"It's Only Treason If You Lose…

"…and I didn't lose, it was stolen from me."

— Teh Orange Menace

• When one builds and maintains organized crime's favorite no-questions-asked low-commission-per-transaction fencing operation pawn shop, one'll eventually have to answer to Dah Man. This miscreant is either lying through his teeth, or so morally/ethically defective, that some "corrective action" is necessary; the key question is what corrective action, and that's a hard question thoroughly deflected by everyone's public posturing. Distillation of a certain compound from castor beans is a kewl kitchen science experiment… and potential terrorist act and war crime; the former is no justification for the latter, only a post hoc rationalization.
• This guy might be next. OK, probably not next; given the timeline of the previous sausage link, we should look for hints of investigations (into something criminal or quasicriminal) and such some time in early 2031 — mark your calendars now! In this instance, the main deflection is a single word: "Learn." They keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it does (for electronic processors, especially Von Neumann-pipelined processors however massively parallel-linked). Or, more likely, it does, but they're either intentionally or unconsciously in denial (PDF); that just leaves bargaining, depression, and acceptance to go before the grieving can begin.
• I might well grieve for opportunities lost, but I won't grieve for the gatekeepers thrown out of work as literary festivals and nineteenth-century-commercial-model periodicals of all kinds disappear. Nobody is asking the obvious question: cui bono (hint: probably not the kneejerk reaction)?
• The pretense of nonnormative evaluation of facts, of the apolitical/nonpartisan nature of searching for answers {freewall}, actually does nobody any good. "Searching for answers" is inherently normative in that it implies that what is already known (and, more to the point, assimilated) is not a complete description of reality. IMNSHO, that's a good normative baseline; in the eyes of theocrats and those whose power (and often personal identity) are directly tied to avoiding change, not so much. But in this sense, the laws of thermodynamics are "normative" — and it really helps to understand, or even just acknowledge, the fuzzy boundary between "technology" and "science"…
• The problems with illusory neutrality in the search for knowledge pale next to illusory knowledge in the search for power. The key assumption behind this remarkably ignorant editorial is simple: That there are clear, unmistakeable, and most importantly policy-directing answers to be had in the first place — and that these editorial writers have them (even if they're not revealing them yet). As (fictional character) Lord Marbury said, "It is about religion, and I can assure you that they do not share our fear of [thermonuclear] bombs." Or of bigotry.

  Unless and until the West — and, most especially, the descendants of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England, and France, and the Ottoman Empire, and to a lesser but still significant extent Czechia and Ha'am — acknowledges that the map is not the territory, that Jerusalem is the City (and the City), the illusion that some single, superior solution exists will remain disturbingly persuasive. The argument will remain which one, when the real problem is the underlying religious bigotry overlaid with ethnic disdain — and the inherent failed-state destiny of every theocracy ever (including all religion-restricted governments not headed by formal members of religious hierarchies). It's important to remember that ethnographically, all descendants from the Levant are "Semitic," despite the self-defeating reflexiveness of how that term is used in the West; thus, my advocacy not of a two-state solution, or a one-state solution, but a zero-state solution. Merely establishing a recognized polity does nothing regarding the underlying problems, especially when the previous/inherited "solution" involved intentionally creating more problems for someone else while deflecting attention from one's own… antisemitism. An eighteenth-century imperial midset led to failures of imagination in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Echoes of calls to prioritize the interests of "Real Americans" (largely based upon whose Protestant Caucasian ancestors were allowed to immigrate and when) are entirely intentional. So is the calling out of the descendants of Col McCormick for the same.

Losers!