It doesn’t matter how much stronger and smarter and better armed the Bad People are; they have to lose because they’re the Bad People. Nor does it matter how idiotic the plan the Good People decide on, the Bad People are required to make the mistakes that will enable it to succeed. When the chips are down, you know that Harry Potter will always manage to drop the One Ring from his X-wing into the cooling port of Mount Doom.

This sort of silliness makes for dreary storytelling, but I’m convinced that it can also cause serious cognitive disabilities. Children who are raised on a steady diet of this kind of schlock are apt to end up thinking that this is how the world works. If they get out into the real world and bloody their noses a few times, they generally learn better, but if they live in a society that doesn’t let them fail, they may well reach adulthood without ever encountering that salutary lesson. Instead, they are seduced by Stormtrooper Syndrome: the conviction that no matter what, you’ll inevitably win because you think you’re morally superior to your enemies.

Interesting piece from two months ago, primarily applying the above fallacy to Western governments’ strategies with the Russia/Ukraine war.

Survivors of the Stolen Generations now left unable to review records of they or their relatives’ experiences (including details of young children’s untimely deaths!) due to the cavalier way the archives were treated. Just outrageous.

Concerning story about the City of Buenos Aires’ efforts to have blanket coverage of CCTV cameras on the city’s streets, with facial recognition systems. The article talks about one man who was arrested and held in custody for six days when the system falsely identified him as a criminal from a part of the country he’d never even been to. It also points out that as a politically polarised country, the system runs the risk of being used for opponents of whoever’s in power and not just for “criminals”, and that the system already seems to be being used corruptly, with the logs tampered with to cover the culprits’ tracks.

A nonprofit startup called Archivi.ng is attempting to digitise every edition of every newspaper – 50 in all – published in Nigeria since 1 January 1960, the year of independence from Britain.

[…]

“Nigerian history is inaccessible online, and the greatest repository of that history is old newspapers,” says Fu’ad Lawal, the founder of Archivi.ng. “The newspapers from our history are rotting away in libraries and private archives, and our mission is to stop the erasure and recapture all the history before we lose them for ever.”

[…]

“The potential of having a newspaper archive since independence would allow the tracing of Nigerian history across 60 years in a country that has had 15 different leaders, five military coups, a bitter civil war, an annulled election, an interim administration and a brutal dictatorship,” [Allegra Ayida, a Nigerian doctoral researcher in history at Yale University] says.

Kazakhs and Kazakhstani citizens are increasingly reclaiming their national histories and rethinking their national identities in light of the imperial and colonial dimensions of Russia’s presence in Central Asia. Maqsat Mälik, a language activist who delivered a TedX talk on transforming the Kazakh language into the language of interethnic communication, told me “if the choice is between preserving our identity and reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the original language, I would rather preserve my identity.” Botakoz Kassymbekova, an assistant professor in modern history at Basel University, concurs: “Russian literature teaches us to love Russia and despise ourselves.”

An article about how the platform most libraries rely on for ebook lending (OverDrive, with its app Libby) is being increasingly “enshittified” over time, having been bought out by a vulture capital firm (KKR) three years ago.

So basically, the US Supreme Court has rolled back the protections people there have not to be discriminated against and denied service on the basis of their belonging to a “protected class” (i.e. race, gender, sexuality, etc.)… on the basis of a fake case, where the supposed gay man that the plaintiff wanted to discriminate against was actually married to a woman and completely ignorant as to this case that supposedly involved him? Considering the Supreme Court is notoriously picky about what cases they’ll hear, I wonder why they chose this completely made-up case to hear… 🙄

Pretty long but good essay on the importance of unstructured play to childhood (and adolescent!) development. It helps to develop creative thinking, negotiation skills, and all kinds of great stuff that you just don’t get through rote memorisation and practice exams. Over the decades, we’ve seen increasing pressure for kids to have more and more of their time consumed by studies and hyper-structured extracurriculars – this is just not good for kids, and we need to push back on it.

The various state and territory Public Trustees in Australia have been absolutely fleecing vulnerable people for all the money they can get their grubby mitts on. On top of that, gag orders in almost every jurisdiction make it illegal for victims of this state-sanctioned theft to speak out. Nonetheless, there’ve been LOTS of reports in recent times telling the stories of people who’ve been able to escape the system and the gag orders, and this is another one. Makes me so damn angry. Heads should roll.

I thought this was an interesting article about day-to-day life in present-day Ukraine. Even though there’s a war on people still have to go to work, and they’re expected to be productive even though a lot of the time they’re running on very little sleep thanks to nighttime Russian bombing raids.