Zephyr Dear

Arun Rath had a good piece on NPR’s weekend All Things Considered about the problematic legacy of H.P. Lovecraft: “Horror of Horrors: Is H.P. Lovecraft’s Legacy Tainted?”

On the one hand, as Rath says, “It’s hard to overstate his influence on fantasy and horror fiction.” But on the other hand, Rath notes, “H.P. Lovecraft was racist — really, really racist.”

He discusses this aspect of Lovecraft’s enduring influence and popularity with Laura Miller, who wrote about Lovecraft last month for Salon. This exchange struck me as insightful:

RATH: Laura, once I learned the depth of Lovecraft’s racism, it became impossible for me to read the stories the same way. They just seemed filled [with] anxiety about WASPs losing control of the world.

MILLER: Yeah. I mean, I think that when you recognize how entwined the racism is with the morbidness and the anxiety and the phobia and the dread that we think of as the signatures of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, in a weird way it gives you a certain element of insight into racism itself.

You know, one of the great things about Lovecraft is that this hot mess of his psyche is just, like, right there. It’s like almost like an autopsy of a really, really messed up personality as well as a story. And I actually feel like it probably teaches us a lot about those attitudes for the next time that we encounter them.

Lovecraftian themes emerged again as I headed off to work Sunday night. My younger daughter is home for a short fall break, and so she and my wife planned a Sunday night scary Netflix marathon — starting with The Cabin in the Woods.

Here’s where the **SPOILER ALERT** kicks in, because spoilers are almost impossible to avoid when discussing that movie, which has at least three big twists in its plot and meta-plot and meta-meta-plot.

Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s movie is so twisty and twisted, actually, that I think it may be spoiler-proof. But still, if you haven’t seen it yet, and you still hope to see it eventually without any potentially experience-spoiling foreknowledge of its story(-ies), then be warned.

OK, then.

The Cabin in the Woods is a story about stories — and about what the stories we want to tell can tell us about ourselves.

It’s also a horror movie about penal substitutionary atonement. It’s a horror movie about how every horror movie is about penal substitutionary atonement.

Not in so many words, of course. That particular theological term is never used. The way the movie puts it is this, from the “Director” played by Sigourney Weaver:

Your deaths will avert countless others. You’ve seen horrible things, an army of nightmare creatures. But they are nothing compared to what came before, what lies below. It’s our task to placate the ancient ones, as it’s yours to be offered up to them. Forgive us and let us get it over with.

These “ancient ones” are something out of Lovecraft — massive horrors from the ancient past, semi-sleeping beneath the earth. And they require blood. Without the sacrifice to appease them, they will destroy the entire world.

The horror story of Cabin, in other words, isn’t all that different from the horror story that some Christian theologies have come up with to explain why Jesus was crucified. The difference is that in those theologies, the bloodthirsty Ancient One demanding a sacrifice lest he destroy everyone isn’t Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, but the God of Abraham.

In those theologies, in other words, the God of Abraham acts like the creepy primordial elder gods that rose up from the fever-dreams of H.P. Lovecraft’s really, really racist subconscious. (Thus, Calvinism.)

My point here isn’t to try to refute that theological claim or to defend the Almighty from the awful accusation that this theory of “penal substitutionary atonement” makes against God. Instead, I just want to go back to what Laura Miller said about Lovecraft’s unintentionally transparent psyche:

This hot mess of his psyche is just, like, right there. It’s like almost like an autopsy of a really, really messed up personality as well as a story.

Our taste in theological stories, like our taste in horror stories, can tell us a lot about ourselves.

I'm just not that interested in writing science fiction this decade. Nope: instead, I'm veering more and more in the direction of urban fantasy. Here's why.

My personal take on science fiction is that this narrow slice of the literature of the Fantastika (hint: if you haven't met that term of critical art before, follow the link before reading on) is about the study of the human condition under circumstances which might plausibly come to pass. By "plausibly" I thereby try to exclude the implausible (wizards, elves, surrealist intrusions from the subconscious) and to include stuff that doesn't exist but which plausibly might exist (artificial intelligence, aliens).

Now, as various SF and fantasy writers have observed, our baseline definitions of what is plausible and implausible change over time. In part, this is because formerly plausible ideas have shifted gradually into the penumbra of implausibility (the luminiferous aether, for example: phlogiston: the other detritus of discredited scientific hypotheses; arguably time travel and faster than light travel might be heading this way too). In no small part, the Mundane science fiction movement is a response to this: if we have no plausible evidence to support large scale causality violation in the observable universe, doesn't it follow that FTL starships are little more plausible than fire-breathing, flying dragons?

(Meanwhile, some items which would have been pigeon-holed as implausible without an eye-blink a few decades ago are not merely plausible today but are probably sitting in your pocket right now. About which, more later.)

In addition to the redrawing of the plausibility/implausibility frontier, we have other factors to consider: notably, our relationship with technology and science. As Vernor Vinge remarked in his novel Rainbows End many modern technologies come with no user serviceable parts inside. Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s, personal computers were (by modern standards) a bit crap, but they offered an unparalleled opportunity to open the lid and learn by tinkering. For example, the BBC Micro in the UK—which sold by the million—had an analog i/o port, user-accessible DMA ports, and ROM sockets into which users could install additional firmware; it was designed for learning. The Apple II similarly featured a fairly simple expansion port architecture. But today's personal computing devices (with very few exceptions) come as shiny sealed boxes; their expansion options exist but are complex and require considerable expertise to develop: they're not designed for learners and tinkers but for users or highly trained developers.

Similarly, in other fields our technologies have developed in a way that's hostile to monkey-see monkey-do learning. You can't credibly learn to service a modern automobile in your own garage. You can't formulate a new pharmaceutical preparation in the back of your dispensary (which, believe it or not, actually happened right up until the late 1930s: even in the late 1970s/early 1980s it was possible for a medium-sized company with perhaps 20-30 researchers to develop and bring to market new medicines).

In part, this is a side-effect of market globalization: to survive even locally a product has to reach a planetary market, which means competing with large organizations and getting access to huge supply chains, which means you need to be big ... and market regulations are structured to lock out upstart small competitors. But that's not the only reason for it. Lots of our technologies have become so complex that just learning how to use them is a full-time job; understanding the interlocking specialities that go into them is beyond individual comprehension.

As brilliant new fantasy author Max Gladstone notes:

Old-school fantasy is a genre of the unknowable. Magic in Tolkien's works is big and vast and ancient. His characters relate to that magic with awe, with fear, and occasionally with love. No one tries to hack the One Ring. Certainly no one tries to build a new one! People acquire the One Ring, or the Palantir, and use each within its limits.

But consider the smartphone I have in my pocket.

No single human being knows how to make this phone. I acquired the phone, and I use it. People who know more about the phone can tell it to do more things than I can, but they're still bound by the limits of the hardware. A few communities are dedicated to modding and hacking phones like mine, yes, but for most people most of the time a smartphone is a portable magic mirror. We make mystic passes before the glass, address the indwelling spirit with suitably respectful tones, and LEARN THE FUTURE. ("Siri, what will the weather be like tomorrow?") The same thought experiment works for many modern technologies.

Max then goes on to make a point that I might well have made myself if I'd thought to put it so explicitly: while the technologies in our far-future SF now look more and more like numinous magical powers, our daily life is perfused by magical devices that obey relatively predictable rules—utter the right incantation and Siri tells you the weather. Which means we as readers are coming to expect an almost mechanistic causality to inform the magic in our fantasies.

(And if that makes sense to you, go try one of Max's novels. No, seriously: if you like near-future SF there's a rather good chance that this fantasy novel will speak to you. Weird, isn't it? Because he's writing SF set in a world perfused by mechanised, systematized magic. We need a word for this: the standard genre tags are too limiting.)

So here's my next step: we are living in a 21st century that resembles a mutant Shadowrun—by turns a cyberpunk dystopia and a world where everyone has access to certain kinds of magic. And if you want to explore the human condition under circumstances which might plausibly come to pass, these days the human condition is constrained by technologies so predictably inaccessible that they might as well be magic. So magic makes a great metaphor for probing the human condition. We might not have starships, but there's a Palantir in every pocket (and we might not have dragons, but some of our wizards are working on it ).

Over the past few years I've found myself reading less and less far-future SF and more and more urban fantasy. If you view it through the lens of the future we're living in rather than the future we expected in times gone by, that's not so surprising. Starships and galactic empires and aliens are receding into the same misty haze of unreality as dragons and demons: instead we're living in a world with chickens with tails and scales and teeth, magic mirrors with answers to every question (many of them misleading or malicious), dominated by abhuman hive minds.

So it shouldn't be any surprise to discover in the world I'm now living in I can engage better with the subjects of my fiction by writing urban fantasy, rather than by extruding good old-fashioned space opera just like grandpappy wrote. This doesn't mean that I consider traditional space opera to be dead (any more than high fantasy with elves, dwarves and dragons is dead): but it's not something I'm engaging with much, if at all, these days.

And now for one final thought.

Traditionally fantasy works were set in a mythologized past: frequently faux-mediaeval, occasionally classical, sometimes (as is especially the case with the more recent steampunk sub-genre) only 1-2 centuries removed. Some fantasies are set in the present: we often mislabel these urban fantasy, although very often contemporary fantasy is rural/wilderness oriented while it's quite common for urban fantasy settings to be historic (Ankh-Morpork, I'm looking at you). But it's still very rare to find a fantasy that's set in the cities of the near future: and I find this genre blind spot fascinating, because the future of humanity is overwhelmingly urban and magical ...

At the turn of the 19th century in the U.S. and Europe, it became wildly popular — and that’s an understatement — for ladies to wear feathers and whole taxidermied birds on their hats. One ornithologist reported taking two walks in Manhattan in 1886 and counting 700 hats; 525 of which were topped by feathers or birds. Buzzfeed has a collection of vintage hats featuring birds; here are some of the ones that were most stunning to me:

At the time, not many people thought much of killing the birds. Europeans and their American cousins “didn’t believe they could put a dent in an animal’s population.” Birds seemed to be an “abundant, even inexhaustible” natural resource.  So take they did.  Millions of birds all over the world were harvested for hat makers for years. The Fashioning Feathers blog offers this example:

A single 1892 order of feathers by a London dealer… included 6,000 bird of paradise, 40,000 hummingbird and 360,000 various East Indian bird feathers. In 1902 an auction in London sold 1,608 30 ounce packages of heron… plumes. Each ounce of plume required the use of four herons, therefore each package used the plumes of 120 herons, for a grand total of 192, 960 herons killed.

Ornithologists started to sit up and take notice. One estimated that 67 types of birds — often including all of their sub-species — were at risk for extinction.  Not only were birds killed for their feathers, they were killed when their feathers were at their most resplendent. This meant killing them during mating season, interrupting their reproductive cycle and often leaving baby birds orphaned.

A campaign to end the practice began. In Europe the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds targeted women. They launched a sexist campaign accusing women of supporting the heartless slaughter of birds. Fashioning Feathers includes this image from a pamphlet titled “Feathered Women” in which the president of the Society calls them a “bird-enemy.”

Virginia Woolf went for the jugular, pointing out that — even though the image shows a woman swooping down to kill a bird — it was largely men who did the dirty work of murder and they were also the ones profiting from the industry.

Ironically, middle class women were at the forefront of the bird preservation movement. They were the rank and file and, thanks in part to their work, in the U.S. the movement led to the formation of the first Audubon societies.  The Massachusetts Audubon Society organized a feather boycott, angering hat makers who called them “extremists” and “sentimentalists.” Politicians worried out loud about the loss of jobs. Missouri Senator James Reed complained:

Why there should be any sympathy or sentiment about a long-legged, long-beaked, long-necked bird that lives in swamps and eats tadpoles.

Ultimately the Massachusetts Audubon Society succeeded in pushing through the first federal-level conservation legislation in the U.S., the Lacey Act of 1900.

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

The latest version of Adobe's Digital Editions, a DRM system widely used for ebooks, gathers enormous amounts of sensitive personal information about its users' reading habits and transmits them, in the clear, to Adobe. Read the rest

Yesterday afternoon Ted Cruz (R-TX) exploded with a sputtering, outraged response to the Supreme Court's non-decision decision to allow marriage equality to go into effect in eleven more states (5 states immediately effected; 6 more effectively legalized). This came after the epic press release from the National Organization for Marriage, an historic primal scream in which the group pulled out every adjective their minds could muster in response to seeing their group's raison d'etre slip out of the universe - "furious word salad", as our gifted headline writers put it.

For most of us this was a decision all about dignity. But for the opponents of marriage equality it really did amount to the final indignity.

Read More →

silmarillionproject:

I think I could write a convincing essay about how Shadow of Mordor is actually more respectful of Tolkien lore than the movies, despite being a completely original narrative. It’s deceptively smart fan-fiction.

My only real complaint with the narrative is shoehorning in the “murdered wife/kid” trope. It feels cheap and lazy, especially when “beating Sauron” is more than enough motivation on its own.

“The World of Mr. Mxyzptlk!” from Action Comics #273 (1961)
Written by Jerry Siegel
Art by Al Plastino

“My super-sneeze is destroying this solar system! Suspecting this might happen, I flew to a long-dead universe where all life vanished eons ago due to a terrible space-plague!”

Superman can destroy a solar system with a sneeze.

James Zark's portrait of Alan Moore as the Joker from the classic 1988/2008 Killing Joke graphic novel is nothing short of inspired. Read the rest

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

:o

“Kafkaesque” refers not just to bureacratic nightmares, notes Joshua Rothman, but “his novels and stories are actually about justice, which he saw as aloof and possibly unobtainable, and punishment, which he saw as endless and omnipresent.” In other words, he continues, Kafka “described an aspect of life that the online world makes more visible and acute”:

There’s a surreal humor to the Kafkaesque—a sense of lurid, unhinged exaggeration. But, at heart, it’s a sensibility based on straightforward observations of human behavior. One observation is simply that punishment is pervasive. … A second, related observation is that, in many cases, innocence and guilt are determined by context. Often, the punishers are guilty, too—perhaps not of the crimes in question but almost certainly of other, more personal “crimes” not recognized by the law. If the court had a wide enough jurisdiction, everyone would be guilty of something.

To read a headline designed for the social-media age is to see these Kafkaesque aspects of life expressed in a new idiom. (From the Washington Post: “Stop congratulating yourself for opposing the Redskins’ name. You’re not helping the real problem. We’re finally paying attention to Native Americans, but it’s for the wrong reason.”) Stories like this aim to startle you with your own guilt—and to enable you to blindside others with theirs. They employ a paranoid style of accusation: you may think you know what you did wrong, but what you’re about to find out will surprise you. Facebook, like much of the Web, is officially designed to encourage positivity; there is no “dislike” button, and the stated goal is to facilitate affiliation and belonging. But, over time, the site’s utopian social bureaucracy has been overwhelmed by the Kafkaesque churn of punishment. … Facebook has become a dream space of judgment—a place where people you may know only in the most casual way suddenly reveal themselves to be players in a pervasive system of discipline. The site is an accusation aggregator, and the news feed is the docket—full of opportunities to publicly admire the good or publicly denigrate the bad, to judge others for their mistakes or to be judged for doing it wrong.

Arrested at sixteen, Kalief Browder was imprisoned at Rikers Island for three years without ever being convicted of a crime. His case was eventually dismissed. From Jennifer Gonnerman’s excellent coverage of the injustice:

In order for a trial to start, both the defense attorney and the prosecutor have to declare that they are ready; the court clerk then searches for a trial judge who is free and transfers the case, and jury selection can begin. Not long after Browder was indicted, an assistant district attorney sent the court a “Notice of Readiness,” stating that “the People are ready for trial.” The case was put on the calendar for possible trial on December 10th, but it did not start that day. On January 28, 2011, Browder’s two-hundred-and-fifty-eighth day in jail, he was brought back to the courthouse once again. This time, the prosecutor said, “The People are not ready. We are requesting one week.” The next court date set by the judge—March 9th—was not one week away but six. As it happened, Browder didn’t go to trial anytime that year. An index card in the court file explains:

June 23, 2011: People not ready, request 1 week.

August 24, 2011: People not ready, request 1 day.

November 4, 2011: People not ready, prosecutor on trial, request 2 weeks.

December 2, 2011: Prosecutor on trial, request January 3rd.

The Bronx courts are so clogged that when a lawyer asks for a one-week adjournment the next court date usually doesn’t happen for six weeks or more. As long as a prosecutor has filed a Notice of Readiness, however, delays caused by court congestion don’t count toward the number of days that are officially held to have elapsed. Every time a prosecutor stood before a judge in Browder’s case, requested a one-week adjournment, and got six weeks instead, this counted as only one week against the six-month deadline. Meanwhile, Browder remained on Rikers, where six weeks still felt like six weeks—and often much longer.

In an additional post, Gonnerman highlights Rikers’ use of solitary confinement on teens – a practice the jail has promised to phase out:

Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary. In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”

Jon Walker connects Browder’s case to the war on drugs:

A very big reason the justice system is overwhelmed and conditions at our prisons are so terrible is due to overcrowding from the drug war. According to the FBI’s nationwide statistics, “The highest number of arrests were for drug abuse violations.” … This doesn’t just hurt people caught up in the drug war and their families. It harms everyone who needs to use the justice system including the victims and those accused of all other crimes. The drug war has so overwhelmed our system of justice that it is has effectively destroyed the constitutional right to a speedy trial.

skeletongrazed:

shout out to the peaceful skeleton communitity

Justin Wolfers calls attention to a survey of leading economists, all of whom agree that ride-share services are a boon to consumers:

When asked whether “letting car services such as Uber or Lyft compete with taxi firms on equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements, but without restrictions on prices or routes, raises consumer welfare,” the responses varied only in the intensity with which they agreed. Of the 40 economists who responded, 60 percent “strongly agree,” 40 percent “agree,” and none chose “uncertain,” “disagree” and “strongly disagree.” On this issue at least, it’s time to retire the caricature of the two-handed economist.

But as Dylan Matthews notes, not all of them are gung-ho:

Chicago’s Michael Greenstone noted that “part of the gain in consumer welfare … comes from undermining property rights of taxi medallion owners.”

Chicago’s Richard Thaler argued that Uber “needs to be careful about surge pricing in emergencies” as “people care about fairness as much as efficiency.” Larry Samuelson at Yale wrote that Uber and Lyft “will not be a Pareto improvement for consumers” — that is, they will not benefit or leave the same all consumers; some will be left worse off. Samuelson’s reply didn’t get into why he thinks this will be the case.

It’s also worth remembering that the phrasing of the question elides the issue of whether Uber and Lyft really are on “equal footing regarding genuine safety and insurance requirements” with taxi companies. Taxi firms would argue that car-sharing services are, in practice, subject to laxer requirements in those areas.

Katie Benner also observes that the sharing economy has a big downside in terms of wages and labor protections:

Startups that connect service workers and customers have raised lots of venture capital based on the idea that low prices will democratize and popularize services that were once reserved for the rich. The viability of these enterprises is tied to scale. Once they are popular and ubiquitous enough, the argument goes, they’ll transform massive swaths of the service economy including transportation, retail and the workforce itself.

To become ubiquitous, these companies need lots and lots of cheap contract laborers to serve customers who want them to be available at the push of a smartphone button. But there’s a big vulnerability in all of these business models: They wouldn’t work if they had to offer full-time jobs with substantial benefits, and the reliance on contract workers to sustain this burgeoning market has become controversial. Kevin Roose recently noted in New York magazine that an emerging “1099 economy” explains how it’s “possible for a cash-flush tech start-up to have homeless workers.”

Avi Asher-Schapiro explores this problem in more depth:

From the very beginning, Uber attracted drivers with a bait-and-switch. Take the company’s launch in LA: In May 2013, Uber charged customers a fare of $2.75 per mile (with an additional 60¢ per minute under eleven mph). Drivers got to keep 80 percent of the fare. Working full time, drivers could make a living wage: between 15 and $20 an hour.

Drivers rushed to sign up, and thousands leased and bought cars just to work for Uber — especially immigrants and low-income people desperate for a well-paying job in a terrible economy. But over the last year, the company has faced stiff competition from its arch-rival, Lyft. To raise demand and push Lyft out of the LA market, Uber has cut UberX fares nearly in half: to $1.10 per mile, plus 21¢ a minute.

Uber drivers have no say in the pricing, yet they must carry their own insurance and foot the bill for gas and repairs — a cost of 56¢ per mile, according to IRS estimates. With Uber’s new pricing model, drivers are forced to work under razor-thin margins.

While full-length articles on Stratechery are free, I also offer the Daily Update for $10/month and $100/year. Each day I write at varying lengths about 2~3 topics of the day, delivered to your inbox, private RSS feed, or via direct link on the right side of this page. The following is a sample of a Daily Update from September 16, 2014

I wrote on Stratechery about the Microsoft angle of the Minecraft acquisition, but I wanted to spend some time on why I’m so bullish on Minecraft in particular, and why I think it’s an excellent fit for Microsoft.

First, though, I want to talk about dolls: American Girl dolls, to be exact.

In graduate school for a design research class we had a semester-long project that was focused on American Girl: specifically, through design research methods (which are largely ethnographic in nature, including observation, shadowing, and in-context interviews), we were to understand what made American Girl such an unbelievably successful (and wildly profitable) business, and then use that insight to create a similar product for boys.

For those who aren’t familiar, American Girl is a line of dolls and associated paraphernalia, including books, clothes, and stores at places like 5th Avenue or Michigan Avenue with hair salons, hospitals, cafeterias, etc. The average purchase in said stores is in the multi-hundred dollar range, and the average American Girl family spends thousands of dollars by the time all is said and done.

The core of American Girl, and the original product line, is time-period specific dolls, such as Molly McIntire, who lived during World War II, or Kirsten Larson, who lived on the American frontier. American Girl didn’t just sell dolls, though: the key was the books. As Wikipedia notes:

The Historical Characters line of 18-inch dolls were initially the main focus of Pleasant Company. This product line aims to teach aspects of American history through a six-book series from the perspective of a 9- to 11-year-old girl living in that time period. Although the books are written for an eight to twelve year-old target audience, they endeavor to cover significant topics such as child labor, child abuse, poverty, racism, slavery, animal abuse, and war in manners appropriate for the understanding and sensibilities of their young audience.

What we realized through our research is that it was these books that were the key to American Girl’s success: while kids loved the dolls because dolls are fun, it was the books that made the parents feel like they were doing good by their kids by buying American Girl. They weren’t buying a frivolous toy; rather, they were buying something that would instill values, impart knowledge, and enable a shared experience. That created a powerful alignment where kids loved the dolls because they were fun, and parents loved buying the dolls because they were educational.

I’m sad to say the second part of our project – how to translate this insight into a new product for boys – wasn’t as successful. Our idea was pretty much a poorly thought-out ripoff of American Girl. It turns out, though, that the answer showed up in what should have been an obvious place: video games. Specifically, Minecraft.

(An important aside: the project I just told you about was by definition delineated by gender, but I do believe that’s a false distinction, and I won’t use it from this point on. Boys certainly play with dolls, and girls absolutely play with video games. And, I’m proud to say, my daughter has built some pretty mean Minecraft houses on the iPad)

Minecraft is a video game, and like most video games, it’s very fun and engrossing to play. Kids are interested. Minecraft, though, is also about building things, and design, and even community. You learn a lot, and that makes parents interested as well. Minecraft is the same powerful alignment of parent-and-children incentives as American Girl, and I think that’s a big part of its success. Satya Nadella certainly agrees. According to Geekwire Nadella told the Seattle Chamber of Commerce:

To me what Minecraft represents is more than a hit game franchise. It’s this open-world platform. If you think about it, it’s the one game parents want their kids to play.

Ben Popper explores why this is in a really great piece on The Verge:

Minecraft gives Microsoft an intergenerational success story that few other games or services can replicate. The Verge spoke with dozens of parents who see Minecraft not only as an incredible tool for bonding with their children, but a gateway to education in computer science that could restore some appeal to the Microsoft brand for the next generation…

A lot of parents are especially happy to spend time and money on Minecraft for their kids because they see it as a teaching tool. Minecraft teaches kids about architecture, and players can use something called redstone circuits to create simple mechanical devices, even entire computers, out of Minecraft blocks. And while Mojang offers a number of different versions and upgrades of Minecraft to download, the incredible variety of worlds to explore and items you can build comes from “mods”, modified software created by the community that can be installed on a server to reshape that world or the rules that govern it. For many young players, mods become a gateway to the world of computer programming, something parents, and perhaps Microsoft as well, are keen to encourage.

John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla – and certainly no Microsoft fan! – had a similar reaction to the purchase and what he thought it might mean to Microsoft:

So here’s the thing: the next generation of makers — 5 or 10 years down the road — they’re all building worlds in Minecraft today. Just look around. Watch what the most interesting kids around are getting obsessed about. Take a look at what they’re building, and the levels of complexity they’re grappling with before they even really can grok what they’re making.

They’re next.

And Microsoft buying Minecraft — and, hopefully, investing in Minecraft in a way that also lets it stay independent and vibrant — says, very clearly, that Microsoft wants to stand, again, with the makers.

That’s exactly why Minecraft fits so neatly with Microsoft’s productivity focus, why I’m such a fan of the purchase (read the Verge article and you’ll see lots of places Microsoft can improve the experience and make it more accessible), and why I so desperately hope it doesn’t succumb to the Xbox’s need to exist.

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The post American Girl, Minecraft, and the Next Generation of Builders (Daily Update Sample) appeared first on stratechery by Ben Thompson.

I'm learning to play the drums, and I got a good DVD from Amazon. It starts off with a rant about drum technique.

The instructor mentions the old rule of thumb that you're best to avoid conversations about religion and politics, and says that he thinks drum technique should be added to the list. He says that during the DVD, he'll tell you that certain moves are the wrong moves to make, but that any time he says that, it really means that the given move is the wrong move to make in the context of the technique he's teaching.

He then goes on to give credit to drummers who play using techniques that are different from his, and to say that it's your job as a drummer to take every technique with a grain of salt and disavow the whole idea of regarding any particular move as wrong. Yet it's also your job as a student of any particular technique to interpret that technique strictly and exactly, if you want to learn it well enough to use it. So when you're a drummer, the word "wrong" should be meaningless, yet when you're a student, it should be very important.

Programming has this tension also. If you're a good programmer, you have to be capable of understanding both One True Way fanatacism and "right tool for the job" indifference. And you have to be able to use any particular right tool for a job in that particular's tool One True Way (or choose wisely between the options that it offers you).

Pam Mazanec, a member of the Colorado state Board of Education currently leading the charge against those AP US History standards, apparently thinks that the US is one of the few countries to have abolished slavery.

Yes, we practiced slavery. But we also ended it voluntarily, at great sacrifice, while the practice continues in many countries still today! ... This is part of the argument that America is exceptional.

"I can't quite place it," writes David Shiffman. Update: The original is at Jezebel: "This Science Museum Has Royally Pissed Off a Bunch of Girl Scouts"

charminglyantiquated:

hey baby, want to come back to my place?

(sexts from the void is a fucking gem)

Hotel rooms can occasionally make you watch Fox. It happens. And I know I should be better than this, but it’s still, yes, shocking in its relentless, cynical propaganda. I was watching a foul, smug gabfest headed by Greg Gutfeld late last night and they introduced a segment on the first Ebola case in the US. Immediately, they cut to a graphic of a gloomy looking Obama with the words “Only in Obama’s America.” Seriously. He’s now responsible for Ebola, it seems. And, of course, the subtle insinuation that Ebola is a black disease and Obama is therefore somehow part of this dark menace coming to our shores was the subliminal message.

Then last Friday night, alone in my DC apartment – Aaron and the hounds are still in Provincetown – I also watched the Megyn Kelly show. You should never watch Fox alone. It was, of course, about the horrifying incident in Oklahoma that day where an obviously unstable and deranged worker had been fired and gone on a rampage, yelling Islamic slogans, and actually beheading one of his victims. It was obviously a deeply disturbing incident and certainly deserved coverage. But the coverage was designed not to lay out the facts, but to foment the most widespread fear imaginable. They played the full 911 tape – to accentuate the horror. They spoke of his possible ties to international terror groups. They had photos of him at a local mosque. They implied – in full McCarthy mode – that the authorities were covering up this Muslim in our midst out of political correctness or, in Obama’s America, government support for Islamist terror. Kelly intoned that this was “the first beheading on American soil,” implying that this was the beginning of a campaign to behead Americans all over the country. It was way into the segment before one of the guests, when asked why on earth the authorities weren’t describing this as an act of Islamist terror in the heartland, muttered that, well, in fact, the dude had just been fired at the place he worked, after a heated argument, and maybe that had something to do with it. Kelly immediately pounced and dismissed any such motive – and the segment moved directly from the local police who had called this workplace violence to an assertion that the Obama administration was behind this p.c. move.

The incident happened that day. I understand that breaking news may not have all the facts available to make full sense of it. But to assert he was arguably part of an international Jihadist group, already planning more attacks, to describe what prompted this horrifying act as solely terrorism, to watch Kelly’s widened incredulous, scandalized eyes asking over and over again why the police were still calling this as a preliminary measure an act of workplace violence … well, it was pure fear-mongering.

It turns out now that more facts are in that he’s obviously a deeply disturbed individual, singled out people he had a grievance about, had shown up at a local mosque and asked to have pictures taken (even though he was not a member of it and its members had no idea who he was), and had gotten into his sick head that he was an Islamic warrior, from reading on the Internet and watching the recent ISIS beheadings. He had just “converted” to Islam and was full of racist and misogynist poison. It would not be the first time an unstable individual had grappled with his demons by adopting some new religion and then went on a rampage to avenge those he had a grievance against. His weapon? A kitchen knife he had gone back to his apartment to get after being dismissed.

My point is not that this was not a horrifying act, and he faces the death penalty for it. My point is simply that the way this was covered reveals ever more starkly that we are in a new era now of the kind of paranoia and terror that sees a terrorist conspiracy behind any and every act of violence, that seeks to equate the acts of this disturbed and violent man as somehow indicative of the many Muslims in that community who were as appalled as anyone by this murder, and that is fast becoming national hysteria that shows no sign of abating.

America, my adopted home, is a place of wonder, of energy, of enterprise, of compassion, of risk and diversity. But it is now and always has been a place where deep-seated fear and paranoia have always simmered below the surface – where McCarthyism once stalked the land, where recent hysteria justified the American president authorizing appalling torture of hundreds of people (with complete impunity), where civil liberties were shredded in a period when more people were killed by lightning than by terrorism, where refugee children as young as eight or nine are treated as terrible dangers to the republic, where undocumented immigrants are left in permanent limbo and where legal immigrants are treated as threats first and assets second, and where our leaders, whom one might expect to calm the public, instead fan the flames of panic for short-term political gain.

The great achievement of those maniacs in Iraq and Syria is to have ignited this strain in American life, exploited the PTSD of 9/11, and brilliantly baited this country into another unwinnable, bankrupting war which will only deepen the polarization that leads to more terror – a war in which what’s left of democratic accountability and constitutional norms are once again under threat. I see no one in our elites, including the president, doing anything to calm this down. And I see a Republican landslide coming in the Congress this fall, with all the consequences of more war and more hysteria ahead.

Welcome to America, no longer the land of the free or the brave, but the land of the paranoid and terrified. I haven’t felt this glum since the Bush-Cheney years. Because, it appears, they never really ended.

The massive, student led protests in Hong Kong were sparked by the fact that Beijing's political and economic elites get to choose the candidates in its elections ("I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating" -Boss Tweed) -- but is this really any different from America's big money primaries, where corporate elites can spend unlimited sums fixing the race? Read the rest

[Found floating around on Tumblr, source unknown.]

This, from Ars Technica, is pretty extraordinary:

In the early 2000s, William “Trip” Hawkins—founder of video game publisher Electronic Arts—was living the good life. … Hawkins had a peculiar way of keeping his cash flow up; he wasn’t paying all the taxes connected to the proceeds of some of his stock sales. Instead, he participated in a tax sheltering setup designed to produce on-paper “monetary losses” to offset the gains. The scheme was all done through accounting firm KPMG, which used convoluted Swiss and Cayman Islands deals that eventually raised the eyebrows of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax auditors. The IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board eventually cried foul. In 2002, the IRS notified Hawkins’ lawyers that the tax shelters, accounting for about $60 million in claimed losses, wouldn’t be allowed for the tax years 1997 to 2000. This meant that Hawkins would be on the hook for millions in back taxes on all those EA stock profits. Still, Hawkins continued living a jet setter’s life until around the time he filed for bankruptcy protection in 2006. For instance, a government legal filing said that Hawkins’ private jet had cost $11.8 million in 2000 and had an “operating” cost of $1 million annually.

Hawkins did eventually pay more than $10 million toward his tax debt, but $26 million still remained. Because of Hawkins’ continued high spending, a federal bankruptcy court refused to give him the usual bankruptcy benefit of wiping his tax burden. … But Hawkins appealed this ruling—and he doesn’t have to pay those taxes, at least not for now. A recent decision by a three-judge panel for the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco sided 2-1 with Hawkins despite objections from a dissenting appellate judge who said that Hawkins didn’t deserve a break because he was engaged in “profligate spending.” The appeals court concluded that it didn’t matter whether Hawkins bought a private jet or lived the high life, so long as he wasn’t willfully scheming to evade his tax burden. The majority opinion concluded that the law was on Hawkins’ side and that “bankruptcy law must apply equally to rich and poor alike.”

The key quote from the majority’s ruling is below:

[A] mere showing of spending in excess of income is not sufficient to establish the required intent to evade tax; the government must establish that the debtor took the action with the specific intent of evading taxes. Indeed, if simply living beyond one’s means, or paying bills to other creditors prior to bankruptcy, were sufficient to establish a willful attempt to evade taxes, there would be few personal bankruptcies in which taxes would be dischargeable. Such a rule could create a large ripple effect throughout the bankruptcy system. As to discharge of debts, bankruptcy law must apply equally to the rich and poor alike, fulfilling the Constitution’s requirement that Congress establish “uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.”

On the one hand, there might in principle be a sort of logic to this. US bankruptcy law has been revised to the great benefit of creditors in recent years. Stripping away another set of protection for debtors could be problematic, given that most debtors in need of protection are not Trip Hawkins. You could read the first part of the argument as referring to this possibility. On the other hand, the second part of the judges’ decision seems to be guided by exactly the opposite fear. They seem, very literally to be arguing that the laws which protect poor people from adverse judgments that they are spending above their income, should also give carte blanche to a rich dude with creative accountants and a massive tax judgment hanging over his head to keep his jet, his Giants season tickets etc without any adverse implications being drawn about his willingness to settle his tax affairs. And they made this judgment despite (as a dissenting judgment points out) the fact that Hawkins’ tax attorney “testified that Hawkins’ intent was not to pay the tax debt, but to discharge it in bankruptcy.” I don’t imagine that the judges realize that they are unconsciously recapitulating Anatole France, with the satiric effect surgically removed. But the incentive effects on rich people in temporary financial difficulties will be interesting, if the judgment stands.

[Title stolen from David Moles, with a small modification]

I made The Witches’ Daughters for Terrestrial, an anthology of earth-themed fantasy comics edited by Amanda Scurti. You can also read it at its forever home on my portfolio website.

The anthology debuted at SPX 2014, and now you can buy it here! It’s full of lovely comics and illustrations, and I’m very happy to be included in such good company. 

I call shenanigans. Self-refuting nonsense doesn’t cease to be self-refuting nonsense just because it gets repeated in a thousand pulpits, blogs, and op-ed columns.

And defending the status quo of the prevailing culture by accusing those trying to change it of “cultural accommodation” is self-refuting nonsense. That argument is as illogical as it is popular. Here’s a recent variation on the theme, from former Bush administration speechwriter Michael Gerson:

The reaction of evangelicals to these trends can (and does) vary widely. They can accommodate to the prevailing culture, as many evangelicals have already done on issues such as contraception, divorce and the role of women (without talking much about it). Or they can try to fight for their political and cultural place at the table, as other interest groups do.

That makes no sense. Particularly when it’s coupled with the accompanying narrative/assertion that says same-sex marriage advocates are dangerous revolutionaries who are recklessly bent on changing a fundamental cultural institution that has endured — sacred and unchanging for millennia — since it was established by God himself in the Garden of Eden.

Those two things cannot both be true. These people cannot both be radical revolutionaries threatening to overthrow the culture and also squishy conformists so desperate to be affirmed by that culture that they will redefine themselves to accommodate it. To accuse marriage equality advocates of both of these things at the same time is simply a contradiction.

But — as Gerson’s reference to “contraception, divorce and [other mechanisms for controlling] the role of women” makes clear — this self-refuting nonsense isn’t just being directed at advocates of LGBT equality. Anyone who is even slightly amenable to feminism will, likewise, be accused of “accommodating to the prevailing culture.”

That’s not just logically contradictory, it also contradicts the objective facts of the matter, falsely asserting that “the prevailing culture,” as a whole, is overwhelmingly feminist.

Again, shenanigans. I call them.

Feminism is a reaction against the prevailing culture. It is a critique that exposes the prevailing culture as patriarchal, enshrining male privilege and male supremacy. This male privilege is pervasive throughout the culture — in art, popular culture, media, religion, law, economics, politics and civil society. “Accommodating to the prevailing culture” would mean accepting that male privilege uncritically. It would mean defending it against any change and anything that might expand or challenge the prevailing culture’s circumscribed definition of the “role of women.” Cultural accommodation means defending patriarchy and male privilege.

“Accommodating to the prevailing culture” means, in other words, being anti-feminist.

So too with our prevailing culture of white privilege and white supremacy. With colonialism and corporate oligarchy and white Christian hegemony and with the pretense that fossil fuels are the best/only way to supply energy. Those are all entrenched, pervasive aspects of the “prevailing culture” — the very culture that conservatives like Gerson are, by definition, fighting to preserve, protect and prevent from being questioned or changed.

That is, after all, what “conservative” means — it means conserving the culture. Conservatism is a political and theological ideology based on ensuring that the prevailing culture continues to prevail. It is cultural accommodation writ large.

A reader shares a harrowing series of stories and insights on corporal punishment, which at times borders on torture:

This email is too long, Andrew. But I don’t know another way to do it. Those last sentences in your post on “The Racial Divide On Spanking Kids” are packed with the stuff I’ve been struggling with all week. I’m sending this because I took so much time to write it. I’ve been close to tears often this week, and I suppose it’s a way of defending that tenderness.

“Discipline”: It was a belt or a switch in my house, except for the handful of times I was slapped. I hail from a poor, white, fundamentalist family in Texas. Sometimes we managed to get a hold of the bottom rung instead – lower-middle class, or is it upper-lower class? – but it wasn’t ever a very firm grip. I think that matters, our economic and social status – how it operated on my parents, their sense of self, their sense of control and agency, their standing, that fuzzy line between “poor” and “trash,” the dependable hierarchy at home of respect and obedience. But I can’t unpack all of that, and I don’t know what it would mean for anyone else if I did.

Whenever I got caught swearing – or if someone told my mother I’d been swearing – I had my mouth washed out with soap. In practice, even this is a stupid and violent thing to do. Really, the logistics of the sink and the soap and the faucet, the mouth and the hands, the gagging and spitting and crying – it’s jammed with aggression. I was six the first time.

Mind you, I never once swore at my parents. Not once. I swore at other kids or my siblings, and as I was the youngest by a decade – this was all mimicry. In truth, I was a freakishly good kid, but only because I wanted, more than anything, to keep out of the way and get through the day unnoticed. As all the evidence shows, this stuff doesn’t work: I’m a committed swearer to this day – but, well, there’s a time and a place. You learn that sort of thing over time, not over a sink.

Before I was tall enough to choose my own switch, my mother would get it herself. And the period of time that marked her absence, waiting for her to return with one, was filled with terror. It is a kind of psychological suspense that no child is equipped to manage. I certainly wasn’t. I remember that waiting period much more vividly than I remember the pain of being struck, repeatedly. (Does anyone “spank” a kid once a session? Isn’t it always part of a series?) I can hear myself crying and screaming, I can see myself touching the welts later, the stippled blood, but it has none of the embodied force of that terrible, terrible waiting.

When I was finally made to get my own switch, it was a kind of relief. Maybe because I felt I had some control? Alone and outside, it was nice to get lost in the concentration required to choose the right switch, the one that might hurt the least. (I’m choking up now, typing this. All week it’s been like that, following the national reactions.)

Anybody who thinks that hitting a kid with a switch is remotely related to “spanking” or “swatting” or “discipline” is full of shit. It’s a violent, strange, lacerating affair. Where the length of the switch lands can’t be controlled; anyone who’s used one – or been hit with one – knows this. Adults don’t get to shrug and claim they didn’t mean to lash a child’s scrotum or face or breasts. A child will automatically jerk and twist and try to shield herself when someone is striking her with a switch. (Whipping posts were useful because they prevented this very dance. One could aim better, land the strike with precision. Become a marksman.)

A child is also typically being grabbed and yanked with the parent’s free hand. It’s chaotic. Shit is going to go wrong. You don’t know where the next blow is going to land. That’s what makes it so terrifying for a kid. And a switch is like a whip – it is a whip: each lash has stages; it curls and snakes and bites. The sound of it, both a rip and whistle – awful.

As a kid, I was not only hit with a switch; I was “paddled” with a board (in school), hit with the belt, and slapped. But nothing had the psychological impact of the switch. Every blow was new and surprising and fresh. A switch is unpredictable. That is its nature. That is its power. Any offending adult who claims not to know that is a liar.

My father never hit me. I don’t know why. He beat the shit out of my brother and sisters. My mother didn’t intervene. And then one day he stopped. Cold turkey. Later, perhaps motivated by guilt (her other children were his stepchildren), my mother would scream at him to punish me, but he wouldn’t. I can still see him shaking as she screamed, pushing the belt into his hands. I don’t know how I knew it – I was too young – but I did know: he was trying to control himself. He was shaking from the effort required to resist. And I remember perfectly those minutes of fear and confusion: Why does he look afraid? Why does she want him to hurt me? Is he going to? Why does she hate me?

Almost ritualistically, it ended with her grabbing the belt, crying and yelling both, and “spanking” me with all she had. My father always, always, left the room. I feel certain they would tell you, or anyone taking a survey, that they spanked us and disciplined us. Yes. That is was their responsibility, and their right.

I graduated high school in Texas in 1986. Students were still “paddled” in the principal’s office then. It was a long board with three holes drilled into it. It had a handle. We would bend over, knees straight, and put both hands on a chair. For the girls, a secretary was called in to observe. I worked half days my senior year and so was ineligible for detention. After three tardy slips and without the option of detention, I was paddled. I can faithfully report that it didn’t help me get to class on time. I was already a tired kid, overwhelmed and depressed, living in a chaotic house. I couldn’t always get it together or keep it together between work and school and home. Corporal punishment didn’t change that.

I will say that the boys in my high school got hit a lot harder. A lot. I remember leaving class with a bathroom pass once and seeing a boy I didn’t like – he frequently taunted me in front of other students about my small breasts – alone in the hallway, returning to class after a “paddling.” His walk was slow and stiff. He was in real and visible pain. He looked humiliated, and like he’d been crying. And I remember feeling confused because I had the urge to comfort him – him of all people.

Mostly I’ve been wrestling a lot with how all these terms have been conflated in the media and between people lately: “spanking” and “discipline” and “punishment” and, let’s be straight about it, flogging. The bravado and the gallows humor: classic (mal)adaptive coping strategies for all manner of survivors and people living or working in violent, fearful, unpredictable environments – soldiers, the hazed, the bullied, the ostracized or marginalized, ER nurses, cops. I sense it sometimes, how tough I can feel – or toughened. I took it. I made it through. Man, can I take things. There’s something haughty in the feeling. Triumphant. A badge-of-honor quality to it. But I know it’s an overcompensation. I know it’s a coded admission of my vulnerability and my anxiety about feeling helpless, of how my early dependence and vulnerability was exploited.

Maybe it’s transference, but I swear I could see the very same brew on Hannity’s face during this piece. He repeatedly invokes his father and the ways he was punished by his father. He sounds almost like a battered spouse (or, say, an abused child), claiming he deserved what he got, making excuses for his father. There’s even a pleading tone in his voice – do not take away this guy’s career, don’t put him in jail. But who is Hannity really talking about? Who should be spared and protected? Because for almost the entire clip he’s been talking about his father, and himself as his father’s child.

There’s something poignant and terrible about that merry reenactment with his belt. Slapping it against the desk. Even the certified guests seem to be dazed by the simultaneous demonstration and disavowal. But wait, now he’s snapping the belt. And snapping a belt like that at a child is nothing but a calculated form of emotional torture. I remember it well. I remember it physically, everything in my little body starting to rev and jack-knife. Snap. Snap. Snap. It’s nothing to do with discipline; it’s everything to do with domination, control, intimidation. (There’s this, too: Some people just like this shit. Same way some people like making and seeing their dog cower.) Either way, it’s pretty much condoned in our culture.

If you’re the sort of person who needs to idolize your parents your whole adult life; if you can’t navigate the necessary distance from which to admit their inevitable mistakes and weaknesses; if you can’t simultaneously love them and admit your own honest anger or pain, the dark ways you’ve been formed, too; if you need a rationalization for how you also “discipline” your children – well, then, I guess you talk a lot about how fine you are, or how you deserved it, or how harmless and necessary it is and the rights we have to it – all this “spanking” and “discipline” – maybe you brag about it a little, and you take off your belt on live TV and snap it for all the world to see, because, hey, everybody’s all right. The kids are all right. Right?

Christopher Ingraham flags a highly disturbing study:

The new Living Planet Index report from the World Wildlife Fund opens with a jaw-dropping statistic: we’ve killed roughly half of the world’s non-human vertebrate animal population since 1970. … The declines are almost exclusively caused by humans’ ever-increasing footprint on planet earth. “Humanity currently needs the regenerative capacity of 1.5 Earths to provide the ecological goods and services we use each year,” according to the report. The only reason we’re able to run above max capacity – for now – is that we’re stripping away resources faster than we can replenish them.

Inae Oh provides more details:

The report attributes this insane drop almost entirely to human activity, including overfishing, unsustainable agriculture, a dramatic loss in natural habitats, and—of course—climate change. The most severe decline was experienced by freshwater species, whose populations fell a shocking 76 percent—nearly twice the rate experienced by marine and terrestrial species (both of which dropped by 39 percent).

Brad Plumer compares this report to an earlier one:

In its previous 2012 report, the WWF estimated that vertebrate populations had declined just 28 percent since 1970. Now they estimate that there’s been a 52 percent decline. Why the change? In that previous report, the WWF’s scientists said, they had been over-representing trends in North America and Europe, which have actually had fairly stable wildlife populations in recent decades. Re-weighting their sample to account for steeper declines in the species-rich tropics — particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia — makes for a bleaker picture.

#Syria | Tomorrow’s @mortenmorland cartoon: “Hands up if you’re one of the good guys!” http://t.co/cQO217XrZj pic.twitter.com/lh5EDTeDVw

— The Times of London (@thetimes) June 14, 2013

Last week, a US air strike meant to hit a base held by the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front almost hit a Free Syrian Army facility instead:

Since U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Syria began on Sept. 22, there has been no coordination between the U.S. military and its alleged partners on the ground, according to FSA leaders, civilian opposition leaders, and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the U.S. and allied military operation. It’s this lack of communication that led to an airstrike that hit only 200 meters from an FSA facility in the suburbs of Idlib. One source briefed on the incident said multiple FSA fighters were killed in the attack.

“Unfortunately, there is zero coordination with the Free Syrian Army. Because there is no coordination, we are seeing civilian casualties. Because there is no coordination, they are hitting empty buildings for ISIS,” Hussam Al Marie, the spokesman for the FSA in northern Syria, told The Daily Beast.

Shocking that things can go awry like this during a war “effort”. Allahpundit rightly sees downsides to targeting both ISIS and other jihadist groups at the same time:

What’s at risk of happening here, as ISIS and the Nusra Front congeal, is our allies in the Free Syrian Army suddenly getting it on all sides. Assad has every reason to keep killing the “moderates”; the west has always eyed them as a potential governing regime in Syria once Assad is gone, so by eliminating them Assad makes himself the only anti-ISIS game in town. And now both ISIS and the Nusra Front have a strong reason to target the FSA.

Notwithstanding this week’s mishap, Nusra will suspect that the “moderates” are either already [feeding] intelligence to the Pentagon about their locations or will be soon. The smarter strategic play here, surreal though it may seem, might have been to leave Al Qaeda alone at first and concentrate on ISIS, so as to better isolate the latter group.

But then, maybe that was impossible. Once ISIS is gone, who’s likely to replace them in control of Sunni areas? Right — Al Qaeda. We’re holding the weakest hand on the field with the FSA. To clear a path for them to rule, we’ll have to eliminate … everyone, basically.

And the quicksand will get deeper and deeper. As if that’s not enough, Fred Hof insists that the US treat Assad as our enemy as well:

The salient fact governing today’s situation in Syria is that there would be no Islamic State were it not for the criminally sectarian manner in which the Assad regime chose to respond to peaceful political protest. This would be true even if the Assad regime had had nothing to do with sustaining Al Qaeda in Iraq during the years of American occupation. This would be true even if regime-IS collaboration on the ground in western Syria were merely happenstance: an accident produced by the existence of a common enemy.

Aaron David Miller illustrates why all of this is nuts:

So, here’s my latest worry. Looking at our Syria policy, it has begun to dawn on me that we really face a two-part conundrum that we will have difficulty unpacking. First, there’s the obvious: hitting the Islamic State (IS) strengthens Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. Second: If we choose to hit him, we’ll buck up IS, al-Nusra, and the rest of the swell groups who are in the Syrian opposition, not to mention alienating our new friends, Iraq’s prime minister, and of course, Iran, and a few of our old acquaintances like Putin.

That two-part conundrum only reinforces my real concern: the new and potentially slippery slope that is at the heart of our approach. And it’s not boots on the ground. Instead, it’s the reality that we’re being pulled inexorably like a moth to a flame not just toward a military conflict with Assad, but toward bearing the responsibility for fixing — or worse for creating — the new Syria. Indeed, under the realist’s rubric of striking IS to keep America safe, we may well end up in the very place U.S. President Barack Obama has willfully tried to avoid: nation-building.

And the beat goes on, and on, and on …

The European Convention on Human Rights was intended to enshrine the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in law for Europe. The UN UDHR was passed by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 as a response to the horrors of the second world war.

In no small part, the ECHR was pushed for by a fellow called Winston Churchill, who said:

"In the centre of our movement stands the idea of a Charter of Human Rights, guarded by freedom and sustained by law. It is impossible to separate economics and defence from the general political structure. Mutual aid in the economic field and joint military defence must inevitably be accompanied step by step with a parallel policy of closer political unity. It is said with truth that this involves some sacrifice or merger of national sovereignty. But it is also possible and not less agreeable to regard it as the gradual assumption by all the nations concerned of that larger sovereignty which can alone protect their diverse and distinctive customs and characteristics and their national traditions all of which under totalitarian systems, whether Nazi, Fascist, or Communist, would certainly be blotted out for ever."

So. Conservative-in-name Prime Minister David Cameron today promised to repeal the Human Rights Act, the legislation enshrining in UK law a chunk of supranational legislation put in place by notable former Conservative prime minister Winston Churchill as an anti-totalitarian measure.

Coinciding with Home Secretary Theresa May's attempt at reintroducing a universal surveillance regime of which the Stasi or KGB would have been proud, and her avowed desire to gag unpalatable political views from the media, you've got to wonder where all this is intended to go ...