Apple will now forestall implementation of its threat to inspect your private photographs and text messages, and eavesdrop on your Siri commands, for suspected kiddie porn. The entire infrastructure is wrong in principle, but critics of Apple’s plans have their own ideas of what “principle” might entail, and it always means “make sure my political enemies are harmed but my allies are protected.”

It was particularly risible to read that Apple’s surveillance mechanisms might be reused by some kind of authoritarian or repressive régime. Apple already is one of those. Its authoritarianism merely pleases the political biases of the far-left Apple press. [continue with: Apple already is a repressive régime →]

Hey, Retard! is what the game-changing E‑mail software from Basecamp is not called. Its name is just Hey.

The great Jason Fried of Basecamp, author of so many bestsellers on usability and the futility of meetings at the office, charges you a hundred bucks for the worst E‑mail software in three decades. Hey.com is the IBM PCjr of electronic mail. [continue with: Simpletons and slow children now have their own E‑mail software →]

Shawn “Toxic” Smith will bill you 200 bucks an hour for men’s therapy. (No less than that fee – for philosophical reasons, he states.)

Relationship Repair

I offer solution-focused couples therapy to eliminate hurtful, destructive patterns and create a loving and supportive relationship.

I dared to E‑mail Smith regarding an unrelated issue. He replied by calling me names and musing that a certain flavour of burden he imputes I am dealing with is my entire fault. He’s the hurtful one, yet I am deemed to engage in destructive patterns.

I infer that Smith will take your money and fake like he is nice and caring in the Frank Mackey manner, all the while shit-talking you behind your back. He’s willing to malign gay men he’s never met, so I put little past him. In no respect is this tolerable behaviour from any kind of analyst, let alone one who uses the title Dr. and boasts he is licensed.

Though I was only ever a listener, I recall better treatment from call-in shows on AM radio in the ’90s. Shawn T. Smith is indeed toxic, hurtful, and destructive, and he is a danger to any man seeking his help.

Lydia Perović (no relation) interviews a mainstay of this Weblog, Russell Smith, and gets everything wrong that could be gotten wrong, from facts to copy to mondegreens to ‘apostrophes and ‘quotation marks’.

The YA is largely targeted at young girls. And I know this form my son; there are now a lot of middle grade books aimed at boys. But now we’re moving into the YA phase. There’s almost none I can find. I’m reading him old, really problematic adventure books that he absolutely loves. Biggles. This is so English. Biggles is a series of stories about a First World War pilot and adventurer, written by a British army officer in the air force of the time. He wrote them in 1920s 30s, 40s, and it’s all upper class British “fighting the Hun and the Bosch” and daring-do adventuring and getting out of scrapes and escaping from behind German lines and it’s classist and xenophobic and tremendously exciting for a 12-yo boy. There are all kinds of stereotypes about ‘silly Frenchmen’ and ‘uptight Germans’ but it’s intra-European so it’s fine.

Is an inability to publish correct type and copy another reason why literature is dying? (Is such a death deserved, even merciful?)

Perović and Smith operate in a world where Reality Hunger was never written. Of no surprise whatsoever were Perović’s absent questions on plagiarism.

Boomers by Helen Andrews (Penguin, 2020) shows how little value now resides in signing a book deal with Penguin (even well before 2020). This thing was not fact-checked or in any sense vigorously edited. [continue with: This just in: Publishing still moribund →]

Vizmin and/or transgenderist malcontents paying good money to learn how to rat out their bosses, i.e., RyeHigh journalism students, have published an 8,100-word manifesto denouncing their own faculty.

Fortunately enough, the manifesto lists its signatories (which word these kids do not know). Place all these journalism students, and their co-conspirators, on lifelong blacklists; block them everywhere online; and circulate their names to others with hiring authority. In other words, launch preëmptive strikes. [continue with: Ryerson journalism blacklist →]

David Shields has a more galactic-sized talent even than I had apprehended if he can produce Reality Hunger (q.v.) and a dozen other books from a trash heap like this.

F. Lebowitz (q.v.):

We have way too much democracy in the culture and way too little in the society. But in order to make these judgements, you have to agree or believe that some things are better than others. Not “some people are better than others.” Not “some genders are better than others.” Not that some races are better than others. But that some writers are better than others. Some painters are better than others. Some composers are better than others. Because of course it’s true….

But judgments about music or writing or whatever, they’re purely subjective. You have to know a lot to make these judgements, and that makes people think you are arrogant because you think you know more than other people, even though it’s a fact that some people know more than other people.

No, some people are better than other people.