Linkage
A Venn-diagram that helpfully distinguishes between nerds, dweebs, dorks and geeks.
A very useful term: squick.
About Oscar the hospice cat.
Do the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 47 “your libertarian credentials are obvious”.
Making a statement: not entirely sure which one.
Nice story about being patient with people who may have an entire history you do not know of.
The Perth SF/F community is facing a difficult issue of an admitted but not prosecuted sexual assault and resultant con attendance issues.
About crime in the ancient world.
Lecture arguing that we are in a new civilisation.
J K Rowling’s remarkable June 2008 Harvard commencement address.
First academic biography of Eva Braun displays her as not being a “dumb blonde”.
About the messiness of grief.
Sometimes, even in the world of aid, feedback about failure does get taken some notice of.
Discussing the purposes and directions of environmentalists and environmentalism, on the “hook” of whether environmentalists are bad for the planet. Wondering if the green movement is bad for the environment: (often, yes ).
Killing over karaoke in Philippines.
Sentenced to a month in prison in Dubai for kissing on the cheek. A woman who reported being raped in Dubai has been charged with having sex outside marriage with her boyfriend.
Suggesting Europeans are becoming increasingly tolerant of Jew-hatred.
Israeli apartheid week seeks to de-legitimise the state of Israel: the Ontario parliament unanimously condemned the week.
Review of a book arguing that anti-Semitism arose from the war propaganda of the Flavian dynasty. Bigotry only persists if it is functional: and functional for the bigots. Another review, with rather more detail about the sweep of the book.
About Arthur Koestler:
On the page, Koestler was a tireless critic of tyranny who taught us much about our times. In person, however, he seems to have been a towering egomaniac, taking up and discarding other people like so many soiled tissues. Few writers of the last century better diagnosed the monstrousness of others, but that did not stop Arthur Koestler from being a monster himself.
10 questions for Peter Turchin, a pioneer of cliodynamics:
At some point I simply realized that most of the big questions in population dynamics were solved, or about to be solved. So I wrote my book on Complex Population Dynamics, where I synthesized what I thought these answers were, and started looking for some more challenging field. It turned out that the last scientific discipline that has not yet been mathematized was history. At first, I thought that I would simply write some mathematical models for historical dynamics, as a hobby. But once I did that, I wanted to see whether their predictions could be tested with data. To my great surprise, it turned out that there is a lot of quantitative data for historical processes, so testing models and theories is eminently possible. As a result, at this point my main thrust is empirical, rather than mathematical; or, more precisely, I am primarily interested in testing theories with data.
About why Islamophobia is a mischievous and destructive concept:
The discourse of 'Islamophobia' and 'anti-Muslim racism' is ideologically motivated, dishonest, and dangerous. It threatens free speech, trivialises racism, reinvigorates real racism, and emboldens those who promote theocratic politics. As such, it is a discourse that must be wholly rejected by all who promote the values of the Enlightenment, oppose racism, and seek to stand up against genuine anti-Muslim bigotry.
Amnesty International has suspended the head of its gender unit when she protested at the Amnesty’s collaboration with someone of very dubious antecedents. Statement by the head of Amnesty International’s gender unit. Salman Rushdie denounces Amnesty International as “morally bankrupt”. Hitch argues that Amnesty International has “lost it way”.
A very useful term: squick.
About Oscar the hospice cat.
Do the Libertarian Purity Test. I scored 47 “your libertarian credentials are obvious”.
Making a statement: not entirely sure which one.
Nice story about being patient with people who may have an entire history you do not know of.
The Perth SF/F community is facing a difficult issue of an admitted but not prosecuted sexual assault and resultant con attendance issues.
About crime in the ancient world.
Lecture arguing that we are in a new civilisation.
J K Rowling’s remarkable June 2008 Harvard commencement address.
First academic biography of Eva Braun displays her as not being a “dumb blonde”.
About the messiness of grief.
Sometimes, even in the world of aid, feedback about failure does get taken some notice of.
Discussing the purposes and directions of environmentalists and environmentalism, on the “hook” of whether environmentalists are bad for the planet. Wondering if the green movement is bad for the environment: (often, yes ).
Killing over karaoke in Philippines.
Sentenced to a month in prison in Dubai for kissing on the cheek. A woman who reported being raped in Dubai has been charged with having sex outside marriage with her boyfriend.
Suggesting Europeans are becoming increasingly tolerant of Jew-hatred.
Israeli apartheid week seeks to de-legitimise the state of Israel: the Ontario parliament unanimously condemned the week.
Review of a book arguing that anti-Semitism arose from the war propaganda of the Flavian dynasty. Bigotry only persists if it is functional: and functional for the bigots. Another review, with rather more detail about the sweep of the book.
About Arthur Koestler:
On the page, Koestler was a tireless critic of tyranny who taught us much about our times. In person, however, he seems to have been a towering egomaniac, taking up and discarding other people like so many soiled tissues. Few writers of the last century better diagnosed the monstrousness of others, but that did not stop Arthur Koestler from being a monster himself.
10 questions for Peter Turchin, a pioneer of cliodynamics:
At some point I simply realized that most of the big questions in population dynamics were solved, or about to be solved. So I wrote my book on Complex Population Dynamics, where I synthesized what I thought these answers were, and started looking for some more challenging field. It turned out that the last scientific discipline that has not yet been mathematized was history. At first, I thought that I would simply write some mathematical models for historical dynamics, as a hobby. But once I did that, I wanted to see whether their predictions could be tested with data. To my great surprise, it turned out that there is a lot of quantitative data for historical processes, so testing models and theories is eminently possible. As a result, at this point my main thrust is empirical, rather than mathematical; or, more precisely, I am primarily interested in testing theories with data.
About why Islamophobia is a mischievous and destructive concept:
The discourse of 'Islamophobia' and 'anti-Muslim racism' is ideologically motivated, dishonest, and dangerous. It threatens free speech, trivialises racism, reinvigorates real racism, and emboldens those who promote theocratic politics. As such, it is a discourse that must be wholly rejected by all who promote the values of the Enlightenment, oppose racism, and seek to stand up against genuine anti-Muslim bigotry.
Amnesty International has suspended the head of its gender unit when she protested at the Amnesty’s collaboration with someone of very dubious antecedents. Statement by the head of Amnesty International’s gender unit. Salman Rushdie denounces Amnesty International as “morally bankrupt”. Hitch argues that Amnesty International has “lost it way”.