A crucial point made in a lecture on computer heuristics by Richard Feynman, two years before he passed away in 1988, is knowledge shouldn’t be treated like competition:

The British Government has announced their Home Office will have a Director General for Homeland Security.

Some in the UK reacted by saying it sounds American.

Nice try.

I thought everyone knows that America most definitely gets most of its English terminology for security from… wait for it… England.

I mean who has a Home Department, or a Home Secretary for the Home Office? Not America.

The Voice of America (VOA) explained this exact problem years ago in a story called “Are You in the Homeland Generation?” on their “Learning English” channel:

Historically, the Old English word hamland meant “enclosed pasture” — a protected field for animals. The word homeland first appeared in Modern English in the 1660s. It combined the nouns “home” and “land.”​

But a deeper look at how the word homeland was used outside of the U.S. shows why some people are not comfortable with it. The government of South Africa used the word homeland for areas it created for only African peoples during the period of apartheid. These “homelands” separated the Africans from white citizens.​

Friederike Eigler is a professor of German at Georgetown University. She said that in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people used a similar word to homeland – heimat – to express intense national pride.

“It became more and more a political term because it was sort of meshed up with ideas of the nation and nationalism. And then that kind of came to a head during World War II. It became very much tied up very much with notions of the German race, and the nation, nationality or national socialism, and so in that sense it got very discredited as a result in the postwar period.”

In the early 2000s, when the U.S. government created the Department of Homeland Security, some objected to the name. Peggy Noonan writes for the Wall Street Journal. She thought the Bush administration should change the name. She said homeland “isn’t really an American word.”​

James A. Bartlett blogs for The Ethical Spectacle. He thinks the problem is that the word homeland has to do with the idea of being a native. He quotes the second Merriam Webster definition of homeland: “a state or area set aside to be a state for a people of a particular national, cultural, or racial origin.”

Mr. Bartlett believes the word homeland does not describe the United States well. The U.S. is a diverse country of immigrants. Are those immigrants also able to call the U.S. their homeland?​

Speaking of people being confused about where words come from, machines are also pretty terrible at this.

A simple query for the word “homeland” using Google’s algorithm on British government archives brings up this hilarious example: “Home Secretary” [many paragraphs later] “Auckland”

A new thought-piece from a powerful British government lobbyist (Vice President of Global Affairs, Facebook. Former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, leader of the Liberal Democrats, member of Parliament) was introduced to me by Bryan Lee rather blankly as…

Facebook VP explains it’s your fault you’re fat, if you didn’t dress like that they wouldn’t say those things, and if you want to quit smoking stop buying cigarettes.

Of course such a framing of the argument had me hooked and off I went to read the entire piece.

It was a cringe worthy work of total tone-deafness.

However, it was even worse than buying cigarettes. This was tobacco plantation language.

Someone has taken time to write what amounts to a justification of colonialism as a partnership, where the subjugated love oppression as a new form of freedom.

Facebook seems to steal management values from colonialism, so maybe I should have called this post “taking the pith”.

Unfortunately this is not a hyperbole. Such nonsense is not unheard of in Britain, and this feels like someone on track towards repeating some of the worst mistakes in history.

As I’ve written here before, I spent a bit as an academic in the British archives reading actual memos from Foreign Office and Colonial Office staff. These arguments and their tone are very familiar, so perhaps I’m keying into that history and glaringly obvious signs that others haven’t studied or seen before.

There are moments as a historian when you open a dusty folder and stare at the hand written memo from Churchill, taking in the flow of every pen stroke and thinking about the power in his words. I might call those some of the highlights.

Then there are moments when some unknown chap in a pith helmet has telegraphed a racist screed about his vision to treat humans like animals and deny them freedoms because that is what they think another human deserves… leaving a knot in your gut as you can’t peel your eyes away from the historic relevance of disgusting cognitive blindness. Those are NOT some of the highlights.

This “Facebook VP…member of Parliament” very strongly invokes the latter.

I’ve also written here before about this colonialism topic in tech and why it’s a quagmire to avoid; so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised Facebook has a VP gleefully crossing the bright line.

Who else sees themselves in such a privileged power position as to say awful things about humanity without any real sense of responsibility?

Let’s break down a few examples.

1) You can’t kick the British Empire out of its colonies

Even if Facebook ceased to exist, social media won’t be — can’t be — uninvented. The human impulse to use the internet for social connection is profound.

Classic colonialism says you can’t just have the oppressors leave. They’re baked into targeted society by cruel design so they very often say it would be impossible for their victims to ever reach true independence.

Note here also how an “impulse…for social connection” is made falsely equivalent to social media. We don’t need social medial for social connections. That’s a logical fallacy to fit right into such proto-colonialism.

2) You owe the British Empire your good lives under colonial oppression

Personalized digital advertising not only allows billions of people to use social media for free, it is also more useful to consumers than untargeted, low-relevance advertising.

This is just so obviously and patently false, I could write long blog posts on it alone. First, advertising doesn’t make things free it obfuscates taxation without representation. Second, repeated studies have shown that targeting is garbage economics and totally fails to achieve its claimed goals. Third, about the only thing targeting is actually able to do is inflame bias and conflict. Fourth, the privacy loss and freedom-destruction of targeting systms is a ridiculously high price to pay. And the list goes on, as explained succinctly the Atlantic…

The eBay study suggested that people who click most ads aren’t being influenced. The Facebook study suggested that people who are being influenced aren’t actually clicking ads. It makes you wonder whether clicks matter, at all.

Given how Facebook systems currently are being run by unaccountable and immoral leadership, we easily can prove that an un-targeted, low-relevance experience is essentially a safer happier world for everyone.

3) The British Empire is your friend who prevents you from being a primitive savage

Turning the clock back to some false sepia-tinted yesteryear — before personalized advertising, before algorithmic content ranking, before the grassroots freedoms of the internet challenged the powers that be — would forfeit so many benefits to society.

A world before personalized advertising isn’t false. That really existed and still does exist. But it’s especially toxic here to see “grassroots freedoms” invoked completely opposite to actual events.

Again massively unfair fallacy, as it uses false equivalence to list individual freedom brought about on the Internet as something just like the surveillance used by giant centralized powers to track you everywhere. Apples are not bananas.

Pure propagandist nonsense.

I’m reminded of British colonialists who argued that Africans turning back the clock to sovereignty would lose their freedoms. Imagine a sentence like “some false yesteryear before British rule, before ships landed and men with guns invaded your homes, before men challenged the powers that be — would forfeit the benefits of being in a colony.” It sounds totally contradictory because it is.

4) The British Empire is the future because it controls the future. There is only one queen.

This is the magic of social media, the thing that differentiates it from older forms of media. There is no editor dictating the frontpage headline millions will read on Facebook. …it is of course the case that these systems are designed by people. It is Facebook’s decision makers who ultimately decide what content is acceptable…

Notice the doublespeak here? Magic and differentiation comes from having no editor, other than decision makers who ultimately are just… editors.

Older forms of media had decision makers who ultimately decided what content is acceptable. It is not hard to see there is no magic, no differentiation on that front.

The shame here is pretending an editor is not an editor to control the entire dialogue; evade laws and common decency in order to peddle basic oppression as some kind of exceptional “magic”.

5) You will find no better colony than under the British Empire. Floggings set to continue until morale improves.

And it is entirely reasonable to argue that private companies shouldn’t be making so many big decisions about what content is acceptable on their own. It would clearly be better if these decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers. But in the absence of such laws, there are decisions that need to be made in real time. […] But of course, you don’t see the algorithm at work, and you have limited insight into why and how the content that appears was selected and what, if anything, you could do to alter it. And it is in this gap in understanding that assumptions, half-truths, and misrepresentations about how Facebook works can take root.

The logical fallacy here is no true Scotsman. He is pleading for “democratically accountable lawmakers” to deliver magical new frameworks (when plenty relevant ones already exist — Facebook has repeatedly violated basic safety and privacy).

Realize instead that lawmakers don’t have to lift a finger for everyone to already see that “you don’t see the algorithm” is a completely planned failure.

Nobody wrote a law telling Facebook they had to give users limited insights. There was no law that Facebook had to deliver gaps in understanding, Facebook wasn’t legally required to leave people with half-truths.

Facebook chose all that awful destiny for their users. They built a torture box and put people in it, then started selling tickets to see it and saying “we shouldn’t be doing this and it would be better if someone could tell us to stop, but in the meantime this person’s obvious lack of freedom for our profit is just their opinion”.

Consider the absolutely tone-deaf irony here. On a platform claiming to provide a fantastical modern world of intelligent algorithms to figure out the right fit of information to keep you informed, they also say if you’re uninformed from the giant gaps in their platform that’s entirely your fault.

The gaps they say are your fault are the exact things that Facebook has the most control over. They claim to be able to close all the gaps in knowledge about some random person’s day scooping ice cream, despite having nothing to do with it other than surveillance, but simultaneously claim they can’t close the gaps that would explain how their own work is done.

Shall I go on?

Let me instead turn to an Indian opinion piece from 2020 that clearly warned us about Clegg repeating the worst mistakes of history.

The attempt by Clegg, presently on the payrolls of the global leader in social media, to push for free flow of data is really a part of the larger concerted attempt by digital giants to protect their monopolistic business from potential competition from firms in emerging developing countries, including India. In a narrative reminiscent of the colonial times when the EIC was attempting to get a foothold in India, Clegg cleverly camouflaged the business interests of his principals and instead, projected free flow of data as being democratic and also in India’s interest.

The EIC is a reference to East India Company.

The company’s transition from trade to conquest has preoccupied historians ever since Edmund Burke famously attacked it as a “state in the disguise of a merchant”. […] This story needs to be told… because imperialism persists, yet “it is not obviously apparent how a nation state can adequately protect itself and its citizens from corporate excess”. And it needs to be read to beat back the willfully ignorant imperial nostalgia gaining ground in Britain…

Indeed. Clegg seems willfully ignorant as he lays out the colonialism thickly. Clearly he is at risk of using his position within a merchant to operate it as a state just so it may achieve ill-gotten corporate excess (of which he is a direct beneficiary).

If nothing else, this is all food for thought given Facebook has created a C-level role for blockchain yet keeps its ethics buried at the Director level (reporting through government relations).

There’s probably a very simple reason Facebook neither understands human rights and ethics at the C-suite, nor makes room at that level for someone who does.

Such a person surely would have blocked Clegg’s completely tone-deaf messaging that Facebook can justify its colonialist mindset.

Have you seen this comedy video about hidden meanings in country music?

It’s pretty funny but also sad how true this is.

For example while I was relaxing on an airplane trying to sleep with the country channel on, a song called “The Big Revival” woke me straight up. It almost immediately reminded me of the kind of racial trigger words I used to hear in rural Kansas.

A quick check of its history revealed its author was a reclusive Dennis Linde, originally from Texas.

He was the quintessential mystery man of Nashville because he didn’t go to all the functions,” Scott Siman, an artist manager who had known Linde since the 1970s, told The Tennessean newspaper. “If you ever saw Dennis Linde it was amazing, because you didn’t get that opportunity very often.

A mystery man. Interesting. You may have read some of my earlier posts on encoding messages in songs (e.g. Kumbaya and Atilla).

Also see “Ten Factors that Encourage Extremism”

…extremist tendencies are able to develop codes of communication that are difficult for outsiders to understand…

This song seems like another case of encoding, but it’s very vague and I don’t know if I can achieve the comedy genius of Key & Peele in explaining what I hear.

Get ready for the big revival
Get ready for the big revival

Get ready for the big revival
Everybody get in the van
There’s a little church on Eagle Mountain
It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land
If your faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

Now Reverend Jones, he struts and dances
While the guitar plays Amazing Grace
He testifies in tongues of fire
With tears of joy running down his face
He ain’t sure and we ain’t sure exactly what he said
But praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

You won’t find many hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit
But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide

Now when you hold that deadly viper
Keep the holy spirit in your mind
Do not lose your concentration
That serpent’s surely bound to strike
Either way you won’t forget the first time that you said
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead
Praise the Lord and pass me a Copperhead

Here are the clues I started picking at, which as I said reminded me of triggers I heard in rural Kansas:

• little church on Eagle Mountain
• It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land
• faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead
• pass me a Copperhead
• testifies in tongues of fire
• ain’t sure exactly what he said
• hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit
• But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide
• hold that deadly viper

“little church on Eagle Mountain”

There’s really no reference or context for an eagle in this song perhaps other than to evoke patriotism and pride. Unfortunately mountain, as the modifier, doesn’t seem like it would come from some innocent place like a bald eagle on purple mountain (far better phrasing if you ask me). The next line talking about blood really cements it for me as German and therefore classic encoding. Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) is the house on top of a mountain in Bavaria where Hitler entertained guests.

“It’s called The Blood of the Blessed Land”

Blut and boden (blood and soil) is how white supremacists make claim to be more connected to the land than any other races. So an eagle mountain church called blood of the blessed land is quite literally the very common symbolism invoked by white supremacists based on Nazi history.

“faith ain’t strong enough, child, you might wind up dead”

The penalty for being unfaithful to the cause is execution. Capitol punishment has and continues to be very clearly racist.

“pass me a Copperhead”

My first thought here was the old copperhead balls that we used to shoot in the empty spaces around Fort Riley, yet that seemed too obscure while also maybe from the same deeper reference.

Rummaging through history I quickly realized pro-slavery Democrats in the 1860s who opposed American Civil War and wanted immediate truce with a Confederate South, were called a Copperhead.

Copperhead, also called Peace Democrat, during the American Civil War, pejoratively, any citizen in the North who opposed the war policy and advocated restoration of the Union through a negotiated settlement with the South. The word Copperhead was first so used by the New York Tribune on July 20, 1861, in reference to the snake that sneaks and strikes without warning.

That sounds a lot like Americans who sided with Nazi Germany in WWII and demanded peace be negotiated as quickly as possible with Hitler (calling themselves “America First“), or a lot like the Americans who sided with Germany in WWI and demanded non-intervention (calling themselves “America First”). In case that isn’t obvious, “America First” meant KKK before 1929 and Nazism/KKK after — Copperhead predates them all.

The key here is that the Copperhead platform opposed Republican president Lincoln because of what they termed “an unconstitutional war against slavery”. Moreover, Lincoln called Copperheads a grave threat.

In January 1863, Abraham Lincoln made a remarkable confession. He was, he told a senator, more worried about “the fire in the rear” than he was about the Confederates to his front.

Remember tongues of fire (it’s coming next)?! Fire in the rear were Copperheads.

It turns out a Democratic Congressman of Ohio named Clement L. Vallandigham became known for his anti-federal Copperhead speeches of 1863 where he falsely alleged Republicans had gone to war to enslave the whites. Sounds crazy, right?

Commander of the Ohio military, General Ambrose Burnside, arrested Vallandigham on fairly obvious grounds of treasonous behavior (“declaring sympathies for the enemy”).

This might be a good moment to also point out Vallandigham accidentally shot himself while trying to prove that someone could not accidentally shoot themselves. He was… an idiot.

If that vignette doesn’t explain how crazy a Copperhead was with their tongues of fire, and how it ended up so connected in this song with wackos who obsess about the eagle mountain blood and soil, I’m not sure what does.

Moreover white supremacists today refer to themselves as “Constitutionalists” or similar to Copperheads, so this period in history could come to mind. The Copperheads argued the South could never be conquered and ran slogans like “The Union as it was, Constitution as it is”.

Here are the exact words from a 1863 Copperhead speech by the Hon. C.L. Vallandigham where you can see him tell the absurd lie that America would enslave whites if they didn’t enslave blacks.

“Pass me a Copperhead” is surely the flag of white insecurity.

“testifies in tongues of fire”

As I said above, this seems to be validation it’s about Valladigham attacking President Lincoln. Just before the fire comes Amazing Grace, an historic “revival” song used for background and a setup to the fire. These combinations of phrases and words have powerful association to tragedy in the 1800s.

‘Amazing Grace’ would have spoken to [slave] desire for an experience of freedom, of one day seeing God face-to-face, of one day being with him for all of eternity, and no longer subjected to the type of cruel treatment they experienced during slavery.

“ain’t sure exactly what he said”

Oath of silence and vagueness to the fiery events. No one can testify to what happened. This even gets to the point of “Know Nothings” (before 1855 calling themselves the Native American Party, American Party after) — an extremist “nativism” political party by white immigrants that used secret society (e.g. KKK “hidden empire”) to oppose immigration of other races.

“hypocrites that’ll take the chance on getting bit”

Again emphasizing you’re either in the group, a follower, or you are dead.

“But a true believer can survive rattlesnakes and cyanide”

This line really cements the Nazism. While an eagle mountain of blood and soil may seem the most obvious call-outs to Nazism, cyanide is completely over the top. Why cyanide? No way it is random. Of all the things to put into a song about revival… in the 1920s cyanide was used to kill Americans using gas chamber.

Washington, Arizona, and Oregon in 1919-20 reinstated the death penalty. In 1924, the first execution by cyanide gas took place in Nevada… a special “gas chamber” was hastily built.

Those three states in 1919 saw a HUGE rise in KKK activity. It was not a coincidence, as I said above about the racism of capitol punishment, that KKK were taking control of a state and using cyanide gas chambers to kill non-whites.

Zyklon B had become available in the U.S.A. in the early 1920s when fears of alien infection had been inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists. […] The use of Zyklon B on the U.S.-Mexican border was a matter of keen interest to the firm of DEGESCH. In 1938, Dr. Gerhard Peters called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern. […] Peters went on to become the managing director of DEGESCH, which handled the supply of Zyklon B for the Nazi death camps.

The Nazis in 1940s used Zyklon B cyanide to murder 1 million people.

Again, we have a song here saying eagle mountain, blood and soil, and believers survive cyanide. It’s a trifecta of Nazism on top of the odious Copperhead background. How is this song not titled “Get Ready for the Fourth Reich”?

“hold that deadly viper”

This reinforces for me that the danger of a copperhead is being used in the context of a particular purpose, leveraged even, as a necessary evil to test true faith. As hard as I tried to flip the whole story and see some kind of positive story of surviving against threats of generic danger, the words just don’t add up that way for me and instead sound like a celebration of Nazism (which, let’s be honest, was ideologically similar to Copperheads).

Maybe you’ll have more luck and can decode it further or more accurately. To me, we have a popular song in America basically trying to invoke white nationalism.

To test my theory I listened to many versions of this song. Here’s a 2008 release:

On the airline radio I first heard it played by Kenny Chesney:

That’s an awfully strange looking bus in the image for a white nationalist tune.

Suddenly I felt like maybe I had the song wrong. Peace symbols? This guy looks like he’s into love and happiness (to be fair that’s exactly the disinformation Nazis broadcast on radio telling their targets to drop their arms… right before invasion).

So I went and found the video featuring that bus. It’s in a song called American Kids… that talks about America coast to coast etc as if representing all the kids while having only whites in the video.

Only whites.

You can’t make this stuff up. The cast is so white, so painfully not like America, I had to watch it twice just to be sure there was absolutely no other race but whites represented in a video claiming to be for all the “American Kids”.

It’s actually creepy how the video also seems to suggest American Kids worship that singer.

And just by way of comparison, I have to throw out a positive example of a “snake” video that shows what something purporting to represent “American Kids” could have done; a bus can be so much more with crowds dancing and singing around each other in a distributed manner (note this internationally diverse video is the 20th most watched on YouTube with over 3 billion views).

As I said at the start Key & Peele do a far better job at laying out the obvious racism in country music than I have done here.

But I can tell you as someone who has spent a lot of time studying triggers and encoding, as well as KKK history, when I was half-asleep listening to the radio these rather peculiar song lyrics woke me straight up.

“The Big Revival” had me immediately wondering who would write out such known white supremacist imagery under a title invoking things like rise of the KKK and rebellion against the United States. And on that note, the most curious part might be that it was written by a guy who wrote what other people wanted, remaining hidden and reclusive.

It all reminds me of the encoded racism of Ronald Reagan, as I’ve written about here before, and more specifically how Lee Atwater (Advisor to Reagan, campaign Manager to GHW Bush, Chairman National Republican Committee) described Reagan’s strategy to attack Americans:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Now be honest, how many of you realized “cut taxes” was Reagan’s way of getting away with saying “nigger” by not saying it?