This little cat was a bit concerned about how loud the neighbour’s dog was being. (That dog would be Jökull, which I know because his owner keeps shouting at him whenever he’s barking too much. “Jökull! Hættu að gelta!”)

The redpolls came for another seed raid yesterday. They were quite lively and would not stand still 🙂

My sister sent me a couple more photos of her cat Kolka, a former rescue she got from the cat shelter here in Hveragerði. A masterful blepper.

• “Someone edited my photo to unbutton my blouse and reveal a made-up hint of a bra or something else underneath. 🤨”
• “Claims that ‘AI can replace teachers’ betray a very poor understanding of teachers’ work”. “All the hype around ‘AI will replace teachers’ is as unfounded as with any other profession, and the teachers in our research project are well justified in being unswayed – if not bemused – by such statements. ”
• “You Need More Enough — Mule Design”. “The 2024 Mule Books edition of Just Enough Research is here!” One of my favourite books has a new edition.
• “The Anatomy of a Bad Idea – Paul Taylor”. “The notion that good ideas automatically win out is a myth. Bad ideas, especially those that tap into our desire for quick fixes, can easily gain traction and crowd out more nuanced solutions.”
• “Fine-grained provenance, Automerge updates”. Automerge is one the more interesting projects in the local-first web software scene. (Yjs would be the other one.)
• “revealing the fediverse’s gifts”
• “You Might Not Recover from Burnout. Ever. - Devon Price”. “Among the exploited and overworked, the compulsion to sleep and stare off into space can feel similarly uncontrollable. And yet, it is also a blessing, a ravenous hungering for more life.”
• “CSS min() All The Things — Smashing Magazine”. This is clever
• “Accountability sinks | A Working Library”
• “Analysis: Aviation could consume a quarter of 1.5C carbon budget by 2050 - Carbon Brief”. “While it is true that aviation may be a small slice of a large pie at the moment, as other sectors seek to reduce their emissions in line with the carbon budgets, aviation will come to occupy an increasingly large share, if it continues to grow.”
• “the secret ingredient to coming up with good ideas for a story | by Doc Burford | Oct, 2024 | Medium”. “So, look, you wanna be creative? Well, it might seem scary until you actually practice it enough, but the answer is: figure out what you’re writing, figure out what kind of story it is, strip away the things that don’t matter, and build up from there.”
• “the secret ingredient to coming up with good ideas for a story | by Doc Burford | Oct, 2024 | Medium”. “The exercise of take an idea, now strip out the common tropes until you get to the basics, now try to put the basics in another kind of setting or with a different sort of character is a great way to be creative.”

This weekend I pointed out what I felt was a funny local news story here in Iceland:

“AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-Americans

An Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public notice

People were absolutely horrified

Why?

Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a holster, AROUND CHILDREN 😱

The uniform was also not accurate for an Icelandic cop but what people found obscene was the idea that anybody would carry a gun around children, even holstered

Quite a few of the replies were along the lines of “quite a few police forces carry guns, it’s not because the AI has a US bias.”

This is nonsense. Does anybody really think that model-generated images of police officers are biased towards being armed because of the massive glut of photos of Finnish police officers in the training data set?

Does anybody seriously believe that image generation models made by US companies using mostly US data show a cop with a gun because, “hey, let’s make sure German police are represented fairly by our model”?

Don’t be ridiculous.

Most of the responses were people thankfully agreeing with the notion that police carrying weapons is bad, but I also got quite a few comments from people absolutely not seeing the issue. “Why? You think the cop’s going to go on a rampage?”

So, for those from countries where, paradoxically, routinely arming police makes people feel safe, a short history of Iceland’s path from being one of the more brutal and violent nations in Europe to being a largely pacifist one.

Iceland used to be so, so violent

We used to kill each other a lot.

Iceland was settled in the late eight hundreds by Vikings. Written records, as well as archaeological and genetic evidence shows that many of these settlers were second generation Viking settlers from the British Islands, which technically made many of them Viking-Celts. Many of the original settling population were also Celtic slaves, though they had all been freed by the year 1000 when chattel slavery was banned by law in Iceland. Today, modern gene sequencing seems to indicate that your average Icelander is 30-40% of Celtic descent. As a nation, contrary to the other Nordic countries, modern Icelanders are descended from both the Vikings and their victims.

(Also, last I checked, 1-4% of our genes seem to possibly be of Sámi descent, which was a surprising discovery, though I haven’t followed up to see if that was born out in later studies.)

The Vikings were not known for their pacifism. The voting system for Iceland’s Althing, for example, was proxy combat. Effectively, you assessed which side, for or against a proposal, was likelier to win in combat. Recounts or challenges to that assessment meant doing the actual combat and seeing which side won. And, yeah, that could mean that having a noted sociopath and former mercenary like Egill Skallagrímsson on your side could result in it winning even though it had fewer numbers.

Our predilection towards violence continued until internecine violence escalated to such a point where the country became completely dysfunctional, our resources depleted, and we lost our independence to Norway in 1262-4.

Then Norway lost their independence to the Danish and once the Danish took over things steadily got worse. The Danish ran monopoly and starvation policies in Iceland, where each part of Iceland was controlled by a regional governor (sýslumaður), who operated on behalf of the Danish crown, and who had legislative, executive, and judicial powers. The authorities were effectively free to loot their region at will. Most of the violent massacres in Iceland’s history after we lost our independence were done at the direction of these regional governors.

The massive powers of the regional sýslumaður were not fully removed until Iceland lost a case at the European Court of Human Rights in the 1980s because, and I paraphrase loosely: “you have regional governors who both hold executive and judicial powers with no checks or balances? WTF is wrong with you?”

(Modern Iceland may be a mostly pacifist country but we have never in our history voluntarily relinquished corrupt practices.)

In addition to the looting – regional monopolies set the price that farmers could sell their goods for and the price they could buy goods at and they were fine with the difference between the two resulting in starvation – a good chunk of the Icelandic population were outright slaves. Over 25% of Icelanders were in a form of serfdom, vistarband, whose conditions and rights are, in both modern terms, a form of slavery. That proportion of serfdom was, for a time, the highest in Europe.

Combined with Iceland’s tendency towards natural disasters—weather, volcanos, and earthquakes—and the ruling authority’s refusal to build any infrastructure to deal with any of it, meant that Icelanders died a lot. Like, a lot.

Most children died before they reached the age of five. Most of the rest died before they became adults. If parents had a male name, for example, they wanted carried on into the next generation, they gave all their sons the same name hoping at least one of them would survive to become an adult.

You know how people who study historical life expectancy statistics love to point out that the distribution of life expectancy is usually bimodal? That in most cultures you have high infant and child mortality, but life expectancy wasn’t that awful if you survived that gauntlet into adulthood?

Not so in Iceland. People died as children and those who survived mostly died before middle age. If you go to Iceland’s national library and read through some of the diaries preserved from that time, you’ll find people just over forty writing about how they expected to die soon.

A couple of times in recent history, we had to move cemeteries here in Iceland due to construction and, because we’re quite obsessed with history as a nation, archaeologists and historians were brought in to carefully dig them up and move the remains, inspecting them in the process.

What they discovered were numerous skeletal remains of children. Every adult bone showed signs of malnutrition. Even the ones belonging to Icelanders who were ostensibly “richer” than the rest. Conditions that archaeologists normally only see in remains from post-war or post-plague famines were the norm in Iceland, even among those who were supposedly of the Icelandic upper class (that is, collaborators).

It should not surprise anybody then that the Icelandic independence movement was largely pacifist and non-violent. If the Danes threatened violence, like by sending a representative of the crown with an armed guard to demand that you ceded your demands of independence, you stood your ground but didn’t raise your fist. “We all protest.”

We attained self-rule in 1918 and from the start our constitution called for both pacifism and neutrality, though we were force to abandon the latter at gunpoint by the US after World War 2 (a long story full of typical US bullying, you can probably guess quite accurately what happened).

Despite being pacifist and having no standing army, proportionally more Icelanders died in WW2 than Americans, because of our heavy involvement in the merchant navy that was shipping food through the Nazi blockade of Britain. My granddad lost two brothers to German submarines – he never forgave Germans as long as he lived.

—But, if you don’t have an army, what do you do if somebody invades you?

Well, I expect we would do the same thing we did the last time we got invaded. We protested, loudly, but did not take up arms because that would have just gotten more people killed.

Though, that didn’t mean Icelanders at the time were entirely passive:

One Icelander snatched a rifle from a marine and stuffed a cigarette in it. He then threw it back to the marine and told him to be careful with it.

Iceland has a lot of problems. Our institutions are starved of funding after decades of near-continuous right wing rule. (The post-2008-collapse ostensibly left-wing government was only allowed to follow the thoroughly right-wing International Monetary Fund economic program.) Corruption is pervasive, to a degree that most foreigners simply aren’t capable of appreciating. So much so that building codes, for example, are effectively meaningless. There’s no guarantee that a new residential building here will be even close to code and it’s unlikely the builder would face any meaningful consequences if their non-compliance is discovered. The police in many regions are effectively direct servants of the fishing industry oligarchs – who also run big chunks of our private media as their personal propaganda outlets. We are a thoroughly xenophobic nation whose racism can be genuinely shocking if you’re unlucky enough to encounter it. Naziism and fascist ideas – such as eugenics – had popular support here and you still hear echoes of it in our modern healthcare practices. One of my all-time favourite Icelandic writers, Þórbergur Þórðarson, was fined by Iceland’s supreme court for writing an article in 1934 called “Nazi Sadism” that did nothing more than outline what was then already known about Nazi violence and torture.

Even though Iceland, as a society, has an extremely low tolerance for violence, many people here are fine with others committing violence. It’s fine as long as it doesn’t happen here.

But, overall, we find violence shocking. The whole point of a modern society is to prevent violence and save lives. That’s what it’s for.

Our police do not carry firearms, because a firearm is an explicit threat of lethal force. If our police routinely carried firearms, then that would be telling both them and the citizens they encounter that the job of a police officer is to kill people. It makes them soldiers, not law enforcement.

Icelandic police are trained to use firearms and have controlled access to them as needed. But they are also trained to believe that it’s their job to risk their lives for others – like firefighters – so they should always prioritise saving the lives of others. Even the perpetrators. Unlike US police who are, I’m told, trained to “shoot to kill”, Icelandic police are trained to try to shoot to disable if they’re forced to return fire.

Our police has only once in our post-independence history shot and killed a man. Even then they shot him only after he had discharged a shotgun right into the torso of a police officer. (The vest took the brunt of it, the cop’s fine.)

When knife violence is on the rise, our response is “how did we let these people down so much that they resort to violence?”

A few years ago, when woman was horrifically murdered going home alone after partying, our response wasn’t to try to prevent young women from enjoying their lives but to ask ourselves “what can we do to make the nights safer for women?”

We are a society with many systemic problems, prejudices, rampant corruption (seriously, most non-Icelanders have no idea easy how it is for some people here to completely disregard the law), and a thoroughly ingrained xenophobia.

But our saving grace is our low tolerance for violence.

And what I’d like you to ask yourself is this:

What has gone wrong in the many so-called “free” and democratic societies around the world where killing civilians is explicitly a part of a police officer’s job description?