Happy Birthday to the queen of the scream queens, Barbara Steele! https://t.co/qnhQvROGVa

Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

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When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

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The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

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But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

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A couple days back, I wrote up my best understanding of what happened with /r/wallstreetbets and meme stocks like Gamestop, trying to show how all the different, seemingly contradictory takes on the underlying financial stuff could all be true.

https://t.co/xWzre4r0Yj

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In the days since, a new series of contradictory takes has emerged, these ones disputing the meaning of this bizarre financial spectacle, and likewise what response, if any is warranted as it unfurls.

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I think that all of these takes can also be true, and as with the trading itself, reconciling them requires that we widen the frame.

Let's start with Jimmy Carter.

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In 1978, Carter's IRS created the 401(k), a tax-sheltered account for people who wanted to gamble on stocks to fund their retirement.

That was a fringe proposition at best.

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The normal retirement system was a "defined benefits" pension where your employer guaranteed you a certain monthly percentage of your salary from retirement to death.

The vast majority of Americans wisely prefered a guaranteed payout to a tax-advantaged gambling account.

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At Wikipedia, we are told MLK and the other founders of the SCLC were inspired by Billy Graham. Right. Why would these guys be inspired by Billy Graham? Please ask yourself if that makes any sense.

THE BATTLE OF PRATAPGARH (10 Nov, 1659)

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj's impeccable military genius and matchless courage humbled the Adil Shahi Sultanate.

The beginning of what was to come later for the M0ghuls from one of the most indefatigable defenders of Dharma!

(Thread)

Shivaji’s growing influence in Maval region, made him a threat to the Adil Shahi ruler of Bijapur who sought to restrain him. The man who was given the responsibility of this mission, was their commander, Afzal Khan. Afzal was a formidable warrior known for his ruthlessness.(1)

His strategy was to bring Shivaji out into the plains, where he held an advantage, compared to the rocky Deccan terrain. Afzal attacked the holy town of Pandharpur, and later demolished the temple of Bhavani at Tuljapur to instigate Shivaji in a bid to bring him out.(2)

Shivaji was angry but remained patient. Knowing that he could not defeat Bijapuri Sultanate in an open battle, Shivaji moved to Pratapgarh fort, located on rocky heights, surrounded by thick forests of Jawali.(3)

This set the pattern for future Maratha attacks, using guerrilla warfare against larger invading armies rendering them ineffective in unfavorable terrain.(4)

Taj Mahal is Hindu Monument: Prof Marvin Mills, Reputed New York Architect.
@LostTemple7 @DivineElement

1.Professor Marvin H. Mills, a leading New York architect and professor of architecture at the Pratt Institute had studied the Taj Mahal in detail. Here is part of his letter published in The New York Times. 👇👇

2.“New information and analysis have come forth to constitute a compelling argument that the Taj was actually a former Hindu palace occupied and converted to a tomb by the Moguls…There are many other inconsistencies in the Taj legend. The building to its left is now a mosque.

3.Had it been built originally as a mosque it would almost certainly have been oriented directly to Mecca,instead of due west.The four“minarets”that surround Taj mausoleum r inappropriate,for they logically should have been in front of the“mosque”for convenient calls to prayer.”

4.Through the letter, he had appealed thus, “The origin of the Taj can best be determined through scientific dating by carbon-14 and thermoluminescence, which the Archeological Survey of India should be urged to undertake.”
According to Prof Mills,

Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

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Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

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Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

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It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

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For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

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Why are loops called "loops"?

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Before addressing the question in the title tweet, let me first back up to the origin of the term "quasigroup". The first use of the term was by Ruth Moufang in 1935 in her study of the multiplicative structure of the octonions.

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Moufang defined "quasigroup" in a much narrower sense than we do now. The details are not part of this story, so I'll skip them. What she called quasigroups we now call Moufang loops in her honor.

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The current definition of quasigroup - a set with binary op * s.t. for all a,b, the equations a*x=b, y*a=b have unique solutions x,y - is due to Hausmann & Ore (1937), in the same paper where they introduced the "other" meaning of "groupoid": a set with a binary operation

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It was A.A. Albert (1943) who introduced the term "loop" for a quasigroup with identity element. In his words, "It will be very convenient to have a special name for such quasigroups..." (p.510)

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