Sankte Hans, the 23rd of June

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Today, Denmark celebrates the marking of Midsummer under the local name and tradition of Skt. Hans. Unfortunately, the countryside is too dry to celebrate with the usual bonfires due to the fire hazard, so the celebrations are more “relaxed” for many. Few or no bonfires in any case.

I am happy to say that I’ve managed to reclaim my old domain Liberterran.org which I gave up on some years back – the ones that snatched it up have released it, so back into my fold it goes, albeit with /some/ changes to its original Paleo-liberal/Individualist-anarchist ideology. :o)

Happy Midsummer, all!

Reminder in re Freedom of Speech

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I’ll have you commit to mind, that the people who are dismissive or unsupportive of the freedom of speech and freedom of expression of others, rarely have anything of import or insight to say.

Was everything regarding statecraft and jurisprudence up to these people, liberal democracy would collapse into belligerent recriminations and violence in a year.

Happy 2022 to all

As we are entering the third year of the COVID-19 debacle, I hope this year will be the high watermark of the pandemic, though I sense we will have to arm ourselves with patience irt. when we will return to a semblance of normality.

We shall see. Best of luck to you all. Be sensible.

Quick responses to the usual GW skeptic talking points

“So much snow, how can this be global warming!?”
The world is bigger than your back garden, you know.

“It was such a long and cold winter two years ago, how can there be such a thing as global warming?!”
For the same reason that a drizzle of snow into April does not mean that summer’s cancelled.

“Scientists are only doing it for the money.”
Even in the decades before there was any significant political or media attention about the global climate?

Oh, yeah, those postdocs are /really/ living the sweet life with fat paycheques they get from their plentiful for research grants on their desks year in and year out!

“Climate and environment and all that stuff is only something lefties talk about.”
That’s because ‘lefties’ are the only ones who give a damn when scientists have something of concern to say.

“Green energy schemes and such just makes us poorer.”
The same way that sandbagging your house does when the levee is about to break? Sandbags are expensive, you know.

“Curtailing carbon energy use will crash the economy!”
Right, because a, say 0.5% short-term drop in GNP growth will spell permanent doom for society.

“Ending coal use causes unemployment!”

As if employment in a danky coal mine is just dandy. Miners lung and tunnel collapses are after all just is something that comes with the job, and better stick with the devil you know, right?

Yeah, okay. And mountaintop removal also gives the wife and kids the sorely needed food supplements since foodstuffs are generally deficient in lead and mercury. We don’t want to rob you of those benefits either, do we? Fecking environmentalists.

“I know that it’s all a hoax! I can prove it, I have years of expertise in <this or that field of engineering>”.

Then why the damn are you spending your time in this debate forum then when you could be out there harvesting fame and Nobel prizes left and right? Oh, wait.

“Climate is chaotic and can’t be modelled. So all these models are just bunk and useless!”

The movement of water molecules in a pot of boiling water on your stove is also chaotic, yet that doesn’t mean that you won’t be certain to scald your hand by plunging it into it.

“Government should stay out of this!”

Right, because all private economic decision makers that operates on a for-profit basis will spontaneously and cooperatively can be trsuted to act in the best interest of the global society and curtail their use of carbon fuels.

“There isn’t a problem, you or the goverment have nothing to do in this regard.”

Keep saying that when I’m opening up a landfill in front of your house. You got a problem with that? Tough.

“NASA just can’t be trusted.”

You have an alternative source of data and analysis of this data, then? If that is the case, why should we trust them with anything?

 

“You don’t get to take my money!”

I don’t give a feck about your money. Spend it on whatever you like. But DO care about what eventually happens  when you put to use whatever you buy with your money.

Buy yourself a buzzsaw, tear down the old pines in the back of the garden and have yourself a good time with the buddies. Lovely. Fine with me. But when you throw on some old tires on just for the hell of it, with me living right next door and having a garden party as well, then it’s not fine with me anymore.

I don’t care about you buying plenty of bourbon, but I DO care if you go on a merry drive in the city after having a generous sample of it.

Buy all the guns and ammo that you’d like and get to it at the firing range; I haven’t a care. In fact, that’s great! But the day your rounds start land on my grounds, then I start caring – a lot.

 

You get the point.  You got it before you read this far. Its likely that you even got it before you came to read this.

 

So, if you come up on a bunch of guys pissing in the big swimming pool where everyone else are spending their time, do you call them out on it* or tell yourself “nah, its probably lemonade”?

*) I was about to add “…and tell them to piss off”, but I caught myself.

Adding to Hitchens’ deconstruction of Islam,

…now, that one thing is that Islam is incoherent, parochial, backwards, stupid, brutal and basically false, as much is clear from not only Hitchens’ words and wit, but from the sources of scholarship on the subject. More unsettling is that that the political tradition that has historically, or at least over the past 200 or so years been in opposition to these religions of old, have over the past fifty years increasingly made themselves useful idiots for degrading western intellectual discourse and progressivism as well as societal coherence and stability by watering down the toxic nature of a backwards nomadic religion as entirely permissible, nay outright _desirable_ in the cultural makeup of a modern society. Now, actual, true to traditionally leftists are somewhat seen as heretics in the contemporary left-leaning political sphere since it is comme-il-faut to pay lip service to the culturally enhancing effect of open borders to people who have neither contributed to an affluent society by their labor yet expect to reap the benefit of membership of it, nor has added to and is less likely to contribute in maintaining a secular and progressive society of openness, absence of religious dominance of the citizenry, or the equal legal rights or general dignity of women.

Odd is it also that the degraded ranks of leftists have kowtow’d to what can likewise be considered a bastardized version of the economic-liberal notion of “free movement of labor”, only that it is less labor asmuch as it is a free movement of dysculture.

Distasteful, annoying, unpopular, indecent, but free and unharassed

Outlawing shitty speech won’t make shitty speech or the mindset it envelops go away, only make it less visible. It will linger in shadowy places where the public can barely see it, where it does not receive the scrutiny and scorn it might deserve and where awareness of it has faded to the point where civil and safe countermeasures against its spread will be too little and too late to halt its spread once it does once again advance.

Likewise, the outlawing of free speech tends to erode what speech is reasonable and necessary, though usually unpopular.

Where the former threatens to annihilate a free civil society in a backwards way by inducing a reactionary series of clamoring of hostilities and brazenly spurious calls for “law and order”, the latter will slowly eviscerate the freedoms and open institutions of a liberal democracy as well as civic associations by way of a dysmoral induction of citizens into the policing each other as that of a razor blade that progressively shaves a notch too closely, eventually leaving the skin not seemly, but bloodied.

The first tends to cause harm on the body of the public in a tangible manner, ie. authoritarian and brutal; the second leading to a rise of a diffuse totalitarianism by way of control of the mind of the public consciousness.

Freedom is preserved by members of the general public who posess the courage to walk the tightrope over a chasm of two species faux decency; that tightrope spun from the yarn of a freedom of discourse and expression of a standard high yet not unreasonably so, in a braid together with a firmness of conviction that the means of freedom are the ones that must be used to exhaustion to guard and preserve them as a whole, even when the means of force by ways of government or vigilante thuggery seem alluring to ‘solve’ these problems of individuals voicing their hatred and abomintion, real or imagined.

Surely, the nasty people with the nasty ideas will go away when swiped away by a mightier force; a hand directed by those of us decent. And we will probably never need to use that forceful hand again, will we? Or do we even care?

—

May a free New Year be brought to you and your fellow citizens ask in return that you throw in your efforts to bring a free and thus hopefully good and safe New Year to them as well.

“Can you do this little thing for me?”

If you serve some sort of specialist function in your job or your general capability, chances are that you have had some idiot ask you (or beg you) to do “this tiny little thing” for them.

“Hey man, you are good at this, so can you fix this thing for me? It just stopped working, but since you’re so smart at this stuff, I’m sure you can fix it in just fifteen minutes!”.

In retrospect, in 20 years of being a “computer geek”, I’ve had this served to me far too often, and far too often have I had the misplaced generosity of agreeing to take on the task. I’ve been raised too well.

Almost always do these incessant “tiny jobs” turn out to be something that take at the VERY least twice the time you’d think it would – or the idiot that handed it to you thought it would. In one case I had a task take me ten times the expected time frame, though I’d concede that it was due to my own stupid perfectionism, spending unreasonably much time to hunt down and fix a problem which should really just have a sticky-label smacked on it which read “this thing is fucked. toss it, buy something new”.

What the real lesson here isn’t that the “tiny jobs” usually turn out not to be tiny.

The lesson is that the assholes that hand them to you are either deeply ignorant as to how much time it takes to collect data, diagnose, get the right tools for the job or bug-tracking and start fixing, actually fixing (requires other tools, and likely spare parts), slapping it back together, testing that the shit works, then retesting, and then getting it back to the person in question. This is not counting the time and mental effort it takes to do the mental logistics of all of these, from A to Z.

Aside from their ignorance would be what is even worse: The likely case they simply don’t care about your time spent, more astutely, the time you spent accumulating the knowledge that is intimately linked with your ability to perform the work demanded of you.

You see, there is this economic fact about people that they are willing to pay somewhat in proportion to their own assessed importance of what they want.

There is the more important fact that people tend to haggle the price, just for the sake of haggling, which is why nobody ever says that you’re asking too low a price when you say that you’d like 20$/hour for the work you performed. “OMG; only twenty bucks?? You did so well, this is so important to me, here, have forty!” Yeah, right.

Even if you do decent work for this miserably low wage, your skills taken into consideration, you will still sit with the turd in your lap if the thing you did work on end up failing for whatever reason. It could be the gizmo you fixed, switched with a spare, or it could be a thingamajig somewhere else in the thing that died on them. The assholes that asked you for a poorly-compensated favour will end up pointing the finger at you 90% of the time, though usually diplomatically, as it tends to work better most of the time amongst people that have high moral standards and/or high standards as far as their professional integrity goes.

Some of the time they may be right (and you will have screwed something up, in which case you are naturally obliged to fix the mess, and they not do it again), but often not. But you still have that cross to bear.

So, you end up with more work, which just might just end up in the same merry-go-round as before, in which case you start look thoroughly incompetent at your job. You will start feeling like either like and incompetent, or an asshole, or both. Bear that cross, you incompetent! You should have done your job properly the first time! (Don’t mention the bathtub curve. Most people don’t understand the statistics, and the odd fact that dispirited items tend to behave in perverse ways compared to their expected function, which is a law unto itself).

If it does turn out to work well, not only will the reward usually be minuscule compared to their convenience of dropping it on you, they will usually just forget about your effort, because the price you asked was inconsequential to them. Do you remember every grab after pocket change you tossed out for trifles? No, you don’t.

Point of this whole open wound of doing “favor work” for others as a professional, is that not only are you underpaid, but you are also under undue moral pressure for your work, often for reasons out of your control, if you did your work well.

You know why professionals charge so much for their services, such as on-location consultants and “fixers” from one of the big brand manufacturers?

It is because that if the thing that needs fixing is important enough, people will pay their asking price. If it is not, they won’t. Their decision shows their real intent. Second and of greater gravitas, it is because people are assholes. They are ignorant as to the cost in your time; worse is that if they are less ignorant, they are assholes that don’t care!

Worser still (adjective maculation for emphasis), the cheaper you set your price, the more they will not only make you dance around if something goes wrong, the more they will subliminally despise you. Why shouldn’t they? You’ve shown your worth to them with your too-low price – their resentment is costless to them. You are their willing favor-monkey.

Your time is time taken out of your free time, that precious substance we call our spare time, the thing that is increasingly squeezed between your 37-40-45-50 hour work-week (commuting not included), the necessity for sleep and other bodily functions, family life, and the time you need as a human being to socialise with your friends and acquaintances. Time done on favours for assholes that don’t appreciate your effort is time down the drain.

They may be assholes in asking you for work for pittances, but they are not the idiots if you agree to their crumbs. You are.

Litmus test: If someone asks you to “hey can you fix this!”, sling out this: “Sure I can! Just give me a thousand [dollars/euroes]!”. Gauge the resulting reaction. Take notes.