Thank you for saying this.
Shut up about plot holes!
In short: you don’t know what a plot hole is, so please shut up about them.
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting.
Political musings from someone who thinks the S-D curve is more important to politics than politicians.
Month: August, 2018
August 27, 2018
This is absolutely amazing.
The headline is terrible.
The story, however, is stunning.
Does $60,000 make you middle-class or wealthy on Planet Earth?
The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.
Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.
It’s a critical juncture: After thousands of years of most people on the planet living as serfs, as slaves or in other destitute scenarios, half the population now has the financial means to be able to do more than just try to survive.
“There was almost no middle class before the Industrial Revolution began in the 1830s,” Kharas said. “It was just royalty and peasants. Now we are about to have a majority middle-class world.”
Of course most Americans may find this a little hard to believe, but then:
“Americans have a hard time realizing the American middle class is, in a global perspective, pretty high up,” said Anna Rosling Rönnlund, who founded the Dollar Street project to photograph families and their lifestyles around the world.
And then there is this:
What immediately jumps out flipping through the Dollar Street photos is how remarkably similar daily life is around the world, with the exception of the very rich and poor. The vast majority of the families have electricity, running water in their home, children that attend school and some sort of transportation.
And:
“The most striking thing is so many of the people we visited so far actually have a plastic toothbrush,” said Rönnlund, who started Dollar Street in 2015. “It’s the same with soap. Almost everyone in the world has access to some kind of soap. The poorest buy a tiny fraction of a soap bar or make it themselves. When you come to the middle, you see people buying locally produced, big bars of soap. The higher you go up the income scale, the nicer the soap becomes — or even multiple cleaning products.”
And to those who complain about the crass capitalism which drove this, to those who think this is a horrible and unnatural state of affairs and somehow want to reverse the clock, to those who think we don’t need 23 choices of deodorant or 18 choices of sneakers because somehow this capitalism is making people poorer (rather than driving the development of the middle class) I leave you with this quote:
One poor family held up a plastic bucket as their favorite possession because it was the difference between life and death for them. They dreamed of getting a phone or better bike.
August 26, 2018
Why the left is not enjoying living under the rules they created.
Remember when I noted, based on the comments of an article, that tolerance is not a moral absolute, but a peace treaty?
And observed that by violating the terms of that peace treaty the Left runs the risk of ruin since, in violating the terms of the peace treaty (by attacking conservatives violently and viciously), they are no longer protected by the terms of that peace treaty and run the risk of being violently and viciously attacked?
Well, here’s some of the cultural fallout of the war that is now emerging thanks to the Left’s repeated rejection of peace:
And so, no Guardians of the Galaxy Part 3, at least in the foreseeable future.
Remember: what’s good for Rosanne Barr is good for James Gunn.
And keep in mind that peace treaties take decades to put into place. So expect more firings and more movies being put on the back burner as more lives are destroyed in a tit-for-tat that the Left started with its boycotts of religiously-owned businesses and in it’s attempts to destroy (figuratively, and in a few cases, literally) prominent individuals who exhibit conservative ungoodthink.
“No justice, no peace” sounds like a great chant–but sadly no-one ever thought very deeply what “no peace” really means.
August 25, 2018
I don’t know if this “Trump faces impeachment if the Democrats take the Whitehouse” is a good narrative to run on.
Because all you’re doing is encouraging Republicans to (a) lie when polled about their beliefs, and (b) vote in droves this election cycle, when typically the party in power don’t turn out and vote.
That’s because a lot of people are happy with Trump–as they look at the results (strong economy, declining employment, rising salaries, deregulation, progress on the intractable foreign hotspots such as North Korea, China and Iran), and they see the message from Democrats as being:
“We plan to destroy the man who is making all these things possible–just vote for us.”
And don’t talk to me about some 12 year old tax filing case or Trump’s mistresses as being some sort of existential threat. If tax filing irregularities was an existential threat to a politician, perhaps 90% of the politicians in D.C. would be in jail. And if having an affair was a problem, Bill Clinton would have gone to prison for getting his cock sucked by Monica Lewinsky rather than walk free as a beloved liberal icon. (I mean, you know what that “stained dress” implies, right? That stain isn’t coffee…)
Remember: Bill Clinton was impeached not for having an affair–but for lying about it. All Trump has to do is not say a damned thing, and keep on tweeting as he has always done, since tweeting is not illegal, nor is having an affair.
August 23, 2018
“Risk Inviting?”
The dangers of illiberal liberalism
Liberals who repress speech to prevent harm risk inviting authoritarianism, writes Claire Fox of the Academy of Ideas
What do you mean, “risk inviting authoritarianism?” Hell, the Left (and I refuse to use the term “liberal” because the Left in this country hasn’t been “liberal” (i.e., pro-individual liberty) for a while) has been singing the praises of authoritarianism for a very long time now.
Of course, when authoritarianism arrives, it’s always phrased as protecting the weak and vulnerable. After all, Venezuela’s current horrific economic disaster–which has led to cannibalism (yes, cannibalism)–started as a noble attempt years ago to use the economic power of Venezuela to help the poor.
And here, it’s trying to arrive in the guise of providing “safe spaces”:
If ever there was a vivid illustration of illiberal liberalism, it was the response to one of the essays in this very series. After The Economist published an article by Kathleen Stock, reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex, which sensitively questioned whether “self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans”, the Sussex Students’ Union denounced her as a transphobe. In the union’s original statement, it declared “we will not tolerate hate on our campus.” “Trans and non-binary lives are not a debate.”
These key tropes—“we will not tolerate” and “this is not a debate”—are now frequently deployed to curtail discussion of issues deemed to be taboo, invariably to “protect” people deemed vulnerable from speech deemed hateful. This secular version of blasphemy follows a sacred script, written by those who consider themselves liberals. Dare to query it and you’ll be damned.
There is a famous comment that when authoritarian dictators arrive in a country they don’t sneak in during the middle of the night; they are elected into power with high praise and a thunderous round of applause. After all, this is how Adolf Hitler rose to power: on an “Enabling Act” which sought to sweep aside dissent by concentrating power to a kind leader who would help lead the German people to a better future.
But no-one considers how enabling acts come to be.
This is how. Because we don’t need an “enabling act” unless someone is downtrodden and needs to be protected, unless there are “enemies” for those downtrodden to be protected against, and we’ve reached a supposed boiling point caused by inaction from which there is no other solution.
What do we see today?
A “downtrodden” of women and transgendered individuals who are too fragile to survive criticism. (And while I agree that “Westboro Baptists in your face screaming your ears off” is rude and objectionable, an essay in a local paper is not “Westboro Baptists in your face” rude, or “Leftists in your face screaming your ears off about conservative speakers attempting to give a lecture at a local college” rude. Disagreement is not physical assault, despite the Left’s insistance otherwise.)
An “enemy” in the form of an “alt-right” who supposedly insists on free speech as a vehicle for their rude ideas.
And a Left wing who wishes the power to stop free speech, as it serves no other purpose (at least according to Leftist authors) than to be a vehicle for hateful thoughts which is (in the words of the ACLU, who abandoned their fight for constitutional rights a few years back) “anti-progressive.”
All we need is the burning of the Reichstag (some sort of crisis which galvanize the population) to get our enabling act–and the decent into Left-wing authoritarianism is complete.
Of course “protecting transgendered individuals from being insulted by commentators who disagree with their lifestyle” is pretty weak sauce. After all, who hasn’t been insulted from time to time based on their lifestyle choices?
And while my comment is not intended to disparage transgendered individuals–after all, some of the stuff transgendered people must deal with I would not wish on my worst enemy.
But is it worth throwing away nearly 250 years of freedom for?
Worse, is it worth throwing away the very core freedom (freedom of expression) which protects transgendered individuals? Remember: in Russia during the communist revolution, the revolution was sold as a way to provide greater freedom to those living alternate sexual lifestyles–until a few decades later when they were declared as “deviants” in a Stalinist Russia and thus, enemies of the State…
August 22, 2018
That this even needs to be said strikes me as surprising.
Tolerance is not a moral precept
Tolerance is not a moral absolute; it is a peace treaty. Tolerance is a social norm because it allows different people to live side-by-side without being at each other’s throats. It means that we accept that people may be different from us, in their customs, in their behavior, in their dress, in their sex lives, and that if this doesn’t directly affect our lives, it is none of our business. But the model of a peace treaty differs from the model of a moral precept in one simple way: the protection of a peace treaty only extends to those willing to abide by its terms. It is an agreement to live in peace, not an agreement to be peaceful no matter the conduct of others. A peace treaty is not a suicide pact.
That this even needs to be written strikes me as a little surprising.
Of course there are two dangers with this essay, for those who don’t read it carefully.
One can be seen clearly with this rather deplorable XKCD cartoon:
Don’t see the problem here?
Well, try this: NFL owners approve new national anthem policy with hope of ending protests.
What, you think it is illegal that an employer controls what an employee says or does at work, or attempts to censor messages projected to the public? (Um, isn’t this an argument against Infowars being banned by Facebook?)
Or is this a matter of those NFL players facing the consequences of actions the rest of us think is bullshit and don’t want to listen to? To put it in Randall Munroe’s words:
If [the players taking the knee] are yelled at, boycotted, have [their] show cancelled, or get banned… [their] free speech rights aren’t being violated. It’s just that the people listening think [they’re] an asshole. And they’re showing [them] the door.
See, the problem here is that a peace treaty only holds when people implement the terms of that peace treaty do so with honesty and with clear hearts.
When it comes to speech, a culture of free speech (rather than the simple legalistic limits of the First Amendment) would require us to give the benefit of the doubt to those engaged in speech. That means being tolerate of viewpoints that are not ours, and even viewpoints we may think is “hateful”–since “hate” is often in the eye of the beholder.
And it means that, in our culture in America–the terms of our “peace treaty” essentially require that, rather than shouting others we dislike down and showing them the door (as Randall Munroe explicitly endorses in his comic), we counter speech with more speech: we explain why Randall Munroe’s attitude shown in this cartoon would lead us to a more cruel and meaner world.
Because if one side fails to abide by our peace treaty by shouting down and boycotting those they disagree with–then neither side is bound by the peace treaty.
And that means open season yelling at and boycotting left-wing speakers.
Of course conservatives have always delayed before embracing the tactics of the Left: how long did it take for us to go from the Left-wing protesters marching on Washington D.C. in the early 1970’s to the Tea Party protesters marching on Washington D.C. in the early 2000’s? They’re waiting to see if the peace treaty violations on the Left is an aberration by a few or a refusal to acknowledge the terms by the majority.
And with the election of President Obama–it looked to conservatives to be a rejection of the peace treaty in-toto. In many ways, attitudes by the Left expressed by folks like Randall Munroe–which represent a rejection of the peace treaty of free speech–led to the right’s seeking out a Donald Trump to be President.
Which is why every time the Left gets pissed off at a President Trump tweet, Trump’s core base support increased. Because President Trump is doing precisely what his core voters elected him to do.
To the conservatives who voted for Donald Trump, war was declared a long time ago when the terms of the peace treaty was torn up–and it’s about time someone fights back.
The second problem is related to the first.
The first problem is that a peace treaty requires people to act with honesty and clear hearts.
The second is that people seem ready to abandon the terms of that peace treaty quite easily–because to the human psyche, war seems more glamorous than peace, at least until the reality of war presents itself to us.
Now this may be a very deep and primordial drive in the human psyche. After all, as observed by Mike Rowe on “Dirty Jobs”, in Episode 5 of Season 1, that demolition is a stress-relieving job. There is something gratifying and pleasing to take a sledge hammer to a wall and destroy it.
At some very basic level, we want war. War is inbuilt into each of us.
Who here hasn’t had a fantasy about hurting someone or getting revenge or hitting back when you feel wronged? Who here hasn’t imagined what they would do if they had a weapon they could take to someone who they felt wronged them?
There is a reason why war has been–up until the past few decades–the default mode for much of the world, and why it is the default mode for some of the world even today.
There is a reason why it is easy for groups such as Antifa to recruit unapologetically violent protesters to beat up people and destroy things.
There is a reason why an appeal to “peace” is an appeal to “the better angels of our nature.”
Because if “peace” was the default and “war” required extraordinary activity, there would be far less war in the world today.
We are, however, inherently tribal creatures. Tribalism is built into our brains at a very primitive level–Dunbar’s number even gives a physiological limit to the size of our tribes at around 150 people. And we have an instinct to go to war with those not of our tribe: it’s fight or flight, and you can see this instinct in every animal with a brain.
War is the default. Peace requires effort.
So we must try to uphold our peace treaties, despite our worst instincts.
When we get angry it is easy to discard the peace treaties. After all, if I’m on the losing end of a transaction, it’s not that I wasn’t good enough or level enough or did the right things–it’s because the other person is a threat to me, a threat to the tribe–and they must be destroyed.
And it is fucking hard to listen to the better angels of our nature, to understand that there is nothing to be gained by throwing away the peace treaties negotiated carefully by our culture, to seek out and destroy the other person.
Because if I do that, then they no longer have to abide by the peace treaties that define the civil behavior that underlies civilization.
And they’ve already demonstrated they have the upper hand. So do I need to go back for a double-serving of hurt?
And where does that cycle end? With school shootings? Rampage murders at work?
So on this front I will take one small issue with the article I linked with.
Certain rights (negative rights) are inherent “rights” in the sense that they require no governments to enforce them. The right to free speech, for example, requires no formal organization to provide me speech, in the same way that positive rights (such as the “right to a job”) requires the creation of a modern economic system protected by governments to define “jobs” in the first place.
But those negative rights (the right to free expression, for example) do require cooperation between individuals. They do necessitate the establishment of these cultural “peace treaties,” especially in a country as culturally diverse as the United States. They require us to cooperate, for us to be civil, and in being civil for us to create the underpinnings of civilization.
And to fully appreciate these peace treaties and the ramifications of our cultural negotiations, they require a deep and abiding respect for philosophy–for the philosophers who tried to understand the edges of moral theory, for the alternate viewpoints they offer us to help expand our thinking.
So these peace treaties must not be treated lightly.
Which means to reduce “tolerance” from a moral precept to a “peace treaty” does not reduce the moral imperative for each of us to take responsibility in keeping the peace, and in tolerating other viewpoints which we may disagree with or find hateful.
In fact, it puts more of the burden on each of us to be tolerant of our neighbors.
Because that informal peace treaty is the only thing keeping us from descending into chaos and war.
August 21, 2018
My thoughts on the toppling of “Silent Sam.”
For those of you who do not know, the “Silent Sam” statue was a statue of a confederate soldier erected in 1913 on the UNC Chapel Hill Campus during an era where a number of confederate statues were being erected in part to “put ni–ers in their place.” (*) Unlike many confederate statues which were mass produced at that time, this was commissioned and paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a heredity association which promotes the Lost Cause narrative around the South.
The UNC Chapel Hill campus, for those who are also not aware, leans farther left than UC Berkeley.
And last light, the statue was torn down by protesters.
My comments, left elsewhere:
How you get a thing is just as important as what you get.
What we got was right.
How we got it opens the doors for any group who is upset–rightfully or not–to engage in the destruction of public or private property to express their outrage.
And while what we got was right, we also run a risk of empowering the people who did the toppling–the Workers World Party (who sponsored the “Do It Like Durham”, source, )–whose own political agenda is not just setting history right, but [imposing Soviet-style communism in the United States.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_World_Party)
And while what we got was right, if we allow other radical Left-wing folks set the agenda, a couple of hundred years from now we’re going to have this conversation all over again–but the statues being toppled will be that of Marx and Lenin.
As an addendum, I fully support the arrest and prosecution of the protesters who engaged in this act of destruction. If you believe your actions are right and your belief leads you to be willing to face the consequences of your actions–it would be, in a way, unfair to your beliefs to then let you skate and not suffer the consequences of your actions. And allowing one group to skate under conditions like this makes a mockery of the law, since it suggests that we play favorites with certain groups. (Appropriate leniency can then be shown in the sentencing phase.)
On the other hand, I partially blame the spineless politicians who tried their hardest to kick the can down the road so as not to make waves. For more than a year now they actively debated the removal of Silent Sam in the face of strong opposition going back decades. And while protesters who seek to undermine President Trump and disrupt political events (such as the WWP) brought the statue “front of mind”, the debate has been silently brewing for a while now.
Which means our spineless politicians had decades to quietly remove the statue to some museum somewhere so that the statue could have been put in the proper historic context.
See, for example, the second paragraph starting on scan 104 of this collection: comments by Julian Carr on the dedication of “Silent Sam.”
August 18, 2018
I’m not the only one who has noticed.
Apparently I’m not the only one who has noticed that social media platforms only escape direct legal responsibility for the content published on their web sites if they act as completely neutral parties who take no editorial action against content published on their web sites unless prompted to by a formal complaint.
If you rely on someone else’s platform to express unpopular ideas, especially ideas on the right, you’re now at risk. This raises troubling questions, not only for free speech but for the future of American politics and media. …
Now these companies are trying to have it both ways. They take advantage of the fact that they are not publishers to escape responsibility for the endless amounts of problematic material on their sites, from libel to revenge porn. But at the same time, they are increasingly acting like publishers in deciding which views and people are permitted on their platforms and which are not.
The thing is, it may pass First Amendment muster–as has rightly been pointed out by others, the First Amendment does not apply to corporations. (Though I find it deeply ironic how hard the Left is relying on corporations–for whom they have historic deep distrust–to censor messages for them.)
But that does not mean it necessarily passes muster with certain other laws–specifically Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which acts as a safe harbor for “information content providers” from the content published on their platforms, but only so long as those providers do not actively censor content on their platforms. Otherwise, those platforms are not “information content providers”, but “publishers” who are liable for all the content on their sites.
Nor does it pass anti-trust laws, which is the angle provided in the above article. After all, Alex Jones’ “InfoWars” is itself a media operation–and in competition with companies such as Facebook and YouTube, with CNN and MSNBC. And when one set of media companies shuts down another from the public square–that could be considered prior restraint of trade.
And while one could answer “well, if he really wants to be in the public square, he should do the same heavy lifting internet companies like Facebook has done”–that is a problematic answer itself. Because it suggests for any of us to want to speak our minds on the Internet, if what we want to say is unpopular or seen as hateful, only the extremely wealthy–those who can afford the thousands and thousands of dollars to set up an Internet trunk line and massive servers on multiple coasts–can speak.
I mean, this is the very argument the Left has been using for a while now in its opposition to Citizens United: that it permits a handful of very wealthy individuals and large corporations to monopolize the public square–and to drown out or eliminate alternate political viewpoints.
Or is it the Left only care about such things when it’s their voices who are not in ascendency?
And does this mean to the Left, freedom is like a trolly car: you keep riding it until you get to your stop–then you get off?
Worse–the Internet is corporations all the way down. After all, even if you can afford to spend the thousands of dollars a month for a dedicated trunk line–you still have to buy the trunk line from a Tier 1, 2 or 3 provider. And who is to say that a Tier 2 provider (such as Comcast) or a Tier 1 provider (such as AT&T) won’t be pressured to cut you off from the Internet for saying something people don’t like?
After all, that’s what happened to Pirate Bay, though they were cut off because they were clearly violating the law by pirating music, movies and software.
Without access to a Tier 1 or a Tier 2 provider, you’re left with… what? Running your own fiberoptic cables under the ocean and becoming a Tier 1 provider yourself?
Isn’t that the essence of the Left’s objection to “Citizens United” on steroids?
In the Left’s long march through the institutions a lot of wreckage has been left behind. We’re seeing colleges become jokes. We’re seeing newspapers and television news falling ratings and revenues. We’re watching many other institutions disintegrate–and the latest is seeing a lot of powerful Internet companies, protected by Sarbanes-Oxley from competition from young upstarts (to the point where to make money in technology today, you can’t just create a new idea–you must create an idea that one of Facebook, Apple, Google or Amazon will buy) sow the seeds of their own destruction.
And the reason why this “long march” simply does not work in the United States is because unlike Western Europe, whom the Marxists saw as an impediment to the socialist state they saw as the precursor to true communism and whose culture (of Christianity, authority, family tradition, sexual restraint and patriotism) needed to be destroyed–the United States was founded on the philosophical principles of the Freedom of Man:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
And any agenda of “radical egalitarianism” proposed by the Left in the United States must deal with the real, fundamental and existential question “how is your ‘radical egalitarianism’ better than our devotion to individual liberty?”
As Calvin Coolidge noted in 1926 on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
It’s no wonder those who best embrace the Left’s assertions of “radical egalitarianism” in this country–the fools who join Antifa incorrectly believing–as the (Marxist) Frankfurt School believed–that the United States (having embraced Christianity, authority, family tradition, sexual restraint and patriotism) was ripe for a Fascist uprising similar to the National-Socialists of Germany in the run-up to World War II–are often historically ignorant and culturally blind.
Because unlike the rest of Western Europe, we have already embraced “radical egalitarianism.” Our Declaration of Independence is a declaration to the world of our belief in “radical egalitarianism”, in individualism, and in the supremacy of individualism over the State. Ours is already a country where cultures and governments bend to the needs of the individual, rather than the other way around.
Our governments print voting pamphlets in every native language spoken by the voting population rather than demands our populations learn English to participate in government. Our governments provide reasonable religious accommodation for all faiths and religions–permitting women to wear hijabs in their drivers licenses, for example–rather than going to war against women for wearing the wrong style of dress.
Our history is full of individuals practicing all lifestyles: a century ago we went through a “Christian Perfectionism” phase, where “Perfectionists” of all sorts created great communes to practice odd and interesting lifestyles. One of these “Christian Perfectionist” communities was the Oneida Community, who practiced “free love” (in fact, that’s where we get the term), and started a small company to fund their community which still exists today.
So when the “Antifa” shows up, to Americans they look like NAZI brownshirts but in another guise. We may look at a President Trump with trepidation–after all, every 4 to 8 years we replace the most powerful man in the free world with some inexperienced noob, and Lord knows what sort of chaos that may give rise to. But as radical individualists, the sort of “anti-fascism” being sold by a bunch of often aging radical Leftists does not look like progress.
It looks reactionary, not progress–like proceeding backwards to feudalism (the precursor of socialism), to a time when the world was organized as surfs under the thumb of their (Antifa) manor Lords.
So let the Left continue its long march through the institutions.
Some of these institutions desperately need tearing down and rethinking anyway.
Certainly Facebook has exceeded its usefulness, as has Twitter, and I welcome the next iteration.
Perhaps a more democratic solution based on a common protocol such as RSS, with a search directory that allows us to find our friends and subscribe to their individual feeds without the filtering of a profit-oriented Facebook who wants to rearrange our timelines and insert ads as they see fit.
I mean, hell; all you need is a discovery mechanism associated with RSS which allows an RSS publisher to automatically publish a directory of the RSS feeds of the people they’re subscribed to–and you’ve pretty much replicated Facebook’s “friending” process.
Hoist this on top of a peer to peer networking system with cryptographic handshaking to prevent governments and corporations from intercepting (and censoring) wire messages, and you now have a completely distributed replacement for Facebook–all built on open protocols, that can conceivably then allow individual developers to produce their own clients.
But I am not worried at all about our dedication to Individualism.
The world is moving towards individualism, after all–not away. Unless there is a very powerful authoritarian government on the doorstep of a weaker government, such as Russia chipping away at Ukraine or at Georgia, for most people we are moving towards greater individualism, towards greater individual responsibility and towards greater individual freedom.
Because everyone yearns to breathe free.
Even the Antifa folks yearn to breathe free. They only take the path they do because they’ve been taught that their brand of socialist-communist double-think is a freer path to greater individual autonomy than the alternatives they completely misunderstand. But then, it takes an academic (or a student of that academic) in order to be that fucking stupid.
August 18, 2018
Your headline of the week, from Sweden:
Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens
The story does not disappoint.
August 17, 2018
Dear Google: This Is Stupid.
By the way, Safari stopped recording the elapsed time after 5 seconds when trying to load the CSS file from fonts.googleapis.com, but trust me–it’s longer than 5 seconds. In fact, I managed to write this entire post, including the snapshot of the Safari inspector showing elapsed times–and the CSS file for Google fonts still has not loaded.
Do we need to break the entire fucking Internet so you can load that specialized version of Helvetica that you think looks slightly nicer than the built-in fonts on my computer?
Fuzzy little things that I find interesting. 
