The Insecurity Apocalypse

I don’t mean a lack of security in tech or otherwise infosec/opsec. That’s probably well on its way, mind, but that’s Marcus’s beat more than mine.

I mean the dudebro insecurity apocalypse, which has become increasingly hard to ignore, no matter how much the particular dudebros wish it could be and tell their cult-flavored followings it isn’t happening. [Read more…]

Winning the Longest Game

I think it may be said that the bad guys here are winning a long game, but going to lose the longest. A glimmer of hope, though they’ve ensured needless suffering in the meantime.

I’m not referring to the oft-misued MLK quote “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Unfortunately (at least, taken like this in its stripped-down version), that’s nonsense. Rather it’s what “Beau of the Fifth Column” said: to change the law, first you change thought. [Read more…]

ACAB: All Cops Are Broken

We know this. It’s not news. Most of us have seen at last a couple of exposés on cop training and the crazy lengths it goes to now. We know they’re afraid all the time and trying to hide behind all that armor and a nice comforting blanket of bullets.

What’s not always made clear is: it’s literally, deliberately, traumatizing. Cop behavior is weaponized PTSD. Below, a video with an ex-cop talking about what it did to him: [Read more…]

Cross Contamination

I recall reading something a while back that I couldn’t find when I went to write this, about a Christian flavor of atheism. Not the actual sorta-religion “Christian atheism“, but rather the position “I’m an atheist, but the God I don’t believe in is Jehovah.” To those of us who grew up in Europe or places colonized by Europe, this is to some extent unavoidable: to varying degrees, we’re soaked in an assumption of Christian faith and if we have to outright reject a religion we had before, it’s almost always some flavor of that one.

Similarly, there’s a lot of people who are agnostics or just secular in their daily lives to the point that even if they have a faith it doesn’t really have anything to do with them except the occasional big holiday observances or family functions. These people aren’t atheist per se atheist, but are still passively steeped in a Chritianity-saturated environment.

There are effects of this. It affects our values and our language – and with them, our marketing. It tells us what a hero is, and thereby what to do to look like one. It tells us that being the underdog looks good, that fighting an inhuman – dare I say, demonic – enemy looks good, and that the ultimate image to make people love you is to become a martyr. It tells us, in point of fact, what “cancel culture” really is. [Read more…]