Atrocities -- a scrapbook

I had been thinking of displaying a set of pictures at my office, about the states of human conditioning which are often not thought about or talked about (for better or for worse) by people in general.

This evening, some sanctimonious comments from a friend about visual comparisons I was making between Omran Daqneesh another friend, have motivated me to increase the priority of this project.

The source photos here are from the Internet, of course, and they will be modified prior to the final installation.

Loss of limb and general gore has been deemphasised, since you really get those in all kinds of accidents. I think what people should always remember, regardless of the time of day, is that all these things happened intentionally, as a result of hate, fear, what have you, and generally were actuated by strongly intentional people. The existence of such people and the states-of-affairs that they perpetuate must be part of the consciousness of any educated society, its children and adults alike.

A friend said: Jerng, your infamous picture of the Syrian kid has a back story =P

The picture of the kid (Omran Daqneesh) was taken by Mustafa al-Sarout, a journalist who is a known associate of Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki - one of the rebel groups in Aleppo funded and armed by the US, at least 1,000 Zenki fighters were directly on the CIA payroll.

This "moderate" US funded group last month beheaded a child and posted the video to social media. (News link in comments, but no video or images in case my account gets reported, lol. It is easy enough to find for those inclined to do so.)

Russian airstrikes are key to reclaiming territory from rebel groups like these. The likely reason for the release and public dissemination of Omran Daqneesh's picture is to drum up support towards the US forcibly ending Russia's airstrikes in Aleppo.
Basically, the US is doing what it's always done for decades - they go in, fund and arm rebels or opposition parties in order to destabilize the government, there's a list of at least 20 countries where they've already done that. (edit: look up what they did in Indonesia)

Omran's picture is just the latest tool they're using.

An observer: "And the point is?"
Me: "We are bored by the subject."

Barbarian Fuckwits So Snoozin

Philistines everywhere.

One set of babarians learns how to download libraries and fails to realise that what most of what the libraries do doesn't fall under the domain of coding... which is properly the operation of microelectronics for the automation of information processing in abstract... information pertaining to disciplines they never encountered in school.

Another set of fuckwits never learnt that cooking is chemistry, and lives in a bubble where molecular gastronomy and specialty coffee are bastions of innovation.

Just kill me now. Hahaha. Haha. I suppose we pick our poisons.

The Real Goal of Teaching Kids to Code?

Teaching kids to code (A) is like teaching kids to repair cars (B). It (B) serves a purpose when there are a lot of mechanical engineering issues in the world to be addressed... but the value of mechanical engineering in general decayed over time as it was superseded by more abstract technology. One day (A) will be highly automated or supervenient on other skills, and (A) too will fall out of favour.

If you go farther upstream (lower level) on what both A and B supervene upon, then you're looking at the ability to understand language in a technical fashion (semantics, syntax, representation, hard relations, and fuzzy relations) (C), and you're looking at applied mathematics and statistics in general (D).

(C) and (D) further supervene on comprehension of the rules of logic (E1), and metalogic, the nature of semantic cognition (E2), pure mathematics and probability (E1), and epistemology (E2).

The classical Greek aristocrat studied grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the three primary skills of 1%-ers. Liberal arts - the trivium. Followed by arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, the quadrivium.

The classic approach is not far off... but the disciplines have been mutated a bit. I would argue that now you want to replace that with linguistics, cognitive science, pure math (E1), and the arts. As for the application part... that's dialectics, i.e. what the philosophy department (E2) does in general. Everything else nowadays is downstream from that.

E1 is more applied, but it's as high up in abstraction as you can for for engineering purposes. E2 is ontological, and humanistic, concerning itself with HTF does E1 work... where did it come from... are we sure we have the best possible grasp of it... are there alternative grasps, and how do we compare them, etc.