Published at 08:07 on 5 April 2018
It’s become increasingly obvious that he did willingly choose to collaborate with the Trump campaign, despite Trump’s well-known fascistic, authoritarian tendencies (which even other Republicans were commenting on during the campaign).
Doubtless, this decision was part of a way to retaliate against Hillary Clinton for her role in an administration that persecuted him, but that’s just a juvenile temper tantrum. I don’t like Hillary much either, but Trump was clearly the worse of the two choices.
After all, what did Assange’s efforts get him? A superpower led by its most corrupt, least transparent regime ever, one threatening to start wars in various spots worldwide, one of which could easily escalate into a nuclear conflict between China and the USA. That’s in addition to a tremendous impediment to progress on global warming.
Assange has shown he was willing to gamble the world’s future for the sake of his petty personal feud with Hillary Clinton. Fuck you very much, Julian.
Published at 13:23 on 3 April 2018
Exhibit A is Honduras, where then Secretary of State Killary Clinton endorsed a coup that installed an regime with a horrible human rights record, and Donald Adolph Bone Spurs Trump now stigmitizes the inevitable refugees from.
Published at 11:58 on 1 April 2018
In war, it tends to be best to worry more about defeating the enemy more than it is to worry about being nice to the enemy in order to make him like you.
In politics, therefore, “If they go low, we go high” is not always the best policy. What is the best policy depends on the particulars of the situation. What exactly do “going low” and “going high” mean? What are the chances of victory with each strategy? Are there any principles which must be compromised to follow either? If so, how important are those principles? And so on.
What made me think of this is the case against gerrymandering that is currently in the Supreme Court. The chance of an anti-gerrymandering verdict has been increased because it’s not just Republicans doing dirt to Democrats; in Maryland, the Democrats are quite reasonably being accused of doing the converse.
Nobody much likes to admit it, but the show that Supreme Court justices put on about adhering to higher principles rather than just going for what their gut wants is quite often just a show. Witness how often conservative justices forget about states’ rights the minute they are asked to rule against a state doing something they consider unacceptably too far to the left.
If it were just red states doing gerrymandering to the disadvantage of Democrats, it would be much more likely that the conservative justices would find some pretext for ruling in favor of a state’s right to gerrymander. Instead, Maryland has helped to give them motive to find some pretext for ruling the opposite way.
Published at 07:16 on 30 March 2018
The Washington post said: The vegans came to protest his restaurant. So this chef carved a deer leg in the window.
First, there is no such protest group as “The Vegans.” Saying there is makes about as much sense as reporting that “The Jews” did something when only a particular subset of them did. Veganism is a dietary choice, full stop. All you need to do to become vegan is refrain from eating any animal products. There is no organized movement you must join and adhere to.
Second, the restaurant was targeted not because it simply served meat, but because:
- It served a particularly cruel meat product, foie gras, and
- Its advertising crassly tried to portray the establishment as an ethically responsible dining choice.
In other words, the restaurant’s owners basically painted a huge target on their backs, then act surprised when that target starts attracting brickbats.
And yes, foie gras is a particularly cruel meat product, far worse than the norm.
Published at 00:09 on 28 March 2018
Even an unrepentant pro-war neocon like George Will is now worrying that Bolton and Trump will start wars. It should have been set further forward some time ago, but it definitely should be now.
Published at 21:10 on 26 March 2018
Use the highest resolution you can. Do not trust the defaults at a print shop to be reasonable. Do not trust the defaults for your software’s PDF generator to be reasonable.
Both defaults might well be reasonable for most of the fonts popular with contemporary tastes in typography, but the fonts popular in the 19th century were crafted in part to show off how the ink and paper technology of the day had progressed to the point where the fine details they employ were possible.
I found that when using Monotype Modern, the thin parts of the strokes showed up so poorly with 10 point body text at the default printer resolution, that the readability of the resulting text was seriously compromised. This might be part of the reason why such fonts have a bad reputation for readability: modern print technology can fail them.
Do everything at the highest resolution possible. An output of 1200 DPI is the bare minimum, with 2400 DPI being better (letterpress printing with hot type had an effective resolution of around 2000 DPI). By “1200 DPI” I mean 1200 DPI in both axes, on a black and white printer. (Color printing uses clusters of 4 dots, and printer makers use weasel wording to flatter their products, so a “2400 DPI” color printer has only the resolution of 600 DPI black-and-white one.)
Using the highest resolution the printer can print should not typically cost more; most shops charge the same per-page fee whether you tell their laser printer to print at a degraded resolution or its best resolution. If you can’t even get 1200 DPI, take your business elsewhere; the shop you are using has substandard technology.
Published at 04:55 on 25 March 2018
Hundreds of thousands of right-wing Americans held marches protesting the violence and crime committed by immigrants and Muslims, featuring tearful testimonials by friends and relatives whose of those whose lives were cut short by acts of immigrant and/or Muslim perpetrated violence.
Long-established First and Fourth amendment rights were held to be obsolete relics of an earlier era and impediments to urgently-needed laws for addressing the crisis.
Conveniently overlooked were well-established facts indicating there is no crisis, given that crime is not increasing and immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than the native-born.
Overall, it was portrayed in the media as an inspiring example of citizens getting motivated to address a long-standing social problem, and hope was held out for progress that might lead the USA to becoming a more safe, modern, and orderly society like Japan or Singapore.
Oh, wait…
Published at 15:06 on 23 March 2018
Just personally, as a queer and an anarchist, I’ll be doubly targeted if the fascists (already in control of the national government, albeit and thankfully with a comically incompetent leader) decide to send their enemies off to the camps. If they come for me, I want to be able to take some of them out.
Beyond just personally, if enough of those targeted have this attitude, those doing the targeting are likely to reevaluate their decision to be fascist collaborators.
The USA is a failing empire on the brink of going full fascist and anyone harboring delusions about it being able to magically achieve some version of late 20th-century European Social Democracy (complete with the requisite social peace and low levels of firearm ownership) just because they’d like it to is pursuing a fool’s paradise.
Besides, those European paradises of government control and regulation are far closer to going fascist than many may realize, as the recent growth of parties like Alternative für Deutschland and Lega Nord illustrates. Even Europe isn’t really the Europe that liberals tend to imagine it is.
The State and the Right have a near-monopoly on the ownership of weapons, and have been taught (in no small part by liberals who refused to prosecute the Bush Regime for its crimes in Iraq) that they can engage in excesses and get away with it. This is a recipe for disaster, and the absolute last thing we need is to give the State more power to render the oppressed even more powerless.
Published at 21:12 on 22 March 2018
Science is merely a process by which an external reality can be observed and verified, nothing more. Science can document as accurately as possible, given our personal failings, how the world is going to hell in a handbasket, but in and of itself it can’t actually change much of that process.
That process is governed by ruling classes and power hierarchies that run on threats, force, human conformity, appeals to emotion, widespread indoctrination, and so on. Science can help understand those processes but again it can only describe them.
Science is about knowledge, not action.
Changing things will require a process of revolutionary struggle; ruling classes never voluntarily relinquish power just because it’s the nice thing to do (and you built and enunciated a convincing fact-and-logic based argument).
Published at 18:47 on 21 March 2018
There is a shortage of decency in the high-tech industry.
I base both these assertions on my experiences at the symposium today, where I met not one but two other individuals in basically the same situation as I am. As long as the high-tech industry considers the following non-qualifications to be job requirements:,
- Male,
- Between the ages of twenty-five and fifty,
- Thinks coding is the most fun thing in the universe,
- Thinks coding is about the only truly fun thing in the universe, really, and
- Outside of role-playing games, martial arts, and science fiction and fantasy fandom, thinks there’s basically little else of interest besides computers.
Then, yes, that industry will continue to suffer a “shortage” of “qualified” people.
