Atwood on #metoo
Monday, January 15, 2018
My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.
Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions.
[…]
The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.
If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place?
Margaret Atwood takes to Twitter to respond to criticism of #MeToo Globe op-ed
New manifesto
Thursday, January 4, 2018
On my temple in Delphi there are two words written: Know Thyself. It’s good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself.
Programming language stuff
Thursday, January 4, 2018
The market for new programming languages, as I write this in 2017, is competitive but not impenetrable — but like a freshly minted Ph.D., no one seems to be sure of Perl 6’s market prospects, and like a just-turned-in dissertation, no one seems to know whether the fruit of many years’ labor is actually worth a damn.
It is now possible to glimpse a future in which all that code is written in specific C replacements with strong memory-safety properties. Go, or Rust, or Cx – any way you slice it, C’s hold is slipping.
The big break in computer languages
The largest trend driving development towards [Garbage Collection] languages haven’t reversed, and there’s no reason to expect it will. Therefore: eventually we will have GC techniques with low enough latency overhead to be usable in kernels and low-level firmware, and those will ship in language implementations. Those are the languages that will truly end C’s long reign.
a reason for not doing a Ph.D.
Thursday, January 4, 2018
The Career Move That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Imagine if we all just stopped believing that the only way to be an academic is to be constantly employed by a university. There—wouldn’t that make people’s lives a lot better? Let’s just do that.
January
Thursday, January 4, 2018
I Hate New Year’s Day, Antonio Gramsci, January 1, 1916
That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigour.
Continuing the recovery
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
of this blog, i spent a couple of hours manually adding categories to old posts. Boy, i must have been bored.
Still lots of stuff broken, links often break on the internet.
Also, i missed the blog’s 10th anniversary. ¯\_(?)_/¯
Žižek
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
These contradictions don’t show that ideology is “irrational” — the problem is exactly the opposite, that there are too many reasons supporting their views. Žižek argues that these piled-up rationalizations demonstrate that something else is going on.
Have been a Slavoj Žižek fan follower for a while. Maybe i should read one of his books soon. Ha.
The Vampire Castle
Wednesday, December 20, 2017
The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church.
(the comments are brutal, even by low internet standards)
