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link roundup 10

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First, it seems to be a fact that the genuinely intellectual wings of the alt-right or neo-reaction (NRx) or whatever you want to call it, are probably too intelligent and sophisticated for bourgeois intellectual workers to engage with, let alone compete with. The reason I know this is because I have only been able to really explore this world with the privilege of my sabbatical; bourgeois intellectual workers typically just don’t have the time to read a bunch of long essays on the internet. So if those essays are actually pretty smart and a legitimate challenge to your institutional authority as a credentialed intellectual—you are functionally required to close ranks, if only with a silent agreement to not engage. As an academic political scientist, I have at least average comfort with the history of political thought, yet when I really peruse all the independent NRx intellectuals, if I’m being honest I’d have to admit that I would need to go back to the books to really grok and engage what some of them are trying to say. I am on research leave and I don’t even have the time (or interest) in really doing that as deeply as would be required to engage all of it meaningfully. This is how I can very confidently call bullshit on any currently full-time bourgeois symbol-manipulator who pretends to know with any confidence the alleged uselessness or harmfulness of the NRx intellectual ecology.

Now, as soon as anyone from this non-institutional world produces effects within the institutional orbit, it is actually a really serious survival reflex for all institutionally privileged intellectuals to play the morality card (“no platform!”). If all these strange, outside autodidacts are actually smart and independently producing high-level intellectual content you don’t have the time to even understand, let alone defeat or otherwise control, this is an existential threat to your entire livelihood. Because all of your personal identity, your status, and your salary, is based directly on your credentialed, legitimated membership card giving your writings and pontifications an officially sanctioned power and authority. If that door is opened even a crack by non-credentialed outsiders, the whole jig is up for the respectable bourgeois monopoly on the official intellectual organs of society.

The shrinking of the middle is largely due to a recent rise in the share of women (who also represent a majority of college students) who identify as either liberal or far left. The share of female respondents, but not male respondents, who describe their political views this way was at an all-time high (41.1 percent for women, 28.9 percent for men). Left-wing views peaked for men way back in 1971, at 43.6 percent.

The share who labeled their political beliefs as either conservative or far right peaked in 2006 for women, and 1989 for men. Another milestone was hit this year: the largest gender gap in self-reported liberalism to date (12.2 percentage points).

Slobodchikoff, an emeritus professor of biology at Northern Arizona University, has been analyzing the sounds of prairie dogs for more than 30 years. Not long after he started, he learned that prairie dogs had distinct alarm calls for different predators. Around the same time, separate researchers found that a few other species had similar vocabularies of danger. What Slobodchikoff claimed to discover in the following decades, however, was extraordinary: Beyond identifying the type of predator, prairie-dog calls also specified its size, shape, color and speed; the animals could even combine the structural elements of their calls in novel ways to describe something they had never seen before. No scientist had ever put forward such a thorough guide to the native tongue of a wild species or discovered one so intricate. Prairie-dog communication is so complex, Slobodchikoff says — so expressive and rich in information — that it constitutes nothing less than language.

In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.

you may have seen this make the rounds, but did you notice steve sailer in the comments?

It is well to repeat that none of the frogtwitter stars who collaborated with Lucia to create the exhibition are Nazis. Kantbot, who wrote the script for the video, summarised frogtwitter as “the last bastion of indiscriminate and all-embracing cultural criticism”; a space not for ideology, but for pure, truly unfiltered critique. It is an anti-political sphere, in many ways, or perhaps one of a politics of pure aesthetics. He points out that the takeover of conventional activism by corporations, creating a world where supposedly heroic, radical ideologies have become just more brands, has made plentiful artistic space for a truly nihilistic satire.

The magic of frogtwitter lies in the balance between the darkness of their nihilism and the joyous, majestic, life-affirming vitality with which they express it, buttressed by a fierce intelligence. Teeveekwa, the star of the video, told me that they were aware of the likely antifa reaction, and deliberately created the show in such a way that it could subsume the resulting violence ideologically, enhancing the narrative and providing more material for future creations.

The Foreign Service List provides another clue, in the form of diplomats’ official assignments. Of all the jobs real State Department representatives perform, political reporting is generally considered to be the most important. Although genuine FSRs frequently hold administrative and consular slots, they are almost never given the important political jobs. So where an FSR does appear in the listing with a political job, it is most likely that the CIA is using the position for cover. There is an exception to this rule: A comparatively few minority-group members who have been brought into the Foreign Service as Reserve Officers under a special program. They are found exclusively in the junior ranks, and their biographic data is complete in the way the CIA people’s is not.

Finally there is another almost certain tipoff. If an agent is listed in the Biographic Register as having been an “analyst” for the Department of the Army (or Navy or Air Force), you can bet that he or she is really working for the CIA. A search of hundreds of names found no legitimate State Department personnel listed as ever having held such a job.

…and related – Leopard Spotted:

[Instead, KGB officer Yuri Trotov‘s method was] a clever combination of insight into human behavior, common sense and strict logic. Bureaucracies … are fundamentally creatures of habit and, as any analyst knows, the key to breaking the adversary’s [operational security] is to find patterns and repetitions. From the late 1950s at the Soviet mission in Thailand and later Japan, Trotov first applied his methods to identifying U.S. intelligence officers in the field. He began systematically combing the KGB archives for consistent patterns observable in the postings of CIA counterparts. What Trotov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Why? Because the CIA personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

The haystack needle Mehta presented Monday now connects Lazarus to WCry, although the tie connecting the two isn’t precisely clear just yet. WCry’s creators may have deliberately added code found in Cantopee in an attempt to trick researchers into mistakenly believing Lazarus Group is behind the ransomware. Researchers at antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab said such a “false flag” is plausible but improbable. The Cantopee code snippet, the researchers explained, was removed from later versions of WCry, making it hard to spot and hence ill-suited to act as a decoy.

“For now, more research is required into older version of WannaCry,” the Kaspersky Lab researchers wrote in a blog post headlined “WannaCry and Lazarus Group—the missing link.” “We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack. One thing is for sure—Neel Mehta’s discovery is the most significant clue to date regarding the origins of WannaCry.”

One of the most unnerving aspects of footwork is how it withholds catharsis. Drums and samples stutter repeatedly, like a gas stove that sparks but never lights. It can feel relentless, uptight, spooky, and desperate; you don’t nod along so much as try to find your path through a maelstrom of way too many snares and high hats. Samples are sped up to a surreal, chipmunk whir or slowed down to a dirgelike pace, at times clashing with the furious rhythms. But there’s something hypnotic about the sound of different rhythms coming together on a track. The music and the dancing can feel wildly free, or aspirational, as though it’s up to the rest of the world to catch up to their speed and vision.

[…]

Many people argue that we’ve exhausted the possibilities of the human voice, and that this has led pop artists to tinker with digital processing. Listening to “Black Origami,” I wondered if the same could ever be said about rhythm. I keep returning to the album, because it keeps me off balance. A song begins with a steady rhythm, and then its parts rearrange themselves into something frenzied and nightmarish. Nothing is where you expect it to be. “Holy Child”—a collaboration with the minimalist composer William Basinski—seems austere and slow, as a woman’s chants are tracked by sparse, muted drumrolls. Her voice is slowly stretched apart, then reinserted alongside a massing riot of snares and kicks, until it becomes its own kind of sputtering rhythm. This is the most enchanting aspect of “Black Origami”—its willingness to turn anything into a beat. There are kick drums and high hats, tambourines and claves, handclaps and foot stomps, the staccato stabs of a singer’s voice; I also felt as if I were hearing the sound of change clattering around in a bowl or a car door being slammed, someone dropping a drum kit down a flight of stairs.

music from the future. also, pitchfork’s bnm

misc

an easy script to set up a full fledged seedbox with minimal configuration. intended for a vps, but works perfectly well on my ubuntu desktop.

fork of sonarr, automated downloading of movies from usenet and trackers (including ptp and btn!)