English history is replete with notable warnings via story telling such as King Ludd, who allegedly motivated his followers (Luddites) to stand against empty technologist acceleration and for measured and regulated human professionalism.
It turns out Germans may also have expressed similar principles in public discussion, coining the dubious word “getürkt” (faked) during the start of industrialization. Here’s how that word originated with a chess game “machine” to amuse Austrian royalty, and how it’s still relevant today.
Kupferstich eines “Schachtürken”
First, the Ottoman Empire was very much on the mind of German engineers for a very long time due to war, a frequent topic and focus of education.
The great wonder of the printing press, this symbol of civilisation, was first used to print propaganda. […] …the first, and completely preserved, print attributed to Gutenberg, the Türkenkalender (1454). This is a pamphlet about the most feared and exotified Orient: the Turks at the fall of Constantinople. Before The Bible? Yes, it was printed before the complete Gutenberg Bible was printed.
Second, deep fears of sophisticated dangers were attributed by some German speakers to the increasing appearance and integration of Turks.
The Treaty of Karlowitz (26 January 1699), for one obvious example, was treated by Europeans as having saved them from Ottoman rule, as it concluded the Great Turkish War of 1683–1697. What could be more utterly captivating to Europeans in the 1700s than to engage in a fun strategy game to defeat the cunning Turkish strategist?
Hungary and Slovakia are basically the shaded regions ceded to Austria. Click to enlarge
Enter a Slovakian “entertainer” named von Kempelen into the Austrian court 50 years after Ottomans had ceded territories to the Austrians (Slovakians regarding themselves as liberated from 150 years of Turkish rule).
The performance of a French magician in 1769 for the Austrian empress Maria Theresia did little to impress him. So Wolfgang von Kempelen told the empress that he could build a machine that would be much more spectacular and amazing.
[…]
We are left to speculate why von Kempelen constructed the player with the appearance of a Turk. In any event, this decision corresponded to the style of his day. Turkish coffee and tobacco were then modern in Vienna. In addition, a foreign-looking player made the machine seem more exotic.
The enthusiasm of the ruling houses of the 18th century for automated devices was widespread, and their creators were highly regarded. The most well-known of them was Jacques de Vaucanson, who became famous during the first half of the 18th century with his music machine. (He also built a mechanical duck which could eat grain, digest it, and excrete.) Wolfgang von Kempelen contributed more than just his Chess Turk to this fashion for automated devices. He constructed a speaking machine which is considered his true masterpiece.
…debates over the possibilities of AI have been raging since the ‘70s.
The 1770s.
The Tesla “possibility” of AI has been repeatedly proven to be fake (not least of all because of its hidden use of “mechanical Turks”) and thus seems deserving of the specialized German word, invoking von Kempelen’s intentional trickery using machinery.
A brilliant essay out of MIT suggests Twitter management is turning itself into a willing promoter of violent hate crimes.
…lives will get worse as Musk empties out the Twitter equivalent of the Phantom Zone, allowing vicious, bigoted, and even violent harassers, Nazis, and white supremacists to return.
It’s similar to what I was warning regulators back in April, except now there’s hard data to prove my prediction true.
That is to say, if you’re planning to be active on Twitter now it’s like moving to South Africa to do business after you hear apartheid leaders promote hate for profit.
That’s not really a hypothetical. The Twitter CEO’s childhood was in South Africa and he has no record of anti-racism. He moved to America where he found Harvard had been graduating students like Kansas’ Kris Kobach with obnoxiously false papers about apartheid being good for business (hate speech impossible by then to peddle within South Africa).
Does any reasonable person really want to join in such plans of ill gotten gains when they are so obviously immoral and short sighted (e.g. every lesson in history)?
The Phantom Zone honeypot is a good framing for what Twitter already has become. The CEO markets it as his vision of toxic white masculinity playpen for profit; hateful barbaric cartoon characters are in a clown-like rush to attack and censor any voices of reason or human rights.
Users thus deleting Twitter apps now achieve real freedom because they refuse to participate in such old known oppression tactics.
Leaving this Twitter platform has become a bold rejection of tyranny, a clear act of anti-racism. Better quality of life, far higher standard of living, is easily found elsewhere.
Nobody thus should want to be seen holding a now toxic, “marked” Twitter bag.
As Twitter management intentionally slides into profit from support of crimes against humanity, expect it to face nothing less than digital sanctions… a sad repeat of 1980s South Africa for those who didn’t learn the right lessons the last time.
One peculiar point that I’ve heard proponents of Robert E. Lee repeatedly raise on forums is from a dusty old rumor about his role in the deeply troubled Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
President Polk intentionally worked to aggravate Mexico and provoke a war. On January 13, 1846, Polk ordered American forces into deeply disputed territory. In April, an army of approximately 4,000 men lead by General Zachary Taylor entered the Nueces Strip, a contested territory that Mexico and many Americans regarded as never having been a part of Texas. Polk knew this action would antagonize Mexican military forces stationed within sight of Taylor’s army at Matamoros. Colonel Hitchcock, who served with Zachary Taylor’s army, could see the real intention of his deployment from his vantage point on the front lines: “We have not one particle of right to be here. It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.” […] Historian Amy Greenberg has also shown how racist attitudes that saw Mexicans as racial inferiors and anti-Catholic bigotry enabled American soldiers and leaders to justify extreme violence and what we would now regard as war crimes against Mexican forces and civilians.
Allegedly the highly decorated U.S. General Winfield “Trail of Tears” Scott was some years later overheard assessing it all with this phrase:
Success in the Mexican War was largely due to Robert E. Lee’s skill, valor and undaunted energy.
Such a statement makes little sense in terms of military history. More interesting is that the closest that the above oft-quoted phrase gets to being from Scott himself is that it was only ever overheard and paraphrased.
We don’t actually find any records from General Scott saying these specific words. There’s far more readily available evidence of the reverse, as historians suggest that Scott himself was responsible for a strategy of tragedy.
Here’s a good example, and probably the real source of confusion. It’s a publication out of the hasty second rise of the KKK, attributed to Lee’s personal assistant (who was blind at the time, not kidding) that inadvertently exposes the story’s disconnect.
Source: Wright, Marcus Joseph., Long, Armistead Lindsay. Memoirs of Robert E. Lee: His Military and Personal History. United Kingdom: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1886, page 61.
Or, more precisely, we are meant to believe words written by a blind man who was Lee’s close companion… without much evidence of any of them being true. The attribution to Reverdy Johnson also lowers credibility since he’s a crazy character known for arguing Blacks couldn’t be American citizens (1856 Dred Scott case) before falsely trying to convince people in 1872 “there’s no KKK in the South“.
Yeah, that’s Reverdy, just a plain old wrong side of history guy. He also was blind in one eye after 1842 because he shot himself in the face while “practicing” for a duel with Henry Wise.
Armistead and Reverdy turning up as sources of the phrase attributed to Scott is problematic; it’s some seriously shaky scaffolding upon which two revisionists tried to prop up an awful Lee. People today strut about the Internet saying General Scott said something about Lee, yet ignoring the rather important source (and timing) details here that undermine it.
Reverdy was truly awful. He literally positioned himself as a lawyer intent on protecting and preserving the KKK when it faced being destroyed by President Grant’s newly formed Department of Justice (notably also after Grant had recalled Reverdy). Who wants to believe Reverdy honestly overheard anything from Scott? I mean do you think Reverdy didn’t just make up bogus stories, or that Lee’s personal assistant didn’t just make up bogus stories? Did I mention both of these men couldn’t see?
But let’s say for the sake of argument Scott did in fact think the whole war’s “success” should be dropped on Lee’s shoulders, not just because a sightless Armistead and a scurrilous Reverdy arguably went about stuffing unwanted words into Scott’s mouth.
The greatest military and political leader in American history, President Grant, gave us this related insight about that war:
“He called the Mexican-American War our ‘most evil war,'” [bestselling and award-winning presidential biographer Ronald C. White] said, describing how Grant opposed political ambitions that aimed to expand the U.S. border across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. “He said he should have resigned. For Grant, the very idea that a large country could attack a smaller country was the most immoral venture the United States had ever embarked upon. And that’s why after the Civil War, all the way to the end of his life, Grant would visit Mexico, had friends in Mexico, and admired Mexico’s struggle to become a liberal democracy.”
Anyone who wants to commemorate such evil ambitions, as Grant put it, would invite easy criticism.
If Lee is to be credited for the “most evil war” shouldn’t monuments to him mention the massive casualty rates, American soliders killed en masse, while invading a country on false pretense and lies?
Of the 90,000 U.S. soldiers who served in Mexico, nearly 14,000 died, a death rate of 15.5% – the highest rate of any foreign war in U.S. history.
The easy answer might be memorials depicting such brutality and failures in war (what Lee’s supporters today try to pretend shows “his success“) further bury Lee under his mountains of failure — yet another reason to tear down his image.
“If you go to the mall in Washington, D.C. there’s no monument to this war there, one of the very few to which there’s no monument,” says Peter Guardino, author of ” The Dead March: A History of the Mexican-American War,” and a historian at Indiana University. “This was a war of conquest for us. We fought this war to take territory from another country. We were successful. But it’s still not the kind of thing that people want to talk about.”
Lee was an aloof, aristocratic suicidal maniac who unnecessarily discarded his own soldiers with abandon (as I’ve written before).
…an unhappy military career, which took 30 years to earn Lee the rank of colonel. By the decade before the [Civil War], Lee had become subject to spells of deep depression, fits of morose behavior, occasional outbursts of violent temper and an obsession with death that amounted to “an almost suicidal tendency.”
That’s a far more accurate telling of Lee’s sentiment after his performance in the Mexican American War, versus the seemingly bogus words attributed to Scott that make Lee sound like some kind of bouncy happy Klan. Oops, I meant clam.
America won the war for a number of reasons, not least of all because Mexico was economically weak, politically distracted and militarily lacked supplies to fight off the invasion.
To put it bluntly, if someone highlights Lee as a “success” they likely are trying to falsely represent the evil and immoral political stunts in Mexico. Lee’s proponents aren’t doing his horrible traitorous reputation any favors by spreading old Reverdy’s bogus propaganda again.
Firefighters remarked on how much water and time they had to waste, as if they didn’t get the memo from 2013: Tesla engineering is an environmental disaster.
Multiple fire departments were dispatched to a vehicle fire at Mile Marker 137 on Interstate 80 Westbound in Cooper Township just before 11 a.m. Tuesday.
Multiple departments had to be called because they kept running out of supplies. The reporters try to claim the car was unrecognizable after the fire, even though Tesla fires are always easily recognizable.
More than 12,000 gallons of water (one fire department’s water reserve for an entire month) is now needed to contain any Tesla on the road
They’re the worst ones sucking up the most resources by design.
Do regional taxpayers want their emergency services standing around dumping a months worth of water in two hours because… someone was stupid enough to own a Tesla? I hope not and someone finally works up the courage to stop this company’s fraudulent CEO.
This story should be read like a Chinese cruise missile crashed in Pennsylvania.
Chinese artist rendering of the explosive Tesla remotely controlled in America
That means Tesla management has managed to not only undermine basic principles of engineering by producing a car that is inherently far less safe compared to other cars, but it also reduces performance of anyone trying to drive it safely (as I very clearly warned back in 2016, after investigating how a former Navy SEAL was killed by Tesla).
Quantitative data, as well as qualitative reports, prove a point unavoidable at this date. Here’s yet another case:
A professional safety driver in Korea has been forced into court despite severe post-tramatic stress to describe how he was hired to drive someone’s Tesla that malfunctioned severely, crashing and killing his customer and almost him too.
Choi Woan-jong, who made his living driving people in their own cars, says the Model X sped out of control on its own and that the brakes failed in the December 2020 accident. […] “It felt like the car was swept away by a hurricane,” said Choi, who said he had been driving for more than 20 years and had experience driving Teslas. […] Choi and his lawyer are seeking to show that the car’s electrical systems failed and that its design slowed firefighters’ attempts to rescue Yoon. The Tesla’s battery caught fire after the crash. Smoke and flames filled the car, according to firefighters and a video of the scene, taken by firefighters and viewed by Reuters. Choi escaped through a broken window on his side. Firefighters were delayed in pulling Yoon out of the back seat, because the Model X’s electronic doors failed to open from outside, a Dec. 31, 2020, fire department report reviewed by Reuters shows.
It’s a similar failure by design scenario as the infamous and widely reported Boeing 737 management crisis, where pilots ended up in a fight with the controls before tragically being killed along with all their customers due to known flaws.
Woefully poor engineering practices, total disregard for quality, makes Tesla a very uniquely disastrous brand. If you want a safer world, ban such sub-par technology already.
Bernie Madoff couldn’t have produced a worse product and he went to jail.
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