A draft post titled “Flanders Festival Ghent disgraces itself” got published in error. It was a draft which I thought I had made private. I don’t think there was anything wrong with what I said, only that I should be focusing more on topics of more long-term significance. It’s deleted now.
After my enjoyable tour of the libraries of Rockingham county, I started thinking about doing something similar to follow it. My first thought was sites relating to American independence; there are plenty of them in my area. Then an idea that’s more off the beaten track came to me: a tour of abolitionist sites. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport and conducted much of his activity in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier was from Haverhill, just across the border from me. Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford after escaping slavery, and today I’ve learned how much other anti-slavery activity was based in New Bedford. (Sign up with Captain Ahab, and you’ll be out of the slave-catchers’ reach!) Also today (that is, Sept. 11, when I’m writing this), I found out the MBTA has renamed a ferry after Frederick Douglass. It isn’t obvious how to tell where the boat will be at any time, but it’s at least worth knowing.
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Ilya Somin has written an in-depth analysis of Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in the Supreme Court’s decision to lift the injunction against racial profiling by ICE. I can’t claim anything close to Somin’s expertise, but I want to call attention to an alarming point in Kavanaugh’s statement. Somin writes:
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There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.
Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
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As I’ve noted in previous posts, it’s easy to get videos taken down on YouTube, harder to challenge the takedown. An FDA official may have taken advantage of this to censor videos he doesn’t want seen.
A Guardian article says:
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It’s been a while since my last Liberty Fund article, but I’ve got a new one on “Marlowe, Goethe, and the Faust Legend”. If you’ve read The Magic Battery or the related stories I’ve posted on this site, you know the Faust story fascinates me.
The story was posted to the Liberty Fund site about a month ago, after sitting with a promise of eventual publication since last year. I only found out when they paid me.
In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:
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EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs are familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Not many of you will have heard of another satirical songwriter, Georg Kreisler, if only because he wrote in German. If you’re American and have heard of him, it’s probably because of the striking similarities between two of his songs and two of Lehrer’s. Let’s take a look at them.
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Just this post, and I should be done for today. A benefit of the migration is that the ActivityPub plugin now works. You can follow this blog from Mastodon or similar services by subscribing to “@blog@garymcgath.com” just as you’d subscribe to any other account. It might not be available on servers that allow only short-form posts.
This is the first post I’ve made since installing ActivityPub, so it serves as a test and means the feed isn’t empty.