rekabis

Narcissism abounds in every sentence.

If anyone wants a read that’ll seriously fuck with your head, try Hardfought by Greg Bear. A somewhat small novella, it takes place thousands of years in the future where humanity is engaged in a fight for survival against an enemy that no-one can understand.

The military patois is thick and barely understandable, with turns of phrases that you are forced to figure out on your own. The physics reads more like mysticism and religious doctrine. The combatants are modified from childhood to become perfect warriors until it is debatable if they are still human. A budding romance between a particularly talented pilot and the civilian analyst tasked to figure out and replicate the successes that produced her - which, ironically, was the humanizing elements of the highly illegal romance in the first place - sets the stage for humanity’s defeat.

And yet, a project started by the enemy in an attempt to understand the humans comes within a hair’s breadth of actually ending the war… until the alien’s own hidebound and ideologically blinkered leaders kill the project out of horror at the heresy it encapsulates.

Its ideas and concepts are maximally dense while the prose itself is sparse to the point of being almost haiku-like. The descriptions alone hew strongly to Chekov’s Gun, with no excess characterizations that don’t directly contribute. I have re-read it over a dozen times in the decades since I got it and every time I have peeled back more layers to find new revelations and themes.

There has never been a communist country; only countries run by communist parties.

They were “communist” just as much as North Korea is “democratic”.

Just because a word exists in a name, doesn’t mean that the word actually applies in any fashion whatsoever. The political parties of both the USSR and China were as communist as fish are birds. Which is to say, absolutely not. They wore “communism” as a thin veneer of legitimacy over a bulwark of feudalistic authoritarianism.

And the real clue is in the name: Communism. Communal. No real leaders aside from administrative functionaries. Classless and cooperative. Everything that the USSR and China never was.

Edit: Russia became communist in 1917. By every metric with which you could possibly measure communism, it was dead by 1918.

Where is John Wick with diplomatic immunity when you need him?

Canada seriously needs diplomats who know significant levels of mixed martial arts and other forms of defence. And then we need to attach them to groups like this.

Officers like that desperately need to be made to eat their truncheons. Preferably sideways.

Pretty sure it screams at us sometimes.

If there was an atmosphere to carry the sound, the sun would be screaming at us at just over 100db.

For reference, sounds at 85db can start causing hearing damage after only 8hrs of exposure.

It’s not that we’re not allowed to look at it, it’s that we have oodles of evidence on how severely damaged our vision becomes when we do look directly at it without sufficient protection, and anyone with two functional neurons to rub together isn’t going to be doing any looking unless they are wearing the appropriate vision protection.

For the last decade I have been using IISCrypto to neuter older and obsolete algorithms. I just apply the most recent PCI profile and restart.

Now granted, this program is unknown to many security professionals I talk to, which is why I mention it here: it works on all NT versions of Windows after Vista. Super-easy to restrict a system to the stronger and more secure algorithms.

Abolish all patents and copyrights, everywhere, except for a creator’s ability to assert “I made this”.

Against Intellectual Monopoly

Don’t mind the rest of the lower left, but I’m there mainly for the antifascist bit.

Have you ever heard Scottish person speak?

Like, seriously nards-deep into full Scottish brogue? It’s like a language that bears zero resemblance to the English language.

Although TBH, have a pretty readheaded lass talk to me in Scottish, and fuck me she could read the phone book and I wouldn’t give a shit I’d just be sitting there catching flies trying to soak it all in.

Relevant example

50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn't get further than one chapter or so.

What I find so bizarre is that the women who go hardest for this stuff tend to be either repressed housewives or hardcore feminists.

Because if Christian Grey had been an unemployed layabout in a decaying double-wide, it would be a horror novel instead of smut. The only reason why it’s smut is because Christian is filthy f**king rich and exemplifies almost every toxic masculinity trait imaginable. And that is in addition to behaving like a controlling abuser.

In this context I see a baseline as a language that

1. A majority of the speakers have above-trivial skills in it, say above a sixth grade level in both written and spoken.
2. More than one-fifth of the population has this ability.
3. said language has extreme density in certain geographical regions, leading to dominance in those regions

And for some countries, there would be several that could fit both criteria. Switzerland would likely have French, German and Italian meeting all thresholds, allowing all three to be baseline languages.

Unfortunately, French does not meet the minimum-used criteria for Canada, as only 18% of citizens can speak it with any great skill. However, the geographical concentration criteria would likely overrule the usage criteria (via Québec), thereby allowing it to remain a baseline language.

Secondary languages would have similar criteria, only relaxed somewhat.