Messages

511

History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: History yays

« on: September 24, 2021, 01:04:54 AM »

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

Agreed, I wouldn't normally expect an archaeological excavation to be reported in Nature, but this is very much not a normal excavation. Analysing the debris must have required expertise well outside the usual archaeological repertoire, and the conclusion seems like exactly the sort of thing that would appear in Nature if it had been found by any means other than archaeology.

And it does seem like the analysis involves people from many different specialties, its not "a physicist has reinvented the field of epidemic modelling" or "a biologist has reinvented historical linguistics."

Some of the people on social media are complaining that the archaeologists are from two places on the edge of academe (Veritas International University in California and the non-accredited Trinity Southwest University in New Mexico), but almost all archaeology in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan is funded by sectarians.  That is not really any stranger than the fact that most archaeology in Denmark is funded by Danes!  Nation-states have an ideological commitment to seeing people who lived in their territory as their spiritual ancestors, and worshipers of the God of Israel have an ideological commitment to see the ancient Jews as spiritual ancestors.  And this paper seems to be independent from the archaeologists.

I may give the paper another read on the weekend but I don't have the expertise to evaluate most of the details.

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History, Science, and Interesting Information - The Great Library / Re: History yays

« on: September 23, 2021, 10:36:36 PM »

Wow, I had not heard of that one!

It seems like it is getting pushback on birdsite, but corporate social media and group blogs attracts a lot of "talking points for people with brains."  I am disturbed by the effect this has on our systems for building consensus based on testing claims, because people are speaking with their authoritative professional voice but not bothering to use those slow thoughtful ways of evaluating claims within their area of expertise.  Some of those pushbacks makes blatantly false claims about the article (no, the authors do not say Tall el-Hamman is biblical Soddom).  I hope some of those criticisms turn into actual blog posts with footnotes.

Nature is a very unreliable venue on archaeology and philology, but on first glance it looks like a properly formed article.

513

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 21, 2021, 04:55:35 PM »

Elections Canada has a good "results tracking" page https://enr.elections.ca/National.aspx?lang=e  Canadian bureaucrats are usually not good at timely sharing of data, but Elections Canada is.

The mail-in votes are counted separately so some seats may change hands over the next few weeks.  For example, Nanaimo-Ladysmith has a close three-way race and 8,000 ballots to count which is about 15% as many as the total the total of counted ballots for those three leading candidates.  Paul Manly the Green incumbent is currently in third but its possible that mail-in ballots will have different demographics than the votes cast in person.

The three mechanical challenges this election were that many mail-in ballots arrived at electors late or at the wrong address, and that since it was September many students had just moved and had trouble proving their new address. In Canada a lease or bank statement or car insurance will do fine as proof of address.  Elections Canada also chose not to hold polls on campuses, so suburban polls were clogged up with electors who had to try to prove their current address and make sure they were at the right poll for that address.

Probably the most significant result is that the People's Party of Canada did get 5% of the vote.  That brings them much closer to being a real party and not just Maxime Bernier's personal project https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/platform

Edit: here is an OK explainer of how voting by mail works in Canada https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/federal-election-2021/record-number-of-mail-in-ballots-means-final-election-results-could-take-a-while-1.5593216  Ballots can be sent in by mail or dropped off in a ballot box at one of the polls.

Edit: it may be significant that the Green Party got a seat in Southern Ontario (the arrowhead of aerable land between the Great Lakes).  Southern Ontario is Anglo Canada's London or New York + LA, its the tiny area in a large country which the deeply parochial chattering class sees as real, so representation there gets disproportionate attention in the national media.  OTOH, Annamie Paul only got 8.5% of the vote in her riding of Toronto Centre despite spending almost the entire campaign there, and that chattering class loved to gossip about infighting inside the Greens. 


Now here is a story: one of the candidates who is currently ahead in his riding was rejected by the Liberals two days before the vote over a 2019 charge of sexual assault https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/undecided-races-2021-federal-election-1.6185685

514

Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Warfare 1917

« on: September 18, 2021, 07:55:52 PM »

A comment on Bret Devereaux's blog reminded me of Warfare 1917, an elegant little game about the beginnings of the modern tactical system from Armor Games.  https://www.crazygames.com/game/warfare-1917  (their website at https://armorgames.com/search?q=warfare does not seem to have it any more, maybe because I previously saw it as a flash game)

You’re a commander, either British or German, fighting over a contested bit of front in 1917. You only know how to do three things.

1) Call for reinforcements
2) Call for fire support
3) Order your men forward to try to take the enemy line of trench, or die trying.

Now it did NOT have the race to the parapet bit, and there weren’t covered communication trenches to move between your lines, so it wasn’t a perfect simulation. But I did find that if everything worked out, it’s the way the article describes: You smash up the enemy trench line with your artillery, keep their heavy hitters like machine guns from moving, and your assault forces will almost always take the trench.

But your opponent is rarely so cooperative. While your guys are going over the top, he’ll likely as not launch his own artillery strike and now suddenly half your guys are dead and the remainder don’t have enough force to take the trench, even battered as it is. And, most importantly, THERE IS NO WAY TO CALL THEM BACK at this point. They either do or die, and the “die” is way more likely unless you send in reinforcements double-quick, but that means that if it fails, you’ve probably depleted your local reserves and are very vulnerable to counterattack.

515

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 16, 2021, 02:51:54 AM »

Its too expensive for me in hardcover in my current circumstances, but the Brits on this forum might be interested in this ethnography: Simon Akam, The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11 (2021)  I flipped through a physical copy, C.J. Chivers has an interview with the author.

516

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 15, 2021, 06:47:12 PM »

Hmm, I'd expect anti vaxx support to be quite evenly distributed rather than pooling in already conservative seats. It's something that spreads well via tech more than in person which tends to lead to more even distributions electorally.

I don't think that is the case in Canada.  While the Internet allows the idea to spread rapidly to new communities, to become popular  in one it needs existing fissures and distrust of authorities.  In BC there is a large unvaccinated population in the south-eastern valleys, which is why cases hvae been exploding there but not in Vancouver like they did during the first year of the pandemic.  I think in the USA some black populations are suspicious because of the history of doctors in the USA using blacks and prisoners and people in the US overseas territories as lab rats.  But as a comment to Grenier's post said, Bernier's "broad shallow" support is exactly the opposite of how successful new parties have been built in Canada since 1918.


Orange is the southeastern valleys ("BC interior"), purple is Greater Vancouver, red is the adjoining mountains, all dates in 2021


There is also a strong base for "restricting gatherings due to the pandemic is unacceptable" thinking in the prairie provinces. A lot of the aggressive protests against the prime minister seem to be in southern Ontario.


This random substack has an analysis of PPC voters which disagrees with some of the things I said above (although agrees that there is a remarkable consensus between the three major parties) https://theline.substack.com/p/matt-gurney-we-know-who-the-ppc-voters  Some other PPC policies like anti-immigration and explicit climate-change denialism (versus "make me carbon-neutral, oh lord, but not yet") are strongly Tory-coded.  Under First Past the Post, the rural areas with low vaccination rates tend to send NDPers or Conservatives to Ottawa.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 15, 2021, 05:52:19 PM »

I suppose that the one new thing in the last weeks of this campaign is that Maxime Bernier's People's Party of Canada is now polling at 4-8% nationally after he started to make nice with the anti-vaccine protesters.  Éric Grenier has some half decent analysis on his Substack.

Under First Past the Post, some people tell pollsters they will vote for a small party then pick a big party on election day, so unless the PPC gets a seat, or keeps enough support to be elegible for the debates in the next election, this will likely have no effect on results.  Its just possible that the PPC drains off enough support for the Tories to put them second in some close ridings, but I think its more likely that most of their votes will be in Tory safe seats.

Gerald Butts, the former Prime Minister's Office staffer who caused the SNC-Lavalin scandal, has been getting some work as a commentator. Obviously such a skillful, truthful, and nonpartisan person is an excellent authority for journalists to rely upon :headdesk:

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 14, 2021, 03:46:41 AM »

Today I voted in advance (walked over to a local high school with photo ID and a form which came in the mail and marked my ballot with a pencil stub).

More standard operating procedures: parties have volunteers dredge through candidates' social media histories and release the controversial bits when it is too late or forbidden for parties to nominate another candidate.  This time, targets included Conservative candidate Lisa Robinson in the Beaches-East York riding and the posts were on twitter.  She denies that the account was hers.

This is a big deal if you happen to be in one of the ridings where a candidate is targeted, but since the 2010s it hits about 1% of candidates in every election.  Before the web people dug up trash in other ways, they just had to go out and talk to people and sort through newspaper morgues.


So far, the increase in advanced voting and vote by mail due to the pandemic seems to have been less than expected (CBC). 


Oh, and a Liberal MP in Ontario has withdrawn his candidacy after being accused of sexual harassment by a staffer.  That suddenly puts that riding up in the air since the party which won last time now has no candidate and its too late to nominate a new one.  The candidate denies the allegations.  But after #meTo, "elected official accused of sexual misconduct" is a dog bites man story.  (In this post, bold marks the bits of a controversy which in a game about Canadian politics could be generated by a random-number generator, although to the people involved each is unique and important).

519

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 09, 2021, 11:09:11 PM »

I've been seeing some discussion of the election in my circles and social media timelines, almost all focused on Trudeau - usually a "this announcement is good but also very minimal compared to what's really needed" on any given topic. Although there was some more approving sentiment around a clip of him delivering a sharply worded put-down to some Covid-denier media group.

I actually only know two people face-to-face who talk about Canadian politics.

On one hand the policy convergence between the three major parties is a good thing, because most of the differences are debates about "is that the best way to spend that money?" or "would that policy achieve its stated objective?" rather than "are $minorityGroup people?"  Whoever is Prime Minister at the end of September, not much will change.

But on the other hand, the only new things to talk about are "WFT is going on inside the Geen Party of Canada?" and maybe "is Erin O'Toole really the moderate conservative of his platform?"  I guess Justin Trudeau got caught offering that $900 million contract to a charity slash company which had paid Trudeau family members generous speaker fees, but "Justin Trudeau is not the innocent reformer he claimed to be in 2015" was a theme of the last election.  There are big domestic issues like RCMP reform and Canadian participation in the wars in Syria and Iraq but I don't see much interest in them by the campaigns.

I might have one more post about platforms (the Greens are not releasing a proper one, just a series of policy positions which have not been submitted to the Parliamentary Budget Office for cost estimates).

Canadian media are focused on the unexpected rise of Erin O'Toole's Conservatives, because the Tories getting the largest number of seats would be different and unexpected.  (Its not clear that they could form government if there was a plausible coalition including the Liberals but not them, but Harper managed it and the parties will have no cash at the end of the month so you can imagine scenarios where they form government without too much handwaving).


Edit 2021-09-10: Looking at the candidates in my riding, the top four all seem like thoughtful people with a broadly materialistic world-view about policy (Elizabeth May is enthusiastic about being some kind of Christian).  Here are interviews with the candidates in the local daily paper, a Q&A about old-growth logging, and a short radio interview with the Green, NDP, and Conservative candidates.  As you can see, there is a lot of agreement about what issues locals are concerned about and in what direction things should change.  The problem is that the systems in parties and parliament and the old media get in the way of the thoughtful, well-meaning people who want to get things done.

Elizabeth May has a reputation for providing excellent services through her constituent office which is another of those issues that gets erased in the Ottawa and Toronto media

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 09, 2021, 07:26:42 AM »

As further evidence that this is a boring and stupid election, the Liberals are trying to use firearms policy as a wedge issue between L/C swing voters and a vocal minority of the Tory base. As I have said before, Canada has firearms laws which should be effective at reducing homicides on paper, but we are not so good at things like tracking where the guns used in homicides come from (or investigating reports that people with friends in the RCMP are stockpiling weapons after being banned from possessing them).  Reducing violence between drug gangs or reducing the flow of handguns from the United States is HARD, but banning another scary-sounding weapon is easy and works on people who don't follow firearms policy.

It also entrenches firearms policy as a partisan issue, and gives hunters and collectors more bureaucratic hoops to jump, but this election is about people and power not policy positions.  When we wanted to, we got data and found that changes in firearms law had reduced suicides as intended, but right now the government does not want clear evidence on questions like "what percentage of the firearms used in crimes were legally imported into Canada for civilian use?"
Edit: for the Liberals to accuse the Tories of not being tough on legal gun owners is exactly as creative as parties in a British election to argue about who would do the most for the NHS or for parties in a US election to appeal to the Revolution and the Founding Fathers - they keep doing it because it works, but if you pay attention to federal politics you have heard it all before and its unlikely to result in substantive change

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 07, 2021, 05:45:40 PM »

As I understand it Ghani pushed hard on building a single, functional Afghan National Army at the expense of warlords' forces and militias, but that project was only really going strong from the middle of the last decade and was badly hampered by corruption, so may have increased reliance on foreign support to hold off the Taliban - fatal when the rug got pulled.

I think quite a few militias in Iraq and Afghanistan were created by the foreign forces trying to boost their numbers (as in, they talked to people and said "we can give you arms and uniforms and salaries if you provide a hundred men").  Often they had some corporal give the new militia an Arabic or Pashtu or Dari name so they could claim it was indigenous.  And of course a lot of these militias turned to extortion, kidnapping, rape, and murder, but its hard to take back the weapons once you have handed them out and declared that you can't control the area without them.
Various sources are reporting that the new regime is selling or trading ground vehicles and aircraft to Iran, presumably in exchange for things the new regime can actually use like food and fuel.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 06, 2021, 04:35:07 PM »

Has anyone seen any commentary on Afghanistan in the past 10 years which believed the republic would last four years after the foreign troops left and was not an empty-headed pundit or a press release by those troops or the former regime?  People seem surprised by the fact of the fall and not just that it was a few months earlier than expected.

Eg. former Staff College teacher Gwynne Dyer, 6 July 2021

Everybody in the Afghan national army already knows that the war is lost. So the U.S. intelligence reports predicting that Ashraf Ghani’s puppet government (the term is not too harsh) could fall within six to twelve months of a U.S. troop withdrawal are too optimistic.

The last German, Italian and British troops left Afghanistan last week, and the last US troops are leaving right now, apart from some 650 soldiers to guard the American embassy and the airport. (Always hold the airport, because people lined up on the embassy roof waiting for the last helicopter out is a bad look.)

But Kabul may fall in a lot less than six months. The Taliban already hold at least half the country and they are currently taking new districts literally every day, including ones only an hour’s drive north and south of the capital. The army is just melting away, and the air force will be grounded within weeks once the foreign technical support goes home.

Yes, agreed on the confusion - the Taliban now claim to be in complete control of Panjshir - the Panjshiris still dispute this.
 

There is also the rumour that Pakistani aircraft are supporting the assault on Panjshir.  Since the Cuban Revolution its been notorious that the worst thing a minor power can do to the USA is humiliate it, and the USA does not need Pakistani supply lines into Afghanistan any more (the corrolerary of a geopolitical theorem first published in 1955).  So parts of the US government may try to hurt the Pakistani military regime in ways they could not when they found Bin Laden hiding just outside the Pakistani military academy.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Canadian Politics 2021

« on: September 04, 2021, 06:58:43 AM »

Possibly of interest: Alex Usher, a vaguely centre-right consultant and the only person commenting on higher education in Canada full time, is starting to analyze the parties' education platforms https://higheredstrategy.com/2021-pse-platforms-the-conservative-party/

and the CBC has a piece on one of the problems in Canadian politics, the housing crisis
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/checkup/how-affordable-is-your-housing-situation-right-now-1.6155647/measures-to-make-housing-more-affordable-wouldn-t-be-popular-with-voters-economist-1.6155683  It does not talk about all the money obtained in dubious ways overseas being flooded into Canadian real estate to get it into global capital markets.  That obviously drives up housing prices especially in British Columbia.

Canada faces real issues - a global pandemic, an authoritarian and unstable neighbour trying to get us into a fight with another authoritarian great power, tainted recreational drugs which are killing more people than the pandemic, climate change, people becoming homeless because of housing prices - and I wish our elections and political thinking were at all serious.


Due to infighting, the Greens have slipped to the same level in national polls as Maxime Bernier's hard-right People's Party of Canada, about 4% support.  Polls are very unreliable in Canada and national-level or provincial-level polls are useless, but I suspect the party will lose its second seat leaving MP and former leader Elizabeth May.  That would be a very bad thing for the party because I am starting to think that both the new leader and her need to be showed the door and a larger pool of figures needs to start doing the work.

The Greens only have candidates in 75% of ridings, and Annamie Paul has only campaigned outside the Toronto riding she wants to win once (and that was in another TO riding).  That makes sense for the internal power struggle within the Greens (a party leader with a seat would be hard to dislodge) but must contribute to the fall in national support.

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 03, 2021, 06:43:56 PM »

Between 2001 and 2011, a lot of people in Kandahar city were saying that Hamid Karzai was instrumental in inviting in the Talaban in 1994.  But the pot which was taken to the well one time too often was broken.

Fighting in Panjshir seems to be continuing, with both sides claiming significant successes: it's really impossible to tell what's actually going on. Pro-Panjshiri twittter accounts have reported territory gains and hundreds of Taliban losses, whereas pro-Taliban accounts claim that most of Panjshir is now under control. It's perhaps notable that the Taliban forces have suggested a ban on posting videos from the area, nominally for operation security reasons but this might also imply they're covering up a slightly less rosy picture than they'd like to portray.

There was the case of the Tigray revolt in Ethiopia a few months ago where the government occupied the cities, imposed a news blackout, and withdrew with its tail between its legs.  But I am honestly not trying to follow because Afghanistan has had far too many Anglos who don't even speak Dari (an easy language for English speakers) pronounce on its internal affairs.  In Afghanistan, the people (under the old definition) have spoken.  Because of that old definition, they probably made a very different choice than a poll of the whole population would have.

My impression (from random people on the Internet claiming to be Afghans, and quotes in news) is that there is very great confusion about what is happening even for people who speak the languages and have local contacts.  I am reasonably confident that the Taliban are not nearly so acceptable to the population in general as they were to the men with weapons and training, and that Hamid Karzai was one of the ones negotiating with the Taliban about what would replace the republic and the deputy treasury minister who walked into his office one morning to find out that the government had fled was not.

Edit: I think I am thinking of Ajmal Ahmadi https://nitter.eu/aahmady 

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Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Afghanistan

« on: September 02, 2021, 09:58:06 PM »

I'm not sure how many people know that the Taliban often spent more energy in the 2010s fighting Islamic State franchises than the former government and its foreign backers.  (Of course the Taliban had their own foreign backers in Pakistan, but that does not feature much in their English-language propaganda). 

I have seen an estimate that the Taliban was already collecting more taxes from cross-border trade than the former government was a few years ago.

I wonder what relations the new government will have with Iran which shares a border and a language with part of Afghanistan.

If I were a betting man, I would be interested in hearing the odds that Hamid Karzai is alive and free two years from now.  He is playing the Talleyrand game in a place much less nonviolent than Long 19th Century France.


Many people in the former government committed mass murder, serial rape, and other atrocities.  What approach will the new government take to them?  And how will they stop people from taking punishment into their own hands?


Dexter Filkins has an account of fighting and parleying in Afghanistan at the end of the post-Soviet phase of the civil war in 2001 https://scholars-stage.org/fighting-like-taliban/  Foreigners in the oughties also saw networks of washed-out fighting positions above the hulks of armoured vehicles, so there was some deadly serious fighting during the post-Soviet war too.