De linguis latina et sinica

Ladies and gentlemen, the desert paradise of Dubai

• The dark side
• Slaves of Happiness Island

He is smart in a way so obvious that he tries to hide it from his bosses by speaking in broken English. He knows five languages, loves poetry, and dreams of getting a master’s degree, but is instead working 12-plus-hour days in 50° heat.

They say Sheikh Zayed built Abu Dhabi, just like Louis XIV built the Louvre. This is a myth. But migrant workers’ names are never engraved on donor lists.

Imagine a community being cut off temporarily from the Internet by a natural disaster. With the current centralized architecture of the web, that community would lose access to pretty much every resource on the Web including their own local newspaper (who’ve likely outsourced hosting to aws). On the distributed web, resources of local interest like news, weather, government information, maps, and other common-interest items would still be accessible from other clients in the neighborhood.

“Why We Need the Distributed Web”

Re: Xanadu

There has always been this thing where people make up new names for things that already exist when they are convinced that their ideas are so mind blowing that existing language cannot adequately suffice.

—Timothy Lee Russell

How many of these rules are satisfied by the current World Wide Web, even in part?

1. Every Xanadu server is uniquely and securely identified.
2. Every Xanadu server can be operated independently or in a network.
3. Every user is uniquely and securely identified.
4. Every user can search, retrieve, create and store documents.
5. Every document can consist of any number of parts each of which may be of any data type.
6. Every document can contain links of any type including virtual copies (“transclusions”) to any other document in the system accessible to its owner.
7. Links are visible and can be followed from all endpoints.
8. Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
9. Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies (“transclusions”) of all or part of the document.
10. Every document is uniquely and securely identified.
11. Every document can have secure access controls.
12. Every document can be rapidly searched, stored and retrieved without user knowledge of where it is physically stored.
13. Every document is automatically moved to physical storage appropriate to its frequency of access from any given location.
14. Every document is automatically stored redundantly to maintain availability even in case of a disaster.
15. Every Xanadu service provider can charge their users at any rate they choose for the storage, retrieval and publishing of documents.
16. Every transaction is secure and auditable only by the parties to that transaction.
17. The Xanadu client-server communication protocol is an openly published standard. Third-party software development and integration is encouraged.

It is instructive, then, to consider the primary ways in which the modern Web is functionally broken.

In 2014, John Pilger was invited to the annual Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, a conference of free thought and debate. His discussion was titled Breaking Australia’s Silence, and he spoke about our “secret” history, our colonial sins, and our collusion with Western imperialism and its depredations. Standard fare, really. The moderator invited questions from the audience. Here is the text of the first question and answer:

Audience member: Do you think that the West should ever get involved in wars overseas … ?

Because it feels despite our misadventures in the 2003 Iraq war and despite the problems that we’ve caused … it feels like you’re saying … we should just let ISIS kill whoever they want to kill and commit genocide however they wish to … don’t we still have a moral responsibility to help the people who have been beheaded, killed and crucified on the streets of Syria and Iraq right now?

Pilger: It’s interesting about this hideous beheading, isn’t it? … How much do you know about the beheading of Aboriginal people in the early days of this country?

Can the reader imagine the reaction? Of course you can. The audience broke into rapturous applause. The questioner was berated for being “very selective”, but the irony, like everything else, was at Pilger’s expense.

I think this interaction between Pilger and the audience is a perfect example of the regressive left’s cast of mind: A tragedy is at work in the present, but we will ransack the past to find an inexpiable sin; we can hold that sin against us, and in doing so, we rid ourselves of moral authority and moral responsibility; remind us of our colonial guilt, and we offer applause, but what we’re really doing is offering ourselves up for flagellation.

The regressive left is sinister and ahistorical; it is led by masochists who defend sadists; it is an attempt to make the world safe for fascism. It must be resisted and discredited.

Take, for example, the Islamic State’s burning of a Jordanian pilot in February, 2015. At the very least, one might expect condemnation. Not New Matilda, which published an article by Chauncey Devega titled: “Yes, ISIS Burned A Man Alive: White America Did The Same To Black People By The Thousands.”

Here, in a title and a nutshell, is New Matilda’s foreign and editorial policy.