L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree
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  • Francis Turner

What We Have Here Is Failure To Educate Sep 6, 2018

I have some friends who are college lecturers. They are the unfortunates (of various titles and grades of professor - mostly adjunct) who actually have to face the hordes of undergraduates and somehow impart knowledge to them. At this time of year the students are busily poring over course descriptions and syllabi, and making enquiries about the exact requirements. These enquiries lead the recipients to despair (and, in the cases of the non-Mormon, to booze) For example: Syllabus says Each student must complete a term paper or a final class project. Note emphasis on the OR. Professor giving the course...

By Francis Turner Vote12 2

Shocker! The Chinese Read Clinton’s Emails Aug 29, 2018

I'm shocked, shocked, shocked. Also appalled. Amazed. Astounded and various other adjectives. No I'm not. I'm genuinely surprised (in a good way) that this was reported by anyone and I will genuinely be shocked if CNN, the NY Slimes, The Wapo and so on to follow up on this. In fact I suspect the only way they will is if President Trump tweets about it and they then have to do their duty to bury the story as best they can. I note that I totally missed the first report on this from a month ago which also, mysteriously, failed...

By Francis Turner Vote4 4

My Beautiful Fridge, His Not So Pretty Laundrette Aug 24, 2018

In San Francisco there is general agreement that there is a lack of housing as well as an excess of feces, drug needles etc. You might expect therefore that the local authorities would streamline the permit and approval process to allow more residences to be built. If you did expect that, you would of course be completely wrong because NIMBYism is alive and well in the city. In fact people who want to turn a one-storey laundromat into a block of flats with a laundromat at the bottom have to sue the city to be allowed to develop his property...

By Francis Turner Vote4 0

She Did Nazi That Coming Aug 20, 2018

The minor event that is SJWcon is coming to a close as I write this and, so far as I can tell from reports on social media, it is ending with a whimper and not a bang. While various people said they would protest and counter protest and those statements caused a certain amount of consternation, in fact the grand total of both sets was maybe three dozen. The panels on their riveting topics of wokeness and whether or not disabled people would survive in a post-apocalyptic world (quick answer: they wouldn't and that's problematic) appear to have been held...

By Francis Turner Vote8 5

To Ban or Not To Ban Aug 18, 2018

As Powerlineblog says, the lefties have outsourced the censorship of speech they dislike to Silicon Valley. Powerline reports on the case of Prager University which, having sued Google over its problems with Youtube, now finds itself shadow banned on Facebook. Much the same has happened to Doug Wead who presents some fascinating graphs about how mention of TRump - or even having a Trump quote on the bottom of a screen capture - leads to no-personing. And then there's Jim Treacher who suffered a ban for unexplained reasons - meaning he has no idea what to avoid in order to...

By Francis Turner Vote5 2

Banned by the Faceless Machine Aug 16, 2018

I think everyone has commented on the Infowars banishment from the halls of Social Media. Like most I consider the bans and blocks to be a mistake both philosophically (free speech means freedom for vile speech duh) and for reasons that Sarah Hoyt explains pretty well at PJM. However I think that is, in many ways, the tip of the iceberg: the Internet giants are blocking a lot of people for a lot of reasons and those reasons range from the despicable (see above for the latter as well as my previous post on the subject) to the praiseworthy. Huh?...

By Francis Turner Vote4 1

Kill All Normies – a review Aug 10, 2018

Update: Large portions of the book appear to be plagiarized. My respect for the author has, as a result dwindled drastically. I have not changed the rest of this post however. This is a review of "Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right" by Angela Nagle and a shorter version has been posted on Amazon. TL;DR worth reading, limited, ignores Jordan Peterson (probably because it was written slightly too soon), skip to the end for some non-review bits The author, Angela Nagle, appears to be a British feminist and this colors her...

By Francis Turner Vote2 2

Code Is Free Not Spam Aug 5, 2018

Update: See the bottom for something else FB disapproves of that needs to be watched (and which - second update - they have "graciously' decided to allow.) I'm sure many of my readers are already aware of this but on the book of Feces, the url https://codeisfreespeech.com/ is considered to be spam. So far, at least, the spam detection algorithm extends solely to the URL itself and the use of various URL shorteners but not pictures. Just for fun I tested this further - see screenshot. The image alone was fine - and in fact remains fine so far. Adding...

By Francis Turner Vote2 1

Return of the Permit Raj Jul 24, 2018

Update: I have added/corrected some details about the particular regulations in question I mentioned India's Permit Raj recently. While the Indians have dismantled quite a bit of their Permit Raj, bureaucrats throughout the developed world have seen it as something to admire and emulate. Take, for example, the land of free enterprise that is Australia. A friend I know there is trying to build a house - or rather to be slightly more accurate to not build a house but take a perfectly good existing house and move it a few hundred yards instead - and he's encountered enough red...

By Francis Turner Vote3 0

The Russians and the Narratives Jul 17, 2018

Note: There's an update at the end stolen from someone who nicked it from someone on the book of faces President Trump met President Putin in Helsinki and they had a press conference. Then, as Baldilocks put it so accurately on Twitter: I think that a Weapon of Mass Hysteria was detonated today. I'm not going to say that I think President Trump covered himself in glory at the press conference, far from it, but I don't think his comments deserved the amazing meltdown seen as a result. In fact I'd say he did an amazing job of causing the...

By Francis Turner Vote7 4

XX and Prejudice at Yale Jul 11, 2018

President Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh as the next SCOTUS justice and, entirely predictably, the screeching left went wild. Of course, as became rapidly clear, they would have gone wild no matter who was nominated. Little things like forgetting to replace XX placeholders with the actual name and pre-printed signs for multiple possible nominees did kind of give the game away. However some students (and others) at Yale seem to take the screeching to a whole new level with an open letter complaining about Yale Law School's press release on the subject. That letter is crying out for a good fisking...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

Rhetoric vs Reality Jul 9, 2018

Every marketing professional knows you sell the sizzle. The smell of the bacon. The sound of the onions frying. The dream of a new future. If you're marketing something that's worthwhile, the product that the customer gets at the end lives up to the sizzle. If not you get one-star reviews complaining about how reality failed to live up to the hype. The same applies to political systems and philosophies. Does the proposed political solution produce the promised paradise? or not? After 100 years of trying one might have thought that socialism and communism and related political concepts such as...

By Francis Turner Vote5 0

When Satire Is Truth Jun 30, 2018

Back in the 1960s Malcolm Muggeridge, after publishing what he thought was a ridiculous joke and then discovering that it was actually true, made an observation on parody/satire: There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known. This observation became known as "Muggeridge's Law" A half century later and the truth of this observation has become so apparent that searches for "Life imitates the Onion" produces thousands of results and it becomes increasingly hard to tell whether an article is joking or serious. Here...

By Francis Turner Vote5 6

Brexit Out of the Box Jun 24, 2018

One of the big disappointments to me of Theresa May's handling of Brexit is how conventional she (and many of her ministers) have been regarding Brexit. Rather than treat Brexit as an opportunity to try something radically different that could reinvigorate Britain and inspire the world we're left looking at policies that seem designed to try and make sure Brexit has as little a change on Britain as possible. Given that the UK is a long way from perfect this seems a trifle odd and far from both the rhetoric of the Leave campaign and what I believe voters wanted....

By Francis Turner Vote2 2

Immigration – Cui Non Bono? Jun 20, 2018

In the last week or two the question of immigration has come to the attention of the chattering classes again. Said chattering classes are shocked, shocked that other people in developed nations are not enthralled with having lots of new neighbors from "shithole nations" (to coin a term). It might, I think, be worth examining the costs and benefits to different groups of people of immigration. First there are the immigrants, they are in fact the sole clear beneficiary of migration. Even in a case where they end up in an MS-13 controlled neighborhood, things are likely better than in...

By Francis Turner Vote3 6

Racist Science Jun 14, 2018

Diworsification is now reaching the parts other SJW trends do not reach: Engineering, Science and Technology. As proof I present the editorial from Nature this week saying that "Science benefits from diversity". This editorial is full of derp and lacking in actual science, but it is, however, educational. Now, let me be clear here (in my best Obama tone), I'm not in any way stating that Science should be a white, male, cisnormative heterosexual only activity. In fact it isn't, hasn't been since about the mid 19th century, and no one, least of all me, regrets that. There are famous...

By Francis Turner Vote4 1

I’m not Listening, It Explained Jun 1, 2018

One of the things that most marks out the SJW sort is their utter inability to tolerate an argument. If they say something (or more usually somebody) is bad then they have absolutely no interest in listening to people explain why that thing/person is not in fact bad. Instead they shout that the explainer(s) are ****ISTs ***PHOBEs etc. and that this conversation makes them feel unsafe. Now I have no idea who Jaym Gates is. It (note gender neutral pronoun) seems to be some kind of SF SJW gadfly. More specifically one that is clearly unaware of the word "irony"since...

By Francis Turner Vote12 1

John Humphrys, Bigot May 29, 2018

Given the gagging of UK media regarding Tommy Robinson, I've been wondering what the UK media does think is newsworthy. So I listened to the BBC's "Today Programme" today and heard a, umm, fiery interview between the veteran presenter John Humphrys and Clare Akamanzi, head of the Rwanda Development Board. The interview was as a result of articles about Rwanda's sponsorship of Arsenal FC. Mr Humphrys managed to display appalling arrogance, bigotry and a complete misunderstanding of economics and I was very glad to hear Ms Akamanzi rip into him and call him out as he did so. If you...

By Francis Turner Vote2 0

In England, Gandhi is Spelled Yaxley-Lennon May 27, 2018

One of Mahatma Gandhi's tricks used against the British Empire in India was to get himself arrested for reasons that would highlight idiocies and unfairnesses of Briitsh rule. In other words even though he was in fact breaking the law, by getting arrested with lots of publicity he intended to show that the law was bad and, by implication, that the British Raj was bad. Almost a century later and back in Blighty a gentleman called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is trying the same trick. Mr Yaxley-Lennon is better known as "Tommy Robinson" and notorious as the former leader/spokesman for the English Defence League....

By Francis Turner Vote5 7

Why Government Doesn’t Scale May 27, 2018

One of the big things in Computer Science is "scalability". Scalability is how we get something that works quickly for a handful of data points also works in a reasonable time for thousands or millions of data points. When things don't scale (or when they are stressed beyond the anticipated load by too many people visiting/using...) you get things like the Twitter "Fail Whale" and if it happens too much the people that designed/coded the system get fired. Hence software developers really care about scalability and talk about choosing the right algorithm so that the system does in fact scale....

By Francis Turner Vote31 4

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