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.

omg, Did I dream about her again?

I was going down on her. It was pretty good.

I think because of the Tulsi Gabbard stuff recently; she was pretty all-in on her. Or was it Bernie…?

Oh, es que la tortuguita sí me lo dijo…

Dreamt that nenita said “I love you” in an Instagram story that was really more like a messenger. Tried desperately to screencap it…

If “culture” were to be defined in the anthropological sense, then clearly the most direct heirs to ancient Greeks would not be modern Englishmen and Frenchmen, but modern Greeks. Whereas, in Huntington’s system, modern Greeks parted company with the West over 1500 years ago, the moment they converted to the wrong form of Christianity.

It is possible to say Napoleon or Disraeli are more heirs to Plato and Thucydides than a Greek shepherd of their day for one reason only: both men were more likely to have read Plato and Thucydides. Western culture is not just a collection of ideas; it is a collection of ideas that are taught in textbooks and discussed in lecture halls, cafes, or literary salons. If it were not, it would be hard to imagine how one could end up with a civilization that begins in ancient Greece, passes to ancient Rome, maintains a kind of half-life in the Medieval Catholic world, revives in the Italian renaissance, and then passes mainly to dwell in those countries bordering the North Atlantic. It would also be impossible to explain how, for most of their history, “Western concepts” like human rights and democracy existed only in potentia. We could say: this is a literary and philosophical tradition, a set of ideas first imagined in ancient Greece, then conveyed through books, lectures, and seminars over several thousand years, drifting as they did westward, until their liberal and democratic potential was fully realized in a small number of countries bordering the Atlantic a century or two ago. Once they became enshrined in new, democratic institutions, they began to worm their way into ordinary citizens’ social and political common sense. Finally, their proponents saw them as having universal status and tried to impose them on the rest of the world. But here they hit their limits, because they cannot ultimately expand to areas where there are equally powerful, rival textual traditions—based in Koranic scholarship, or the teachings of the Buddha—that inculcate other concepts and values.

—David Graeber

See also “The Interface Culture”:

We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.

To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or “honoring diversity” or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other—to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The problem is that once you have done away with the ability to make judgments as to right and wrong, true and false, etc., there’s no real culture left. I think this is why guys with machine guns sometimes pop up in places like Luxor, and begin pumping bullets into Westerners. They perfectly understand the lesson of McCoy Air Force Base. When their sons come home wearing Chicago Bulls caps with the bills turned sideways, the dads go out of their minds.

[I]f we believed in a free press, why were we supporting Yeltsin, whose buddies murdered reporters in bundles? Russians believed in us deeply when I first went there—they believed in all the Radio Liberty propaganda. Having a blue passport made me a hero in 1990 Leningrad. By 1999 we were considered swindlers, and a big part of Putin’s rise was that he was seen as a nationalist standing up to the West.

—Matt Taibbi

No pude resistirme decirle «te quiero» e inmediatamente me lo arrepentí. A pesar de lo «no pudimos querernos bien», ella nunca me lo ha correspondido. Always awkward silences.

Aún no he podido llorar, but this whole thing is leaving me way sadder than I thought

“Vuelve mi amor”

A few minutes to write in the stillness of morning, flying out tonight, not feeling much except a little stressed about the logistics.

La tortuguita me dijo que quiere morir y que no aborde el avión.

Well, it's been an exciting and enlightening week of fascinating revelations all around

Quiero poder sentir plenamente lo que sentía con ella pero todo lo demás me distrae

Came last night with ariadnæ—sort of sin querer (me tocaba pero no quería acabar sin la nenita; I wasn’t really in a position I could try to detenerlo una vez que empezó and tbh she had made Me super-hard two nights running); felt like I was being a softie by indulging her pero al final she moaned so loud and long I felt like it was probably worth it—and am now feeling somewhat indifferent, like she’s older, not as hot aunque da morbo, more of a pain, more likely to fracasar espectacularmente, etc. But then I remember the ansia/anguish I felt when I felt like I was losing her and figure I’ll just never be happy.

Actually suddenly finding myself not caring about much + I’m blaming the lack of sleep

ariadnæ dismissing Me with a shrug, la nenita blatantly defying Me… all while obsessing about how la tortuguita’s getting used.

Called her phone just out of curiosity—can’t find her cell number in my in-box, of course I lost it with all her voice mails. Her machine answered—can’t believe how hard my heart was beating… even on mute with *67.