I was going to write something about French culture in relation to Charlie Hebdo and in fact had started it, but this is better.

Basically, don’t listen to anyone writing about the whole affair who doesn’t know anything about French culture.

They will (and have been) getting it wrong. Very, very wrong.

I can’t fucking believe we have to defend secularism and free speech against “liberals,” but there you go.

You know I used to believe that the Right was utterly fucking crazy when they talked about how the liberals tend to embrace objective evil if it’s cloaked in the veil of oppression. But now that I’ve seen the liberal reactions to Muslim oppression of women and now Charlie Hebdo and secularism, you know what?

The Right was fucking, well, right  — a little, at least.

Claiming that the attacks in Paris had nothing to do with Islam or religion is as deluded as claiming that the Christians here murdering abortion doctors has nothing to do with Christianity.

Just utterly fucking wrong.

Of course, both actions have a lot to do with a lot of others things, too — but ignoring the role and culpability of religion as fuel on the fire (and sometimes the main fuel) is like pretending a detonator has absolutely nothing to do with setting off a bomb.

People want to ignore, to minimize, what scares them. What they fear might be true, or might not. And that’s fine for them.

Not for me.

Ah, the sounds of someone who has never done any work with regular, technically illiterate users and has probably never dealt with a high-volume, multiply-forwarded email environment.

Two main reasons to include your email address in your email signature: many users have no clue how to find your email address in the email client. I’d say 30-40% don’t, from having supported users in the past.

And depending on how the sender’s email server and client is set up, and how your email server and client is set up, forwarded email is sometimes stripped of the email address so you can only see the person’s name. If the original sender or senders’ info is not in your address book or GAL (etc.), then you have no idea of anyone’s address beyond the closest-proximity email.

So yes, in a business environment it is always smart to include your email address in your signature. It helps technically-illiterate users and it is a dependable way to ensure that even email forwarded to others always contains your email address.

Now that 4K monitors and TVs are on the verge of a popularity explosion, I have to look back and laugh at all the people (geeks included) who absolutely assured me 5-6 years ago that we’d never need more than 3-4Mbs of bandwidth for home use.

That that was enough for anyone. That anything else was just ridiculous and wasteful extravagance.

A 4K stream not compressed all to hell requires about 15Mbs.

Of course these naysayers weren’t everyone, but a significant minority or my guess is a small majority.

They remind me people on BBSes back in the day moaning and complaining when 800×600 and 1024×768 monitors started coming out (in the time where 640×480 was HUGE) that no one would ever, ever need such a huge screen and it just made computers slower and blah blah blah….

Next will be 3-D and VR, which will happen in the next 5-15 years. It’ll require 10-100x the bandwidth, which many will insist we “don’t need.”

Until we do.

Of course this ignores the fact that having an at-first “purposeless” higher resolution and higher bandwidth is what allows innovation to happen (which is why the cable companies oppose upgrading their networks).

Many people are persistently, stubbornly short-sighted.

Today on Tumblr, I learned that making your lips look fuller with make-up is racist.

Good god, don’t these people have anything better to do? I mean, come on.

This is how a movement discredits itself without any outside assistance.

When everything is racist and cultural appropriation and evil, nothing is — it actually harms the real fight and the people you are trying to help.

I said in an earlier post that Jeff VanDerMeer came the closest to blending literary sensiblities with a quality plot.

I take that back. I think Marge Piercy, a much less well-known writer, does it better. So far I’ve read Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She and It and both have strong, comprehensible plots as well as high-quality writing. In fact, if you removed the plot, added some pretension and some of the usual unnecessary literary foofaraw and set them in the required NYC, both could be literary novels.

Piercy excels at description while not overburdening readers with needless detail. Parsimony with precision is difficult in writing, so I admire that.

Why regular people shouldn’t have guns.

What sort of moron takes a shot at a target they can’t see or haven’t seen at least once? Well, I’m not being fair. Most people, probably, would panic and do that.

I’m in favor of gun control because most people can’t control their guns.

I don’t think I can or will read Amanda Marcotte anymore. She is a good writer, but is consistently wrong about many things (Duke lacrosse rape case, Scott Aarronson and hating all low-status men unworthy of her, and others I’m forgetting, though there is at least one glaringly wrong thing on her site a week) who frequently and maliciously mischaracterizes her opponents’ arguments and intentions.

She is, as pointed out in a comment, a mediocre mind who believes she’s much smarter than she actually is. While this is common to many people, probably me included at times, her nearly-unparalleled compulsion to belittle those in real pain and her deep lack of compassion makes me intensely dislike her despite agreeing with her on perhaps 90% of issues.

The world needs firebrands, but she is not one; no, she is more like a tiny spark that fizzles out in a huge sea while thinking it has a chance of setting alight the entire ocean.

She is the epitome of the over-educated but actually relatively clueless person who believes that her education makes her better than us poor schmoes who didn’t waste $60,000 on ideas and thinking we could and did learn on our own in a quarter the time, for as the saying goes $1.50 in late fees from the library.

Good lord, this makes me feel old.

Of course A: and B: drives are a MS-DOS/Windows thing. The first OS I ever used didn’t have that concept, but instead on the TRS-80 the drive numbers were appended after the file name, like MYFILE.TXT:1 or whatever.

I actually prefer the Linux way anyway of mounting drives or volumes in directories. Most people don’t know this, but you can also do this on Windows now. Though I don’t recommend it as it confuses the hell out of Windows users and even Windows sysadmins.

This is what I mean about nerd-sharming. (Though I only agree with about 50% of the piece.)

I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life. Whether we’re “mouth-breathers”, “pimpled”, “scrawny”, “blubbery”, “sperglord”, “neckbeard”, “virgins”, “living in our parents’ basements”, “man-children” or whatever the insult du jour is, it’s always, always, ALWAYS a self-identified feminist saying it. Sometimes they say it obliquely, referring to a subgroup like “bronies” or “atheists” or “fedoras” while making sure everyone else in nerddom knows it’s about them too.

Amanda Marcotte is one of the worst, also, for this. She really hates nerdy men. It’s a lot easier and less risky to punch down, I guess.

But since when did it become ok to shit on the downtrodden?

And the idea that there is more harassment committed by nerds — as some feminists now believe — is fucking absurd. Being a member of a frat is associated with something like a 300% increased chance of that person having raped someone. Nope, I ain’t fucking making that statistic up. And I’ve actually seen male lawyers commit sexual harassment right in front of me.  Never have seen a nerd — who is usually too shy to talk to a woman anyway — do that (though I believe it happens, just not as often).

Indeed, harassment is very real and common, but re-defining harassment to include, “Someone I didn’t like because he doesn’t fit my idea of man and was in my general vicinity and might have even looked at me” doesn’t help feminism, doesn’t help women and it ends up hurting a lot of other people.

This is where having no historical knowledge gets you.

At least some people are trying to learn, I guess. More people need to try harder.

To my grandfather, Irish and Welsh people were definitely not white. They were scum, no better than black people. But he didn’t call them black people.

Lorde would not have been white to my grandfather, being Irish and Croatian by heritage. I know this seems really impossible to some (dumb) people, but this was true for roughly ~100 years in the US.

Anyway, over the long term (100-300 years) I suspect that racism towards brown people will also disappear, and instead we’ll have racism against AIs for a while.

It’s conventional wisdom that Mockingjay is inferior to the other two books in the Hunger Games trilogy.

I’ve read the series twice now. I don’t agree. I think people are mostly reacting to the grimness of the book. For that grimness and unflinchingness, Mockingjay is my favorite of the series.

It’s comfortless by necessity. The trilogy as a whole is one of the few — in or out of YA — that grapples seriously with propaganda, responsibility for choices, the limits of one’s power and how best to use it, how even making a good and right choice might condemn others to pain and death.

Mockingjay is the mortar round that has been fired high up into the air and is whistling down on the reader, an inevitable shell of consequence from all the choices the characters made in the prior books.

(Warning: spoilers might follow.)

What’s also odd is that people — and even some of the same people! — complain about the fairy tale ending of Mockingjay. Did these folks even read the books? The denouement is survival, and barely that. It’s implied that the brutality and monstrousness of humanity has not receded, and perhaps never will. In the end, Katniss lost her sister, Gale, and 95% of the people that she grew up with.

If that’s a fairytale ending, then it’s a shitty fucking fairytale.

Mockingjay is in fact disliked because it’s not really exciting or thrilling, but rather a slog through grief and loss and the consequences thereof. (By the way, one of the points that Collins is making with the Hunger Games books is that we all still do find games of death exciting, vivifying, and that is in fact human — but it’s also an implicit criticism, forcing us to look at ourselves and ask, could we, can we be better? This criticism and examination reaches its critical turn in Mockingjay.)

It’s one of the most adult books I’ve ever read.

Most of the prissy supposed better “adult” novels about similar topics shy away; Collins never does. However, in Mockingjay she shines a million watt floodlight on it all and says, This is what we’ve built, and what we’ve built will destroy us.

Humanity’s radio bubble.

Also mostly irrelevant, because at the rate a radio broadcast attenuates, beyond 20 or 30 light-minutes out from earth, unless you know exactly where to point a very large and powerful detector, information theory (a pretty damn hard and fast limit) says that nothing ever made could detect any non-directed normal-power broadcast.

So aliens in Alpha Centauri and beyond aren’t watching Howdy Doody because the energy from that and anything else ever broadcast from earth is utterly and completely subsumed in and by the background noise of the universe.

There’s been nothing we’ve done that anyone not in this solar system could even know about in principle, with any technology.

It’d require a exawatt or maybe zettawatt laser to send a message to any place likely to harbor life, and then we’d have to know exactly where to point the device.

Kind of casts a new light on the likelihood of SETI detecting alien life, really.

Why are all the liberals coming out of the woodwork to insist that the Islamic-inspired terror attack in Paris has nothing at all to do with Islam?

How fucking daft can you be? Apparently so daft your brain has a draft.

What inspired my rant below was this, which I found here.

As someone who is self-employed, insurance for me and my family is absurdly expensive. After the ACA was enacted, my insurance cost went up and the level of coverage went down.

What? You mean all the things good little liberals like Amanda Marcotte said about how those meanie Obama-haters were all lying when they said their premiums shot up under ACA – you mean that wasn’t true?*

How COULD IT BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE?

So yes kids, many people’s coverage has both worsened and gotten much more expensive under the ACA, despite the deranged shit Marcotte and people like her routinely spew.

*Note: I am not a Tea Partier or a conservative (quite, quite the opposite), but I will gladly link to a conservative site when it’s correct.