Is this the right room for a strawman argument?
John Cleese gives an inadvertent demonstration of how to strawman. It’s rather embarrassing to see one of Argument Clinic’s idols as a subject for dissection, but we must follow the path of intellectual honesty, and break out the flensing-knives.
Continuation at a tangent to [stderr]
Tools like Palantir are the tip of an iceberg: a gigantic iceberg of data. In case you don’t know, when organizations like the NSA are talking “big data” they are talking “yottabytes.” i.e.:
The Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) [wired]
“That’s not fair!”
We seem to be on the fence about fairness: we want some things to be fair but not at our expense; suddenly it’s unfair to be taxed to support something we don’t agree with, when we would have happily paid the same taxes to support something we do like. I instantly spiral down into linguistic nihilism when I try to think through “what is ‘fair’?” in most cases, because all that I seem to be encountering is other people’s strongly-held opinions. But if we’re going to re-balance society, or decide who gets which slice of cake, we have to have a way of talking about what is fair.
I’m usually surprised by the coverage regarding NSA/CIA/FBI spying: there’s some stuff we definitely should be scared of, and there’s other stuff that I file under “so, what?”
For example, the fact that the US government has consistently ignored its own laws regarding wiretapping: nobody who has observed any government in action should be surprised by that.
Via Atlas Obscura: Bat Girl rescues Bat Man and Robin.
Warning: sexism, body self-image, marketing
A friend of mine sent me a link to this, because someone gave them this product as a sort of a joke… But it’s not a joke.
The story is that Louis XIV had 16-lb’er cannon cast with the words “Ultima Ratio Regum” in the decoration.
I was not very impressed with Mad Max: Fury Road, except that it had a laudable shortage of Mel Gibson and a great deal of Charlize Theron. I went to see it, however, because I know director Miller is a big fan of in-camera stunts and there’s real artistry in the over-the-topness of his movies.
The news about US troops engaging in Syria has been pretty low-key. Probably because, you know, it exposes some government lies about the degree to which the military is/was going to get involved in the fighting in the area.
