chose to cover it up.

Inside Pz II Luchs | A WW2 Time Capsule

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 13 Oct 2023

A remarkably rare vehicle, with just 100 built and just two still in existence, the Panzer II Ausf.L “Luchs” is a reconnaissance variant of the Panzer II and this is one of the most intact and original vehicles we have in our collection. Join Chris Copson as he looks inside this Second World War rarity.
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QotD: The misleading wisdom of the ancient world

Filed under: Europe, History, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is difficult for us, today, to take some of the teachings of the ancients seriously. The ancient Greeks believed, for example, that peacock flesh did not rot, and that various small creatures — think mice, maggots, and clams — spontaneously generated from inanimate matter like wheat, meat, and sand.

These seem, today, to be so obviously wrong that our ancestors seem stupid. But they were not. Have you, for example, ever actually observed a mouse being born? And if you’d never seen a peacock, might you not also believe that its flesh really does not rot? We generally do, even now, take our facts on authority, trusting that somebody, somewhere, has observed them or performed the relevant experiments and found them to be true. In fact, things can get all the more convincing when we try the experiments ourselves. I described last week how the rapid “growth” of metals in certain solutions seemed to confirm the theory that they also grew, albeit much more slowly, underground. Or take Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, who in the early seventeenth century reported that, having placed some wheat and a sweaty shirt in a barrel, lo and behold, a few days later there appeared some mice. Spontaneous generation confirmed! (He also, somehow, found that small scorpions spontaneously generated from placing basil under a brick in the sun.) In fact, the persistence of spontaneous generation as a theory should give us pause — although it was tested from the seventeenth century onwards, it was only finally completely debunked by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s.

How could the authority of the ancients be so potent for so long? Well, consider the context. Today, in a world of skyscrapers, indoor plumbing, and the widespread use of horse-less metal chariots, we rarely think that the ancients were in any way more advanced than us. We would, automatically, question them. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, in a world of wooden houses, dirt floors, and carts, then the still-standing achievements of the ancients must have been mind-blowing: centuries-old pyramids, aqueducts, amphitheatres, and arenas, not to mention the written accounts of technologies long lost. Archimedes had allegedly set fire to Roman ships at the siege of Syracuse in the 3rd century BCE, using only mirrors focusing the sun’s beams. Archytas had apparently made a flying pigeon out of wood, and Daedalus had achieved human flight. Perhaps Vulcan’s legendary army of iron men might have been real automata.

Anton Howes, “Trusting the Ancients”, Age of Invention, 2019-10-10.

January 13, 2024

The ongoing encrapification of the internet – “When I hear the phrase ‘web platform’ I reach for my gun”

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia used to be a techno-optimist, eagerly looking forward to ever-improving online experiences. He, like so many of us, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that those hopes are fading out of sight:

I once loved new technology. I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley for 25 years, and was bursting with enthusiasm for its free-wheeling mission to transform the world — and have some fun along the way.

When the Worldwide Web made its debut, I thought I’d found Nirvana. It was like tech was turning everything into a game.

But look at me now. When I hear the phrase “web platform” I reach for my gun.

Where did it go wrong? Did I just get old and embittered? Or did something change in the tech world?

Let me share a story that might help us decide.

What kind of business spends hundreds of billions over 10 years — just to get worse?

This is a story about the birth of the search engine.

There were no commercial search engines back in 1993. But a Stanford student named David Filo compiled a list of his 200 favorite websites.

His buddy Jerry Yang helped turn this into an online list. They called it “Jerry’s Guide to the Worldwide Web”. Filo and Yang added new websites every day to their list — and classified them according to categories.

This turned into Yahoo.

Here’s my favorite part of the story: These two students didn’t even know they were running a business.

They did it for fun. They did it out of love. They did it because it was cool. “We wanted to avoid doing our dissertations”, Yang later explained.

But a venture capitalist named Mike Moritz heard about Filo and Yang, and tracked them down. The founders of Yahoo were living in total squalor in a trailer littered with stale food and pizza boxes, strewed alongside sleeping bags and overheating computers. A phone rang constantly — but nobody bothered to pick it up.

Moritz was dismayed by this dorm-room-gone-wild ambiance, but he was impressed with the students’ web searching technology. So he asked them the obvious question: How much did they plan to charge users?

Filo and Yang had no answer for this. They wanted to give their tech away for free.

Yahoo wasn’t even selling ads back then. It wasn’t tracking users and selling their private information. It didn’t even have a bank account.

But it was a community and had millions of users.

That was a word you heard frequently in Silicon Valley in the early days. People didn’t build web platforms — they formed online communities.

It was a FUN community. People enjoyed being a member. Even the absurd name Yahoo was part of the game — although early investors hated it.

Yang’s job title was “Chief Yahoo”. Filo’s position was “Cheap Yahoo”.

Investors always hate those kinds of things.

But a new web business, back then, was expected to have a silly name. Here are some of the websites launched in the mid-1990s.

Moritz wanted to turn Yahoo into a business. And the founders realized that their fun community was growing faster than they could handle in their down-and-out trailer. So they sold out 25% of Yahoo for $1 million.

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