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Sept. 30, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
26:38
The Week that Was - 30 September 2018
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This is the week that was, or possibly this week in Stupid, dated the 30th of September 2018.
Forgive the confusion, ladies and gentlemen, but it seems I'm doing both this weekend.
Mr. Av Akkad has once again been unwise enough once more to furnish me with the keys to his ziggurat.
My guess is it's out of a feeling of pity on his part.
His having trounced my attempts of a weekly news round-up for the past one and a half years, thoroughly humiliating me week in, week out with his devastating viewing figures compared to my own, he more than likely decided that, now that he's stepping aside from weekly news for a while, he would allow me to partake of a few crumbs from the giant's table.
I have been told I am free to do as I usually do, so long as I leave the place intact.
There has not been an overwhelming amount of social justice madness this week, but there are always new stories of interest of which one nonetheless might want to know.
So, on with the news.
Fortnite is a computer game, I'm told, which has now released its season six, whatever that is.
But the reason this game has made headlines, ladies and gentlemen, is because its maker, the modestly named Epic Games, has apologised for its inclusion of supposedly embarrassing breast animations for the avatar named Calamity.
Because the sight of mammaries being subject to gravity under motion might prove too much for people.
Because self-evidently, none of the complainants, nor anyone working at epic games, so they would have us believe, has ever noticed the effects of physics on a woman jogging past them in the park.
Moving on.
South Africa's former president Thabo Mbeki has spoken out in a pamphlet against the present direction of South Africa and the ruling ANC party in particular.
The successor to Nelson Mandela has strongly criticised where the ANC is headed.
He particularly condemned the proposed expropriations without compensation of farmland held by white farmers.
Tabo Mbeki is still widely respected.
So when he states that the ANC no longer seeks to represent all South Africa, people take note.
He insists that once the party stood for all South Africa, white, Asian, and black, but that this principle has been abandoned.
He points to former President Jacob Zuma's claim that the ANC is a black party.
Mr. Mbeki indeed supports land reform, but one where the land is purchased from white farmers willing to sell.
He insists that the reform cannot be undertaken by jeopardising the rights of different races in South Africa.
Given what we have been observing in South Africa recently, it is heartening to hear that there are still some prominent voices of reason calling for restraint.
One can but wish Mr. Mbeki good luck with his intervention.
But maybe now at least, those who claim that any suggestion of there being a problem in South Africa is racist will refrain from such accusation when there is in fact a black former president of the country highlighting the very same issue.
There has been quite a bit of news of interest in Europe this week.
Let's just breeze through it, shall we?
Following on from the general election, the Swedish centre-left prime minister has fallen.
A vote of no confidence called by the centre-right was backed by the Sweden Democrats and thus toppled the centre-left Prime Minister Stefan Lovrin.
But Mr. Lovrin is far from out and hopes to get the job back.
That said, there seems to be stalemate in the Swedish Parliament, with neither bloc prepared to work with the Sweden Democrats, and thus neither side being able to command a majority.
We will simply have to watch and see what happens.
Things continue to shift in Germany, as many people believe that the Angela Merkel era is coming to an end.
Folker Kowder, who has been a close ally of Ungela Merkel's, and has been the chairman of her party's parliamentary group, has been ousted from that position by her party, much against Mrs. Merkel's will.
This may only be a small setback to the Merkel government, but it does seem to indicate that the complete grip on power, which has seen Mrs. Merkel in office for 13 years now, is beginning to slip.
A man boarded a rush hour bus drunk near Paris, made what were said to be lewd remarks about a woman's breasts, and smacked her bottom.
He has now been found guilty of sexual aggression for the slap and been sentenced to three months in prison, as well as incurring a 300 Euro fine under a new law against catcalling.
Why do I mention this?
Well, three months in prison seems somewhat excessive.
There are quite serious offences people can commit to earn them three months in prison.
Of course, it is inappropriate behaviour.
Of course, it needs to be dealt with.
But being sent to prison for smacking someone's behind is plainly ridiculous.
300 Euros for a drunken comment about a lady's breasts is also ludicrous.
Ridiculous and ludicrous these things may be, but when we look at the Western world, this French example seems to indicate quite nicely the direction of travel for the rest of us.
On Thursday, we learnt that Dutch security services claim to have foiled a major terrorist plot.
In the Dutch towns of Arnhem and Weert, seven men have been arrested who, according to police, were trying to source AK-47s, hand grenades, and bomb material.
They were allegedly also seeking to get firearms training.
Prosecutors believe the plan was for a joint bomb and gun attack at a public event with a car bomb also being detonated.
The alleged ringleader is a 34-year-old man of Iraqi heritage.
The new Italian government has been in the headlines this week.
After much wrangling, it finally agreed its budget.
Let's just say the result raised some eyebrows.
Both the currency and the stock markets wobbled a bit.
Italy is now projecting a budget deficit of 2.4% for 2019.
That is three times as much as the 0.8% deficit proposed by the last government.
But the parties which make up this new government made plenty of promises.
Expensive promises.
The question is: can Italy, a nation already indebted to the tune of 131% of her GDP, afford to go on leaking money like this?
Naturally, governments who share the Euro currency with Italy are rather concerned.
After all, Italy is second only in indebtedness in Europe to Greece, and we all know what state they're in.
Thus, watching this Italian high wire act, we all strenuously hope that they don't fall off.
Back in Germany, Friday saw a knife attack in broad daylight in the old town of Ravensburg.
Reports are that the alleged attacker is a 19-year-old Afghan who apparently attacked folks at random in the town centre.
Three people appear to have been injured, two Syrian men and a German.
In a bizarre twist, it seems to have been the town's mayor who confronted the attacker and persuaded him to put down the knife before the police arrived.
Now, the incident seems to be being viewed by the authorities as the act of a disturbed young man with possible mental issues.
They seem to have ruled out terrorism.
They could of course very well be right in this.
But this story makes me feel rather uncomfortable, for I am quite certain I have heard that view expressed before in Germany.
A cursory search brought up this story from April this year, in which a van was driven into people seated outside cafes in the town of Munster.
The attacker thereafter killed himself.
It was never disclosed who the person was, only that he was in fact a German citizen and had mental problems.
So it may well be that I am jumping to conclusions here, but one does grow a tad suspicious when two incidents take place within a six-month period, both bearing the hallmarks of a terror attack, and yet both are put down to mental issues.
Then again, it could just be an unfortunate coincidence.
But it does make you think.
Everyone's favourite Filipino Charles Bronson impersonator, President Duterte of the Philippines, was at it again this week.
The man is always good for a headline, but this time it's something special.
The Philippines find themselves in the middle of an outright drug war.
President Duterte is clamping down hard, and many of the casualties in this war are actually being credited to extrajudicial killings by the security forces.
So amid all this, imagine the President trying to dismiss criticism by announcing, My only sin is the extrajudicial killings.
Should you think this is the newspapers playing fast and loose with the truth, here is the clip in question.
Now, how do you get out of that one?
Enter National Police Chief Director-General Oscar Albayalde, declaring the president spoke merely out of frustration.
Because, of course, that explains it all.
Who among us has not, when frustrated with various matters, publicly confessed to extrajudicial killings?
Why, surely that's perfectly normal.
So, yes, next time you think Donald Trump or some other politician may be going off at the deep end a little, remember, they haven't actually said yet that all they were guilty of were a few extrajudicial killings.
It's all a matter of perspective, you see.
Usually I do not report on individual incidents such as the following, but indulge me.
For there was a little kerfuffle at Dublin Airport this week.
A gentleman, having arrived with a lady at about seven in the morning for a flight to Amsterdam, was informed they were in fact too late and the flight was already departing.
Frustrating as such a matter no doubt is, this gentleman's reaction was somewhat different to that of most people.
He proceeded to break through an airport door and ran across the tarmac, shouting wait towards the Ryanair plane, which was preparing for take-off.
He was eventually tackled to the ground by airport staff.
Handed over to police, the 23-year-old was eventually taken to Dublin police station, and then on to Dublin Court, and was charged with criminal damage to the airport door he'd smashed open.
He was granted bail and will need to reappear in court in November.
Journalists having gathered, no doubt intrigued by this tale, then had insults shouted at them as this rather unique character swung for them with his suitcase as he was leaving, before at last he lowered his trousers and mooned at reporters and fellow bystanders.
A trip to Ireland, anyone?
But talking of airports, most of us have been there, delayed at an airport, bored stiff with nowhere to go.
The best place to be in such an event appears to be Geneva Airport, when the Camerata of Le Mans Orchestra is delayed with you.
Plane?
What plane?
Was anyone waiting for a plane?
Better yet, nobody sought to complain that they weren't sufficiently diverse.
But if there is a lesson to be learned from this for Dublin Airport, clearly what that airport needs is more vivaldi.
What is the latest must-have accessory for the fashionable lady politician about town?
Why a baby, of course.
And so we find New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Adern bringing her infant to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Because why would it possibly be a problem to introduce into a political debating chamber a baby which might at any moment start wailing incessantly?
But then this is hardly anything new.
After all, only ten days or so earlier, Joe Swinson, the lady tipped maybe one day to lead the UK's Liberal Democrat Party, took her seat in the House of Commons with her baby.
Because of course these highly paid women couldn't possibly find someone to look after their child while they attend to political debate in service of their constituents.
For it couldn't possibly be that these ladies are signalling to a female electorate, using their babies as political devices, by which to indicate that they're just like other mothers.
No, one really needs to have babies in a debating chamber.
It's progress.
So here I'd like to take the opportunity to point to a story which cropped up this week, which I actually believe to be fake.
A Russian model was reported to be spraying water-laced with bleach at men's crotches on Russian underground trains.
I guess it had the plausibility of being the latest social justice stunt.
But if you watch the videos, something about them doesn't feel right.
Moreover, the girl in the clip for some reason doesn't appear to be the student/slash model who is taking credit for it.
In some of the articles, it is suggested that Russian media has reported this to be fake, and a stunt in which actors were used.
Yet no sources are provided.
But yes, to my mind, this has the hallmarks of a publicity stunt by an aspiring model, rather than being an example of the latest social justice madness.
Tellingly, perhaps, the video in question has by now been removed from her channel.
Then we had a story on the operating system Linux, which powers a great many devices these days, being possibly under significant threat due to a politically correct code of conduct having been introduced.
Some drew a connection between this introduction and the well-known developer Linus Torvalds having stepped away from the Linux project for a while.
But Torvalds has stepped aside temporarily for other reasons, namely his apparently famous temper, which he has promised to work on while he's gone.
By the sound of it, he could get quite aggressive in public criticisms of computer code which he didn't feel met his standards and could get quite personal and insulting with it.
He seems to be readily admitting that this does seem to have been to the detriment of Linux development.
Therefore the idea of introducing a code of conduct is, given the context, not that controversial.
What has raised eyebrows is whose off-the-shelf code of conduct one has chosen to implement.
It is the so-called contributor covenant, used by other open source projects including Google, Microsoft and Apple.
According to Wikipedia, this covenant has been used in over 40,000 open source projects.
Given that provenance, it is maybe understandable why Linux decided to opt for this, thinking it the one everyone else in the industry uses.
The problem critics are pointing to is that the contributor covenant was created by trans person Coraline Ardar Aimke, and that in places it is dripping with social justice language.
Defenders of this code of conduct simply state that it asks for people to be treated with decency and respect.
But critics fear it is the beginning of a social justice invasion of their territory.
One need only look at the very opening page of the Contributor Covenant website to see why people might be somewhat anxious about this code of conduct.
Open source has always been a foundation of the internet, and with the advent of social open source networks, this is more true than ever.
But free, Libra, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of colour, and other marginalised populations.
Part of this problem lies with the very structure of some projects, the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualised or culturally insensitive names.
Marginalised peoples also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance.
Studies have shown that organisational structures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality.
People with merit are often excused for their bad behaviour in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions.
Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon.
These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people.
Now, supporters of the covenant, such as the publication zdnet.com, dismiss this all as a storm in a teacup.
They are right to a point, as anything being discussed thus far is hypothetical.
No developers have actually left Linux, or have threatened to leave Linux.
Concern, however, has been expressed about what would happen to those found in breach of the contributor covenant.
People are suggesting that sooner or later developers might be expelled from the project due to their behaviour being in breach of the covenant.
It is important to point out that people are not rejecting a simple code of conduct.
Far more, they are anxious about being expelled for breaching social justice rules.
This has led to an article doing the rounds about some developers threatening to throw a kill switch and withdrawing the code from the project.
Now one must stress that this is the absolute worst-case scenario, and the legal basis and ramifications are not quite known, as this seems to be uncharted territory.
But apparently the developers of a piece of code in Linux remain the owners of it, and they could withdraw it.
Now one must point out that this is only a possibility should anyone be expelled.
Given that the code of conduct has only just been introduced, we are more than likely far from any such thing occurring, if it ever does.
Moreover, the source for this story is being questioned.
Now I know many will regard zdnet.com to be on the social justice bandwagon, but I think it is worth listening to what both sides are saying.
Yes, someone under the nom de plume unconditional witness, who had never posted to the Linux kernel mailing list before under that name, wrote that people ejected from the Linux kernel community due to the code could rescind the license grant regarding their property via written notice to those whom they are rescinding the grant from, regarding their property.
So the threat of code being withdrawn comes from someone who has, at least under that name, never posted before on the mailing list.
So this may well be a politically motivated threat coming from the equivalent of a troll.
We cannot know.
I therefore think one needs to be careful with the conclusions one draws here.
What has happened is far from ideal, and some people within the developer community seem to be upset about it.
But it is very difficult from the outside to get a handle on just how deep this runs.
I am not a developer.
I have no insight into the world of Linux development.
Were I to be working on Linux, I too would feel uncomfortable about this.
Frankly, I too would oppose it.
But I think we need to be careful not to fall victim to confirmation bias here and declare that, because social justice has moved into Linux, Linux is now in some state of crisis, that code is likely to be withdrawn, and that the whole project is to be thrown into chaos.
Especially not on the back of one post from an unknown poster on the Linux mailing list.
I think all we can do is hope that those opposing this will prevail and that maybe a different code of conduct is chosen to substitute the contributor covenant.
All else we are left to do is to await developments.
The distracted boyfriend meme made the news this week.
Yes, the picture which has become ubiquitous on social media irked the Swedish advertising authority.
A recruitment firm had put out an advert, with a distracted boyfriend being you, the present girlfriend being your current job, and Barnhoff, the recruitment agency, being your potential better future job.
But the Swedish advertisement regulator, Rechlamombudsmannen, did not like that one bit.
The advertisement, we are told, portrays women as interchangeable and suggests them to be mere sex objects.
Therefore, the advertisement cannot be permitted, according to the country's advertising guidelines.
So there you have it.
Men looking at women in a manner that would suggest that they have a preference if sexist.
Coming soon to a place near you.
The prize for the most nonsensically titled article this week must without any doubt go to Zoe Williams, who penned this for the Guardian newspaper.
Do you boast about your fitness?
Watch out, you'll unavoidably become right wing.
Not only is the title breathtakingly daft, but on reading the article you struggle to see how anything the lady says in it should lead to the conclusion she proposes in the title.
So there you go.
The Guardian at its finest.
Now we have all been witness to the nyon endless Kavanaugh-Ford Senate Committee hearing.
I will not go into this, as I believe anything that can be said about it has long since been said.
But as I have the floor here, I'd thought I'd take the opportunity to expand a little.
For I think most Americans, whichever side of the political divide they are on, will have felt that this state of affairs, which we see reflected in the Senators' politics and their deeply polarised views, is not normal.
This does not apply solely to the United States of America.
Everywhere in the Western world, things seem to be amiss.
Politics seem to have become dysfunctional.
The political game no longer works.
Here is how I view this.
Every so often the system needs renewing.
In the space of a few decades, the world moves on.
The political and economic settlement which brought about stability and growth then no longer seems to fit with the present.
One such great settlement was immediately after the Second World War.
These economics and politics lasted until somewhere round about the mid-70s, by which time the world had moved on and the rules of the late 1940s and early 1950s simply no longer were a match for the actual state of affairs.
In the Anglosphere it was Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who are largely credited with having brought about a new political and economic settlement in the 1980s.
On the European continent, I guess it would be people like Francois Mitterra and Heywood Kohl who would be credited with a model under which Europe has operated for all this time.
But things have moved on.
The world we inhabit is far removed from that of the 1980s.
Our economies are transformed, new technologies are everlastingly emerging.
No one in 1980s politics would have envisaged twenty-four-hour news, the internet, or social media.
And so the model designed for a world of the 1980s is creaking under the strain of a time for which it is no longer suited.
Moreover, just as corporations have grown ever more creative in how to reduce their tax bills, so too have politicians and government machines spent the last thirty years finding ever more ways of wresting democratic control from the people.
And so here we are.
We now live with a political model that is obsolete.
Just as in the 70s we are now seeing all manner of political dysfunction.
Back then too we had plenty of students in the streets of continental Europe throwing Molotov cocktails at police who in turn deployed tear gas.
Most struggle even to remember what irrational nonsense most of those student demos were about.
So too politics in the 70s was heavily polarised and nothing seemed really to work anywhere.
Progress seemed almost impossible.
And this is precisely where we are, again.
It seems to be cyclical.
Every few decades the model no longer works, becomes eroded by scheming politicians, unions, academic institutions, or non-governmental organizations.
And the economic models too no longer fit, as the underlying economy evolves with new trends and technologies.
But remember, looking back at the 70s and 80s, we can make sense of it now, with the benefit of hindsight.
But for those who were in it, everything must have appeared rather chaotic, and the wheels no doubt seem to be coming off the wagon.
So if to us our present state of affairs seems an utter mess, politics seems to have become toxic, global multinational giants seem to be running away with things, and social revolutionaries seem to want to watch the world burn.
Remember, this is the end of the old model.
Or in other words, these are the birth panes of the new model which will emerge from all this.
There will be another settlement.
The world will return to order.
Things will begin to make sense again.
So don't despair.
Just stay sane.
Let them screech and shout.
Be patient and lend your support to the sane option, the grown-up solution, when it eventually arises.
Then hopefully we will not only find ourselves in a world in which politicians at least make some sense again, academic institutions cease indoctrinating people, and our democracies can be revivified to something more able to express the democratic will of the people.
So whoever you are, try being a little more British.
Keep calm and carry on.
Well, I think you see, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. of Akkad's worries about my temporary residence here were completely unfounded, and I have left the place without a scratch.
What?
What are you looking at?
In any case, that concludes this edition of The Week That Was.
Or this Week in Stupid.
Well, you know what I mean.
That is all from the Sabbath Pass for now.
Thank you very much, and Goodbye.
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