More Zonkyness

Author: Mike Meredith

  • Transfolk & The Principle of Least Astonishment

    The interesting thing about the Trans Day of Visibility accidentally (to state the bloody obvious, Easter keeps moving around so such accidents are inevitable) colliding with Easter Sunday is that it has caused all the really fucking nasty shits to come out of their hutches spitting lettuce everywhere.

    And yes you are really fucking nasty shits.

    According to the last UK census only 0.5% of the population are transfolk; you could spend your entire life without encountering one. And transfolk are quite probably the most bullied minority there is – one report referenced by this guide suggests that 34% of young transfolk have attempted suicide. That’s probably higher than the suicide rate (one estimate puts it at 25%) amongst Nazi concentration camp inmates.

    Now that is attempted suicides but it is still astonishingly high and points to a horrendous level of alienation and indeed bullying.

    That needs fixing. And part of that fix is to tell the really fucking nasty shits to keep quiet.

    One of the dumbest things that the nasty shits want is to force transfolk to use the public toilets marked for the gender they were born with. In other words they want people who to all appearances are women to use the mens facilities; and they want bearded blokes to use the ladies.

    Now I don’t especially mind ladies (or transwomen if you insist) using the gents toilets although it does cause a double-take and a moment wondering if I’ve mistaken the sign on the door. Especially with those “fun” signs.

    Oh and that “principle of least astonishment”? If you have gender segregated toilets, you expect to find those who look like men in the gents and those who look like women in the ladies.

    But can you imagine the reaction if someone with all the appearance of a bearded bloke walks into a ladies? There have apparently already been women assaulted in toilets for looking too masculine by the ‘gender police’.

    You don’t have to understand gender dysphoria to feel sympathy for transfolk – I don’t. It’s completely incomprehensible to me. And the really fucking nasty shits who criticise transfolk? Well they’re probably really fucking nasty shits in other ways too. So figuratively slap ’em down every time they raise they heads.

    Because they deserve it.

  • SSH And The “Chinese Bots”

    So I was reading 𝕏 and came across one of those memes showing “Chinese bots” making connections to “open” SSH ports to Internet accessible servers. The suggestion to turn off password authentication in favour of public/private key authentication was certainly a sensible suggestion (on a very simplistic level it effectively makes a very strong “password”).

    But the “Chinese bots” thing sort of irritated me a bit, so I decided to trawl my personal firewall logs looking for attempts to connect to my ssh port(s). Even ignoring the IPv6 probes, there were 1251 different addresses probing my network (just one public IPv4 address) in the months of March so far.

    Why is this irritating? Because the addresses of the machines attempting to break into a non-existent ssh service here are those of compromised machines. They may be in China, or the USA, Russia, etc. but that in no way betrays who is controlling those “bots”.

    Anyway, for some data :-

    CountCountry
    502,US USA 840 United States
    128,CN CHN 156 China
    97,KR KOR 410 Korea, Republic of
    33,SG SGP 702 Singapore
    27,BG BGR 100 Bulgaria
    26,RU RUS 643 Russian Federation
    22,HK HKG 344 Hong Kong
    22,GB GBR 826 United Kingdom
    20,DE DEU 276 Germany
    16,SE SWE 752 Sweden

    And “China” isn’t even in the lead in this case! I have included just the top 10 as a long list of random countries with one or two robots isn’t very enlightening.

    The key point here is that the national identity of the compromised host attacking tells you nothing about where the true attacker is from. Russia is quite a likely candidate given it’s status as a rogue nation with a known tolerance for cyber criminals (as long as they co-operate with the state when the state needs their skills), but that is just background knowledge.

  • JK Rowling Denying The Holocaust

    There is currently a furore about JK Rowling having denied that the Nazis targeted transfolk with a comment specifically stating that the poster should “check their sources” which becomes amusing …

    For the record, the historical suppression of the world’s first institute covering trans healthcare is a matter of record. And although I’m not going to chase down threads to verify this, there is very little doubt in my mind that transfolk would have been sent to concentration camps as homosexual men were.

    Now the average person might be forgiven for being ignorant about the suppression of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft; after all those who aren’t interested in the subject will make an assumption that the “Holocaust” was just about the killing of the Jews.

    It is true that non-Jewish victims are somewhat less publicised and that most groups weren’t targeted for annihilation as the Jews and Roma were, but being worked to death in a concentration camp with random and brutal punishment up to and including murder isn’t a kind fate. And certainly qualifies as repression.

    Any public figure should be more careful about denying that something did or did not happen.

    I have just seen a video claiming that JK Rowling isn’t a Holocaust denier because the word Holocaust refers specifically to Jewish victims. Well, there’s a discussion to be had about that – but it should be noted that the Jewish have a specific word for what happened to them (Shoah), which some people believe leaves the word “Holocaust” free to use in reference to all of the victims of the Nazis; it certainly works better than “Nazi crimes against humanity”.

    B&W Picture of the entrance to Winchester's Great Hall
    Entering The Great Hall

  • Is A New Tory Party Leader A Good Idea?

    Well yes, the Tories need a new party leader to rebuild their party after the next election. Before the election? The new leader will just be a sacrificial lamb that’ll probably be thrown out onto the slag heap (hopefully a nice soggy wet one) at the next election.

    It’ll almost certainly not save them from being wiped out (and that’s from 6 months ago; if anything, things are even worse today) at the next election.

    An overwhelming majority of people want an election now and changing leaders now in what will be seen as yet another undemocratic move (it isn’t; it’s just people like to think they’re voting for a particular PM when they’re just voting for their MP) is likely to make the Tories even more unpopular.

    If I were Starmer, I’d launch a parliamentary vote of no confidence as soon as the replacement showed up in parliament :-

    The people don’t want you.
    We don’t want you.
    The other parties here don’t want you.
    And if they were honest, half of those on your side don’t want you either.

    – Me putting words in Starmer’s mouth.

    He’d lose of course, but the people will see it as an honest attempt at doing the right thing.

    A long road to the gatehouse
    Dover Castle Gateway

  • Reforming the Commons Pigsty

    The current crop of clownish criminals in the House of Commons just goes to show that the regulation need a bit of a brush-up. Here’s a few of my suggestions :-

    1. Secret electronic voting. Which has the downside that we can’t see what our MPs voted for or against, but does allow them greater latitude in ignoring the party whip when it comes to things that shouldn’t be passed.
    2. Electronic voting should make this easier: MPs should recuse themselves when their vote could influence their income – for example MPs who are also landlords should not vote on motions involving landlordism.
    3. MPs should be allowed to do jobs outside of their work as an MP, but their income should be capped at an hourly rate equivalent to their salary as an MP; any extra goes into the general taxation fund. Sound unfair? There’s plenty of senior public sector workers with exactly that sort of contract. It would allow MPs to keep “in practice” but not encourage them to seek outside work.
    4. MPs who change party allegiance or lose the whip should be subject to the same recall petition mechanism that being found guilty of “wrongdoing” makes available.
    5. Accusations of lying should be permitted which should invoke an investigation. A false accuser gets sanctioned (which opens them up to a recall petition) and an accurate accusation gets the accused sanctioned (likewise).

    I’m sure there’s a whole bunch more to add but that’s enough for now. I’m sure MPs will hate it, but to be honest, the more an MP hates a regulation, the more likely it is to be useful.

    B&W picture of the sea and some old wooden posts.
    Ruins