blog

On 14 December 1967 the government passed the Neuwirth Act on contraception at its first reading. Although not yet paid for by social security, the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this which offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professionals, artists and senior management—and some small businessmen. It is interesting to note that the “sexual revolution” was sometimes portrayed as a communal utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the historical rise of individualism. As the lovely word “household” suggests, the couple and the family would be the last bastion of primitive communism in liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy these intermediary communities, the last to separate the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.

Children existed solely to inherit a man’s trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That’s all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there’s nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven’t a clue what he might do when he’s older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value—he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That’s how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.

– Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles

reading

• The psychology of prohibiting outside thinkers – jmrphy.net

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.

• Political polarization among college freshmen is at a record high, as is the share identifying as ‘far left’ – washingtonpost.com

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).

• Can Prairie Dogs Talk? – nytimes.com

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.

• My Family’s Slave – theatlantic.com

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?

• Inside frogtwitter’s dark artistic mind, where nihilistic satire meets fierce intelligence – ibtimes.co.uk

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.

• How to Spot a Spook (1978) – cryptome.org

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.

• Virulent WCry ransomware worm may have North Korea’s fingerprints on it – arstechnica.com

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.”

• “Black Origami”: Jlin’s New Dance Album – newyorker.com

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

• QuickBox

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.

• Radarr

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

here’s a collection of japanese electronic music netlabels. if you’re familiar with this kind of thing, you likely know maltine, but there’s a handful that are a little more obscure and are worth checking out. all of them have free high quality releases.

label	highlights
Maltine Records	guchon, madmaid, dj newtown, iserobin
Bunkai-Kei Records	nyolfen, elect-LO-nica compilation
Sayonara Records [defunct]	gigandect
tuxu records	the つくしEP collection is seriously stellar
Otherman Records	iserobin, xacksecks
edsillforRecordings	dunno, this one’s new on me but it’s breakcore

– Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (1993, 78-79)

to begin with this week – two links that should be read sequentially, but if you only read one, i recommend the first. (but read both!)

the guardian piece about accelerationism is also surprisingly good.

reading

• AGAINST POLITICAL ART – medium.com

Anyone in the art world who has gained the privilege of speech is someone for whom the system is working, and who is working for this system. In formal terms, the discourse which they generate reflects their status and their aims. The “content” is inconsequential. What is required is a form of speech which can supply opinions on a range of subjects (valuable for arts professionals, competing in an industry in which meaning constitutes a form of value) which is theoretically directed against massive global forces (glamorous, since it aligns the spokesman with the rebels, as well as flexible, since it can be applied with minimum variation in almost any country) but doesn’t implicate anyone personally (it is acceptable to run an anti-neoliberal program, which is sponsored by a bank, or arrange a biennial about freedom in a country employing slaves). This is a discourse which fulfills the need to speak, but has no fundamental connection to a concrete object.

• NO PLATFORM FOR ARISTOTLE – medium.com

The reality is that international contemporary art promotes multicultural left-wing sentiments, for obvious reasons: it is a State-supported, global capitalist industry. Capitalism isn’t itself racist, sexist, or right-wing: it’s beyond ideology because it sells ideology, and the more manufactured it is, the more capitalist. Capital liquidates patriarchy because it it liquidates tradition and nature in insatiable hunger for profit — that is Marx’s argument. It’s anti-racist — it annihilates all human differences into quantitative units; on the same basis, if feminism lowers wages, and creates consumer markets, it’s pro-feminism.

[…]

The power of the networked media — this machinery of viral replication — was something to behold. But it wasn’t inexplicable. The speed through which the campaign [to shut down the LD50 gallery] escalated was possible only because of a shared interest of elite cultural institutions, and the radical Left in presenting the specter of a “fascist” enemy as their opposition. The Hackney Gazette, e-flux, the Guardian, and The New York Times all recirculated propaganda legitimating the campaign. The Mayor of Hackney supported it. Art Monthly, funded by the Arts Council, carried a piece by Larne Abse Gogarty describing “a delusion of free speech only permissible to those who never have to feel vulnerable on the street.” (I wondered how facing a mob screaming Nazi at you ranks in the vulnerability sweepstakes.)

• Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in – theguardian.com

I asked Land what he thought of left accelerationism. “The notion that self-propelling technology is separable from capitalism,” he said, “is a deep theoretical error.”

• The Professor and the Jihadi – nytimes.com

The visit, along with group discussions, they said, had pushed the jihadist contingent to be more communicative. They had kept to themselves before the debate, their lives and rap sheets a mystery. “Now we begin to understand a bit more,” the North African told me. One of the jihadis “had a breakup, others had family problems.” Some of them, he added, had begun to talk a bit differently about their prospects after swapping stories with other inmates doing longer sentences. “They had this idea that we’re fiche S” — the designation used for monitoring potential terrorists — so “there’s no future. Now they seem to understand there is a future. They talk about having jobs, marriage, kids. There’s a positive evolution.”

But when the two inmates talked about life outside prison, their own optimism faded. France, they said, seemed to be building toward a confrontation with Islam. It was the same in all of Europe, they said, and even in the United States (they made clear that they spent much of their time watching TV news). For young men from the French banlieues, assimilation and radicalization appeared to be two sides of a coin that never fell in their favor. “All the profiling, the discrimination, it adds up,” the North African said. He continued, referring to the numeric code for France’s most notorious banlieue: “Ninety-three — if that’s on your C.V., it’s hard to get a job. There’s frustration among the young. That becomes hate, and hate becomes radicalism.”

• This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like – nymag.com

Usually, an article like this, abstract and argumentatively complex as it is, wouldn’t attract all that much attention outside of its own academic subculture. But that isn’t what happened here — instead, Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt, abetted in part by Hypatia’s refusal to stand up for her. The journal has already apologized for the article, despite the fact that it was approved through its normal editorial process, and Tuvel’s peers are busily wrecking her reputation by sharing all sorts of false claims about the article that don’t bear the scrutiny of even a single close read.

• [Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies](http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n7/full/ng.3285.htmlMeta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies) – nature.com

Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts.

• The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering – edge.org

Now, along comes the demographic transition—the recent shift to lower death rates and then lower birth rates. Malthusian catastrophe was averted, but the price of relaxing selection has been moving the mutation-selection balance toward an unsustainable increase in genetic diseases. Various naturalistic experiments suggest this meltdown can proceed rapidly. (Salmon raised in captivity for only a few generations were strongly outcompeted by wild salmon subject to selection.) Indeed, it is possible that the drop in death rates over the demographic transition caused—by increasing the genetic load—the subsequent drop in birth rates below replacement: If humans are equipped with physiological assessment systems to detect when they are in good enough condition to conceive and raise a child, and if each successive generation bears a greater number of micro-impairments that aggregate into, say, stressed exhaustion, then the paradoxical outcome of improving public health for several generations would be ever lower birth rates. One or two children are far too few to shed incoming mutations.

• Mass Extinction And The Structure Of The Milky Way – arxiv.org

We use the most up to date Milky Way model and solar orbit data in order to test the hypothesis that the Sun’s galactic spiral arm crossings cause mass extinction events on Earth. To do this, we created a new model of the Milky Way’s spiral arms by combining a large quantity of data from several surveys. We then combined this model with a recently derived solution for the solar orbit to determine the timing of the Sun’s historical passages through the Galaxy’s spiral arms. Our new model was designed with a symmetrical appearance, with the major alteration being the addition of a spur at the far side of the Galaxy. A correlation was found between the times at which the Sun crosses the spiral arms and six known mass extinction events. Furthermore, we identify five additional historical mass extinction events that might be explained by the motion of the Sun around our Galaxy. These five additional significant drops in marine genera that we find include significant reductions in diversity at 415, 322, 300, 145 and 33 Myr ago. Our simulations indicate that the Sun has spent ~60% of its time passing through our Galaxy’s various spiral arms. Also, we briefly discuss and combine previous work on the Galactic Habitable Zone with the new Milky Way model.

misc

• Learning Russian – reddit.com

huge list of resources for learning russian that i posted earlier this week

• Factorio – factorio.su

this game is really really fucking cool – think minecraft plus starcraft, autism-fuel resource extraction simulator with guns; pirate downloads, wiki, and (mostly russian) community attached to this unofficial site

• ngrok – ngrok.com

”I want to expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.”

just wrapped up my final assignment of my undergrad career. it’s a research paper about hikikomori, the phenomenon of japanese shut-ins that’s been increasing since the 1990s, written for my east asian culture class. i’m very interested in the subject, so i got special permission to write a different essay than the one that was assigned to the rest of the class (basically tying together all of the reading assignments for the semester).

i had a hiki phase, from about age 18-21. it was a really dark time for me, and i reflect on it a lot – i’m deeply afraid of falling back into the lifestyle, because it’s very seductive to me. even now, in a relatively functional phase of my life, i spend most of my time sitting on my computer in my apartment and rarely go to social events or see friends. the main difference is that now i have a girlfriend, and i’ve been attending university for the last few years.

the paper is here, pardon the handful of typos that are still in that version. excerpt:

The concept of hikikomori is a perhaps too easy to confine to a mere diagnostic criteria or strange culture-bound syndrome. Beyond these labels there is a deeper context of Japanese cultural practices, the smothered expectations of young men, and the social detritus cast aside as the Japanese tiger falters in its long recession. As connectivity accelerates, linking disparate individuals as it fuels anomie and subverts traditional social structures, we in the west should not be surprised if we find our young people following the paths forged by the hikikomori in the wake of recessions, globalized industrial outsourcing, and a low-security job markets in many regions. We may look for lessons to preempt these challenges by examining the previous two and a half decades of scrutiny by social scientists, clinicians and media with regards to the hikikomori.

i’ve been brushing up on my russian since i found out about duolingo last week. i’m only ~20% through the program but it’s pretty fun – you can make ‘clubs’, which i did yesterday. i named it “Мы любим Путин и Трамп” and it immediately filled up with randos and hit the user cap within a day, lol. it’s got a leaderboard (pictured) which i spent an hour grinding today, but unfortunately you’re unable to communicate with your club in any meaningful way, just a half-dozen pre-made choices along the lines of ‘cant beat me!’ or something similarly devoid of content.

anyway, i was looking into what other options there were for practicing russian online or on smartphones. a very promising one is wordbrewery, which aims to teach you core vocabulary using auto-excerpted sentences from current news stories – though it seems to have an issue with scraping comments as well. i also found the learning russian subreddit, which has what looks like a nice assembly of resources if you’re interested in learning or refreshing, as well some cute stuff like the following:

[ this tweet was deleted :( ]

“soaring dragon”

finals next week! graduation the week after assuming i didn’t fail my online class 😑 lots and lots of reading in the meantime.

reading

• Beyond Alt: Understanding the New Far Right – nymag.com

When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous — not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs — because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke — freighted with political meaning — suddenly in the news.

[many more links and reading inside this piece]

• A Branch of the UN Just Launched Its First Large-Scale Ethereum Test – coindesk.com

For the next month, cryptographically unique coupons representing an undisclosed number of Jordanian dinars will be sent to dozens of shops in five refugee camps across the nation. Then, instead of using a smartphone or a paper wallet to access the funds, recipients will rely on yet another emerging technology.

Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.

• Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle – slatestarcodex.com

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

• Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013) – thenorthstar.info

The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

[highly recommended; i’m surprised i hadn’t come across this piece before, rip mark fisher]

• A Newcomer to the Fediverse – robek.world

Perhaps you noticed: I said that I used to enjoy #FrogTwitter. I haven’t lost my taste for heterodox shitposters, but Twitter keeps banning my faves. @menaquinone4 was knocked out of the sky. I don’t want to link to his current account — both because I’d rather not see him torpedoed again, and because I have no way of knowing whether the current iteration of Mena is run by the original Mena. I never followed @BronzeAgePervert, but he’s another community figure who has been suspended (although not banned… yet… as far as I know).

[…]

I’m a pretty mainstream type of person. You could say that I’m a run-of-the-mill Blue Tribe coastal elite! But I tend to gravitate toward the social fringes. I like people who are outgroup to almost everyone but themselves. I feel more comfortable with those people, because they tend to be nonjudgmental and open to exploring surprising ideas.

• The Weaponization of Information: The Need for Cognitive Security – rand.org

Dimitry Kiselev, director general of Russia’s state-controlled Rossiya Segodnya media conglomerate, has said: “Objectivity is a myth which is proposed and imposed on us.”3 Today, thanks to the Internet and social media, the manipulation of our perception of the world is taking place on previously unimaginable scales of time, space and intentionality. That, precisely, is the source of one of the greatest vulnerabilities we as individuals and as a society must learn to deal with.Today, many actors are exploiting these vulnerabilities. The situation is complicated by the increasingly rapid evolution of technology for producing and disseminating information. For example, over the past year we have seen a shift from the dominance of text and pictures in social media to recorded video, and even recorded video is being superseded by live video. As the technology evolves, so do the vulnerabilities. At the same time, the cost of the technology is steadily dropping, which allows more actors to enter the scene.

• Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification – journals.sagepub.com

Through its monopoly on violence, the State tends to pacify social relations. Such pacification proceeded slowly in Western Europe between the 5th and 11th centuries, being hindered by the rudimentary nature of law enforcement, the belief in a man’s right to settle personal disputes as he saw fit, and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty. These hindrances began to dissolve in the 11th century with a consensus by Church and State that the wicked should be punished so that the good may live in peace. Courts imposed the death penalty more and more often and, by the late Middle Ages, were condemning to death between 0.5 and 1.0% of all men of each generation, with perhaps just as many offenders dying at the scene of the crime or in prison while awaiting trial. Meanwhile, the homicide rate plummeted from the 14th century to the 20th. The pool of violent men dried up until most murders occurred under conditions of jealousy, intoxication, or extreme stress. The decline in personal violence is usually attributed to harsher punishment and the longer-term effects of cultural conditioning. It may also be, however, that this new cultural environment selected against propensities for violence.

• Who is Publishing NSA and CIA Secrets, and Why? – schneier.com

That points to two options. The first is that the [Shadow Brokers] files came from Hal Martin. He’s the NSA contractor who was arrested in August for hoarding agency secrets in his house for two years. He can’t be the publisher, because the Shadow Brokers are in business even though he is in prison. But maybe the leaker got the documents from his stash: either because Martin gave the documents to them or because he himself was hacked. The dates line up, so it’s theoretically possible, but the contents of the documents speak to someone with a different sort of access. There’s also nothing in the public indictment against Martin that speaks to his selling secrets to a foreign power, and I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that the NSA would leak. But maybe I’m wrong about all of this; Occam’s Razor suggests that it’s him.

The other option is a mysterious second NSA leak of cyberattack tools. The only thing I have ever heard about this is from a Washington Post story about Martin: “But there was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee, one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.” But “not thought to have” is not the same as not having done so.

• How Liberals Fell in Love with The West Wing – currentaffairs.org

Debuting during the twilight of the Clinton presidency and spanning much of Bush II’s, it predictably vacillated somewhat in response to events while remaining grounded in a general liberal ethos. Having writing credits for all but one episode in The West Wing’s first four seasons, Sorkin left in 2003, with Executive Producer John Wells characterizing the subsequent direction as more balanced and bipartisan. The Bartlet administration’s actual politics—just like those of the real Democratic Party and its base—therefore run the gamut from the stuff of Elizabeth Warren-esque populism to the neoliberal bilge you might expect to come from a Beltway think tank having its white papers greased by dollars from Goldman Sachs.

But promoting or endorsing any specific policy orientation is not the show’s true raison d’être. At the conclusion of its seven seasons it remains unclear if the Bartlet administration has succeeded at all in fundamentally altering the contours of American life. In fact, after two terms in the White House, Bartlet’s gang of hyper-educated, hyper-competent politicos do not seem to have any transformational policy achievements whatsoever. Even in their most unconstrained and idealized political fantasies, liberals manage to accomplish nothing.

• Intel’s remote AMT vulnerablity – mjg59.dreamwidth.org

How bad is this

That depends. Unless you’ve explicitly enabled AMT at any point, you’re probably fine. The drivers that allow local users to provision the system would require administrative rights to install, so as long as you don’t have them installed then the only local users who can do anything are the ones who are admins anyway. If you do have it enabled, though…

misc

• climate – github.com

Climate is the ultimate command line tool for Linux. It provides a huge number of command line options for developers to automate their Linux system. This tool can be extremely helpful to learn various unix commands too. There is an option to print each command before they’re executed to help you memorize them over time.

• Documentation of Security Tokens and their uses. – github.com

Security tokens are small hardware devices one uses to prove physical access to a computer system in addition to traditional text credentials like a username or a password. The larger an organization gets, the higher the potential of a smartphone or a computer might be accessed by an unauthorized third party.

While adding the requirement of having to physically insert or touch a device to a username and password may seem simple, it is something one can not do remotely. This makes it a highly effective and simple way to greatly limit damage and data theft from remote attackers.

• OpenSnitch – github.com

OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall. […] OpenSnitch is an application level firewall, meaning then while running, it will detect and alert the user for every outgoing connection applications he’s running are creating. This can be extremely effective to detect and block unwanted connections on your system that might be caused by a security breach, causing data exfiltration to be much harder for an attacker.

two more weeks until graduation and whatever the rest of my life is. we’ll see how it goes!

reading

• The French, Coming Apart – city-journal.org

At the opening of his new book, Guilluy describes twenty-first-century France as “an ‘American’ society like any other, unequal and multicultural.” It’s a controversial premise—that inequality and racial diversity are linked as part of the same (American-type) system and that they progress or decline together. Though this premise has been confirmed in much of the West for half a century, the assertion will shock many Americans, conditioned to place “inequality” (bad) and “diversity” (good) at opposite poles of a Manichean moral order. This disconnect is a key reason American political discussions have turned so illogical and rancorous. Certain arguments—for instance, that raising the incomes of American workers requires limiting immigration—can be cast as either sensible or superstitious, legitimate or illegitimate, good or evil, depending on whether the person making them is deemed to be doing so on the grounds of economics or identity.

At a practical level, considerations of economics and ethnicity are getting harder to disentangle. Guilluy has spent years in and out of buildings in northern Paris (his sisters live in public housing), and he is sensitive to the way this works in France. A public-housing development is a community, yes, and one can wish that it be more diverse. But it is also an economic resource that, more and more, is getting fought over tribally. An ethnic Frenchman moving into a heavily North African housing project finds himself threatening a piece of property that members of “the community” think of as theirs. Guilluy speaks of a “battle of the eyes” fought in the lobbies of apartment buildings across France every day, in which one person or the other—the ethnic Frenchman or the immigrant’s son—will drop his gaze to the floor first.

• PGP public key and self-service postal kiosk expose online drug dealers – arstechnica.com

Initial analysis of DARKAPOLLO and AREA51’s public PGP key indicated that both keys were registered to the same email address: Adashc3l@gmail.com. A social-media search for the phrases Adashc3d31 and Adashc3d resulted in the discovery of a Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook account belonging to someone identified as “Ahmed Farooq” or “Ch. Ahmed Farooq” (Hereinafter referred to as FAROOQ). The Facebook profile belonging to FAROOQ indicated that he resided in Brooklyn, New York.

• Paradise Lost: The Rise and Fall of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by Tam Hussein – joshualandis.com

In fact, al-Baghdadi creates what Benedict Anderson calls “an imagined community” through the use of powerful propaganda, tapping into the emotions of many Muslims. This isn’t just a cynical attempt, Graeme Wood is right here, ISIS are True Believers-zealots. They may have been former secular officers who were thrown into Abu Ghraib but, just like the F.L.N commander in The Centurions, they had rediscovered their religion, their reality had been shaken with the fall of the modern Iraqi state. These highly trained officers couldn’t just return to the coffee shops to smoke a fat Zaghloul and drink bitter coffee, lamenting the presence of US marines on their streets. That jarred with their sense of honour, no, they would return to Fallujah and Mosul where their families were and fight. These officers did what an Algerian officer in The Centurion did, they gave their failed country “a history and a personality.” They grabbed the black ‘Abbasid’ flag and made it synonymous with Islamicate. Heavily reliant on ‘salvation history’, they created a vision that the banner of Islam spread from East to West. They ignored historical reality where at one point there were three caliphates that vied for power with each other, and that even after the fall of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, no caliph existed at all for several years. ISIS did what Lartéguy says happened in Algeria, they created a history based on the cemeteries of the dead not based on historical reality. It was Fake News caliphated.

• On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries – e-flux.com

Land and Moldbug also raise the question of alternatives, which, in the spirit of Thiel, requires “recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism.” In “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” Moldbug related his own trajectory from a progressive to a Jacobite. He rejected the political correctness and politeness of progressives by proposing to instrumentalize Hitler and the reactionary thought of fascism. This is a form of ideology critique descended from radical left thinking about what happens when ideas and practices are institutionalized. It is only in the “cathedral” that ethics and dogma overlap. But while for the non-academic left, this dogma is ineffective and benign, for the neoreactionaries it is an existential threat; political correctness becomes a toxic threat to Western Civilization.

• The Neohuman Transition: Forgetting, Erasing, Becoming New – socialecologies.wordpress.com

It’s as if some alien intelligence was reprogramming humanity through the immanent transforms of our own socio-cultural matrix of possibilities. Those like Nick Land on the extreme edge of philosophical speculation, or those like R. Scott Bakker from within the naturalist scientific paradigm both agree we are undergoing and entering a crash space that is rewiring our physical and mental systems to the point of no return. That all our connections to the human meaning systems and realities that have guided us during the great Agricultural phases of civilization and kept us connected to the rhythms of the natural world and the phases of the cycles of moon and stars is at an end. We are becoming machininc and artificial, bifurcating our cunning intelligence from its natural roots and entering the digital civilization of a new connectionism that is undermining the human and replacing it with the inhuman or neohuman.

Many will see this as pure fantasy and literary humbug. Many will continue to resist such as tomfoolery and madness. Many will refuse the great transition and will try to stabilize and remain in their traditional worlds, bound to the old ways of earth and the natural. And, yet, they will be few and far between, creatures of a subworld that will not become other, transcend their human heritage and will be left behind in a world of dying embers. Traditionalists and reactionaries of every stripe hold onto the old sovereign mythologies of power, control, kingship, Great Leaders, and the power of tyranny and authoritarian monarchical thought and regulation.

• the diagrams of acceleration – antinomiaimediata.wordpress.com

here, I’ll limit myself to the abstract form of these “runaway suppressors”. they are complimentary to the runaway producer of techno-commercialism: the less it happens, the less it happens. in such a way that they intrinsically contain a program for their own dissolution: as soon as their object of suppression vanishes – thus liberating the productive process that engineered them – they themselves vanish. it’s friction that produces them.

suppression, in such analysis, means compensating the compensators. a few forms for that to happen:

• counter-taxation: mechanisms through which taxation is dodged or reversed (anything from tax dodging, money laundering, corporate welfare, etc).

• illegibility: ways through which agents become invisible to the state apparatus, and thus can operate beyond, behind or beneath its regulations.

• cypherpolitics: becoming grey to the colorful politics, effectively avoiding social outcomes based on political discourse. cryptographic media use, in a way that allows science to become neutral because anonymous. also, other uses of unidentity. (seriously, the link explains way better)

• exit: if some idiot thinks tariffs are a good idea, you move. neo-nomadism should be a thing already.

• The Crucible of the Application Process – quillette.com

That notion of impartial, universal caring has been, if not abandoned, then at least grossly distorted by certain academics on the far-Left. Over the past several centuries, our scope of moral concern has been expanding. Many of us now appreciate the virtue of caring for people of other races, cultures, religions, and gender identities in a way that nearly all of our ancestors didn’t. My worry is that identity politics is morally regressive—encouraging the spread of ideas which will contract the scope of our moral concern. Instead of promoting a notion of caring characterized by universality and impartiality, the far-Left seems to be pushing a localized and deeply partial notion of caring which extends only to those with whom we can personally identify.

But the thing I don’t understand is why do you care? This was the final question of my Rhodes nomination interview. I can’t properly express the frustration I feel whenever this question is put to me. Every time I try to explain the importance of extreme poverty, and every time my answer isn’t good enough.

misc

• linuxbbq

LinuxBBQ is a multi-purpose operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux “sid” branch, spiced up with kernels and tools from siduction, grml and our users!

The BBQ offers different flavours and desktops to build up from (“Roast Your Own”) that can be customized and remixed by the user. Community contributions are consequently implemented.

Furthermore, special purpose desktop solutions are being actively developed and released.

The editions - coming in different setups of WM/DE and applications - are designed to be configured and customized by the end-user, producing redistributable ISOs that are bootable from USB, CD or DVD can be easily produced in short time.

i found something i’m absolutely delighted with the other day – it’s called newsbeuter, and it’s a cli ncurses rss reader – “the mutt of rss readers”. documentation, archwiki article, github.

after i left most social media a few years ago, i started assembling a new mode of internet use. i spent a lot of time cruising blogs and finding interesting people and began posting on a forum, for the most part. i had been using feedly as an rss reader – i never had a chance to try google reader, and i kept crashing and burning trying to host rss software like tiny tiny rss on my vps. feedly works reasonably well, but it’s bloated and ugly so i’ve been keeping my eyes open. enter newsbeuter

i’ve come to really enjoy being able to read and compute on a dark screen cramped with terminals. ncurses is a cross-platform library meant to create terminal-based gui’s, and i’ve developed a lot of aesthetic attachement to having newsbeuter, vim, ncmpcpp, and finch filling my peripheral vision with nice mono terminal text and dark color schemes. it beats flashing browsers and memory-intensive gui frameworks imo, at least.

the only real disappointment i’ve had with newsbeuter is that there doesnt seem to be any way to have a single linear timelines one can simply scroll through or paginate – only individual posts, manually reloaded (autoreload is an option but blasting 60 urls every time i want to open it was a bit of a pain), paged through with n.

anyway – i’m so excited about having a terminal based rss reader that i wanted to share, even if i’m just talking into the void of this blog. i hope someone else might find it as exciting as i do. and here is my config dotfile – i think it’s relatively sane to copy/paste.

no link list this week – i haven’t had the time, and may not for a week or two, we’ll see. but in the meantime, i’ve uploaded a copy of the notes from one of my classes – contemporary middle east, an anthropology class i’m taking that is easily my favorite of the semester. the notes are here, they’re not terribly long and they’re very engaging in my opinion, especially if you have an interest in islam and iran.

(also, look how pretty these notes are – even nice tables! i use vimwiki to take notes and it has an awesome export to html function)

reading

• The relentless consumerism of “unboxing videos” – theoutline.com

I don’t remember much about 2009 — I think I was in 9th grade, or maybe 10th — but I know almost every line of dialogue in that year’s finest YouTube video: “Hanwei Practical XL Katana Unveiling HD,” posted by the user “That Sodding Gamer.” If you haven’t seen it, you won’t be disappointed. In it, a man who looks to be in his late 20s unboxes a mid-range replica sword with the help of his mother and younger brother. He recounts his past encounters with low-quality swords as he struggles to remove the plastic packaging. His demeanor is alternately bored and petulant, even as he comes face to face with his long-awaited $210 purchase. His mother, entrusted with the camera, seems to annoy him. Her bemusement at her adult son’s interests is palpable, but she sounds resigned to her fate: Her grandchildren will be swords and sarcastic T-shirts. Such is life in an austerity economy.

• Critical step in DNA repair, cellular aging pinpointed – sciencedaily.com

The findings, published March 24 in Science, offer a critical insight into how and why the body’s ability to fix DNA dwindles over time and point to a previously unknown role for the signaling molecule NAD as a key regulator of protein-to-protein interactions in DNA repair. NAD, identified a century ago, is already known for its role as a controller of cell-damaging oxidation.

Additionally, experiments conducted in mice show that treatment with the NAD precursor NMN mitigates age-related DNA damage and wards off DNA damage from radiation exposure.

• Accelerationism, Left and Right – pmacdougald.wordpress.com

Nick Land’s neoreactionary, right-wing accelerationism is racist in any conventional sense of that term. Yet Land is also a quite interesting thinker of capitalism, and because capitalism, broadly defined, is the reality that structures and will continue to structure human existence throughout the foreseeable future, he is perhaps worth paying attention to. His overriding political and ethical ‘goal,’ from which his racism, his eugenicism, and technological fetishism spring, is optimize for intelligence, which for him is both the Darwinian law of the universe (‘Gnon’), as well as a functional description of what really-exisiting capitalism actually does. Even to call it a ‘goal’ is misleading, as for Land capitalism is an abolition of Hume’s is/ought distinction. What capitalism ‘should’ do (optimize for intelligence) is, as a matter of fact, what it does. Land’s Acclerationism, insofar as it can be understood as a political program, simply counsels that we let this process be, because we don’t really have the capability to control it anyway.

• Men Without Work – maudlineconomics.com

But the progressive detachment of so many adult American men from the reality and routines of regular paid labor poses a threat to our nation’s future prosperity. It can only result in lower living standards, greater economic disparities, and slower economic growth than we might otherwise expect. And the troubles posed by this male flight from work are by no means solely economic. It is also a social crisis – and, I shall argue, a moral crisis. The growing incapability of grown men to function as breadwinners cannot help but undermine the American family. It casts those who nature designed to be strong into the role of dependents – on their wives or girlfriends, on their aging parents, or on government welfare. Among those who should be most capable of shouldering the burdens of civic responsibilities, it instead encourages sloth, idleness, and vices perhaps more insidious. Whether we choose to recognize it or not, this feature of the American condition – the new “men without work” normal – is inimical to the American tradition of self-reliance…

• WALNUT attack – spqr.eecs.umich.edu

Attackers that have capabilities to deliver high intensity acoustic interference in close proximity to the target MEMS sensor [embedded accelerometers in consumer electronics] can spoof the sensor to output arbitrary, attacker–chosen, signals. Our experiments demonstrate the spelling of the word “WALNUT” over the output signal of a MEMS accelerometer. With proper knowledge of the algorithms that are utilizing the polluted sensor data, adversaries may be able to control the behavior of a system that relies on the sensor data to make automated decisions.

• China’s Success Explains Authoritarianism’s Allure – bloomberg.com

It’s not just about the emerging economies in general, but rather one such economy in particular: China. By purchasing power parity measures China is now the No. 1 economy, and the world’s leading exporter, in addition to its longstanding role as the world’s most populous country. It has had an almost unbroken string of high-growth years since 1979, often at double-digit rates, and it avoided much of the negative fallout from the financial crisis. Its geopolitical influence and its military have been gaining on the U.S. or Europe for decades.

If several generations of Westerners were intrigued by communism, Marxism, Stalinism and even Maoism, is it so implausible to think they might feel some kind of magnetic attraction to the less liberal systems that are flourishing today?

• How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West – areomagazine.com

How much of a threat is postmodernism to science? There are certainly some external attacks. In the recent protests against a talk given by Charles Murray at Middlebury, the protesters chanted, as one,

“Science has always been used to legitimize racism, sexism, classism, transphobia, ableism, and homophobia, all veiled as rational and fact, and supported by the government and state. In this world today, there is little that is true ‘fact.'”

When the organizers of the March for Science tweeted:

“colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, & econ justice are scientific issues,” many scientists immediately criticized this politicization of science and derailment of the focus on preservation of science to intersectional ideology. In South Africa, the #ScienceMustFall and #DecolonizeScience progressive student movement announced that science was only one way of knowing that people had been taught to accept. They suggested witchcraft as one alternative.