Monday, August 3, 2020
Deadwind Season 2
DEADWIND S2 Trailer
We watched the entire second season of this series over two days. That was entirely too much. We need to start restricting our TV watching.
The plot is a little complicated. I'm not sure I've got it all straight, but the good guys figure out who the bad guys are and the bad guys get their just desserts, so it's all good. There is a serial killer at work killing half a dozen people over a short period of time. The lead detective, a youngish woman with a child and wild, wild hair, figures out the connection between these murders and puts them on the track of the culprit. But there is something about one murder that doesn't add up, and she digs around until she finally figures out who done it, and it's someone that no one suspected. Turns out he's been at it for years and killed a bunch of people, many more than our recent revenge based murderer killed.
There are also a couple of killings that happen on the spur of the moment, both in response to being threatened. You just don't know what's going on in some people's heads.
There were a couple of interesting bits. One is the proposed Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel. It is a big issue with mayor's new political party. It also seems that some people in real life are serious about it.
Ferries play a role as does cold water.
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| 1991 BMW 850i |
On Netflix, in Finnish with subtitles in English.
Spoilers follow. The lead detective, Sofia Karppi, has an adult step daughter, Henna Honkasuo. Henna finds a stash of Subutex that was hidden in the snowy woods (where have we seen that before?). Never mind that the guy who buried it there has been murdered by our revenge motivated serial killer, somebody figures out that she has the drugs and wants them back. Probably because she told her new boyfriend, who was trying to sell them wholesale and got killed for his trouble. The bad guys want these drugs, but when she finds that her stash, which was hidden under a railroad bridge, has gotten ripped off, they offer to let her work off her 'debt' by smuggling several kilos of drugs across the border from Tallinn. She and her handler take the ferry to Tallinn, get a taxi to the middle of nowhere, dig up a million dollars worth of contraband from underneath some rubbish in a derelict house. Now another couple of guys drop off a car for them and they head back to Helsinki on the ferry. Henna overhears a phone conversation with her handler that convinces her that they are going to drop her in the shit. This leads to a heated discussion and her handler pulls a gun on her. She relents, he puts his gun away, she pulls out her dad's big switchblade and stabs him in the gut half a dozen times. He collapses and dies on the deck. The big, open, windswept, totally unoccupied upper deck. She drags his lifeless body to the rail and dumps him overboard along with his gun and her knife.
The mayor kills her number two man when he threatens her so she pushes him off the end of dock. Bad place to be standing if you are going threaten somebody, dummkopf. He flunders in the ice cold water for a few seconds, but makes no attempt to save himself. Doesn't he know how to swim? If that's the case what the heck is he even doing on the dock? Double dummkopf. He was a political hack, so he got what's coming to him. Is that the message here? It was just kind of weird and unexpected. But we already know the mayor is cold blooded from a previous encounter with some skateboarders who were harrassing her blind daughter who is trying to ride to a board.
I wrote this a couple of weeks ago at least, but I didn't post it. Possibly because I had more to say, but now I don't remember what that was, so here we go, even if it isn't finished.
Sunday, August 2, 2020
Sugar Mills
Java Sugar Mills in Action - 2004
blackthorne57
This video reminded me of the sugar mill on Maui I saw when I was there two years ago.
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| HC&S Puʻunēnē Mill. Photo 2015 by Wendy Osher. Photo taken back when the mill was still in operation. |
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| Current Google Streetview of the same mill. |
Update January 2024 replaced missing video. At the end of the new video there are some views of Mt. Bromo.
Saturday, August 1, 2020
Orthodox Privilege
Stolen entire from Paul Graham:
There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the concept is overused, there is something to it, and in particular to the idea that privilege makes you blind — that you can't see things that are visible to someone whose life is very different from yours.
But one of the most pervasive examples of this kind of blindness is one that I haven't seen mentioned explicitly. I'm going to call it orthodox privilege: The more conventional-minded someone is, the more it seems to them that it's safe for everyone to express their opinions.
It's safe for them to express their opinions, because the source of their opinions is whatever it's currently acceptable to believe. So it seems to them that it must be safe for everyone. They literally can't imagine a true statement that would get them in trouble.
And yet at every point in history, there were true things that would get you in terrible trouble to say. Is ours the first where this isn't so? What an amazing coincidence that would be.
Surely it should at least be the default assumption that our time is not unique, and that there are true things you can't say now, just as there have always been. You would think. But even in the face of such overwhelming historical evidence, most people will go with their gut on this one.
The spectral signature of orthodox privilege is "Why don't you just say it?" If you think there's something true that people can't say, why don't you be brave, and own it? The more extreme will even accuse you of specific heresies they imagine you must have in mind, though if there's more than one heresy current in your time, these accusations will tend to be nondeterministic: you must either be an xist or a yist.
Frustrating as it is to deal with these people, it's important to realize that they're in earnest. They're not pretending they think it's impossible for an idea to be both unorthodox and true. The world really looks that way to them.
How do you respond to orthodox privilege? Merely giving it a name may help somewhat, because it will remind you, when you encounter it, why the people you're talking to seem so strangely unreasonable. Because this is a uniquely tenacious form of privilege. People can overcome the blindness induced by most forms of privilege by learning more about whatever they're not. But they can't overcome orthodox privilege just by learning more. They'd have to become more independent-minded. If that happens at all, it doesn't happen on the time scale of one conversation.
It may be possible to convince some people that orthodox privilege must exist even though they can't sense it, just as one can with, say, dark matter. There may be some who could be convinced, for example, that it's very unlikely that this is the first point in history at which there's nothing true you can't say, even if they can't imagine specific examples.
But except with these people, I don't think it will work to say "check your privilege" about this type of privilege, because those in its demographic don't realize they're in it. It doesn't seem to conventional-minded people that they're conventional-minded. It just seems to them that they're right. Indeed, they tend to be particularly sure of it.
Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem. Similarly, if someone says they can think of things that are true but that cannot be said, it's only polite to take them at their word, even if you can't think of any yourself.
Once you realize that orthodox privilege exists, a lot of other things become clearer. For example, how can it be that a large number of reasonable, intelligent people worry about something they call "cancel culture," while other reasonable, intelligent people deny that it's a problem? Once you understand the concept of orthodox privilege, it's easy to see the source of this disagreement. If you believe there's nothing true that you can't say, then anyone who gets in trouble for something they say must deserve it.
Via Brain Micklethwait's New Blog. He posted excerpts from Graham's post and then added some comments of his own. It might help to know who Attlee was: Prime Minister of the UK after WW2.
Chronas
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| Roman Empire in 100 AD |
Chronas is a history map application with over 50 million data points which every registered user can curate and contribute to (just like Wikipedia).Next time I am wondering about what was going on somewhere, somewhen, I'll to remember to give it a try.
Pic of the Day
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| The athletic circle of Montmartre Paris - Maurice-Louis Branger - 1913 |
Tim Traveler took us to Montmartre last month and I got a post out of it.
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