Republican chaos open thread

As it happens, and in order to self promote, I did a vid recently about when you get family split companies.

There are a couple of brewing companies here, Sam Smiths and John Smiths. John was Sam’s father and when he moved the company to bigger premises he gave Sam the old brewery to see what he could do with it.

I can confirm they were both great at making beer.

@Vicky: BBQ is srs bzness in Texas, yes. My mouth is watering at the thought of brisket. My local ‘cue joint (a couple restaurants and a spot at the local arena of sports and concerts) does the same thing with the coals.

Hereabouts, we’re into In N Out Burger. (mouth continues watering) When we got a Krispy Kreme, it was officially opened by the police chief. Leaning into the stereotypes! It was tough to get in for a bit, but now it’s just a store, although it’s busy on Free Donut Day. I try not to go the shopping area it’s in, particularly if the HOT DONUTS sign is on.

@Alan: Your location in that video is very scenic. And the CC is very literal. I see it wasn’t important enough to need duckie and Capybarrister. I can never remember which half of Aldi’s owns Trader Joe’s, but it does mean we get some lovely European stuff.

Ooh, even more so.

It gets weirder. Alan’s Youtube embed near the bottom of page 1, at the end, produced a “suggested videos” grid with one that looked interesting, “Signs of Autism in Adults – Autistic Traits You Never Knew Existed”. I clicked it and something shocking happened:

Blocked Page

An error occurred during a connection to http://www.youtube.com.

The URL in the address bar had a bunch of query parameter cruft, some of it referencing WHTM:

I edited the address in the address bar down to just:

and hit enter. Same bullshit. I then pasted the URL into the search bar, thinking maybe it would work if a Google site was the referrer, as it would be if I clicked it on a Google search result page, only to get:

Blocked Page

An error occurred during a connection to http://www.google.com.

Something was not only blocking my access to this Youtube video, but blocking the search as well, and therefore presumably any URL containing that video’s address as a substring.

None of my local browser extensions should have been blocking anything like this. I suspected either a cookie had been set that Google’s network of websites did not like or else there was actually some sort of censorship going on (in Canada!!)

So I opened an incognito window and pasted the video URL into that. Worked on the first try. Bad cookie seems to be confirmed, except … once I had done so I had access to Google and YT in my non-private window as well. I pasted the same YT video URL into it and yep, access granted to that as well.

In particular, about five minutes apart, the same exact URL pasted into the same exact browser instance address bar didn’t work and then worked. So whatever this blocking was, it was temporary.

I am nonetheless alarmed at this. Nobody has the right to deny me access to a public Youtube video. I want to know who did this, how, why, and a foolproof method to circumvent it in any future incident. (Though I know of a lot more things to try, including Tor.)

The nexus to WHTM topics being, besides that the whole incident was triggered by a link from a video posted here by a regular, that someone is interfering with access to autism videos. That looks suspiciously like Nazi shit, and even if there was a more innocuous motive, it’s still not a good look on, well, whoever it was.

And really, “Blocked Page” with a big grey X and no help link, meaningful explanation, or anything, outside of a corporate net or Russia, on a personally owned machine without nannyware installed, on a normal non-wireless consumer broadband connection? What the fuck?

I’ll keep all of you posted (if David will fucking let me) in case I run into any more instances of this, and in what context (disabilities, LGBTQ, racial minority content, porn, non-porn sexuality material such as health information, political sites of either wing, or etc.) and especially if I see this pop up at any non-Google-owned sites. If it turns up again I’ll try Tor and using proxifying sites (e.g. hidemyass) that go through non-Canadian exits, to see if it’s geographically scoped. I’ll try a US exit in particular since there doesn’t tend to be any kind of censorship there, even of hate speech.

I’ll also let you know if that particular video turns out to contain that, though AFACT at first blush it’s supposed to be on our side.

In ongoing research I have stumbled onto something that significantly supports my speculations regarding the origins of misogyny in attrition warfare among nomadic animal herders in a great-steppe environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

Pay particular attention to Lanchester’s Square Law.

The upshot is, in symmetric warfare, gunners, archers, and such are effective in proportion to the square of their numbers. “Linear warriors, quadratic wizards” is such a ubiquitous RPG trope that even the RPG authored by God adheres to it.

The relevance to the hypothetical origins of misogyny in steppe-herder wars being largely decided by numerical superiority is obvious. Given that they had ranged weapons (e.g., mounted archers), and given that the steppe environment means wars are decided by pitched battles much more than by sieges, ambushes, or any other kind of asymmetric warfare (versus mounted warriors on a steppe, you can run but you can’t hide, and a dearth of stone for construction and the advantages of nomadism and, therefore, portability means no fortifications that will last five minutes past the first volley of fire-arrows), the battles would hew strongly to the hypotheses underpinning Lanchester’s laws.

So, not only does the side with more archers have the advantage, but that advantage is quadratic in how lopsided that is, not just linear as I had originally supposed. That means even a fairly small advantage in archers will translate into an enormous advantage in combat, and it even instantiates a feedback loop of “going all in”: if one nomadic polity travels as a unit and fights as a unit, never splitting up, then everyone else has to do that as well to survive. That even reinforces the nomadism (initially for the reasons herd animals are nomadic, because if they stayed put they’d soon exhaust the local food supply, but now, if you want to attack someone else your odds are best if you uproot your entire polity and fling it in their faces rather than just sending a battalion or two).

This in turn makes for a massive long term advantage for certain policies. First and foremost is that everyone who can bear a child should labor specialize as a baby factory, to grow a population numerical advantage, and second, everyone *else* should become as good at archery as possible, to turn that into a maximum growth rate of archer numerical advantage. In particular, you get toxic masculinity directly out of that because all men should become warriors in that scenario, and therefore you get a culture that strongly reinforces a notion that the measure of a man is his fighting capability-and-willingness, as well as that the measure of a woman is her ability to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. All sexist gender role stuff pretty much then flows directly from those two imperatives, with the exception of slut-shaming and related matters. Those stem from women becoming status accoutrements for men, and that stems from men keeping harems “back in the day”.

Except that, in the steppe-nomad socio-political environment, the size of your harem is the size of your weapon factory, where your weapons are archers (as a mere bow, by itself with no one to wield it, is not useful). Harem size as status marker comes from military strategists worrying about the missile gap.

Slavery can likely also be laid at these assholes’ door. It’s a lot easier to have all of your men in the military and all of your women making more of both themselves and military men if you can force captives, who would presumably be disloyal as soldiers and couldn’t be trusted, to do all the other jobs, like cooking, sewing, and sweeping the yurt.

All of this also makes allying with other clans likewise quadratically advantageous, but also makes it imperative that the clans in an alliance act strictly in lock-step, since dividing the forces would be disastrous. That means top-down authoritarianism, indeed a species of ur-totalitarianism, would be the order of the day, and further that it would be very advantageous to wipe out the “who belongs to which clan” distinctions and make it all one super-clan to facilitate cooperation with such. Blood being thicker than water, that’s easiest done by intermarrying, so the exchange of highborn women as diplomatic overture is predicted. The emergence of continent-scale empire is also baked into the cake, as the logical endpoint of such amalgamations. The logic of warring polities on the steppe leads inexorably to the eventual existence of Genghis Khan.

And whenever Malthus rears his ugly head, famine stalks the land, and consequent infighting breaks up the khanate, the individual patriarchs with the largest harems and the most loyal, closely-related men to pick up bows, are the ones with the advantage in the ensuing civil wars and disintegrative period. One father with dozens of wives and dozens of sons will outcompete a bunch of squabbling separate “nuclear families” or any other such arrangement. And since “as below, so above” this arrangement is what will get projected up into the sky by the society’s theologists: a sky patriarch with a battalion of warrior-angels and a huge harem of eternally young and nubile women with whom to reward the faithful upon death. So, all the tropes shared near-universally by monotheistic religions.

Knowing that the combat, and thus geopolitical, advantage accruing to the steppe polities that went farthest in these internal policy directions grows quadratically makes the case for all of this just that much stronger.

(The Norse culture must have come from some hybrid between hunter-gatherers and a steppe nomad society. It’s difficult otherwise to explain both the Vanir, typical nature-spirit gods of the former type of society, and the Æsir, with its divine patriarch and warrior-heaven Valhalla and Valkyries and so on and so forth. This is supported by the steppe’s Wikipedia article’s claim that “along the northern fringe of the Eurasian steppe, nomads would collect tribute from and blend with the forest tribes”. Æsir, meet Vanir. Indeed the same sort of hybrid religion must have existed in Greece, and likely spread from there to Rome to the Germanic peoples, with the initial contact happening in Greece, where east meets west, forest meets steppe. The later, classical-times Greeks have a fossil remnant of a Vanir-like nature-spirit pantheon, only unlike the Norse they had demonized them: the Titans. That points to a conflict between the two proto-Greek-religions that was ultimately decided in favor of Zeus over Cronus, probably corresponding to a real-world forcible assimilation of a naturalistic-pagan paleo-culture by a more urbanized and cosmopolitan culture who had paganized a steppe sky-god religion. A similar thing documentedly happened later with the Christianization of Europe, as pagan rituals and observances were appropriated and rebranded (Yule into aspects of Christmas, most blatantly) and the associated gods literally demonized (e.g. hunter gods like Cernunnos turned into Satan or like figures — that’s when Satan got his horns in Christian depictions, during or after the forcible assimilation of European pagans). I have a theory where the steppe nomads established predatory, and later parasitical “protection racket” relationships with settled-horticultural polities located near the steppe boundaries, then integrated over time to become a settled, bloodline-distinct, hereditary, parasitic ruling class in some of these polities, creating hybrid societies with most of the trappings we associate with the word “feudalism”: noble and royal families, from whose ranks not only the bosses but the cavalry, significantly, are drawn; land-ownership, which neither progenitor culture likely had, arising from the protection-racket stage, which created protectorates with disputable borders — even the idea of a territorial Westphalian-type nation-state, as well as personal land-ownership, must have arisen from this single wellspring; the noblesse oblige and similar legalistic obligations between vassals and lords, derived again from the original protection rackets, refined over time into parsed legalistic contracts in the interests of minimizing wars between different steppe-mobsters over protection territory. Contract law, and perhaps all notions of property rights as well as other kinds of rights and obligations, may stem from this source. Indeed, it might not be too strong a claim to say that much of the trappings of what we consider “western civilization” arose from the hybrid cultures and specific circumstances that arose when these parasitical relationships first were established. The different in detail, but remarkably similar in broad strokes, forms of e.g. Japanese feudalism and Chinese legal tradition point to convergent processes happening all around the border of the Great Steppe of Eurasia. All Old World civilizations can trace their roots to a handful of nuclei along that border, from Xianyang west through Athens and the other Greek city-states to Rome, indeed with the added pattern of a narrow but defensible barrier of rugged terrain separating the city from the steppe (respectively, the Helan Mountains, the Pindus Mountains and Armenian Highlands, and the Appenines; interestingly, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the Balkan Mountains, and the steppe also have this arrangement). The hybrid cultures established these, and grew large amalgamated meta-polities that became the first non-nomadic empires, against the threat of further raids from latter generations of steppe nomads.)

I wish that they’d expel Bibi.

So many Israelis AND others would be way fucking better off. Perhaps even some Palestinians, though given the current state of Israeli politics, that’s far from guaranteed.

@Surplus to Requirements: On the battle efficiency thing, that only holds true in a wide-open environment where visibility and mobility are both high. It’s much less true in an environment full of large obstacles and lower visibility, such as, say, a forest. In a highly constrained environment, such as a narrow pass, a small number of combatants can often hold off a much larger group for a long time before falling. Guerilla tactics, when successful, allow one to strike and vanish while taking few to no losses. Archers also aren’t quite as effective against those who have shields and helmets designed to be reasonably good at blocking arrows, and regular (non-armor-piercing) bullets are less useful against bulletproof vests. Even morale counts a great deal, as lower lower-morale unit is more likely to break discipline sooner and/or flee prematurely. It’s never only a matter of numerical superiority, just saying.

I mean, if you’ve got two squads of fearless robots facing off against each other under ideal battle conditions and you don’t care how many survive so long as you win, then having a few extra does make a huge difference, yes.

[Should have added that while we don’t know why the Indo-Europeans developed patriarchy, it could have been for similar reasons to the Afro-Asiatics in a parallel cultural evolution, or it could have just been that fast breeding made some tribes better at conquest and colonization, like Surplus suggested – since their spreading across two continents happened in multiple waves spanning several centuries, giving them plenty of time to evolve their cultures and tactics. But that’s speculation either way.]

The gag order is marginally interesting, but I won’t be really interested unless and until there’s a show cause hearing related to its enforcement.

In the meantime, I’m actually terribly interested in Alan’s take on Trump’s new privacy suit in the UK against Steele and his former employer (“Orbis”? is that right?)

From what I’ve heard, all the damages alleged are reputational rather than privacy-based. Reputational damage should be handled with a defamation lawsuit, but as bad as the UK defamation laws are, the courts there have previously recognized that any reputational damage would have come from the **publication** of the dossier, not the mere compilation of the dossier. Since Steele and his employer are not the company who published it, nor did they leak it to the publisher, they are not legally responsible for defamation in the UK.

It’s all very interesting in that it’s possible — I won’t consider the case solid without Alan’s opinion, but it’s possible — that his representation in the UK is of the same level of quality as his legal representation in the USA (including, but not limited to, Sidney Powell & Rudy G).

Best guess is that this suit is simply a way of amplifying his claims that Steele lied when he said that in his professional estimation there was maybe a 60% probability that a pee tape he’d heard rumours about actually existed.

The stupid thing is that those claims had faded over the years and received little attention recently. It seems far more likely that he’s making the pee-tape claim newly relevant (and newsworthy) to his detriment than that he’s cleaning up stale violations of the privacy.

@Vicky P: Oh look, if it isn’t the consequences of his own actions.

So this matter might well get settled in Daly’s Wine Bar.

I can see that.

OT: It’s still a bit weird for me to see all my QC acquaintances suddenly become KCs. Business card printers made a lot of money last fall.

Just a brief update on the UK Trump case.

Second and final day of hearing today.

Orbis running a number of arguments.

Not responsible for any loss because they didn’t leak.

Trump consented to data being made public by referring to it on last day in office.

Left it too late (although it is just in limitation). Trump argues was busy being president.

Can’t show a loss or even if could not recoverable.

Those are good argument.

Trump though has Tomlinson. He was counsel in the appeal that determined you could recover for reputational loss in data claims.

So whilst the claim does have some hurdles to overcome; it’s not unarguable. Otherwise Tomlinson wouldn’t run it. Our code of conduct has very strict rules on lending ourselves to abuses of process. We can run rubbish cases, but they must have at least an arguable basis in law.

But one thing that did come out. Orbis claimed that, when Trump made the disclosure, two MI6 agents went missing never to be heard of again. To me that seems pretty significant. That a private company would know that. Which seems to hint at their connections and sources within SIS.