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Would it make sense for people to get a sample of their gut bacteria so that they could repopulate after antibiotics?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_microbiota_transplant#Autologous_restoration_of_gastrointestinal_flora
Thank you.
In his famous 1985 Paper Charles Tilly explained the origin of European states basically as the development of territorial monopolies in the protection racket market. They gradually grow and professionalize their organization, developing customer service like courts and parliaments and doing all the stuff from “Seeing Like a State”.
What do SSC readers think of this?
To me, that is is the biggest issue i have with the anarcho-capitalist idea of security: i don’t think it is new.
What does this mean for the aspiration of world-peace? do we have to wait until technology makes the world a unified market for security that then monopolizes? Or should we hedge against further competition, banning PMCs and strengthening state sovereignty?
Also what about the missing pieces – ethnic&national identity, religion, ideology etc.
The self-determination of peoples is a basic principle of international law, the responsibility to protect has relatively recently been invented – might this be helpful in aligning security institutions with people’s preferences or is this a basically harmful subsidy of protection rackets, keeping the system from reaching stable equilibria?
War is the father of all things, but how does patricide work in this case?
Reading through EY’s book, why is he using the term ‘adequacy’ like that?
It:
1: looks insanely arrogant. Almost like a straw-man parody of someone who expects everything to be perfect. “Is civilisation good enough”? I don’t think the average person would even indulge that with a ‘good enough for what, exactly?’. -The natural response to that is probably ‘it’s going to have to be- good enough for me’. Is it *good enough*? Who puts a question like that, without explanation, on the front page of their book?
2. Seems to bear little enough relation to ordinary use of the term, and has alternatives which do. -i.e. has no excuse. What’s wrong with, for example, competent, functional, or “efficient” in the non technical sense? (just the three first ones that came into my head.) I’m sure he can think of something that’s not a subjective two-place-term floated without one of its places specified, -or rather with the implicit specification of his personal tastes for an arbiter of civilisation will suffice in his judgement.
_
TL:DR: Competent means ‘good enough for its task’. ‘Adequate’ means “good enough for me”. Picking ‘adequate’, of all the words he could have chosen, does not look like a lack of ostentatious humility, but pure incompetence at best, Reversed stupidity at best, -or like ordinary human grasping of a particularly clueless/transparent kind.
_
(http://lesswrong.com/lw/ro/2place_and_1place_words/)
_
edit: or, if you’re super attached to the term or its connotations, you could say that the lack of a definition and explanation on page 1 is,
I realise he’s trying to make a point, but the way to do that is to make the point, not to assert it through your choice of terms and carry on like you don’t know what you’re up to (which one genuinely may not, but all the same) The point (presumably) is to convince, not just to parade your extreme-looking perspective in a self-indulgent (high status) manner.
I want to learn about the Taiping rebellion. Does anyone have book recommendations?
I’d be interested good histories of china post-tang dynasty.
I haven’t finished it yet, but I’m currently reading Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom : China, the West, and the epic story of the Taiping Civil War. It’s ok, at least.
For a better book covering Qing to communisim I recommend the one by Spence, The Search for Modern China. It’s really only got one chapter on the 1850s and 60s time period.
Flashman and the Dragon is remarkably informative for being historical fiction.
Update: I bought “God’s Chinese Son” by Jonathan Spence. I saw a recommendation for it in an Amazon review for “Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West” which marshwiggle recommended, and also marshwiggle recommended another book by Spence, so it seems like a reasonable option. I haven’t received it yet so I can’t comment on the quality myself.
Has Science been looking for anti-aging in the wrong places all along?
(The answer to that is “no, but sometimes you find things in unexpected places”).
The Amish are going to outlive us all! Well, one particular isolated community with a specific mutation will live longer and age more healthily than the rest of us, that is.
DUE TO THEIR SUPER STRAIN OF MUTANTS, THAT IS!
I wondered a little about the headline since I would imagine a lifestyle low(er) in highly processed foods and high in physical labour and activity means better general health, but they seem to have tested the mutants against other members of the same community and found marked differences.
It’s an extra ten years (presumably in good health). Good, but not that dramatic. There are also families where people typically live into their nineties in good health without doing anything special. They are being studied.
This article is pretty good except for some goshwowohboyoboy about the low tech Amish lifestyle. It mentions that the gene is one of those recessives where it’s good to have one copy, but two copies give you a clotting disorder. (Is there a word for “one copy good, two copies bad”?)
The comments are an informal study of the proportion of people who comment without having read the article, but there’s a mention of von Willebrand’s disease which may have a similar genetic basis.
In the aging field ten years from a single mutation is nothing to scoff at. That’s actually really impressive.
The specific case for a single gene like this or sickle cell anemia is called overdominance, and the general case of heterozygosity conferring fitness is called heterozygote advantage
An extra 10 years is better than a 12% increase.
(Of interest – it seems most people die really freaking soon after being admitted to a nursing home.)
Speaking of wine, here in Ontario alcohol sales are tightly controlled, but the Liquor Control Board of Ontario has to make its price structure completely transparent.
http://hellolcbo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1251/~/lcbo-pricing-structure%3A-price-markup-example
For example, for a bottle of table wine with a final price of CAN$12.04, the breakdown is
$4.62 supplier/freight
$6.21 government of Ontario
$1.00 government of Canada
$0.20 container deposit
(And one penny got lost somewhere.)
More of unshared human experience: issues with hearing. I think of myself as mediocre of hearing.
There was a discussion at facebook about about having trouble hearing what people say in a way that isn’t deafness. The words just don’t register as words, but some people have instant replay so the words can be understood in retrospect. I think I’ve got two or three seconds of instant replay.
I’ve got that. I think of it as my attention (possibly to a lot that isn’t my internal monologue) revving up slowly. I’m capable of saving myself from a fall, so kinesthesia presumably doesn’t have that problem.
I don’t have the reflex to answer something that’s an extremely approximate response, though that doesn’t seem to be rare.
When I can’t make out words, I usually hear a blur, though in recent years, my brain occasionally supplies nonsense words.
I have trouble making out the words in songs. You can’t bury love? You can’t hurry love? Rap is usually hopeless for me– when I found I couldn’t follow the words even with subtitles, I really gave up. I could probably train myself to be better at this, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
And I have trouble distinguishing words from background noise, though one time I tried using “this is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard” adapted from Kenny Werner’s Effortless Mastery, and it worked pretty well. It was quite hard, but might be worth cultivating. The general idea is to give yourself an incentive to pay attention to what you’re actually hearing rather trying to hear better.
Fortunately, I’m able to take “This is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard” as a heuristic(?) rather than a literal truth. The next sound will also be the most beautiful sound. It’s not really about comparing the sound to all past sounds.
I think I have slightly worse than average hearing. It’s not noticeable in most situations, but in crowded restaurants, sitting with a big group around a big table, the people around me can typically hear what someone across from them is saying long after it’s all noise to me.
I usually just say something along the lines of “What?” or “Huh?”. During this time my brain is usually able to process the actual words and come up with a real answer, so I can just continue speaking.
Sometimes this is kind of funny because after my initial “What?” the other person might want to repeat the last sentence, but then getting an answer from me before being able to do so.
I’m not an expert, but I wouldn’t expect this hearing phenomenon to be related to being able to save yourself from falling. The latter is (probably) done by your cerebellum, while processing words and language is (also probably) done in your frontal and/or temporal lobes.
By the way, I think the two or three seconds of replay are commonly referred to as Echoic Memory. Now that I think of it …
Only some? I always expected that having echoic memory is the default.
I was about to say that my attention revs up slowly, and then I started wondering whether than was true of all senses.
A company called Ava’s Winery has produced a wholly synthetic wine. Apparently it’s not bad.
Interesting. Though I suspect that a sweet sparkling wine is easy mode and makes the price class reference quite misleading (“natural” sweet wines are often relatively more expensive because it’s difficult to get the grapes to develop a sufficiently high sugar content).
It was interesting to read about how even ordinary wines are highly manipulated products these days. It’s not just grape juice and yeast. Not at all.
Sounds interesting, but I’m wondering what the manufacturing process is based on. If it’s “commercial ethanol” then it’s in the same area as a lot of cheap(ish) liqueurs which simply take the base alcohol, throw in a load of sugar or sweeteners, and slap in some artificial flavouring.
Are they basing it on vodka or something? And why not switch to fruits/berries other than grapes? That they started with a Moscato isn’t too surprising; the sugar and carbonation will help disguise any ‘artificial’ taste and make it more palatable. If they can produce a drinkable white or red that isn’t a sweet dessert wine will be the real test.
Oooh, I already know the sweet-spot for the low end of this market: a bag of fountain syrup (so the end-result is carbonated) branded “Sham-pagne”. Brunch mimosas would be so much easier for restaurants, and the stuff they use now is already terrible enough that a comparable synthetic shouldn’t be too tough.
I thought for cheapo Buck’s Fizz and the like they had already swapped out the champagne for sparkling wine instead? You are probably correct, and Ava products will end up on restaurant tables for places that don’t want/can’t be bothered with all that fancy real wine and trying to sell half-bottles and by the glass and the rest of it. You’ll have “red”, “white”, and “sweet/sparkling/dessert” and that will cut down on all the fuss.
Probably be able to get it pre-packaged in cocktails and spritzers as well, to make it sound fancier than it is.
Woo-hoo! Got myself banned off the sub-reddit for
being a bitchnot being sufficiently pretentious when leaving a comment on an old-school ‘ripping off Gibbons who did it first and better’ post about a new book by an ex-Catholic not-quite academic about how Christianity is really bad, mmmkay?Okay, so I fired first about “tell me something I haven’t heard before” but goodness gracious me, they are somewhat sensitive over there? I think what got me into trouble was the use of a rhetorical device for making a point through exaggeration, viz. “Not gonna read it because…”
Seemingly Biblical literalists are not the only literalists out there, because the body of my comment showed that I had indeed read the quoted article and was responding to it. But I think I mostly got into trouble over my smart-arse tone; as I’ve said, the atmosphere of the sub-reddit brings out my even-more confrontational and aggressive side than on here. Good job the high-minded and delicately-reared mods of the sub-reddit had not been present for our debate on the Dark Ages, is it not? (In fairness to the mods, I will agree that I was a passive-aggressive pissy little bitch in the comment I left, but that was mostly down to “Ah crap, not this dead horse hauled out for another flogging again? Hasn’t anybody read any critique of the critique from the past thirty years? And it’s published by Pan Macmillan which should tell anyone who knows anything about British publishing houses all they need to know about its background as serious versus poppiest of pop culture historical and Classical pretensions” reaction on my part and plainly not politely explaining step-by-step why I thought this was not a fruitful or useful article to read, especially for those with some interest in the topic who would genuinely have Heard It All Before).
I am thrilled to bits over this ban, really I am! I am genuinely proud of having been banned for not fawning over a heap of crap book slung out by Pan Macmillan (God love them, I had no idea Pan books was still going, I remember when they were a horror imprint back in the 70s, I used to devour this series put out by them. The reviewer is right that the stories did become “crudely sadistic” in the later and last volumes. All of which is to say, Serious Academic Publishing House this is not). And lest anyone think I am harbouring resentment or ire towards the mods, no, not at all! I simply cannot help myself when it comes to making sarcastic comments, Jerry Coyne would tell you it’s the predestined result of my lack of real consciousness and free will 🙂
Why am I thrilled to bits? I’m not claiming to be Persecuted For My Religion, far from it, but this makes me feel like I am Standing Up For My Principles (which include ‘make some attempt as a historian to see both sides’ and ‘don’t dress up a mass-market pop-culture money-maker as True Serious Scholarly Research’) and Going Down In Glorious Defeat (the ever-popular romance of the lost cause which is so prevalent in the Irish character and you can see in the Cavalier culture of the South with the idea of the defeated but not disgraced Confederacy, the notion of the generals like Lee being honourable gentlemen); that with Cyrano, I can say:
😀
Yes, they very much prefer cries of “Tallyho!” and noisy and extended quarterstaff antics — “Ho! Ha ha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust! Sproing!” — to the well-placed dagger in the ribs of the other side’s argument.
the well-placed dagger in the ribs of the other side’s argument
I can’t really claim to have been that subtle and elegant, but mostly it was a cri-de-coeur of “this really is the same old stale thing hashed up and reheated”. I mean, remember our discussion contra Scott on the Dark Ages? Guess what Ms Nixey’s work is described as when she was invited to give a talk this year at a History Festival in Dublin (only found this through Googling now, glad I didn’t know of it earlier because of dangers of apoplexy):
Ah, yes: burning all the scientists on a bonfire of books of ancient knowledge, leading to centuries of ignorance and stagnation until rescued by the enlightened minds of the Renaissance. Haven’t we heard that one before? She even trots out the Hypatia myth, if this review is to be believed!
Seems to have won an award back in 2015 and honestly I have heard neither of the award nor the book, and generally there would be some kind of peep in the papers about “brilliant new work of controversy”, which leads me strongly to suspect that whatever about the controversy, the work is neither new nor brilliant. I am particularly addled by the appending of “The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion comprehensively and deliberately extinguished the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to ‘one true faith'” to this work as that is quite literally the established party line that was peddled for three hundred years, if not longer! Imagine someone writing a book that was hailed as “This work reveals for the first time the shocking truth that Jews were subjects of persecution throughout the ancient and early modern world!” I think even the sub-reddit mods might go “Gee, really?” to that one!
I mean, this is precisely why Tim O’Neill has set up the History for Atheists blog, and I only appreciate the man more and more when I see stuff like this, particularly being touted over on the sub-reddit where (sticking up for the humanities again) I would deem most of the readership and participants are very well up in STEM and IT but not so hot on history, religion, history of religion, general arts etc.
In the real world, of course, all the books that survive from ancient Greece and Rome survive because monks preserved them and made copies of them. So… these nasty Christians were simultaneously setting out to destroy all the books, knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world, and to make copies of the books, knowledge and wisdom of the ancient world?
Firstly, no, there were lots of ancient works around before the wave of Arabic translations in the twelfth century (including our old favourite, De Rerum Natura). Secondly, who made copies of these books between late antiquity and the Islamic golden age? Oh yeah, it was those pesky (Syrian and Egyptian) monks again…
And please note the “translated back into European languages from Arabic” which manages to pack so many assumptions, preconceptions and misrepresentations into one phrase that it would take too long to unpack.
I do feel sorry for the particular mod I’m tussling with in a back-and-forth correspondence, as they are trying to teach me to comb my hair and wash my face and walk upright and generally act civilised, but on this particular issue (involving as it does two of my hot buttons – religion and history, bad and lazy instances of both) I am unrepentant and digging my heels in and balking like a mule; the stubbornness from my mother’s side of the family and the obstinancy from my father’s side mean Non, rien de rien! Non, je ne regrette rien! 🙂
From my browsing over the there it looked even more far right wing than over here. I’d have thought you’d be right at home.
There’s more than one kind of right wing.
Wait you consider Deiseach far right wing!? What would make that the other commentators here?
What would make that the other commentators here?
All to the left of me, which means you’re stinkin’ bleeding-heart liberal commie pinkos, each and every one of you, even the libertarians 🙂
*grumbles about the Mensheviks*
Don’t be mean, Deiseach, or you won’t be invited to our struggle sessions.
Outgroup homogeneity bias. Deiseach is a prude and religiously conventional, both common conservative traits to be sure, but she’s her own kind of conservative.
Deiseach has said that she’s what progs call asexual. That’s… being a prude on Easy Mode, I guess?
Meanwhile I’m vibrantly heterosexual but don’t talk about it here because I’m religious and sex is objectively irrational. 🙂
I call her a prude because of how judgy she gets when the subject of sex comes up. That she’s like that may have something to do with her being asexual, but obviously not all asexuals are like that.
Do I get judgy about sex? I suppose I do, but generally I intend it in “Goddammit, why is popular culture so sex-soaked? I don’t want or care about 24/7 ‘which celeb is banging which other celeb’ or the recent model which is ‘which celeb is outed as a sex pest today?’ coverage” terms. Also how it is commercialised and shoved down our necks (Valentine’s Day is the worst but it’s not the only way ‘you gotta be part of a couple so you can and must consume our output under the guise of TWU WUV AND WOMANCE’ offends).
Mainly I don’t care what you do so long as you do it in private, don’t tell the rest of us you are soooooo morally superior for being liberated enough to get your ashes hauled outside of marriage, and most importantly NO KIDS INVOLVED. When you have kids, you need to grow the fuck up, and “but mommy/daddy wants a new boyfriend/girlfriend so sorry Junior all my time and attention and ‘love’ is going to them” is not the way to do it as long as they are young and dependent on you.
You’re also cynical (dubious? aggravated?) about love.
You are correct, Nancy. I am extremely cynical about love, possibly due to work-induced bias; the people most banging on about “It is for love!” are the ones making the stupidest damn decisions, fucking up their lives, their ex- and current partners’ lives, their kids’ lives, then trailing the mess in to social services/local government for a fix, but not one bit inclined to change their (pop culture? the media? IT’S SOCIETY’S FAULT?) induced “Twu Wuv is the mostest biggest importantest thing ever!!!! (and if you don’t find it on the first try, keep on trying)”.
I realise this is a very grating attitude to people who are genuinely looking for, and cannot find, love, but I ask those people: are you screwing up your entire life and expecting someone else to magically fix it for you because (a) “I quit my job, moved to another part of the country/another country entirely, have no job or support structure lined up here, because I was In Love with someone except the relationship broke down about ten minutes after we moved in together and they* kicked me out of the house and as stated above no job or support system so heh, I’m homeless and penniless, what can you do for me?” (b) “I have three kids with different surnames because I was In Love with three different guys who all have a string of kids by various partners and now I’m on to Number Four and oh yeah, I’m pregnant again and my three older kids are all getting in trouble at school and with the neighbours, weird that, it’s almost like a lack of stability and consistent parenting in early life might have something to do with it – anyway, can I move Number Four into my social housing with me? Always remembering that if I get on the outs with him, I’ll be kicking him out and cutting him off from all contact with the new baby, but it’s surely Twu Wuv this time!” (c) “Yeah, I moved in with my girlfriend when she got pregnant except now she had the baby, she’s kicked me out and won’t let me have anything to do with them and I really have nowhere else to go and I really am still in love with her and want to be involved in the kid’s life but she won’t give me a second chance and even though you’re not a trained therapist or social worker I will spend the next half an hour crying down the phone to you about my broken heart and broken life” (those last cases are really sad, by the way, and I mean in the “evoking pathos and sympathy” not “what a loser” sense of “sad”)/”Hello, I have an undisclosed number of ex-wives/partners. You will have to put on your Sherlock Holmes deerstalker to discover that I have one (1) ex-wife and child in my home country, another (that makes No. 2) ex-wife and child in this country, and I was with No. 3 when she left her husband for me, but now I’ve moved on to No. 4. Allegedly. Because really I’m still living with No. 3 who is now pregnant by me, except we’re both lying to the Social Welfare and to you guys about cohabiting so we can (a) get higher individual social welfare payments (b) she can get a house as a single mother and then I can move in with her and sell this house and keep the money. But naturally I’d be a fool to tell you all this, ha ha ha! So that’s why I’m not going to tell you, and it’s only by piecing together information from an application I put in with Wife No. 2 back when we were still together, and comparing it with the other application that No. 3 put in, that you can put all this together”.
*I use “they” because this is Equal Opportunity stupidity; there have been examples from both genders of this carry-on.
I’m not going to include under the above heading the tale of “So I came out as a lesbian and left my husband to move in with my girlfriend who had come out as a lesbian and left her husband before we met, and we settled down in a new house and got on really well with the next door neighbours, a straight couple. So well, in fact, that three months later my girlfriend and the husband next door ran off to Australia together. Well. Didn’t see that one coming”, because the person there was side-swiped by unexpected circumstances.
If you are looking for love and are not any of the above, then good luck to you!
tl; dr – love is fine, if you have some common sense to go along with it. Making stupid decisions and ‘excusing’ those with “it was all for love” is still stupid. The successful couples I know are where it’s “we knew each other beforehand, we were going out together for a couple of years, we got on well and had mutual interests, and yeah we decided to get married” where it’s not some Big Once In A Lifetime Romance, not Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde, but ordinary everyday low-key life.
I’m the wrong kind of right-wing, Brad; not American so the political compass doesn’t fit and worse, socially conservative plus fiscally liberal (instead of the other way round) plus that’s based on orthodox religious – Christian, even! – views 🙂
Genetics of passenger pigeons
The hypothesis is that they were strongly selected for living in huge flocks, which is why they all died off instead of surviving in small groups.
I’m not sure that the strong immune systems which make sense for large flocks would make it hard to survive in small groups, but there might be something else.
This caught my eye:
“When a beneficial mutation spreads through a population, it carries along with it adjacent stretches of DNA, so subsequent generations carry not only the good mutation but entire sections of identical DNA. These regions of low diversity can be broken up by recombination, the process in which paired chromosomes exchange sections of DNA during the formation of eggs and sperm (which explains why parents don’t pass on exact copies of their chromosomes to their offspring).
“Recombination tends to happen less frequently in the middle of chromosomes than at the ends, a tendency that is especially pronounced in birds. In the passenger pigeon genome, the researchers found that areas of low genetic diversity were in the middle of chromosomes, while higher diversity regions were at the ends.”
I’d assumed that genes are selected for individually, but apparently not.
One of my friends spent days trying to fix a computer program that wasn’t working– he gave up on that and rewrote the program, which took three hours. Any thoughts about when you decide to quit fixing and just rewrite?
Almost never. Most nontrivial programs encode in them a lot of knowledge that won’t transfer over into a rewrite. The main reason to do it would be if the underlying problem has changed so much that the knowledge wouldn’t carry over.
A program that takes three hours to write would probably not qualify as “nontrivial” though.
Chesterton’s fence strikes again!
To further expand, it also matters what knowledge the codebase carries. If the original designer made an architectural mistake, then a whole stack of the codebase might be work-arounds for that issue. Whereas a re-implementation might be able to jettison that architectural problem (and thus most of the codebase).
As an example: trying to make transactions work on a database which definitively doesn’t support transactions.
For a complete rewrite, sure. For a program that’s got a hundred classes in a dozen modules, rewriting a couple classes from scratch or even rearchitecting an entire module often turns out to be a pretty good idea. Do that for enough years and your code starts to look like the Ship of Theseus paradox; did you “just rewrite” it or not?
And for a program that isn’t broken up so neatly, refactoring it to break it up is almost certainly a pretty good idea even if that ends up being the entire extent of the rewriting you do.
Sure, but that kind of knowledge won’t always even make it into future versions of the same program. If you have test coverage for a desired behavior, you can apply those same tests to your proposed replacement: transfer complete. If you don’t have coverage, and you don’t even have any power users currently relying on that behavior, then that functionality has a half-life: someone will eventually break it by accident while they’re working on other behavior they do care about, and you won’t find out until a year later when the “why did this stop working?” emails start coming in.
You first job before a massive refactoring is a test suite that embodies the current program behavior including things that don’t seem to make any sense.
In the idea world that includes spherical cows and sufficiently smart compilers, a refactor should produce the exact same binary. It should just be a reorganization of the source code.
In the real world that’s impossible, but if you are going to do a refactor it should be a refactor, not a rewrite in the guise of a refactor.
—-
For those outside the industry that might be confused, the underlying fact of the matter that drives a lot of this is that code it is generally easier and more interesting to write new code than to read and understand existing code. So when a programmer is tasked with making some changes to an existing code base there is always the danger that he will decide he’d rather just rewrite it. A manager of programmers, 99 times out of 100, should shut this down cold. The problem is figuring out when is the 100th time …
The great thing about rewriting the software is that you can replace all the boring and annoying bugs you know with an exciting and new set of original bugs.
first, what The Nybbler said.
second, and its hard to say definitively without seeing the code, i’d have looked at this code and done a quick estimate of how long i thought it would take me to write from scratch. i’d have then tried to guess how long it would take to fix, if i thought it would be quick i’d have probably tried a couple of things but once it started to get all spiny and hairy i’d have dropped it and rewritten it.
as an aside your friend may want to take a look at “Refactoring by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler” and “Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers”
He said that whatever was wrong with the program made it hard to get it to start up at all.
sorry for the delay in responding, life happened 🙂
but just in case this is helpful to your friend (and hopefully i’m not teaching granny how to suck eggs)…
at this point i’d need more info, what operating system? what do the system logs say? if its unix-y based doing something like ‘strace program-name’ or ‘truss program-name’ can help with startup problems. if the program does network stuff, running a packet sniffer like wireshark or tcpdump can show you whats going on at that level. i’d also like to know what running it in the debugger showed etc
I don’t think my friend was looking for advice– he works for google.
I was curious for myself.
@tumteetum
Indeed, I once worked a little on code that consisted of a single block of code consisting of 10,000+ lines (don’t ask) and it was remarkable how quickly one could bring some order into the chaos by refactoring.
yes it still surprises me how fast it helps, and how, after enough refactoring, all of a sudden the code just seems to collapse in on itself, thats when i know i’m on the right track.
Perennial SSC topic alert: Today I stumbled upon a comment from Brendan Eich regarding his ouster from Mozilla. Short and cryptic, but makes clear that the popular narrative isn’t the whole story.
Clear as mud to me – but perhaps it would be clear if I knew the required things about California law, corporate governance, and so on. Can someone who does know about those things explain?
From what I could gather digging in to the incident, there was a heck of a lot of office politics going on when he was selected as CEO. Some of the board and other employees had a favoured candidate who definitely was not him, and when Eich got the job, there were unhappy people who wanted to find some way to give him the push.
The oblique reference in that tweet seems to be that under California law etc. they couldn’t successfully challenge his appointment and have it overturned, so they were casting about for another way to give him the boot, and the “boycott” was a means of doing that by getting the company to yield to popular pressure: have him jump (resign) before he was pushed.
That OKCupid started this “did you know Eich is a monster?” campaign was very damn fishy from the start, and I’d not be one bit surprised to find out some unhappy folks within Mozilla reached out to some like-minded people elsewhere to set this whole thing up. But that’s just wild speculation on my part; I’ve always thought the OKCupid thing had a lot to do with the parent company having a rival property to Mozilla’s Firefox and competing for Google partnership work with them, and using this as a means to weaken Mozilla or make them look like a bad choice to be linked with in the public eye hey guess what we’re the squeaky clean white knights in this and coincidentally we’ve got a solution to your requirements! Getting insiders from Mozilla happy to work with you on ousting their CEO and giving you this whole idea on a platter was just icing on the cake for them.
I suspect this is *usually* what’s going on when a very high-profile person is ousted for some kind of crimethink/twitter outrage storm/racist joke/whatever. There was a complicated office-politics battle in play and the current equilibrium was that they had their high-profile job; the outrage storm/etc. then showed up and shifted the balance of power in the office politics battle. Most people using this outrage inside the organization are simply using it as a tool–many may find the outrage silly or distasteful, but it still helps them win, so they use it.
Having gotten back into homeownership after a bit of time, I am sharply reminded why I drifted libertarian the last time.
So, from a leftist perspective, libertarianism:
The radical perspective that you shouldn’t have to ask the government for permission to repair a fence the government requires you to repair.
Seriously. And in order to ask the government permission, I must do so in person, during hours I have to take time off of work to achieve. And they can deny it, after charging me a fee to look at the proposal to put the exact same fence up that was already there, only not broken. And then fine me for not fixing the fence they refused to let me fix.
And I am an intelligent and wealthy person – I can actually afford to, and have the capacity to, deal with this. Looking around my neighborhood, which is lower-income, most people can’t, and will be forced to hire people to do the work – after getting fined – and go into debt to do so – not because they can’t install a fence panel or three, but because they can’t navigate the bizarrely byzantine process of getting permission to do so.
Unless you own a business or do your own home maintenance (and other activities as appropriate), you do not understand. There is a reason these things are associated with anti-government sentiment.
Time to go hire a person to do a land survey, because I am legally required to do so, in order to get permission to do something else I am legally required to do. And when I am done I get to pay the government to look at this fence to say “Yes, that is the fence you said you would build”. And hopefully they don’t look around while they are out to see if there are other things they can require me to do.
Oh, and I have installed fences before. The section in question is going to take me three hours to do. The process will take dozens, and will cost more than the work itself.
If you just go ahead and do the repairs without the requisite kowtowing, what would happen? If all you’d have to do is eat a 3-digit fine and then they go away, it might be a worthwhile tradeoff (though an unjust scenario, to be sure).
They’d issue an injunction, then keep fining me until I get the permit issued. Which would give me a month or two to get the permit issued, so it is definitely an option.
I specifically avoided an HOA because of this sort of nonsense (and also I wanted to use native plants, instead of adding to the water consumption and river nitrate problem by installing St. Augustine everywhere, which is a no-go in most local HOAs). I forgot how bad local government can be.
Ugh, that stinks. Good luck!
This is one of the advantages of my upper-middle-class NJ town over some neighboring upper-upper-middle-class towns (I don’t know about the frankly rich ones like Millburn or Alpine, though they probably just have their people deal with it). Minor crap without a permit won’t get you in trouble, because the town just doesn’t give a damn. People re-roof and get replacement windows and doors without permits all the time, for instance. I’m not sure if you could get away with putting up a fence without a permit, but repairing one is explicitly allowed.
(mumbles something about tyranny tempered with incompetence, but is forced to admit that at least the repair part is a reduction of tyranny)
Hell, the city on the other side of my fence – literally, I am on the border – doesn’t require permits to install fences, much less repair them.
I suspect they are trying to gentrify my neighborhood – they issued a bunch of notices recently, where the issues have been ignored for literally years. It is a bad-ish neighborhood directly across a major street from the old wealth neighborhood (and the city design is fascinating – the rich neighborhood has a very nice park, and there are two tiny, poorly maintained parks on the shortest route to walk there, which I think are intended to keep the poor people from making the longer walk to the rich people park.)
Gentrification is going to happen either way, as more urban neighborhoods are getting popular again, but this seems uglier.
What is funny is that I wouldn’t need a permit to repair the roof, because the damage was a result of Irma, and roof repairs were specifically excluded from the permitting process on a temporary basis to get everything sorted out quickly.
It is almost like the government is aware the permits aren’t actually a necessary part of the process, and just regards them as a form of taxation.
My town allows repair of up to 1/4 of the roof at a time without a permit. One could suggest that a full-reroof isn’t actually done _simultaneously_ and so falls under this exception, but I don’t think anyone would actually buy it. Nevertheless, the roofers don’t get permits, and no one seems to care. The real reason for permits in our area is so the town can do a step-up assessment and increase the property taxes, and a re-roof wouldn’t trigger that anyway; you’d have to do an addition or convert unfinished space to finished.
It could always be worse.
It’s like they read those stories about China sending the dissident’s family a bill for the execution, and thought: “Hey, that’s a GREAT idea!”
Sometimes I feel like our society needs more violence, not less.
I think I’ve mentioned once or twice that I really appreciate your posts.
Is this a “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers” reference?
Just many prosecutors.
There are few professions quite so as full of people who who as much make me wish I believed in an afterlife, and in the Judgement Of God.
This law firm does seem to have managed to figure out how to combine the worst uncaring aspects of publicly funded prosecutors and the venal evil of privately owned law firms, and fused them into a literally hellish horror.
Being serious this time, I agree about this law firm.
As for prosecutors, I think plenty of them are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they die – if the same is done to them as they did to others they are in quite a bit of trouble. That’s not a comfortable belief.
Perhaps you are mistaking a revenue stream for a zoning ordinance?
Keeping this in mind helps me be less angry about all the times I’ve been ticketed and towed in my town. Still very angry, but less angry nonetheless. I’m not sure why.
From my time in local government, this was one of those “rock and a hard place” problems for the council to deal with. Parking fines are not a revenue stream in the same way as the US (at least, not in small towns like ours; clamping is the big money-spinner idea imported from the UK and mostly in Dublin which is big enough to make it profitable) and cars are not towed down here, though fines may and will be issued.
The town was built in the days when you got around by walking on your own two legs as God intended, or maybe if you were really fancy you had a horse. It was not built for cars, and the streets are narrow. So you have the problem of (1) houses built beside streets that the builders never visualised ‘and people will want to park their internal combustion engines outside their residence’ (2) if cars are parked on both sides of the street, they either have to be half-parked up on the footpath (which annoys and inconveniences pedestrians and forces them out into the traffic to get around the parked car) or if fully parked on the street kerbside, this reduces the lane of traffic to a single lane in between the parked cars and annoys drivers, especially drivers of vans and lorries (3) there just isn’t the room for everyone to park a car outside their house.
So issuing permits is a compromise solution, and gets a lot of “but I need to park a car outside my house because my mobility is impaired/I have a sick or elderly family member/other vital reason” applications for exceptions, refusals of which make the residents angry and get them complaining to their local councillors and representatives, as well as owners of local businesses who want on-street parking so people will patronise their shops and businesses.
There’s no way to make everybody happy.
Nothing like homeownership to catch one in the juxtaposition of BTFSTTG and NIMBY.
Bitcoin is designed to limit the number of bitcoins, but wouldn’t there be some sort of equilibrium as a result of having assorted cryptocurrencies?
I’m not sure what you mean by equilibrium, but if you’re asking if there’s really no limit to the number of Bitcoins because similar cryptocurrencies can be created, then the answer is no. U.S. dollars have a finite quantity, even if Zimbabwe or another country creates a currency and calls it ‘Dollars’. Same thing with cryptos, where there are many imitators but a finite quantity of the original crypto Bitcoin (which derives its value in part by acting as a Schelling point among the plethora of digital currencies). By algorithm design, only 21 million Bitcoins will ever exist.
I was thinking that if the theory that a little inflation is essential for a healthy economy is correct, then there might in some sense be not enough bitcoins.
While I hope there will never be a way to make fake bitcoins, it’s conceivable that there’s some consensus desired amount of cryptocurrency, and additional brands will fill in the gap.
or maybe there will be bitcoin2.
Ah, got ya. Currency competition is healthy and there’s over a hundred cryptos at the moment. What level of inflation, if any, consumers prefer in their currency will be discovered through a market process. Personally, I’d prefer a currency that doesn’t lose value over time, but inflation is advantageous to other groups.
It’s also to be seen if Bitcoin will function best as a currency, or more like gold as a store of value. The transaction cost is currently pretty high for Bitcoin, and alternatives such as Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin are cheaper to spend (though not widely accepted). Future planned protocol improvements will make it easy to transfer from Bitcoin to altcoins and vice versa, and Bitcoin might end up working more as a settlement layer while other cryptos work better for day-to-day spending.
EDIT: BTW, 1,800 new Bitcoins are created each day. That rate will be cut in half in 3 years, and then in half every 4 years after that, until things stabilize around 21 million bitcoins total in 2100. So there is some inflation in Bitcoin, but it’s predictable and designed to reduce over time.
I’m going to pre-emptively declare this is not about Culture Wars; I don’t know the local politics involved but Wikipedia leads me to believe that the owners of the Seattle Times lean Republican, and so I’ll assume the paper’s editorial stance inclines that way too.
I was interested by this story because it involves what seems like a really progressive and up-to-date church (they appear to be Unitarian Universalists) in a complicated situation, and the reporting doesn’t take a hatchet to them but does manage to skewer some attitudes that are teeth-achingly hip by contrasting them with the attitude to the people on the receiving end; you need to read the entire story for yourself but there were parts where I was wincing over “do these people not see how clueless they look?” Maybe the reporting is unfair, I can’t say.
The interesting part was that this is a progressive, liberal church – you know, the good type of Christianity. Usually these kind of “they say they’re Christians but look how they’re behaving towards the poor and needy!” stories lean on conservative churches (though are UUs Christian, as such?)
Here’s the problem:
Here’s one of the “had me going ‘ow ow ouch'” moments:
Another one of those moments: all worried about the trees, don’t mix with the formerly homeless people living on the grounds because, you know, privacy. Yeah.
Let it not be said that progressive Christians don’t believe in miracles.
Also, she lived on the property, and never met anyone who worked there? That’s an impressively large chunk of land.
Yeah, that sounded odd to me. But it seems to be a large site, with these cottages tucked away in a particular area, and the occupants are “formerly homeless”. The woman quoted in the story (Ms London) is black, and I’m going to take a wild guess and assume a lot of the other occupants are also black/POC/poor, and even if they are church-goers they’re probably not gonna visit the “rich white liberal not-really-Christian” church.
The line about “church members intentionally not meeting any of the residents” killed me, because it underlines the absolute cluelessness of the people and gives a very pointed portrayal of them: nice white well-off (relative or not) folks who are high-minded, give to proper charitable organisations, and don’t mix with the poor folks who are the recipients of that charity. Had it not been for that, I’d have had a great time laughing at the “laying on of hands for the trees, solar-powered in Seattle, gender-neutral bathrooms because that’s the first thing anyone will look for in a church and is our ceiling too high because that would be corporate capitalist consumerism (as we park our SUVs in the lot)” story.
I do appreciate it’s a problem for the church in question, who never set out to be landlords, provided this facility as a charitable function back years ago, and now have (probably not up to modern code) houses that it is a lot easier and cheaper to simply knock down, but the unfortunate thing is that there are a set of people going with them, and what happens next? Okay, the story answers that, there’s a Community Psychiatric Clinic which is in charge of case management for the residents and will get them rehoused, but that’s why I was wondering about any political involvement behind the scenes either from the paper’s angle or the church; it’s unusual to see a news story that’s any way vaguely critical of a right-thinking, right-on church (there’s a photo of the congregation attached to another story with a big supporting same-sex marriage banner) as distinct from “here’s another mega-church pastor scandal, boy those fundies talk the talk but they sure don’t walk the walk”.
I think there’s a real gospel message here, though. Homeless people – destitute people, “destitute” being the best meaning of the word “poor” as used in the Greek gospels – are not convenient, easy to deal with. Fulfilling the teachings of Jesus is demanding. It’s too bad that this church has chosen to put human things (such as electric-car charging stations) ahead of the things of God.
At the same time, I think that it would be fair for the congregation to look at other ways to help the relevant homeless. If you’re looking at spending $1 million/10 people, then it’s fair to say “maybe we could get more for the money”. Not necessarily donating it to AMF, but tearing down the cottages and building something that houses more people for the same money.
Leaving aside all the other stuff, surely places of worship traditionally have high ceilings specifically because the grandeur and the echo helps to create a sense of awe that a low, strip-lit plasterboard ceiling can’t?
I always assumed it was for the otherworldly quality it imparts to choirs, which can help turn a mediocre group of singers into something very pleasant and transforms excellent groups into something spiritually moving.
Yeah, that’s part of what I meant. But even the visual effect of the ceiling being really high / you feeling really small by comparison with the building, must surely be part of the magic.
I would like to agree, as someone with a lot of experience singing in choirs, the effect of good acoustics cannot be overstated. It really does turn a good sound into something phenomenal.
I distinctly recall at state chorus, when we were first starting, the conductor started by just instructing the group to sing a chord and listen to how it sounded in a space designed for it.
For some brands of progressive Christianity, grandeur and awe are bugs, not features.
This seems both unkind and unnecessary, and I have severe doubts about its truth.
Just look at the direction of the post-1960s liturgical reforms, in both the Catholic and Anglican Churches. The overwhelming trend has been towards making things simpler, plainer, and more easily comprehensible.
I don’t see how that comment is unkind or unnecessary. It’s absolutely true that certain Christian denominations eschew ornate churches in favor of very plain places of worship because they feel like spending large amounts on their church goes against the teachings of the Bible, so acknowledging that these people exist isn’t unkind. As far as unnecessary goes, it was on topic, so I don’t see the issue.
Wait, why is that unkind? I don’t think grandeur and awe are necessarily good things. It’s not like it’s only a feature of some progressive Christians views either. I don’t think anyone would say the Amish are big on grandeur and awe either.
The cynical part of me thinks the high ceiling worries are really about the heating bills because solar power or not, and deep pockets congregation or not, you are still going to burn a lot of energy heating all that amount of large, empty space!
Grotto is a non-trivial part of local, personal Catholic faith in many (most?) parts of the world.
This is not to say that UU – who strike me as the uber-Protestant form of Christianity – have the same sense. But it’s not like the high ceilings are a required part of the awe.
I suspect, while knowing exactly what is in the article, that it’s the million dollars, not the parking spaces, that are the key issue.
Also, how in the whatever is something suitable to serve as housing for 10 people, but it would cost a million dollars to renovate?
I could believe that seismic retrofits will do it. Depending on the occupancy group ADA compliance could also add quite a bit.
I know that area. I know that exact intersection.
Those 3 houses are old, run down, about worn out, and the roofs have obvious signs of moss and water damage. And they are often filthy and have soggy cardboard boxes of junk piled around them. Every now and then the church tries to have the exterior cleaned and the gardening done, and within a few months, it’s back to the same mess.
Most of the rest of the neighborhood has gentrified, especially after the UW demolished all of the old worn out houses on the land it owned in that neighborhood, and constructed high density student and facility housing.
Also, housing that old in Seattle has not been earthquake proofed. Earthquake remediation, especially in old houses, is Not Cheap. When the big one hits, those houses are going to fall down, kill everyone inside them, and catch on fire, right at the moment when the SFD can’t get to them. You don’t have to do earthquake remediation on houses left in place, but as soon as you start doing major work, those rules start kicking in.
Backthread there was discussion of lead and asbestos. I will bet $100 that those houses have lead paint and asbestos, currently safely encapsulated and entombed. But again, if you start doing any major work that will disturb it, the rules kick in, and out come the inspectors, permits, respirators, and hazard suits.
IMO, the UU church there should do what many other churches in Seattle have done, and just sell their parking lot and also that land those houses are on to a developer, who will then build 5 story high density housing on it, and the city then gets a bite of property tax, and can spend some of it on subsidized housing. The local big black congregation church a few neighborhoods over, the First African Methodist Episcopalians, did exactly that a few years ago, and even put together an outreach program to other black congregation churches in the larger area showing them how to do the paperwork.
The richer white folk at the UW UU probably don’t want a 5 story condo stack next to their ugly 1960s-style building though.
The richer white folk at the UW UU probably don’t want a 5 story condo stack next to their ugly 1960s-style building though.
Hey, I looked the place up online and that ugly building won architectural awards and is a reason for prospective historic listing! (Ignore my superior European smirking over the “it’s a whole fifty years old, it qualifies as historic!” rule):
I agree it’s ugly but that was the run of modern church architecture; you have not seen “putting the ugh in ugly” until you’ve seen 70s renovated/new build Catholic churches. One of the strong contenders for the inaugural Annual My Eyes They Bleed Church Architecture Prize is the
Temple of the Esoteric Order of DagonUC Berkeley Newman Centre (yeah it would be Berkeley, wouldn’t it?)That’s going in my Unknown Armies/SCP inspiration folder.
Is that altar for Christian services, or pagan services at which they plan to conduct human sacrifices?
Per the Center, “It is an architectural statement of Christianity with its roots in the altar of Abraham and in the catacombs of Rome”.
So, pre-Christian human sacrifice, check, and then they’re all set to dispose of the bodies.
I don’t see any runnels for the blood. Either they’re going to make a huge mess, or the faithful will gather around the altar like kittens around a saucer of cream.
Ugh. It’s like a five-year-old designed the altar and lectern as part of his primary school arts and crafts project.
Please, these are at least theoretically Christians we are talking about.
Saucer of wine.
It’s Berkeley; they’ll never find anyone pure enough to be worthy of sacrifice.
If the sacrifice is sufficiently “contaminated” peyote or LSD, the Old Ones don’t always notice the lack of purity in other respects. The response to prayers heralded by such a sacrifice, however, can be amusingly and/or dangerously unpredictable.
How dare you accuse the Esoteric Order of having such bad architectural taste.
I don’t see any runnels for the blood.
Note the two holes in the ‘altar’ (which I strongly doubt is according to the rubrics, and as for the ambo, I’m not even going there – literally or metaphorically). Though probably the evoked entity will be lapping up the blood anyway, and any spills or remaining stains – well, that’s the beauty of the all-stone design for easy cleaning!
It’s one of those “bare concrete” designs that works okay-ish in a climate like Berkeley where I am going to assume the song “It never rains in California” is climatically accurate and you have warm temperatures and sunshine for enough of the year so that it’s not cold, damp and grey inside. But yeesh – even the real catacombs are not as creepy!
Berkeley is moderately rainy in normal years, though affected by periodic drought. The famous California climate is mostly a southern California thing.
I have to disagree with that last bit. Berkeley is – along with San Francisco – a special case. Fog rolls in off the San Francisco Bay making parts of SF and most of Berkeley cold, wet and overcast through the summer, hence the famous quip usually attributed to Mark Twain.
But you only have to go a TINY BIT inland – just past a row of low hills that blocks the fog – to recover that famous California Climate. Silicon Valley proper – Stanford and Palo Alto and San Jose and Mountain View and Cupertino and such – all arguably have better weather than Southern California. There’s just a week or two of rain in the winter but the rest of the year temperatures are mild and skies are blue and houses don’t need air conditioning and only rarely need heating.
That is not consistent with my experience. The rainy season is about half the year. That doesn’t mean there is rain all the time, but it does mean that there is rain sometimes. A lot more than a week or two.
@Glen, No need for air conditioning, only a little heat needed, only a little rain in winter doesn’t sound better than SoCal weather, it just sounds exactly like SoCal weather (or at least Santa Barbara weather, the only place in SoCal where I spent any length of time).
I should have looked at some actual statistics first. By this comparison, Berkeley consistently qualifies as “very cold” on winter mornings whereas Mountain View and LA don’t have any “very cold”. Meanwhile, LA has an extended period in the summer that qualifies as “warm” with a good chance of “muggy”, whereas Berkeley and Mountain View are virtually never “muggy” or “warm”.
I’m not a fan of muggy or uncomfortably warm weather, so I prefer northern California, which errs slightly on the side of “bring a light jacket in case it gets cool”. Though an advantage LA has is that when the outdoor weather is too danged hot and muggy, the water temperature is really comfortable and not at all cold.
If you toss in some other part of the country, say, Manhattan, the difference versus anywhere in California tends to be pretty stark.
The Unitarian Universalist church is open-minded almost to the point of parody. It’s been joked that their theology boils down to the statement that “there is at most one god”.
On a more interesting note, my experience has been that it’s an attempt to provide much of the structure/community that a standard congregation might have, but without really the theology. It’s been my experience that this is then substituted with Social Justice movements internally, though that need not be the case.
And that they address prayers “to whom it may concern.”
My stash of Unitarian Universalist jokes:
At meetings someone speaks and says nothing. Nobody listens — and then everybody disagrees.
How many gods are there? Polytheist: Many. Monotheist: One. Atheist: Zero. Agnostic: “Don’t know.” Unitarian: “Any number except three. Well….maybe, but which three?”
To have a few doubts is normal. To have many doubts is a crisis of faith. To have contant doubts is to be a Unitarian Universalist.
Unitarian Bible Study Today! Bring your own bible and scissors
Unitarians are bad at congregational singing because they’re always looking ahead to see whether they agree with the lyrics
Universalists think God is too good to send them to hell. Unitarians think they are too good for God to send them to hell.
What do Unitarians do when they’re really mad at you? They burn a question mark on your lawn
What do UU’s and Dracula have in common? They both originate in Transylvania, and they both shy away from the cross
The fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the neighborhood of Boston
What do you call the guest of honor at a Unitarian funeral? All dressed up and no place to go!
UU Time–why nothing important happens until fifteen minutes into the meeting
It’s been joked that their theology boils down to the statement that “there is at most one god”.
I thought some UUs found that level of theological rigour much too constricting and overbearing, not to mention being judgemental and prescriptive to prospective/current congregants who are atheists/agnostics/other?
I’m a fairly conservative person, and I’m Catholic, so UU’s always seem like an odd knock-off. But–two of my favorite bloggers are UU’s–Rivka (Respectful of Otters, Tinderbox homeschool) and Doug Muder (Red Family Blue Family). Doug Muder’s “The Hallowe’en Cat” and “Seeker of Dishonor” have an awesome non-satirical satire of UU’s (the “Society for Rational Ethics”).
https://energyarts.lpages.co/webinar-tai-chi-mastery/
Folks, I’m not sure if or how you can get at that link– it’s part of a free course, but I can’t see where to sign up now.
In any case, I’m posting it because the Ars Longa, Vita Brevis discussion may be dead, and there’s a detail which fits nicely.
The video is mostly Bruce Frantzis talking about his lineage, his personal history of studying, etc.
He talks about what he studied with his last teacher, and how hard he studied. He learns one thing after another, and then he gets to internal alchemy, but his teacher died.
Apropos of nothing much:
Slate Star Codex is not actually an anagram of Scott Alexander. But you know what is?
Learn Stat Codex
That’s why there’s the “N” on the little book in the header.
Today in political correctness gone mad: British bakery chain Greggs forced to apologise for portraying Jesus as a sausage roll. Isolated incident that doesn’t reflect on Christians as a whole, or yet another step down the path towards religious tyranny?
British sausage rolls are not very good, so I agree that they should apologize and start selling better food instead.
The notion that if you wish me to purchase your products, then you don’t portray my lord as a food stuff – or if you do you apologise – seems to me entirely reasonable and doesn’t reflect poorly against Christians at all.
I would suggest – although I’m certainly not willing to test it out – that the reaction would not be so peaceful and free if it were Mohammed as a sausage roll; at the very least collars would be felt.
How do Muslims feel about the portrayal of prophets as sausage rolls? Do they only object if it’s Muhammed?
My post didn’t mention Muslim’s reaction to anything, so I’m surprised you asked me as I don’t really consider myself an expert on Muslim reactions.
I’m afraid I don’t know. However, Christ is actually seen as a prophet in Islam – I don’t know if they call him Christ – and if you consider the difference in reactions to {Hebdo compared to Christ satires, South Park’s censoring of Mo, the attempted shooting at the ‘Draw Mohammed’ contest, the famous Mohammed cartoon controversy and riots etc.} thus we can say that they do hold ‘the perfect man’ in more reverence than at least one of their prophets; and thus not reacting to the manger (which isn’t symbology in Islam regardless; that Christ was a baby of course they’ll recognise, the trappings of Christmas they’ll recognise too from Christanity, but its not part of their religion I don’t think) is not evidence that they wouldn’t react if they did an advert of a recognisable act where Mohammed is replaced with a sausage roll.
I hope that helped.
Well, you did say: “I think that perhaps the reaction wouldn’t be so peaceful and free if it were Muhammed as a sausage roll; at the very least collars would be felt.”
So, who is it that is going to be reacting “less peacefully” with a more extreme reaction than arrest (“collars felt”), if not Muslims?
I’m just thinking that if there were to be a religious reaction on the part of angry Muslims to the hypothetical sausage roll Muhammed, they should probably be just as angry by the portrayal of Jesus as sausage roll (whether they agree with the general iconography of the nativity, or not).
Worst than arrest is imprisonment, which would be done by the secular authorities. There is also the possibility of a social media mob lead by some like Harman (you might consider that not quite as bad or less peaceful as arrest; conviction certainly is worse).
If you do wantto make the claim that their is no greater objection on certain Muslims’ parts to disrespectful portrayal of Christ* as there are of portrayals of Mohammed then this frankly doesn’t pass the laugh test.
* I use Christ deliberately, its possible that the reaction would be different if it was unambiguously and uniquely Iyr.
I’m not sure. Apart from Jesus being less important than Mohammed is in mainstream Islam, I’d expect that even if I were a) a Muslim and b) someone self-entitled enough to demand that non-members of my religion should treat my religion with the same reverence I do, I’d still be able to recognise the Greggs’ sausage roll nativity as not being intended to poke fun at Islam, and, to the degree that I considered Christianity a false religion anyway, probably not be particularly bothered by it.
Issus Ibn Mariam is the form I’ve seen.
Cheap shot, but, um…
The Eucharist is not to be partaken of lightly.
ha! Kinda backed into that one.
The use of the word “forced” seems poor. The company did something silly, people got offended (not terribly unreasonably, imo), and then the company apologized, at least according to the linked article.
If that’s really all that happened I think that this is a good example rather than a bad one.
It matters, I suppose, that the offense seems reasonable. The company replaced a well-known and popular sacred symbol with a commercial food-product. I think that warrants at least a “really, guys?”
That depends on what the “or else” was, I suppose.
It was stupid, to be fair. There’s a witty way of doing this and a stupid way, and they picked the stupid way. Using traditional manger figurines of the Three Kings and then sticking a sausage roll in the manger isn’t clever or funny. I wouldn’t be horrified and offended by it, but it was clumsy and lazy and would have had me rolling my eyes.
I think getting a response from British Anglicans that “hey, this is also a sacred festival of our faith and this is not funny to us” is no harm as a reminder that Christianity is not simply about “let’s all be nice and the local church is a centre for social work” but is a religion; they should and could have stuck to secular Christmas/Xmas/Winter Festival imagery for their Advent calendar, then they could have put their sausages where they liked.
I assume it wouldn’t have been a problem if the three kings had been bringing sausage rolls.
I think it might be a bad idea to associate a food product with myrrh and frankincense. Gold might be okay though.
“Our sausage rolls are as good as gold!”
I assume it wouldn’t have been a problem if the three kings had been bringing sausage rolls.
That would have been a lot funnier than the picture they used!
Tagline: Is that a sausage roll or are you just happy to see me?
I’m very disappointed by the fact the sausage roll hasn’t been artistically sculpted to look like Jesus. I feel like your description really got my hopes up for no reason.
It’s just a sausage roll in the place where Jesus would normally be placed in a nativity seen.
I’m also disappointed by the milquetoastness of the pastors’ criticisms in the article. They seem mad more about the commercialism of it than the portrayal. One gets the impression they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t an advertisement to sell stuff. And there are no threats of hellfire, damnation, or stoning.
That’s what struck me about this, too.
Some passages from the article, including the headline (bolding mine):
Aletha Adu, the author of the article, consistently uses fairly imprecise language when describing Christians’ reactions, like “forced,” “came under fire,” and “hit out.” But as imprecise as those phrases are, I wouldn’t really consider them to be broad enough to cover the actual quotations from Christians in the article. Complaining “it goes beyond just commercialism” or complaining that it “raised the issue of Bible stories being misused to sell products” doesn’t strike me as actions that reach the level of “forcing” the chain to apologize. It certainly doesn’t rise to the level of what I think most people would consider “political correctness gone mad” to reach, when it comes to “forcing” an apology or “hit[ting] out” at someone for creating imagery they consider offensive.
Either the quotations in that article are woefully incomplete (this would strike me as strange since I would expect the quotations included to be selected for in such a way as to support the author’s descriptions, but also not inconceivable) or inaccurate, or the author’s description of the event is misleading, I would say.
Buzzfeedification of news.
“Local pastor DESTROYS blasphemous ad–you won’t believe what happens next!”
YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE HOW MANY CLICKS THIS HEADLINE IS GETTING…
It’s The Sun, a UK tabloid (arguably the UK tabloid). They’re all like that all of the time anyway.
I assumed that the last quote was included for contrast with the implied angry letters to Greggs from individual Christians.
Perhaps that’s the case. It’s hard to properly contrast the direct quotation with angry letters that are only implied, though, when the author, again, uses such imprecise language to describe the response. I’m not even convinced that we’re justified in believing that angry letters are implied! What does “hit out at the chain” really mean, as in, what literal physical actions did Christians take due to the offense they felt by the existence of this imagery? It could be an angry letter-writing/boycott campaign, or it could be a coordinated stalking campaign with threats of physical violence, or anything in between.
It’s unfortunate that the article and the headline make a point to use such strong-yet-imprecise language but only provides supporting evidence that is in contrast to that.
I did try Googling this news and found this article which provides some more supporting evidence, such as:
This definitely does look a lot like some version of political correctness gone mad. In general, I think hypersensitivity about insufficient reverence to Christianity doesn’t tend to get labeled as “political correctness,” but I think it’s a very similar phenomenon.
Aletha Adu, the author of the article, consistently uses fairly imprecise language when describing Christians’ reactions, like “forced,” “came under fire,” and “hit out.”
You tend to get that in stories about religion, though. There used to be plenty of “Vatican slams”, “Pope hits out at”, kind of headlines where, when you read the actual story, it turned out “A bishop said it might be nice not to do this kind of thing” or “Pope actually is Catholic and so repeated Catholic teaching during homily at Papal Mass” was the matter in question.
“Local Methodist thinks this is not quite on” is not going to make a sensational eye-grabbing story the same way as “Angry Evangelical hits out in outrage!”
I think a lot of recent reaction, especially in this context, is that there are sincere believing Christians in the UK (whether Church of England or other denominations) and they’re getting tired of being the butt of jokes, regarded as either nice but ineffectual and a bit feather-headed, or eccentrics, or at most out-of-touch old prudes and grumps. Judaism, Islam and other faiths would never be presented in the same way, but it’s safe and unremarkable for comedians to fall back on jokes about Christians as “but really aren’t these people just too silly?” or for companies to use Christian feasts like Easter and Christmas as commerical exercises (it’s only the middle of November and already they are running the Christmas ads). Sticking to the secular Santa Claus Christmas would be okay, but using specifically religious imagery in this fashion is just bad taste and poor manners. It’s like taking a real photo of a real grieving family around the grave as Granny is being buried, only they stuck a sausage roll instead of a coffin into the middle of the picture. Nobody (or only a very few) would think it was funny or good form even if it’s legally okay and even an expression of free speech.
British tabloids generally love a bit of effluence-stirring, so the explanation is almost certainly that the journalist is exaggerating things to make it look as if people are angrier than they actually are.
Pearl Harbor Part 3 is up at Naval Gazing.
So…does anyone have any ideas about how I might be able to meet fellow vegetarians to make friends with?
Not to talk to them about vegetarianism in particular, mind. Just…friends I could make, who are vegetarian, who I could then talk to about normal every-day stuff. Normally I don’t bother too much with ensuring my friends and I have beliefs that are all that similar, but…it’s an important belief to me, and not a single friend I have, out of dozens, shares that belief. It’s not a big deal, but it would be nice to have some people to talk to who are on a similar wavelength to me on this.
It’s tricky though, because just about any vegetarian meetups or forums you could find, are particularly fixated on vegetarianism itself, as opposed to a place where vegetarians can find each other and talk about whatever. Anyone have any advice on how to get past that?
I feel like almost everyone I know is vegetarian or vegan.
If I knew what I did, I’d tell you—and, probably, stop doing it.
At the risk of imposing, do any of these friends have interest in making another friend? No pressure of course, I just thought It’d be worth bothering to ask. If it’s inconvenient or annoying, put it out of your mind.
Probably not the online kind.
A less flippant response to your original question would be to mingle in the hippiest, or leftiest, circles you can bear. Start going to yoga groups?
Shop at whole foods or the local farmer’s market?
You meet people while shopping?
…though now that you mention it, that local store with tons of vegan food also does frequent presentations about health and such. Maybe that’s the ticket.
In the olden times, aristocrats tended to beat peasants when it came to battle fighting.
Yet, modern farmers tend to be incredibly physically strong, when compared to most people.
What training regime did aristocrats use to make sure that they weren’t physically outmatched by peasants?
I think it was largely due to them having much better equipment, like metal plate armor, and weapons specifically designed for combat like swords.
I don’t know. If you put me in a suit of armour and gave me a sword, would I have an advantage against an Arnie-type with a stick? I suppose I’d have better training in how to fight, also, which might be decisive.
In addition to the equipment, they grew up learning to use it and regularly practice — hunting, tournaments, a lot of leisure involved using tools and skills that were useful in fighting peasants.
Is that a good approximation of hypothetical combat between an aristocrat and a peasant? My guess is that the typical peasant – even within the subgroup that is able and willing to fight – isn’t quite as big and strong as an Arnie-type. Of course, if you are also bigger and stronger than what a typical aristocrat was – to about the same extent that an Arnie-type is bigger and stronger than a typical peasant – this might still be a decent approximation.
And if it’s the case that you are bigger and stronger than a typical aristocrat to about the same extent that an Arnie-type is bigger and stronger than a typical peasant, my guess is that having a suit of armor and a sword against his stick and less durable armor would give you a huge advantage. Maybe not insurmountable, but I’d guess that the Arnie-type would have to rely on something other than sheer strength to defeat you – whether that be better technique or just disregard for his own life and safety.
Yes. You would have an incredible advantage over an Arnie type with a stick. People don’t get how GOOD armor is. It is really hard to hurt someone in plate or mail armor, and it is really fucking easy to stick a sword or spear into someone unarmored.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, military aristocrats weren’t fat pampered slobs. You’re thinking of later days when aristocrats divorced themselves from the fighting. And they trained.
But a guy in well-made plate armor with a weapon of battle in his hands, surrounded by peasants with no armor and spears, was like a fucking weapon of mass destruction. They can’t do anything to him unless they manage to weight him down with sheer numbers, and still may have a difficult time actually finishing him off, and he can kill them very easily.
Until someone invented good enough handheld firearms.
Or even before that, so I have been told, learned how to grow English bowmen.
Yes, until high-powered firearms.
It is possible to penetrate armor with non-firearm weapons, of course, yes, potentially including longbows. But you can’t do it with untrained troops. English longbowmen were elite specialists who required lifelong training, which is the reason why it wasn’t trivial for everyone to just go, “Oh, we’ll add longbow yeomen to our fighting forces.”
Much as it pains my patriotism to say it, English longbowmen weren’t quite the super-soldiers of popular history. The English victories in the Hundred Years’ War had more to do with superior generalship and good use of terrain than superior archery.
English longbowmen in their heyday were really excellent archers.
I mean, let’s distinguish this from “action movie protagonists.” And a longbow is probably pretty close to the bottom of the list of weapons that you’d like to have if you’re facing someone who has a sword or other useful sidearm, fifteen feet away from you, whether they’re armored or not.
No matter how good your archers are, they’re going to get snowed by cavalry, unless say your cavalry would have to charge into prepared fortifications and in unfavorable terrain (ie, Agincourt). But English longbowmen were really genuinely awesome archers. The problem is, you needed to train seriously for decades to get to be able to use that heavy a bow draw with accuracy and without only being able to fire a few arrows before tiring. There was only about a hundred year period in which England managed to convince its people to put in the necessary training to produce large corps of longbowmen.
Sandor, I think you’re overselling the advantages of armor a bit. Yes, it’s a real advantage, but no armor protects perfectly. I would guess that if you pitted a guy with armor, shield, and sword against guys with quarterstaffs and dirks, the results would equalize at 3-1 or 4-1. The best bet for the light fighters would probably be to get the heavy guy off his feet and then stick him where the armor ain’t.
Whenever one starts talking about many-on-one fights, there are a lot of variables to contend with. I think that three or four dedicated, well-trained, well-coordinated guys with quarterstaves could potentially disarm and knock down a well-armored guy and then having immobilized him, work dirks into the weak points of his armor, sure.
But have you ever tried to gang up on a guy when nobody can immediately grapple him? It’s surprisingly tough to coordinate your attacks. And when you’ve got a situation where you’re looking at a bunch of guys against one much-more-lethal guy, you’re often dealing with a situation where the group can win, as long as they’re willing to accept the loss of the first and/or second person to engage. Which tends to lead to nobody wanting to engage.
But ultimately, my point here is that good armor is very, very protective. Yes, you can knock down someone in armor, get a bunch of people to sit on him, and then work a knife through a gap in the armor, for sure. There are also weapons that are decent at penetrating or denting armor (maces, for example). But being in good armor in a fight is a HUGE advantage.
I’ll second that point about many vs 1 fights. Even without armor and without hits causing a screaming guy bleeding out on the ground, it is entirely possible to use superior skill to threaten an untrained group and keep them from coordinating. But if they ever decide to sacrifice half their number, well, you can only kill one at once. Swords kill or disable way faster than quarterstaves in a group against armor, so that’s even more of an advantage to the aristocrat.
I’ve been on the other side of that fight many times, in the context of SCA combat. Of course, my opponents had the same armor and weapons as I did, just, usually, less skill.
If they are not trained in how to do it, the better fighter has a reasonable chance against two or three opponents, because he can engage them one at a time. If they know what they are doing, every time you close on one the others close on you, and you lose even to people significantly worse than you are.
Note, by the way, that a shield is a lot less expensive than armor, and to some degree a substitute.
I would expect that a shield works best against the enemy you are paying close attention to, whereas armor is better for turning a pitchfork to the head from a fight-ending blow to a painful reminder that there’s a peasant you weren’t paying close enough attention to.
Yes. And in a many against one fight, each of the many is paying close attention to the one.
From what I’ve heard in the Eastern martial arts world, the stories about one highly skilled fighter killing five or ten others mostly take place in the context of protracted battles. If everyone’s fresh, unharmed, with sound equipment, and you can see them coming, and you pit ten moderately trained amateurs against one really good professional with commensurately good gear, the professional’s going to die almost every time. But an hour or two into a battle (or even less — fighting seriously is really tiring), less skilled fighters are going to be a lot more tired, a lot more likely to have minor wounds slowing them down, a lot more likely to have lost or damaged weapons and armor. And the tactical situation’s probably a lot more confused. That all adds up.
Eating their fill every day, for starters. If you’re a peasant living somewhere near the $1-a-day level of absolute poverty, hunger is an occasional visitor. It’s hard to grow strong with that sort of lifestyle, particularly if you start running into various deficiency disorders, like rickets. But that won’t be a problem for aristocrats unless things go completely to heck.
Also, aristos used to eat a high protein diet, and were physically bigger.
Well, actually the thing that put it into mind was that I shook hands with a guy who worked on a farm, and even though he was smaller than me he had a “vice-like grip”.
Modern farmers are not physically equivalent to medieval peasants.
Your statement is overbroad but to the extent that it was ever true, it was mostly the result of specialization and equipment, along with some intangibles like motivation/mindset. Also, it’s not clear whether you’re talking on a individual or collective level, but for the latter “aristocrats” are almost by definition part of a structure that has established methods to recruit, train (maybe), and field organized bodies of armed men, peasants probably not.
Being able to afford real weapons and war horses was probably a big one. Older armies didn’t always provide weapons to every militiaman, let alone high quality ones.
They spent all their time hunting and riding and jousting, so they were also in good physical condition — an practiced in using fighting weapons 😛
(Overly broad stereotypical answer to broad question.)
In addition to the nutrition and equipment issues already mentioned don’t underestimate the utility of actually knowing how to fight. Dedicated training, the time to practice, and friends/retainers who have the same, are luxuries that the average peasant didn’t have.
The same regime that taught them how to use their weapons. Fighting in armor is hard work, and training in armor means that your typical knight wasn’t that much weaker than a peasant. And he had armor, and knew what to do with it.
Do you even know how to use that thing?
I think you overestimate how physically fit peasants were back then. They probably suffered from various ailments like back problems or issues from lack of variety in their diet.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that in feudal times in most feudal areas, taking up arms was illegal for non-nobility or non-military. Thus, peasants lack access to weapons and armor and the requisite training to use them effectively.
Peasants would usually need to have spears and/or bows(*) for hunting / livestock protection, and of course knives and axes and pitchforks and the like. Good swords and armor were sufficiently expensive that it probably didn’t matter whether they were legal for peasants. And training to a high level of proficiency with good swords and armor, or with spears and axes against people with swords and armor, was tedious enough that nobody who had to work 60+ hours a week in the fields could do it.
Swords are only modestly better than axes, but armor is hugely better than no armor and combat training vs being good at chopping wood is no contest at all.
* Notwithstanding all the Agincourt mythology, most bows were next to useless against plate and not all that useful even against shield and mail.
Could you clarify? The Agincourt mythology I’ve heard would *agree* with the second half of your sentence, but would then (rightly or wrongly; I’m no expert) claim that longbows were special: much heavier in draw weight, which required much more training to be of benefit in war, and which had no benefit for hunting. (Are you choosing a shot designed to pierce armor? Only if the point is archery practice, not just deer meat.)
Why is Google so popular? Shouldn’t economics predict that there will be several popular search engines that are all about the same quality? It’s not like Facebook or Microsoft, where someone can’t easily start a competitor because of network effects.
Google is just genuinely way better than all alternatives. Mostly because they collect massive amounts of information on everyone and use it to tailor results.
Unfortunately, it’s exactly like Facebook. You could with enough money, some genius programmers and a hell of a lot of severs build a system that competes with Google in every technical aspect, but you’d still be at a major disadvantage. Google just has so much data, not just on websites but on its users which is incredibly valuable in providing a search service. A competitor would have to start from scratch for all the contextual clues (location, word order, search history, misspellings, etc) that Google knows about and can refine their search engine.
It’s a worrying trend of the digital economy that there really isn’t anything that can unseat this kind of intrinsic market leader advantage.
The obvious exception is when someone comes up with a better way of doing whatever the market leader does. Margolis and Liebowitz have looked at the pattern with regard to software, where there is again an advantage, although not exactly the same one, to the incumbent. Their conclusion was that you have serial competition. At some point a new program appears that is significantly better than the incumbent and rapidly replaces it.
Shouldn’t that would lead to a serial of monopolies rather than a competitive market?
A monopoly at any one time, but competition over time about who will be the monopoly.
Think of it as the commercial equivalent of the American system of serial polygamy.
I don’t think you have the correct mental model of Google’s business.
Google is also supported by network effects. Website-creators fine-tune their sites to increase page-rank on Google. Users interact with Google in ways that improve the search results, both for themselves and for other users.
Bing had a marketing campaign a few years ago where you were encouraged to compare Bing and Google search results (blinded). I tried it. It was a pathetic failure on the part of Bing. Making a good search engine is really difficult.
Bing is dreadful and is only surpassed in awfulness by Ask.com* which is the drippings from the devil’s arsehole (my boss at work uses that as her search engine) and every time I look for a simple search for a local service it returns results that would not even qualify as manure, since manure is a useful by-product. I end up tearing out my hair and going to Google, which may be selling what remains of any soul it ever possessed, but still to date manages to give me the result I want as one of the top three returns (if I ignore the paid-for results taking up the top slots on the search page, grrrr).
This is work-related and only when using the boss’s PC (there’s particular software packages and files only on her PC), for my own work PC and at home I have Google (and Chrome) installed.
*Ask Jeeves as was used to be okay, I have no idea what happened with Ask.com but it’s all paid-for and advertisement results which really fucks up the returns for even simple queries: pages of spam to wade through and a hellish lay-out on top of that.
Shouldn’t economics predict that there will be several popular search engines that are all about the same quality?
You would think, given that when it started out there were several other contenders all looking strong in competition against it. But Google for whatever magic reason was just better – easier to use (the way you phrased queries really made a difference on the results other search engines returned), higher quality and really did nearly always produce exactly the result you wanted in the top ten results.
I used to try different search engines and even the good ones involved a lot of trawling through the results “nope, no, no good to me, what the heck is even this one?, no” while Google invariably was “try first result returned – yeah, that’s exactly what I was looking for!”
So it vaulted over the competition and established itself as the best, then as more users came on-stream and heard about its reputation, they used it in preference to others or as their only search engine ever, and that built up a dominance that has been very hard to overcome.
What do people think of duckduckgo?
Desperately want to like it, but whenever I check, it just isn’t quite good enough. That was a couple of years ago, mind, so it might have improved since then.
Their ‘bang’ feature (prepend your search with an exclamation mark and a letter to search other search engines) is a crappy gimmick, though. Anyone who thinks that’s useful needs to set up their browser search engines.
I use it exclusively. Love it.
I want to like it and tried it for some time recently, but I’ve given up because it’s still noticeably worse than Google.
Having been using it near-exclusively for the past several years. To the extent I give up on a search and repeat the search with Google, it rarely helps. (That is, if DDG isn’t finding a good answer easily, then Google doesn’t find one either.)
That said, I do not search Google while logged in and do not let them keep track of me to the extent I can prevent it. Those who let Google return “personalized” results may find it better. DDG never returns personalized results of course.
Shouldn’t it be duckduckgreydu? (Sorry, I’m from Minnesota).
I suspect economics works a bit differently in the case that the user doesn’t pay for it.
In which case the consumer is the advertiser, and the “user” is actually the product. Hmm…
Ding ding ding
One network effect is that something like 75% of people use Chrome or Safari as their browser, and so by default they also use Google as their search engine.
How do you guys feel about honouring the military?
I’m English. Last week I went and saw a bunch of guys in red coat uniform perform a reenactment of Napoleonic era drills.
And, watching them, I was struck by a kind of visceral fear and loathing of them. I don’t know if it was some ancestral thing, but I had this real feeling of red-coats as enemy. These guys would have been shooting me.
So, that got me thinking. When I wear a poppy for remembrance Sunday, the people I’m thinking of are the citizen soldiers who fought in the First and Second World War. I don’t really have any interest in glorifying professional military forces.
I might respect their individual heroism, but perhaps I also fear them as a force of oppression.
They have to be kept in their box, to an extent.
I’m confused; are you sayng you see English soldiers as an instrument of oppression against an English citizen? Or were the red-coats acting out Napoleon’s army or some other meaning?
Instrument of oppression.
I’m not sure if it’s echoes of my celtic blood, or the luddite in me, or what.
I’m surrounded by people who, either honestly or as a performance, regularly denigrate military personnel so it’s not an alien viewpoint to me. That said I cannot understand it at all.
The area I grew up in had a lot of Navy families, due to the Filipino population, and my dad was a sailor himself. One of the players in my college D&D group served in Afghanistan. And I strongly considered ROTC myself after seeing my roommate do it in undergrad.
The reason I said all that is basically to get across how completely normal these guys are. They’re not a bunch of bumpkins on “hillbilly welfare” and they’re not slavering murderers or crypto-fascists. They’re perfectly ordinary working and middle class guys who love their country.
Anyway, don’t worry. They aren’t going to shoot you. They’re actually decent guys and if you want to see that firsthand I’m sure you can find one to talk to over a beer.
Sounds like you’ve got a pre-WWI view of the British army. Prior to WWI, people liked the Navy, but due to the British army’s role in putting down various demonstrations, strikes, riots, etc, Tommy Atkins was not too popular. This wasn’t just in the less-willing parts of the British Isles, they got used on Englishmen too. For example.
Personally, I feel a great gratitude towards the Canadian military for their role in liberating parts of NW Europe in WWII.
Although note that Peterloo was not largely carried out by professional soldiers. The charge was by the Manchester & Salford Yeomanry, a militia unit recruited from tradesmen and shopkeepers and commanded by factory owners.
Mixed. There are a lot of people I respect deeply, because they did really hard jobs. But at the same time, I also know people who went in, did work that was pretty much identical to what they might have done in civilian life, and got out. Them, I don’t really respect much more than someone doing the same job on the outside. There’s the possibility that something goes wrong and they end up getting shot at/blown up, but it’s not really that high these days.
That said, I know a lot of veterans. They’re normal people, and I don’t see any reason to keep them in a box. Force of oppression? Where? I’d probably be serving now if not for the ADD meds. I have no real desire to oppress anyone, except when I’m being ironic. Which I’d probably do less if I thought I might be taken seriously.
There are a lot of jobs that should probably be done by civilian contractors. I suspect the military chooses not to so they can avoid labor regulations.
Well, it also gets very expensive and troublesome to hire civilian contractors to work in forward areas, where armed forces have to operate a lot, particularly if the work is too sensitive to entrust to locals.
There is the mechanism used in the UK of having some jobs (crew of certain sealift ships and tanker aircraft, for example) done by civilian contractors who are required as a condition of the contract to be military reservists, so in the event of war they would be “activated” and therefore subject to military discipline and treated as military personnel should they be captured.
The US does something similar with rank and file members of the Naval Reserve and of the Army Corps of Engineers. The officers are “regular” Army/Navy but a good portion of the crews are reservists who are “activated” for the purposes of a specific mission/job.
I don’t think it’s just labor regs. On one hand, yes, it’s obviously better to use contractors in most of those cases. On the other, contractors are not particularly good near the front if you’re in a major war, and if you’re going to maintain the capability to do, say, supply work in a major war, you’re going to need some uniformed personnel in those jobs. It might be enough to thin some occupations, and make up the shortfall with draftees/new enlistees in the event of a major war, but even that could come back to bite you.
Why?
Legal reasons. If you have personnel in danger of capture, you want them in uniform so they’re protected. Also, they’re less likely to run if they’ve had military training, and if you can shoot them for doing so.
@Incurian,
Because soldiers are expected to take risks that civilians generally refuse (or do only for a lot of money.) Soldiers are also subject to military justice if they refuse, while civilians are not. And solders are trained to operate effectively under combat conditions, while civilians are not.
Plus, it means that if things really go bad, you’ve got people already in the military with some training who can be combed out and used to replace losses in combat units.
Roughly speaking, you can’t pay people enough money to e.g. sail the SS Ohio into Malta. There may be a few people who would take the job if you offered them enough money, but there aren’t enough of them to win a war and you couldn’t afford them if there were. If, instead, you offer them a modest amount of money but also a uniform that gets them the sort of sincere respect that the OP finds anathema, lots of people will take that deal and your front-line soldiers will get the supplies they need to win the war.
Contractors are for peacetime, or for lopsided little wars where only your pilots and special-forces operators face significant danger. And winning the really big wars is a privilege reserved for nations which can honor and respect the people who do it for them.
I need to think about this. My spidey-sense is tingling but I’m not exactly sure what’s going wrong here.
This is true, but it does raise some questions, given that those people, AFAIK, were merchant sailors and not naval personnel. Those men have never gotten the recognition they deserve, even though taking ships across the Atlantic was one of the more dangerous jobs of the war. To say nothing of trying to get them to Malta in 1942.
(Note to self. Add topic to Naval Gazing list.)
SS Ohio had a mixed crew on the Malta run; I had misremembered it as being all-navy, which is why I chose it as the example, but on examination it turned out not to be the case.
And you’re right, of course. Traditionally, the merchant marine was an intermediate case, uniformed and disciplined similar to a military service while facing lesser (but still substantial) risks in the service of commerce rather defense. Being a merchant sailor or officer was a respected profession, if not in quite the same way as naval service. I would guess that in 1939, the expectation was that uniformed merchant sailors serving the cause of defense would get the full measure of respect that they had earned, while in 1945 there were more than enough heroes to go around and huge bills looming under the label “Veteran’s benefits”.
Now that they’re all safely dead and we don’t have to pay them anything but memorial respect, that makes it easy to do the right thing.
Not really. It had a naval guard onboard to man the guns. That was entirely standard throughout the war, but at least in the USN they weren’t part of the crew.
In 1939, the expectation was that being a merchant sailor wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous as it turned out to be. (They suffered higher per-capita casualties than any of the services.) I do know that the merchant mariners got paid pretty well, particularly on some of the more dangerous convoys, but I’m slightly confused as to the drivers of how.
I’ve seen a couple memorials recently, but it’s still something that I think is underappreciated in popular culture.
I don’t get it.
Being from Germany, we don’t have a positive tradition on honoring the military I can relate to, as other countries have.
Also, soldiers are to me The Outgroup, but with guns, thus worse . Looking at military engagements after WWII I am clueless as to how one would want to actively participate in that and give special status points for people who do. And being post WW2 Germany socialized i am not at all reassured of them being “perfectly ordinary working and middle class guys who love their country”, we have a trope about those.
My guess is that kinda symmetrically to that honoring the military is indended to honor the heroes selflessly fighting the big bad Evil. They are the ones saving us from nazis/communists/terrorists or whoever it is that day who Hates Our Freedom.
Or maybe having a military is in itself valuable enough to outweigh the occasional misguided war?
I am obviously not very good at steelmanning the pro military view, anyone care to help out?
I’m sure someone can do better, but here’s my shot at briefly steelmanning it:
It starts with the idea that in the absence of someone prepared to competently wield force you don’t get peace – you get warlordism or sometimes even worse. The respect comes out of respect for that competence, thankfulness for (compared to some of the alternatives) peace, and an understanding that sometimes there is a price paid in lives for that peace.
Yes, all of that can get mixed up with tribalism and worse. But there is a core of sanity in giving respect to the military – at least in America, where on a good day we do have a competent military, peace, and soldiers who will sacrifice to protect others if that is the only way to do it. We can and should wish for a more competent military, less violence, and more upright soldiers. But there are undoubtedly worse possibilities as well.
Ideally perhaps, wars would not be fought. However, the odds of no country in the world fielding a military are far too low. If no one has a military, first country to field a military gets to claim untold riches and power for itself. Given that, your country either needs a military or needs to be protected by a country with a military.
Because as much as militaries are used to fight pointless and expensive wars, it’s way worse for everyone to be defeated by the Romans/Huns/Mongols/Mughals/Nazis/Soviets.
Also I feel like you’ve answered “why special status points” in your question. It’s because otherwise almost no one “would want to actively participate” in a war. If you treat the military as the outgroup, you’re either encouraging them to interfere with government (which I think we can agree is bad). Like the Janissaries in the Ottoman Empire, outgroup turned into unofficial decider of Sultans. Or you’re not going to have a military, and then you are going to be obliterated by someone who does have one. I’m having a hard time thinking of countries with no military and no protector, but the Moriori were a pacifist culture and we can see where that got them when the Maori invaded.
The same events that led Germans to dislike the military led the rest of the world to like them.
Think about it this way:
Whatever you think about the Bundeswehr and the US Army, the alternative to their existence wouldn’t have been peace. It would have been the Nationale Volksarmee and the Soviet Army.
Everything you like about modern Germany only exists because someone was willing to put on a uniform and stand in between your family and the people who would have seen their way of life come to an end.
Communism no longer exists but there are still states and non-state actors who oppose the existence of a free Germany. The men and women who stand between us and them are no less important now than they were during the Cold War.
On the intellectual front marshwiggle is absolutely correct. In the absence of someone prepared to competently wield force you don’t get peace. You get warlords. See Peter van Uhm’s TED Talk on “choosing one’s instrument”, or Robert Heinlein’s The Pragmatics of Patriotism for the long form explanation.
On a personal note I always feel vaguely awkward when civilians thank me for my service. Partr of me wants to be flippant and respond “No, thank you for your tax dollars” another wants something a bit more cutting like “I’m not the one you need to thanking” but we all have our roles to play, and cutting someone down who’s just trying to be polite is not who I want to be.
Thank you everyone for your answers and extra cookie points for the Heinlein speech. While i have known most of this on some level, this helped me consolidate these ideas better into my worldview.
Thouhts on the potential new US tax bill?
The part of it that’s most relevant to me is that gradiate students usually have their tuition covered by the university and are paid a stipend for teaching. the tuition and stipend varies from school to school, but the former can be as high as $50k, and the latter is rarely much over $30k.
Currently, the students are not taxed on the tuition coverage they recieve, but the new bill would tax that as income, even though we never see that money and it’s really just paid to the university by itself. the result of this would be someone who really makes $20-30k being taxed as if they made $50-80k, which would be up to a 400% tax increase and in some cases would be half or more of their real income. This would result in graduate student stipends no longer being a living wage in many cases and they would pay the highest proportional tax rate in the country.
Obviously i think this is a really bad idea. if it passes the system will have to reequilibrate somehow but i can see graduate enrollment going way down and attrition increasing.
The GOP tax bill is full of bad ideas, and it’s disappointing that President Trump is being a standard Republican