Regrettable Acts – Page 13 – Splendid Isolation

As If I Needed Another

May 8, 2024 Kim du Toit Technology

…reason not to install the latest “upgrade” from Windoze: here it is.

Microsoft will soon begin pushing adverts into the Start Menu of Windows 11 with the inclusion of ‘recommended’ apps.

And why not? It’s where users are at their most vulnerable, so to speak: right at the beginning of the process. It’s like starting your car, but before the engine fires, you first have to listen to a 15-second advert for “recommended” tires, Bud Lite or windshield washer fluid. But of course, it’s being pushed as a helpful benefit:

Microsoft says the ads are aimed to enable users to find ‘some of the great apps that are available’.

That’s Microsoft all over: just trying to be helpful, as is someone who will pass you a bucket of lighter fluid instead of water when you’re trying to put out a house fire.

Although the update [KB5036980] is currently optional, it will soon roll out to all Windows devices within the coming weeks.

Of course it will — coercion is one of Microsoft’s major strengths. But:

Luckily, there is an easy way to turn off the pesky adverts with a simple change to your device settings.

Luckily. Until that feature too is disabled in future “updates”, depending on how much blast-back Microsoft gets from customers — not that they’ve ever paid much heed to that in the past, unless the storm of protest was overwhelming.

I have generally made it my personal policy to skip generations of Windows OS — I never used Win 9, for example, going from 8 to 10, and then only because someone I trusted not only chided me but actually forced me to make that change, having to do it himself because I flatly refused to do so. (Thanks, Dan.) And I was only able to have him do that because I was a house guest at the time. Unfortunately, he lives about two states away from me so I won’t be able to do that again this time.

And in any event, I’m going to get this fucking “feature” when I get my replacement PC* later in the year. Let’s hope there really is an “easy way” to turn the thing off, or else the laptop’s durability will be sorely tested as it slams into the opposite wall. (My new apartment doesn’t overlook the pool this time, so the laptop’s waterproofing will not be called upon.)

*In response to my earlier woes, several Readers sent me their older laptops to try to help me out — and thank you, every one — but I was never able to make them work for me, even with considerable input from Daughter, who is a pro at this kind of thing. Sadly, it’s a new one I’ll be getting, or else I’ll just go back to using my older Dell which, although slower than a carthorse on downers, is at least still capable of closing without needing engineering manipulation of the Rubik Cube degree.

En Passant

May 7, 2024 Kim du Toit Grooming

In yesterday’s funnies I featured a meme which contained the following pic:

Am I the only guy who hates this “style” with a passion? It’s a modern one — it certainly doesn’t appear in any art or photographs before the 20th century — and I can only think that whoever first came up with it must have hated women, a lot.

Missing: Self-Respect

May 6, 2024 Kim du Toit Clothing, Grooming, Manners

Dalrymple talks about how everyone’s all concerned about self-esteem, but completely lacking in self-respect.

Not only do people fail to make the most of themselves, they seem determined to make the worst of themselves, as if they were setting a challenge to others not to remark on them or pass a judgment about the way they look.

Actually, it’s worse than that. People are so caught up in their self-esteem that they think it’s more important than self-respect — in other words, that how they feel about themselves is more important than how others feel about them, and missing the point that both are important.

T.D. talks about clothing:

In England, fat young women (of whom there are lamentably many) squeeze themselves into unbecomingly tight costumes, like toothpaste into a tube. It is as if they were intimidating you into not noticing how hideous they look.

Well, yes; it’s the classic mark of the narcissist. And that attitude is just as prevalent in these here United States.

Look, I understand all that: goths, hippies, biker gangs, Mods ‘n Rockers (yeah, I’m dating myself badly here) and all the so-called fashion trends that bedevil every generation.

All of them, however, have one thing in common: they denote that the wearers are societal misfits.

Since I passed the age of adolescence, where such nonsense was important, I’ve always had one or the other of these self-imposed restraints on myself whenever I leave the house: would my Mom / wife / grandfather be ashamed to be seen in public with me, dressed as I am?

If the answer is even marginally “yes”, I change my outfit.

And quite frankly, if there’s anyone who doesn’t give a rat’s ass what anyone thinks of me, that would be me. But I care, deeply, about what my close family and -friends think of me, and that reflects itself in many aspects of not only my dress but also in my behavior.

Alone with my male buddies, I’m a total lout. In polite company, I’m a different person altogether.

It is the habit of a lifetime, drilled into me by parents, boarding school, the army and wives; and frankly, I’m too old to change my ways now.

In a business setting, for example, I’m always well-dressed (suit, tie, polished shoes and all that) and likewise groomed (neat hair, trimmed beard, clean-shaven and nice-smelling).

So when I go to a company and see a bunch of men with scraggly beards, clothing which looks like they were slept in and with body odor to gag a vulture, I honestly don’t care about their self-esteem; I just find them repulsive — and no matter what, I can’t take them seriously.

Judgmental? You bet your fucking life I am.

Our Northern Neighbor

May 2, 2024 Kim du Toit Rights

Here’s an interesting story:

Canadian Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was booted from the House of Commons for the day on Tuesday after a heated exchange where he refused the House Speaker’s request that he remove from the record his comment calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “wacko” and “extremist.”

So much for that “parliamentary privilege” thing in Fidel Trudeau’s Canukistan, eh?

Firstly, under parliamentary privilege, the House Speaker can only “deplore” or “censure” scurrilous language — expulsion for expressing an opinion is strictly disallowed in a parliamentary setting — and secondly, even without parliamentary rule, it’s an abridgement of the politician’s freedom of speech. (I know, I know: foolish Kim for believing that such things still exist.)

I guess none of that applies anymore in Castro Country.

Conundrum

April 24, 2024 Kim du Toit Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13. And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level. And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele. After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy. Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post. Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

Train Smash Time

April 12, 2024 Kim du Toit Train Smash Women

Oh yeah, baby: it’s that time of year when the Grand National is run at Aintree, and when we can look forward to some Train Smash Women and their antics.

Only, this year? Not as much fun as usual… so far: