For example, Gmail feels compelled to protect me from myself by insisting on scanning all of my mail attachments for the big bad “viruses” that they might contain.  This is a huge waste of my time.  First of all, I think I’m competent enough not to download and execute sketchy attachments from people I don’t know.  More importantly, even if I did execute attachments irresponsibly, they’re not going to do anything to my Ubuntu computer.  Maybe the virus scanner should check which operating system the user is running before it wastes everyone’s time protecting Linux from a non-existent threat.

If Gmail were reasonable, it would at least give users the option of turning off its malware-scanning function.  But since Google thinks it knows better than me what I need, it’s entirely impossible to disable this nonsense.

Gmail also forbids the attachment of file types that it thinks might be dangerous.  Of course, rather than actually analyzing the contents of an attachment to determine the hazard associated with it, Gmail just looks at the file extension.  In other words, if I wrote a malware script named gmailblows.exe, I wouldn’t be able to attach it to an email.  But if I renamed the script to gmailblows.exe.txt, it would be a perfectly safe attachment, according to Google’s state-of-the-art virus scanner.  On the other hand, if I try to send a legitimate file whose name ends in ‘.exe’, Gmail will block the message, no matter what’s in the file itself.

Gmail also frustrates me because its integration into Evolution, the mail client that I prefer, leaves a lot to be desired.  It works alright about 65% of the time, but it occasionally becomes really slow for no discernible reason.  It also does a bad job keeping my folders in sync, and the ‘Trash’ directory is an unstable mess.

In part, Gmail’s poor performance under Evolution can be blamed on the Evolution developers, who should spend some time figuring out why it hangs arbitrarily, etc.  That said, every other IMAP mail service that I’ve used in Evolution–and I’ve tried at least a half-dozen–has worked fine.  The reason for Gmail’s exception is that, instead of implementing the IMAP protocol the way everyone else does, Google concocted a bastardized version, which it has yet to document sufficiently.  As a result, it’s hard to make Evolution work properly with Gmail.

If Google wanted to practice what it preaches, it would develop its software in accordance with standards and, even if the source remained proprietary, at least provide decent documentation.  Of course, if Google took steps to make Gmail work better with offline clients like Evolution, fewer people would use the Web-based version, meaning they’d miss out on all the advertisments that Google generates for them by reading their email.  And if privacy invasion and exposure to consumerist advertising weren’t part of the email experience, where would society be?

1. This site now gets more than a thousand unique visitors a month, 99.5% of whom are attracted by the ndiswrapper database that I jacked from the Google cache a few months ago.  Most of the traffic comes thanks to the Debian wiki, which links here.  I’m glad burnthesorbonne.com is finally serving a useful purpose by helping Linux users find the appropriate drivers for their wireless cards.

Of course, there are very few wireless cards that aren’t natively supported by Linux now, so most people shouldn’t be using ndiswrapper at all.  But I guess it’s still a viable option.

2. Microsoft thinks that more people are running Linux than OS X on computers at home and work.  That’s pretty interesting, although I suspect the data is based on an international survey, and Macs remain dominant in “developed” countries.  In any case, I’m glad to see the arbitrary dichotomy of “Mac vs. PC” finally split open to allow alternative operating systems into the discussion.

3. Baltimore is colder in the winter than I was led to believe.

4. Someone should write a book about how eighteenth-century European militaries resisted Enlightenment thought.  Lots of people have already written books explaining how reason and order shaped ancien-régime warfare, but I think it would be easy to refute their theses.  For example, mathematically precise formations were characteristic of the Swedish army in the Thirty Years’ War, quite a while before the Enlightenment is supposed to have begun.  I also don’t think the notion of limited warfare during the eighteenth century, which most people attribute to the influence of the Enlightenment, is accurate; after all, do you think Voltaire would have written the rape-and-pillage scene at the beginning of Candide if eighteenth-century warfare was as pretty and restrained as most authors have supposed?

5. Apparently the humanities are dying, so there may soon be no money left to pay people to write about eighteenth-century warfare.  That’s sad.

In case you don’t know, Birthright is a program that sends young Jews, mostly Americans, on ten-day vacations to Israel.  Thanks to the donations of wealthy Zionist activists, they get to go at absolutely no cost.  In exchange, the Zionist establishment gets a chance to instill in diaspora Jews the sense that Israel is totally awesome, never does anything wrong and is only criticized by as a result of anti-Semitism.

As you might suspect, Birthright is a bunch of racist nonsense, right down to its name.  If I suggested that it were my “birthright” to ride in the front of the bus, for example, by virtue of being born white and Christian, that would be pretty racist.  But apparently it’s totally acceptable for Zionist Jews to suggest that the fact of being born Jewish gives one the right to do something that’s manifestly forbidden to millions of other people, by the fact of their failure to be born Jewish.

Indeed, while thousands of ignorant American teenagers get shipped off on all-expense-paid partying trips to Israel every year thanks to the hard work they did being born to Jewish parents, thousands of Palestinian teenagers whose grandparents lived on the land visited by Birthright groups until it was ethnically cleansed by Zionist Jews can never go back, even if they paid their own ways.

I wish I lived in a country where privilege were determined by what you do, rather than by who your parents are.

Lest the reader think that this grievance was inspired by a single bad experience, I should point out that such an assumption is incorrect.  I’ve had my time wasted at the self-checkout at least three times in the last month.  This is especially frustrating because, not having a car, I can only buy what I can carry with me for eight blocks, meaning that I have to go grocery shopping and face incompetent people trying to check themselves out quite frequently.  I’ve already wasted enough of my life on incompetence; I don’t have time for people who don’t know how to operate self-checkout machines.

In other news regarding my unremarkable life, some kids decided to mug me a couple weeks ago.  Not content merely to demand my money, they felt a need preemptively to hit me in the head.  This happened very close to my house, which is not supposed to be in a particularly ‘bad’ neighborhood, at 4:30 in the afternoon.  Consequently, I now hate Baltimore, and specifically the portion of its population that feels a need to assault and rob graduate students in the middle of the day.

If you want to rob undergraduates, I’m all for it–after all, the university already screws them (or, more likely, their parents) out of tens of thousands of dollars each year that they willingly give up in exchange for a pretentious education.  But I barely make enough money to pay my rent; I don’t have much left over to donate involuntarily to underprivileged teenagers.  These people should get a job, not rob me.

Moreover, the whole point of participating in the social contract is that it’s supposed to protect me from arbitrary violence.  It clearly fails when I can’t walk on my own street in daylight without worrying about having my skull broken every time I pass a group of teenagers on the sidewalk.

Maybe Baltimore should build a wall between its good and bad neighborhoods in order to keep these people away from me.  It works for the Zionists; why not Baltimore?

The event consisted of two individuals giving their opinions on the conflict.  One of them was Anna Baltzer, whom I helped bring to Cornell a few years ago.  She’s extremely intelligent, experienced and not too politically radical.  It also helps that her grandparents were Jewish Holocaust refugees, so it’s harder for her enemies to dismiss her as an anti-Semite (not that they won’t try) when she says bad things about the occupation of Palestine.  You should go see her if she’s ever near you.

The ‘pro-Israel’ speaker was some guy named Ariel Roth, although you’re apparently supposed to call him ‘Dr. Roth’ in honor of his having earned a Ph.D.  Everyone who calls himself a doctor for having a Ph.D. should be incarcerated.  But this man especially deserves to be incarcerated, because his argument was this:

“I served in the Israel Defense Forces and personally helped to perpetrate the occupation of the West Bank.  The things that we did to those people made part of my soul die [he literally referred to his 'soul dying' during his experiences in occupied Palestine].  But if committing brutal human-rights abuses [he also literally spoke of 'brutal human-rights abuses'] is what it takes to have a Jewish state, I’m all for it.”

This is an extremely interesting, and equally disturbing, argument.  Most Zionists tend to insist that the occupation is a big party for Palestinians, that Israeli soldiers are renowned for respecting human rights, and that claims to the contrary are obviously just anti-Semitic nonsense, even when they’re made by Israeli Jews.

Mr. Roth was similarly candid regarding the historical narrative, admitting that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes in order to ethnically cleanse Palestine and make room for Jews in 1948.  He said that if he were an Arab, he would have rejected the U.N. partition plan too.  And he didn’t even dispute Ms. Baltzer’s assertion that Israel was the aggressor in 1967.  But he insisted that as a Jew, he didn’t care too much about these historical injustices, because as long as Jews are safe, that’s all that matters.  Perhaps he chose this strategy because he was speaking at a Jewish college in front of a mostly Jewish audience, but I was quite shocked nonetheless to find a Zionist so comfortable with public declarations of his racism.

I don’t think that Ariel Roth is an idiot — after all, he has a Ph.D., which makes him a certifiable mega-genius.  I thus am led to conclude that he knew very well what his rhetoric was doing, and had carefully constructed his arguments.  Instead of denying all of the charges against Israel, he was proud to admit that he’s a Jewish supremacist and could care less about anyone and anything not Jewish, hence his unconditional support of Israel.

If only AIPAC would exercise such candor and admit that its members are just a lot of racists, the world would be a much better place — and perhaps I’d finally be able to live in a country that no longer dedicates the largest amount of its foreign aid to the decimation of an Asian people who had the terrible luck of being chosen to pay the price of European anti-Semitism.

I’ve never liked banks very much.  I think there’s a lot of corruption inherent in the principles of finance: rich people get richer by exploiting the fact that they have money to begin with and you have none.  Moreover, rich people don’t actually do anything in the process besides count their money, while the rest of us work (or go to graduate school, where no one really works, but it’s easy enough to create the pretense of working).

If someone robs a bank by exploiting the fact that he has a weapon and the bank doesn’t, he would go to jail, but exploitation of me by the bank is perfectly acceptable–or, indeed, not only acceptable but celebrated, since we’re all supposed to believe that life was not worth living before the development of mercantilist economies and international financing.

Obnoxious people like to tell me that the rich people are doing society a swell favor by allowing normal people to indebt themselves enormously in order to buy stuff that they don’t need and can’t afford.  I guess that credit can be useful sometimes, but it can also be very destructive.  Why don’t we build a financial culture where people buy stuff only when they can afford it?

Also, excessive interest rates are supposed to be justified by the risks that our wealthy friends bravely take in order to provide us the opportunity to borrow money from them.  In fact, it’s clear that rich people face no risk, since the government will nicely compensate them for defaulted loans.  In other words, if you’re born rich and go into banking, you can’t lose.

Early-modern Europe, to which this discussion is of course bound to lead, provides several useful examples of how banks are meant to be treated.  In particular, Philip II of Spain is a good example.  Philip liked to borrow tons of money in order to fight the English, Dutch and other assorted enemies, then default on his loans and tell his creditors to just deal with it.  He got away with this at least three times.  I guess you can do these things when you’re in charge of the world’s largest empire, which makes it hard for the banks to foreclose on your house, et cetera.  The world needs a new Philip II.

Louis XVI also admirably defaulted on his loans after the unfortunate Seven Years’ War, screwing over a lot of rich people who had loaned him money.  Despite this, he managed to get more cash a few years later when it came time to intervene in the War of American Independence.  He also avoided bankruptcy in the 1780s by having Necker cleverly cook the books, which worked pretty well until the Revolution, after which Louis was dead anyway, so his debts (which eventually got paid off by confiscating and selling Church property, incidentally) didn’t matter much to him.

So the lesson is: great world leaders borrow money, don’t pay it back, and the banks just have to get over it, not get bailed out by the government.  If more people would read their early-modern European history, they might start applying its teachings and creating a society where it’s a little harder for enormously rich people to remain enormously rich without doing anything.

If you don’t believe me, try to remember way back in 2006, when the Democrats ‘took back Congress’ and everyone said, “holy crap, now we can finally end the war, stop blowing lots of money on useless stuff, no longer make cliché threats about moving to Canada, et cetera, et cetera.”  Then the Democrats didn’t actually do anything besides pander to the Zionist lobby (which was only a change insofar as the Democrats pandered more than the Republicans had), so everyone shifted their messianic hopes to the 2008 presidential election in the belief that it will be the one that saves the world.

I hate the American democratic system in general, because it ensures that I only have two real choices for anything, neither of which ever represents more than 10% of my interests.  As far as I can tell, this is the only country in the world where people have to put up with such a sham.  Even the French have managed to engineer a multiparty political system based on compromise and coalitions, meaning that votes actually matter even if they’re not cast for one of the two leading parties.  In this country, where neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have ever had to think about engaging the agenda of a third-party group in two hundred years, you may as well not vote at all unless you’re going to vote for one of the two front-runners.  This is pretty deplorable, and almost makes me wish that I were French, which is a pretty extreme statement.

I especially hate presidential elections and all of the hackneyed hype about ‘getting out the vote’ because, having lived in New York my whole life until a month ago, and now as a resident of Maryland, I am quite aware of the regrettable reality that, even if I were presented with meaningful choices in the presidential election, my vote would have absolutely no relevance, since New York and Maryland always go Democrat.  We shouldn’t even bother holding elections for the president in these states.  Indeed, I bet that we could send a few kids to college if we relieved ourselves of the costs associated with paying seventy-year-old women minimum wage to supervise polling places/eat a lot of donuts on election day.  I think we can all agree that our public money would be better spent on sending kids to college than on administering an election in states where everyone has already known what the outcome is going to be for the last fifty years.

It’s things like this that lead me to spend all day escaping reality by reading about Irish Jacobites in Louis XIV’s army, instead of doing something that matters.

I thought at the time that these individuals were all just old and crazy.  It’s recently come to my attention, however, that there are lots of people in France who genuinely believe that the Bourbon dynasty should and will be restored.  The current heir to the throne, Louis XX Alphonse of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, even has his own website, royaute.org–which must have been a pretty hard domain name to come by.  For those of you who don’t read French, here are some of the more ridiculous assertions on that site:

Comment oublier que la plupart des grands édifices artistiques et culturels qui font, aujourd’hui encore, le renom de la France, ont été créés, protégés et encouragés par nos rois ?

How can we forget that the greater part of the grand artistic and cultural edifices to which France owes its modern renown were created, protected and inspired by our kings?

Indeed, how can we forget that in a political system where power is illegitimately consummated and monopolized in one man, that individual is responsible for everything produced by the adherents of the political system?  Nevermind thinking about how much more productive French society might have been had individuals enjoyed the liberty of creating and producing of their own volition, without relying on the arbitrary patronage of the descendants of barbaric warrior chiefs.

La  mémoire  nationale  est  en  crise. Au  moins est-il  urgent, sauf  à se dissoudre  et à disparaître – hypothèse qui n’a rien d’absurde au regard de plusieurs indices, notamment démographiques – qu’ils prennent une vraie conscience de ce qu’ils sont dans la longue durée et qu’ils partagent en commun le miracle singulier de leur histoire nationale.

National memory is in a crisis.  It is urgent, to prevent it from dissolving and disappearing…that [the French] realize what they are in the grand scheme of things, that they understand the singular miracle of the national history that they share.

Take note, French people: in the grand scheme of things, your only value is that you used to be ruled by some kings who got deposed a while ago.  Beyond that, it’s obvious that France is morally, culturally and historically bankrupt.

Louis XX also links to the site of the Cercle Henri IV, which, besides apparently being designed by a seven-year-old, is equally absurd.  For example, it has a “question-response” section (which doesn’t actually have questions, just responses to presumed questions) that would make the opponents of the Second Vatican Council quite proud:

La Royauté désigne la qualité, la fonction de Roi : le fait d’être Roi. Ce concept se trouve incarné dans la personne du Roi qui est le lien entre Dieu et son Peuple.

Royalty designates honor, the function of the King: the fact of being King.  This concept is enshrined in the person of the King, who is the link between God and his People.

Shocking.  I thought that everyone grew up and stopped believing such nonsense a long time ago, but apparently not.

C’est un principe sacré qui ne meurt jamais : «le Roi est mort, vive le Roi».

It’s a sacred principle that never dies: “the King is dead, long live the King.”

This logic is incoherent and defies analysis: “[insert ridiculous quote here that doesn't make sense in the context yet sounds intriguing]”

[S]i le Roi est catholique, les Français ont leur LIBERTÉ de CONSCIENCE.

If the King is Catholic, the French people enjoy their FREEDOM of CONSCIENCE.

Sure, as long as the French people are all Catholic too.  Otherwise, the Huguenots would probably assert that they did not really enjoy much freedom of conscience.

Nous dirons qu’une monarchie est la GARANTIE de CONTINUITÉ, d’UNITÉ, de DÉFENSE du bien commun, de STABILITÉ, puisqu’un Roi est éduqué dans cette voie dès son plus jeune âge.

We aver that a monarchy is the GUARANTEE of CONTINUITY, of UNITY, of the DEFENSE of the common good, and of STABILITY, because the King is educated in these pursuits beginning in his youth.

Apparently kings are the only people capable of learning how to govern.  Instead of choosing governors based on merit, we should choose them based on how much they are related to the Capetian, Valois or Bourbon dynasties.

—

The absurd people who created those websites are a good example of why the revolutionaries should have gotten rid of all of the aristocracy and royalty in the 1790s instead of letting them escape to Germany and Spain and Italy.  You have to nip these people in the bud, or they keep creeping back up to try to restore the monarchy and things, which causes no end of problems–they kept coming back in the nineteenth century, and that was no good.  If only Georges Danton were still around, perhaps we could deal with the monarchists once and for all.

What we should commemorate is the battles of Vienna, Malplaquet and Brandywine, which occurred 325, 299 and 231 years ago today, respectively.  You should think about how different your life would be if: 1) Jan Sobieski and the Poles (along with some Germans) had not prevented the Ottoman takeover of central Europe by saving Vienna from the Turks; 2) Malplaquet had gone better for the English and friends, who might have managed to keep the Bourbons out of Spain if it had; or 3) the Americans had won at Brandywine (actually, probably nothing would have changed if Brandywine had not been a British victory; Brandywine is not so important when put into perspective).

On the topic of historical battles, it should be noted that military history is falling apart in America.  Whenever I’ve tried to think about doing a project on military history, I was usually encouraged to think about cultural or social history instead, since that’s what’s supposed to be important these days.  This is unfortunate, because we should study all kinds of history, without prejudice to the types that best complement ideological agendas.

At the same time, the fascists responsible for bringing us “social networking” have managed to inspire dumb people with the belief that, thanks to the newfound “interactivity” of the Internet, their opinions matter.  Such fallacious convictions are illustrated, for instance, by a facebook group calling itself “People against the New Facebook System,” whose waste of an html file I copied here. Here are the highlights of its groundbreaking work:

Let those who run the facebook know how you feel. You can sign this petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/ada4305/petition.html , or you can send feedback to the owners of the facebook through the send feedback button

“Those who run the facebook” could care less how you feel as long as you keep clicking ads.  Too many losers subscribe to the belief that the facebook administrators work out of the goodness of their hearts to create a delightful “social-networking experience” for idiots around the world who have nothing better to do than post grammatically invalid messages about how totally wasted they were last night lol on their friends’ walls.  The possibility that facebook is run by penurious fascists interested in nothing more than money, and who have presumably introduced the New Facebook System after carefully calculating that it will generate more profits, chronically escapes too many people.

In addition, no one sane believes that signing an online petition accomplishes anything.  These people apparently think that the individuals who own facebook are going to say, “Oh no, less than one percent of our users have signed a petition (mostly with first names only) on a third-party website expressing opposition to the NFS.  God help us if we don’t heed their warnings and revert to the old interface immediately!”  I hope that someday, the people who think that online petitions are in any way relevant will grow up to realize that no petition on the Internet, and for that matter no petition in general, has ever effected meaningful change.

***CONGRATULATIONS! We have won a major, global victory! The official implementation date for the new facebook has been pushed back to September 27th!

Holy crap!  The release of the New Facebook System has been delayed for unspecified reasons, and we can now claim a major, global victory!

First of all, it’s entirely unclear how this success, even if it could be definitively linked to the hard work of People against the New Facebook System, is “global.”  Second of all, the last real major, global victory was in 1945.  These people need to read some books.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO VENT YOUR FRUSTRATIONS ON OUR WALL OR DISCUSSION BOARDS! WE WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU PREFER ABOUT THE OLD FACEBOOK AND WHAT PROBLEMS YOU ARE HAVING WITH THE NEW LAYOUT!

FRUSTRATION ONE: IF YOU CAN’T USE THE CAPS-LOCK KEY RESPECTFULLY, YOU SHOULD CONSIDER DOING A FAVOR TO THOSE AROUND YOU BY CUTTING OFF YOUR HANDS.  Moreover, anyone older than four should realize that the place to lodge grievances against the New Facebook System is with the facebook administrators.  Whining and crying about how overwhelmed you are by having to learn to use a slightly new interface is for naught unless you do so in the presence of people who actually have power.  If the twelve-year-olds who created People against the New Facebook System had the power or competence to do anything besides whine, they wouldn’t have had to pollute the Internet with their group in the first place.

I seriously worry that every day brings me closer and closer to a world where the Internet becomes so full of stupid, ignorant people that I have to give it up entirely.