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Holy crap, can you even imagine the response if Obama had proposed extrajudicial confiscation of guns?!

Trump: 'Take the guns first, go through due process second'

I saw this the other day and found it quite interesting, given a lot of the 'arguments' being put forward here on SN.

what strikes me about the reaction to this growing backlash is not just its vileness, but its lameness. Trump’s response to Parkland — let’s arm teachers! — wasn’t just stupid, it was cowardly, an attempt to duck the issue, and I think many people realized that. Or consider how the Missouri G.O.P. has responded to the indictment of Gov. Eric Greitens, accused of trying to blackmail his lover with nude photos: by blaming … George Soros. I am not making this up.

Or consider the growing wildness of speeches by right-wing luminaries like Wayne LaPierre of the N.R.A. They’ve pretty much given up on making any substantive case for their ideas in favor of rants about socialists trying to take away your freedom. It’s scary stuff, but it’s also kind of whiny; it’s what people sound like when they know they’re losing the argument.

(Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/opinion/the-force-of-decency-awakens.html )

I see it over and over again here. Something's going on? It's George Soros' fault, of course! Don't like the argument someone makes, they're "socialists" who hate America, want to take away all your rights, and are worse (or at least as bad) as Stalin.

Care about your fellow humans or sick of crony capitalists, regulatory capture or xenophobic trashing of anything that's different? You're a Marxist who hates capitalism and pines for a land of gulags, collectivized everything and iron-fisted suppression of speech and expression.

It's pretty sad. If there's an argument to be made for/against stuff like municipal FTTP, single-payer healthcare, civil rights for all, gun control, women having control of their bodies, etc., etc., etc., then make a relevant argument.

"You're a socialist/marxist/anti-capitalist/SJW who wants to destroy $X and are just like Stalin." and other semantically null bullshit aren't arguments. It's just posturing and value-free (although apparently quite satisfying) name calling.

I'm not suggesting that folks not be allowed to spew whatever crap they wish to spew, rather I'm wondering aloud if there aren't more folks who, if they think about it (or at all), might opt for actual arguments rooted in logic and evidence rather than semantically valueless name calling.

As of the latest reporting by the Treasury Department, the US gross national debt rose by $41.5 billion on Thursday, February 22, to a grand total of $20.8 trillion.

Here's the thing: On September 7, 2017, five-and-a-half months ago, just before Congress suspended the debt ceiling, the gross national debt stood at $19.8 trillion.

At that time, I was holding my breath waiting for the gross national debt to take a huge leap in a single day - as it always does after the debt ceiling gets lifted or suspended - and jump to the next ignominious level. It sure did the next day, when it jumped $318 billion.

And it continued. Over a period of 8 weeks, the gross national debt jumped by $640 billion. Four weeks after that, it had ballooned by $723 billion, at which point Fed Chair Yellen - whose cheap-money policies had enabled Congress to do this for years - said that she was "very worried about the sustainability of the US debt trajectory."

Then Congress served up another debt ceiling.

That debt ceiling was suspended on February 8, at which point the gross national debt began to surge again, adding $1 trillion ($960.4 billion rounded to the nearest 100 million), a 5% jump in the gross national debt in just 5.5 months

The US's national debt spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months

I was about to install the Tor Browser into a new VM, but found that https://www.torproject.org is down as of ~0000 on 25-Feb-2018 GMT.

I checked with several browsers on several hosts, but no soap. What's more,
http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/torproject.org.html and https://isitup.org/www.torproject.org both agree.

Is this a DDOS? Recovery from a hack? Fallout from the recent announcement?

I searched around the web and didn't find anything about this, except for a July, 2017 Reddit post complaining that the site was down.

The browser is still available on Github and, I assume, other download sites/mechanisms.

I wonder what's going on?

Okay, the Eds, using the term losely, in their infinite wisdom, again, terms used loosely, rejected a submission from your loyal and faithful Soylentil, aristarchus. This is not unusual, or unexpected, and normally I do not resort to journal entries for rejected submission, but in this case, I actually spent a fair amount of time putting it together, and despite what the eds fear most, that reality has a well known liberal bias, reality has a well-known liberal bias, and the subject matter of this particular rejected submission needs some discussion. I turn it over to you, my fellow trusted and loyal Soylentils, persons of rapier wit, and steel-trap minds, charity to a fault in debate, real Lentils of Soy!

Original Submission (this is going to hurt, and lose stuff.)

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

A post on the American Philosophical Association blog [apaonline.org]offers some insight into the popularity of a certain Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, who seems much beloved by the alt-right.

Peterson’s work invites a much more extensive critique than I have the space (or inclination) to offer here, and there have been numerous excellent critical pieces (including this recent article in The Guardian) [theguardian.com], but what’s more interesting to me is the question of why so many young men are drawn to his work, specifically what need his pseudo-intellectual misogyny fills for these men, some of whom I’ve found to be otherwise quite intelligent and reasonable in one-on-one interactions.

Evidently, Peterson just published a book, and controversy has ensued. But our author here thinks it is nothing to worry about.

However, I think it is more likely, given that we have largely integrated the pain of those collective traumas, that this regressive moment will be relatively brief, and we will soon see a progressive wave of compassion, justice, sustainability, and even kindness in reaction to the Trump-Peterson era. I suspect this regressive movement will be viewed by history as the final death rattle of the older mode of relation, making way for the emergence of a qualitatively novel historical era. As Whitehead writes, “new epochs emerge with comparative suddenness,” and the tragic regression we’re currently enduring may ultimately be understood as the factor that finally propelled us into a novel mode of relation.

And of course there is much more commentary available, as in The Guardian article referenced, and many other places.

Digg [digg.com] reviews the book:

David Brooks writes in The New York Times that Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, is having a moment, and that he may be the "most influential public intellectual" alive. The man that Brooks, a writer known for missing the mark on cultural criticism, calls "the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which" young men are raised today has revealed himself over the last year to harbor a bevy of regressive ideas on sex and gender that turn out to be grounded in his own psychological theories.

Some Canadians [macleans.ca] are rather disapproving:

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson was in the news this week—and one imagines this makes the university sad. Peterson first made the news and became a belle of the alt-right when, in September 2016, he announced that he would not use a student’s preferred pronoun if he were asked to, except that he might if he felt the request was “genuine,” and no one had asked him that anyway.

        What that poor man has been through.

And she adds more:

“Postmodern neo-Marxism” is Peterson’s nemesis, and the best way to explain what postmodern neo-Marxism is, is to explain what it is not—that is, it is entirely distinct from the concept of “cultural Marxism.”

        “Cultural Marxism” is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values. “Postmodern neo-Marxism,” on the other hand, is a conspiracy theory holding that an international cabal of Marxist academics, realizing that traditional Marxism is unlikely to triumph any time soon, is out to destroy Western civilization by undermining its cultural values with “cultural” taken out of the name so it doesn’t sound quite so similar to the literal Nazi conspiracy theory of “cultural Bolshevism.”

        To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

What the poor man has been through!

Finally, from the pages of The New Statesman [newstatesman.com]:

In recent weeks, I have become mesmerised by a clinical psychologist who is the darling of the alt-right. That is not a sentence I ever thought I’d have cause to write, but Jordan Peterson is something else.

        I had seen some of his lectures before that notorious interview with Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News in January, the one that gave him particular notoriety in the UK for his comments on the gender pay gap. As Stephen Bush wrote last week, Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, is at base a self-help guide, and like every other contribution to that bloated canon contains a mixture of the persuasive and self-evident.

Dark Enlightenment or dank memes, it does seem that the intellectual pretensions of the alt-right are somewhat less than solid. But in a world of changing and confusing roles and self-identities for males, I usually refer to The Art of Manliness [artofmanliness.com] for more actually useful information, without all the rightwing agitprop, and very handy mustache grooming tips.

Original Submission

Pushing 30 is exercise enough.

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Alright, clunky, but most links restored. Have at it, and knock the TMB off his high horse!
*****
Update, of sorts. I have received a message from the TMB his own self, one of those things, again, that lowly normal Soylentils do not have, bragging about how he now has two journals with over a hundred comments. Well, lah-de-dah! Do we really need to turn journals into a popularity contest? This is one reason why, normally, I just let rejected submissions lie. If Soylentils are not interested enough to have it on the front page, in the estimation of the eds, then it probably does not belong there, or in a journal. And I would direct everyone to NotSanguine's journal on rational debate, it is much more interesting than this one. Unless you are a incel with a Red Pillar who voted for Trump.

Appearing in court today, former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI and to the Special Counsel at a meeting last month. In preparation for the guilty plea, Robert Mueller filed superseding criminal information earlier today which alleged Gates and Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars that they earned through their work for the Ukrainian government.

So that puts the Mueller Score at 5 guilty pleas and 19 indictments.

Rick Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying to investigators

So, my last entry was about Annie, a girl at my coffee shop that gave me her number. I also mentioned that she has a sister that works there too and that I /cannot/ for the life of me tell the two apart.

They are identical twins, so that makes me feel better. I didn't just want to be a white guy that can't tell Asians apart. (I feel vindicated!).

I was in there this weekend, and I tried to ask her sister what her name was. Turns out, this was Annie, the one that have me her phone number. Well fuck... Anyways, I chat her up, and find out her sister's name is Anna. Anna and Annie, identical twins.

They are Chinese, and these are their chosen western names. Their actual, Chinese, names are boy names because somehow it's lucky to their grandparents?

Bizarre... I think I would hate having a basically identical name to my identical twin.

For those of you playing along at home that brings Mueller's score up to 4 guilty pleas and 15 indictments.

Mueller probe: London-based son-in-law of Russian businessman to plead guilty to false statements

The original 43

Plus, turns out the shithead who murdered 17 kids yesterday was a white supremacist.

But yeah...both sides are totally the same.

One of Trump’s first acts as president made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns

So, most people know I've been using Linux since mid-2004, and that I started with Gentoo...which, yes, is the equivalent of learning to swim by donning a bacon bikini, rubbing yourself in A1 Steak Sauce, and jumping in the Amazon in the middle of piranha season.

Over the last 13+ years, Linux has...changed. A lot. I am sorry to say that I don't believe most of the changes have been good ones: GTK 3.x, the fiasco that was the KDE 4 series, RedHat aiming to become the next Microsoft, and the crux of the former, SystemD. Yes, I am a SystemD hater, and I make no apologies for it. It does things wrong, it does not even pretend to follow the Unix philosophy, and its syntax and "feel" remind me more than anything of PowerShell, which has to be the most bloated, flabby, weak, user-hostile CLI environment in history.

I also don't have a lot of money for hardware; this post is being typed on a used Thinkpad T440s I was lucky enough to acquire for $200 on EBay from a trusted source. And, being that i work 55+ hours a week *and* do anti-human-trafficking stuff, I don't have endless time to piddle around with Gentoo any longer. Much as I love the near-insane levels of control and configurability it offers, my poor ULV mobile i5 CPU just can't take that level of abuse for long.

So...I'd been distro-hopping for a while, playing with Devuan, Slackware, Artix, Obarun (unsuccessfully; the fucker just wouldn't install and I have no idea why), even FreeBSD.

And then a friend from college, the one who got me into Linux all those years ago, suggested Void.

Now, I'd heard of Void before, but had never even visited the homepage. Doing so left me somewhat underwhelmed, but intrigued; it was very businesslike. There wasn't the patronizing aura of the *buntu family, the slightly notionally-cabbage-smelling, half-baked feeling around Debian, or the complete unprofessionalism of umpteen hojillion other flavor-of-the-week distros.

If anything, it felt like FreeBSD, which I had limited success with and mostly enjoyed, but which didn't let me do a few things I really had gotten used to on Linux. So with Matt's encouragement, I downloaded the Xfce installer, backed up my stuff, cleared out my HDD, and booted it up.

It was a revelation. I don't know how else to describe this. Aside from the slightly WTF choice of using CFDisk, the installer was a no-nonsense NCurses-based affair that reminded me in all the good ways of the Slackware and FreeBSD bootstrappers. It was one of the most painless and ye-gods-FAST installs I had ever seen. Rebooting worked immediately; I was presented with a vanilla Xfce desktop and a very minimal set of programs, which is how I like it.

Two things immediately stood out: the first is the package manager, the XBPS suite (xbps-* commands). I can't say enough good about this; it's like Arch's Pacman for adults. it feels like the lovechild of Apt and Pacman in all the best ways, and it is *blazing* quick. It also has an xbps-src build system, which is to xbps something like the *BSD ports tree is to FreeBSD's pkg utility. It even acts a lot like the ports tree.

The second, and the thing that has made me a Void fangirl for life, is the Runit init system.

OpenRC isn't bad, and I'll take just about anything over Gawdawful SystemD, but Runit feels like alien technology. It is incredibly fast, it's very simple to administrate--just symlink stuff from /etc/sv to /var/services--and it will even, something like the Minix reincarnation server for its drivers, automagically restart crashed services for you!

Did I mention fast? Because this thing goes from "pushing Enter on the GRUB prompt" to "SDDM login screen ready for my credentials" in 10 seconds. 10. I counted. 9-and-a-bit, actually, but close enough to 10 to say 10.

If you run Linux, if you *love* Linux, try Void. You won't regret it. It will change the way you think about Linux. It sweeps away all the bad decisions of the last half a decade. Stuff Just Works. It's the most stable Linux I have ever used, and this despite being nearly as bleeding-edge as Arch. Runit is the star of the show and I wish it were standard on every distro. Do it. You won't b disappointed. Enter The Void.