Incoherent ramblings

Falling victim to youtube clickbait: Sociologist claims “Math is racist”

January 24, 2020 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

Retrospective note:

It appears that the youtube thought police have struck, and the video linked to below is no longer available: “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.”  I’ll leave the link in place below in case of the unlikely event that the original posting account is ever reinstated.

The video I watched may have been a clip from “Watter’s world”, interviewing Anne Delesio-Parson (linking to rumble instead of youtube to avoid further censorship.)  I had some doubts that it was the same interview, since I remembered the interviewer being more verbally adapt, and this interviewer Watter is anything but verbally adapt at the beginning of this video.  However, I think that Watter is playing dumb (rather condescendingly) at the beginning of the interview for theatrical effect, so this may be the same video after all.  It’s definitely as annoying as the original, and makes many of the same points.

Original blog post:

I made the mistake of listening to the following stupid interview while eating lunch today:

This was a stupid interview, and was probably just designed to piss people off:

  1. The premise itself is asinine.  There have probably been racist applications of all fields of study, but that does not imply any intrinsic racism.  Individuals can be racist, but it takes extraordinary circumstances to make a subject racist.
  2. The interview format was ridiculous.  If one makes the unlikely assumption that there is some sort of nuanced view to the thesis, how can somebody be expected to explain it in 4 minutes in an aggressive and confrontational interview?

Sadly, it sounded like the interviewee actually did want to make the claim that “math is racist”.  However, she was actively trying to bend language to her will, redefining racism in the process, which is both lazy and pathetic.  It seems to me that it is profoundly immoral to attempt to use words that have historical baggage, words that invoke an emotional reaction because of that history, and then do a bait-and-switch redefinition of the word under the covers.  It’s like playing the magician’s game, distracting somebody with the left hand, while the tricky right hand palms the coin.

What would racist fields of study actually be?  How about the research programs of the Nazi doctors, or US military radiation and disease experimentation on blacks in the ’50s [1].  Those I’d call racist research programs.  To use abuses of math to call the subject itself racist weakens the term to the point that it is meaningless.

The 4 minute constraint on this interview was also pointless.  I don’t have any confidence that the interviewee would have been able to provide a coherent argument, but this sound bite format made that a certainty.  Calling that an interview is as ridiculous as the thesis.  Kudos to the interviewer for quickly calling her on her BS as it was spouted, but he should be ashamed of trying to fit that “discussion” into a couple of minutes.

<h1>References</h1>

[1] William Blum. <em>Rogue state: A guide to the world’s only superpower</em>. Zed Books, 2006.

Some adverts from 1930’s and 1940’s Argosy pulp magazines

December 29, 2019 Incoherent ramblings ,

I have a whole pile of 1930’s and 40’s era pulp fiction magazines that I bought when I was a kid.  I’d read all the Tarzan books and was also raised in a Scientology household where LRH was revered, so I hoped to buy some of the original Argosy pulp fiction mags that I understood featured both these authors.

I asked at my local used bookstore if they had any such magazines and was told yes, but “If you want them, you buy the whole box.”  The bookstore owner didn’t want to haul the box out of the back storage room, have me flip through them, not find what I was interested in, and then have to put them all back.  I basically had to buy the whole lot sight unseen.  For $15 I ended up with a giant box that had a whole bunch of Argosy magazines as well as a whole bunch of “Blue Book” (a “magazine for boys and men”.)  I didn’t score the Burroughs nor the LRH that I was hoping for, but they were pretty neat nonetheless.  Plus there were a couple 1910’s era magazines that I also scored, which I thought were worth the $15 just by themselves.

Despite how cool I thought these mags were, the bulk of them have languished in boxes (kept from degrading in comic book bags), for years in various basements.  When my latest move was pending, I thought it was time to get rid of some of them.  They didn’t move on kijji nor facebook-marketplace, but I gave a few away to people who came by the house, and have now also started sprinkling some of these around various Toronto “Little Free Libraries” in the new neighbourhood.

The aspect of these magazines that I like the best are the ads.  Here are the ads from two 1936 issues and one 194x issue (both of which now live in a neighborhood little free library.)

weird match.com identity theft?

November 29, 2019 Incoherent ramblings , , , ,

My gmail inbox was filled with “Like” emails from various guys this morning, and it appeared that somebody had created a new match.com profile using my gmail address:

Weirder still, the identity using my email address, was that of a woman:

I don’t understand the motivation of using my email address, since I was able to use that email address to submit a password change.  At that point, I was able to see that the profile was for somebody purporting to be an Australian.

In the time between changing that passsword to lock out the originator of this profile, and switching it to ‘not visible’, the password appears to be reset again.  I’m not sure how that would be possible given that the password change confirmation emails were going to my gmail account.

This made me wonder if match.com is populating itself with fake profiles, and they’ve now switched this one to use a different email address?  That theory seems to be substantiated by the following article about an FTC law suite against match.com for the use of fake profiles.  Looks like their angle is getting people to purchase paid subscriptions after seeing that there was interest in the fake profiles they generated:

“According to the FTC’s complaint, Match sent emails to nonsubscribers stating that someone had expressed an interest in that consumer. Specifically, when nonsubscribers with free accounts received likes, favorites, emails, and instant messages on Match.com, they also received emailed ads from Match encouraging them to subscribe to Match.com to view the identity of the sender and the content of the communication.”

Assuming that this case is not yet resolved, it’s pretty clumsy of match.com to continue to play the same scam.  It’s also pretty clumsy of them to use a female identity for me, but I guess my name is non-standard enough that they didn’t know what to do with it (either that, or they just take a lazy 50/50 chance when creating their fake profiles.)

 

EDIT: managed to re-reset the password, long enough to figure out how to shut down the identity.   Before I did so, I grabbed a screen shot of “my” profile:

I see that the “Profile Hidden” that I selected the first time I logged in was still selected.  I also tried changing the email address associated with this profile to one that I use only for spam, but match.com won’t allow that without also knowing the birthday that they used to create the fake profile.

Celebration of “killing in the name of” day.

November 11, 2019 Incoherent ramblings , , ,

November 11th, known as “Remembrance Day” in Canada, is pretty much intolerable on social media.  We are inundated with flags and blind patriotism, pictures of veterans posing in the formations of their original invasion pictures, inane comments like “he died so I could live”, “the price for freedom” and other similar obfuscated war propaganda.

This is the day for the inhuman celebration of the killing of the unnamed enemy, forgetting that that enemy had a face.  This is a day for forgetting that the enemy was also coerced into fighting in the name of their worthless governments or country, just as the veterans of North America were.  This is a day for forgetting to do causal analysis for why the wars were fought.  This is a day for forgetting that war is actively sought for profit, and how evil political puppets of war profiteers lie their way into wars on behalf of their countries again and again, regardless of what side they are nominally on.

We’ve all been touched by the wars of the 20th centuries in many ways.  My VanaEma (grandmother) and my dad effectively lost most of their family, their homes and their heritage, and were refugees in Finland and Sweden.   Having lost his real father, my dad ended up abused and damaged by his first step father, a drunken beast who thankfully died in a fishing accident.  If there had been no world war, he would have had a home, his real father, his country and family.  Dad lived a lot of his life seeming displaced, and not fitting in.  VanaEma’s final husband was stuck mentally in his WWII experience, and talked of nothing else, reliving that trauma again and again by inflicting it on anybody around.  I think that is why my VanaEma ended up needing a hearing aid — so she could shut off her husband.  I don’t celebrate the war that led to all this trauma and displacement.

I don’t think that I personally know any North American veterans of the war, but know of three in my family circle that were made to fight on the German side of the war, all damaged mentally.  Two of those men went on to damage their family as they lived out their PTSD, initiating a cycle of abuse that still has an impact today.  The thing that we should remember is not the valor and the glory of war, but the evil of war.  This should not be a day of triumph and celebration of victory over the enemy, or flag waving, or the mindless propagation of the fable of the “Good war”.  We should remember that we had two times in the last century where millions of people fell for the propaganda and coercive conscription imposed by their governments that had them fight and die for wars that should never have been fought at all.

There is no good side in the mass mobilization of men for war, only death.

 

A mostly useless Jeffrey Epstein document from the FBI

October 18, 2019 Incoherent ramblings ,

The FBI appears to have made a mostly useless document release about Epstein.  The only non-trivial, non-redacted content that I could find in the first 16/21 of these documents was a black ink purchase order and letter describing it.

The three last documents appear to have some interview notes that might be of investigatory interest, but it appears that, in the interest of protecting a dead pedophile, the FBI has redacted almost anything that could possibly be incriminating.

Jeffrey Epstein Part 17 of 21:

pg 91

went upstairs
stayed downstairs
introduced herself
Jeffrey came down in robe introduced himself
paid 200.00
paid 300.00
paid 200.00
and told her

pg 167:

A friend
do you want to make 200.00

go to million or billion
house

pg 169:
JE said that he knew models
that was the reason
he was going to

pg 170:

times each friend
told then
They went on it

171:
want to go back
won’t do it again
w/ a week or two
called
Gave # to JE

172:
JE provided advice about
– What to eat – salad
not ????/or drink
drink lots of water
exercise

173:
JE paid 200.00

174:
He asked her to

175:
they would want me to
didn’t like

176:
went to JE
given to me from cell
anymore

==============================
Jeffrey Epstein Part 18 of 21:

pg: 10
Help him
Holiday break – X mas
JE purchased ticket
tickets to
Picked her up
Inverviewing?
Bottle of champagne
casual asking @ schools
new … about it
talked @ traveling to help w/ school
bathroom in residence later
office
limo

pg 11:
have … for dinner
limit
went home to
JE
JE
unconfortable
left
don’t worry about school
Theought that meant he would pay
talked to

pg 12:

Got to know you better
finalize plans for summer
bought ticket -> ? paid for it
someone picket her up she did not know
Friday -> Sunday
little drive
Some discussion about where she was going to be staying
JE said she will be staying with US
thought JE

pg 14:
Bought popcorn/cokes
seeing them again -> doign the trip etc
did not want to mess up things for
herself and/or
before x-mas > Months prior to flying to NM
JE called once
$4000.00
+ few hundred dollars

[there is more in this particular pdf to review — more notes from interviews.]

==============================
Jeffrey Epstein Part 19 of 21:

– a bunch of photos (recieved 2011), scanned in black and white instead of grey scale. What isn’t redacted is pretty much impossible to see.