Terrible Cat Puns
Half-Asleep Chris makes Terrible cat Puns:
Six year old boy arrested for picking flower
In North Carolina:
A six-year-old boy who picked a flower from a lawn at a public bus stop is now facing a criminal charge.
The little boy was forced to go to juvenile court in the US state of North Carolina to face charges of injury to real property after picking the tulip from the area.
The boyâs attorney said his attention span was so short that during court proceedings she had to give him a picture to colour in.
So glad the North Carolina police are going after the REAL criminals, and not wasting their time with trivial unimportant matters like murder, rape or burglary.
Pirates to take over Czechia?
TLDR news asks whether the Pirate Party will win the upcoming Czech election
Arrrr!
How New Atheism enabled wokeness
Jamie Paul suggests that the new Atheism movement enabled wokeness, by destroying the power of religion:
The movement was kicked off by a series a provocative best-sellers, beginning with Sam Harrisâs âThe End of Faithâ (2004), and including other notable books such as Daniel Dennettâs âBreaking the Spellâ (2006), Richard Dawkinsâs âThe God Delusionâ (2006), and Christopher Hitchensâs âGod is Not Greatâ (2007).
[...] And atheism won. Religion emerged battered and limping from nearly every clash.
The victory of new Atheism left a religion-shaped hole in people's hearts:
This left a spiritual vacuum. There was an abundance of religious energy, and nowhere to put it. People have traditionally derived meaning and purpose from religion.
Which was filled, for some, by wokeness:
Left-leaning young people who became adults in the early 2010âs emerged into subcultures where traditional religion was an embarrassment, but they nevertheless possessed of a great deal of the ambient religious enthusiasm that permeates wider American society. [...] With the collapse of meaningful work, and the intellectual disrepute of Abrahamic religion, many young people have taken to filling this void with politics. And while Wokeness is the clearest example, itâs not the only one.
As politics, wokeness has its flaws, because religion and politics serve different goals:
Politics can be many things. A tool. A means to an end. An interest or hobby. For some, a career. But it cannot be a replacement for spirituality or a sense of meaning. In doing so, you come to care too much. It becomes too personal. You grow too attached. This doesnât just make politics toxic, it makes you worse at politics, too. Defeats are reframed as existential crises instead of setbacks. Victories are soon downplayed. When progress occurs, its existence is denied; new goals with equal and dire urgency are swiftly set up. The sky must always be falling â the struggle must always be eternal.
For the woke, racism will never go away: they have a psychological need to find racism in every nook and cranny, so will always find it.
Furthermore, they are not driven to suggest practical solutions to problems -- and suggesting such solutions may get you branded a heretic to the woke -- since they are in it, not to find solutions for the external world, but to find meaning in their internal world. This also partly explains why they are conflict theorists and low decouplers.
Incidentally, Shuichi Tezuka also notes that as religion has declined, people on the political left increasingly view their politics as a religion:
The incorporation of religious elements into leftist politics was examined by James Lindsay and Mike Nanya, who conclude that leftist identity politics represent âa roughly religious structure that services the same human needs that religions do from within a remarkably different paradigmâ. ReligionÂlike aspects of this structure include the formation of a moral tribe, the adoption of a social mythology to explain the world (in which the structure of society is shaped by conflict between groups defined by race, gender and sexual orientation), a focus on an inwards search for recognition of oneâs unconscious wrongdoing or unacknowledged privilege, and the importance of publicly demonstrating oneâs commitment to the belief system.
Inceldom is (also) a religion
The previous item noted wokeness is a religion. It appears inceldom is a religion too, at least for some people:
The incident with the super-soaker inspired Genco. âI put some orange juice in a water gun, I was planning to spray some foids [women] and couples like ER did, when I finally did do it, it was ERâs birthday and I didnât even know that,â he wrote on an incel website. âFelt like I spiritually connected to the saint [Elliot Rodger] on that dayâ (radicalised incels often refer to Rodger in religious terms, and depict him in religious iconography).
If the decline of traditional religion is leading to lots of new religions springing up, as it appears to be, it would be best if they were wholesome religions that enabled human flourishing.
What would such a wholesome religion be like?
Latin Mass and the decline of Catholicism
Niall Gooch writes that Pope Francis is restricting use of the Latin Mass, but that this is unlikely to have much effect on the decline of the Catholic Church:
There is a broader issue with Traditionis Custodes, which is it feels like displacement activity for a hierarchy with no real idea of how to reverse the decline of Catholicism in the West. Empty seminaries, bad preaching, inadequate catechesis and secularised schools, the shrinking of consecrated religious life, slapdash liturgy: these are huge and urgent difficulties. The preference among a minority for the Extraordinary Form seems very small beer in comparison.
I think he's right. Why is catholicism in decline? Catholicism, like all relgions, is a meme-complex, and its one that sprung up and endured in an environment of agricultural state societies. It is therefore evolved to be fit in that environment.
But modiern soiceties aren't agricultural: they are industrial and post-industrial. Meme-complexes that were fit in the agricultural environment are likely to be less fit in the post-industrial environment.
Funmdamentally, Catholicism is declining because the environment it is adapted for is not the environment it is now in.
Biafra and the Igbo struggle for independence
Springtime of Nations looks at the Igbo people's struggle for independence in the Biafran War:
It is a basic principle of this blog that all nations have a right to self-determination, including full independence if they so wish. This applies to Biafra, and it also applies to Scotland.
South Korea contra Google and Apple
Google's and Apple's app stores generally require in-app payments to go through their app stores, meaning Google/Apple get a cut. App creators can't do anything about this, because these big companies have a monopoly over their platforms.
South Korea is forcing the greedy monopolists to change their ways by allowing other payment systems:
South Korea has passed a bill written to prevent major platform owners like Google and Apple from restricting app developers to built-in payment systems. The bill is now expected to be signed into law by President Moon Jae-in, whose party championed the legislation.
The law comes as a blow to Google and Apple who both require in-app purchases to flow only through their systems, instead of outside payment processors, allowing the tech giants to collect a 30 percent cut. If tech companies fail to comply with the new law, they could face fines of up to 3 percent of their South Korea revenue.
Instead of fining them 3% of revenue, South Korea should threaten to cut them out of their market. Apple's main business is overpriced crappy phones, so this would be no great loss to South Korea, shich should instead develop its own solution.
The UK should do something like this too, though it probably won't.
Wee Ginger Dug contra BBC
Paul Kavanagh notes that the BBC always does its best to boost Britain:
The BBC in its broadcasts to the rest of the UK not only fully buys into the myth of British exceptionalism, but it is one of the major propagators of that myth with its gushing coverage of the royal family, the wall to wall entitlement which characterises its coverage of UK, and especially English, participation international sporting contests, and its interminable production of reality contests with Great British in the title, as though there were something peculiarly and especially British about baking a cake or sewing a hem.
... while also doing it's best to put down Scotland:
On the other hand the BBC in Scotland never misses an opportunity to remind Scotland of its inadequacies and failures. The consistent message from BBC Scotland is that Scotland is a country which struggles to attain adequacy.
Time for a Scottish National Broadcaster which would be responsive to the needs and desires of the Scottish people.
manyguns contra capital letters
Dr Linda Manyguns PhD (sorry, that's dr linda manyguns phd) has declared war on capital letters:
dr. linda manyguns joins the lowercase movement to reject the symbols of hierarchy wherever they are found and will not use capital letters except to acknowledge the Indigenous struggle for recognition.
I note that manyguns, while being against hierarchy, is sure to make everyone know she has a PhD and uses the title Dr.
this is a beginning effort at describing the use of lower case on the website of the office of indigenization and decolonization.
Indigenous people have been actively engaged in a multidimensional struggle for equality, since time immemorial. we strive for historical-cultural recognition and acknowledgment of colonial oppression that persistently devalues the diversity of our unique cultural heritages.
I'm sure the White Supremacist Cis Heteronormative Dyadistic Kyriarchic Patriarchy will be quaking in its boots!
Ajax woes
The British Army's new Ajax armoured fighting vehicle is having difficulties, says Matsimus:
Ajax is a ÂŁ3.5 billion programme to provide 600 armoured fighting vehicles for the British army.
While the program has been going since 2010, only 26 vehicles have been delivered and the Army has had to stop trials because soldiers are suffering from vibration and noise problems, which are so extreme they are making soldiers sick and impeding their ability to fight.
Ajax is based on the ASCOD vehicle used by the Austrian and Spanish armies since 2002. So in its 19 years of use it should have had all the bugs ironed out by now, right? Wrong! For the British Ministry of Defence, buying off-the-shelf kit would never do, they will always insist on the highest specs and latest gold plating (while makes it a much more expensive and risky purchase). The British version has:
a new engine
new drivetrain
new suspension
new turret
new armament, the British/French CTAS40 gun
new sensors and fire control equipment
new electronics
new armour
So it's essentially a whole new vehicle! What Britain should have done is kept the existing Warrior platform and made incremental improvements, such as a new turret (with new gun and electronics). Warrior exists, we know it works, it isn't the latest thing but so what? An AFV is basically a metal box with an engine and tracks -- these are not new technologies! The things that change in warfare are sensors and electronics, so just change them, and for everything else make incremental improvements.
It's possible the whole project will be scrapped, which is a sad indictment of MoD incompetence and waste.
Have we reached Peak Woke?
AMAC asks Has the Woke Wave Peaked?. They cite a poll, in which Americans born after 1997 have turned against Cancel Culture:
Another sign is that ultra-woke newspaper the New York Times have taken on noted anti-woke public intellectual John McWhorter as a columnist. McWhorter's books include Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America to be published next month.
Of course, two swallows do not make a summer.