Atheist Bastard

Can you stomach the success?

2008-11-07T16:50:00.004Z

I'm reminded of New Year's Eve 2000: As midnight edged closer it became crushingly obvious to everyone that the symbolic rollover wasn't going to effect much practical change at all, and the mood quickly turned sour.

I think I prefer this present iteration of the theme, actually; watching the trainwrecks is strangely soothing. Why, look over there, that's the same "citizen-soldier" who was one of the few to get an interview with John Bolton, two years ago.

2008-04-28T17:51:00.004Z

Ugh, what is it about Austrians.

The closest thing to prefiguring this would be Seidl's Dog Days from 2001. For all the times that film was called smutty and "ruthlessly nihilistic," apparently he didn't go far enough. One critic who thought otherwise said:

In the end, I think Ulrich Seidl belongs to a different school altogether. He’s the Austrian Todd Solondz. He’s telling us yet again that life in the suburbs is pretty boring and mean and meaningless and frankly I don’t believe him.

Always believe the voice of moderation, right?

2008-04-26T20:21:00.008Z

We accept the fundamentalists' view of their religions as being the most accurate, because we want to nail down what religions are, and their versions are black and white, we can understand them, even if we understand them only to disagree, even violently so.

"...idealistic people often become misanthropic when they are let down two or three times."

...recently we have seen how certain movements in the Christian right have embraced counter-cultural forms of style found among skaters, punks, goth, and hard rock for very conservative ends. Where many of these movements are implicitly forms of critique of cultural hypocrisy and capitalist consummerism, these semiotic codes instead get redirected to the most normalizing, conformist, reactionary ends.

I think I'm going to call that last one the 'Rage For the Machine' effect. It might just be the inevitable end station of commodified dissent.

Lost in Translation is on. It looks like it would have been mind-blowing in 1996 at the latest.

Stereo illusions

2008-04-26T09:58:00.013Z

Via the other person who thought he was clever by playing on "Memex," I finally found Ted Nelson's ~~Way Out of the Box~~ (temporarily down, see Google's cached copy). It's an informed rant against the predominant desktop metaphor that's staring you in the face at this very moment:

But these ideas have a plausible air that has set like concrete into a seeming reality. Macintosh and Windows look alike, therefore that must be reality, right? Wrong. Apple and Windows are like Ford and Chevrolet (or perhaps Tweedledum and Tweedledee), who in their co-imitation create a stereo illusion that seems like reality.

[Transquote]

So if Douglas Engelbart is Moses and Xerox PARC Judaism, then the Mac would slot neatly in as Catholicism—it's always had icons and a pope—and the PC as Protestantism, together creating an illusion of a deeper truth where there's really only memetic mutation.

Whereas Ted Nelson is like Diagoras chopping up an image of Hercules to boil his turnips, which would explain why I'm so fond of him. In particular, I love his insight about interface design:

One result is office software that's incredibly clumsy, with slow, pedestrian operations. Think how long it takes to open and name a file and a new directory. Whereas video-game software is lithe, quick, vivid.

Why is this?

Very simple. Guys who design video games *love to play video games*. Whereas nobody who designs office software seems to care about using it, let alone hopes to use it at warp speed.

(I've been waiting six years for someone to make an interface based on Bullfrog's excellent game Dungeon Keeper 2, which is just about the only real-time strategy I can stand.)

Contrast with Wordie Errata's comment on the state of hyperfiction:

At least since HyperCard debuted in the late 80s people have been talking about how electronic media enable "new forms of storytelling." That phrase (along with "non-linear") has introduced so much plotless tech-wanking, so much storytelling that wasn't so much new as simply unbearable, that I tend to become hyper critical whenever I hear it.

Aw, I think he just made Chris Klimas cry.

Is it real or is it Memex

2008-04-25T18:59:00.001Z

Going on a tangent about that piece of art which gave rise to some sentences you don't often see, I wound up on the Dimensions blog, reading:

The internet age has elevated the non-event, the fantastic, to the status of the real. Not surprisingly, performance art has thrived in this environment. Shvarts' formal ingenuity speaks for itself.

And then just the next day on the (unrelated) Wordie Errata blog:

Slice is told through two fake intertwined blogs. I'm so up to my eyeballs in what I think are real blogs that this just seemed like more of the same; I couldn't really tell the difference between it and the tripe you come across on LiveJournal et. al. every day.

What I think are real blogs.

Given this, what can I do other than declare this blog decidedly not real? This is not my beautiful blog! I am not keeping it real in any shape or form! I have been faking it from the very first post! Turn off your computer now!

But concept art was not dead

2008-04-19T16:43:00.006Z

Aliza Shvarts, an art major at Yale, issued a press release that she's due to present a project consisting of the blood and potential 1-2 weeks gestated embryos expelled when taking abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself.

Brilliantly, she now says she didn't do any tests to confirm whether or not there were actual embryos present. Judging from the reactions, this is one of the most successful instances of denying catharsis for artistic effect in a long time.

To really drive the nail in further, consider that embryos this early in gestation are likely to be too small to be reliably detected, so even if there is an exhibit of blood and someone buys it (for a hefty sum, I can only hope) to have it examined, there will be no definitive last word in the matter. She has not only succeeded in getting attention, she has succeeded in making pretty much everyone afraid, desperately screaming things like "GAME OVER" to make the bad thoughts go away.

Via Bitch PhD. There's a blog of the 'Dimensions' journal.

Drugs are behind some of our greatest art

2008-04-16T16:13:00.003Z

The army of pharamaceutical-fundamentalists marching under the banner of just say no to drugs must be stopped. After all, hasn't the taking — or abuse, as these fundamentalists would have it — of mind-altering substances been an essential help to all truly great artists, even if it sometimes made them seem desperately unhappy and drove them to the brink of destruction?

Will this unreasonable denying the glory of being totally zonked out of your head not end until the art that defines our culture has become bland, boring and completely alienated from the truth that becomes evident when you drop acid?

It's a great tribute to our age that a scientist can still be greeted with more adulation than a pop princess.

Observe the context: They're Dr. Who fans.

2008-04-15T18:34:00.004Z

Can an interactive web site produce false memories?

The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product -- potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can't.

Via Hack Real.

2008-04-15T12:49:00.001Z

...movies which celebrate the same lifestyle of surface, built on a foundation of violence...

Music to my ears, of course.

Say, could this have been the inspiration for the Voldemort for president campaign?

Speaking of cultivation in tubes

2008-04-14T20:50:00.003Z

Breaking: In vitro meat.

For the next couple of days, I'm probably going to walk around muttering "tubemeat" to myself while giggling like a madman.

2008-04-14T16:43:00.004Z

At long last, after combining this interview with this review, I've realized what it would take to enjoy the Matrix trilogy: You have to be Catholic.

(The one true interpretation is of course the Marxist one. In fact, the blissful ending resembles nothing so much as the obligatory socialist utopia at the end of a sixties Chinese film.)

Hangunteaux

2008-04-11T17:59:00.003Z

Watch as freelance comic adventurer extraordinaire, Ryan Estrada, releases new portmanteaux (¿Que?) into Korean.

I think this is one of the most subtly strange and wonderful things I've seen on the net all year.

Tibet and so on

2008-04-10T16:16:00.003Z

Proving that false dichotomies are not exclusive to the right, your friendly local chapter of diehard communists may present you with the choice that you're either with Beijing all the way or you want Tibet to revert to the old feudalism.

On the bright side, I'm better off for having discovered Beijing Newspeak, Imagethief and the lovely expression volunteer security. (via)

And wouldn't you know it, the Chinese are crying about the lies of the liberal media (in this case, CNN).

Sticky love notes

2008-04-08T14:05:00.004Z

I've seen not one but two instances of Post-it^® love notes today. Is this some sort of alternative Valentine's sponsored by 3M?

(Although this would appear to be the month of the Post-it, it'll be two more years before it turns 30.)

Don't blame me

2008-04-04T14:20:00.003Z

...I voted for the atheist apocalypse.

Those are clearly Dawkins and someone familiar as the harbingers of science and reason, but I completely fail to recognize progress and equality.

—no, wait, I mean—

2008-03-29T11:07:00.005Z

Ban Ki-moon apparently denounces Geert Wilders' film about how the Quran is a recipe for TERRORFASCISTONAZISM (pulled by Network Solutions, then pulled from LiveLeak, now hosted on Google Video).

It really is little more than a PowerPoint presentation with video clips in it, really. There's also little to distinguish it from your average piece of internet paranoia: It's remarkable mostly for the sheer amount of shit it's managed to stir up, being protested by entities as diverse as the UN Secretary-General, Afghanistan, the World Council of Churches and Slovenia. There's also this report of a cute campaign to "smother it in apologies."

The backlash against all this makes supporting the video the internet-hip thing to do. This should be good news, if it means that blasphemy becomes a thing to be cherished and protected: Unfortunately, you can always count on people's exceptionalism to make them think that it's only okay to blaspheme against that one religion with the scary towelheads in it. After all, Jesus is such a universally good guy, it's not like anyone would ever even need to blaspheme against him. Me, I can only hope this will usher in an age of comprehensively desecrating all that's holy; given enough blasphemers, threats become futile.

Lastly, let's not forget who wears the pants in this relationship: If the question of insulting Islam became big enough, OPEC would only have to threaten to cut everyone off and there would be no shortage of Western governments willing to hand over the blasphemer's head on a silver platter. And don't get me started on the several thousand volunteer hostages we've placed in Central Asia for easy access.

Long-distance umbrage in the Gossip Age

2007-09-02T14:57:00.000Z

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.

Genetic fatalism

2007-08-19T19:14:00.000Z

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

2007-08-18T16:31:00.000Z

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

2007-08-17T09:49:00.000Z

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

2007-08-16T21:13:00.000Z

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

2007-08-15T21:42:00.000Z

...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

2007-08-14T21:42:00.000Z

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

2007-08-13T20:17:00.001Z

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

2007-08-11T11:47:00.000Z

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?

2007-08-08T13:18:00.000Z

Lovely capsule description.

BusinessSpeak

2007-08-07T17:54:00.000Z

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

2007-08-06T20:45:00.000Z

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

2007-08-05T13:05:00.000Z

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

2007-08-04T18:44:00.000Z

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

2007-08-02T22:32:00.000Z

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

2007-08-01T19:48:00.000Z

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]

2007-07-31T20:40:00.000Z

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.

2007-07-31T20:37:00.000Z

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

2007-07-28T16:31:00.000Z

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

2007-07-27T21:31:00.000Z

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

2007-07-27T11:31:00.000Z

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

2007-07-26T16:06:00.000Z

(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]

2007-07-21T13:54:00.000Z

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

2007-07-21T10:10:00.000Z

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

2007-07-19T13:31:00.000Z

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

2007-07-18T14:18:00.000Z

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]

2007-07-12T07:08:00.000Z

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

2007-07-12T07:02:00.000Z

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

2007-07-11T09:45:00.001Z

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]

2007-07-10T11:26:00.000Z

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

2007-07-09T09:06:00.000Z

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

2007-07-08T07:08:00.000Z

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]

2007-07-07T23:36:00.001Z

Technorati Profile

[technorati ping example]

2007-07-01T19:52:00.000Z

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

2007-06-30T20:46:00.000Z

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

2007-06-30T02:45:00.000Z

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

2007-06-28T20:09:00.000Z

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

2007-06-27T16:39:00.000Z

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.)

Enough to make you think. Twice.

2007-06-26T18:35:00.000Z

When I have the flu I seem to gravitate towards Something Awful, as I did this winter. The fever was bad enough that I found myself reading Something Awful articles about Second Life. Second Life, you may know, is the more famous of online 3D environments that are less like games and more, well, just environments really — what we used to call a "MUD" back in the day. (If you don't know what Something Awful is, you're probably happier not knowing, trust me.)

From there I heard about this person, who apparently holds three degrees but spends most of her time going on about how Second Life, which is run by a private company on centrally-controlled servers, fails to be all things to all punters and provide utopian cyber-democracy, or something. (The company running SL is called Linden Labs, hence the numerous statements directed at whichever Linden.)

I have some sort of point here, I promise. Now, from this post:

What I mean, for practical purposes in arranging a society by "belief in God" isn't even some specific god or God or some specific major religious system or set of karmas running over dogmas. Not at all.

It's much more basic: it means a higher, organizing, unifying principle. A Higher Power. If you don't have some belief in something higher than yourself (a higher power, a pattern of a higher intelligence, something larger than yourself, anyway), then all you are left with is your own ego, your pals' ego, and they're certain to reinforce your ego, and you, theirs. [...]

As Dostoyevsky put it, in my translation, "Without God, anything goes" [...]

Ah, Dostoyevsky. Did he really put it that way?

The rest of the post exhibits the sort of rambling that reveals why it's a bad idea to follow links from Something Awful when feverish. But still, the extensive misquote of Dostoyevsky undeniably indicates that the statement has a certain kind of resonance.

That resonance would perhaps be with people who like to invoke the Absolute to reinforce their own ego, and only their own ego, without even the need to consult any pals. I know it's so, because God told me.

On second thought. To what extent do people use "God" to mean common societal standards?

Yes I am feeling better now, thanks for asking.

The gateway drug to Stalinism

2006-12-13T08:54:00.000Z

It seems to be very easy to tar any atheist as an inhumane communist. In addition to the exchange mentioned in my last post, it's a throwaway point in this opinion piece in NYT, by N.D.Kristof:

Granted, religious figures have been involved throughout history in the worst kinds of atrocities. But as Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot show, so have atheists.

A slightly less grazing treatment by Rod Liddle in The Spectator:

By far the weakest part of The God Delusion is when Dawkins attempts to explain why atheistic regimes have far outdone religious regimes in their murderousness, their inhumanity. [...]

Isn't that the point, I suggest. That with one set of values removed, another will always fill its place? That if you remove religion, there is a gap which will always be filled — and usually by something worse than belief in a deity? Are we ever worse than when we feel ourselves to be unconstrained masters of our domain, answerable to nobody but ourselves? [...]

By Dawkins's argument, the moral imperatives of 500 years ago were, de facto, right then — and wrong now. In the end, it leaves you without a real sense of right and wrong, merely a constantly shifting plane — and thus open to the malefactions of a Hitler or a Stalin or a Mao or a Pol Pot.

(Note the sly little insertion of Hitler, who won an election in a Christian country.)

Anyway, the presumption seems to be that not having a religion to which everyone is expected to conform will almost automatically lead to seduction by malevolent dictators. This sort of thing keeps popping up, so presumably it has some sort of resonance with people.

The best counter I've seen is Sam Harris:

(Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture).

Presumably there is some feeling that having an Authority gives you the proverbial moral anchor. Which would be why Italy, being anchored firmly to the pope, has no problems with organized crime.

Maybe there's a sense that some types gravitate towards dogmatism, and that it's better for them to join a moderate church than a totalitarian movement. But really, are Dawkins or Harris against free speech, or for outlawing churches? Implicit in this is also that people with these inclinations won't just go for the most dogmatic community he can find, religious or not. Religions are tacitly presumed to be basically mostly beneficial.

As for "answerable to nobody but ourselves," it paints a picture of someone who makes himself out to be a god, rather than someone godless in an actual society. People in a society will develop norms, because this is a very fundamental feature of humanity. Any people, anywhere, will negotiate "social contracts" between themselves rather than just pulling random individual codexes out of thin air.

Anyone truly megalomaniac will easily think to pay lip service to the prevailing deity, if that is what it takes: on this note, check out Liddle's complete non-mention of Mussolini in his list of dictators. Mussolini has to be omitted, of course, as he exemplifies that totalitarian leaders can be quite perpendicular to strong religiosity.

Lumping towards futility

2006-12-10T23:14:00.000Z

This argument between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Dennis Prager, who is some warmongering radio talk show host, is of course unfruitful practically by definition, as it's on wether God exists.

Before you shout "next!", though, the back-and-forth seems to reveal one interesting thing, about categorizing. Somewhere about here, a familiar lumping-together rears its head:

Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters."

The salient thing about this, and the reason I'm even mentioning this discussion, is that Harris also lumps together, but in a different way. Prager, responding to the strategy "we are all atheistic about Zeus":

But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

In the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. What on Earth does that even mean? It means that Prager is indignant at being lumped together with those false believers. Harris operates with a category 'religion' which contains, well, religion, and Prager has a big faceted category labeled 'true religion' ("Judeo-Christianity" and conformity) and a wastebasket of 'false religions and abominations' (everything else).

So Harris is in the same intellectual league as Stalin, because he's one of those, you know, those secularists. Regardless of the fact that Harris does not appear to be a Marxist-Leninist, nor a Stalinist.

This link purely for the sake of science

2006-12-07T02:24:00.000Z

Measuring the Speed of Meme (via Bitch PhD)

2006-12-01T00:24:00.000Z

I can't seem to stop looking at this photo.

Epitaph for 'social networks'

2006-11-29T23:42:00.000Z

"Myspace is not about friends." It's about using other people as a status symbol.

2006-11-28T22:00:00.000Z

Greg Easterbrook, on Beliefnet, does the old Intelligent Creation repetition, right down to trotting out the slogan teach the controversy:

But then, just as in 1925 opposition to natural selection was not really about the theory but about sustaining a status quo in which people were not supposed to question clergy, so today's evolutionary fundamentalism is not so much about the theory but about sustaining a new status quo in which people are not supposed to question scientists. Yet this discourages students from engaging in one of the most fascinating--if not the most fascinating--of questions: Why are we here?

The most fascinating question that comes to my mind while reading this paragraph would be if Easterbrook needs directions to the philosophy department, where he would find why's aplenty.

More interestingly, it displays an equation (clergy=scientists) that seems to have been making the rounds among American Intelligent-Creationists: science is just another form of dogma. So it doesn't matter if the dogma is scientific or religious, and they should have equal weight.

2006-11-02T21:35:00.000Z

Not everyone who describes themselves as Christian or Jewish believes in God. Indeed, only 76 percent of Protestants, 64 percent of Catholics, and 30 percent of Jews say they are "absolutely certain" there is a God.

...according to this Harris Poll of U.S. adults.

I wonder how many Christians would tell you they believe in reincarnation, to the sighs of clergy that the uneducated believers got the faith wrong.

Imaginary relationships

2006-10-25T21:24:00.000Z

In the Metafilter comments on Terry Eagleton commenting on Dawkins' The God Delusion (Eagleton quoted in italics):

"It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you without being in love with you himself."

You know, this actually explains a lot. People are in love with the idea of God. Literally. So no matter what God says, no matter how evil the commands from the organization or the little voice in your head become, you mostly just DO them, because you love him/her/it.

Hmph, I'd never thought about it this way before. A large chunk of the world (half, maybe?) would appear to be in an abusive relationship with an imaginary being.
posted by Malor at 1:00 AM PST on October 25

That comment is brilliant, in a slightly similar way to this TMCM strip.

Interestingly, Terry Eagleton himself seems to be the sort of Christian who's gone more than half the way to Taoism:

Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. [...] He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.

...would that be all theologians, or just the subset of them that happen to agree with you, Dr. Eagleton?

(Of course, any truly sensible person wouldn't disagree with me, because I cannot possibly be wrong.)

If you're against us, you're purely negative

2006-10-21T11:45:00.000Z

A common feature with apologetics is to cry that atheism is just parasitic on, or a negation of, "Christianity." Consider this page:

"atheism" comes from "a" the negator and "theos" (God in Greek).

...or perhaps rather "male god"? The alternative is made unspeakable by the handy definition. (The fact that you can even make the argument in the first place appears to be connected to "negative singular existence".)

Of course, to the believer, God just exists. Whereas to the atheist, God is something that exists only because people believe in it; in fact, something that is purely a belief.

So the believer reads it as "denying God", and the atheist reads it as "not believing in this 'God' character" — a shining example of a clash of worldviews. (Of course, estimating other viewpoints is difficult when your perspective absolutely must be true.)

This is perhaps also the reason why believers are so keen on wanting non-believers to profess "agnosticism": a statement of "gosh, I guess we don't really know" gives them less of a case of cognitive dissonance.

(A related case of political narcissism on the form "anyone who disagrees with me is just being negative" can be found here, if you have the stomach.)

Judt on recent political grotesqueness

2006-10-19T18:47:00.000Z

The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially.
[...]
This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

—Tony Judt in the London Review of Books, on the recent political climate.

On a tangent from that article:

They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide.

That's about lefties-turned-"hawks", and again seems to echo the meme that's been sloshing around (Francis Fukuyama, was it?) that the "neocons" are actually crypto-Trotskyists.

Not even wrong, or worse

2006-10-18T21:24:00.000Z

Michael Shermer of skeptic.com writes an effective putdown, in Scientific American, of the fair-and-balanced meme that makes no distinction on the knowledge put behind opposing positions. This would be the same fallacy that makes "evolution is just a theory" go as far as it does.

Hope for abandoning abusive faiths

2006-10-16T20:29:00.000Z

Thousands of people on the bottom of the Hindu caste system have apparently converted to Buddhism, Christianity and miscellaneous other beliefs, en masse.

It's heartening when people rise up against cruel religious systems of oppressive-compulsion like this, though it's a bit depressing, to me, that it's more striking in the public eye when it's a conversion than it would have been if it were a rejection.

(Of course, Buddhism, depending on which one, could be ignostic. But most people tend to see Buddhists as "worshipping Buddha, so therefore Buddha is, like, God.")

2006-10-14T16:57:00.000Z

At last, a snappy and comprehensive putdown of 'political correctness', which, according to the Intelligence Report article, has mutated into an entirely-hallucinated bogeyman, paraded by American white-supremacists under the name of "cultural Marxism." Yes, really.

The familiar knee-jerk charge of "political correctness," of which a less malignant example can be found here, is of course only conceivable by willfully ignoring the balance of power in a society. After all, no one likes to be reminded that they are, in fact, The Man, and not the rebel-alliance automatically-lovable underdog. Using the slogan "politically incorrect," it's easy for anyone in the majority to cast themselves as the lovable rebel. (And it looks great on T-shirts, of course.)

It is interesting that it's difficult to popularize the point that political in/correctness is the perfect cover for creeping racism, as the article points out is already happening.

(via catching up on Orcinus, whose essay Rush, Newspeak and Fascism is a more in-depth treatment of many related problems)

2006-10-13T17:27:00.000Z

Sara Robinson of Orcinus has discovered Dawkins' Root of All Evil? miniseries (that I'm still thinking about), and uses the basic matter that they could never have gotten made in the US as a tangent point, speculating in some sort of Apocalypse of Christianity.

It smacks a bit of wishful thinking, really. The premise of "they're doing this in the name of your savior, you know" has a lot going for it, but this wouldn't appear to be the way to tap into it; perhaps something to do with the way it internalizes rather than rejects the apocalyptic myth.

The God that must not be named

2006-10-12T13:24:00.000Z

Velfna is great!

Now, I realize some of you might say that "Velfna doesn't exist." But how can you say that? You just said Velfna yourself! You already acknowledge Velfna's greatness! Do you not long to taste Its pears of eternal clemency?

Such is the power of names: it allows you to paint someone into the same corner as yourself.

[This would appear to be called "The problem of negative singular existence statements" (article apparently by Dr. M. E. Reicher). Looks like I have my work cut out researching it.]

In Steven Poole's Unspeak, he deals with a growing tendency in recent political speech to methodically employ words and phrases that obscure opposing and alternate viewpoints; they unspeak their alternatives. That is, the nouns themselves function as covert capsule arguments, akin to effective marketing slogans.

"Velfna" above is a rather basic example: it uses Velfna as a proper noun and then immediately ascribes greatness to it. The nature of language makes it very hard to back out of the corner that's been thus painted: counterarguments, such as "Velfna isn't great" and "there is no such thing as Velfna" both involve saying "Velfna" a lot. Asking "but what is Velfna?" is also just as likely to drive the conversation further into the half of the field occupied by Velfna.

Not to mention that just thinking about it makes your mind go Velfna, Velfna, Velfna. Before long, you react to "Velfna" as though it were a word that makes any sort of sense.

The word "God" is functionally not entirely identical to Velfna. It is in fact so unique and deeply entrenched that it's difficult to find anything to compare it to. It appears to presuppose, in itself, that there is only one god, as evident in the Arabic use of the definite article. However, the word also makes itself somehow like a coconut: if you try to crack it, even with a vise, it tends to slip.

It follows that once a religion has discovered a word with this property, it will tend to spread, and strengthen the impact of the religions that adopt it. Confusion then arises when different religions which have all adopted this come together and figure they must be worshipping "basically the same god" or "a heretic god," depending on how magnaminous they're feeling.

Certainly a very high mileage from just one capital letter.

(Pandagon already reviews and critiques Unspeak brilliantly so I don't have to. Cheers!)

It must be really easy to keep believing

2006-10-11T10:32:00.000Z

"Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" seems as though it ought to be more rhetorically effective than it is.

Maybe people don't like to be reminded of just how much it is they forget, especially things they once believed in.

Or maybe it's to do with the sheer simplicity of it.

(The quote is from Philip K. Dick, apparently. I had forgotten.)

Infidel mathematics

2006-10-10T20:49:00.000Z

If we look at this Intelligent Creation argument, more precisely the quote near the end:

Darwin’s assumption that the terms species and variety are merely given for convenience’s sake is part of a larger materialist and reductionist program that undercuts the natural foundation of counting and distorts the natural origin of mathematics. To put it more bluntly, in assuming that “species” are not real, Darwinism and the larger reductionist program 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.

–seems to be a sort of worked-over Berkeley argument, except now solipsism is a bad word. If there isn't a grand authority father-figure in heaven, then who vouches for where things begin and where they leave off? Why dear gosh, how can you even count on your fingers if you don't know your fingers from your hand, and your hand from your arm? Not to mention your nails. They could be in Newcastle for all you know!

There is not much more for me to say here because every time I read this passage, I just splutter at the absurdity of what is on the page [...]

There is a method to this madness. It's paranoid Manichaeism taken to absurd lengths.

Hell yes

2006-10-09T18:34:00.000Z

I could pull quotes from this all week. (This is nominally about that US congressman who was exploiting sixteen-year old interns.)

This terror is a complex of the sexualization of children and teenagers, and the violence directed against children and teenagers in the society.

In their view there is a vast homosexual conspiracy to infect youth with gay secular humanism. In short, the evangelical world sees a counter world – a Satanism of secularlism, that like themselves, infects people with exposure. [...] In the Manichean war, the forces of light and the forces of darkness engage in a race to reach, and save or corrupt, the unconverted.

For most of its history, until the late 1970s, the more evangelical one was, the more likely one was to be not involved in politics AT ALL--to see it as an inherently sinful realm.

—The Revolution Eats its Own, by Stirling Newberry. At last, recent history, and Team America: World Police, is beginning to come together to something coherent.

Ugly, but coherent.

Stay Clean, order yours today

2006-10-07T13:17:00.000Z

This just in. Christian T-shirts to make sure you never accidentally touch a filthy Unclean who hath partaken in Meanness:

Wear this, and you'll know for certain whenever an Unclean comes near: for they will emit piercing wails, repelled by the pietous light of your unyielding righteousness.

Eternal war, part CXXXVII

2006-10-03T15:52:00.000Z

Interesting. Americans are apparently beginning to internalize the notion that

Now since when has the objective of war been to never kill or torture civilians? Not in World War II, where we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intent then was to crush the will of the other side, and to make so horrible for them to keep fighting us that they would surrender.

It is refreshing when they just out and admit that they're in favor of employing terrorist tactics. Or maybe this is just due to "terrorist" having been used as a synonym for "enemy" for so long that it completely passes them by.

Implied, of course, is the notion that since our side did it, it must be okay. Forgotten is the simple fact that most wars before 1933 did not involve civilians very much. Forgotten is the fact that WWII's civilian slaughters were so horrible that a Geneva convention was drawn up to prevent it from happening again.

Note also the circumspect language — goals of war are not usually defined negatively, nor are they usually consistent throughout the course of it: war has its own logic, and tends to sweep people along once it starts to churn. As we can see.

Gentlewomen, stop your engines

2006-10-02T07:47:00.000Z

To be a gentleman was a distinguished title. A gentleman shows restraint, he's refined, he does not resort to violence. The power of the gentleman comes from his restraint, and the fact that he can afford to show restraint; it comes from the things he could do but chooses not to. Men are presumed to be non-gentlemen by default.

Women are supposed to be all nice all the time, so they've never had access to this power; there is no such word as gentlewoman. Niceness is apparently only a virtue when it's backed by the potential for not being nice.

This is related to one of my main problems with redemption; namely, that it glorifies someone who did something bad first, and then stopped, more than it does someone who never did the bad thing to begin with.

God only knows where they learn these things

2006-10-01T18:28:00.000Z

One would historically worship a fertility god to gain fertility; a god of war to attain success in battle; a god of alcohol for a good time; and so on.

Western societies worship a god of bullying, then have the audacity to be surprised when our children acquire this value only all to well.

Torture

2006-09-29T19:50:00.000Z

If you really believe that torture can be used to change people's minds:

Would that mean I could change your mind on the effectiveness of torture by beating you repeatedly?

(Don't worry. I would only use sound techniques like the repetitive administration of legitimate force.)

(If your answer to the first sentence was no, well, Amnesty has the best track record of preventing people from being tortured and held without trial.)

The noblesse of poverty

2006-09-22T15:26:00.000Z

Everyone knows that being poor makes you noble. After all, if it weren't for the major ennoblement of their situation and the real sense of community fostered by having no one else to rely on, how would anyone be able to stand it? Now, I keep seeing these people, still alive after some time on the streets, so clearly it can't be all that bad.

Not to mention how suffering purifies the spirit. Oh yes, we'd better not ease any of that suffering, otherwise their nobility might be wounded.

If poverty is basically harmless, why then the status quo is right and just, and there's no reason to change it. How splendid.

Show of weakness

2006-09-18T16:50:00.000Z

Jehova's Witnesses and their ilk always travel in packs of two. In a related field, clipboard beggars for worthy causes never go after groups: when I asked one of them about it, she told me it rarely meets with success.

So groups reinforce behavior and consistency of belief; what else is new. Well, the fact that I was able to talk to the representative about her job, instead of the Cause, is a blueprint for something I've never tried with evangelizers: humanization as a defense tactic.

How's it going? Save many souls lately? Take care, now.

It'd be great if it worked. If I'm lucky, I might get some stories out of them about the things that people tell them.

The million-baby question

2006-09-17T11:16:00.000Z

A thought experiment: you're held prisoner. On the other side of safety glass are five innocent babies. In front of you is a contract to sign over your immortal soul to Satan, a quill pen and a sample of your own blood. You are told that for every five minutes you do not sign this contract, five children will be killed. If you wait it out, they are shot and new babies brought in. What do you do?

Most any atheist will find the choice a simple one, because both the immortal soul and Satan are fictional concepts, whereas the babies are very real. So you swiftly sign the contract and hope your captors hold up their end of the deal.

As a believer? Well, the babies are innocent, so their souls should go right to heaven, right? Whereas you, too, is innocent, a victim of circumstance; everything should be all right in the afterlife as long as you hold fast and don't sign that contract. If the believer eventually does sign the contract, it will not be because of their faith, but because of their basic humanity, a thing shared by most humans: a baseline reluctance to see people slaughtered in front of your eyes when there's something, anything, you can do about it.

Far-fetched? Not quite. This is the memeified, some-guy-in-a-pub version of the basic criticism levelled at believing there's a reward in the afterlife: namely, that this belief has a very nasty potential to reduce the value of life in this world towards worthlessness. This applies to any belief that postulates an afterlife of rewards, heavens and the like.

Believers tend to behave as if this implication doesn't exist, or doesn't apply to them. For good reason: it would be a very uncomfortable thought, if they had to take it seriously. Fortunately for their self-image, their minds are suitably barricaded to block it out completely.

Case in point: [1]

Unspeak

1990-05-23T02:40:00.000Z

This growing body of research shows that new, postevent information often becomes incorporated into memory, supplementing and altering a person's recollection. The new information invades us, like a Trojan horse, precisely because we do not detect its influence.
—E.L. Loftus, The Reality of Repressed Memories

The term unspeak, coined by Steven Poole in the book by the same name, describes a tendency in recent political speech to deliberately use phrasing with subtle connotations that obscure opposing or alternate viewpoints. It would be the most advanced weapon in the arsenal of spin doctors. The general idea is that of a Trojan horse, or an information bomb, slipping past conscious critical thought to expand into an idea resistant to argument, without having had to argue for itself in the first place.

From the introduction:

[...] It represents an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak – in the sense of erasing, or silencing – any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one way of looking at a problem: in terms of ‘life’ rather than ‘choice’, or in terms of tax as something to be ‘relieved’ rather than, say, a way of ‘contributing’ to society.

[...] (In fact, the existing phrase ‘concentration camp’ already did the same thing somewhat more subtly: people in ‘concentration camps’, after all, did not sit around in tents playing chess or writing poetry. That phrase originated as a British euphemism for its own practices in South Africa. Language that was originally used by the perpetrators of violence in order to justify it became the normal term: a pattern that we will see repeated in Chapter Four.)

More at Unspeak.net.

See also posts tagged unspeak, in particular non-arguability.