What I’ve been reading today: Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China

It’s a beautiful May day in the bright, sunny South. And it’s been a spell but I’ve been trying to keep things a bit more active once again here at the Rad Geek People’s Daily, and I feel like the time is right for a return to Shamelessness.

So, gentle reader, what have you been up to lately? What have you been working on? Got anything big coming up? Anything you’ve written lately? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Don’t hold back. Let’s get Shameless again.

So I don’t know if this is your thing, but if it is, you may have noticed that in all of the Iberian Romance languages, the most commonly used words for the left — the direction left, or on the left-hand side — are obviously related to each other: Castilian Spanish izquierdo, Catalan esquerre, Galego/Portuguese esquerdo, etc. — are all obviously related to each other, but none of them seem to bear any particular relation to the usual Latin word for left, which is sinister.^[1] So then if they didn’t get it from granddaddy Latin, where’d they all get it? Well, the other day I learned that the answer is that when people give you directions on the Iberian peninsula, they’re all getting their word for left from Basque. Neat.

Shared Article from Wiktionary

ezker - Wiktionary

en.wiktionary.org

1. ^[1]Forms of that word still exist in the modern languages — it’s siniestro in Castilian Spanish, sestro in Portuguese, etc. — and they can strictly speaking still be used to mean to the left or on the left-hand side. But their primary use is much more like English sinister, to suggest something perverse, evil, unsettling or insidious; using them to indicate left as a direction or handedness would be to make a word choice with a certain connotation of archaism or exoticism, like using sable instead of black to describe the color of my coffee table.↩

Here’s a great recent article by Jacob Hornberger:

Of course it is. There’s no reasonable question about this. The fact that Right-wing cultural politics and American nationalism continue to bamboozle professed libertarians into believing that there is even the slightest compatibility between border controls and libertarian politics — and the fact that so many people within political libertarianism continue to prevaricate about the issue or shove it to one side, as if it were unimportant — the fact that anyone could take libertarianism to mean anything other than an uncompromising enemy of deportation, criminalization and exclusionist border control of any kind, is the shame of the so-called Liberty Movement.

Shared Article from The Independent

The CIA destroyed a copy of a torture report 'by accident'

The CIA inspector general's office has said it "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despi…

independent.co.uk

CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report

The CIA inspector general's office has said it "mistakenly" destroyed its only copy of a comprehensive Senate torture report, despite lawyers for the Justice Department assuring a federal judge that copies of the documents were being preserved.

The erasure of the document by the spy agency's internal watchdog was deemed an "inadvertent" foul-up by the inspector general, according to Yahoo News.

One intelligence community source told Yahoo News, which first reported the development, that last summer CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)

Sometimes bad things happen, and it’s just nobody’s fault, really. Sometimes accidents happen or mistakes are made, and everything just happens to come up CIA. Whoops, there it goes. Oh, there goes the disk too.

Here’s a bit more on the oopsie.

The 6,700-page report contains thousands of secret files about the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation methods, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other aggressive interrogation techniques at "black site" prisons overseas.

. . . Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr opposed the publication of the report in 2014. Since taking power he has attempted to recover copies of the report that were distributed throughout the Obama administration.

–Sadie Levy Gale, CIA ‘mistakenly’ destroys copy of 6,700-page US torture report
The Independent (17 May 2016)

Despite constant siege-mentality rhetoric, constantly invoked as a reason for police to be ever more aggressively controlling, ever more trigger-happy, ever more insulated from criticism in the name of officer safety, as a matter of fact, there has never been a safer time to be a police officer in the United States.

Shared Article from the Guardian

FBI data showing drop in police deaths undermines 'war on cops' …

Preliminary data show a 20% decrease in number of officers intentionally killed in the line of duty and the second-lowest total in the past 12 years

Jamiles Lartey @ theguardian.com

See also.

• GT 2011-02-01: Siege Mentality (cont’d)
• GT 2010-01-23: Siege Mentality