This is iOS 15 Safari dark mode. White text on white background. Does no one at Apple even use their own hardware/software? [1]
Let’s zoom in:
Yeah, no. Not even light gray on white. White on white.
File under the same heading as:
[1] Eat your own dogfood, as the kids say? Or not kids since that saying has got to be going on 40 now
[2] And you think I’m ever going to let iTunes Apple Music ever in a million years have read/write access aka Match aka Sync Library to my terabyte of music? Hahahahahaha. Some of that stuff is irreplaceable and not on any streaming library
[3] One for Mail, one for mds
[4] Because fuck you, that’s why
[5] Helpfully Safari left all the now empty Safari windows open, in different Spaces than they originally were, so Apple-tilde does nothing for Safari until you find them all and kill them with fire
There used to be all these Safari extensions that saved the state and resurrected it because Apple would regularly lose everything because you restarted, crashed, or failed to buy anything from iTunes for a month. I let them all go because they were also unreliable in unpredictable ways, and it seemed like Apple had fixed this finally. For about a year. I wonder if they are still around since they were sherlocked.
Tagged apple, iTunesI’m glad to see this blog post comment has caught on a little bit. It stunned me when I first read it, and now I’ve seen it in such disparate places as LGM, Jalopnik, and Charlies’s Diary [1] [2].
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
— Frank Wilhoit [3] , 20180321 crookedtimber.org
Read the whole thing, as the kids say:
There is no such thing as liberalism — or progressivism, etc.
There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law [4], conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation.
There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.
For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
[1] With and without attribution, or attributed incorrectly to the wrong FW.
[2] Maybe not so disparate, but I was surprised when I saw it in the Jalopnik comments with absolutely no push back that it was wrong. It’s apparently self-evident. It’s just whether you think it’s a desirable condition or not.
[3] This Frank Wilhoit, a musical composer, and seemingly pretty sharp fellow. However, he’s not that Francis Wilhoit, from subsequent comments which I can no longer dig up. Also he died in 2010, so unless it’s a nom-de-plume, or he’s posting from the grave, it’s a different Frank Wilhoit. Though from the very short Wikipedia entry, he seems like a good dude who might have said this. However, there should absolutely be credit where credit is due for this conception.
[4] “Bad money drives out good.”
I was raised on The Jetsons. I was promised flying cars, robot house cleaners, and jetpacks.
As a splinter GenX/Boomer [1], the color of sky in my youth was that of a television, tuned to a dead channel. The streets of LA were wet, and it rained and the buildings rotted and dripped.
I didn’t get any of that in this drought-stricken, smoky, orange-skied pandemic world.
The cars sound like Jetsons cars. They do figuratively fly down the streets, almost impossible to hear. But don’t actually fly.
The Camaros and Challengers and Mustangs sound like American Graffiti [2].
It remains true in all ages and all dystopias that you know the score, pal. You’re either cop, or little people.
[1] Douglas Coupland is my age. I don’t feel like a boomer [2]. I don’t care what demographers say about the year I was born. Curves don’t linearly determine economics or sociology (haha Laff). I didn’t get a pension, low house prices, a lifetime job, or a summer of love. I did get punk, grunge, alt-country, AIDS, Reagan, a 401k, antibiotic-resistant STDs, neoliberalism, end-stage capitalism, worthless startup stock options, OWS, and cheap college tuition. The collateralized tranche meltdown gave me a house and a dog and an old sports car.
[2] OK, boomer.
It’s one thing when a car tries to pass on a blind curve while you’ve going the speed limit on a 5% downhill grade and almost head-ons into the oncoming traffic just to get around you before a stop sign in 200 m. [1]
After decades on the planet, and especially the last four years, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised when people on bikes are assholes to other people on bikes… but I was.
And I suppose I’ll be a bit less surprised next time.
[1] This guy had a Larry Elder sign in front of his house for about 4 days before the election, and no days after. I guess that’s not something you’d want to be proud of. It fits right in with someone who’s willing to have a head-on collision because he can’t wait a few seconds (literally maybe five – I was going 29 mph and have the GPS to prove it) to get to the next stop sign. He didn’t stop at that stop sign, or the one before. So I don’t ever want to hear any shit about bikes not following the rules of the road. When the two-ton murder machines start following the rules of the road, or even begin to understand the concept of “right-of-way”, then I’ll stop doing Idaho stops, which ought to be legal.
Tagged bicycle, bike, shenanigans
I was once again listening to the dynamic climbing duo [1] while working out in the backyard [2]. Now they’re complaining that, if you roll up to one of the most popular crags in the US, in prime season, with four kids [3] and a huge posse, you get to be all pissy if the group that got there before you doesn’t want to let you and yours into the line-up.
The more stupid one ranted about isn’t it climbing ethics that everyone gets a turn? How dare they say, well, we got here first, and we have four people climbing this, so if you and all your crew takes a turn, we all get one burn and that’s it. Oh my god, how rude can these people who woke up early and got here before me be? I shall post a strongly worded 140 character twit about this. Or spend 20 minutes of an hour-long podcast crying about it.
Well, no. No it is not, and never has been. If you walk up to Nutcracker on a Sunday after a late morning brunch at the Ahwahnee, do you get a turn? No you do not. You go back to your Sprinter van, and get up earlier tomorrow, hipster.
If you walk up to the Grande Grotta at 10 am, should you be surprised when you find out there are already five people in line on the route you wanted to do? Should they let you in, given that a burn might take 40 minutes? Would you demand your rights as an American? Or would you skulk off and just find another damn route?
Because the rule is, and has ever been: First Come, First Serve, baby.
Even if they’re your draws [4]
At some point you get up earlier, or come later [5], if you don’t want to wait in line on a popular climb.
And oh by the way, the super boss climbers who wanted to get on the climb, and were super pissy and rude about it to the people who got there before them, still got to get on the climb before the end of the day. Just not when exactly they first wanted to. And though these super boss climbers who were pissy and rude were walking around like, well, I’d just onsight this, if you’d let me take your turn, peon, on the climb that you woke up early to get to, you peasant, the super boss climbers did not in fact onsight the climb, and had to come back the next day to try to send again.
But somehow that was the fault of the folks who woke up early to get on the climb they wanted to do, and not the fault of the people who rolled up late with four kids and who knows how many other people long afterwards, for not letting the late comers just jump in line and screw you and your needs and wants.
Really, is this how it is in Colorado? Because it ain’t like that anywhere else I’ve ever been. It wasn’t even like that in Colorado when I was climbing there. I know these are Famous Writers and Podcasters who have traveled all over the world and Climbed With Their Famous Friends Who Can’t Be Named At Sekrit Crags You Peons Aren’t Invited To, but to me they just sound like entitled jerks.
[1] it’s a motivating hate-listen
[2] because I don’t want to catch delta from the mouth-breathers at the local gym, which doesn’t even begin to enforce masking. When will Large SoCal City implement the same vaccine mandate that SF has? It’s a forgone conclusion that that’s where all sane places are headed. Why not bow to reality and implement it? Oh yeah, the same reason that hundreds of school kids are exposing themselves to disaster one block away now. We Must All Be Sacrificed for the God of Convenience and Capitalism.
[3] Climate change anyone?
[4] Well, maybe you get a little slack for that. But not infinite amounts.
[5] A little known fact: The best temps, and times, are often at dusk, so if you can hang around reading a book all morning, and time it right, you can be warming up, and getting your burns on your proj, when the sun is gone, the temps are dropping, the humidity is just right, and all the people who started climbing in the sun are smoked and have gone home and taken their annoying little rug rats and badly trained mutts, both of whom should be tied to a tree, back to the Sprinter van.
I killed my first Aedes mosquito today, around noon. It was full of blood, probably mine. I look forward to the return of yellow fever and dengue. Between contested elections, occasional insurrections, half the country taking dog heartworm medicine instead of a vaccine, the roads falling apart because no one wants to pay any taxes, and the probability of the next governor of this state being a anti-science, anti-vaccine nutcase with 13% support of the population, I think it’s safe to say I no longer have any first-world problems…
POSIWID, QotD 20210904
—Stafford Beer, 2001
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