A recent thread about butter and Europe

I forgot to post these tweets which appeared in a thread last week.  Both somewhat amusing and somewhat educational:

Didn't see that coming

Well, this news seems to have caught everyone by surprise:

OnlyFans, the subscriber-only website synonymous with pornography, has announced it will ban adult material from the site after pressure from its payment processors.

The company will continue to allow some posts containing nudity but “any content containing sexually-explicit conduct” will be banned, with the site instead focusing on more mainstream content.

Not that I have ever used it, but it is pretty remarkable, I think, to watch the way that people have realised there is more than one way to skin a cat (a phrase which, incidentally, feels deserving of replacement in this animal friendly era) when it comes to online porn reduction:

Payment processing companies increasingly control what material pornography sites are able to host. Last December, Visa and Mastercard briefly banned payments to websites owned by online pornography giant MindGeek, following reports it was hosting “revenge porn” uploaded without the consent of those involved. The financial businesses only backtracked when MindGeek deleted tens of millions of unverified videos from its sites such as PornHub.

OnlyFans has enabled tens of thousands of sex workers to earn substantial incomes in return for handing over 20% of their earnings to the company, with many creators saying it has given them financial freedom. Internal figures obtained by Axios suggest about 16,000 creators earn at least $50,000 (£36,000) annually from the site.

However, it has also faced growing political and regulatory scrutiny over its ability to remove illegal and exploitative material. Earlier this month more than a hundred US congressmen and women demanded a department of justice investigation into OnlyFans, relating to the alleged presence of underage material on the site.

Comedy tastes change

I see that relatively well known British comedian Sean Lock has died.   I barely know of his work, as it seems to me he has mostly appeared on panel shows which I have not found amusing, largely because I have an aversion to (the far too ubiquitous) Jimmy Carr.   My general impression is that I used to find him harmless - but not especially funny.  [Update:  I have watched some "best of" compilations of him on Youtube since his passing - and yeah, I just didn't find him particularly funny.]

But, once again I have to observe, there are few British comedians - or at least, few shows featuring them - that I have any time for now.

I still find Would I Lie to You to be by far the best, with consistently likeable and funny performances by the three regulars (David Mitchell, Lee Mack and Rob Brydon).   And I do particularly enjoy episodes with guest appearances by Bob Mortimer.  He was on one last night, as it happens, featuring a wildly improbable story about giving a scotch egg to a formula 1 driver in the 1990's as a sort of good luck charm before a race.   It was hilariously told, and I laughed again during it, even though I think this is the third time I have seen it.  (I saw it on Youtube originally, last year - it is from a quite recent episode.)

But so, so many other British panel shows leave me cold.   I positively dislike so many of their comedians now, and really, I don't quite understand why.   As I have long thought, at some point during my life, I switched from liking a lot of British comedy to feeling that most of it kind of repulsed me.

Speaking of comedy panel shows, last night on the ABC also featured a new one with Wil Anderson and Jan Fran, Question Everything.   Anderson can be very funny, I think, and Fran has a pleasing style of delivery too.  But man, did the panel amuse themselves too much last night, or what?   They seemed to find each other absolutely hilarious - and it really wasn't warranted.  It was like the studio had been filled with laughing gas:  that was what the giggly, excessive laughing at slightly amusing quips reminded me of.

Someone needs to get a grip on this aspect of the show - and get better guest panelists.  I had heard of none of them last night, and none struck me as worthy of exposure. 

 

The cheery world of the Taliban

Back to the pessimistic takes:  the Washington Post has an article on How Life under Taliban rule in Afghanistan has changed.   A taste:

Over two decades of conflict and politicking, Taliban control in Afghanistan has become a patchwork of edicts and codes, with some areas seeing modest reform. But overall, fear and intimidation remain at the heart of the militant group’s command.

In one district, elders successfully lobbied Taliban fighters to open a high school for girls. In other provinces, clinics funded by international aid groups are now allowed to function. But in those same places, harsh, often public punishments remain common. Torture and imprisonment are widely used for infringements as minor as possessing the wrong SIM card....

Public beatings and executions are routine inside the Taliban’s Afghanistan. And women are almost entirely absent from public life, largely denied equal access to education and employment. Access to health care and some education has expanded under the Taliban, but that is largely a result of work by select international aid groups the militants have allowed to operate.

“All their changes are only for their own benefit,” said a 22-year-old university student from Helmand province who has lived in Taliban-controlled territory on and off his entire life. Like others in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the Taliban.

“If you start criticizing the Taliban, you are their enemy,” he said. “Nothing has ever changed with that.”

 And yet, to answer the question "why does anyone support this mob", we get this brief observation:

Other civilians said they prefer the Taliban’s justice system to that of the government. A taxi driver who lives in Mazar-e Sharif said he repeatedly traveled into Taliban territory to obtain a ruling on a family property dispute after government courts proved ineffective.

“The Taliban’s process is faster than the government,” said the driver, Mubaraksha Zafar, 38, “and there is no corruption.”

Huh.

 

Thoughts of a non expert on Islamic terrorism

At the ABC, there's a very pessimistic take on the future course of Islamic terrorism in light of the Taliban's return to power in Afghanistan.   A couple of experts in the field are quoted:

There are two main ways the Taliban's control of Afghanistan increases the threat of terrorism, according to experts. 

Firstly, there will be considerable opportunity for Al Qaeda to bring foreigners into Afghanistan to train and equip them as fighters, according to counter-terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton. 

"When we think of Taliban today in control of Afghanistan, there is no evidence the Taliban has changed their view and lots of evidence of close association with Al Qaeda, through marriage, shared leadership and shared world view," he said.   

Secondly, the Taliban's success may prove to be inspirational. 

"The idea that you can win. The idea that the Americans can be pushed back," Professor of International Security and Intelligence John Blaxland said.  

"That is reverberating around the world, that is right across the Middle East, north Africa, South-East Asia, southern Philippines, parts of Indonesia and southern Thailand — that's adding spring to the step of those who are railing against the infidels, the non-Muslim world."

Professor Barton said it was now very hard to counter that narrative because "everything suggests it's right".

Now, I freely admit to no expertise on the subject, so I may be totally wrong.    But my gut feeling is that this take is too pessimistic for the following reasons:

*    It ignores the defeat of Islamic State as a public relations black eye for jihadist rule, generally speaking.   In fact, although the Taliban helped fight against IS (this article usefully tries to explain the differences between the Taliban, IS and Al-Qaeda), is it partly because of the failure of IS that the Taliban is trying to sell itself as the new, improved, don't-be-scared-of-us-we-are-much-less-into-killing-our-citizens-now version of radical Islam rule?

*  Saudi Arabia itself is still on a slow path of social reform in favour of women and being more open to the West.  Isn't it?

*  Where exactly does radical Islam look like an actual success, in terms of running a country or region?    And large scale terrorist acts lead to some pretty fierce push back in countries like France and Sri Lanka - 

On March 13, Sarath Weerasekara, Sri Lanka’s minister of public security, announced that the government will ban wearing of the burqa and close more than 1,000 Islamic schools in the country. The minister was quoted as saying that “the burqa” was a “sign of religious extremism” and has a “direct impact on national security”.

and 

PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron is redrawing the line that separates religion and state, in a battle to force Islamic organizations into the mold of French secularism.

In recent months, his administration has ousted the leadership of a mosque after temporarily closing it and poring over its finances. Another mosque gave up millions in subsidies after the government pressured local officials over the funding. A dozen other mosques have faced orders to close temporarily for safety or fire-code violations.

The government has taken these actions as a precursor to a much broader push to rein in the independence of mosques and other religious organizations across France. Mr. Macron has submitted a bill to Parliament, called the Law Reinforcing Respect of the Principles of the Republic, that would empower the government to permanently close houses of worship and dissolve religious organizations, without court order, if it finds that any of their members are provoking violence or inciting hatred.

*  Indonesia still has a radical Islam problem, but a government pretty actively policing against it, too. 

Sure, Islamic inspired terrorist attacks are  not going to disappear - but isn't the obvious lesson of recent year, even to radical Islamists, that big attacks invite big and long lasting pushback?  The return of the Taliban doesn't do much to change that, it seems to me. 

So, I don't know, but maybe Taliban Rule Mk 2 is less of a terrorism inspiration than the experts think - especially if they become a "success" in governing by courting foreign money by selling themselves as the "no longer really into terrorism" government.   

I hope this completely non-expert, gut feeling assessment has something going for it.

We shall see.

   

Dyson spheres still a thing

Oh, we have scientists still wondering about what super high energy use civilisations might be using, and it might be...wait for it...a Dyson Sphere-y thing around a black hole.  Let Science magazine explain:

But astronomer Tiger Hsiao of National Tsing Hua University says we might be looking for the wrong thing. In a new study, he and colleagues set out to calculate whether it would also be possible to use a Dyson sphere around a black hole. They analyzed black holes of three different sizes: those five, 20, and 4 million times the mass of our Sun. These, respectively, reflect the lower and upper limits of black holes known to have formed from the collapse of massive stars—and the even more enormous mass of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive massive black hole thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way.

Black holes are typically thought of as consumers rather than producers of energy. Yet their huge gravitational fields can generate power through several theoretical processes. These include the radiation emitted from the accumulation of gas around the hole, the spinning “accretion” disk of matter slowly falling toward the event horizon, the relativistic jets of matter and energy that shoot out along the hole’s axis of rotation, and Hawking radiation—a theoretical way that black holes can lose mass, releasing energy in the process.

From their calculations, Hsiao and colleagues concluded that the accretion disk, surrounding gas, and jets of black holes can all serve as viable energy sources. In fact, the energy from the accretion disk alone of a stellar black hole of 20 solar masses could provide the same amount of power as Dyson spheres around 100,000 stars, the team will report next month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Were a supermassive black hole harnessed, the energy it could provide might be 1 million times larger still.

If such technology is at work, there may be a way to spot it. According to the researchers, the waste heat signal from a so-called “hot” Dyson sphere—one somehow capable of surviving temperatures in excess of 3000 kelvin, above the melting point of known metals—around a stellar mass black hole in the Milky Way would be detectible at ultraviolet wavelengths. Such signals might be found in the data from various telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Galaxy Evolution Explorer, Hsiao says.

Meanwhile, a “solid” Dyson sphere—operating below 3000 kelvin—could be picked up in the infrared by, for example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey or the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The latter is no stranger to looking for the infrared signals of traditional, star-based Dyson spheres. But, like all other such searches, it has yet to find anything conclusive.

Opatrný says using the radiation from accretion disks would be particularly clever, because the disks convert energy more efficiently than the thermonuclear reaction in conventional stars. Aliens concerned with the sustainability of their power supply, he suggests, might be better off encapsulating small stars that burn their fuel slowly. However, he continued, “The fast-living civilizations feeding on black hole accretion disks would be easier to spot from the huge amount of waste heat they produce.”

It is kind of hard imagining what this type of civilisation would even look like, though.  Here's the amusing last paragraph:

As for what the aliens might use this energy for, Opatrný has some thoughts. “Mining cryptocurrency, playing computer games, or just feeding the ever-growing bureaucracy?” he jokingly muses.

 

 

Some Tweets of note

 And I tend to agree with David Roberts:

 

The problem with France

A short column in The Economist points out that French political discourse is often prone to the sort of hyperbole that I really dislike:

VENTURE INTO the chat rooms of French cyberspace or onto the streets of Paris, and the impression this summer is of a country on the brink of totalitarian rule or civil collapse, or both. In July the word dictature (dictatorship) surged tenfold on Google, in anticipation of a new “health pass” introduced on August 9th by President Emmanuel Macron. This makes full vaccination (or a negative covid-19 test) a condition of access to restaurants, bars, trains and other places.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a right-wing deputy, called the new pass sanitaire a “sanitary coup d’état”. Michèle Rivasi, a Green politician, called it “apartheid”. Protesters clutched placards with slogans such as “False pandemic, real dictatorship” and “Pass Nazitaire”, or photos of Mr Macron with a Hitler-style moustache. A few wore yellow stars on which was written “non-vaccinated”, eliciting widespread indignation. Joseph Szwarc, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, called the comparison “odious” and said he shed tears at the sight: “I wore the yellow star; I know what it was.”

In April and May the phrase guerre civile (civil war) spiked on Twitter, after retired right-wing generals wrote an open letter offering to step in to save the country should it slide into chaos. A poll suggested that 58% of the French backed the officers, and nearly half thought the army should step in on its own initiative.

Why is France so often convinced it is on the brink, and so prone to rhetorical hysteria? The country’s disjointed and rebellious history is one answer. “Are we in 1789?” is still a periodic headline in the press. And indeed, the prospect of disorder is not wholly fanciful. A culture of mass protest is deeper-rooted in France than in any other European country, and reasoned debate often gives way to factional theatrics and sabotage. Fifty years after the May ‘68 student uprising, gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) ransacked Paris. In July anti-vaxxers invaded a town hall in Chambéry, in the Alps, and vandalised vaccination centres. 

But their food!  I still want to visit for an extended period. 

A reasonable case

I thought Biden's address today on Afghanistan was very reasonable and struck the right note.

The US may have been able to do some things differently, but when a government just ups and runs away (and doesn't pay its military), there are limits on what can be achieved in orderly fashion. 

Update:  Jennifer Rubin in WAPO thinks so too.

Update 2:  more - 

Message to Monty

So, the ever increasingly nutty Catallaxy blog died, leaving a snall-ish but loud community of Australian wingnuts feeling lost with no where to share their wingnutty (and increasingly paranoid) positions on climate change, COVID and the culture wars.   

Several people rushed to form a replacement blog, with three main contenders.

One is run by monty, a not unreasonable fellow, except when it comes to the idea of the value of giving wingnuttery an outlet.   Because he is re-posting at his blog posts by dover-beach at his attempt at a Catallaxy replacement, and posts at the new Catallaxy site run by Adam.

Now for the message part:  why, monty, would you repeat on a site you control the misinformation and wingnut culture war material of these two other blogs?

You are doing the world a disservice.  You will get no moderates or Lefties trying to engage in debate - because the wingnutty Right of Catallaxy is beyond argument and has been for many years.  You know that.  You know they have been getting worse.

Their messaging on climate change and COVID is now positively dangerous - and it makes no sense for you to be giving them a wider platform than their own. 

Come to your senses, and blog your own wingnut critical material by all means.  But stop trying to help them re-build their own community of wrong, dangerous, paranoid and stupid ideas.

 

Must be China's turn

A decent summary of the situation in Afghanistan seems to be the one in The Economist, which notes:

The Taliban, thought to number no more than 200,000 soldiers, armed mostly with equipment they have seized from their enemies, have taken all of Afghanistan’s urban centres in little more than a week, generally without much resistance (see map). The answer seems to be that what they lacked in brawn, they made up for in brains, determination and political shrewdness. For the past year, diplomats in Doha had hoped that the Taliban could be compelled to negotiate with Mr Ghani’s government to agree to some sort of power-sharing agreement. The insurgents evidently realised it would be more profitable to negotiate with Mr Ghani’s underlings, city-by-city, and thereby simply pull the rug out from underneath him.

Hence in Herat, a jewel of a city near the Iranian border, Ismail Khan, the warlord who took the city back from the Taliban in 2001, after fighting for days, surrendered and was filmed, in captivity, pleading for “a peaceful environment”. In Kandahar, the city at the heart of Afghanistan’s southern breadbasket and the birthplace of the original Taliban, the governor was pictured handing over to his Taliban counterpart. In Jalalabad, in the east, the Taliban marched in without firing a shot, after elders in the city negotiated a surrender. Mazar-i-Sharif, a northern city which once served as a bastion of anti-Taliban resistance in the 1990s, folded in similar fashion.

In each case, the militants have made wide-ranging promises, to “forgive” those who served in the American-backed government, in exchange for surrender. In Kandahar, former soldiers who surrendered have been issued with laisser passer documents that they can show at Taliban checkpoints. There, throughout Friday night the sound of gunfire echoed throughout the city. According to residents, it was mostly fired in the air in celebration.

The Afghan army, for all its apparent strength, seems to have fallen to what might be called Yossarian syndrome, after a character in Joseph Heller’s second-world-war novel, “Catch 22”. Yossarian was asked what would happen if everyone thought as he did that fighting was pointless, and replied he would “be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn't I?” Similarly, the Washington Post quoted one Afghan officer explaining why his soldiers would not stop the Taliban: “Brother, if no one else fights, why should I?” Afghan military morale was not helped by the government's fiscal crisis, which has led to government staff and troops missing pay for months.

What does the Taliban takeover mean? For all their promises to show mercy in victory, few among Afghanistan’s intellectual elite are reassured. After the militants took Spin Boldak, a town on the Pakistani border that was among the first to fall in late July, credible reports emerged quickly afterwards of dozens of government supporters being massacred. In Kandahar in late July, when the militants began to take the outskirts of the city, they kidnapped Nazar Mohammad, a popular comedian, and murdered him. Reports from Kandahar say that armed Taliban have been going door to door seeking out people who worked for Western governments. In recent weeks, thousands of refugees have collected in Kabul’s parks. Hundreds have mobbed visa-processing centres, hoping for a space in the last-minute evacuations being organised by Western powers.

The Taliban’s political arm in Doha has claimed that they are no longer the bloody theocrats who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when accused criminals were publicly executed at Kabul’s football grounds, including women who were stoned to death for adultery....

The big geopolitical question arising from this is what China will do.   It's hardly going to be seen as a friend of Islam, given their massive attempt to end its influence in its own territory;  but on the other hand, minerals and money.  US News wrote:

At stake for Beijing are agreements it has already secured from the Taliban not to harbor inside Afghanistan any Islamic extremists with designs to wage insurgencies in parts of western China, notably the restive Xinjiang province – a promise that far exceeds anything the U.S. has been able to extract with regard to the persistent threats of al-Qaida operatives partnered with the Taliban.

Any sort of stability in Afghanistan would also allow China to reap the benefits of prior economic investments in the region, including mineral rights in Afghanistan. Buried in the latest report from the U.S. inspector general overseeing reconstruction in Afghanistan was a little-noticed observation that China has dramatically increased its economic interests in Afghanistan recently, encouraging the completion of a road in the Wakhan Corridor – the sliver of land connecting the two countries. It cited an Afghan Public Works Ministry spokesperson who said, "China has expressed a huge interest for investment in Afghanistan, particularly in the mining sector, and this road will be good for that, too." The Taliban recently seized wide swaths of that territory as part of an apparent campaign to control Afghanistan's northern border crossings. 

China also seeks stability in Afghanistan for the sake of regional infrastructure projects it's already pursuing in neighboring Pakistan as a part of similar investments globally known as the Belt and Road Initiative. 

I get the impression it will all end in tears.

Finally - I will repeat the observation I have made before:  I don't understand how, in modern times, Islamic fundamentalist inspired leadership which is willing to rule on the basis of terrorising its own population retains any popularity at all.   I don't understand these societies.

 

Jam, curry, Wagner and vampires

That sums up an unusual Saturday:   we had an excess of loquats from our tree in the yard, so for the first time in my life, I tried making a jam.  Result at breakfast this morning:  pretty good.  

After that, moved into making beef rendang - sure I buy the paste (I have recommended the brand before), but chopping up the chunk of beef shin takes a while.   

While doing these time consuming activities, I got through the whole of Das Rheingold (the Opera North recorded version) on YouTube on the TV for the first time, too.  That led to me explaining over dinner that it's clear to me now what Tolkien was missing - a wage dispute by construction workers resolved by kidnapping the client's sister-in-law until they get paid.   Oh, and an ugly, lustful dwarf who, in modern terms, goes all incel after being taunted by three women that he'll never get it on, so to speak, with anyone.    Yes, the sexlessness (dare I say - insipidness) of Tolkien has never been clearer.   Then again, I haven't reached the incest in the Ring cycle yet.  Which, I wonder, was part of the reason Hitler was a Wagner groupie?  

Onto another German thing - watched the popular new Netflix film Blood Red Sky.   Yes, it's Vampires on a Plane, but gee, it's made with a heap of energy.     The movie has a poor review on Roger Ebert.com - I haven't heard of the guy who writes the reviews there, but I now know I can safely ignore him.   It wasn't perfect, but it looks great and there's not a dull moment:  I can understand why it has been popular.  

So, quite the day.

Derivative concerns

I mentioned recently that I was a few episodes into the first season of The Mandalorian and finding it enjoyable enough.

Maybe I was just tired last night (I did fall asleep briefly during it), but I found episode 4 was causing me to reconsider - this show seems to just be Westerns I've seen before set in the Star Wars universe.   Oh, there's a little bit of novel mystical cult thrown into it, and a cutesy baby Yoda, but I'm starting to resent the derivative aspects too much.    

Is this a sign of old age?   I mean, it's not as if the very first Star Wars movie wasn't derivative too - but it did seem that the way different old elements were thrown into the mix (especially, in my opinion,  the non denominational mystical religious bit) had given rise to something novel.  Then Empire Strikes Back deepened the best part of it, and after that the series mostly got stuck in various repetitions on the same narrative theme.  Well, I suppose you could say the prequels tried to do something a bit different - but they were botched in their own special way.

And I still agree thoroughly with this assessment I noted in 2019.   If only Lucas had got the Force right... 

Jeez, talk about getting desperate for talent

Alternative title:   HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*gasp for breath*HAHAHAHAAAAA!

 

 

The conservative authoritarian threat

I seem to have missed this Washington Post article from July:

A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP

The particular church it highlights is a particularly nutty sounding one in Texas, but Catallaxy taught me it's not just Protestant evangelicals who are really keen on a revival of religious authoritarianism - the conservative Catholic movement has the hots (so to speak) for any East European country with a leader, no matter if he got there democratically or not, as long as he wants to put the gays in their place and does other culture warring to their liking.   (See Hungary, Russia, Poland.)  

Update:  on the latter point, see this post by conservative Catholic Catallaxy fixture dover-beach, in his new blog which is one of the contenders for a Catallaxy replacement:

There is now a coordinated attempt to stifle any resistance to the new hegemonic order emerging in the post-Cold War era both in Europe and the Anglosphere. Consider the effort being expended on the denigration of PM Orbán in Hungary merely for offering his people a reasonable alternative to liberal globalism that would not have battered an eyelid a generation ago. Do not underestimate the viciousness of this campaign; their will to power is terrible. 

No surprise

Yes, I do recommend reading the Julian Sanchez twitter thread on this.

The only surprise is that it's the nutty Washington Times reporting this.

The problem of the Right (continued)

The thing that constantly astounds me is the lack of responsible leadership from anyone in the Republican Party.

I mean, I really doubt - perhaps this is my mistake - that they are all so universally stupid as to reject medical expertise.   But it would seem that no one in any significant position of power will tell their "base" to stop culture warring on it - they need to accept mainstream expertise, even if experts adjust their advice from time to time.  

I mean, does no one in the entire national leadership of the GOP think this is irresponsible??:

Update:  here's Allahpundit explaining the politics:

Each party is gambling that its stance on mandates will be a winner with swing voters, especially the sort of suburban parents who heavily influenced the outcome of the last election. The GOP approach, a la Ron DeSantis, is to oppose mandates of any kind. No to requiring vaccines and an emphatic no to requiring masks in schools. Dems are reprising their “safety first” pitch from last year, claiming they’re doing everything possible to keep kids safe amid a scary new Delta wave by requiring precautions while Republicans obsess about getting back to normal. Which way will voters go on that?

He doesn't seem to be interested in my point:  in a politically healthy country, the parties shouldn't be playing such intense politics over health! 

Some crypto commentary of note

At Axios:

Bitcoin is becoming part of the dollar-based financial system it once sought to displace.

Why it matters: Cryptocurrency is beloved by people who want to transact outside the reach of any government. But it's gotten mainstream enough that politicians and regulators want to co-opt it and bring it squarely within their own fields of influence — even using it to help pay for an infrastructure bill.

The big picture: As crypto assets have grown to be worth well over $1 trillion, investors and financiers have increasingly wanted to get involved in the space — without taking any kind of legal risk. 

• They've been aggressively pushing for regulatory clarity, and often see their expensive compliance departments as a comparative advantage, differentiating them from the early true believers.
• Regulation, however, would defeat much of the original purpose behind the desire to create cryptocurrency in the first place — the dream of being able to create a store of value that's untouched by government interference.

Context: When bitcoin first arrived on the scene, there was a chance governments would crush it, prosecuting anyone who used it.

• Bitcoiners dreamed instead that it would thrive under the benign neglect of the government. While egregious fraud might be prosecuted, they mostly just wanted to be left alone.
• They got their way, in some form or another, for many years. But those days are coming to an end, and we're now clearly at the beginning of the end of cryptocurrency as an anarcho-libertarian Utopia.
• Cryptocurrency's future may be as an integral part of the existing financial system, regulated just as much as any other financial product.

Driving the news: SEC chair Gary Gensler — who previously taught a course on cryptocurrencies at MIT — gave an important speech last week laying out a maximalist vision for the degree to which his agency can and should regulate the asset class.

 I'm pretty sure I can hear Sinclair Davidson sobbing somewhere in the distance...

 

It's taking its time, but this is probably right

A good article at the Washington Post about the Mike Lindell election fraud fiasco, which is happening as I write this:  The Con is Winding Down.

This is how all cons end. Things stretch and stretch and stretch until: snap. So instead of presenting your data, you encode it and obfuscate it and promise that there’s actually something there, but wait, hmm, that is weird, let me see what’s happening. Instead you say things like that there was a medical emergency that slowed things down and just ask everyone to stick with you for a moment. It’s just buying time — like Trump calling senators on Jan. 6 — hoping that if another hour or so passes, you can somehow regain control.

The writer, Philip Bump, also quotes with approval a twitter thread argument made by Julian Sanchez about how conspiracy promotion works.   I'll copy that:

On Monday, Cato Institute senior fellow Julian Sanchez offered an insightful chain of thoughts about the overlap between those who believe false claims about the election being stolen and those who reject the coronavirus vaccine as dangerous.

In both cases, Sanchez wrote, the conspiracy theories “have the superficial trappings of real science. Links to journal articles on the one hand, or on the other, impressively hackery looking hex dumps & spreadsheets full of IP addresses” — a reference to Lindell’s information.

“[I]n both cases, this evidence is absolutely useless to the target audience,” he continued. “They have neither the training nor the context to evaluate the quality or relevance of technical articles in medical journals — or even to understand what the article is claiming in many cases. … They are, however, being flattered by the INVITATION to assess the evidence for themselves — do your own research, make up your own mind!”

Instead of offering their trust on experts in their fields to explain complicated subjects, the audience is convinced that it needs only to trust itself — though, of course, they’re actually simply trusting the hustlers presenting incomplete or misleading information. What the hustlers offer the audience, Sanchez says, “is the illusion of not trusting an authority — unlike all those sheep who trust the mainstream authorities.”

Data from YouGov shows that the overlap of those who don’t want to get the vaccine and those who think that Biden is an illegitimate president is nearly complete. About three-quarters of Republicans hold the latter position and 3 in 10 the former, but a quarter both reject the vaccine and Biden’s election. 

Yes, the appeal to the vanity of the "independent thinker" who is a climate change sceptic has been extraordinarily clear at Catallaxy for many, many years.   They don't recognise the con that is being put over them.

Mind you, if you go to Twitter at the moment, there are still thousands watching Lindell who think he is "killing it" - actually proving something significant.   So it's going to be a while yet before the conspiracy burns up.

Mystery song by singer I didn't know I had heard before

So, I saw reference to this on Twitter, when Phillip Adams asked the twitterverse last weekend to tell him the meaning of life.  (I think he was looking for column fodder.)   Someone in response suggested he look up a song Let the Mystery Be by Iris DeMent.  So I did, and I don't think I had heard it before.  It's pretty likeable:

 

Even though it was new to me, I see that it has been covered at least a couple of times, and look!, there's a version which has David Byrne participating in it (and Natalie Merchant and 10,000 Maniacs):

  

It's a pretty nice cover!

I realised I would have heard Iris Dement before, as she sang Our Town, which was used in the final episode of Northern Exposure: 

 

 I think I probably assumed it was a song by some early to mid 20th century country singer, but Iris wrote it when she was 25 (in 1986.) 

Her Wikipedia page indicates she has put out 6 albums, which isn't a huge amount. Seems her politics are very Left-ish as well: perhaps that puts a limit on country singer success in the US.