Poland's historic divisions
In 1815, Poland was divided up between Prussia and Russia. If you super-impose the 1815 borders on a modern map of Poland you can see how people vote differently in what was Prussia to what was Russia.
Chivers contra New York Times contra Slate Star Codex
Tom Chivers talks about the NY Times' attempted cancelling of Slate Star Codex:
Murray contra Dorrian
Chris Murray goes to prison for reporting on a court case. The background of this is that former First Minister Alex Salmond was accused of sexual assaults. Salmond was acquitted on all charges -- including one where his accuser (not a victim, as Salmond was acquitted on all charged) was shown to be in a different place than where she said she was at the time of the alleged assault. Murray reported on this court case and while he didn't name any of the accusers, he was charged with "jigsaw identification" -- saying things which combined with what others said, could identify people. Notably, various newspapers reported the same evidence, and were not charge with anything. The only one charged was noted critic of both the Scottish and UK governments, Chris Murray.
I will point out here that it is very convenient for Nicola Sturgeon that her predecessor as first minister and leader of the SNP was charged with these offences, as it made her political position more secure, and that she therefore had both the motive and the opportunity to stab a knife in the back of Salmond, who was her political mentor and had helped her career considerably.
Getting back to Murray, he writes:
I hope that one possible good effect of my imprisonment might be to coalesce opposition to the imminent abolition of jury trials in sexual assault cases by the Scottish Government, a plan for which Lady Dorrian – who wears far too many hats in all this – is front and centre. We will then have a situation where, as established by my imprisonment, no information at all on the defence case may be published in case it contributes to “jigsaw identification”, and where conviction will rest purely on the view of the judge.
That is plainly not “open justice”, it is not justice at all. And it is even worse than that, because the openly stated aim of abolishing juries is to increase conviction rates. So people will have their lives decided not by a jury of their peers, but by a judge who is acting under specific instruction to increase conviction rates.
It is often noted that conviction rates in rape trials are too low, and that is true. But have you ever heard this side of the argument? In Uzbekistan under the Karimov dictatorship, when I served there, conviction rates in rape trials were 100%. In fact very high conviction rates are a standard feature of all highly authoritarian regimes worldwide, because if the state prosecutes you then the state gets what it wants. The wishes of the state in such systems vastly outweigh the liberty of the individual.
All this is true. Rape is a serious crime. But misuse of state power is a much, much more serious crime.
Indeed this is the central question of politics: how to make sure that those in positions of power use it for the good of society, and not for their own selfish ends (such as accumulating more power to themselves). As the Romans said, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who guards the guards?)
Where:
the state is abandoning jury trials in sexual assault cases
judges are being ordered to increase conviction rates
people who report on these cases are thrown in prison
then all these taken together give massive powers for a becoming-authoritarian government to oppress and jail its critics.
The right to have the facts judged in serious crime allegations by a jury of our peers is a glory of our civilisation. It is the product of millennia, not lightly to be thrown away and replaced by a huge increase in arbitrary state power. That movement is of course fueled by current fashionable political dogma which is that the victim must always be believed. That claim has morphed from an initial meaning that police and first responders must take accusations seriously, to a dogma that accusation is proof and it is wrong to even question the evidence, which is of course to deny the very possibility of false accusation.
Indeed so.
Why would we remove the only barrier – a jury of ordinary citizens – that can stop abuse of state power?
Because the people doing the removing want to abuse state power, perhaps?
Taliban capture Kabul more quickly than expected
On Saturday 14-Aug-2021 I looked at Metaculus and their users' crowdsourced prediction was that the Taliban would capture Kabul on 6-Sep-2021:
In fact things moved quicker than that and Kabul actually fell the next day!
No benefit from Brexit
UK manufacturers say there has been no benefit from Brexit:
There are no benefits as a result of Brexit, an organisation representing UK manufacturers has said.
According to Make UK, it is currently hard for manufacturers to see any advantages from leaving the EU, and the organisation warns exports to the bloc could become a permanent problem if the government does not step in.
So, no surprises there.
Elon Musk's tiny house
Elon Musk apparently lives in a 20 by 20 foot house made by prefabricated home company Boxabl. Here's the interior layout:
And this is what it looks like:
de Boer contra Talusan
Freddie de Boer notes that would-be woke scold Roslyn Talusan (@roslyntalusan on Twitter) has got her well-deserved comeupance for this tweet she posted:
de Boer writes:
It’s encouraging to see that a drive-by accusation of cultural appropriation was met with the mockery that it deserves. (I assure you that those 6,000+ quote tweets are not echoing the sentiment.) As I’ve said, as hegemonic as this particularly cruel strain of social justice politics has become, the worm has already begun to turn against it. While we’ll be signaling our social justice bona fides for the rest of our lives, the particularly aggressive and self-aggrandizing school of woke politics is bound to lose, as it’s profoundly unpleasant.
Commenter Carina adds:
Roslyn Talusan has protected her account, but has posted her PayPal requesting money for therapy after "almost 48 hours of harassment from Nazis."
This is so typical of how these things go. Talusan, a blue-check with over 10k followers, posted a photo of this obscure cookbook author and called her out (and continued criticizing her in subsequent tweets). Then when people pushed back, she cried harassment.
I'm sure it sucks to receive 6k negative replies (Twitter pile-ons are almost always disproportionate) but I hate the idea that anyone advocating "social justice" can pick fights and then immediately claim to be the victim. There's no awareness that her own tweet was hostile and probably caused this cookbook author distress.
Roslyn Talusan is the epitome of cry-bullying. The more pushback her and her ilk receive, the sooner we'll be rid of that particular form of cultural unpleasantry.
Which reminds me, there's a post I've been meaning to write about how all cuisine is fusion cuisine, and how talking about cultural appropriation in food is therefore absurd.
Why should Scotland?
Seen on Twitter:
Edinburgh cycle sharing scheme to close
Edinburgh's "Just Eat" cycle sharing scheme will close, due to theft and vandalism:
In 2018, Edinburgh City Council contracted Hampshire business giant Serco to run its bike hire scheme, with transport bosses promising the ‘innovative’ scheme would be a ‘huge success’ for the city.
The scheme was supposed to be self-financing, with revenue generated from bike rentals and sponsorship from Just Eat, but the scheme has been plagued by vandalism and theft which has pushed up costs.
It's sad that a small minority of criminal scum can force this to close. Maybe the cycles could be electronically tagged so criminals could be caught and punished?
Payment processors contra Onlyfans
Onlyfans has decided to remove porn from its website. Why have they made such a suicidal decision? Because their payment processors forced them to:
OnlyFans, the subscriber-only website synonymous with pornography, has announced it will ban adult material from the site after pressure from its payment processors.
Payment processing companies increasingly control what material pornography sites are able to host. Last December, Visa and Mastercard briefly banned payments to websites owned by online pornography giant MindGeek, following reports it was hosting “revenge porn” uploaded without the consent of those involved. The financial businesses only backtracked when MindGeek deleted tens of millions of unverified videos from its sites such as PornHub.
Payment processors are too powerful; they shouldn't have this amount of power.
If, in an independent Scotland, the democratically-elected government decides to to ban porn or Onlyfans, that's fine because the power rests with the Scottish people, who can kick out the politicians if they decide to.
But the Scottish people don't have the power to kick out Visa and Mastercard, who aren't democratically elected.
When Scotland becomes independent, we must see to it that we are not only independent from Westminster but also independent from the global banking industry, whose interests may not co-incide with ours, and which therefore might be a threat to us.
TLDR news goes into this in more detail:
TLDR makes the same point as me that this is undemocratic.
I don't mean to be antagonistic, but I struggle to understand the mindset of opposing Brexit and also wanting Scottish Independence - I think they're both bad ideas, and just because one has happened doesn't make the other a sensible response. I actually think an independent Scotland would do fine, but I think the border situation is going to be way more hassle than it's worth for both countries. (If you join the EU, I promise that the English will insist on passport checks and customs to prevent any refugees from sneaking in, and we'll all have to suffer through it).
I'm personally biased because I live in Scotland but was born in England and so frequently travel between the two countries (well, I did before Covid), but a repeat of the NI-Ireland border situation seems like a nightmare for trade and travel.
If the motivation is just "fuck the English" I can totally understand (Brexit was basically just the English raising a collective middle finger at the EU for similar reasons), but the cost of leaving just seems to outweigh any economic benefits.