The smartest guys in the room

I was reading about this guy, Vitalik Buterin, who is supposed to be some super-smart crypto guy. There’s an infestation of them in the dudebro community.

Buterin comes from a long tradition of Silicon Valley special smart boys, who have had it hammered into them that domain expertise — i.e., actually knowing stuff — pales into insignificance compared to pulling ideas out of your backside by virtue of your superior intelligence and upbringing and social position.

He was taught this by other Silicon Valley special smart boys. Peter Thiel literally paid Buterin not to go to college any more, based on this theory — that one special smart boy reasoning from first principles will surely beat the accumulated experience and wisdom of mere humanity.

There are a million of these guys, and they all have long and wordy blogs.

Ooh, that’s mean. But if you’re like me, you want to know you can know how out of touch with reality they might be. Maybe they actually are really smart guys, you know. But here’s an example of thinking out of the box. Get a good grip on your jaw before it rolls under the table.

Before founding Ethereum, Buterin put considerable effort in 2013 into trying to convince investors to fund him in constructing a quantum computer. (Note that no quantum computers able to solve practical problems are verified as existing as of early 2017.) His plan was to use this quantum computer to solve computationally infeasible problems that can’t be done practically on an ordinary computer, such as reversing cryptographic hash functions.

Since he didn’t know how to build a quantum computer, his plan was to simulate one on an ordinary computer – since this apparently wouldn’t count as just running a program to solve the impossible problem. This was an idea that had long been put forward by Jordan Ash, his associate in this endeavour, who had put considerable effort into this startlingly crank mathematical notion.

How do you reveal that you know nothing about ordinary computing and nothing about quantum computing at the same time? I wonder if Peter Thiel would reward him with a big grant for this idea.

I want to know who funded the kidnapping

Prime suspect: this thug

As I’m sure you’ve already heard, Venezuelan migrants in Florida were rounded up an induced to take planes to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, as part of badly aimed right-wing scandal mongering. The conservatives were using these people as pawns to trigger some hypocritical liberal response (which they didn’t get — right-wingers lack the empathy required to understand that liberal perspective, so they constantly miss the mark), so they fucked around and are about to find out.

A group of Venezuelan migrants who were flown from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last week — allegedly after being falsely promised work and other services — have filed a class-action lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other officials who arranged the flights, saying the officials used fraud and misrepresentation to persuade them to travel across state lines.

One question keeps bouncing around in my head about this story, and I’m not seeing it answered. They made up a professional-looking, shiny brochure, purportedly listing “Massachusetts Refugee Benefits”. They chartered two planes for a 1300 mile, 6 hour flight. They gave them gift cards to trick them into boarding.

In his interview with Hannity, DeSantis said that the migrants “all signed consent forms to go.” But the lawsuit alleges that migrants suffering from food insecurity were pressured “to sign a document in order to receive a $10 McDonald’s gift card.”

That all adds up to a substantial bill.

Who paid for it?

Did this come out of the state budget for Florida, or did some wealthy donor hand the perpetrators a bucket of money? Somebody had to fork over the cash for this kidnapping scheme, and it had to have been premeditated, planned without anyone considering the ethics of their crime, which, to be honest, is typical of conservative planning and doesn’t narrow the field of suspects very much.

I’m sure someone has remembered the principle of “follow the money,” I’m just not seeing much discussion in the news about it yet. I’ll be looking forward to the inevitable revelations that the lawsuit will smoke out.

Gavin McInnes is a truly deplorable person

Creep.

How did this guy get any attention at all?

These quotes come from a book, We Are Proud Boys: How a Right-Wing Street Gang Ushered in a New Era of American Extremism. I haven’t read it, I don’t think I could read it without hurling it into the trash. It must be rough to be an author writing a necessary book critiquing a subject that can only inspire deep revulsion.

The Proud Boys name first came to Gavin McInnes while he watched, with disgust, as a twelve-year-old boy with brown skin sank a musical number onstage at a school recital.

This little Puerto Rican kid comes out, and he goes, ‘I’ll make you a proud boy!’ It was the gayest fucking song, he said. When I was watching I was like, this is obviously the Hispanic son of a single mom. He did high-five a grown man afterward, but couldn’t have been the real dad.

The origins of the Proud Boys, the nation’s most notorious political fight club, can be traced to one reactionary bigot behind a microphone who hate a child he figured was a fatherless Puerto Rican. McInnes seems to embrace this characterization, though his wife is apparently appalled by it.
She’s pissed, she’s like: ‘So your whole thing, your whole organization, is mocking a twelve-year-old gay boy?’ he said. And I go: ‘That’s such a crude way to put it but yes. Yes it is. Because that little boy personifies how far gone we are.’

They know nothing about the boy. They don’t know that he’s gay, they don’t know that he’s fatherless, they don’t even know that he’s Puerto Rican, but McInnes invented this figure of hate and built his own public identity around it.

That Gavin McInnes is a notoriously popular public figure personifies how far gone we are.

To answer my question from the beginning, that confession came when McInnes “recalled the story for his guest, a comedian named Aaron Berg, who sat giggling…” There are a lot of enablers out there, people who think being transgressive is all it takes to be funny, who will sit and giggle at the most disgusting anecdotes. He built an audience of assholes, and that gave him what populist power he has.

You can’t have it back

I think I’ve made it quite clear that I’m unimpressed with dead queens or live kings around here. I may have to rethink my opinion of British royals, though, thanks to this commentary.

If these wankers were to represent the majority opinion of their kind, I’d say we need to drag the corpse of the dead queen out of her vault and throw it in the Thames, and then lop off a few more royal heads. Great engine of civilization my ass. It was a system that benefited a minority population at the expense of all the people in the red part of this map. It was a great engine of exploitation that wrecked innumerable cultures.

Also, isn’t the USA a pretty good counter-example, showing that decolonization wasn’t a disaster? Counterpoint: the USA then went on to carry out its own exploitive conquests sans any royal family, so maybe we shouldn’t blame kings and queens so much as the whole ugly system.

The real question here, though, is how these guys plan to bring back the empire. I don’t think they have the military muscle for reconquest, and they got rid of the East India Company 150 years ago, and threw away their economic clout with Brexit. A couple of feeble old Tories shaking their fists at the sky and demanding their treasure back isn’t going to cut it.

Everything everywhere all at once, spiderling edition

This week is a mess: I gave an exam, I need to get it all graded. I have two students doing senior seminars, with rehearsals tomorrow and the day after. We have two — count ’em, TWO — faculty meetings this week. And then there’s the usual course load.

So of course this is the day another Steatoda triangulosa egg sac has to start spewing spiderlings. It doesn’t look like much right now, that blurry dark blob is the egg sac itself, and I count a whole six newly emerged spiders, but more will be coming in the next day or two. Just these few are a handful, as soon as I popped the lid they were rushing to balloon off into the sunset. We have an experiment in mind for this batch, so we’ll be setting that up real soon.

Oh, right, this also meant that this morning I was frantically scrubbing the dishes I’ve been neglecting in the sink, because we’ll need a lot more containers.

It doesn’t look like much, but tomorrow that will be a seething box of baby spiders.

Copaganda

There was a time in my callow, naive youth when I’d see a show like Law & Order (or Dragnet — I watched that as a kid) and think it was an accurate portrayal of how the police worked. Then I’d see the news about, for instance, Rodney King or George Floyd, or all those untested rape kits (11,000 in Detroit!) and the disjoint between the reported reality and the television fantasy began to pile up. The TV tells me the police will deliver justice if I’m ever wronged, but the news is telling me it’s more likely they’d deliver pepper spray and a nightstick, and then ignore me afterwards.

I’m happy to see John Oliver delivering the truth. Law & Order is a lie.

That show really needs a disclaimer at the beginning and end of each episode stating, “This show is a fantasy about how we wish the justice system operated. There is nothing real about how the law works portrayed here.” Maybe bracket it with genuine statistics about case clearance rates and incidents of corruption and unjustified violence.

Jackie Chan of the spider world

They’re a little guy, capable of absurd acrobatic stunts to take out a bigger opponent. It’s Euryopis umbilicata!

“It has this crazy way of hurtling itself at an ant, doing this fabulous cartwheel then, like Spider-Man, attaching a piece of silk in mid-air to the ant,” said the study’s senior author, Prof Mariella Herberstein of Macquarie University.

“Then it keeps on twirling away from the ant while the ant is being captured. At that stage [the prey’s] fate is sealed.”

I’ll have to see it to believe it.

Yep. That’s Drunken Spider style.

I’ll have to show the video to my spider colony. They have a rather sedate and unspectacular style of just charging forward and stabbing their prey with a venomous fang, no flash or style.

Good god, when will this end?

The front page of the Washington Post:

The front page of the New York Times:

I don’t care any more. Shove the old dead parasite into her vault and move on, OK? I understand the slow procession of a corpse across a country might be the only news of importance in the world, but I have a suspicion that other things might also be happening, and it might be appropriate to balance a relatively mundane event with some matters of real import.

Oh, look! There was also a football game or two this week, and what? Biden declares the pandemic is over? Sorry, we’re out of time, need to talk about the queues of Brits lined up to watch a hearse drive by.