February, 2018 archive
QOTD 0
S. S. Van Dine:
Logic is the most perfect artificial means of arriving at a false conclusion.
Van Dine, S. S. (Willard Huntington Wright), The Garden Murder Mystery
in The Philo Vance Murder Cases, v. 5 (London: Leonaur, 2010), p. 62.
“Crisis Actor” 0
I’ve been intrigued by conspiracy theories and those who embrace them for decades.
Most conspiracy theories are stupid and require herculean suspension of disbelief; they wouldn’t pass the test for an X-Files script.
The “crisis actor” conspiracy theory–that hordes of persons are paid to rush to the scenes of mass shootings or other heinous acts so quickly that they are already there when the events happen so as to pretend to be victim–is mindbogglingly stupid. The persons who spread it are cynical manipulative bastards, and those who believe it are cretins.
(Ask me politely, and I’ll tell you what I really think.)
Video via Raw Story.
Arms and Demand 0
I’ve been thinking back over my high school teachers and considering whether I’d have trusted any of them to be packing heat. I suggest you do the same.
Most of them I would not have trusted to pick up a gun. One or two I would have expected to gleefully fire one on any pretext.
The idea that arming teachers will somehow deter violence is profoundly stupid, but we live in a profoundly stupid society dominated by profoundly stupid people.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Don’t let politeness get your goat.
In a message posted Thursday afternoon on its Facebook page, the police department said someone trespassed onto the property of Smiling Hill Farm and Hillside Lumber last weekend and killed a pregnant goat that was in a fenced-in pen.
“The killing of this goat was not an accident,” police said in the post.
Concealed Weapons 0
Heh.
But the weapon, a model of which was used in the Parkland, Florida, massacre, was hastily withdrawn late on Tuesday. . . .
The website for the dinner had been scrubbed of references to the AR-15 as well as a 10/22 Ruger rifle as the door prize. Stevens County Republicans auctioned weapons at their 2016 and 2017 dinners . . . .
Easy Marks 0
Daniel Ruth muses on Americans’ susceptibility to being suckered. Here’s a bit:
You have to give some grudging credit to the Russian trolls. They didn’t create American gullibility. They didn’t invent American civic illiteracy. They merely exploited it.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness takes practice.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my entire career,” said Sunbury police Chief Timothy S. Miller Wednesday. . . .
The range was set up in the kitchen. The target was in a box six to eight feet away, Miller said. Bullets from a .22-caliber rifle went into the wall behind the target, he said.
The United States has become Lord of the Flies brought to life.
Click for the original image.It’s All about the Algorithm 0
Anne Applebaum explains.
I don’t agree with her wholeheartedly, because she doesn’t differentiate between the actions of Facebook and those of Facebook posters, nor does she remark on the credulousness of the American Facebook user. Nevertheless, as regards how Facebook and other anti-social media platforms manipulate the material that Facebook users see when they log in, I submit that her piece is worth a read. Said manipulation may not be “publishing,” but at the very least it is some form of “polishing.”
A snippet:
At the same time, Facebook has declared itself free of responsibility: The company continues to argue that it is not legally liable for material that appears on its platform because it is not a “publisher,” even though it behaves in every other way like a publisher, including by collecting advertising revenue that used to go to publishers. The result is that anyone who seeks to spread false information on Facebook or any other social-media site is, in practice, no longer bound by laws on libel or false advertising that were explicitly designed to stop them.
