Long-distance umbrage in the Gossip Age

Iran protests the Swedish local newspaper Nerikes Allehanda printing a Muhammed charicature by one Lars Vilks who saw the opportunity to troll a dead horse. This made The Kabul Times yesterday, resulting in mildly photogenic demonstrations.

N.A. has a circulation of 63 900 if I'm reading this right, and looks to be located in the Swedish equivalent of flyover country. Someone must have been actively relaying the item for it to make The Kabul Times. The reason this hasn't been plastered all over by the SUPPORT DENMARK!!! crowd would appear to be that the artist can't draw for shit.

In fantastically related news, also from yesterday, someone successfully trolled the Shaolin monks by posting (yes, on the internet) that a ninja once totally flipped out and kicked their arses.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Shaolin Temple, the cradle of Chinese kung fu, is demanding an apology from an Internet user who said its monks had once been beaten in unarmed combat by a Japanese ninja, Chinese media reported on Friday.

"The so-called defeat is purely fabricated, and we demand the Internet user to apologise to the whole nation for the wrongs he or she did," the Beijing News said, citing a notice announced by a lawyer for the Shaolin monks.

Beijing News doesn't seem to be online, unfortunately. Still, if this is true it paints a picture of a shrinking world where everyone's rapidly becoming like roommates that have spent far too long together, or where—to quote David Whiteland—any number of people can disagree with each other regardless of the distance between them. It's the new chaos effect: wave a pen in Scandinavia and something catches fire in Central Asia.

Now if only someone could trick Muslim fundies into drawing charicatures of Shaolin monks, the circle would be complete.

[Technorati Gossip Age Nerikes Allehanda cartoon controversy epic trolling flip out intercontinental umbrage miserable defeats in both kung-fu and love ninja burger real ultimate power trolling umbrage at a distance utter lack of artistic ability you have offended the Order]

Genetic fatalism

The Extended Phenotype, p. 13:

The important point is that there is no general reason for expecting genetic influences to be any more irreversible than environmental ones. What did genes do to deserve their sinister, juggernaut-like reputation? [...] Why are genes thought to be so much more fixed and inescapable in their effects than television, nuns, or books?

Apparently there seems to be a sort of prurient attraction, an irresistible itch towards viewing genes as Threads of Destiny weaved by the norns of fate. Scientology exploits the ease with which you can combine scientific trappings and superstition: but this rise of the popular superstition of genetic fatalism is potentially much worse.

We can see it already beginning to hurt people in this LA Times story, U.S. military practices genetic discrimination in denying benefits, detailing how the US military, exempt from the usual genetic-discimination laws, treat genes that give a small increase in the risk of disease as an inescapable fate, a preexisting condition.

But Nunes said the armed forces' disability policy was flawed by a fundamental misunderstanding about the biology of inherited diseases.

This is a chilling reminder of how much more justified superstition can seem when it adopts a superficial appearance of being rooted in scientific results.

[Technorati determinism fatalism genetic determinism genetic fatalism genetic predestination high-tech superstition norn DNA prurience science-superstition]

Enemies of Scientism

Enemies of Reason pt. 1 is out. It has an excellent soundbite where an astrologer's response to bringing up swapping people's horoscopes is I think what you're up to here is mischief. Ooh-la-la. Remember: scrutiny equals mischief.

Next he says: I just don't believe in the experiment, Richard. It's that simple. (Magical thinking? He can make everything uncomfortable go away by simply not believing in it?)

In defense of his livelihood the Observer astrologer responds (via):

For scientism, however, personal experience is not admissible. Everything must be subject to randomised, controlled double-blind trials, just like medical drugs - 'drugs that work' as Dawkins insists.
...
Scientism, of course, hates meaning. It prefers to view humanity as a random accident, isolated in a cosmos of 'indifferent vastness' - the legacy of the post-Copernican enlightenment that Dawkins claims is now being 'betrayed'. The opposing view, that the world has soul and purpose, that humanity and the cosmos are linked, is to be found not, as he and others claim, in the dogma of religion, but in art and in the depth psychology of Freud and Jung that Dawkins holds in contempt.

What a brilliantly straightforward demonstration of 'meaning' used to signify unwarranted self-importance on the part of humanity.

Hmm, scientism. There's a blemish of a word.

The first quote for the 'overzealous' sense of scientism in OED is Shaw's 1921 Back to Metuselah, running through FA Hayek to the welcoming embrace of people feeling miffed at their bread-and-butter getting questioned.

Huston Smith: Scientism adds to science two corrollaries: first, that the scientific method is, if not the only reliable method of getting at the truth, then at least the most reliable method; and second, that the things science deals with—material entities—are the most fundamental things that exist. You know, material entities, like beams of light. Or perhaps he's using "material" in the sense of not imaginary.

This is from GR Peterson's Demarcation and the Scientistic Fallacy:

Thus, scientism would not be said to occur in the proper discouse of metaphysics and theology, not because these disciplines do not make claims about the ultimate nature of knowledge and reality (they do) but because making such claims is part of the proper function of these disciplines, which are not commonly understood to be among the sciences.

Ahh, I think I get it now. This is about people who are sore because they're afraid that their cushy little gravy-train of never getting questioned might run out of steam.

Good.

[Technorati Enemies of Reason atheist bastardry demarcation faith as shield free respect gravy-train religion magical thinking scientism scrutiny equals mischief suspension of disbelief truth equals mischief unwarranted self-importance]

Humility in spam

Concluding this three-part series on drawing lessons from scummy internet baiting, we have a tactic I just culled from the end of a bit of comment spam:

(Please feel free to delete this post if you don't want it on your blog. Thanks for the informative blog and opportunity to post.)

I should feel free to delete it? Wow, I think I just might take you up on that incredibly generous offer.

What do you even file this under? Spamming them with kindness? Correctly predicting that people who read it will instantly be filled with a desire to delete it, cheekily granting a permission that isn't theirs to grant?

Perhaps superficial humility, appearing humble simply to throw people off with the unexpected attitude, mixed with the psych! of saying that you can go ahead and do what you were going to do anyway. If in marketing you don't want people getting defensive, in spam you often don't want people getting offensive when they're able to delete your message.

Interestingly, this demonstrates that the technique of killing them with kindness—commonly presumed to be invariably angelic—is readily adopted by spammer scum.

[Technorati angelic kindness comment spam glorious spam killing them with kindness spam lessons spam taxonomy spamma from heaven spamming them with kindness superficial humility]

Don't worry me

Reading up on e-mail fraud, aka. phishing, I found this illuminating paper by M Jakobsson: The Human Factor in Phishing [PDF], which has this juicy tidbit relevant to general psychology:

Subjects did not like that this website said phishing attack in progress in three different locations. Some commented that phishing is too obscure a term for a financial institution to use in their communications – the phrase identity theft was offered as a plausible substitute. In Tsow et al. [44], it was established that if the focus on security was downplayed, then there was a significant increase in trust (p < 0.022).

So if you try to alert people that there's reason to be worried, they'll only be all too happy to shoot the messenger. Negativity and fear is judged on the basis of superficial association with things that look worrisome, not on what is genuinely detrimental or fearsome — in the words of the paper, People judge relevance before authenticity.

Which is to say, no other reason than that they don't like what they hear.

Further on:

This highlights why phishers often have higher click-through rates than legitimate providers of advertisements: Fraudsters can offer much nicer enticements than legitimate service providers, as they are not tied to their word.

About Markus Jakobsson.

[Technorati Markus Jakobsson diffuse fear messenger-shooting negativity not tied to their word shoot the messenger shooting the messenger superficiality what you want to hear]

A better world with spam

...no, I'm not talking about MAKING.VISIBILITY.FA$T, I mean that a lot of psychological fallacies that used to be difficult to talk about can now be readily illustrated, due to the increasing number of people who've seen some amount of spam in their inbox.

For instance, have you ever received spam with a sender's address that was similar to the name of someone you knew? This is a deliberate exploitation of apophenia, people's tendency to promiscuously connect the dots with little justification. The spammer only has to come close, the recipient will walk the rest of the way.

We have phishing, where people are deceived into going to a site similar to one where they may have a subscription and fooled into entering their password — ie, conning, giving off a superficial look of genuinity in the manner of the stereotypical used-car dealer who says you can trust me, I'm a Christian.

We have spam that inserts a block of text specifically designed to make it seem more relevant, mimicking the superficial form of genuine content. This might serve as an illustration of cargo-cult science, scientology etc. that only mimics the surface of real research.

Last but not least, people are much more likely to believe something that reaffirms them: witness the tenacity of comment spam that says Great post! Here are some links you might like, the omnipresent marketing technique You have already won! and of course the widespread ILOVEYOU e-mail worm that dashed romantic hopes and wasted man-weeks across the world.

[Technorati apophenia cargo cult conning deception fallacies illustrated glorious spam reaffirmation spam pedagogics spam psychology vikings singing]

Elaboration

It would seem the mind abhors a vacuum. Shortly after I'd invented the farcical example of a dodecahedron-shaped earth, I found myself thinking that, surely, major rivers would form along its edges.

Immediately on thinking that, I was almost revolted with myself for my capacity to come up with useless Time Cube-grade nonsense. So why did I think it? Apparently having inflicted the concept of a dodecahedron earth on myself wasn't enough; maybe the concept was simply too bare that it could be put to rest. Like some sort of obsessive-compulsive toymaker, my mind simply had to sew some ridiculous tassels on to the already ludicrous idea of the dodecahedron to really give it the style it deserved.

I'm not sure what category to chalk this up under. I'd like to say it's something like reducing uncertainty, but Uncertainty reduction is taken, it's apparently a part of social communication theory.

Of course, there is such a thing as being too complex to be commonly understood as well. It'd appear that there's an optimum level of complication that makes for a good yarn for most people. If The Magical Number Seven is to be believed, you'd expect the upper bound on this to be somewhere around seven "major features" — but of course, this raises the question: how do you define what's a major feature?

[Technorati apophenia chewing cud dodecahedron earth magical number seven obsessive elaboration posts needing categorization seven registers stylish tassels uncertainty reduction]

Huge silly controversies

Flat Earth vs. spherical Earth is often used as an example of opposing viewpoints. However, a lot of popular propositions are all of them so far off the mark, they could just as well be debates on whether the shape of the earth is flat or pyramidal.

Once a conflict between absurdities becomes a big thing, it can be difficult to make people see beyond the spectacular clash of horrible idea against awful idea. Take hypertext visionary Ted Nelson, who under the heading "The huge silly controversy" says I see almost no difference between the Macintosh and the PC. Stunning and unheard of? Exactly. Seeing beyond this particular conflict is perhaps especially difficult because computers are things that you buy — if no alternative is available off-the-shelf this is the same, to a consumer, as no alternatives being conceivable. The mouse and the clicking and the icons is simply the way of things. Invented, you say? But it's so natural! It's what everyone does!

When two sides of the same coin become the only viable currency like this, people tend to see everything in terms of it, leading to some very strange categorization. Returning to the hypothetical case of flat earth vs. pyramidal earth, say you came to a debate panel — perfectly balanced with equal time for 'flat' and 'pyramid' views — and said the world was round. To someone who primarily kept the farcical conflict in mind, the first thing they'd say would probably be, Oh, right, you think it's like a flat disc? I'll chalk you up with the flat-earth side, then.

It's as if, once a side or two has become sufficiently elaborated, people are painted into a corner, having severe trouble backing up to a position where they can approach something without preconceptions or singing vikings, where they'll let you order something that doesn't have any spam in it.

What I have in mind in particular is the assumption that not carrying the card of a religion is like not wearing a caste mark. You have to wonder if this is for the benefit of people so they know which stereotype to apply to you.

If you want a mark for effort, you can approach the pyramidal-earth people and try to convince them that it's sort of like a pyramid... with more sides. You know, like a dodecahedron, only with lots and lots of sides? If you succeed in doing anything other than disgust or confuse them, you'll then see the flat-earthers chalking up a victory against the now fragmented pyramid-earthers while ridiculing the minority position of a dodecahedumb-earth.

[Technorati consumer choice consumer mentality dodecahedumb elaboration far-fetched Python refs framing framing the debate glorious spam group fragmentation group mindset lovely spam minority opinion pyramidal earth spam and eggs spam spam spam two sides of the same coin vikings singing we have always been clicking icons winning by default]

Containing multitudes

I just had a really kooky thought. This was spurred by having my concept of genetic information straightened out.

The upshot is, the technical sense of 'information' is reduction of uncertainty, and this leads to some counterintuitive results. Eg., if you have two notes with the exact same thing written on them, you might be tempted to say that this is more information, but that's not the technical sense: technically, once you've read a sentence, reading it again contains nothing new, hence no 'information'. That is, 'information' is measured by how much it informs.

When we take this application of information theory to genetics and turn it back on informatics, we get some wonderfully strange results: after all, when you learn something you gain information, yes? Now, in meme-type theories, you tend to think of one mind as one organism, because that's nice and intuitive. But, the human mind is able to contain far more uncertainty than any single organism's genes. Wouldn't this make the human mind more like a species?

More astute wackiness ensues when we consider that the information in a genotype typically increases under selection pressure. Information in a mind increases while learning; hence, studying becomes the meme-equivalent to selection pressure.

Yes, you are reading Blogger, home of half the crackpot theories in the universe. But still, it amuses me to think of exams as extinction events.

[Technorati Shannon 1948 crackpot theory extinction exams information theory kookiness meme theory memetics mimetics selection pressure]

Wondering is better than knowing?

Lovely capsule description.

BusinessSpeak

The relation of Unspeak™ to advertising slogans and such seemed like it should be obvious, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I read apenwarr's old post about IBMese — the strange language involving "paradigm shifts" and "issues" and "core competencies".

Why are these two examples interesting? Because I finally found the common theme: "non-arguability." [...] It's not that you don't argue with it because everyone agrees; it's that you can't argue with it because the person making the statement wins by default.

[...] But sales - and by extension, people hacking - is different. In that case, you're messing with someone's emotions with the goal of getting them to agree with you and eventually do something for you (eg. buy your stuff). And the biggest barrier to sales is (ironically?) defensiveness: the feeling that someone is trying to sell you something. Being non-controversial helps avoid making people defensive.

This would be a type of framing, then, akin to winning by default because you're playing on home ground and your local supporters won't let anyone else on the field.

Non-arguability appears to be one step up on the ladder from what was the previous state-of-the-art of advertising, knowing common criticisms of advertising and preempting them in the manner of: You might ask yourself, why does a famous celebrity like me go on TV to tell you about the wonders of Pro-Vital™? Why, it's because you'll do anything for money, of course. But the real answer is preempted by following up with The answer is, Pro-Vital™ really is that good!

With this higher-level defensiveness, you usually can't just shoot it down with well-timed snappy truth. Someone trying to take the non-arguable proposition apart to expose it as a load of old toss, no matter if it actually is, will come off as negative, pessimistic, a hair-splitting naysayer who wants to argue about Those Things That Everyone Knows. You'll want to watch out. That could mean he's not only a hair-splitter, but a... reductionist.

More on this later, maybe.

[Technorati advertising rhetorics bizspeak businessSpeak businesspeak defense-lowering framing framing the debate non-arguability noncontroversiality people hacking reductionism reductionists soundbite culture stealth marketing unarguable war on specifics winning by default]

Genetic cybernetic

So I took Dawkins' own advice, and read The Extended Phenotype.

What struck me afterwards was that the influence from artificial-intelligence types is obvious enough that he could almost have called it animal cybernetics. I mean, apart from the bit where everyone would make horrible jokes about bionic badgers and things.

This is perhaps to be expected from the analogy of parasites pulling levers to manipulate their hosts: after all, the word "cybernetics" comes from concepts of piloting. The difference between cybernetics and the extended phenotype would perhaps be that the extended phenotype is concerned with drawing the shortest lines between genes and behavior. The feedback from behavior to genes is through differential survival, so the feedback loop wouldn't be tight enough, nor the causality tightly enough connected, that we can talk about cybernetic systems proper.

...or maybe we can, if we talk about cybernetic systems on the level of an entire genome and up. Apparently there's something called Schmalhausen's cybernetic approach.

He was the first to propose an evolutionary scenario of interaction of the main components of biosphere, from the subcellular level to the biocoenotic one. Evolution and speciation are considered in this scenario as a cybernetic cycle of regulated processes with direct and feed back

(I'm guessing that last bit would be direction and feedback.)

There's also this, which sounds intriguing, and this which I haven't the faintest idea what is but it sounds totally sci-fi.

eg., biocybernetics seems to be the study of regulatory processes within the organism.

[Technorati Richard Dawkins bionic badger cybergenetics cybernetic cybernetics extended phenotype lever-pulling]

T-shirt

Hmm. Hmmm.

A?

The scarlet letter? You're kidding. That's, um... very... postmodern?

Now I sort of want a T-shirt that says "Diagoras Fanclub" on it. I mean, one that isn't the logo for FC Diagoras. S'pose I'll have to make it myself.

Don't say a word — it's easy to pass as a Christian or a Muslim, you know.

Yes, and you'll find it easier to persuade people when they don't discount you as an outgroup member to be opposed from the outset. Shouldn't matter objectively of course, but given humanity's tendency to tribalism...

[Technorati A Out Campaign atheist bastardry]

DNA newly recovered episode

This interview with Douglas Adams was apparently recorded in 1979 and promptly failed to get sold to anyone: the tapes then spent two decades composting in a cupboard before being unearthed and published in Darker Matter. Lost episodes. How appropriate.

Especially interesting is that this has an early instance of the story of how the name hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy popped into his head. From this interview, we hear:

Then I suddenly remembered what had struck me six years previously – but I hadn't done anything about it and hadn't even remembered in the intervening time – which was when I had been hitchhiking around Europe, when I was a student or just before I went up to Cambridge, I had this book called The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. And I remember wandering into a campsite in Innsbruck late one night, being not entirely sober, and the stars were all out and I just remember thinking at that time 'Somebody should write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.'

Contrast with the version at Wikipedia.

Edit: I see from looking at Darker Matter's Technorati tag that it's in the process of closing. Oops.

[Technorati Darker Matter Douglas Adams hhgg]

Eternal meaning

More Douglas Adams:

It's very clear in the end - is it an A or a B? - ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

Which recalls the old complaint that without an authority-figure deity to mandate the dividing lines, we burn away the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world and instead leave it stranded on a solipsistic island of the human imagination. Because clearly, meaning has nothing to do with the human imagination; if the world doesn't conform 1:1 with what's in my head then everything is meaningless for all time.

Of course, the definition of life has always been a matter of opinion. It's just that with religion, people tend to deliberately suppress that things have ever been different — after all, it's an eternal truth, so how could it ever have changed? We've always been at war with Eurasia, etc.

[Technorati Orwellian atheist bastardry deliberate forgetting]

After education

Really catching up here, this news is only a week old. From The Register: Conservapedia too pinko? Try Metapedia.

Metapedia — literally after education, presumably it's where you would go when you're done learning — is an alternative wiki devoted to the pro-European cultural Kampf.

(Honestly, Pro-European? These people must be Americans to whom 'European' means 'white'.)

Oh look, it's our old friend cultural Marxism, complete with hallucinated conspiracies by The Frankfurter School. I told you the bastards had adopted "political correctness" as a convenient cover for creeping racism.

Well, at least now you can research white-supremacy pricks in one convenient place. I'd look into it more, but I have to find a way to block that bloody logo in the upper corner first. It's going to give me nightmares.

This probably needs to be refuted, since people will believe anything as long as it's blamed on communists:

Anti-racism is the Marxist ideology of opposition to “racism.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term “racist” was coined by Leon Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Anti-racism is a major focus of Cultural Marxism.

Of course, if they'd bothered to look up racialism they would have found an instance from 1907, long before Trotsky's 1930 book.

[Technorati European meaning white Frankfurter school Metapedia blame the commies creeping racism creepy logo cultural Marxism free speach hallucination political correctness retardpedia war on memory white scumbags]

Reading up on this Deming person who's apparently big in business religion, I mean, philosophy. I came across this:

Deming used an illustration of washing a table to teach a lesson about the relationship between purpose and method. If you tell someone to wash a table, but not the reason for washing it, they cannot do the job properly. That does not mean just giving the explanation without an operational definition. The information about why the table needs to be washed, and what is to be done with it, makes it possible to do the job intelligently.

Hah. This is the polar opposite of my experience in the military, where absolutely everything operated on a need-to-know basis: everything, everywhere, right down to why you pitch a tent in a particular way. Presumably this was to condition us into obeying orders without question.

[Technorati business-religion random-anecdote]

Tribalism, in sports? Unheard of.

More old news:

Students at Bishop Sullivan Catholic High School will receive sensitivity training as a result of anti-Semitic chants and graffiti during a recent basketball game against rival Norfolk Academy.

Several Sullivan students met with Norfolk Academy's cultural diversity club Thursday as part of a series of events aimed at promoting tolerance, Sullivan Principal Dennis W. Price said.

[...] "Then, at some point, our students were chanting, 'We love Jesus,' " he said. "It was obviously in reference to the Jewish population of Norfolk Academy; that's the only way you can take that."

You have to wonder what they were surprised at, if not that their students were being too unsubtle about the tribalism inherent in the whole set-up. Two groups whose most salient organizing feature was religion, playing a match against each other... and they assert their own group's cohesion by referring to their religion? Who would have thought?

Perhaps the match was meant as a reassurance that you can conduct tribalism in a cordial manner. I certainly feel reassured.

While I'm being political

For something like the Danish cartoon controversy to have its flames fanned like it did, it had to be convenient news for a lot of people: first, for the ones who compiled the dossier, misters Akkari and Laban, I suspect they could very well have been believing their own bullshit, not merely wanting to get on the map.

The numerous other people involved, though: what did they get out of it? I couldn't quite figure it out, until I saw this post by Angry As'ad, a Lebanese professor at Berkeley:

This is absurd. In Arabic newspapers, some Western companies took out ads to declare that they are not Danish. This while Arab governments are doing business with Israeli companies. Personally, I boycott Israel and Israeli products, but will not boycott Denmark or Danish companies.

Here we see a professed standard (enmity towards Israel) not being translated into action, presumably because Israel has enough industrial power that a boycott would be seriously impractical. Railing against a perceived enemy that they're not particularly dependent on thus provides not only a handy outlet of frustration, but also a cover for this hypocrisy. How convenient.

On the other side, we have a class of people who believe that Islam is a scourge, but keep on buying colossal amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia. How to resolve this uncomfortable hypocrisy? Why, you bray loudly on your blog. Feels good, doesn't it.

Of course, being too obvious about blanket-hating an entire faith would be distasteful and in fact might get you arrested. But support Denmark, that's a pleasantly vague message that does most of its work through connotations. Sound familiar? It's all part of the war on specifics.

Support Denmark. Not support Jyllands-Posten, mind. That's a bit difficult to spell, what with all those wacky Danish letters in it, for the unwashed who already have trouble spelling free speech. Instead, J-P is represented by the entirety of Denmark, even though all the Danish government did was fail to take the extraordinary action of censoring newspapers. But c'mon, it's not like Denmark is all that big a country? How could they possibly need more than one newspaper, am I right? AM I RIGHT? Yeeeah.

This substituting the whole of Denmark for a Danish newspaper might be seen as a simple reaction to the fact that the boycotts were of Danish products generally. But given the average blogtard's propensity for tribalism and all these people who have trouble seeing that Europe even has individual countries in it... no, I don't think so.

With freedom of speech thus reduced to an excuse for a hot-air football match, people happily donned jerseys labelled "Denmark" and "outraged Muslims". By the time news emerged that Jyllands-Posten had previously refused charicatures of Jesus for fear they would offend, everyone were too busy thumping their chests to notice. Perhaps they had forgotten the name of the paper. Perhaps they had forgotten that there ever was a paper to begin with. The original circumstances merrily shed, it became the meme of The Danish Cartoon Controversy. Nevar forget!

Then the coarse lumping-together seriously backfired — or it would have, if people generally didn't have the attention span of gnats. In the case of Erik Haaest, the arts council that awarded him the money genuinely is part of the Danish government, making the whole-for-the-part actually somewhat justified.

Well, I certainly feel safer knowing that free speach is "defended" by a gang of tribalistic attention-deficit cases, their defence contingent on the opposition being someone they already hate. Don't you?

[Technorati Danish cartoons GSAVE NEVAR FORGET TWAT angryarab atheist bastardry blogtards cartoon controversy chest-thumping free speach global struggle memory hole metonomy never forget post-mortem equine flagellation soundbite culture vitriol war on memory war on specifics]

INTERNET HATE MACHINE

Newsflash:

last night Fox 11 in Los Angeles spent five minutes investigating Anonymous

—you know, Anonymous, that sinister figure lurking everywhere in the shadows of the interblags.

Yes, really. Warning: aneurysm-inducing stupidity displayed by absolutely everyone involved, self included for inflicting it on others. The soundtrack not only has bass-laden ominous chords, it's peppered with gratuitous gunshot sounds for emphasis. The "news"man literally says But truly epic lulz come from raids and invasions. (via/alternately)

Amazingly, YouTube's video response feature is almost useful for this case (since, well, it's not that hard to pose as Anonymous).

[Technorati EXPLODING VAN Fox INTERNET HATE MACHINE anonymous atheist bastardry b-tards corruption of LOL epic lulz hype interblags lulz media stupidity nevar forget ominous soundtrack pool is closed retardation rule one slow news day truly epic lulz]

Support the Danish Kampf

Apropos yesterday's (The Simon Wiesenthal Center protesting Danish writer Erik Haaest getting a cash award for his work):

On second reading, that "censorship" line the arts council gives sounds like the last-ditch excuse of a committee that doesn't want to set a problematic precedent for yanking awards away after they've been handed out.

Still, this all makes a nice irony on all these people who still have the "SUPPORT DENMARK!!!" buttons up that they plastered all over their blogs without thinking, back when the cartoon controversy was convenient news.

For bonus tasteless glee, consider that the German version of those buttons uses "Kampf" for "struggle" in the translation of struggle for free speech.

Be sure to support the Danish Kampf, boys and girls.

[Technorati Erik Haaest atheist bastardry cartoon controversy politically correct politically incorrect support Denmark]

Superficial balance II

(previously)

Douglas Adams, in 1999:

I don’t accept the currently fashionable assertion that any view is automatically as worthy of respect as any equal and opposite view.

Today at Respectful Insolence: Mistaking failure to support for "censorship": The Danish government funding a Holocaust denier. (from History on Trial)

That is, the Danish government is actually awarding money to this Haaest, not just tolerating his opinion. This appears to be the actual article in the Danish Information, and here's the statement from the Simon Wiesenthal Center website.

Respectful Insolence goes on to say something I've been trying to phrase myself:

They know they can appear far more legitimate than they are, and they are not constrained by evidence, science or the truth, which allows them to put the side that is constrained by these things on the defensive. Moreover, as the "rebel," the crank almost always controls the agenda, and, particularly in the U.S., people root for the seeming underdog anyway.

A true underdog story™ of how one man's dream of corrupting the truth got him gobs of cash! Heartwarming, that's what it is.

Tangentially: Lipstadt has her post tagged "Holocaust Denial; Politically correct idiocy". Politically correct, of course, is another one of these concepts that are easily bent into obscene shapes.

[Technorati Erik Haaest atheist bastardry politically correct]

Via Scalzi: Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, an examination of the highly, ah, evolutionary nature of "the" Bible.

I didn't know King James Version had actually been translated back and forth between Greek and Latin. That's amusingly like the process used on the film script for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451; in that case, the repeated translation between French and English was apparently done to remove nuance from the language for the purpose of emulating an impoverished culture.

Ketchup for the soul

On the quite interesting-looking Denialism blog, we have a review of Barbara Ehrenreich's review of the cult-of-positivity tendency — perhaps mostly American, but we all tend to regress towards American standards

You are about to read a re-re-review of unprecedented profundity!

— to slather everything unconditionally with boilerplate "positivity", much like some people are unable to eat anything not covered in ketchup.

You've already managed to read half this post! Keep going! You can do it!

Ehrenreich then goes for the kill: that the cult of positivity is actually yet another way to blame the victim for its ails, another route enabling people to Stop Worrying So Much and attain technicolor Happiness by gorging on loads of consumer shite.

It's all good! There are so many opportunities that just abound in the happy fields of people prancing in slow motion, their faces cramped into a permanent grin! Smile™!

I was going to have a profound conclusion of some sorts, but no one's reinforcing me for it. Eh. Maybe there's something on TV.

[Technorati Barbara Ehrenreich atheist bastardry cult of positivity dispositional optimism dodgy metaphors gluttony ketchup for the soul manic-depressive prose positivity]

Café Taoism, the high C of faith

Arr, flamewar! PZ Myers at the epicenter, almost as a matter of course. A familiar argument in the reaction from Mark Kleiman of samefacts.com seems instructive:

Religious thought, writing, and speech, at its adult level, is always metaphorical. "Humans are created in the Image of God," taken literally, is nonsense, if you remember that it is a part of a religious tradition that says that God is an infinite, omniscient, beneficent, immortal being "without parts or passions," which is the opposite of finite, finitely rational, ethically challenged mortal beings with physical bodies and emotional drives. It makes no more sense as a proposition in comparative primatology than "My love is like a red, red rose" makes sense as a proposition in botany. But it's a very powerful metaphor for the ethical proposition "Human beings are not to be damaged or degraded." (Of course religious writers don't generally assert that "God" names a metaphor rather than an entity, any more than the actor playing Hamlet looks at the audience and says, "I'm not really the Prince of Denmark" or any more than a Pynchon novel carries a disclaimer on the title page, "None of this stuff really happened.")

[...] But if, like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters, you think of God as an especially potent metaphor (or, to put in more flowery terms, "a mystery to be understood only in part, and then by faith") — if you think that, then the whole debate is pointless. Both Gerson and Meyers are just being silly: it's two blind men debating the nature of the elephant while groping around different parts of a Land Rover.

Like anyone who has thought deeply about these matters. Anyone truly reasonable couldn't possibly disagree with me, after all, because I am the very epitome of reason. I like the comparison with fiction, though.

At its adult level. What is this adult level? Well, from his redux, fresh today:

[...] So, for me, "that which alone is wise and good" does not allow itself to be called "Zeus," or by any other name. ("The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name," says Lao-tse.)

Ah, so the adult level of religion is a kind of café Taoism. Thanks for clearing that up.

How would we know when someone is on this adult level, though? After all, labels for belief merrily conflate the "childish" and "adult" versions. The adult version being the "properly understood" one, by Kleimannic decree, you'd think it'd be the highest priority of churches to make sure their followers are believing properly. Maybe it'd make for a lot less grief if believers could wear little badges saying I am not a literalist; you may address me like an adult.

I see now it's a "criticism of his theological tone-deafness." Clearly that means café taoism is like the highest overtones of the basic belief that carries the chord, and I'm mistaken for focusing on the bass that resounds every way I turn.

[Technorati Mark Kleiman PZ Myers atheism atheist bastardry atheist bigotry cafe taoism dodgy metaphors literalism metaphors we live by]

Intelligent falling rehash

From Skeptico:

PaV seems to think that if you can study nature and learn some lessons from what nature has built, that proves there is an intelligent designer.

Clearly this doesn't go far enough. We can learn from the way things fall, allowing us to glean insight through the science of intelligent falling; this indubitably proves that the hand of God is pulling each and every one of us down with His tough love.

Remember: not a single gravity-related injury could have come about without the guiding foot of divine perfection. The bruise on the so-called atheist's buttocks refutes his own flawed arguments even as he fails to make philosophy the bitch of Christ. This godlessness will only lead to chaos, anarchy and the grave heresy of elevators, going against the force that the Lord Himself has decreed we shall toil under.

[Technorati Skeptico atheist bastardry gravity is a harsh mistress intelligent design intelligent falling problem of evil sarcasm]

Out of nowhere, a sudden unchurching. (via Pharyngula)

From the CNN story (document isn't on vatican.va yet, it seems):

[..] described Christian Orthodox churches as true churches, but suffering from a "wound" since they do not recognize the primacy of the Pope.

But the document said the "wound is still more profound" in the Protestant denominations [...]

Ooh, a wound. I wonder, how would a denomination bleed? Perhaps they gush the stuff that faith is made of.

Looking this over again, it seems a fairly clear case of that classic tactic: reinforcing unity through the vilification of a common opponent.

Then there's this juicy soundbite from a Di Noia:

"But, as you know, it is fundamental to any kind of dialogue that the participants are clear about their own identity. That is, dialogue cannot be an occasion to accommodate or soften what you actually understand yourself to be."

Oh yes, I always find it impossible to talk to anyone not wearing a little belief-tag clearly labeling their ideological affiliation in detail.

Anyway, hmm. He's equating identity with dogma and then saying Changing my dogma would be violating my identity. Isn't he?

[Technorati PZ Myers atheist bastardry dogma eternal truths just a flesh wound unchurching vilification wounded church]

Atheist extremism pt. 5000

Jason Rosenhouse on scienceblogs, against the argument that Dawkins and Hitchens are basically saying kill whitey:

If Dawkins and all the rest stripped every snide remark out of their books, that would not stop the right wing noise machine from painting them as dangerous extremists. The mere fact that they are endorsing atheism and having some success is enough for that.

The wide spread of the atheist-extremist meme would indicate the degree to which the noise machines have already succeeded.

[Technorati Jason Rosenhouse atheism atheist atheist bastardry atheist extremism noise machine]

Journey to the center of the blogosfear

There had been of late an increase, in the messages passing by on the pneumatic tube, of canisters marked Attn: 8 random facts about myself. Clearly some sort of chain-letter; harmless as long as it didn't exceed message-handling capacity.

An exemplar that had dumped into my tray for lack of a recipient piqued my curiosity. I succumbed to the temptation to trace it to its source—this was an easy task, I told myself, especially because the chain-letter, potentially duplicating eight ways at each recipient, must obey the principle of Octo-Logarithmycks: even if there were, say, as many as thirty thousand of these things, it shouldn't take more than ten "generations" or so to reach the source. Its path, I knew, could be traced by scent with the application of specially prepared rodents, of which I happened to possess a pair.

Peeling back the onion-like layers of these pen-pal "communities" revealed striking and astute connexions: from atheists to Christians to erotic novels, from bookworms to Sufism, from admonishments to buy more Victory Gin to Shia knitting.

Then the trail went cold, somewhen in early March. I appeared to be going in circles. Had this "mi-meme" been born of a Mœbius-loop time anomaly? Was this creature an abomination of causality, never meant to cross the threshold into our world?

My palms sweating, I turned to the archaic tome known to some as Altavista advanced search. It only confirmed my gravest fears: the Thing had slithered out of the deep abyss whose name is whispered only in the most purple of prose.

rathish Said,
October 12, 2006 @ 7:22 pm

alexis chetta.. shall i tag you…????
I wanted your permission before tagging you.
If you dont want to repeat a tag again in your blog…u can always
postpone this tag.And if dont wanna do this..it is also okiie…
The tag is 8 random facts about you.

It was MySpace, and I had exposed myself to its progeny.

Still I pressed on, back into the deepest recesses of the Thing's past, where primordial soup sloshed against the shores while the names of elder monstrosities were tossed about with abandon — when suddenly, all was quiet but for faint, ululating pipes in the distance. Then:

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ok, I was tagged by Robbie to list 8 random facts about me....they are probably not so interesting...but here goes....

1. Thursday I was in line at Wal-Mart with 2 more items to be scanned when the electricity went out....45 minutes later I finally got to leave!!

2. I am watching the Disney Channel....with my sister!

3. I am cooking a roast for the first time!

4. I like to paint although I am not that good at it!

5. My markers have to be arranged, ROYGBIV, or it bothers me terribly!!

6. I miss playing the piano...we do not have a piano here so I only get to play when I go home...

7. I graduate May 13, 2006!! Only a year late!! Not too bad!

8. I love bite-sized Cherry Twislers!

Ok, so maybe it is not so interesting, but that is my list...now I tag:

Allyson, Scott, and Nash!!

I see it, ph'nglui an even greater horror than MySpace— who would know but for wgah'nagl the drums cheezburger fthaghn mglw'nafh lolthulhu roflmao Chínhđi unàycùngv Shub-internet.ims.disa.mil ïarpanet [the rest of the note is illegible]

[Technorati Victory gin chainletter cheezburger fthagn dodgy Gothic failed sanity check isometric logarithmycks lolthulu memetrace plastic rodent purple prose untitled.gif]

Seeing the phrase "French president" on a newsticker, I caught myself thinking, for a split-second, "Freedom president." Which was an amusing instance of additional backfiring from the heavy-handed attempt at lingustic engineering long since ridiculed into the ground, "freedom fries."

---

Something completely different:

In our world, things don't look like this, don't shift and reform and lose and regain their shape. The only things that do are fire, smoke and water, and none of those things are solid objects. These Transformers, though, they are solid, bewilderingly so. They attract and offend the eye, make you feel like you've missed something, stir a bookmarked desire to see the movie again.

Curse you Mr. Flower, I mean Notley. Now I'll probably have to see that movie and write an unbearably pretentious review linking it to Gonzalo Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.

Speaking of which, I'll be damned.

[Technorati Gonzalo Frasca apophenia deja vu freedom fries heavy-handed linguistic engineering transforming mecha]

Distilling the espresso religion

I'm increasingly getting the impression of very similar language used to describe "religious extremism." As an easily available example, let me pick on an excerpt from Sam Harris' End of Faith, The Problem with Religious Moderates (emphasis mine):

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

This must mean that by being a moderate, you're being less strong than you could be. I'm inclined to blame this on Harris being an American who equates violence with strength, but this sort of language is generally quite common, isn't it?

I wonder if this isn't a case of taking at face value the fundamentalists' own claim that they're a return to the "foundation" of faith, to the roots, the essence: an image of anything not "literalist" as watered-out coffee — and fundamentalism, strong espresso. As someone who'll have no truck with the concept of Platonic ideals I find this quite nonsensical, of course. But. When you keep using this metaphorical image, you're basically reinforcing the literalists' own bullshit, confirming the stereotype that feeds their cause: that they have greater religious authority because they follow "the" dogma "to the letter."

"To the letter." The existence of multiple "hard core" belief-mutations around the same holy book should be enough to expose the ridiculousness of literalisms. Even if all the copies of the particular holy documents are letter-for-letter identical, meaning does not lie in the printed words alone: it arises in the interaction between the person and the words, in the interpretation that is unavoidable for any human being. Every person being different, it's impossible to have no variation in meaning: the only way to get an unambiguous result from it would be to feed the words to something controlled by a deterministic computer program. (Turing-complete holy code, anyone?)

And yet, we reinforce this myth of the "most literal" interpretation where fundamentalism is the espresso from which weaker cappuccinos and lattes are derived. Stop it, please. Stop helping these bastards that are making the world unsafe for tea.

[Technorati Sam Harris atheism atheist dodgy metaphors espresso religion essence of hogwash framing fundamentalism hard core literalism memetics rhetorics stop helping unspeak violence is strength]

Morality of the angry atheist

Let's take Slavoj Zizek's March 2006 NYT piece Atheism is a legacy worth fighting for, a fairly good one:

These weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice: The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the "godless" atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies.

Rabbi Avi Shafran won't have any of that. In criticizing it, he immediately erects this, an instructively boilerplate case of "these 'atheists' can't be true atheists, because the 'True Atheist' strawman in my head have no morals":

To a true atheist, there can be no more ultimate meaning to good and bad actions than to good or bad weather.

Or maybe meaning is something that is created by humans, so human actions can have meaning after all.

Ah, but he wants ultimate meaning, as opposed to garden-variety inferior brand meaning. Of course.

As an example of a life without morality, he gives:

Mr. Kuklinski, who was retired from life at the age of 70, claimed, utterly without remorse, to have killed more than 100 people as a Mafia enforcer; his favored methods included ice picks, crossbows, chain saws and a cyanide solution administered with a nasal-spray bottle.

The happy hit man's example might not have given pause to Professor Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. But it should have.

Because the notion that there is no higher authority than nature is precisely what enables people like Mr. Kuklinski -- and the vast majority of the killers, rapists and thieves who populate the nightly news.

Utterly unrelated to religion, values or meaning, of course.

Matter of fact, it's been known for some time now that Mafia initiation rites involve people swearing on saints. Religious symbols are used to reinforce allegiance to the Mob. That is, it's precisely by taking the symbols of "ultimate meaning" and tying them to the Mafia that it bolstered the loyalty that it did.

In his view, a purposeless process of evolution has brought us to where we stand, and our feeling that there are good deeds and evil ones is but a utilitarian quirk of natural selection -- like our proclivity to eat more than we need when food is available. And so, just as we might choose to forego a second helping of pizza if we harbor an urge to lose weight, so may we choose, for personal gain (of desires, not pounds), to loosen our embrace of a moral, ethical life. Biological advantages, after all, are not moral imperatives.

Other way around. It is highly probable that moral imperatives are biological advantages. As numerous studies have shown.

Moral feelings are just that: feelings, hard to suppress. As such, these feelings (purely "utilitarian," as if being useful was a bad thing) may have brought more good than all the pious well-wishes in the world. Believers, after all, are no strangers to hypocrisy.

In a followup, he wonders why every atheist to which he peddles his ignorance is so angry:

MORE INFORMATIVE is the atheists' anger. I think it derives from the realization of where their declared convictions perforce must lead. That would be - as per my original essay - a place where the very concepts of morality and ethics are rendered meaningless, a worldview in which a thieving, philandering, serial murdering cannibal is no less commendable a member of the species than a selfless, hard-working philanthropist. (In fact, from an evolutionist perspective, the former is probably better positioned to impart advantages to the gene pool.) It is a thought so discomfiting to an honest atheist that all it can yield him is fury.

Some atheists, no doubt, are not infuriated at all by the implications of their denial of a human calling higher than nature. They revel in the knowledge that whatever they wish to do is fine, as long as they manage not to run afoul of the man-made (and themselves inherently meaningless) laws of society. If skillful enough, they can carefully lift items from the local store, surreptitiously violate others' rights or privacy, and covertly bring harm to those they dislike or who stand in the way of their wants.

Most atheists, though - and they, I contend, are the angry ones - would never dream of doing such things. Because they know that there is right and there is wrong.

Wrong? Is it "wrong" when a dog steals a bone from his fellow canine, or when a mantis eats her mate? Of course not. But when a human being steals or hurts or kills another, it's qualitatively different. Deep down we know we are answerable to Something beyond our own natures.

Or maybe the ineffable Something(tm) we're answerable to is exactly our own nature.

Let's have an actual "evolutionist" perspective. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, 1989 and later editions, chapter 12: "Nice Guys Finish First". This gives a plausible explanation for altruism and moral sense arising not out of self-interest enlightened or un-, but from simple evolutionary advantages — that is, straightforward advantages from cooperation explain why, when there's no higher whatever, we don't all eat each other given half a chance.

Dawkins being one of the most prominent atheists in the world today, Rabbi Shafran would perhaps have read his books if he were truly trying to understand the atheism that he writes about — but is he trying? Believers — and I would contend, this includes most of the vocal ones — are, after all, generally quite willfully incurious about it, marching to the tune of "GOSH. I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAAAAAND..."

[Technorati Dawkins Shafran Zizek atheism atheist morality piety selfish gene strawmen unselfish phenotype]

Technorati Profile

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I feel vaguely queasy when I'm reminded that the concept of 'curing homosexuality' is alive and stomping on human faces, now last by the Friendly Atheist's Ex-Ex-Gays Speak Out. Then something in the quote caught my eye: the guy they interviewed fell in love with another counselor.

...I mean, it's so obvious. Put a bunch of "ex-gays" together in the same place, and what do you get?

Ah, the power of love.

How theology is different from witchcraft

We've had the gender pronoun switcher regender for some time. Now Sam Harris picks up the search-and-replace and applies it to Terry Eagleton's Dakwins review, replacing 'theology' with, well, see for yourself:

This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of [conjuring and divination] that would make a first-year [sorcerer's apprentice] wince...Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and [witchcraft] are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates [witchcraft] from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake... while [belief in magic], rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it...

Sam Harris is of course the author of Letters to a Wiccan Nation. This redundant link exchange has been brought to you via Friendly Atheist.

This is so brilliant. I have to look into how easy it would be to create a regender-like web application to automate this sort of search-and-replace satire.

God, devil, what's the difference

A common feature of faith is that it tends to be held for keeps; once internalized, leaving it tends to necessitate a 'crisis of faith' or something and long strenuous deprogramming, I mean soul-searching.

It's a bit like something you put on and then can't take off again, isn't it. In this respect, it's like those items in RPG's that become impossible to remove once you've equipped them. They're of course commonly called... cursed items.

Cursed meme, anyone?

Comforters and god-concepts

A thing that's bugging me.

Believing in God has been called like sucking on a dummy, I think by our very own appointed Pope Dawkins (and here it is).

I take issue with that simile: these days, we can make dummies so that large numbers of children will at the very least be sucking on dummies in the same shape, made from the same mold. But even in this age of televised conformity, everyone build their own gods in their own minds from scratch, without a mold, working on specifications that are by necessity horribly vague.

The result is what you might call a veritable Babel of confusion that no one wants to acknowledge; tragically, practically the only thing in common among monotheists' god-concepts is a demand that your particular god-concept is eternal and immutable. It's no coincidence here that heretics are reviled the most: their slight variation makes it too apparent how malleable and tied to people's particular minds gods really are.

WTC as an anti-religion slogan is ill-advised

The "official Richard Dawkins MySpace presence" is running a campaign (at the bottom of the page) to change people's icons into this thing.

This is a foolish move for a site claiming to be a "clear-thinking oasis." Now, normally I'd be all in favor of hammering the important point home that belief in immortality can make people do horrible things. But just slapping the towers of the World Trade Center on a flyer like this mostly exposes how little you know about their history.

Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr's The Mosque to Commerce, published in Slate on the 28th of December 2001, lays out the history of how the WTC's architect Minoru Yamasaki was heavily influenced not only by modernism and Japanese design but also by Islamic architecture:

Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

The fact of the matter is, the towers probably symbolized minarets.

So. With "no religion," Yamasaki would probably never have imagined the WTC the way it turned out in the first place. Employing the WTC for a slogan against religion like this requires an act of forgetting, of sweeping inconvenient details under the rug. But apparently we desperately need slogans these days. Because it's the information age, or something like that.

(Mosque architecture? In turn inspired by Byzantine.)