Here in peaceful and progressive Canada, it is so easy to feel smug towards larger countries that get their hands dirty in the world arena. Especially that one country built on the conquest and near eradication of its peaceful natives who have received hardly any compensation or even an apology. You know, the one founded on belligerent exceptionalism and manifest superiority over other cultures that was turned into a national religion that has historically led to imperialist conquest and mass slaughter. This country still has an actual federal law that requires all foreigners to carry their papers with them at all times, or risk being deported by any policeman who can, simply on a whim, question and detain them. The country so primitive and barbaric that it actively uses the death penalty, shrugging off international protests about it just as coldly as it does in important environmental issues. Its provincial masses bitterly cling to their traditional values while their media feeds them a constant diet of mindless pap and actively hushes up embarrassing facts. They rarely travel abroad, being not just obsessed with ethnic purity and deeply suspicious, even afraid, of anything foreign, but also unapologetically sexist and classist, especially towards this one minority they consider dirty, criminal and less evolved. We can only sigh in relief that sun is finally setting on the once so unstoppable economic juggernaut… of Japan.
Ilkka, “The elephant in the living world”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2011-01-20
January 26, 2011
QotD: The elephant in the living world
January 23, 2011
John Scalzi on Facebook
John Scalzi has been online for a long time. He even “handrolled his own html code and then uploaded it using UNIX commands because he was excited to have his own Web site, and back in 1993 that’s how you did it.” He’s not excited about Facebook. Not at all:
A friend of mine noted recently that I seemed a little antagonistic about Facebook recently — mostly on my Facebook account, which is some irony for you — and wanted to know what I had against it. The answer is simple enough: Facebook is what happens to the Web when you hit it with the stupid stick. It’s a dumbed-down version of the functionality the Web already had, just not all in one place at one time.
Facebook has made substandard versions of everything on the Web, bundled it together and somehow found itself being lauded for it, as if AOL, Friendster and MySpace had never managed the same slightly embarrassing trick. Facebook had the advantage of not being saddled with AOL’s last-gen baggage, Friendster’s too-early-for-its-moment-ness, or MySpace’s aggressive ugliness, and it had the largely accidental advantage of being upmarket first — it was originally limited to college students and gaining some cachet therein — before it let in the rabble. But the idea that it’s doing something better, new or innovative is largely PR and faffery. Zuckerberg is in fact not a genius; he’s an ambitious nerd who was in the right place at the right time, and was apparently willing to be a ruthless dick when he had to be. Now he has billions because of it. Good for him. It doesn’t make me like his monstrosity any better.
[. . .]
I look at Facebook and what I mostly see are a bunch of seemingly arbitrary and annoying functionality choices. A mail system that doesn’t have a Bcc function doesn’t belong in the 21st Century. Facebook shouldn’t be telling me how many “friends” I should have, especially when there’s clearly no technological impetus for it. Its grasping attempts to get its hooks into every single thing I do feels like being groped by an overly obnoxious salesman. Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position. Basically there’s very little Facebook does, either as a technological platform or as a company, that doesn’t remind me that “banal mediocrity” is apparently the highest accolade one can aspire to at that particular organization.
I have a Facebook account, but only really check it every few days. Twitter, on the other hand I’ve found to be an excellent tool for a blogger: lots and lots of interesting stuff has come to my attention first through a Twitter update from journalists, bloggers, celebrities, and just ordinary folks. And it doesn’t try to worm its way into everything I do.
Some folks felt John was being too harsh on Facebook users, rather than the site itself, so he posted an update later that day:
* In comments here and elsewhere there was interpretation of me saying that Facebook wasn’t for someone like me, but it was for normal people as a) a way to signal that I am awesome and smart and also awesome, and b) normal people are stupid and suck, and that’s why they use Facebook. Yeah, no. It’s not for me because the functionality doesn’t map well for what I want to do or have for my online experience, and “normal” in this case doesn’t mean “stupid people who suck,” it means “people who don’t want to make the time/energy commitment to run their own site.”
It’s always a problem with written work . . . some people will misunderstand or misinterpret what you’re saying — deliberately or otherwise — and it’s difficult to make something so clear that it can’t be twisted. Did I say difficult? I should have said impossible.
January 22, 2011
How Big Government fans cast their arguments
L.A. Liberty rounds up the rhetorical conventions of Big Government sympathizers:
With discussions of “rhetoric” in the air, I thought it timely to propose what I have observed — from online discussions, family get-togethers, and everything in between — as the archetypal rhetorical conventions of big government sympathizers (i.e. the left, generally, though not exclusively):
* deflections (altering or averting the basis of the discussion to a different but seemingly related topic),
* assertions of pathos (appeals to one’s emotions, usually in the form of a sad hypothetical or a specific personal account, intended to either pity a concession or portray the opposition as a monster; this could also take the form of fear mongering),
* assertions of ethos (attempts to find hypocrisy in the opposition’s position, either by alleging that a different position held by the opposition is counter to their opposition’s current position, or by simply alleging “You would sing a different tune if it were you [or other person you care about] who needed [said government program]”)
* ad hominem attacks (related to pathos, such an attack charges either the opposition or another person who shares the opposition’s position in order to render an argument invalid, this often takes the form of accusations of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry),
* straw men (absurd conclusions, ostensibly based on the opposition’s argument, created in order to be refuted)
and perhaps most common of all…
* non-sequiturs (similar to straw men, these are failures in logic that assume incorrect conclusions; often a form of reducto ad absurdum based on incomplete or incorrect data)These conventions can be explained by what is arguably the greatest weakness of big government sympathizers: a lack of reasoned thought and creativity that is the result of their inability to look beyond the status quo. In other words, because government does it, they have a hard time envisioning how it could be done without government.
January 17, 2011
QotD: The impermanence of “The Cloud”
We adopt many web services because they’re convenient (and free!), but it’s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it’s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, or cancel their services at will. By then, of course, we’re trapped in an unstable relationship, and our only means of recourse is to wail as loudly as possible, “You broke my heart!”
The big lesson that should have come out of the Tumbleocalypse was that we trust too easily. Did any of us listen? Nah. Instead, we’re signing our friends up to Dropbox to score 250 megs of bonus storage space and sending our most important documents to “the cloud.” We trust Dropbox because we trust others who use Dropbox: web designers, tech writers and professionals who, we believe, would never gamble with an unproven, flaky, or suspect service. Without this kind of trust-by-proxy, free web services couldn’t survive at all. Can you imagine anybody in their right mind signing up for a Facebook account today without a good friend by the sidelines whispering, “Don’t mind all that privacy whaffle. I know these guys mean well.”
Cloud storage is convenient, of course — ask anybody who’s experienced the horrors of manually synching PC to iPhone — but we downplay the risks involved in outsourcing control of the data we own. We so badly want to live in the future that we’ve lost the ability to question what living in the future might actually mean.
[. . .]
Those who believe that “the cloud” can act as a storage platform for our collective memories believe that everything that was available to us yesterday will be just as available to us tomorrow. Where exactly does this conviction come from?
The web is like any other sprawling city, and maybe worse: it’s so damn rickety it’s a minor miracle it hasn’t collapsed entirely. When you link, you do so trusting that the data to which you direct your readers won’t just up and disappear into the virtual ether. Except that, inevitably, it will — the short history of the web has established that much. We live somewhere, we leave, it becomes forgotten, and then we come back years later to find our old haunts brutally 404’d.
Connor O’Brien, “Link Rot”, The Bygone Bureau, 2011-01-17
December 21, 2010
Do not attempt to change planes in Bombay
India is a rising economic power in the world, but it still has lots and lots of problems. Sean had to change planes in Bombay. It wasn’t a pleasant experience:
It wasn’t just one person who’d fucked up. This was no single, lone fuck-up cascading through the nooks and crannies of a complex system, like a butterfly causes a hurricane; everybody who touched my life that day, apart from, thankfully, the pilot and the airframe maintenance crew and my rickshaw driver, was busy fucking up in one way or another, sometimes spectacularly so. The guy who had all that time to anticipate the Diwali crush and thousands of rebookings fucked up. The guy who’d arranged the airport signs fucked up. So did the guy who cleaned the floors. The women representing Air India and India Air were a pair of fucknuts; the baggage handlers were probably already pretty fucked up before they even got to work, which of course fucked things up even worse. And the guy who designed the airport had, at some point well in the past, fucked up pretty royally. Even my taxi driver was a complete fuckup. The president of Air India? That guy’s totally fucked in the head. What was most remarkable about it, though, is that despite things being so thoroughly fucked, I did eventually get where I was going. With my western eye, all I could see was disaster, chaos, and impossibility; what I couldn’t see, until a good samaritan made it clear, is that there was in fact a solution. I’d been told that this is a common thing in India, that life there can be a series of 11th-hour miracles.
And all this, at the freakin’ airport. If there was going to be more of the same in India, I’d better get used to it — and learn to navigate it better — before I tried to ride my scooter from one end of the country to the other.
H/T to Damian Penny for the link.
November 27, 2010
Anyone remember when Homeland Security got the right to shut down websites?
In addition to their role in defending the homeland, apparently they’re also now copyright enforcers:
The investigative arm of the Homeland Security Department appears to be shutting down websites that facilitate copyright infringement.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has seized dozens of domain names over the past few days, according to TorrentFreak.
ICE appears to be targeting sites that help Internet users download copyrighted music, as well as sites that sell bootleg goods, such as fake designer handbags.
The sites are replaced with a note from the government: “This domain named has been seized by ICE, Homeland Security Investigations.”
H/T to Ace of Spades HQ for the link.
It would be nice to know what part of the act of Congress that set up the Department of Homeland Security permits this kind of action. So that I can know whether to thank George Bush or Barack Obama.
[. . .]
First they were grabbing crotches in airports…
This overrreach by the DHS is breathtaking and clearly violates the spirit of the act of Congress that created it and the public’s understanding of the rationale for the creation of DHS. I’m not saying the domains were not involved in copyright infringement. I’m saying the DHS involvement is odd and the method — seizure of the domains — lacks a certain due process.
It’s ugly and ham-fisted. And it is difficult to see how it could be aimed at drawing the public’s attention away from the travails of the TSA. Rather, it looks like another run-of-the-mill stupid move on the part of Obama and Napolitano. It will be interesting next week to see the reaction of Representatives and Senators.
November 26, 2010
British Columbia: Canada’s Banana Republic
A story in the Globe and Mail on how Elections BC rigged the rules after the fact to reject a petition:
Elections BC rejected a Fight HST recall application as too lengthy — but did so using rules that were drafted after it received the application.
The rejection has led recall organizers to suggest the province’s chief electoral officer deliberately thwarted their attempt to get approval to launch a petition to oust a Liberal MLA who supported the harmonized sales tax, and should step down.
While Elections BC has defended its new rules — which pushed the Fight HST application over a 200-word limit by counting the acronyms MLA and HST as eight words instead of two — recall organizers expressed concern that they were not included in the application form when they downloaded it from Elections BC’s website.
“It’s a total joke. This is the kind of thing they do in banana republics … when they don’t want to have elections or they don’t want people to win. And we’re doing it right here in Canada,” said Chris Delaney, an organizer of the Fight HST campaign.
H/T to Steve Muhlberger for the link.
November 15, 2010
QotD: “Stop crediting the Tories with scruples they show no sign of possessing”
Someday, historians will write about those Tory ministers who, under pressure, had the courage to do the wrong thing. Still, after so many such examples, it might occur to someone that these are their principles: not the ones they are presumed to have, based on past statements, but the ones they actually practice.
[. . .]
I suppose it’s possible these other Conservatives exist in theory, as a kind of Platonic ideal form. And so the principles commonly ascribed to them may also be said to exist, as abstractions. But if they never actually act on them, of what real-world significance are they? How is it meaningful to talk about them?
Perhaps there may once have been this great tension between Harper In Reality and the Harper Who May Exist in Theory, wrestling with each other over every great decision. Probably it was a struggle, jettisoning long-held convictions for short-term political gain — the first couple of times. But after the 50th or 60th time I can’t imagine he even notices. So we should stop pretending he does: stop crediting the Tories with scruples they show no outward sign of possessing.
It’s not as if this is anything new, after all. The Tories have been signalling their disdain for principled politics for—well, since their founding, or indeed before. The lesson the party’s leadership drew from the Reform-Alliance experience was not that these parties had been undisciplined or ill-led, but that they had been too radical, too honest, too principled. And the lesson they had absorbed from the Liberals’ success was the corollary. So: make no promises, if you can, or if you must make some, do not be bound by them, or indeed by anything else. And now we have two such parties.
Andrew Coyne, “Politics all the way down: Stop crediting the Tories with scruples they show no sign of possessing”, Maclean’s, 2010-11-15
November 14, 2010
Life replicates art, kinda
As one of the comments on this article in The Cord points out, it’s highly ironic that “at a speech about a book detailing how the police did nothing to uphold the laws of the land the university did exactly the same thing.”
What was scheduled as a speech by Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford turned sour tonight as protesters opposing the journalist’s new book Helpless: Caledonia’s Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us took over the stage.
Three protesters locked themselves together at the centre of the stage where Blatchford was meant to speak at the University of Waterloo’s (UW) Humanities Theatre in Hagey Hall, with another individual acting as their “negotiator”. A fifth, Tallula Marigold, acted as the group’s media representative.
“We don’t want people who are really, really racist teaching [the people we love],” said Marigold of Blatchford. “And we don’t want that person to have a public forum because it makes it dangerous for others in the public forum.”
If nothing else, the passion of the protesters has persuaded me that I must buy and read Blatchford’s latest book . . .
November 9, 2010
November 7, 2010
October 30, 2010
“North Americans have gotten used to ‘licorice’ that tastes like strips of laminated DQ menus”
A. Brouwer and A. Wilson lament the so-called “licorice” that benighted North Americans put up with:
A Twizzler is to genuine licorice what Edward Cullen is to Vlad The Impaler: empty calories. The real thing is an unmistakable, reverberant, compellingly Gothic experience, older than a crumbling castle and just a little bit spooky (Tutankhamen’s tomb was stocked with copious amounts of licorice). The tenacious, pale-flowered licorice shrub is related to the pea family, and is found in Southern Europe and Asia. Its long yellow-brown roots contain the distinctive licorice ingredient in addition to a compound that is 30 times more powerful than cane sugar. Boiling the roots produces infusions and extracts; crushing and drying them yields sticks for chewing. Like marshmallow, licorice root was originally used medicinally (to treat bronchial ailments, reduce pain from ulcers and arthritis, and relieve anxiety), long before it evolved into a sweet treat. Licorice confectionery is created by adding sugar and a binding agent to the extract, often with added anise (although their flavours are similar, anise is not related to the licorice plant — but it is cheaper). Other ingredients in traditional licorice candy may include molasses, honey, menthol, fruits and berries. The pulped block licorice sold to manufacturers often absorbs flavour from bay leaves used for packing.
The largest exporter of licorice extract is Spain, followed by Russia and Italy; their products range in taste from mild to sharply peppery. The Dutch in particular are crazy for the dark stuff, selling zoet drops in market bins in the shapes of animals, coins and lucky charms. European licorice confectionery tends to be hard and salty, as distinct from the soft, sweet U.S. type. Which brings us back to Halloween here at home, and — sigh — the bogusness of those shiny black ropes. Genuine licorice tastes like a cross between a wizard’s apothecary and the best sugar ever; sadly, North Americans have gotten used to “licorice” that tastes like strips of laminated DQ menus.
October 29, 2010
Would KFC’s Double Down have been a hit without the Food Police panic?
Lorne Gunter salutes KFC and their surprise hit menu item:
Way to go KFC! Your Double Down sandwich has the health police in a tizzy. Those preachy, prancing, eat-your-peas pokenoses can’t decide whether to tax you, shield their children’s eyes from you or send you to re-education camp — or perhaps all three at once.
I’m am happy to hear your new bun-less concoction is your most successful new-product launch in company history. May the marketing mastermind who came up with the Double-D get an unhealthy bonus.
To be honest, I can’t even imagine trying one — two deep-fried chicken breasts wrapped around two strips of bacon, two slices of processed cheese and some sauce doesn’t appeal to me — except maybe as a dare; a Double Down Dare. Still, I am genuinely pleased that you have had the chicken balls to come out with an item that thumbs its nose so completely at conventional public-health wisdom.
I’ll never eat one myself, but I cheer on the spirit of those who tell the Nanny State’s food police where to go.
October 27, 2010
The surplus of “steampunk” in SF
I have to admit that “steampunk” never really made it onto my regular reading list. I rather like some of the artwork and created artifacts, but the actual stories don’t grab me. Charles Stross isn’t a fan, either:
I am becoming annoyed by the current glut of Steampunk that is being foisted on the SF-reading public via the likes of Tor.com and io9.
It’s not that I actively dislike steampunk, and indeed I have fond memories of the likes of K. W. Jeter’s “Infernal Devices”, Tim Powers’ “The Anubis Gates”, the works of James Blaylock, and other features of the 1980s steampunk scene. I don’t have that much to say against the aesthetic and costumery other than, gosh, that must be rather hot and hard to perambulate in. (I will confess to being a big fan of Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius.) It’s just that there’s too damn much of it about right now, and furthermore, it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)
We’ve been at this point before with other sub-genres, with cyberpunk and, more recently,
paranormal romancefang fuckersbodice rippers with vamp-Sparkly Vampyres in Lurve: it’s poised on the edge of over-exposure. Maybe it’s on its way to becoming a new sub-genre, or even a new shelf category in the bookstores. But in the meantime, it’s over-blown. The category is filling up with trashy, derivative junk and also with good authors who damn well ought to know better than to jump on a bandwagon. (Take it from one whose first novel got the ‘S’-word pinned on it — singularity — back when that was hot: if you’re lucky, your career will last long enough that you live to regret it.) Harumph, young folks today, get off my lawn ….
October 21, 2010
QotD: Linguistic voids and what they say about that culture
I thought a bit more about how languages differ on how they assign words to concepts and how this affects the thought processes of people who think in those languages. For example, imagine if some language had only one word that meant both “buy” and “steal”, and you had to express the notion of free markets to them. Yet equally absurd examples abound in English that, despite its huge vocabulary, still uses one word “love” to express how newlyweds love each other, a parent loves a child, a Southerner loves good barbeque and a liberal loves Che Guevara, even though all four are utterly different things. Equally oddly, the verb “play” is used for poker, hopscotch, trumpet and Hamlet: maybe this somehow makes sense for native speakers, but in Finnish all four are different words. Another gap in English that I find ever stranger the more I think about it is how you have to say “extended family” since English does not have a separate word for this hugely important concept (at least I have never heard of it). Such gaps reveal a lot about the speakers who develop the language; for example, recall how the Chinese have one word “crisatunity” to mean both crisis and opportunity, Russians have no word for “freedom” and the French lack the word for an “entrepreneur”.
Ilkka, “A word for everything and everything in a word”, The Fourth Checkraise, 2010-10-21
