Var þess aðnjótandi að aka í fyrsta sinn um Garðabæ fyrr í dag og varð samstundis hugsað til plebbaskaps íslensku elítunnar. Flatt og lífsnautt bílasvefnhverfi með nákvæmlega ekkert fyrir mannsandann, menningarlaus úthverfisparadís fyrir peningapunga og Sjálfstæðisfrekjur, svo þeir sjái sem minnst af pöpulnum sem þeir neyðast til að deila landinu með. Að bandarískri fyrirmynd, að sjálfsögðu, eins og góðum frjálshyggjugikkjum sæmir.

Í sumum löndum kann elítan að meta listir og fegurð. Ekki á Íslandi. Þar er draumurinn að keyra um á stórum jeppa, drekka Víking gylltan og horfa á fótboltaleiki á risaflatskjá í stóru, ljótu einbýlishúsi.

Ég sendi frá mér fyrstu útgáfuna af opna hugbúnaðarpakkanum Platypus þann 9. júní 2003, fyrir rúmum fimmtán árum [!!!]. Var rétt í þessu að leggja lokahönd á útgáfu 5.3, sem er með nýjum táknmyndum frá henni Drífu. Þetta er fyrsta facelift í yfir áratug. Ég er bara helvíti sáttur með útkomuna!

Life has become a great deal more frustrating since I started taking online privacy seriously.

I now run a network filter which intercepts all unknown connections and lets me approve them on a rule-based basis. I generally block all attempts by all software (including the OS) to phone home, making only exceptions when network connectivity is absolutely essential for the program to function. It is then approved on a per-session, per-server basis.

All my traffic typically goes through a VPN.

I use two browsers. One is my "clean" browser", with cookies disabled (except when explicitly allowed) and a number of blockers for ads and embedded social media crap. The other one is my dirty browser, Chrome. I assume that everything I do in this browser is being tracked, logged, analysed and stored. Mostly used for Facebook and Messenger.

Living like this takes time, knowledge, enormous patience and a lot of logging in. No wonder most people can't be bothered. But remember, it's not paranoia if they're really out to get you. And they are.

Þegar ég bjó í Bretlandi 2010 fékk þáverandi kærasta mín, sem var af bandarísku-tjílesku bergi brotin, starf á samlokustað í Edinborg. Hún var rekin eftir rúman mánuð og vinnuveitandinn neitaði að greiða henni launin sem hún átti inni.

Ég varð alveg fokillur og gerði allt sem ég gat til að hjálpa henni að leita réttar síns í breska kerfinu. Hún var auðvitað ekki í verkalýðsfélagi frekar en annað láglaunafólk þar í landi. Engin opinber aðstoð virtist vera í boði.

Eftir tvo mánuði af gríðarlegu basli við kerfið, óteljandi eyðublöð og símhringingar, var mál hennar loksins tekið til meðferðar hjá einhverju „arbitration tribunal“ og henni sagt að mæta fyrir dómara eftir þrjá mánuði. Við mættum í eitthvað möppudýrahúsnæði þremur mánuðum síðar með helling af gögnum í farteskinu - tölvupóstssamskipti, vaktatöflur, staðfest bankaskjöl osfv. - sem sýndu tvímælalaust að henni hafði ekki verið greitt þessi rúmlega þúsund pund [!].

Dómarinn kvað snarlega upp dóm í málinu: Samlokustaðurinn hefði klúðrað formsatriðum í pappírsvinnunni og þ.a.l. ynnum við sjálfkrafa málið. Þeim var gert að greiða henni öll þau laun sem hún átti inni. Sigur! Ég furðaði mig reyndar á að það væri engin sekt við svona svindli og þjófnaði en við fórum á brott sigri hrósandi, duttum í það til þess að fagna, hlógum að fýlusvipnum á fyrrum yfirmanni hennar í réttarsalnum.

Þremur vikum síðar barst bréf í pósti þar sem okkur var tjáð að dómarinn hefði gert einhver obskúr lagatæknileg mistök í málinu sem ógilti dóminn. Dæmt yrði aftur eftir þrjá mánuði. En við vorum þá bæði á leið úr landi. Hún fékk aldrei launin greidd.

Mikið er þetta viðbjóðslegt samfélag, hugsaði ég með mér. Hreint út sagt ógeðslegt. Vinnandi fólk með engin réttindi. Engin refsing fyrir að svindla svona grímulaust á starfsfólki. Málið hefði ekki einu sinni komist svona langt í kerfinu hefðum við ekki bæði verið enskumælandi og ég nokkuð naskur í að eiga við breskt skrifræði eftir langa og bugandi fyrri reynslu.

Svona myndi nú aldrei gerast á Íslandi! útskýrði ég öskureiður. Heima erum við með verkalýðsfélög og opinberar stofnanir sem tryggja að það sé ekki níðst á vinnandi fólki. Djöfull er Bretland sjúkt og dysfúnksjónal Thatcherískt kapítalistahelvíti, tautaði ég og bölvaði.

Mikið var maður naífur þá. Við erum auðvitað lítið skárri. Norrænt velferðarríki my ass.

En þetta meikar svosem alveg sens. Sjálfstæðismenn hafa lengi haft þann blauta draum að breyta Íslandi í einhvers konar klón af nýfrjálshyggju-Bretlandi Thatchers, þar sem fólkið með peningana kemst upp með allt og vinnandi stéttirnar geta bara fokkað sér og étið skít. Og tekist bara nokkuð vel til ef eitthvað er að marka þennan sláandi Kveik þátt.

Í gegnum tíðina hafa öll bestu skáld, tónsmiðir og listamenn yfirleitt verið á vinstri væng stjórnmála. Og það ætti svosem ekki að koma neinum á óvart. Fólk með ímyndunarafl og sköpunarkraft, sem leyfir sér að dreyma um eitthvað annað, eitthvað betra, er ekki líklegt til þess að styðja íhaldið.

Hins vegar hef ég tekið eftir því að ef maður rekst á annað borð á listamann á hægri vængnum þá er sagan nær alltaf sú sama. Viðkomandi hefur fallið fyrir nítjándu aldar rómantísku goðsögninni um snillinginn, skaparann, ofurmennið, sterka einstaklinginn sem kærir sig ekki um að láta aumingjana og meðalmennin, hjörðina, draga sig niður í svaðið.

En kapítalismi okkar daga, a.m.k. eins og hann birtist mér, samræmist ekkert þessari ofurmennishugsjón. Það er faktískt nokkuð sem ég gat aldrei fengið til þess að stemma þegar ég las The Fountainhead eftir Ayn Rand í gamla daga (ekki að hún sé gott dæmi um hægri-skáld). Bókin fjallar um arkítekt og snilling, Howard Roark, sem neitar að beygja sig undir smekkleysi samtímans. Hann fer sínar eigin leiðir, skapar eftir eigin höfði, og gefur skít í plebbana hvað sem það kostar. Sönn objektivistahetja lifir ekki fyrir annað fólk, eins og Rand útskýrir í löngu máli við hvert tækifæri.

En vandinn er sá að Roark er klárlega gjörsamlega mislukkaður kapítalisti. Það eru kollegar hans sem mæta „þörfum markaðarins“ (lesist: þörfum plebbanna, hjarðarinnar) og maka krókinn. Eru það ekki þeir, smámennin hötuðu, sem eru góðir kapítalistar, og Roark sérvitringur sem ekki skilur lögmál markaðarins? Þetta gengur engan veginn upp hjá kerlingunni.

All those hipsters love the Glenn Gould stuff, but I like my Bach on harpsichord. Absolutely stunning performance.

The Ethica of Baruch Spinoza, written in the 1660s, is, to my mind, undoubtedly one of the most significant and iconoclastic works of philosophy in European history. As I discussed in my (now long-abandoned) doctoral thesis, Spinoza was the first modern European thinker to attempt a fundamental, systematic naturalisation of the natural world. While the Ethics are admittedly a difficult work, the Appendix to the first book puts it quite bluntly: There are no ends (or "final causes") in nature. The following is an absolutely astounding and brilliant analysis:

Men commonly suppose that all natural things act on account of an end, as they themselves do. Indeed they think it certain that God himself directs all things towards a certain end, for they say that God has made everything on account of man, and man in order that he might worship God... It will be sufficient if I take as a basis here something, which everyone must admit: namely, that all human beings are born ignorant of the causes of things, and that all have an appetite for seeking what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of this. It follows ... that human beings do everything on account of an end; namely on account of something that is useful, which they seek. From this it comes about that they always seek to know only the final causes of things that have been done, and when they have heard these they are satisfied, because they have no cause for future doubt. But if they cannot learn these final causes from another, nothing remains for them but to turn to themselves and to reflect on the ends by which they themselves are usually determined to similar things, and so they necessarily judge the mind of another from their own mind. Further, since they find, both inside and outside themselves, many means which contribute greatly to the procurement of what is useful to them – for example, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, vegetables and animals for food, the sun for light, the sea for breeding fish – it has come about that they consider all natural things as if they were means to what is useful to them. And since they know that these means were discovered and not made by them, they had reason to believe that there is someone else who made these means for their use. For after they had considered things as means, they could not believe that they themselves had made these things, but they had to infer, from the means that they themselves commonly made for themselves, that there exists some governor or governors of Nature... who have taken care of everything for them, and have made everything for their use. And since they had never heard anything about the mind of these beings, they had to judge it from their own, and so they asserted that the gods arrange everything for the use of men, in order that they might bind men to them and be held by them in the highest honour. From this it came about that each person, in accordance with his own way of thinking, thought out different ways of worshipping God, so that God might love them above the rest, and direct the whole of Nature to the advantage of their blind desire and insatiable avarice. So this prejudice turned into a superstition, and put down deep roots in the mind, which was the cause of the fact that each person endeavoured mightily to understand and to explain the final causes of all things. But whilst they tried to show that Nature does nothing in vain ... they seem to have shown simply that Nature and the gods are as mad as men. For just look at the way in which things have finally turned out! Among so many things in Nature which are advantageous they were bound to find many which are not, such as storms, earthquakes, disease, etc., and they judged that these occurred because the gods were angry on account of the injuries that men had done to them, or, on account of faults that they had committed in worshipping them. And although experience cried out daily, and showed with an infinity of examples that advantages and disadvantages happen indiscriminately to the pious and the impious alike, they did not on this account cease from their inveterate prejudice. For it was easier for them to place this among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and so to retain their present and inborn state of ignorance, rather than destroy that whole fabric and devise a new one. So they thought it certain that the judgements of the gods vastly surpass human comprehension; which would of itself have been sufficient to cause truth to be hidden from the human race for eternity, had not mathematics, which is concerned not with ends but solely with the essences and properties of figures, shown to human beings another standard of truth... Nature has no end which is pre-established for it, and ... all final causes are nothing but human inventions.

(Parkinson translation)

This is heady and deeply radical stuff by 17th century standards. Gotta love Spinoza.

The following passage from William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich made me think of FOX News and the obstinate lunacy of the American right.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

There's a famous American saying: The first generation makes it, the second generation spends it, and the third generation blows it. Often true.

Earlier tonight I was pondering why this might be the case and developed a theory perhaps worth sharing: In reference to my earlier post, I think it may have something to do with increased abstraction, growing distance from the concerns being managed, the shadow-on-the-wall phenomenon.

The first generation, the founder and his kin, starts with next to nothing and builds something enormous, experiencing and learning along the way.

The second generation - the founder's progeny - is raised with some awareness of the family business, brought to work, taught the basics first hand from someone who knows how it's done. Perhaps they acquire, at least partially, the work ethic that lead to the creation of the business in the first place. Never the less, they live their adult lives in luxury.

But the third generation, knowing only luxury and indolence from birth, has no interest in how the family business actually works and is content to merely reap the rewards, thereby squandering the fortune painstakingly accumulated by the previous two generations.

Anyway, just a thought.

When I moved to London in 2006 to study philosophy, I audited several additional courses at the university during the first weeks to ascertain which ones were worth taking. One of them was a new, experimental course called "Philosophy and Social Policy", taught by a respected philosopher of science. During the first session, we students drew lots to determine the order of presentations during the semester. Unfortunately, I was first in line.

Although by no means sure I would take the course, I never the less ended up doing the presentation, which involved reading several journal articles on the subject of "meritocracy." As I went through the readings, I found myself strangely in agreement with F. A. Hayek, although I had long ago given up on his classical liberalism, or libertarianism, as a sterile and sloppy political philosophy.

A week later I gave a critical presentation where I argued that, practically speaking, any formal public indicator of "merit" would be useless for public policy-making. It would only end up as an arbitrary and poisonously selective aggregation of other indicators easily gamed by the elite. If it were ever put to use, people would simply adapt their behaviour to the criterion, just as some US students receive expensive private tutoring when they prepare for the eminently "gameable" SAT.

My central argument was that public indices based on ambiguous and unavoidably moral concepts such as "merit" were a terrible idea since they neither would nor could capture what they were supposed to represent. The paradox of measuring and evaluating in the social sciences is that it changes us, the very things being measured and evaluated. This is seldom understood by people making decisions at the top.

The professor did not respond at all well to my presentation and, as I recall, delivered a long and unfocused harangue on how I had a typical "analytic philosophy" outlook. She also questioned me in front of the whole class about the nature of my undergraduate education and on some points of Bayesian probability theory, a topic I did not understand well. I was offended and humiliated by the experience and decided not to take her course.

Now, many years later, I'm reading a wonderful book, Two Cheers for Anarchism (2014) by James C. Scott, the finest thing I have read in ages. Much to my satisfaction, it makes many of the same points as I did in that presentation back in the day, albeit much more intelligently and eloquently.

Scott is absolutely right. One of the true evils of our times is that the people in charge of important decisions live in a fantasy world of statistics, indices and Excel spreadsheets. We humans have become so numerous, and our our social organisation so complicated and hierarchical, that we have to gather data in order to attempt to understand how it all works. But data has no intrinsic meaning and cannot inform without accurate interpretation, without context and experience, without at least some inkling of the underlying social reality.

Still administrative and economic professionals are invariably trained to focus only on the numbers, at the expense of complex, messy, qualitative social context. Most of them don't even have a birds-eye view. They have a shadow-on-the-wall view. Say what you will about the industrialists of the early 19th century, they at least understood many aspects of their business, from the factory floor to the high offices of finance. Our contemporary technocrats and business managers see only partial, Plato-cave-metaphor shadows on the wall from the comfort of their skyrise offices - abstract numbers, statistics, indices, charts, many of which poorly reflect the world of humans. This is the source of many of our troubles.

Ég las The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich eftir William Shirer fyrst þegar ég var 15 ára gamall að byrja í menntaskóla. Bókin stóð alltaf uppi í hillu í safni pabba frá því að ég var yngri, tætt og marglesin með stórum hakakrossi á hliðinni. Á þessum tíma hafði ég sérlegan áhuga á Þýskalandi nasismans og lét vaða, ákvað loksins að lesa þetta fræga verk. Ef ég man rétt þá tók meira en mánuð að klára allar 1400 blaðsíður, en efni bókarinnar hefur setið í mér alla tíð síðan. Frekar brútal, heilsteypt og vel skrifuð lexía um hatur, heimsku og heilalausa búrókrasíu mannskepnunnar, svona eftir á að hyggja.

Nú, mörgum, mörgum árum seinna, með langa sagnfræðimenntun og fjölmargar aðrar bækur að baki, hlusta ég á þetta verk sem hljóðbók, og það er linnulaust déjà vu í gangi. Ég virðist muna bókina nokkurn veginn kafla fyrir kafla. Ég heyri byrjun á setningu og get oft klárað í huganum áður en hún er lesin. Rosalegt hvernig þetta situr í minninu. Ansi hræddur um að þeir tímar séu liðnir þar sem ég tók bækur svona djúpt inn á mig og varanlega.

„Hvor mange udlændinge har Island i øvrigt taget imod?“ spyr Pia Kjærsgaard.

The population of Iceland at the end of the second quarter of 2018 was 353,070... Foreign citizens were 41,280, or 11.7% of the total population, at the end of the quarter. (Statistics Iceland)

Þeir sem skrifa nafnlausar háðsgreinar um opinber mál á Íslandi eru mestmegnis gungur og aumingjar, og ekki þess virði að lesa. Andríki, AMX, Morgunblaðsleiðararar eru það sem kemur upp í hugann.

Það er hins vegar merkilegt að fólk sem gerir hvað mest af þessu er yfirleitt lengst til hægri í pólitíkinni, fólk með valdið á bak við sig, fólk úr Sjálfstæðisflokknum, fólk sem hefur hvað allra minnst að óttast þótt það væli ad nauseam um meinta kúgun ríkisvaldsins.

En þetta fólk er nógu óttaslegið til þess að skrifa ekki undir nafni. Það óttast eitthvað, en þetta eitthvað er ekki ríkisvaldið. Það óttast réttilega vanþóknun þeirra sem það deilir samfélagi og náumhverfi með, óttast að vera dæmt fyrir sínar ömurlegu skoðanir af nágrönnum, samstarfsmönnum, vinum, fjölskyldu. Kannski einhver von í því.

Þegar ég fór að kjósa í sveitarstjórnarkosningunum í sendiráðinu í Berlín um daginn stílaði ég óvart umslagið á Sýslumanninn í Reykjavík. Daman í sendiráðinu leiðrétti þetta hjá mér. Sýslumaðurinn á höfuðborgarsvæðinu var það víst. Í tvöhundruð og fokkíng einum. Tvöhundruð og einum í fokkíng Kópavogi.

Ég spurði hana af hverju Reykjavík hefði ekki lengur sitt eigið sýslumannsembætti. "Sennilega vegna sparnaðar," svaraði hún. "Þeir sameinuðu þessi embætti."

"Reykjavík er stærsta sveitarfélagið og þar búa flestir. Af hverju spöruðu þeir ekki með því að láta Kópavogsbúa fara til Reykjavíkur, frekar en að senda Reykvíkinga í Kópavoginn?" spurði ég.

Við þessu hafði hún ekkert svar.

En þetta er góð spurning. Allt þetta úthverfapakk í Kópavogi keyrir um á bílum, enda hverfið bókstaflega hannað fyrir hinn heittelskaða einkabíl stolta Sjálfstæðismannsins. Af hverju keyra þeir ekki til Reykjavíkur, frekar en að bíllausir Reykvíkingar séu píndir til þess að taka strætó í þetta sálarlausa, guðsvolaða Smárahverfi?

Sýslumannsembættið er farið, pósthúsið er að fara, allt krökt í lundabúðum og okurverslunum, og ferðamenn bókstaflega kúka í görðunum okkar. Og svo erum við með verstu áfengisverslun á höfuðborgarsvæðinu, með ömurlegu úrvali og hræðilegum opnunartímum. Hart þykir mér vegið að okkur miðborgarfólki!

Sú tilhneiging að nota „passive mode“ í töluðu og rituðu máli er mesta meinsemd íslensku okkar tíma, verri en sletturnar, verri en málvillurnar.

Í vinnunni sé ég þessa úrkynjun alls staðar í íslensku samfélagi: í fréttum, fréttatilkynningum og opinberum skjölum, í viðtölum við talsmenn stofnana og fyrirtækja, hreinlega alls staðar. Enginn virðist nokkurn tímann gera neitt eða ætla að gera eitthvað. Hlutir eru bara „gerðir“ eða „unnið verður“ að einhverju. Mjög þægilegt að enginn sé gerandi því þá ber enginn ábyrgð.

Heilu fréttirnar eru jafnvel skrifaðar í passífum stíl.

„Greint hefur verið frá því að til standi að endurskoða innheimtu veiðigjalda.“ (RÚV)

Hver greindi frá því? Hvenær stendur það til? Hvers eðlis er endurskoðunin? Af hverju er verið að gera þetta? Hver ber ábyrgð á þessu?

Það veit ég ekki. Hlutir „gerast“ bara í kerfinu ógurlega og órannsakanlega, og síðan er „greint frá því.“ Guð forði okkur frá því að benda á embættismennina, pólitíkusana, lögfræðingana, banksterana og Excel-glæponana sem öllu stjórna og ráða og stela. Neinei, hitt og þetta „stendur til“ eða „hefur verið gert.“ Og það „hefur verið greint frá því.“ Þetta er andstyggileg úrkynjun hugsunar og tjáningar.

Orwell hafði heilmikið til síns máls í ritgerðinni frægu um stjórnmál og enska tungu:

„If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient... a continuous temptation.“

Nú þegar KPMG-PricewaterhouseCoopers töflureikniliðið hefur í allri sinni óþrjótandi visku ályktað að best sé að leggja niður fornnorræn tungumál og fræði við Kaupmannahafnarháskóla, hví stökkvum við Íslendingar ekki á tækifærið? Bjóðumst til þess að taka við Den Arnamagnæanske Håndskriftsamling í heild sinni, reddum Excel-bókhaldinu hjá gamla nýlenduveldinu.

Annað hvort verður þetta svo niðurlægjandi fyrir okkar fyrrum lénsherra að þeir hugsa sinn gang, eða Ísland fær allar þessar gersemar í hendurnar og verður langbesta setur fornnorrænna fræða um ókomna tíð. Win-win!

Sannur maður fólksins. Það gerist náttúrulega ekki alþýðlegra en að slá um sig með smá latínu.

Um þessar mundir er ég að horfa á Ken Burns heimildarþættina um stríðið í Víetnam. Ágætir þættir, svosem, en það fer alltaf í taugarnar á mér hvernig Ameríkanar fjalla um tilgangslausu stríðin sín í fjarlægum löndum. Þeir mæta á svæðið gjörsamlega glórulausir, enda á því að brenna þorp, nauðga konum, drepa börn og gamalmenni, sprengja allt í tætlur og eyðileggja landið varanalega með eiturefnum á borð við sneytt úran og Agent Orange. Síðan framleiða þeir allar þessar sjálfhverfu vælukjóakvikmyndir um hve hrikalega erfitt þetta var fyrir bandarísku hermennina. Greyið þeir, að þurfa að upplifa annað eins!

Annar dagurinn í Búdapest og borgin er þegar komin á listann minn yfir fegurstu borgir Evrópu ásamt Prag, Vín og Edinborg. Gotneska þinghúsið er ein glæsilegasta bygging sem ég hef augum borið.

Ætli Viktor Orban og vinir hans í Fidesz sitji þar nú og bruggi ráð um að vega að lýðræði og frjálslyndi hér í landi? Ætli útlendingahatarinn Viktor viti að nafni hans, ungverjinn Orban, smíðaði risafallbyssuna sem sprengdi niður veggi Konstantinopel fyrir Mehmed tyrkjasoldán á 15. öld?

Sadly, the Danes, of all people, are scrapping their Old Norse and Old Danish university programs. Madness!

From Ragnarǫk at the University of Copenhagen:

It is very obvious that the managerialist, pro-business, pro-free-market assault on universities is the major contributing factor ... One might try to address the KPMGs and PricewaterhouseCoopers of this world on their own terms, and make a case for why studying a small language does make you a better employee. But I’m not terribly interested in doing so:

1) I’m not at all convinced that captains of industry really know what they want

2) even if they did, I’m not convinced they would stick to it – the Tony Blair government in the UK spent years getting universities to offer vocational courses, often working closely alongside industry to design them, and many industries now aren’t interested in students who studied those courses,

3) even if they did know what they want, even if they could stick to it, there’s no reason to believe that what’s good for capitalism would be good for human happiness.

Þetta eru góðar fréttir.

Það má vel vera, og verður jafnvel að teljast líklegt, að Gylfi hafi meint vel þegar hann fór að starfa fyrir verkalýðshreyfinguna árið 1989, en menn verða svo samdauna kerfinu með tímanum. Þeir hætta hægt og rólega að sjá eða skilja neitt út fyrir sinn litla heim, sérstaklega þegar þeir hafa lengi vanist góðum launum og keyra um á stórum jeppum í úthverfunum.

Fyrir mitt leyti fagna ég að þurfa ekki lengur að hlusta á Gylfa romsa um hófstilltar kröfur og stöðugleika á meðan "bullshit jobs" elítan í landinu skammtar sér stærri og stærri hluta af kökunni. Vinnandi fólk á Íslandi á skilið betri, skilningsríkari, aggressífari málsvara.

Það er nefnilega eins og Nietzsche sagði: Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.

They say Francis Ford Coppola never made a decent film after Apocalypse Now. Be that as it may, I recently rewatched an old favourite, Dracula (1992), which made quite an impression on 12-year-old me back in the early 90s.

All in all, it's a cheesy, incoherent film, featuring Gary Oldman as a silly vampire loverboy and some spectacularly awful acting from Keanu Reeves (though, mind you, not as bad as Tom Hanks in my last post).

But the music! Oh, boy. The music, by Polish master composer Wojciech Kilar, is unquestionably one of the finest film soundtracks of all time. And that brutal opening sequence. The silhouettes of savage medieval battle to the backdrop of a flaming sky do far more for me than any modern CGI crap.

Also, love that red suit of plate armour.

I've always disliked Tom Hanks as an actor. I know why people like him, though. He's a WASP everyman, bland, superficially charming, banal, offensively ordinary in appearance, the quintessential protagonist of the American "rise from/and/or/struggle with mediocrity" plot. But this, ladies and gentlemen, this isn't mediocre at all. Nor is it banal, or inane. It's just spectacularly, hilariously, wonderfully awful!

This striking quote isn't from some angry left-winger. This is Jeffrey Sachs, the cold-blooded economist best known for designing the “shock therapy” reforms that reduced Russia's GDP by 40% between 1991 and 1998:

“Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now ... I know them. These are the people I have lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in a quite literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise.

If you look at the campaign contributions, which I happened to do yesterday for another purpose, the financial markets are the number one campaign contributors in the US system now. We have a corrupt politics to the core ... both parties are up to their necks in this.

But what it’s led to is this sense of impunity that is really stunning, and you feel it on the individual level right now. And it’s very, very unhealthy, I have waited for four years ... five years now to see one figure on Wall Street speak in a moral language. And I’ve have not seen it once.”

This just about sums it up.

Also, my days with the Apple ecosystem are just about done. They're locking down the platform and that's my exit cue.

It is striking, but not at all surprising, that nine out of ten of the poorest areas in Northern Europe are in Britain. The London elites sucked the rest of the country dry and then blamed the foreigners, hence Brexit. Exactly the same sort of thing is going on in the United States with Trump.

No wonder the North still fucking hates Thatcher.

For once, I am at a loss for words.

I've always known that the writing staff at the Economist was full of upper middle-class right-wing Tory twats with shit for brains and a PPE from Oxford, but this is quite possibly the dumbest crap I've seen from them yet:

It took me years to finish Ray Monk's lengthy biographies of the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell. In fact, I just skimmed the last chapters of The Ghost of Madness in the tram the other day, more than a decade after finishing The Duty of Genius. As I read Monk's searing indictment of Russell in the final pages, I found myself taking issue with his general outlook on these two men.

Monk's books are undoubtedly well-researched and well-written. His intimate knowledge of the two philosophers is impressive, and both biographies are laudable accomplishments. Monk's judgment, however, is flawed. His mostly unqualified admiration for Wittgenstein is misplaced, and his contempt for Russell unwarranted. Our disagreement is primarily a moral one, I think. We simply do not see eye to eye about what makes someone a good and admirable person.

Monk admires Wittgenstein for his honesty, his penetrating intelligence, his self-criticism, his severity, his self-denial, his austerity and his lack of hypocrisy. He sees Wittgenstein's works as towers of philosophical greatness. Russell, one the other hand, is relentlessly portrayed as a vain, self-satisfied philanderer and hypocrite who failed to practice what he preached. Much of Russell's enormous corpus of writings is quite unfairly dismissed as low-brow drivel intended for public consumption (as if that were such a bad thing!).

When I read The Duty of Genius, I was surprised by how little Monk had to say about the appalling character of Wittgenstein. The philosopher's impossibly inconsiderate interactions with others are described mostly without judgment. The man was a genius, and apparently cannot be expected to meet basic standards of human decency.

One does not have to read between the lines to realise that Wittgenstein was a bad influence on almost every single human being he came to know. He was stern, unforgiving, judgmental, temperamental, full of self-loathing and angst. He set impossibly high standards for himself and ruthlessly applied those standards to those around him. It's quite clear that he hated himself, and life in general. But for Monk, Wittgenstein's philosophical brilliance justifies these traits. This is not the case with Russell, who is never given the benefit of the doubt.

Monk's biographies show that both men suffered from depression. But Russell, at least, sought to find happiness and pleasure in life. Wittgenstein simply despised it and seems to have been wholly resigned to the misery of existence.

Russell wanted the world to become a better place. Wittgenstein just accepted the utter evil of it all.

Russell engaged with the world in his writings, preaching kindness, critical thinking, political reform and rationality, however hypocritically. Wittgenstein, in his later years, peddled harmful introspective fantasies about the nobility of hard manual labour to a flock of adoring students.

It seems to me that the former is both braver and more admirable than the latter.

When I played role-playing games in my youth, the Dungeons & Dragons system distinguished between two mental traits: wisdom and intelligence. A sensible division, since the two do not always – or seldom – go together. Wittgenstein may have been intelligent, but he was not wise. In fact, it is difficult not to question the wisdom of someone who so admired Otto Weininger's laughably preposterous Geschlecht und Charakter.

In many respects, Wittgenstein reminds me of depressed friends of mine who succumbed to drug addiction. But at least they took steps, however misguided, to alleviate their suffering, albeit through fleeting artificial pleasure – something Wittgenstein would have despised.

All in all, I cannot help but think the man was deeply in love with his own misery, a character trait much less worthy than Russell's flawed, self-deceptive attempts to alleviate his. We all need small dishonesties to find happiness. No man can be content if he constantly subjects himself to the harshest possible self-criticism. Indeed, it is often difficult to realise where self-criticism ends and self-hatred begins. Our little deceptions, our perhaps-not-wholly-honest coping mechanisms, are needed to live fruitful and contented lives. There is such a thing as too much "honesty" with oneself.

Wittgenstein may have been a brilliant philosopher, but he was an abject failure when it comes to the most important question of philosophy: How to live a decent, happy, fullfilling life. Russell, at least, tried.

"I felt a great disturbance in the [developer community], as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."

This is very bad news indeed. How long until Microsoft turns GitHub into a steaming pile of unusable garbage? They seem to have the Midas-touch in reverse. Everything they acquire turns to shit: Hotmail, Skype, Nokia, you name it.

Probably time to jump ship and move my open-source projects to GitLab or some other host. It's a real shame, because I like GitHub.

Software quality on the Mac is going to the dogs. Some basic stuff we've become used to working over the last 15 years is now broken.

• Try dragging a photo from Photos on to the Preview app icon in the Dock. You'd expect Preview to open a copy of the image. Doesn't fucking happen. Come on, guys! iPhoto did this right back in the early 2000s. Just one of many horrible bugs in the disaster that is Photos.
• Try searching for something in Mail.app, select the email, then hide the application and go do something else for a while. When you bring Mail to the foreground again, your search and selection have both been lost. Absolutely unacceptable.
• Mail doesn't work properly with Gmail anymore. Unable to remember the Gmail password so I have to type it in every time I quit and re-open Mail, or put the computer to sleep. Yikes! This is a serious problem. Almost everybody uses Gmail.
• Mail's message count can no longer be relied on. Sometimes, the only way to fix an erroneous message count in the Dock icon is to restart the app. That's amateurish. This kind of stuff matter.

But not just the Mac, iOS too. My pet peeve is the following:

• Try listening to some lengthy song in the Music app on iOS. Now switch over to another app for a while, do something else, and then return to the Music app. You'll find that if it's been auto-terminated in the background, it doesn't fucking restore the song you were listening to, or your position within the song. REALLY annoying if you've paused in the middle of long audio files, e.g. podcasts, audio recordings, und so weiter.

It may be time to switch. But it's not like graphical software quality and UI consistency on Linux or Android is anything to write home about.

I've been using this little tool for years and finally decided to spruce it up and make a proper release: FastDMG. The source is on GitHub.

It's deeply unclear to me how an afternoon or two of coding and testing can produce a solution in every way superior to Apple's DiskImageMounter. Their software is really going to the dogs these days. But to be fair, their disk image mounting tool sucked from day one.

This remarkable animated GIF map shows the speed with which the newly-founded United States exterminated the Native Americans and seized their land. The founding history of that benighted country is drenched in blood but contemporary Americans seem blissfully callous about their forefathers' long litany of bad faith, betrayal, genocide, treaty-breaking and forced removal. As if the Eurasian diseases they brought over the Atlantic weren't bad enough.

As Chief Red Cloud put it: "[The white men] made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it."

Ég andvarpaði og ranghvolfdi augunum eftir að hafa skrifað eftirfarandi grein í vinnunni í dag:

Lower tariffs on hundreds of EU products as trade agreement comes into effect

Tariffs on hundreds of food products from the European Union were significantly reduced or abolished on Tuesday when Iceland’s bilateral trade preference agreement with the EU came into effect.

Iceland and the EU reached an agreement concerning trade in agricultural products in September 2015, with government spokesmen declaring that the abolition of tariffs would benefit Icelandic consumers by increasing product diversity and pushing prices down.

According to the agreement, Iceland abolishes tariffs on 340 tariff numbers and lowers tariffs on another twenty. The EU correspondingly lowers or abolishes its tariffs. All tariffs on processed agricultural products except yoghurt are abolished, including those on chocolate, pizzas, pasta, baking goods and various other products, while tariffs on unprocessed agricultural commodities such as french fries and outdoor-grown vegetables are reduced.

The agreement also stipulates that both parties significantly increase their tariff-free import quotas for various meat products and cheese. Iceland receives greatly increased tariff-free quotas for agricultural exports such as skyr, butter and mutton.

The agreement was harshly criticised by Sindri Sigurgeirsson, chairman of the Association of Icelandic Farmers, who claims the agreement puts domestic producers in a difficult position. Icelandic farmers are particularly unhappy with the fact that the size of the respective markets is not taken into account.

“In our view, [the agreement] is deeply unfavourable to us here in Iceland while the European Union gets proportionally greater access to our domestic market," Mr Sigurgeirsson said. "Of course, people sought this agreement at the time to secure better access for [Icelandic] skyr and mutton in the European market. That’s the origin of this agreement. But it’s unfavourable and … people didn’t expect this monstrosity of a deal, which makes competition in meat and cheese very difficult for domestic producers.”

Centre Party MPs echoed Mr Sigurgeirsson’s criticism in parliament on Thursday, saying Icelandic authorities made a mistake when they pushed the deal through without consulting interested parties, and without introducing countermeasures to aid farmers.

The agreement was signed by the government of then-Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíd Gunnlaugsson. Mr Gunnlaugsson is now chairman of the Centre Party.

Ríkisstjórn Simma og Framsóknarflokks skrifar undir viðskiptasamning við Evrópusambandið árið 2015, lofar neytendum gulli og grænum skógum, klappar sér á bakið.

Þremur árum síðar eru Simmi og átrúendur hans í Miðflokknum öskureiðir -- yfir samningi sem foringinn sjálfur gaf græna ljósið á! Þetta lið er gjörsamlega óforskammað.

Og af hverju eru bændur skyndilega brjálaðir yfir þessum samningi? Þetta hefur legið fyrir í að verða þrjú ár, samningurinn aðgengilegur öllum á netinu. Ekki eins og þetta hafi verið eitthvað ríkisleyndarmál, en nú skyndilega kemur þetta bændum eins og þruma úr heiðskíru lofti. Kannski þeir kunni ekki á netið.

Menn voru að sækja þetta á sínum tíma fyrir aðgang fyrir skyr og lambakjöt á Evrópumarkað. Þannig er uppruni þessa samnings. En hann er óhagstæður og okkur finnst að menn hafi samið af sér.[heimild]

Héldu þeir virkilega að þeir fengju aðgang að landbúnaðarmarkaði ESB án þess að gefa eitthvað í staðinn? Hvers konar aulaskapur er þetta eiginlega?

Ísland: Þar sem tvískinnungur og viðvaningsháttur er löngu hættur að koma á óvart.

A brilliant fusion of modernism and romanticism. With its strong horns, stirring bass, and doom-infused strings, it perfectly captures Europe's early twentieth century in all its horrors.

What is it with Americans and their butchery of basic English semantics and pronunciation?

It's "I couldn't care less", not "I could care less." Think about it logically for a second or two and you'll find that the latter makes no sense at all.

Also, don't say "Without further a-due". It's "ado", people. Ah-doo, not a-due! Ever heard of that Shakespeare play?

And while we're on the subject:

Coup de grâce is pronounced "Coo-duh-grass", not "Coo-duh-grah." French may sometimes be confusing in terms of pronunciation, but -ce endings are never silent. Vide e.g. fem. name Alice.

Alliteration, such an important technique in Icelandic poetry, is strangely absent in most English verse. All the more respect to Nick Cave for his brilliant and beautiful alliteration in the final verse of the Song of Joy:

Outside the vultures wheel,
the wolves howl, the serpents hiss.
And to extend this small favour, friend,
would be the sum of earthly bliss.

Wagner may have been a horrible human being, but his music is truly sublime.

Mark Lilla's great analysis of our current politico-philosophical malaise (from The Reckless Mind):

One of the less remarked consequences of the cold war's end has been the vacuum of understanding it left behind. If nothing else, the old ideologies focused the mind. With lineages that could be traced back two centuries, they presented clear, opposing portrayals of political reality, however distorted, and programs for acting within it. And they were not arbitrary constructs. They had roots in philosophical and religious traditions with radically different understandings of human nature and history that ran back much further. When the modern ideologies were jettisoned, so was a living connection with those traditions.

Now we are free of the old illusions. So one would expect to find our situation easier to understand and grapple with. In fact, just the opposite seems true. Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life.

Which of these two stories will our historian choose to tell? If he is like most historians that may well depend on which intellectual and political aspects of modern tyranny he feels deserve our attention. If he is trying to understand exclusively the brutality of Soviet "planning," the Nazis' chillingly efficient program to exterminate the Jews, the methodical self-destruction of Cambodia, the programs of ideological indoctrination, the paranoid webs of informers and secret police--if he wants to explain how these tyrannical practices were conceived and defended, he might be tempted to blame a heartless intellectual rationalism that crushed all in its path. If, on the other hand, he is struck by the role in modern tyranny played by the idolization of blood and soil, the hysterical obsession with racial categories, the glorification of reviolutionary violence as a purifying force, the cults of personality, and the orgiastic mass rallies, he will be tempted to say that reason collapsed before irrational passions that had migrated from religion to politics. And if our historian is more ambitious still, and wants to explain both classes of phenomena? At that point he will have to abandon the history of ideas.

Mark Lilla, "The Reckless Mind"

Hannah Arendt's scathing takedown of her erstwhile mentor and lover, Old Nazi Heidegger:

Once upon a time there was a fox who was so lacking in slyness that he not only kept getting caught in traps but couldn’t even tell the difference between a trap and a non-trap. … After he had spent his entire youth prowling around the traps of people … this fox decided to withdraw from the fox world altogether and to set about making himself a burrow. In his shocking ignorance of the difference between traps and non-traps, despite his incredibly extensive experience with traps, he hit on an idea completely new and unheard of among foxes: He built a trap as his burrow. He set himself inside it, passed it off as a normal burrow (not out of cunning, but because he had always thought others’ traps were their burrows). … Alas, no one would go into his trap, because he was sitting inside it himself. And so it occurred to our fox to decorate his trap beautifully and to hang up unequivocal signs everywhere on it that quite clearly said: “Come here, everyone; this is a trap, the most beautiful trap in the world.” From this point on … many came. Everyone except our fox could, of course, step out of it again. It was cut, literally, to his own measurement. But the fox who lived in the trap said proudly: “So many are visiting me in my trap that I have become the best of all foxes.” And there is some truth in that, too: Nobody knows the nature of traps better than one who sits in a trap his whole life long.

Subtle and devastating, but not nearly as much fun as Schopenhauer on Hegel.

Although I must confess a certain nostalgic fondness for the Indiana Jones films, I generally hate Spielberg as a film-maker. One-dimensional, superficial, schmaltzy. This hilarious review tears apart his latest debacle.

Well, in that case, it's a culture worth discriminating against.

After living in Paris, this could only bring a smile to my face.

Breaking news! Britain starts doing what the other Germanic countries have been doing for decades.

I, for one, would like to welcome poor, backward, miserable, right-wing Britain into the 1980s.

I could have sworn I knew the theme at the end of the Rick and Morty episode "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind." You know, the one where Evil Morty makes his first appearance.

Credited as Blonde Readhead but, I'm telling you, they ripped off Chopin.

björn k. ‘bjarndýr, sérstök rándýrategund (ursus) ... Hið forna ie. bjarnarheiti (sbr. lat. ursus, gr. árktos, fi. ŕ̥kṣa-h) sýnist hafa týnst í germ., e.t.v. vegna bannhelgi, og nýyrðið beran- ‘hinn brúni’ tekið upp í staðinn. Svipað hefur gerst í slavn., sbr. rússn. medvedb ‘björn’, eiginl. ‘hunangsæta’.

Svo málum er þannig háttað að Dmitri Medvedev, forsætisráðherra Rússlands, er að hluta til nafni minn.

Oh, the hypocrisy... Over 80% of Sweden's modernist architects choose to live in houses built before 1920. A spectacular case of not eating one's own dog food.

As the article puts it:

Modernism är något man gör mot andra och man kan absolut inte bo i den stilen själv.

Rough translation: "Modernism is something one does to other people. One definitely cannot live in [housing of] that style oneself."

Herodotus is so hilariously Greek. From Tom Holland's translation of the Histories:

There followed next a massive escalation of what until then had essentially been nothing more serious than a bout of competitive princess-rustling - and the fault was all the Greeks'. Or so the Persians claim, at any rate - for they point out that long before they ever thought of invading Europe, it was the Greeks who invaded Asia. Granted, the Persians acknowledge, stealing women is never acceptable behaviour; but really, they ask, what is the point, once a woman has been stolen, in kicking up a great fuss about it, and pursuing some ridiculous vendetta, when every sensible man knows that the best policy is to affect an utter lack of concern? It is clear enough, after all, that women are never abducted unless they are open to the idea of it in the first place.

Who in their right mind would want to boil meat of any kind in a hot spring? Must have been an unpleasant meal.

The Sir Lawrence voyage through the Western Isles brought the travellers to Staffa, where their descriptions of what they learnt to call Fingal’s Cave were soon lapped up by audiences eager to learn of volcanic marvels. Hebrideans impressed Banks less. Nor, initially, was Icelandic hospitality better, since the expedition was at first taken to be a raiding party of pirates. But soon Banks’ group met with a warmer welcome: his servants were so gorgeously uniformed that islanders found it hard to tell gentlemen from underlings. They visited the volcano Hekla, lava samples gathered and the astonishing geyser visited, where Banks arranged for a ptarmigan he had shot to be boiled in the hot spring [emphasis mine].

Banks and the Icelanders impressed each other. There were honorific odes, feasts of cod and shark and collections of Icelandic literature and flora shipped home to London. Banks had Hekla and a map of Iceland on his visiting card and ‘Baron Banks’ became a favoured toast when Icelanders and British visitors met. During the Napoleonic Wars, which involved conflict between Denmark and Britain, Banks often recommended either the annexation of the island or its occupation. Ever since, romanticised appreciation of Iceland’s marvels has been tangled up with similarly challenging political and environmental issues.

Source

Twenty-three-year-old Chantal Tsesi woke to the sound of pre-dawn gunfire. Soldiers marched into her home carrying machetes and told her exactly what they were going to do. "Today we are going to cut off your arm," one of them said. She feared for her six-year-old son, the only other person with her in the house. "They cut off my arm," Tsesi told The UK Independent's Eliza Griswold in 2004. "They cooked it, while they were drinking our mandro [traditional beer], and ate it with the rest of the beans and rice." She added, "They told me they were going to find my husband and eat his heart."

Great article on the enduring value of the lecture.

But lecture attendees do lots of things: they take notes, they react, they scan the room for reactions, and most importantly, they listen. Listening to a sustained, hour-long argument requires initiative, will, and focus. In other words, it is an activity ... No matter how fast-paced the world becomes, listening will remain essential to public dialogue and debate.

Hilarious letter from a reader to The Economist (cited in the paper's style guide):

Sir
At times just one sentence in The Economist can give us hours of enjoyment, such as "Yet German diplomats in Belgrade failed to persuade their government that it was wrong to think that the threat of international recognition of Croatia and Slovenia would itself deter Serbia."

During my many years as a reader of your newspaper, I have distilled two lessons about the use of our language. Firstly, it is usually easier to write a double negative than it is to interpret it. Secondly, unless the description of an event which is considered to be not without consequence includes a double or higher-order negative, then it cannot be disproven that the writer has neglected to eliminate other interpretations of the event which are not satisfactory in light of other possibly not unrelated events which might not have occurred at all.

For these reasons, I have not neglected your timely reminder that I ought not to let my subscription lapse. It certainly cannot be said that I am an unhappy reader.

Willard Dunning

To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

As a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse. Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom.

Around 8:05 a.m., the Hawaii emergency employee initiated the internal test, according to a timeline released by the state. From a drop-down menu on a computer program, he saw two options: “Test missile alert” and “Missile alert.” He was supposed to choose the former; as much of the world now knows, he chose the latter, an initiation of a real-life missile alert. […]

Around 8:07 a.m., an errant alert went out to scores of Hawaii residents and tourists on their cellphones: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” A more detailed message scrolled across television screens in Hawaii, suggesting, “If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a building or lay on the floor.”

As John Gruber of Daring Fireball puts it, "this is just terrible, terrible user interface design."