Author: VD

God and the pursuit of happiness

Religious faith is not a psychological problem. To the contrary, it is the lack of religious faith that appears to be the psychological problem.

In the United States, 36 percent of the actively religious describe themselves as “very happy,” while only 25 percent of the inactively religious and 25 percent of the unaffiliated self-identify in this way, Pew revealed.

Similarly, in Japan, those who are religiously active are significantly happier than the religiously inactive and the unaffiliated, with 45 percent, 34 percent, and 31 percent respectively being “very happy.”

In Australia, the gap is wider still, with 45 percent of the religiously active reporting being very happy, as compared with only 33 percent of the religiously inactive and just 32 percent of the unaffiliated.

Man is not made to live without limits, purpose, or meaning. And religion provides all three.

Sweet journo tears

Learn to code, baby. Just learn to code. The ride never ends.

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

Color me dubious

The US Left appears to be protesting too much:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared in public Monday night, her first public outing since her lung cancer surgery last December. Ginsburg, 85, attended a concert celebrating herself titled, Notorious RBG in Song, that featured her daughter-in-law, soprano Patrice Michaels. Attendees said Ginsburg looked, “glam”, “magnificent” and “great”. One man who said he spoke with and was hugged by Ginsburg said she looked “resplendent”.

Actually, she does look pretty great. I wouldn’t say convincing, quite, but she does resemble a living human being. More or less.

Burn Unit 2.0

Infogalactic is pleased to announce that it is now possible to join the Burn Unit and support the Planetary Knowledge Core through the Arkhaven store. Three levels of subscription are available, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, and all three come with enhanced features and capabilities on our new SocialGalactic system, to which Alpha access will be announced this week to all Burn Unit and Brainstorm members.

We’re also working on providing a coupon to a discounted Burn Unit t-shirt at Crypto.Fashion.

Please note that if you are already a member of the Burn Unit, there is absolutely no need to switch over unless you prefer to use your credit card instead of Paypal. All current members of the Burn Unit will receive the same access to SocialGalactic as the new members.

In answer to anticipated questions, yes, we will soon be able to offer support for the Darkstream and Voxiversity through the Arkhaven store, although I have to see about delivering the promised benefits to the existing supporters before setting that up. We are also working on an Audible-style system of purchasing audiobooks, but that is turning out to be more complicated if we do not wish to have a system that is not entirely manual.

Thank you for your staunch support of the Planetary Knowledge Core. In an age of endless historical revision and SJW memory-holing, we believe it is a vital tool for the preservation of the history and knowledge of Western civilization. Please note that by doing so, you are not only supporting the technology fronts, but are also helping provide strong infrastructural independence to Castalia House and Arkhaven as well.

No one really cares

That’s the one thing you can reliably count on. The masses simply don’t care enough about anything to ever take action unless they are starving. Techcrunch explains why so few people quit Facebook and Google… and by extension, Amazon and Twitter.

Privacy advocates will tell you that the lack of a wide boycott against Google  and particularly Facebook is symptomatic of a lack of information: if people really understood what was happening with their data, they would galvanize immediately for other platforms. Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.

I don’t believe more information would help, and I reject the mentality behind it. It’s reminiscent of the political policy expert who says that if only voters had more information — if they just understood the issue — they would change their mind about something where they are clearly in the “wrong.” It’s incredibly condescending, and obscures a far more fundamental fact about consumers: people know what they value, they understand it, and they are making an economic choice when they stick with Google or Facebook .

Alternatives exist for every feature and app offered by these companies, and they are not hard to find. You can use Signal for chatting, DuckDuckGo for search, FastMail for email, 500px or Flickr for photos, and on and on. Far from being shameless clones of their competitors, in many cases these products are even superior to their originals, with better designs and novel features.

And yet. When consumers start to think about the costs, they balk. There’s sometimes the costs of the products themselves (FastMail is $30/year minimum, but really $50 a year or more if you want reasonable storage), but more importantly are the switching costs that come with using a new product. I have 2,000 contacts on Facebook Messenger — am I just supposed to text them all to use Signal from now on? Am I supposed to completely relearn a new photos app, when I am habituated to the taps required from years of practice on Instagram?

Surveillance capitalism has been in the news the past few weeks thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 704-page tome of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps (credit scores and the reporting bureaus are a whole other beast). There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.

One of the lessons I have learned — perhaps the most important you can learn about consumer products — is just how much people are willing to give up for free things. They are willing to give up privacy for free email. They are willing to allow their stock broker to help others actively trade against them for a free stock brokerage account with free trading. People love free stuff, particularly when the harms are difficult to perceive.

As a general rule, if your plan involves “waking people up with the truth”, it’s going to fail. If you consider that even Jesus Christ himself could not change a petty regional power structure with the truth, you probably shouldn’t count on anything else changing on that basis either.

Suing the SPLC

Gavin McInnes is striking back at the left-wing organization that has weaponized defamation:

Talk show host Gavin McInnes has filed suit against the hyperpartisan Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) this week. The 61-page complaint was electronically filed early Monday morning in the Middle District of Alabama outlining defamation and other tortious acts resulting in reputational and economic damages.

The Canadian-immigrant talk show host is demanding an apology from the left-wing SPLC for purposefully misrepresenting his beliefs in a defamatory manner and the defamatory mischaracterization of a fraternal club he founded, Proud Boys.

McInnes is being represented by noted First Amendment attorney Ron D. Coleman of Mandelbaum Salsburg P.C. and Baron Coleman of the Baron Coleman Law Firm.

This is exactly the right thing to do. None of the whiners who cry about deplatforming but fail to pursue legal action are ever going to accomplish anything, because the Left knows no shame and could not care less about being called hypocritical.

If more people would do the same, Big Social would be considerably less inclined to think it could get away with actions that blatantly violate their own terms and policies.

The next neocon target

It’s an interesting confession of neocon weakness in the aftermath of the Syrian debacle that they are presently targeting Venezuela instead of another Middle Eastern state. But, as the Saker points out, Russia is not in a position to help defend the Venezuelans as they defended the Syrians from imperial aggression:

I am getting a lot of emails suggesting that Russia might do in Venezuela what she did in Syria. Let me immediately tell you that this is not going to happen. Yes, there are a lot of Russians in Venezuela, but the “Russians are not coming”. For one thing, I will never cease to repeat that the Russian intervention in Syria was a very small one, and that even if this small force proved formidable, it was really acting primarily as a force multiplier for the Iranians, Hezbollah and the Syrian government forces. And yet, even the deployment of this very small force necessitated a huge logistics effort from Russia whose military (being a purely defensive one) is simply not structured for long-distance power projection. Syria is about 1000km from Russia. Venezuela is about 10 times (!) further. Yes, I know,a few Tu-160 visited the country twice now and there are Russian advisors in the country and the Venezuelans have a few pretty good Russian weapons systems. But here, again, this is a game of numbers. Limited numbers of Russian-made combat aircraft (fixed and rotary wing), air defense missiles or even large numbers of advanced MANPADs or assault rifles won’t do the trick against a determined US-Colombian invasion. Finally, there is no Venezuelan equivalent to Iran or Hezbollah (an outside ally and friend) which would be capable and willing to deploy real combat forces for actual, sustained combat against the invader.

I can’t help but suspect that Trump has something up his sleeve here. Is he throwing the neocons into a tar baby, perhaps? Is there anyone, anywhere, who is buying the inept imperial rhetoric about the democratic legitimacy of an unelected foreign puppet?

And it is bizarre that the USA is posturing as if it is going to fix a third-world failed state when it is rapidly transforming into one itself. Apparently the plan is for a second New American Century, albeit in South America now that the Middle East plan has failed.

The opposite of boring

I have no idea why people thought last night’s Super Bowl was boring. To the contrary, it was one of the most exciting, cerebral games in the history of the sport.

The Rams’ defensive coordinator, Wade Phillips, had matched McDaniels’ calls all night. Mostly, the Patriots could do nothing against the Los Angeles sub defenses. Because the Rams’ front was so formidable with pile-pushers Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh, they could afford to play one or two extra men in the back end and limit Tom Brady’s passing options with three strong corners. So McDaniels told his men they were just going jumbo, which would force Phillips out of his sub packages and put linebackers on receivers the Patriots trusted could beat them.

McDaniels would keep only one small player on the field—Julian Edelman. And on the next series, he’d play two tight ends (the lightly used Allen and Rob Gronkowki), a fullback (James Devlin), a big back (Rex Burkhead) and Edelman.

“It was a pretty amazing thing,’’ said Allen, one of the beneficiaries of McDaniels’ invention. “Hats off to the Rams. They really knew us. They played us great. But football’s about in-game adjustments. Josh told us on the sideline, ‘We did not practice this at all coming into this game, and I realize that, but this is going off in my head, and it’s something I think we need to do.’ “

The Patriots had averaged 4.9 yards per play in the first 50 minutes of the game. On this drive, they averaged 13.8. New England played what it considers its athletic big offense, and it worked. Gronkowski beat linebacker Samson Ebukam up the right flank for 18 on first down, then hit Edelman on linebacker Cory Littleton for 13, then Burkhead in the left flat for seven, then Gronkowski between Littleton and Mark Barron down the left seam for 29. Sony Michel subbed in for a two-yard touchdown run. Five plays, 69 yards, TD. Pats, 10-3.

Afterward, Bill Belichick praised McDaniels as much as I’d heard him praise any of his coaches. Belichick called the McDaniels change a “real key breakthrough,” and said McDaniels “made a great adjustment,” and called his play-calling “outstanding, as usual.”

One of the things the more casual fans of the game don’t understand is that a team’s ability to “make adjustments” is very limited by the fact that they have to have practiced the plays to which they are going to switch, that’s what it means to have a game plan. A game plan is essentially a book of plays that the team has repeatedly practiced that week, and there may not be another team in the league with an offensive roster capable of switching completely to formations and plays that are not in that week’s game plan.

Part of that is because New England makes such drastic changes in its game plans from week to week. Even if the jumbo package wasn’t a part of the Super Bowl game plan, there were times this season when it was a major part of the weekly game plan so the players were at least familiar with the plays involved. A second part is that New England has the smartest roster in the league, so the players are able to make the necessary changes without being confused or out of position or mixing up their assignments even when running plays they haven’t practiced. And the third part is that McDaniels has the confidence and courage to make such a high-risk call, one that most head coaches, let alone offensive coordinators, would never, ever make.

Remember, most coaches won’t even go for it on fourth down for fear of criticism. Imagine how much flak both McDaniels and Belichick would have taken for abandoning the game plan in a tie game in the fourth quarter deep in their own territory if something had gone awry.

As for the commercials and the halftime show, who cares? That’s all nonsense for the non-fans. I didn’t see any of that stuff.