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6 Aug, 6 tweets, 2 min read
I can't believe China had this flag and just gave it up in favor of the current snoozefest. This dragon may be playing with a ball, but he eats "don't tread on me" snakes for breakfast. Image
Five thousand years of history and you stuck five stars on a red rectangle
Russia had a similar downgrade. They replaced this bad boy with factory seconds from the French flag store Image
The worst offender may be Romania. They had this one in the bag and decided instead to use the three primary colors in a flag that clashes with itself. Image
Full disclosure: this is my own country's effort.

"Flag's due at 5 PM, can't wait to see what you came up with!"
"Wait, *today*? Fuck fuck fuck. Okay." Image
The right-wing government of Poland has recently introduced a Flag Day so everyone can study the noble history of putting a red stripe next to a white one.

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Pinboard Profile picture
7 Aug
I attended one of these meetings (working on an article that later got spiked), listened to FBI, big tech, and privacy advocates all speak up, and was very impressed with how it was conducted. The issue is genuinely difficult. Alex Stamos's thread here is very much worth reading.
The ability to share images and video worldwide is unfortunately also a driver for child abuse. Every large site that lets people upload photos and video runs into this fact. The current arrangement (involving NCMEC, fingerprinting, and big tech companies) is a fragile tradeoff
The governance problem here is we have six or seven giant companies that can make unilateral decisions with enormous social impact, and no way of influencing those decisions beyond asking nicely for them to come talk to the affected parties before they act.
Read 11 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
6 Aug
There's a long tradition in the US media of treating Chinese government policy as subtle and inscrutable expression of grand national strategy, so it's particularly funny that the CCP put a guy in charge who is simply a Marxist-Leninist fundamentalist. wsj.com/articles/china…
Like, the answers are all spelled out in the official speeches, but they are so indescribably boring to read it creates a kind of armor against foreign analysis. So we see a lot of nugatory head-scratching about what the CCP's chess moves mean for tech, for markets, and so on
Sometimes as a journalist you just have to grow a pair and read the Party texts. If the Korean analysts can stand to do it, you have no excuse.
Read 7 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
4 Aug
If you ignore the ideological content of Jan 6 for a moment and look at the mechanics of the investigation, you get a good lesson in the threat social media poses to public protest. Retroactive forensic analysis in a surveillance society can have a powerful chilling effect
Two traditional aspects of protest are in tension—one is that it's a open display, and the other is that it's ephemeral. A world where police can track participants down years after the fact, maybe even after laws have changed, is a different world from one we've ever lived in
I think about this a lot in the context of Hong Kong, where someone was just put away for six years for displaying a political slogan that was chanted by millions of people over the course of 2019. That conviction wasn't retroactive, but it's just a small further step away.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
3 Aug
Hungarians being anti-immigrant is a great historical joke, since they themselves arrived from God knows where in Siberia and spent a good century inflicting misery across Europe before they got their wiggles out and bunkered down in the most defensible terrain they could find. Image
This is the kind of place you choose to live when you're nomadic horsemen who came out of the east to sack the shit out of Europe and don't want the playbook flipped on you by the next horde. They even hired Germans to build cities in the high passes, for early warning! Image
The other historical joke is that no one benefitted more from multiculturalism, tolerance, and ethnic pluralism than the Magyars, who punched way above their weight in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
1 Aug
Washington Post experts reinvent calculus! Image
Experts say descending elevator will continue to descend before it rises.
A bunch of Washington Post reporters who majored in English grasping for a way to explain that the pandemic is still getting worse, but not quite as quickly as it was before.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
30 Jul
No one ever mentions that McCain was shot down while bombing a civilian target in a densely populated city. The secretary's tribute here to what has become an American military tradition is fitting.
The targets McCain and his fellow airmen bombed had no military value; they took place hundreds of miles from where American soldiers were fighting. The purpose of the bombings was to inflict suffering on civilians severe enough to put pressure on the North Vietnamese government.
If in 1967 North Vietnam had bombed a power plant in Oakland we'd consider it the greatest war crime since Pearl Harbor. (There was in fact a nice short story based on such a premise, but I can't remember the author's name).
Read 6 tweets

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