If the universe has any purpose more important than topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help, I’ve never heard of it.

—Lazarus Long


Oderint, dum metuant

June 12th, 2006

In Nablus, a young man is kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists — who then set him free on learning he is an American because they don’t want to end up like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi so recently did.

I am irresistibly reminded of a piece of cynical wisdom from the mouth of the mad Roman emperor Caligula, born of experience in dealing with the barbarians of his day: Oderint, dum metuant: “Let them hate, so long as they fear”.

It is best of all to be loved, of course. But Islamists will never love the khufr; not even the most self-abasing of the postmodern Left’s bootlickers can make that happen. The next best thing is that jihadis should crap their pants when they think about the death-from-above consequences of molesting Americans.

I would actually prefer to have them fear molesting “all civilized people”, rather than just “Americans”. Unfortunately, I don’t see the will to instill the required level of fear anywhere but in the U.S., and I don’t consistently see it here. Not a single Democrat is willing to talk about making the active enemies of our civilization fear its wrath, which is one of several reasons I can no longer consider voting Democrat.

Then there are the practicalities. The U.S. military is implicitly defending all civilized people whenever it waxes a jihadi, but in our world of nation-states it would be a bit much to require it to explicitly retaliate for the death of (say) a Frenchman.

Still…having even bush-league terrorists fear harming Americans is a good start, and as neat a vindication of George Bush’s foreign policy and the war in Iraq as anyone could ask for. The war is not, after all, breeding terrorists; it’s killing the leaders and frightening the small fry into letting go their victims.

Caligula may have been a mad bastard, but understood the barbarian mind and the stringency necessary to deal with it better than most of today’s politicians. Since they will not love us, let them be afraid. Very, very afraid.

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Monkey feces and other forms of communication

June 12th, 2006

I have extremely strong convictions about free speech and robust debate. Thus, I was rather unhappy the first time that I decided it was necessary to delete a comment on this blog. The rule I published at that time was that comments that were both (a) anonymous, and (b) content-free vitriol, would be subject to deletion.

Unfortunately, as this blog has become more popular, some semi-regular commenters have descended to the level of monkeys throwing feces. Often the feces are flung in my direction, but that bothers me very little. What concerns me more is that an increasing percentage of comments are not about ideas but solely about the personalities and motives of other commenters. That is not a useful direction for the blog, even when the accusations being hurled are justified ones originating from sensible people. The entire tone of the blog is being lowered.

Therefore, with great regret, I must announce that I am considering banning commenters who are persistently and virulently disruptive. This would not be from any particular desire to control the wrongdoers’ behavior, rather it would be to relieve more civilized persons from the temptation to get into slanging matches with the wrongdoers. I hope not to have to actually take this step; I hope this announcement will serve as a warning to those who need it that they must moderate their behavior or begone.

Bannings, if any, will not take place in the dark of night; my notion of honor forbids this. Should I ban anyone, I will do so publicly with an accounting of my reasons in each case, and accept any criticism that ensues.

Massive Intelligence Raids Follow Zarqawi’s Death

June 8th, 2006

NEW YORK (Disassociated Press) - In a surprise sequel to the death of top al-Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi this morning, police have executed raids and searches on dozens of newsrooms and editorial offices belonging to a shadowy and ill-defined network called the “MSM”. The resulting haul of intelligence on terrorist objectives and strategy has been described as “priceless”.

“It’s no secret that these `Main Stream Media’ organizations have been handing the terror network a lot of its talking points,” said one spokesman. “Increasingly, terrorists have been shaping their strategy around media operations, relying on their tacit partnership with the MSM to achieve shared political goals. Cracking the media side of the operation may be the most effective way to cut off the terrorists’ oxygen.”

Representatives of the New York Times, the Reuters news agency, the Guardian, and other apparent targets of the investigation declined to comment, except to blame U.S. President George W. Bush for millions of hitherto-undisclosed Iraqi civilian casualties, higher gas prices, several extragalactic supernovas, and the Hindenburg disaster.

Commands and Colors: Ancients

June 5th, 2006

I’ve put a new page up on my website about the excellent Commands & Colors: Ancients game. It’s just couple of variant rules and some scenario results now, but may grow in the future.

I have received a death threat

May 21st, 2006

Well, this is novel. I’ve just received a terroristic death threat. From an idiot who failed to obscure his return path. Here it is, precisely as I received it mere minutes ago:

From salehizadeh_atc@yahoo.com  Sun May 21 22:44:42 2006
Return-Path: 
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.1.1 (2006-03-10) on snark.thyrsus.com
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE,
	DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS,UPPERCASE_25_50 autolearn=no version=3.1.1
Received: from snark.thyrsus.com (localhost [127.0.0.1])
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	for ; Sun, 21 May 2006 22:44:42 -0400
Received: from grelber.thyrsus.com [192.168.1.31]
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	for ; Mon, 22 May 2006 00:34:05 -0400
Received: (qmail 18608 invoked by uid 60001); 22 May 2006 02:43:29 -0000
DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws;
  s=s1024; d=yahoo.com;
  h=Message-ID:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding;
  b=lFrB0rAPphpP3Q0wd5pQF1rMjBCYJ5O8pKh0risWlb2KbzXBMfqKQpx/SHq/s1DUJvPATn8XDECDCawxtzr1TokVZPGtbEfmV1BFHO3w6sr83VgcpMPrpf0fxSS6G2rCdMcSm2Xe0c45olKryo3zHIKz8Rygdu1xdES2rK/90Bk=  ;
Message-ID: <20060522024329.18606.qmail@web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
Received: from [217.219.56.65] by web30106.mail.mud.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sun, 21 May 2006 19:43:29 PDT
Date: Sun, 21 May 2006 19:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
From: hhh hyftyf 
Subject: Islam
To: esr@thyrsus.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-UID: 24454
X-Keywords:                                                                                                    
Status: RO
Content-Length: 343
Lines: 12

We have your address.

               YOU WILLBE KILLED
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               YOU WILLBE KILLED
               YOU WILLBE KILLED

__________________________________________________
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I will report this threat to the appropriate authorities. I guess all my writings about terrorism and Islam struck a nerve somewhere.

Here’s a message to whoever is behind this threat: Maybe you think you can intimidate me, or that threats like this will stop other bloggers from speaking the truth about your barbaric mass-murdering death-cult. Well, screw you and the camel you rode in. I will not be silenced, and we will not be silenced. All you do with terroristic threats is to demonstrate your evil nature, confirm our resolve to resist you, and speed the day when your diseased ideology will be wiped from the face of the Earth.

Testosterone makes people stupid

May 12th, 2006

Yes, testosterone makes people stupid. No, I’m not talking about the men who secrete and metabolize it, I’m talking about the nervous old women of both sexes who pronounce upon it as though it were some sort of demonic drug.

Latest in this parade of absurdity is a study of the effect of handling guns on male testosterone. Lurking behind the study is a clear agenda — the designers wanted to show that guns cause violence. Jonah Goldberg rightly slams this nonsense in National Review Online, reminding us that conservatives may after all be good for something.

I read Jonah’s column while a shreddin’ track from Joe Satriani’s new album Super Colossal poured out my speakers. Hearing what Satch does on a fretboard definitely raises my testosterone level. Should we be banning electric guitars for their aggression-inciting effects, now?

The study involved hot sauce, which I’m pretty sure raises mens’ testosterone levels too. Are we to forbid the import of capsicum peppers on this account?

There’s no end to this sort of silliness, short of recognizing that the people who propagate it are self-panickers who, if the entire planet turned into a brightly colored and harmless Nerf-world tomorrow, would fear their own shadows.

The fault lies not in guitars or hot sauces or testosterone or firearms but in the self-panickers’ tendermindedness and moral infantilism. It’s “Mommy! Mommy! The bad thing made me do it!” amplified and projected on everyone else.

To which the only counter is two words: Grow up!.

Animal imagination?

May 9th, 2006

About a month ago, one of my regular respondents asked me to blog about self-awareness in animals. I’m doing so now because it will be useful for an essay I’m planning to write about ethical and legal definitions of humanity.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eurogame Phenomenon

May 4th, 2006

I enjoy strategy games. I’ve been playing them since the heyday of the elaborate hundreds-of-tiny-counters hex-map historical-simulation wargames in the 1970s and early 1980s. But those games don’t get played much any more, largely because they took so long to set up and learn; after 1985 or so younger gamers moved to computer simulations instead, and as the hex-wargame genre stagnated many old-school gamers eventually abandoned it in favor of military-miniatures gaming.

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Memetic Success

April 30th, 2006

Bwahahaha! My sinister master plan for world domination is working. Straight from the pages of the highest-quality general-news magazine in English, check this out! The money ‘graf is the last one:

Moreover, the ease with which the internet spreads wrong-headedness–to say nothing of lies and slander–is offset by the ease with which it spreads insights and ideas. To regret the glorious fecundity of new media is to choose the hushed reverence of the cathedral over the din of the bazaar.

There’s an old saw to the effect that there’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit. More precisely, when your signature memes start showing up as generative metaphors in elite and popular usage with your name stripped off them, you know you’re winning.

Winning, that is, at the only game that is really interesting – changing the world.

(Hat tip to my blogson Walter Hunt over at Stone of Remembrance, though I’d have seen it anyway in my weekly Economist and later did.)

In the Belly of the Beast

April 17th, 2006

In the beautiful-irony department, I have just learned that my name and copyright now appears in the EULA (End-User License Agreement) of a Microsoft product. A vector-graphics editor called “Microsoft Expressions”, apparently — thanks to Martin Dawson for the tip.

The history behind this is that GIFLIB is open-source software for hacking GIF images — the direct ancestor of libungif, which is the name under which the codebase is more widely known these days. The original software was by Gershon Elber for DOS; around 1987 I ported it to Unix, cleaned up the architecture, added numerous new features, and wrote documentation. When Unisys started to jump salty about the GIF patents in the mid-1990s, I handed the project off to a maintainer outside U.S. jurisdiction, Toshio Kuratomi.

I have no idea why the copyright on this EULA is dated 1997, I think that is a couple of years after I passed the baton to Toshio Kuratomi.

Subsequently I did a lot of work on libpng, implementing 6 of the 14 chunk types in the PNG standard and designing a new more object-oriented interface for that library. So if you use open-source software that handles either of the two most popular raster-image formats, it is rather likely that you rely on my code every day. Yes, that includes all you Firefox and Netscape and Konq and Safari users out there.

And now, my code is in a Microsoft product. This may not be the first time; in fact, thinking about all the other places it would have been silly for Microsoft to pass up using libpng and giflib, it probably isn’t even the dozenth time.

I’m OK with this, actually. I write my code for anyone to use, and ‘anyone’ includes evil megacorporate monopolists pretty much by definition. I wouldn’t change those terms retroactively if I could, because I think empowering everyone is a far more powerful statement than empowering only those I agree with. By doing so, I express my confidence that my ideas will win even when my opponents get the benefit of my code.

Besides…now, when Microsoft claims open source is inferior or not innovative enough or dangerous to incorporate in your products or whatever the FUD is this week, I get to laugh and point. Hypocrites. Losers. You have refuted yourselves.

Apologists for Islam

April 14th, 2006

Since I posted Dan Simmons’s Message From The Future, I’ve had a couple of Muslims show up on this blog protesting that I’ve got it all wrong, that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion and Islamic terror is an aberration not sanctioned by the Koran.

Here’s a challenge to all you apologists for Islam: stand up in your mosque and declaim, loudly, that religious violence is an abomination against Allah — that those who use terror in a program to restore the Caliphate, those who would execute ex-Muslims who convert to any other religion, those who would condone ‘honor killing’, and those who incite hatred against Jews and other Peoples of the Book have fallen from the Narrow Way and will burn in hell with the sons of Iblis.

If you are unwilling to do this for religious reasons, or fear to do it because of the reaction of your fellow Muslims, then shut the fuck up about your so-called ‘religion of peace’, because you are a liar and a hypocrite.

That is all.

My Comment Policy

April 10th, 2006

I deleted a coment this morning.

This is not something I normally do, except for comments that are both anonymous and content-free — abuse and invective do not count as ‘content’ for this purpose. The comment I deleted this morning was not anonymous, and it could be argued that there was some content in it.

However, the content (if any) was drowned in a sewer-main’s worth of crude insults hurled by one respondent at another. I will not tolerate this, even when the insult-hurler is nominally on ‘my’ side of an issue.

Armed And Dangerous is not a public square and “free speech” standards do not apply here. If you have nothing to contribute to debate over the things I write about, I can and will cut you off at the knees. This applies to those who broadly agree with me as well as those who disagree. (If anything, I give my opponents a little more leeway than my allies.)

In my own small way, I’m trying to defend civilization here. So keep it civil. Or else.

Dan Simmons’s message from the future

April 6th, 2006

I very seldom post just to forward my readers to someone else’s writing, but SF author Dan Simmons has earned it with this potent warning. Read the whole thing. Because it is indeed our future, unless we wake up.

Islam Is At War With Us

March 27th, 2006

I’ve been warning since 2002 that the West really is in a war to defend civilization against Islamic barbarians, and had better face up to that fact before the consequences of whitewashing Islam as a “religion of peace” get worse.

Comes now Fjordman, a blogger from Norway who tells us that Moslem immigrants to Sweden report themselves to be at war with Swedes. See also his earlier post about how Swedish society is disintegrating — not despite its commitment to ‘multiculturalism’, ‘tolerance’, and the welfare state, but because that commitment is being ruthlessly gamed by Islamofascists who see themselves as the conquering vanguard of the Dar al-Islam.

Read the rest of this entry »

Open Letter to Steve Lohr & John Markoff

March 27th, 2006

You’ve described only symptoms in Windows Is So Slow, but Why?, not the underlying problem. Closed-source software development has a scaling limit, a maximum complexity above which it collapses under its own weight.

Read the rest of this entry »

HOWTO updates

March 27th, 2006

I’ve just upgraded to Fedora Core 5. As a consequence, I’ve updated the following HOWTOs

The End of Faith

March 17th, 2006

Sam Harris’s The End of Faith is a well-executed polemic of a kind that, in retrospect, has been curiously absent in the West over the last fifty years. Not since I read Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian in the early 1970s have I seen an attack on organized religion as clear, uncompromising, and compelling as this one — and Russell’s book was expanded from a lecture he gave in 1927.

Why, in a supposedly secular and modernist society that is heir to the anti-religious Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century, do we not see more outright attacks on particular religions, or religion as an institution in general? Mr. Harris supplies a surprising answer: he thinks ‘tolerance’ is a problem, that the modern West has agreed to accept almost any form of unsanity or fanaticism as long as it is labeled ‘religion’.

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The Rape Exception

March 14th, 2006

Logicians know that when you deduce a contradiction, your premises are broken. When human beings express a contradiction, it usually means their true beliefs are not their stated or conscious ones; they’re rationalizing a position which they may not be fully aware of.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hotness in Hollywood

March 13th, 2006

I had planned my string of meditations on the movies to stop with three. But, having succumbed to the mischievous blandishments of my beloved wife Cathy, here’s a fourth. Today I shall consider hotness in Hollywood — some movies that at least partly sold me with sex, and how they did it.

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When Hollywood Gets It Right

March 12th, 2006

My last two posts (If Hollywood Were Really Brave and Out of the Frame) have slammed Hollywood pretty hard for cranking out preachy, boring crap while congratulating itself on its bravery. I’ll make it a triptych by examining some recent movies that I found truly excellent.

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