If it bleeds, it leads

Newspaper editors must relish this situation. There is so much blood.

There are unknown numbers of dead — hundreds, the newspapers say, while also stating that many are uncounted in the chaos — and a million people displaced, bridges and roads and towns destroyed, and the Russian army rumbles slowly forward.

Just over 1 million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion began, according to data from the U.N. refugee agency — an exodus that is set to become Europe’s worst humanitarian crisis this century. That figure already matches the number of refugees who were displaced from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan in 2015. The International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine, the intergovernmental organization’s prosecutor said in a statement.

It wasn’t that long ago that I’d open up the news in the morning to see graphs and tallies of how many died the slow death of COVID-19. Now I open the news to see the stories of sudden gory deaths, explosions, and families fleeing the onslaught. It is not an improvement, world. Especially since the pandemic continues, it’s just been bumped from top billing.

The lyrics are supposed to go “Forward he cried from the rear And the front rank died”, don’t you know

I have no idea how the war is going in Ukraine — it seems to be turning into a hard slog of urban warfare, with Putin committed to saving face by throwing everything he’s got at a couple of cities. He has turned his vicious elite Chechen units on the country. I’m going to take solace in the little victories, at least.

That bearded guy to the right is Magomed Tushaev, a monster who committed atrocities against LGBT people. He’s dead now.

A despotic general who ruthlessly rounded up and killed LGBT+ people in an act that became known as the “gay purge” has been killed in the fighting in Ukraine.

Magomed Tushayev, who was a military boss under the command of hardman Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, was killed in fighting at the Hostomel Airport, a key Russian target not far northwest of Kyiv.

Tushayev previously led the 141 motorised regiment of the Checnyan National Guard and his death was confirmed by a spokesperson for Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky.

Anti-LGBT+ purges were first reported in the southern Russian republic back in 2017 and reportedly involved kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings.

Under the leadership of the infamous Kadyrov, who recently said Vlaidimir Putin needed harsher tactics in Ukraine, Tushayev was key in the persecution of LGBT+ people.

Am I a bad person if I say, “Good!”?

It’s a worrying sign for the Russians that generals are getting killed. Usually it’s just the grunts on the front.

I didn’t ask to live in interesting times

But here we are. It’s been a rough decade — we had a terrible one-term president who appalled most of us with his incompetence and corruption, and seemed to inspire the authoritarians and racists and wanna-be fascists. One of our political parties tumbled down into outright insanity, which isn’t a good thing for a country run by a two-party system. We’re repeating the Gilded Age crap, with billionaires getting richer and richer. The ongoing climate crisis continues to be ignored by our capitalist overlords. Then layer a pandemic on top of all that that has killed a million Americans and triggered another million or so it flamboyant science denial, rapidly spread by the greed of the social network poombahs.

We should cry out like Job, I should think. But now we get a major land war in Europe to add to the world’s tribulations.

I have no idea how that war is going. One thing that has repelled me lately on the media are all the pundits, whether they have a cushy sinecure at some major newspaper or they are Joe Nobody, sitting in his car opining at a camera (oh, how I loathe those videos of middle-class, middle-aged white guys sitting in their cars talking at their phones) telling me which side is going to win. Worse is when they declare why their side is going to when. Near as I can tell, the Right thinks the Russians will conquer because they despise pronouns, while the Left thinks Ukraine will win because Zelensky is sexy. They don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a cacophony of pure noise that isn’t helping.

So, what I do know…

Russia is making a massive effort, throwing all kinds of soldiers and artillery and tanks at Kharkiv. They could win the military battle, it wouldn’t surprise me. Ukrainians are brave, but bravery doesn’t stop a bullet. I have no idea what the outcome of the war will be, other than pain and death and misery, and we’ll have to helplessly wait and see what happens. Isn’t that annoying? Big dramatic bloody events occur, and we here on the other side of the world have to wait.

I do know that Russia is losing the diplomatic war rather brutally. Suddenly, coalitions and alignments and nations that have been around for practically a lifetime are shifting! I haven’t seen this kind of transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finland is discussing joining NATO? Sweden is increasingly antagonistic to Russia? Ukraine has requested to join the EU, and some countries want to fast-track that application? It’s all happening so scary-fast. We’re racing towards a polarization and alignment of forces that we haven’t seen since the Cold War, and let me tell you, that’s not a good thing.

What I do find encouraging, though, is that the world was quick to react with open condemnation of Russia for invading a sovereign state and killing citizens. I just wish that the world had been equally damning when the US invaded a sovereign state and murdered hundreds of thousands of innocents — we can hope that what emerges out of this new world is an agreement that bullying smaller nations by powerful ones will no longer be tolerated.

Unless, of course, the bullying nation decides everyone needs a good scourging with nuclear fire.

And that’s all I know. Sit. Wait. Watch.

Hey, Job has sort of a happy ending, right? He loses his family, his health, and his security, but God gives him new kids at the end? It’s kind of warped that the Old Testament thinks families and kids are fungible, so I’m not going to take much consolation from that.

Let’s start a social media site!

It’s easy, right? You could write it in BASIC and run it off the old Apple II in your closet. You just accept a text string from someone calling in, and you post it on a web page, and presto! Fame and money start rolling in.

Even Donald Trump could do it! Or think he could do it, because that man is delusional.

The rollout of Donald Trump’s social network has predictably been a disaster. Truth Social’s debut on Monday was marred by technical problems and a gigantic waiting list, while some people who actually were able to use the service complained of being “censored.”

Truth Social “has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist,” The Washington Post wrote yesterday. Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes said on a Fox News show that Truth Social’s goal is to be “fully operational at least within the United States” by the end of March. The waiting list is now over 500,000.

I wonder how many of those half million are lookie-loos gawking at the train wreck, how many are reporters who figure they just have to report on this desperate ex-politician’s fantasy (they don’t, by the way), and how many are sincere followers of Trump AKA chucklefucks?

Of course he didn’t design this himself.

Truth Social was built using Mastodon open source software.

They just grabbed some existing software, plastered some graphics and revised some of the text messages, and called it good.

I have an account on Mastodon. I didn’t have to wait in line to get it, just found an instance that didn’t have the Donald on it, and started typing. Isn’t the point of Mastodon to have a decentralized distribution of servers, anyway?

Also, it’s a bit ironic to name the failing media site created by a politician known for constantly lying “truth”.

Ireland isn’t going to take it

This is what journalists were supposed to do, I thought. At least this one time, one confronts a liar for Putin with the evidence.

You know, this is exactly what I wanted journalists to do to American politicians when we invaded Iraq. We didn’t get much of it. Instead, we got polarization driving people to Fox News, that nest of lies. And now Fox News is demonstrating that they always were a propaganda mill for conservative authoritarians — could you imagine Tucker Carlson doing anything but fawning over a Russian ambassador making excuses for atrocities?

The Irish people are also protesting outside the Russian embassy, while Irish political parties are calling for the expulsion of the Russian ambassador (although the EU is asking to keep embassies in place, which makes sense if there is to be any hope of a diplomatic solution –– a forlorn hope, but I guess it’s there.)

If you’re “woke”, you oppose Putin

Yesterday was my day for despair. Now that’s over with, and it’s time for rage.

I can’t do anything about Russia or Ukraine, but jesus, do we ever have a bunch of walloping idiot apologists here at home. The curious thing is that they’re neatly lining up across the chasm that has formed in our political divide. If you’re a Trumper, now you’re in Putin’s pocket — and that’s an about-face from Republicans I would never have expected. If you’re into crypto, of course you’re going to take the Russian side, since crypto is little more than a money laundering scheme for oligarchs. And now the IDW is rationalizing for Russia.

It’s like everyone is projecting their pet obsessions onto Ukraine. No, we don’t spend more time talking about pronouns that it does about things that matter. First of all, pronouns do matter, obviously, since they send the Heyings of the world into a frothing fury. And they seem to matter most to the people who hate the idea. If you tell me that you prefer to be addressed as “he,” “she,” or “they,” I’ll accept it as a matter of course and as a matter of courtesy. The anti-woke brigade will react as if you’ve just launched missiles into their Donbass. We aren’t fighting over pronouns, that war was won by the people who recognize that humans live cooperatively in a society.

The people who don’t recognize that side with Putin.

Here’s another thing that pisses me off: when they decide that they must be über-rational because they accept evolution, and therefore evolution must side with the Russians.

The evolutionary lens is logic and first-principles driven, rather than conclusion or ideology driven. Jesus fucking christ. Evolutionary biology is not a formula that you can plug your variables into, and out pops a fixed, flawless solution. Evolution is a diversity machine. It makes peacocks and parasitic worms. It produces humans with a battery of emotional and social needs, and the more complex the organism, the more unpredictable the outcome. Heying is the classic reductionist dudebro who thinks it is reasonable to strip away the complexity of reality to claim that Science with a capital S has decided that their narrow world view is the correct one.

And then they pretentiously announce the superiority of their perspective. I am one of the initiated, and I can tell you that Heather Heying is full of shit. She’s just a dogmatic reactionary who has found a rationale that feeds her ego and allows her to dismiss everyone else as wrong.

Also, Jesse Singal and Heather Heying joining hands to agree that the Woke are bad makes me want to puke.

A tiny glimmering of good news

The police officers who assisted in the murder of George Floyd have been found guilty.

A jury has found three former Minneapolis police officers guilty of violating the civil rights of George Floyd Thursday afternoon. All three officers were found guilty on all counts.

Tou Thao, the officer who held back bystanders when George Floyd was killed, was convicted of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care and willfully failing to intervene. J. Alexander Kueng, who helped restrain Floyd by kneeling on his back, was convicted of the same charges.

Thomas Lane, who held the 46-year-old Black man’s feet, was found guilty of depriving Floyd of his right to medical care as well.

It’s a good start. Now let’s see changes in the culture of the police in Minneapolis.

It’s WAR in Europe

I’ve been reading various articles on events in Ukraine, and I thought, wrongly, that it was going to be one of those prolonged smoldering affair, with Russia taking bites out of a country with regions that leaned towards Russian unity, but oh no, it’s just flat out total war, with the Russian army moving to take over the whole country of Ukraine.

Russia launched a broad attack on Ukraine from multiple directions early Thursday, bombarding cities, towns and villages and advancing toward the capital, Kyiv, as Ukrainian forces tried to stem the onslaught of Russian ground forces and air power.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said Russian troops were fighting to break into the wider Kyiv region and crossed the regional border, where Ukrainian forces were battling to repel them.

Putin’s excuse is that they’re carrying out a program of “demilitarization and denazification”. Riiight. This is nothing but imperial conquest. People are dying. Cities are being bombed.

Meanwhile, here in the US, fifth-columnists are buckling down to the dirty work of painting Putin’s gangsters as the ‘good guys’. Why? Because the Russians are “anti-woke” and label their bathrooms the way god intended them to.

It’s insanity everywhere. Don’t listen to Erik Prince & Steve Bannon — they’re just evil.

They really hate rainbows, don’t they?

All things must fall into a rigid binary. Everything. The right-wing rainbow is just a block of red next to a block of violet. When they do black and white photography they take it literally — max contrast, only solid blacks and solid whites. It’s all hex #000000 and hex #ffffff. It’s ridiculous.

Here’s the latest imaginary binary, wordcels vs shape rotators. There are only two kinds of brains!

Quick, how many cubes can you rotate in your brain? If you’re struggling to even form the image of a cube in your mind, let alone rotate it, then I’m sorry to say that you’re not a shape rotator. You are, in fact, probably a wordcel. If you have no idea what wordcel and shape rotators are, I will explain it to you, and I’m sorry your curiosity has brought you to this article.

At its base, the dichotomy is simple. Wordcels are people who are good with words. Shape rotators are people who are good with math and abstract thought. Use of the terms has skyrocketed online in the past few months, and especially in the last few days.

I’m sorry, this is insanely stupid. Here’s Marc Andreessen trying to be quantitative and instead coming out as a guy who makes up imaginary statistics to characterize people he doesn’t like.

Classic wordcel gibberish.

But look, these are bogus categories — there is a spectrum of mental ability, with different people having a different range of abilities, it’s not all one or the other. Further, individuals vary over time: when I’m writing something other people will have to read, I’m thinking about the words, even if the subject is something scientific. I can also get locked into problem solving mode, where I’m wrestling with abstractions. When I used to write code — and I’m sure some of you are familiar with this — I’d get into the zone where your brain is 100% machine, focused on tracing multiple lines of logic to track down a bug or implement some novel and non-intuitive function. It was great until you snapped out of it at 3am and forgot where you were or how to speak. I’ve literally had moments of verbal paralysis where my brain had to stop carrying out spatial deconvolutions to remember what English was.

These loons are taking the variety of entirely human modes of thinking and trying to cluster them into two terribly unuseful discrete and rigid “types”. People don’t work that way!

But there is a purpose to their madness. Once again, it’s a verbal — dare I say “wordcel”? — tool for conservatives to attack the left for being inferior thinkers while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for thinking like “scientists”. Let’s label those loser Woke folk with a shiny new derogatory term, never noticing how unscientific their whole approach is.

Much of America’s culture war can be cynically flattened and viewed through the lens of these two words; “woke” wordcels live in the land of philosophy and books and liberal colleges, clinging to ideals espoused in their precious books, tweeting about Wordle, while shape rotators are out here coding, building businesses, doing engineering, etc. etc.

And oh, boy, here comes the validation they need:

Hah. I doubt a Jungian psychologist can spin even one three-dimensional cube in his mind!

Sheesh, now I’m doing it. This is stupid. Still, it might catch on with all these right-wing aliens from Remulak.