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Some people who voted for Trump have repented and joined the movement for democracy in America.

But also, there are serious doubts about the integrity of the 2024 elections and a nontrivial possibility that Trump didn’t win the election.

Christian tradition teaches that we are the hands of God; that God gets things done in the world through the instrumentality of human action. When you do an act of kindness for your neighbor, you are instantiating God’s kindness; when you defend your neighbor from harm or oppression, you are instantiating God’s protection.

One of the big differences between Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideology of nonviolence and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideology of nonviolence is that King accepted self-defense while Gandhi rejected it. Dr. King carried a pistol in his early career, and was later defended by armed bodyguards; while Gandhi rejected armed protection and called for oppressed people to surrender to their oppressors. So empirically, rejection of self-defense is less Christian and more Hindu.

Heterosexuality and homosexuality are subsets of allosexuality (sexual attraction and behavior towards others). Autosexual acts such as masturbation are not allosexual and so do not contribute to heterosexual or homosexual identity.

Example: A lesbian trans woman might masturbate using her penis, even though she has no attraction to penis-havers, just because she happens to be equipped with one.

Example: A heterosexual cis woman might masturbate using her vulva, even though she has no attraction to vulva-havers, just because she happens to be equipped with one.

That jerk drank all my beer!

Feudalism, where economic power comes from control of the land and familial connection to the conquerors of the land, was broadly supplanted by capitalism, where economic power comes from control of commercial and industrial capital, which are traded openly in capital markets.

Capitalism has several features that feudalism does not:

• The most productive property in capitalism is industrial and commercial capital: the means of industrial production and trade. While land remains profitable, it is no longer the center of economic productivity; and ownership of the land does not convey the sort of dominion over its use that it did in feudalism. (Nobody thinks it’s weird to build a factory on leased land, for instance: the ownership of the industrial capital does not follow the ownership of the underlying land.)
• Shares of productive property (capital) can be freely bought and sold in capital markets. In feudalism, productive property (land) changes hands through warfare, political processes such as the elevation of new lords by a king, and familial processes such as marriage and inheritance.
• Contract law becomes supremely important in capitalism, as capitalist firms are largely creatures of contract law rather than traditional rights.
• The capitalist managerial class by and large does not arise out of the families of the feudal aristocracy, and does not conduct itself according to the social rituals of the feudal aristocracy. For instance, corporate mergers are not arranged through marriage of the heirs of CEOs.
• Although this is not fully true of early capitalism, in modern capitalism workers are typically free to leave their jobs, and employers are broadly free to fire them if they are not productive. In most forms of feudalism, serfs are bound to the land and may not lawfully leave their lord’s service.

On that last point — Capitalism emerged out of colonialism. Many of the first firms traded on capital markets were colonial enterprises such as the Dutch East India Company (VOC). These firms employed slave labor and enjoyed legal monopolies on trade. This puts the lie to the libertarian claim that capitalism requires free labor and free trade. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with slavery and monopoly. For later examples see the United Fruit Company and other American colonial ventures.

Your body is not a life-support system for your mind. Rather, your mind is a guidance system for your body. Bodies were first; and developed minds to be better at doing body stuff.

I once worked in an office where the IT people would go around and zip-tie the cables to the furniture in the conference rooms, in ways that invariably led to the cables coming under tension and eventually fraying and breaking. (Especially some of the pricier laptop charging cables.)

I’d snip the offending zip-ties (selectively) when I noticed, but they went through a lot of expensive charging cables because someone thought slack cables looked messy.

few outside of Germany knew that concentration camps existed

The creation of concentration camps was widely advertised in Nazi propaganda, as a show of force to intimidate dissidents. It was the later death camps that were secret: the ones that were designed for no purpose but to do murder at industrial scale.

On the other hand, there are plenty of humans who like just about any dog more than they like other humans.

It’s about Trump, dude. Not Trump as politician, but Trump as model for what a “successful” white dude looks like: a sleazebag who cheats on his wives, cheats at business, commits crime on top of crime, uses violence and threats to get his way, etc.

Young white boys need better role-models than Trump and Musk to look up to.

(It’s also a parody of the racist shit people used to say about Black Americans and “bad role-models” like gangsta rappers.)

“Hallelujah” is a song about sex — but it’s not dirty sex, it’s holy sex.

Ward Cunningham, creator of Calvin & Hobbes?

Marathon’s Security Officer already had the green armor and shiny mask.

It has been obvious for many years that the Trump movement aims at the downfall of America, through the promotion and exaggeration of America’s flaws and the increasingly violent suppression of its virtues.

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

S

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

England has a surfeit of terms for obnoxious people.

• Jobsworth (obstructive clerk or bureaucrat)
• God-botherer (religious fanatic)
• Cockwomble
• Minging cockwomble
• Tremulous bollock-for-lobsters cockwomble
• Sir Æthelbert Plonker Cockwomble of the Drubbing-over-Head Cockwombles

I may have made those last two up.