Hey, why is the solstice on 21 December?

Why is Christmas/Yule/Saturnalia a few days later? Why is the New Year a week and half later? Why is the 12th month called the 10th in Latin? Why are these dates all out of line with each other and scattered around?

It’s all because “the Romans had no fucking idea how to run a calendar”.

You think you’ve heard all the ad hoc arbitrariness about how the Romans managed their calendar as you’re led step by step through it all, and then you learn about Mercedonius and you just want to throw everything on the floor and walk away.

A classic eugenics image

A fascinating bit of historical propaganda.

The message is about “The danger of increasing procreation of inferiors” and shows how the good German family on the left, with their two children, will be overwhelmed by the crude nose-picking progeny of those others. How awful! Clearly the people on the right must be culled. We know how that turned out.

We’ve outgrown all that, right? Only alt-right neo-Nazi scum are still peddling that kind of nonsense.

You know, like @WhiteHouse.

I just want to say that it is true that some people will have larger families than other people, but it doesn’t matter — all those children are still people, still have the same potential, and it is the responsibility of the nation to care for them all and give them all the opportunity to use that potential.

(via Kieran Healy)

Twitter is kind of terrible. Why don’t you give it up for the New Year?

Some song lyrics are appropriate here.

This used to be a funhouse
But now it’s full of evil clowns
It’s time to start the countdown
I’m gonna burn it down down down
I’m gonna burn it down

–Pink

Twitter has been a dung heap for a long time — they’ve been notorious for ignoring harassment and treating some truly awful people with kid gloves, to the point where it was beginning to hurt their reputation and their bottom line. What to do, short of actually cleaning up the service? Announce that they’re finally going to ban some Nazis! And they did, and there was much happy PR.

The American Nazi Party’s account was suspended, as were the accounts belonging to Generation Identity, an extremist youth group, and Vanguard America, a white supremacist group that gained attention for its role in the white nationalist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. (James Fields, who was charged with first-degree murder after driving a car into a crowd of counter-protesters at that rally, killing one person and injuring several others, had attended it in affiliation with Vanguard America.)

Individuals removed as a result of the new policy include the neo-Nazi and leader of the National Socialist Movement Jeff Schoep, as well as Michael Hill, founder of the militant white supremacist group League of the South.

In an extremely significant move, Twitter also suspended two accounts belonging to Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, the leader and deputy leader of a right-wing British nationalist group called Britain First. Both Fransen and Golding were arrested last week over multiple charges concerning incitement of hate in Northern Ireland. But Fransen in particular is best known in the US for posting last month several extremely violent anti-Muslim propaganda videos, which were controversially retweeted by President Donald Trump.

Feels good, doesn’t it? Quite a few triumphant news articles popped up this week. How nice for Twitter. You know this was their goal, to pick off a few obvious targets, and then sit back and graciously accept the applause.

I’m glad the American Nazi Party’s official Twitter channel has been eradicated. But you know what hasn’t been removed? American Nazis. They’re all still there. What would have been interesting is if they used all the information they have on who was following the Nazi party, and used that to scan deeper. Some of their followers would have been critics investigating them, but others would have been people cheering them on. Can we get rid of them, too?

You know who is still on Twitter? Other racist organizations, like VDare. David Duke, Ann Coulter, Mike Cernovich, Gavin McInnes. Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson. You can also search for terms like “White genocide” and “cultural marxism” or various racial slurs and find plenty of small fry who aren’t dissuaded at all.

Donald Trump is still on Twitter. I’ll believe in their commitment to principle when they ban that hatemonger, but they won’t, since their only commitment is to dollars.

Just so you know, 31 December is #TwitterEvacuationDay, when many people are making the jump to alternative micro-blogging media, or just throwing up their hands in disgust and giving it all up. It’s the only way to make Twitter wake up, I think…or at the very least, to personally escape the toxic trap.

I’m recommending that everyone make the leap to Mastodon — or, I hope, that at least some of my friends get an account there. Really, it’s just like Twitter — the interface is exactly like Tweetdeck, if you’re familiar with that. The big difference is that, instead of one giant central server for everyone, it’s distributed among many smaller servers, or instances. You see all the activity on your instance (which is necessarily going to be smaller than what goes on on Twitter), but you can also see what your friends on other instances are doing, and you can also browse the contents of federated instances…that is, servers linked to yours.

It sounds more complicated than it is. Just think of your instance as your local neighborhood, but you can easily stay in touch with everyone you want in other neighborhoods.

Go read about Mastodon if you’re thinking about it. I’ve found it a most pleasant social experience. For one thing, the admins don’t allow Nazis to frolic about, and the fact that each instance administrator has a smaller group of people to manage means harassment gets noticed and slapped down hard.

If you’re curious about what kind of instances there are out there, there’s a page that lets you search for your options. For example, you can find an instance that flat out prohibits nudity or spoilers (you can get kicked out if you violate the rules), or one that says sure, you can post your naked re-enactment of the climactic scenes from The Last Jedi. Each instance may also have a general theme — there are SciFi servers, for example, so you can move into a place where your neighbors are more likely to talk about the latest SF novels.

And then you can just join Mastodon through the instance of your choice. It’s easy.

You can find me at @pzmyers@octodon.social. Send me a hello when you’ve signed up.

How’s the weather where you are?

I thought this was fun: a site where you can compare weather statistics for multiple locations. I chose to take a look at how where I live now, Morris, Minnesota, compares to where I grew up, Seattle, Washington. It turns out I’ve had to adapt to wider temperature swings.

No surprise, but it rains more in Seattle…but we get a bit more rain in the summer here. Morris is also a heck of a lot windier than Seattle.

Go ahead, compare your weather to mine. Now we can do it with data!

The Solution

I suppose the alternative is to stop raising boys to be such selfish little shits, but that’s going to take at least another generation.

OK, Democrats, who are the progressive women you’re going to support in the next election? (No, not Hillary Clinton, who I know would be better than the current toxic TV personality in chief, but I said progressive).

Also, I know women can also be toxic. Wanna bet the Republicans are grooming aggressively paranoid and disconnected from reality NRA mouthpiece Dana Loesch for high office?

Cui bono?

The Republicans passed their horrible, evil tax plan. Guess who is going to benefit? This Koch scion.

Jesus. If all he was was a guy with bad taste with a shirt business, fine, OK, sure, express yourself, let’s see if you can make a go of it with a business selling your ugly shirts. But no, he’s just a parasite with rich relatives. He can’t fail.

Once upon a time I worried that all the right-wing militias were going to tear up this country. But it’s looking more and more like it’s going to have to be revolution against the undeserving rich, and the chickenshits who parade around with guns are going to be on the wrong side.

Snowflakes! Snowflakes everywhere!

I’ve already expressed my opinion on Star Wars: The Last Jedi: it was a movie. It was OK. I’m not as enthused as some.

But still, there were some excellent notes in that movie that only sunk in after a while. It did a great job of inclusion. As we all know, representation matters, and also, it’s silly to assume that the science fiction future (or in a galaxy long ago and far way) would be a little bubble of contemporary American culture.

Also, the heroes of the story were all women who were representing caution and restraint and careful planning, while the bad guys were all paragons of toxic masculinity. Look at Kylo Ren, with his temper tantrums and his obsessions; Snoke, who could have been Tywin Lannister for all his greedy scheming; even the two good guys, Poe and Finn, were impulsive dumbasses whose half-baked ideas for sudden victory all failed and almost wrecked the brilliant, well thought out plans of Leia and Holdo.

And now there is the predictable petition to strike Star Wars Episode VIII from the official canon. You have got to be kidding me. Someone is taking Star Wars way too seriously.

This is not a chapter of your holy books. It’s a movie that a lot of people liked very much. There is no inviolable body of dogma; Disney did not slap an official label of “Sacred Precepts of the Prophet George Lucas” on the title screen that you can have scraped off. People will decide whether they like it or not without regard for its sanctioned status in some imaginary list of “real” Star Wars movies.

Over 35,000 people have signed this inane petition.

I should start a petition to damn all the people who signed that petition to hell. It would have as much effect.

There is an analogy to be made between Peter Jackson’s movies and giant predatory robot cities

Wait, what? Peter Jackson is actually making a movie of Mortal Engines, the novel about giant predatory cities roaming a post-apocalyptic landscape?

Ambitious. Let’s hope he doesn’t plan to turn the first novel into a sprawling nine-movie series with buckets of extra ideas poured in. I don’t know if he can make a lean, exciting story any more.

It’s possible

This is a good article about the alien bubble silicon valley is rolling around in. What shocked me most was this one incredibly stupid comment.

On his blog, Y Combinator president Sam Altman argued that political correctness was damaging the tech industry. This is uncomfortable, but it’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about gay people if we want them to be able to say novel things about physics, he wrote.

If it helps, Altman himself is gay.

No, it doesn’t help.

Altman himself is an entrepreneur, which seems to mean he hustles and shuffles money around, but hasn’t actually accomplished anything himself. He certainly hasn’t said anything novel about physics — he’s a college dropout, and his physics knowledge is probably somewhat less than mine, which isn’t saying a lot. Go ahead, check out his Wikipedia page, and tell me what he has done.

And that’s my objection to his statement — he has zero evidence for the idea that tolerating homophobia benefits science, or that a culture that actively promotes tolerance by rejecting bigotry is somehow equivalent to an oppressive culture that punishes people for their sexual orientation. I’ll just point out that it was people saying disparaging things about gay people that led to the chemical castration and suicide of Alan Turing. Germany had many prominent scientists and engineers in the 1930s, and supported science well, but also had the idea that Jews were bad, and so America was gifted with Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, James Franck, Edward Teller, Rudolf Peierls, and Klaus Fuchs. One of my graduate advisors, George Streisinger, was a Hungarian Jew whose family fled the Nazis.

These are all equivalently stupid.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about women if we want them to be able to say novel things about computer science.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about black Americans if we want them to be able to say novel things about refrigeration technology.

It’s possible we have to allow people to say disparaging things about Jews if we want them to be able to say novel things about biology.

When you string it together that way, one thing that you ought to notice is the word “people”. Who? What people? It is the assumption about the identity of people: they are non-gay, non-woman, non-black, non-Jews. They are, of course, rich white men, like the ones who populate the Silicon Valley tech bubble. We have to allow rich white men to say whatever they want in order to allow them to reinvent bodegas, reinvent the bus, reinvent food, and do all those other irrelevant things that will make the privileged richer.

It’s possible. It’s possible. It’s possible. “It’s possible” is not an evidence-based statement in support of a policy. It is the kind of open-ended, vague weasely string of words disconnected from cause and effect that allows great evil to thrive in the crevices of its ambiguity.

It’s possible that if we cook and eat the flesh of Sam Altman, we’ll become immortal gods on Earth. Won’t know until we try.