I’ve tried, I’ve written and written words to put here, but simply haven’t.

I will write here again, I hope, but probably to try to explain myself more. I have things I need to say about why I am doing this.

Just not today. I’m still writing on port 70, though.

I had to move my entire infra to a new server; my old one had been in use so long that the hosting company decided they weren’t willing to support it any more.

So, new server, who dis?

Started Reading The Gutter Prayer, by Gareth Hanrahan 📚

Started Reading Finder, by Suzanne Palmer 📚

Started Reading Rosewater, by Tade Thompson 📚

Started Reading Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo 📚

Started Reading Embers of War, by Gareth L. Powell 📚

Started Reading Velocity Weapon, by Megan E. O’Keefe 📚

Started Reading Salvation, by Peter F Hamilton 📚

Started Reading The Wild Dead, by Carrie Vaughn 📚

Started Reading Blood of the Mantis, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚

Started Reading A Darker Shade of Magic, by V. E. Schwab 📚

Load of fucking racists being manipulated by alt-reich wannabe nazis like Gemma O’Doherty, Peter Casey and their ilk. Direct Provision, as a system, is terrible and needs to end. Emergency accomodation for asylum seekers will always be needed, and these scumbags are doing untold harm.

Started Reading Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig 📚

Started Reading Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 📚

Started Reading Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚

Started Reading The Red-Stained Wings, by Elizabeth Bear 📚

Almost everything in the place which isn’t from the Island of Britain has been variously stolen, thieved, expropriated, plundered and pilfered from everyone else in the world. Even in this article, some worthy from the Museum trots out the basic lie that the Elgin Marbles were “acquired legally”, and cites the ludicrous 1816 inquiry as justification.

I tried visiting it once and was literally nauseated by the implicit Great White Saviour narrative the place emits. Kudos to Robertson for speaking truth to power. Now to get the thieving bastards to give it all back.

Started Reading The Dreaming Stars, by Tim Pratt 📚

Started Reading Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir 📚

I’ve been meaning to read this since forever.

Met him at WorldCon in Dublin, he seemed to be an interesting kind of person, sadly, had to admit that I’d not read his books. Looking forward to it 👍

Started Reading Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch 📚

Apple trufans are the best. The iPhone 11 isn’t fugly, it’s “innovative”.

Also: “Remember, people said the Watch wouldn’t catch on!”

This is not the devastating argument you think it is.

[This] supports what employees told Recode — that they don’t trust HR to be on their side

HR are never on your side. HR are on the side of the company, that’s literally their job description. You want someone on your side, you join a union.

Original Story

Started Reading Seven Blades in Black, by Sam Sykes 📚

Started Reading Romanitas, by Sophia McDougall 📚

Started Reading The Outside, by Ada Hoffman 📚

Started Reading The Ruin of Kings, by Jenn Lyons 📚

Fascists in the Hamptons, an affluent area in Long Island, have complained they cannot admit their allegiances publicly without fearing reprisals.

“It’s like you have this disease and people want to run away from you,” a shop owner in Southampton told the New York Post adding that fascists and white supremacists in the area are “all in the closet” and have to lie to people around them.

An art consult (sic) who said they were also a fan of white supremacy said: “It’s a matter of survival. We are hitting a very dark and strange place as a country.”

Most of Suffolk County, which includes the Hamptons, supported the Fascist candidate in the 2016 US presidential election. He won some 52 per cent of the vote there, compared to Ms Clinton’s 45 per cent.

Another person told the newspaper that he was afraid of being attacked if found wearing fascist regalia, claiming “you really need to fear physical violence.”

The article did not cite any specific incidents of Democratic violence or retaliation against Fascist extremists in the area.

The fears have allegedly intensified after celebrities called for a boycott of billionaire Stephen Ross’s brands for hosting a fundraiser for fascism and white supremacy in the Hamptons this weekend.

Stephen Ross is the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the chairman of the Related Companies, which controls luxury gyms Equinox and SoulCycle.

Tickets for the fundraising event reportedly started at $100,000 (£82,185), which included a photo opportunity with leading fascist political candidates.

In response to the report, multiple people including Miami Dolphins players criticised Mr Ross, with many calling for a boycott and threatening to cancel their memberships to Equinox and SoulCycle.

NB: This is a rewrite of a terrible article from the London Independent in which a load of fascist snowflakes complain about their feels.

Started Reading Dragonfly Falling, by Adrian Tchaikovsky 📚

It is important to note at the outset a key differentiator between Westminster (and indeed NI Assembly) Elections and the Irish Dáil Elections. In the UK system, Constituencies are determined by reference to the number of electors resident in a location. In the Irish system, by contrast, these are determined by reference to the population as a whole.

Northern Ireland has a population of 1.8m people, thus would be entitled to somewhere between 60 and 90 seats in Dáil Éireann, presuming no population transfer in the event of restoration of the National Territory.

Working out the disposal of those seats is not a simple task, as one valiantly attempts to map the UK’s medieval First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) system to the Irish Proportional Representation (Single Transferable Vote) (PR-STV) system with Multi-Seat Constituencies. Given the importance of transfers in Irish PR-STV, there would almost certainly be something of a learning curve for the various populations and parties as they come to terms with it. Sinn Féin would, of course, be at a strong advantage in this regard, having been running in Dáil elections since the early 1980s and the Hunger Strikes.

Some indication - and it is only an indication - of the likely result can be obtained by using the d’Hondt method on the existing polling data. This is far from ideal, it presupposes a single vote for instance, but it can serve to give some indication of the destination of those 60-90 seats.

The trend in all recent Dáil Electoral Boundary Reports has strongly been towards a level of representation at the upper boundary of the Constitutionally permitted levels. In the most recent report, fully 16 of the 39 Constituencies exceed the 30,000 figure¹; while the average representation per seat is 29,762. It would be expected that this trend would be continued in the event of reunification.

For the purpose of this analysis, one also has to ignore entirely the controversial 2018 Northern Ireland Boundary Review. Not because of the controversy, but rather because no election has been fought on the basis of the new Constituencies, nor, it seems, is one ever likely to.

In calculating the seat distribution, I have attempted to follow the guidelines of the Dáil Electoral Boundary Commission, while of course being constrained by the inability to change electoral boundaries. All population data is derived from the most recent population dataset of the Northern Ireland Neighbourhood Information Service.

Current Westminister Seats (as projected Dáil Constituencies)

A casual examination will show that the 4-seat constituencies are, in an Irish context, massively over-represented, all being far at the lower end of the permitted scale. Nevertheless, they are all within the bounds of the acceptable levels. All of the constituencies showing figures in excess of 31,000 inhabitants per seat are well within the norms established by the Dáil Constituency Report, 2017.

Who would win these seats?

To calculate the seat distribution (with the earlier caveats) I used the d’Hondt distribution method against the results of the 2017 NI Assembly Election. Implementations of d’Hondt are widely available, I used Juan Manuel Fernandez’s php dhont script² to the following results:-

Yielding an overall result of:-

Or, in an overall 224-seat Dáil context, the state of the Parties in this hypothetical (using figures from Ireland’s 2016 Dáil Election)

In that scenario, the present “confidence and supply” arrangement between FF and FG would, clearly fail. Even a full coalition of FF and FG would only attain 94 seats, far short of the 113-seats required for a majority government. There would clearly need to be a fundamental reordering of parliamentary blocs to create the circumstances for a government.

If Labour and the SDLP (and possibly the Social Democrats) were to offer themselves as a Left-Bloc, these 15 seats could be a significant parliamentary group. By the same token, if the SDLP were to merge with Fianna Fáil (as has been mooted recently) then that party would grow to the second-largest in the Dáil.

In all events, a Unionist Bloc of ~33 seats would be an enduring and fundamental feature of all future Dáil elections. While people may mock Leo Varadkar’s suggestion that a United Ireland would be a fundamentally different state to the present Republic, I cannot say that he’s wrong.

[N]ot every society has successfully institutionalized the mass shooting. Only one place that has done that, deliberately and effectively. The United States has chosen, and continues to choose, to enact ritual compliance to an ideal of freedom in a way that results in a steady flow of blood sacrifice.

All the thoughts and prayers in the world won’t change that. A sick diseased society needs a Reformation.

Started Reading The Priory of the Orange Tree, by Samantha Shannon 📚

Started Reading Ancestral Night, by Elizabeth Bear 📚

Like Ben, I believe strongly that we need to move past the utter bullshit of Freedom 0. The principle of avoiding harm to others needs to be the primary principle guiding Free Software, and damn the FOSSbros for collaborators when they come screaming and wailing in response.

Started Reading Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, by Temi Oh 📚

Ive’s Apple has been one in which consumers have been endlessly encouraged to buy new stuff and get rid of the old. The loser is the environment, and the winner is Apple’s bottom line.

Started Reading A Man of Shadows, by Jeff Noon 📚

Order in Kriégel case appears to treat social media firms like publishers

Konzentrationslager were Nazi camps where, initially, political opponents, social undesirables and sexual “deviants” were placed by the regime. Later this was expanded to include Jews, Slavs and other enemies of the regime. They were characterised by overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, lack of regard for the well being of the inhabitants, lack of legal representation, uncertainty regarding possibility of release.

In this, the camps followed the principles established by the British in the Boer War The Todeslager and Vernichtungslager (Death- & Extermination-Camps) didn’t exist until 1942. Their purpose was genocide.

Dachau was a Concentration Camp, as was Auschwitz I.

Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, was an Extermination Camp.

For various reasons, all the various -lagers were monikered as “Concentration Camp” by the Western media. There were many more variants of the camps in the Nazi-state apparatus, slave-camps like von Braun’s Peenemunde, Labour Camps like IG Farben’s Auschwitz-Monowitz.

What the USA has created on its southern border absolutely meets the definition of “konzentrationslager”, just as the WRA Japanese-internment camps did during WW2.

This isn’t hard, and it isn’t complicated.

If your defence of Trump’s Concentration Camps is that they aren’t gassing people, therefore they aren’t a concentration camp; then you are exhibiting profound ignorance of the meaning of the word, and you are defending or minimising the horrors of the Nazis’ Konzentrationslager system.

“No nation can fully understand itself or find its place in the world if it does not look with clear eyes at all the glories and disgraces of its past. […] The internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry was a great injustice, and it will never be repeated.”

That wasn’t some soy-drinking appeasing liberal said that, that was George H.W. Bush, in December 1991.

The present regime in the United States has chosen, deliberately and with intent, to ignore those words.

People who ignore those words are not fit to hold office.

I did a d’Hondt simulation of dublin’s result, looks fair to me.

If anyone ever wants to learn about Gerrymandering in a non-USAian context, you probably won’t find a better example than Cork City Council. Significant votes in recent elections for hard-left and such like.

Solution: Expand the offending electorates into the countryside.

Greens are on 23% in Dublin, 12% in the other two, putting them in real contention to take three seats.

The alt-right darling of the media set, Peter Casey, is on 7% in Midlands/NW.

And Divorce Reform is at 87%!

Remember: every .io domain has been illegally expropriated, and contributes to the occupation.