An Amateur Neophyte

Saturday Post 4

2012-01-29T00:31:00.000-05:00

Conservatives and Gay Marriage

When a conservative rails about the sanctity of marriage, protecting marriage, keeping marriage safe from gays, all a liberal hears is homophobia, but there's more to it than that.

Recall the foundations of morality? Dr. Haidt's work has elucidated further differences between liberals and conservatives, namely how they see society.

For liberals, the society is atomic, with individuals forming its base. Their associations and interactions form the larger groups, communities we see. This worldview perhaps reached its apotheosis in the American Revolution. The Constitution enshrines the rights of the individual, followed by the liberties that prevent action by the state and federal governments.

The conservative worldview is molecular, based not on the individual but on the family. The third pillar of morality is in-group loyalty, and there is no loyalty more binding than that of blood. This morality was extended to non-family in the bronze age ethic of sacred hospitality; someone invited into your home is family, thus neither group can betray the other.

For the conservative, all society is based upon blood loyalty writ large. When two people marry, they are uniting two families in an unbreakable blood oath. All families thus knit society together, with blood and marriage forming the warp and the weft. Without the ties of marriage uniting separate families, there would be nothing to hold society together and civilization would fall apart.

This answers the liberal question "How does two gays marrying hurt your marriage?" and also answers the conservative hatred of divorce. By weakening the institution of marriage, it weakens the weft of society. Divorce makes marriage a frivolous pursuit, entered into and exited with ease, turning all extra-familial relations into nothing more serious than friendship. The conservative fallacy of the slippery slope whereby gay marriage leads to polygamy or marriage to animals is the same argument. Conservatives feel homosexuality is a sin, a deliberate descent into wickedness. Enshrining gay marriage would be like giving an orgy or a drinking binge the same solemnity and weight as marriage, which is to say marriage would have the same solemnity as a binge; none at all.

So when a conservative rails on about the sanctity of marriage, he means it. A liberal just hears homophobia, but the conservative really believes that marriage is a holy institution, ordained by god, the basis of social order and that it needs protecting. Plus, he's a homophobe.

Society isn't purely atomic or molecular, but somewhere in between, with each person more or less strongly associated with the people around him. The ties that bind are strong only because we reinforce them with constant association; if you don't see someone for decades, it doesn't matter if he's a second cousin twice removed or your twin, he's become a stranger. By the same token, it doesn't matter if you're a WASP scion of a wealthy house and he's a farmer from Batang, Batang, if you spend hours together every day, you'll become close no matter how much you hate each other. In other words, we're neither a collection of atoms nor a tightly knit sweater. We're more like mayonnaise.

Homosexuality isn't a sin. It's not evil nor depraved nor harmful. To this extent the conservatives are correct: gays form friendships and families the same as anyone else and help us bind our society together. They're entirely incorrect because gay marriage wouldn't weaken the society, but strengthen it, confirming the ties that bind a significant portion of our population.

The conservative hatred of gays is an old one. It's codified in their bible, but I don't believe it began there. Homophobia is a disgust reaction, rather than fear, indicating that it's a social construct. In other words, I believe it's a combination of pillars three and five. Loyalty displayed through adherence to social mores, betrayal of which elicits a disgust reaction in accordance with sanctity/purity.

Iron age Christians distinguished themselves from the Greek and Roman cultures that were colonizing the middle east. It's even older than that for bronze age Judaism, as there were other cultures in the area that practiced homosexuality, even as part of their religion. The ancient Hebrews were notoriously anti-sex, which unhealthy obsession was passed down to Christianity. In other words, I believe that modern homophobia is a relic of ancient Jewish racism (which is also exemplified in such laws as "Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and linen together.").

Thus in-group loyalty was encoded as "avoid the gays from over there", which then was vested with sanctity and required to be maintained perfectly. And it was, for thousands of years, to the detriment of all.

So there it is, the ironic twist at the heart of the gay marriage controversy. Conservatives want to maintain the strength of society by fighting that which would strengthen it. And the cruelty that they espouse is not at all ironic; in moments of honesty they may even admit they hate gays, and are proud to still be practicing 5000 year old racism. That's one hell of a legacy.

A Thor's Day Celebration

2012-01-26T22:21:00.000-05:00

The best thing about Thor's Day is that no matter how you're feeling, hitting something with a hammer is always appropriate and will always make you feel better.

Happy? Laugh and hit something with a hammer.
Sad? Pretend something is the thing that made you sad and smash it in effigy.
Angry? As above, only without tears.
Ennui? Hitting things with a hammer is amusing.
Vague confusion? Hit something with a hammer until it occurs to you that maybe you should be doing something else.

All you need is hammer.

My Library: Alden's American Revolution

2012-01-26T09:21:00.000-05:00

Three books in and we've already hit something on my wall of shame. My library includes a few non-fiction books and some of them I didn't buy for a college class, but for some light reading. Here's a tip: don't let me loose in a museum gift shop without also giving me a sharply defined spending limit. I spent more than $100 on books when I went to DC. I learned a lot about cats and pre-Columbian American history. And dinosaurs. And recreational math.

Anyway, I've actually had John Alden's A History of the American Revolution for almost a decade now and I've never been able to pick it back up. I consider that I put it down for a very good reason. I did a little digging on the book and the author before I wrote this (I didn't want to try reading it without a bit more info) and, in retrospect, I should have guessed it wouldn't exactly be my cuppa. Dr. Alden died in 1991 at the age of 83, which should tell you something about the book. To confirm any suspicions you might have, the book was published in 1969. To put it bluntly, it's dated.

As you might expect from a man who lived through two world wars, Dr. Alden was something of an antiquated antiquarian. He's not charitable to non-caucasians (calling Native Americans "savages" is so pre-King). I'd guess he'd harbor similar sentiments for non-Christians. I know for a fact he wasn't charitable to the British. I suspect that, like many, Dr. Alden made the loving of his country like unto a secular religion. Perhaps, like many, it wasn't all that secular.

It takes a great deal to make me put down a book. I may scoff and roll my eyes and frequently shout, "Oh for the LOVE OF SHIT.", but I'll keep reading. In high school I read a book by a Velikovskyite that I disdained from start to finish. Velikovsky believed that all myths could and should be explained as the result of astronomical phenomena. Fair enough, but his proposed phenomena were horse shit and betrayed a fundamental ignorance of physics, astronomy, biology, and geology. When a 14 year old can explain and provide documented evidence for why your Earth-as-a-moon-of-Saturn hypothesis is nonsense, your theory is crap from start to finish. Nevertheless, I sat through all of 2012 and I read that book.

But it seems I hold non-fiction to a higher standard. I put down Alden's book after 88 pages, because this is what I encountered on the 88th page.

The British aristocracy produced some extraordinary men in the eighteenth century, but none more remarkable than Charles Townshend. ... He was much admired as a speaker in the House of Commons. He was a tall, heavy man with a loud voice, a modicum of wit, a gift for mimicry, and a penchant for abusing all and sundry, whether friend or foe. He was famous for his effrontery. In an age when British politicians were constantly inconstant, he shifted his allegiances so swiftly that he was noted for his fickleness. Behind a façade of health and vigor he was both physically feeble and psychopathic.

Emphasis mine.

I have no doubt that politicians in the late eighteenth century were venal as a rule, short-sighted and ignorant, and frightfully barbaric in their morality (by today's standards), but Alden seems to have been hell bent on portraying the British as actively villainous and disposed not merely to wrest profit from the colonies but to positively grind them into the dirt. I'm certain that the boorish, provincial, classist, racist, half-educated barbarians that populated the British Parliament were no paragons and that they would have felt the colonies to have been at best a distant second to the home Isles in concern, but, even in the sixties, psychopath was a clinical term. Townshend may have been an asshole, with documentation to back up that assertion, but to step from there to an accusation of psychopathy was enough to make me put the book down and is still enough to dissuade me from picking it back up.

I may do so at some point and try to work my way through it. Apparently Alden has a clear style that is quite informative and easy to follow, but I don't know if I really want to try and learn my history from racist grandpa.

Next: Walter Alvarez's T. rex and the Crater of Doom. What a kwinky dink! This is one of the museum books I was talking about up top.

Mantic Wednesday 3

2012-01-26T00:53:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I don't have too much to predict. It's not like too much has changed.

Except that now Newt Gingrich is in the running for reals. Isn't this a guy whose campaign already imploded once? How is this happening? Greg Laden explains it well.

Gingrich represents the Republican Party ... because Gingrich is a stupid hateful hypocrite who is as mean spirited as a rabid dog, and a racist shit.

Heheeeee!

Frankly, this is true. The Republican Party, thanks to 50 solid years of race-baiting and fear-mongering and kowtowing to the ignorance of the worst of America has become the party for racist, white fundamentalists. Go to a Tea Party rally and you won't see any black faces, though you may see someone, with no sense of irony, in blackface.

So, do I have a prediction? Who will win the Republican nomination? Romney is a stupid hypocrite who's completely out of touch with the American people. Newt Gingrich is a stupid, racist, rabid hypocrite who's completely out of touch with anyone who's not a racist Christian. Romney is a Mormon. Gingrich is an evangelical of some kind.

My fondest hope is that Gingrich wins. I really, really, want it to happen. I want it to be true that that's likely, so it's suspect.

I know Gingrich is going to do well in the South and Midwest, and I know he can do well in the primaries (see above re: party for racists). I'm absolutely certain he can't win the general election. Therefor I suspect he's going to start getting some very, very strong pressure to back down from people in the party with half a brain. Being a rabid ass-hat, I don't think he'd back down gracefully, and certainly not without the promise of a big appointment, which promise would have to be off the books.

Pretty much just thinking out loud, here.

Okay, here's my prediction. Gingrich is going to do very well for a few more primaries and he's going to refuse to back down. In order to keep him from completely destroying the Republican chance of victory (not high in any case) this fall, the Republican leadership are going to circle the wagons around Romney and do everything they can to destroy Gingrich before he becomes unstoppable.

I suspect this may even happen before the Florida primary happens.

My Library: HGTTG

2012-01-23T20:22:00.001-05:00

I don't know when I first read Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I know I was fairly young and unschooled in the ways of Britishisms. There was definitely a time when I was far too young to have read it; in elementary school I know I read things that were ahead of my grade level, but Douglas Adams would be a bit much even for a precocious fifth grader. I suspect it was some time during middle school, when I lived in Pennsylvania, that I shared my experience of Douglas Adams's books (not just the Hitchhiker series, but also Dirk Gently) with my brother Caleb and my friend Doug.

While I don't know when I first read Adams, I do know that I've never lived in a home without his books (that I can recall). My older brothers all enjoyed Adams, so my parents' large library had HGTTG and Dirk Gently. Most of it, anyway. At some point I ended up with the entire collection (minus Salmon of Doubt, plus "Young Zaphod Plays it Safe") in a single book. It's one of those purchases I absolutely positively do not regret making.

What is it about Douglas Adams I enjoy? I think it's that he always brought an outsider's perspective to what he was writing. For example, in discussing teleportation,

It’s unpleasantly like being drunk.
‘What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?’
‘You ask a glass of water.’

I'm going to admit that the first time I read that, I had to go ask what it meant. His comparison of human and dolphin accomplishments, his opening discussion of why consumerism is a fairly stupid way to look for happiness, heck, almost any analogy you care to name. Each description, comparison, analogy, bit of humor just screams with a dark, gentle, twisted humor. Yes, I meant to combine those three adjectives.

Adams doesn't write hard sci-fi; like Doctor Who, it's more like science fantasy. He's willing to toss in whatever pseudoscience jargon he wants. Ordinarily that sort of thing irritates me, but he really makes it work, mostly because he never really tries to use it to explain anything, to justify anything, nor to advance the plot. Mostly it's just kookiness. I dig it.

Of course Adams isn't going to be for everyone. He was a radical atheist (his words, so no one would confuse him with an agnostic) and environmental activist. His irreverence and passion can border on the scathing. He also loved technology. Especially Macs. Of course, that was before Macs were beloved by all. In other words, he was a hipster before being a hipster was a thing.

Things Adams has written:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Doctor Who

I'll cover Doctor Who when I get to the TV stuff. I can't wait.

Next up: A History of the American Revolution, by John R. Alden

Sun's Day: Martin's Death Count

2012-01-23T09:49:00.002-05:00

On Sunday's I read a chapter of George RR Martin's incredibly slow-coming Ice & Fire opera. And I'm also keeping a death count.

A Game of Thrones
Prologue: Two members of the black watch killed by Others.
First Chapter: One member of the black watch executed by Ned Stark for breaking oath and fleeing the Wall (because of the Others).
Second Chapter: Jon Arryn, Hand of the King, *SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS*apparently dead of wasting illness, in fact killed by the Queen for learning of her incestuous sex with her twin brother.SPOILERS OVER

Total: 4 dead.

I knew this would be appropriate for Sundays. Three weeks, three people dead, and one in the bank for next week in case he doesn't kill anyone.

My Library: Dangerous Days

2012-01-22T17:18:00.003-05:00

I have an extensive library and I'd like to share it with the world. I could simply catalog all the books, movies, music, and games I own, but I might as well share my thoughts on them, too. I've read, watched, or played very nearly all of them (one or two just sucked), and some of them I read, reread, and rereread as the mood strikes me. So, from end to end, one book/movie/album/series at a time, I'm going to go through them, describe them, and what I like about them. You'll probably notice that I'm going through them in alphabetical (by author) order; that's how I have my library set up. First up, Dangerous Days by Pete Abrams.

Pete Abrams is the author and artist of Sluggy Freelance, a webcomic with fourteen years of archives. Dangerous Days is a collection of comics from the middle of May to the middle of December, 2002. Not entirely coincidentally, this is also roughly the time I discovered and began following the comic. As with a number of my favorite authors and artists, I discovered Sluggy in college. A decade later, Sluggy is still going strong and I'm still following it. Sluggy is one of the older comics on the web, and its archive is daunting. It has followed a daily update schedule (with the occasional very rare vacation) since August of 1997. That is, of this writing, 5,262 days, or 5,262 comics. On weekdays, this is a three panel format such as you'd find in the paper; Sundays a full-color, many-panel comic, also as in the paper; and Saturdays a three panel comic.

This format has varied somewhat over the years. Maintaining a daily update schedule is daunting for any artist, and Abrams has changed how he updates. For a time, in order to have some respite, he gave Saturdays over to guest artists/authors, such as Clay Yount of Rob and Elliot. These days, he's freed his weekends up by posting sketches, rough drawings, a one-panel non-canon one-off, that sort of thing. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't begrudge him these, seeing as he has a family. Also, what he gives us during the week more than makes up for it, since his art and writing has matured with 15 years of work and feedback. What he provides during the week is no longer a three-panel, gag-a-day comic, but a full page, lushly drawn, meticulously thought out story (sometimes hints and musings have been provided more than a decade in advance, completely missed even by his most rabid, imaginative, equally meticulous fans).

Sluggy began as a short-arc comic, having fun with various nerdy story types; typically affectionate parodies, such as the early sc- fi adventure, which parodied Star Trek, dimension travel, Alien and others while also expanding the cast. Over time, as seems inevitable on the internets, the comic became darker and more serious, exploring character growth, tragedy, melodrama, and all sorts of crap. Some fans lament the loss of the zany days of bikini suicide Frisbee , but others appreciating the deeper, more complex stories. Can't please 'em all.

Dangerous Days, named after one of the story arcs contained within, is a good example of all this, containing two horror parodies, a Harry Potter parody, and an arc which deals with a number of betrayals and at least one good character gone evil. Oh, and some zany fun. And ghosts. And an artist obsessed with all things crotch. Seriously. The book also contains a bonus, book-only story to make it more enticing for fans. After all, an artist's gotta eat and that means he's gotta sell.

I certainly don't recommend Dangerous Days for the random reader, any more than I'd recommend the seventh book of Robin Hobbs's Realm of the Elderlings series (eleven so far, with more coming, grouped in self-contained but mutually supporting trilogies), but those 5,262 comics are incredibly daunting to any newcomer. I've gone on an archive binge of sluggy a few times in the past, but not in the last five years, I don't think. If you were to read a week of comics every five minutes (generous for some of the heavier arcs) it would still take you more than twelve hours of reading. Fortunately, there are resources out there to help you with that.

Archive Binge: lets you set up an RSS feed to go through comics at a rate of your own choosing
Piperka: acts as a tracking tool so you can keep a handle on where you are in a number of webcomics, and binge at your own pace

Set up one of those and read five comics a day and you'll have caught up in about three and a half years. Not bad, eh?I do recommend Sluggy, as it hits all the good highs and lows, and Abrams really has turned into an excellent storyteller and artist; a good archive trawl would be well worth your time. I still follow this comic for a reason, and it's not just because of nostalgia for the glorious days of college. It's because I like it.Next up: Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Cats and Mirrors

2012-01-22T13:33:00.001-05:00

The mirror test is a way to determine how self-aware animals are, how bright they are. Does the animal, on looking in the mirror, see another animal or its own reflection? Is it aware that the image it's seeing is an image of itself? The test is old; Darwin showed a mirror to an Orangutan and it made faces, but he realized it was ambiguous; did the ape make faces at itself or another ape? The mirror test is a little more sophisticated now, in that researches put an odorless spot on the animal somewhere it can't see without a mirror and wait to see if it realizes the spot on the reflection is a spot on its own body.

All of the great apes pass the mirror test: gorillas, both species of chimp, some gibbons, and, of course, humans after the age of 18 months. Elephants, dolphins, orcas, and even some magpies pass it. Pigs are believed to be mostly capable of using mirrors. Cats don't pass the test.

Of course, before you can use a mirror, you have to learn what a mirror is. Humans blind from birth and later given sight initially react to the mirror, even in adulthood, as they would to another human until they learn its their own reflection. So do animals, hence chimps that initially make threat displays and then calm down and use it as an aid to self-grooming.

I have two cats. Sappho, my dark tabby, ignores mirrors while Babygirl, my tubby calico, spends lots and lots of time staring into a mirror. Is one cat smarter or more self-aware than the other? When Sappho ignores the mirror, is it because she recognizes it as herself and dismisses it or because she sees it as a non-responsive other cat that she can't play with? When Babygirl plants herself in front of a mirror and stares for minutes on end is it because she recognizes herself, or because she sees another cat and doesn't understand? Since Babygirl hates other cats (she was abandoned in an apartment complex with many strays and learned to hate cats. Then she was rescued by Mildcats at ASU, whence I adopted her.), it seems odd that she would sit inches away from what she deemed to be another cat.

So which cat is smarter? Which more self-aware? Obviously neither metric belongs on a binary scale. I think Babygirl is interested in and confused by the mirror, because she's aware that the image of me isn't me and that the image of the other cat isn't another cat, but I don't think she recognizes the image as a reflection of herself. I've no idea what she makes of the image of me. I like to think that Sappho is more clever, but I have no idea where she stands vis-a-vis the mirror test. She's never shown any interest in mirrors and I have no data, thus no conclusions, however tentative. Why does Sappho not care where Babygirl really, really does? I think it's because Sappho doesn't have Babygirl's traumatic history (Sappho's also a rescue, but I found her crying in a parking lot after only a few days of abandonment in an area with few strays. She was filthy and starving, but unscarred.), so the mirror doesn't pose the same troubling dilemma for her. I'm probably reading way too much into this, but I think Babygirl really wants that other cat to go the hell away; I know she often wishes Sappho would.

In any event, self-awareness and the like are interesting subjects. I kind of want to start breeding programs to try and make intelligent, tool-using cats. And dolphins. And pigs. But not magpies. Those little fuckers can burn.*

* Not really. Magpies are probably cool. But fuck dingoes. They eat babies.

Saturday Post 3

2012-01-22T11:29:00.000-05:00

So this one's a little late. Today I'll talk a little about addiction.

A brain is a terrible, wonderful thing. It is an incredibly complex organic computer, which takes scads of information and boils them down to the essentials, interprets them, and pounds out appropriate reactions, all within a few hundredths of a second.

We are called the rational animal. Research shows time and again that we are not. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we learn that we are creatures of habit and impulse with a mechanism not for reason, but for justification. In other words, we are less a rational animal and more a rationalizing animal.

Addiction can happen in a number of ways, typically from a misfiring or short-circuit of the brain. Gambling is similar to religion in that it's a misfiring of the learning circuit. All animals seek to understand and master their environment. When cause and effect are absent or distantly linked, superstition is the result. Hence, gamblers believe in luck, athletes believe in silly or disgusting rituals, pigeons believe dancing a certain way will deliver a food pellet, and people worship non-existent sky-beards. One aspect of our learning system is the dopamine response; we get high off of chance. You ever notice how you can't stop playing with a new toy and love it love it love it? And after a few weeks you don't care so much. You're getting high playing with it. Studies have shown that the more certain an outcome, the lower the dopamine response. A 50/50 chance (max uncertainty) sees max dopamine response. Change it to 75/25 (whether 75% success or 75% failure, it's still more certain) and the dopamine response is cut in half. In other words, having mastered a system and made the outcome certain, our system is geared to move on and master something new.

With gambling, that mastery can never come. You cannot change the outcome of a roll of dice. Each roll is as uncertain as the last. Until the cards come up, you cannot know what they'll be. Every time you play is as uncertain as ever. I'd be willing to wager that the most popular games at casinos are also the ones closest to even odds. I know that blackjack and craps are both, when "correctly" played, at nearly even odds (roughly 51% to the house, as I recall). The dopamine response is maxed out for every turn of the cards, every throw of the dice, and it will never get better. When you win, the high is through the roof, and when you lose it's even more terrible.

Coffee also shortcuts the dopamine response. Caffeine really does pump you up and make you feel more awake, but it also does the dopamine thing. It's ticked the part of the brain that says "You won!" and the rest of your brain jumps in saying, "What? What did I win? How? Where? Is that a pony? I won! ... Now what?" Over time, your brain notices similarities and attaches importance to them. You drink from a certain mug more often by chance, your brain attaches more importance to that and you start drinking from it exclusively. You develop a favorite brand, a favorite time of day, a favorite method of preparation... Go on, break a coffee drinker's favorite mug. I dare you. One of the reasons quitting coffee is hard is because when you don't do things the right way, your brain interprets it as the opposite of winning. Everything is wrong forever and you can never win. The other problem, of course, is that, as with all drugs, there's a withdrawal response. Coffee's a stimulant, so your brain ramps down activity in anticipation of being brought back to normal. You get rid of the stimulant and it takes some time for your brain to realize it needs to ramp things back up. This also explains why you need to drink more coffee to get the same effect as you once did. As Terry Pratchett once said, there is such a thing as being knurd (the opposite of drunk), and it's very unpleasant. Hardcore alcoholics need a few drinks just to be normal, hard core caffeine-heads need a few cuppas just to be awake. There are other effects as well.

Cocaine works through dopamine and through seratonin. That's one hell of a one-two combo. It feels good when you take it and bad when you stop. Yowza. Alcohol works through a different system, basically it puts the brakes on your brain (hence it's called a depressant). But when you're not drinking it, the brakes come off (no, you're not smarter when you're knurd; you have fevers and hallucinations and seizures).

Addiction tends to be complex and poorly understood, but one thing is certain: it really, really sucks.

Mantic Wednesday 2

2012-01-19T00:18:00.001-05:00

Simply because it's arousing a lot of furor, I'ma predict that SOPA/PIPA will wither and die.

Saturday Post 2

2012-01-14T17:30:00.001-05:00

What is Love? (Baby Don't Hurt Me)

So I've been working my way through Fox's Bones. In general, a decent show, not a great crime procedural (I'm not a lawyer nor a cop, but they get a shit ton of stuff wrong*. Temperance "Bones" Brennan and her band of squints (because nerds have bad eyesight and squint all the time, see?) embody many of the worst stereotypes Hollywood attaches to nerds and scientists. Bones herself is the worst as being borderline autistic and so closeted she doesn't get 99% of the pop culture references around her and misunderstanding virtually every idiom she hears. It is, however, endearing when she tries and fails to use them herself.

The worst part of her characterization is that she's a Straw Vulcan. She's intended to be incredibly rational and thus allow normal people to feel superior when they see her completely fail to understand emotions (and idioms and pop culture), and have to work hard to understand why anyone would prioritize love or happiness. Because emotions are irrational, see? This video (roughly 50 minutes) is an excellent deconstruction of that insulting trope

The above is Julia Galef's talk at Skepticon 4. She gives all the reasons why an actually rational person, as opposed to the pseudorational Hollywood Spock, would understand emotion and give it appropriate weight and priority. I don't particularly want to repeat all her talking points, so instead let me talk about love.

Bones, the character, repeatedly makes the point that the heart is just a muscle and that love is a chemical reaction. Bones, the show, repeatedly makes the point that she's emotionally stunted and stupid and wrong for thinking that and that she should be ashamed and change so she's more like her appropriately emotional partner, Booth.

However, she's entirely correct that love is a chemical reaction. Basically, you become addicted to someone. To their presence, their smell, their sound, all that other jazz. You're high whenever you're around them, or looking at them, or thinking about them, and you say stupid things like "Don't you just love 'love', man?" as if you were a sixteen year old halfway through a plate of magic brownies.

Understanding love as a chemical dependency and a process within portions of the brain allows us to understand it within a social context, a biological context, an evolutionary context, a health context. It helps us understand why and how love fades and people get the Seven Year Itch, and why a break up hurts so very, very badly. Also, why even a couple in the midst of a physically violent domestic dispute will still turn on any interloper who tries to break it up. Putting love into its proper physical context takes a lot of stupid mystery out of life and makes it comprehensible. In fact, it makes it easier to deal with some of it; you actually can die of heartbreak; be told.

Does any of that take away from the power of love? From the fact that being in love is genuinely awesome? That we do, in fact, love love? Absolutely not. This is just another example of the petulant art major whining that the scientist is unweaving the rainbow. Science doesn't reduce everything to numbers and equations. Take a gander at any scientist and you won't find an antisocial manchild viewing the world through a grey haze of numbers, but someone who wonders at the marvels of nature, who finds joy and excitement in discovery. Also, someone with even rudimentary knowledge of biology and physics can really take sex up to the next level, though he'd be wise to get someone with rudimentary knowledge of contracting to install the sex swing.

* Law and the Multiverse, a blog that covers legal issues within comic books is a very educational read. Among other things, I now know for certain that Batman's antics are entirely illegal and roughly 50% useless when it comes to getting criminals off the streets.

Thursday!

2012-01-12T18:18:00.001-05:00

It's fuckin' THORSDAY!

NIMBY and its Converse

2012-01-12T16:13:00.000-05:00

NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard

This old saw refers to necessary but unpopular projects like prisons and power plants. We need them but we don't particularly want them, at least not close by. Property values tend to plummet near such things. They tend to get sent to economically depressed areas because, clearly, ~~poor people don't lobby effectively~~ they need the construction money.

The converse would be things that we don't necessarily need, but which we want close to home, usually for the money it brings in, like military bases and contracts or popular sports franchises. NIYBY. Not In Your Back Yard. It's why Ron Paul, and others of his ilk, though theoretically terrible for the Union, wouldn't be able to get anything done. It's why budget cuts never actually happen. We don't mind pork when it's our pork. Your pork is smelly and stupid, but mine's delicious.

Think of them as the fraternal twins of politics. You have the short, ugly, smelly, stupid prison and the tall, beautiful, very well spoken defense contract. Nimby and Niyby. Pretty much conjoined twins, when you think about it.

Wednesday Prediction

2012-01-11T12:37:00.000-05:00

Romney will duke it out with Santorum and Paul. Perry, surprising no one, will drop out when he doesn't get third or higher in SC. Santorum will stay strong in SC, while Paul will fall further behind. Romney will eventually win in the bigger states, leading to the nomination. Then he'll lose in November because Obama can say "Look at all the things I did! And for all the things I didn't do, blame Congress!"

Terry Pratchett's Documentary on Assisted Suicide

2012-01-09T18:10:00.002-05:00

I don't really understand why people are against this. It seems to me to be supremely selfish to forbid others the right to die.

Saturday Post

2012-01-07T17:07:00.001-05:00

So there's this guy who really likes video games and Disney World, go listen to him talk about computers for a bit. I really recommend it if you have a free hour. His name is Cory. Cory Doctorow.

So Doctorow talks about DRM and touches on how it relates to censorship and the free market and such. He mentions that DRM and censorship tend to be the tools of tyrants and dictators who lock down freedom of expression and information and whatnot.

There are some sayings out there.

"Knowledge is power." -- Thomas Hobbes

"Information wants to be free." -- Stewart Brand

"Information wants you to give me a dollar." -- Bruce Sterling

Knowledge really is power. Tyrants clamp down on the pipelines of communication because it allows people to coordinate their efforts, to spread the word of atrocities or freedoms, to live their lives outside the tyrants' control. If you want an example of the result of the increased freedom available from communication, look no further than Occupy Wall Street. The media have been thoroughly stymied trying to understand this group because they are decentralized. Once upon a time, protests and organizations were 98% stuffing envelopes and 2% deciding what went in them. Now, thanks to the tubes, people can communicate and organize and decide to act without having to have a central, top-down organization structure. Action follows desire rather than command.

Take a look at the benefits of unions. Without unions, we wouldn't have minimum wage, weekends, or overtime. The working poor wouldn't even be that posh; they'd just be working. An employer, by virtue of having many employees and many applicants for each job opening has a great deal of information available to him; he knows how many people want a job and how qualified they are and how much they're willing to work for. The applicant knows only the information about himself and that there's a job available. The employer has much more information and much more power, and that's not a coincidence. The union levels the playing field by unifying the workers to give them collective bargaining power and by getting them to share their information.

The printing press, Renaissance, and Enlightenment are all associated. Again, this is not an accident. While the so-called medieval period was in fact a time of slow development and progress, but the development of the printing press was contemporaneous with the Renaissance, which saw a rebirth of classical ideas when ancient texts, newly rediscovered from Islamic West Asia, became widespread. This added a definite style and direction of development for the flowering of art, science, and literature of the following centuries. This led inexorably to the Enlightenment, in which education and information began spilling out, overpowering that which sought to constrain it. Of course, this was the traditional and still ever-present enemy of education and discovery; religion.

"But Herr Gutenberg, should you print your bible quickly and cheaply, anyone could read it!"
"That, Herr Priester, is exactly the point."

Lest you think I'm speaking hyperbolically, the heads of church and state were very ambivalent about the spread of the press (as were the old guard of industry, the calligraphers). Henry VIII (head of the Church of England) and the Catholic church were among those who sought to limit the spread of information. It is further no accident that the printing press was contemporaneous with the Protestant Reformation. As ideas spread, those associated with religion, which are entirely unfounded in reality, are free to mutate. No longer entirely controlled by a central authority and disseminated through the slow mechanism of hand-copying, even religious ideas were free.

The printing press freed scientists and laity from the church and broke down the centuries-old mechanisms of control by which it had influenced Western Europe. In so doing, it also (as part of the same process) freed us from tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years of superstition, terror, and lunacy. Those who had the ability and the will to truly understand the world and share that knowledge with all finally had the means to do so. Civilization begain with writing, but freedom began with printing.

As knowledge and all forms of information become cheaper and easier to disseminate, freedom will inexorably follow. The Arab Spring of course could have happened without the internet, but what caused it? Discontent with economic decline against a backdrop of increasing education. Look at the Iranian Revolution; though it ended in theocracy, it began with students.

What of America: discovered during the Renaissance and founded during the Enlightenment. The first public schools in the New World, perhaps the world as a whole*, began in the colony of Massachusetts. In the 1640s it mandated free public education for all children to townships of more than fifty families. The earliest years of the union were filled with examples of the new states insuring an educated public. Freedom begins with education, with free information. Information doesn't want to be free, it makes you free.

* A quick search appears to indicate that this is the case. I suspect patriotic bias on the part of the internet.

Keep the Thor in Thor's Day

2012-01-06T13:41:00.002-05:00

Perhaps this should be what I do this year: keep the days true to their origins, end the war on the days.

Sundays: I will go out and worship the sun. As I understand it, this means I must sacrifice a king and wait for him to be resurrected. This is problematic as there aren't all that many kings left. I suppose I could always sacrifice some in effigy, but that would involve making puppets. Solution: Every Sunday I'll read a chapter of a George RR Martin book. There are lots of kings in there and they keep dying. Bam.

Mondays: On the Moon's Day, I will sacrifice cheese. That is to say, I will eat some cheese. Deliberately. With reverence aforethought. I like swiss. And provolone.

Tuesdays: This is another problematic day, as it venerates the one-handed god Tiw. He sacrificed his right hand to the wolf Fenrir. I'm not going to do that. However, in memory of Tiw, I will masturbate left-handed every Tuesday. The things I do to keep the Tiw in Tiw's Day.

Wednesdays: Wodan is a bit harder to revere properly. I don't want to end this quickly, so I'm not going to go out and start lynching people left, right, and center, nor yet sacrifice an eye or get pet ravens. As I have two cats, the birds wouldn't last long anyway. His status as a psychopomp* to the English is a bit harder for me to ritualize. I think I'll delve into the etymology for this one. According to wikipedia,

"Old English had the noun wōþ "song, sound", corresponding to Old Norse óðr, which has the meaning "fury" but also "poetry, inspiration". It is possible therefore that *Wōđanaz was seen as a manifestation of ecstasy, associated with mantic states, fury, and poetic inspiration.

Therefor every Wednesday, in honor of that half-blind old bastard, I'll either make a prediction, write a poem, or get really pissed off. Frankly, given things as they are, that last will probably be the easiest.

Thursdays: HIT SOMETHING WITH A FUCKING HAMMER

Fridays: In honor of Frigg, venerated as wife and mother, I'll make it a point to let my mom know I think she's awesome every Friday. Because my mom is awesome, and not just on Fridays.

Saturdays: Huh, Saturn was a god of the harvest and agriculture. No wonder suburban dads mow the lawn every Saturday. That shit is symbolic, yo. I don't have any children to eat and I don't think I'd want to. I also don't particularly want to cut my father into a thousand pieces with a sickle. I could always celebrate a weekly Saturnalia (a fine Southern tradition known as a "cocktail party"), but that might get tiresome. Instead I'll go with the medieval alchemical associations. Scientists are associated with Saturn and with the humor of melancholy, endowing them with sadness and with wisdom. Every Saturday, I'ma get my wisdom on. And be sad and shit.

Take that, you people who take the stuff out of things!

* Psychopomp: Escort to the lands of the dead. Like Anubis or Charon or the Valkyries.

I'm Actually the Majority

2012-01-06T00:25:00.001-05:00

Everyone agrees with me about everyone else's fairy tales. They just don't like it when I don't kowtow to their fairy tales.

The Sport of Reality

2011-12-29T10:46:00.001-05:00

The universe is a vasty changing sea of strangeness and wonder.

The indoctrinated want to wrestle it into submission and nail it down.

The educated want to go surfing.

So Ron Paul's a racist and a homophobe. I...

2011-12-21T13:47:00.000-05:00

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So Ron Paul's a racist and a homophobe. I wasn't really planning on voting for him before this, but this certainly seals the deal.

See, I agree with libertarians about the whole "leave me alone" thing when it comes to some things, but for the most part I really, really don't. I think most people are assholes to all but their close friends and families, and I don't think that's a good thing. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't need government, and I think it's manifestly clear that we really, really need government.

Ron Paul's Racist Newsletters

I have written many times before of one of the primary reasons why I can't support Ron Paul, despite wanting to stand up and cheer for his views on important issues like civil liberties, executive power...

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Whence Religion?

2011-12-19T18:55:00.000-05:00

If there's no good evidence for the god hypothesis, then where did it come from? What purpose does it serve? Why do people keep believing it?

I'll answer these questions briefly and in order.

Whence religion?
I think religion is a by-product of two different drives. The first is general to all thinking creatures (ie. most animals), the second isn't specific to humans, but has definitely found, I suspect, its greatest expression in humans. The first is that we learn, the second is that we teach.

I don't know that all animals learn; sponges and other brainless animals certainly do not. At least one researcher believes the primary purpose of the brain is movement, and other purposes are all secondary. I'm not sure I agree, though he makes a compelling argument. However, one of the things our brain does is allow us, and many other species, to learn. We are pattern-seeking creatures, we seek to master our environment, we want nummy candies and to win in fights and to get laid and all the other things that will help see to it that we have grandchildren (which the first step to evolutionary success).

To that end, we can become addicted to gambling and coffee.

Actually, that's an unfortunate by-product of the learning process. If you know someone who loves his coffee in the morning, you may notice he has a certain way of doing things. It has to be a certain brand of coffee. A specific flavor, region, roast... He might grind it himself and prepare it in his own little French press. He definitely, no question, has his favorite coffee mug, and probably drinks it at a certain time of day; usually it's part of a larger set of "getting up in the morning" rituals.

One of the things caffeine does is short circuit the part of the brain that lets you know you've won. Whether it's a good grade on a test or solving a puzzle or getting a new iPhone, you know that feeling when part of you lights up and does a little happy dance. Of course, a week later that test is crumpled up on the floor of your locker, the puzzle is in the recycle bin, and your phone is no longer to be carefully placed on its own altar on your dresser, but to be thrown casually onto the bed with all the other crap in your pockets. That feeling goes away because you need to move on to the next challenge, figure out the next thing, master your environment more fully.

Caffeine cuts right to the chase and gives you that happy without having to actually solve, win, or buy anything. Your brain, trying to figure out what it's won at, just randomly attaches importance to whatever's going on when you get your buzz on. Over time, the importance accumulates on things that stay the same: the time of day, the kind of coffee, the coffee mug, the way you prepare it... All of these things become important to you not because they actually make the coffee better, but because your brain has been wired to say WRONG if any of that changes. What was a valuable learning tool has been totally screwed by chemistry.

And gambling? That learning process is meant to find patterns so that we can take advantage of them. Dice don't have patterns, so our system goes completely haywire and, again, starts attaching undeserved importance to meaningless rituals. That is to say, gamblers are superstitious because their brains are on their metaphorical knees, crying their metaphorical brain-hearts out. Okay, that's just why gamblers are superstitious. Addiction is more complex and has to do with the fact that losing feels much more bad than winning feels good. As with any other addiction, you do it not because it feels good but because it feels bad when you don't. How good does it feel? The more certain something is, the easier it is to figure out and the less incentive their is to master it. I'd venture a guess that the most popular games at casinos are very nearly 50/50 odds (played correctly, craps and blackjack are, I'd say that, in the long run, so are competitive games like poker).

Anyway, we aren't the only creatures to develop superstitions in the face of an uncontrollable and somewhat random universe. Psychologist B.F. Skinner discovered that pigeons, given food at regular intervals with no reference to the pigeons' behavior, quickly developed superstitions regarding what causes food to drop. Lest you think, "Well, pigeons, yeah, they're stupid. Terry Pratchett said so." and believe yourself immune, more or less the exact same thing has been observed in humans in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Players rapidly conceived the belief that using a certain skill absolutely improved the loot dropped from treasure chests and could not be dissuaded from that belief (note: they were wrong). When the developers made it impossible to use that skill on treasure chests, there were massive fan complaints that their skill had been rendered useless.

In the face of a large and uncaring world where small mistakes can cause massive dying, superstition was and is inevitable. We are all of us autodidacts to a degree, and we all develop these silly habits. Thus learning can make fools of us all.

What about teaching? Animals teaching their young has been observed in the wild, but nowhere to the degree that it's found in humans. Compared to pretty much any animal you care to name, we are weak, blind, and deaf. We might as well not have noses, and our teeth and claws are a joke. We are completely helpless for several years after birth, and our maturation process is an incredibly protracted part of our lives. How the hell do we manage in a dangerous world? By passing accumulated knowledge from one generation to the next. Far more than any other creature I know of, the human animal passes knowledge from one to another. Long story short, if our children didn't listen to us, credulous to a fault, it would be much, much more difficult for this to happen. And, yes, I mean that literally; children are credulous to a fault. They'll believe any damn thing you say.

What this means is that children, lacking critical thinking skills and, I believe, primed to believe everything they're told, absorb their parents superstitions as readily as their hunting skills, their knowledge of interpersonal relationships, and how not to poop in your food.

This notion has spawned the study of memetics, essentially a branch of information theory that might be considered an analog of biological evolution, where ideas and information travel through their space (inside our heads) and warp and mutate based on a much more loosely governed analog of genetic evolution. Think of it this way: a good idea, how to make a really awesome spear, say, maintains itself because deviations make the spear less effective and its demonstrable efficacy discourage deviations; a bad idea, like repeatedly stabbing yourself in the balls to control the urge to masturbate, weeds itself out because it's demonstrably not effective, and anyway masturbating's not actually a bad thing; a neutral idea, like turning around three times and spitting when you jinx something, can just hang around and mutate and warp because it doesn't have any impact one way or the other. After all, since there's no such thing as a jinx, whether you turn before or after you spit doesn't make much difference. Though the schism and five generations of bloody warfare between the preturners and the posturners were quite hard to watch, and let us not speak of the genocide of the widdershin turners by the sunwisers.

Thus it's quite easy to see religion as another superstition and the result of thousands of years of memetic evolution, an evolution that continues today as sects split and diverge and merge and mutate. Whereas most superstitions hang on just because and we don't necessarily attach much importance to them and really belong just to the individual (like the unfortunate ball-players who neither change nor wash their underpants...), religion is a collection of self-supporting memes. It piggybacks on the morality of sanctity by forbidding the questioning of ideas, on on in-group loyalty by providing visible markers of kinship. It produces an internally consistent structure with little or no external reference, nor much need for one. When it does impinge upon the outside world, it but co-opts other learning (societies that were originally pastoral show it in their myths wherein they hate farmers, see Cain and Abel. Societies in arid countries all hate pigs, which require lots of water. Populations prone to bee allergies learn to despise honey.).

In short, modern religions are crude amalgams, a cobbled together attempt to understand and explain the world consisting mostly of superstitions, the crude xenophobias of the world in which they were born, and occasionally useful rules of thumb from bronze age culture. Useful only in a bronze age culture, mind.

Okay, so much for talking briefly. That's where religion came from. Next, what's it for?

What Does It Take? (God Proof III)

2011-12-19T13:45:00.001-05:00

What would it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Theists often accuse atheists of being as dogmatic as they are for rejecting all of their purported evidence, for being bound to refuse to believe, for being religiously faithful to our unbelief. So what evidence would convince me? Allow me to reason by analogy. What would it take to disprove evolution? What would it take to get me to stop believing in that scientific theory? Popular mythology has it that JBS Haldane once growled "rabbits in the Precambrian". That is, if fossil rabbits were found in Precambrian strata, that would disprove evolution, because a derived form cannot precede that from which it is derived. More complex forms do not precede less complex forms. Such a counterintuitive datum would require extraordinary explanation.

This is precisely why tetrannuative* fundamentalists have desperately sought things like that, have desperately sought little niggling things that would prove a chunk of the theory false. If something like the crocoduck were to show up, it wouldn't be proof of evolution, as the farcical Kirk Cameron claims, but rather proof of creation. Such a hippogriff or chimera would completely explode evolution.

Is that what it would take? No. I declare myself totally intransigent. I won't stop believing in evolution, because a century and a half of being pounded against the anvil of disbelief has not caused evolution to birth such a chimera. Mermaids and hippogriffs and all the rest have been frauds, some more creative than others. At this point, evolution is a theory so firmly grounded that to concede something might overturn it is as idiotic as conceding something might overturn gravity or physics.

Again, someone who hasn't read Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" might be tempted to claim that physics was overturned. No it wasn't. Physics was supplemented. Updated. Improved. Aristotle's intuitive and non-scientific mechanics were indeed overturned by Newton's scientific and calculus-based mechanics, but Einstein supplemented Newton, he did not supplant. Newton's mechanics were not incorrect, they were incomplete. If something appears which challenges the current evolutionary model, it will not prove it wrong, but incomplete. It will supplement rather than supplant. Darwin's theory, crude and incomplete as it was, has not been overturned in more than 150 years despite rigorous scientific testing because, to the limits of that testing, it is entirely correct.

So what will it take to get me to accept the god hypothesis? Nothing I can imagine will convince me to do so. Alternative explanations will always be better because they always have been better, not least because the god hypothesis isn't even an explanation. In the infamous words of Pauli** "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch!". "Not only is it not right, it is not even wrong!" The god hypothesis in most of its forms is wildly unscientific and flies in the face of all evidence. The most reduced forms are scientific (though very unsatisfying to believers. Seriously, who wants to be a deist?) but still wholly lacking in evidence and still face challenges from better supported hypotheses.

Perhaps a theist will surprise me and come up with a new argument, some new kind of apparent evidence. This would be a surprise because it's typically not a creative endeavor, relying instead on retreads from centuries in the past. However, new evidence always has to be considered and I always will. However, the evidence so far suggests that any new evidence will fall in one of the previous categories and will be at best evidence of nothing, or at worst more evidence for a stochastic universe with no god at all. The god hypothesis has always been an answer in search of a question, and science has been the rather kid coming in and saying, "Nope. That question's mine, too."

Does this make me different from a dogmatic theist? Absolutely. The theist refuses to look at evidence, claims it's a lie made by the devil to trick you (sometimes it's a test by god). I look at the evidence and realize it's irrelevant, fraudulent, or simply not even evidence of anything at all. I will always look at new evidence with as much open-mindedness as I can muster. I hope, however, you can forgive me for being a bit cynical. After all, how much open-mindedness could you bring to bear for a flying carpet, a magic crystal, or a fully functional Ouija board?

* Four years old. As in they close their eyes and plug their ears and scream until the thing they don't like goes away.

** I'm not claiming Pauli was an atheist, but he did leave the church in 1929.

Absence is Absence (God Proof Part II)

2011-12-19T10:38:00.001-05:00

Read part one, here.

I've said before that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I want to expand on that a bit.

Once I decided to make a sandwich. As is my wont, I mused quietly to myself whilst I pulled items off of shelves and out of the fridge. I grabbed my bread, my turkey, my cheese, my mustard, and where the fuck is my mayonnaise? My mayo's gone! I just bought some at the grocery store yesterday! I checked the fridge again. No mayo. I checked a third time, carefully perusing the mostly empty shelves. No mayo. For about five seconds, I briefly considered the possibility that someone had broken into my apartment for the sole purpose of stealing my mayonnaise; a brief checked showed me that, yes, my TV and video games and whatnot were still there so that notion was beyond absurd. I turned and looked again and, it's a miracle! My mayo was sitting on the counter next to the mustard. I'd already gotten it out of the fridge and hadn't really noticed because when I talk to myself I tend to not pay attention to what I'm doing. This is how I've occasionally gotten lost on the way to the bathroom or driven to the wrong campus on my way to work.

No one, on hearing that story, would find it reasonable to ask, "But how did you know the mayonnaise wasn't in the refrigerator? Just because light failed to reflect off of a jar of mayonnaise and impinge on the cones and rods on the back of your eye doesn't mean that there wasn't any mayo in the fridge! Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, after all!" Unless, of course, they were philosophy majors. Twenty-year-old jackasses love to say things like that, mostly because they don't know how ignorant they are.

But the absence of evidence for something can be evidence against it. When you're talking about the abstruse realm of particle physics, in which you have to accelerate things nearly to the speed of light and smash them against each other and pick up the pieces (a method unfairly compared to hitting a watch with a hammer to learn how it's put together), not finding a particle doesn't mean it doesn't exist; unless you designed your experiment such that it would be unreasonable for it not to show up. When you're talking about a jar of mayo, arguing that just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there is just fatuous. I didn't see it in the fridge because it was on the counter.

So, what about god? I've already discussed why I dismiss the purported evidence (miracles, scripture, revelation) in favor of the god hypothesis. Most everyone who says they don't believe in god state that they lack belief because they haven't seen any evidence. It bothers me that they then go on to refuse to say the believe there is no god (the two aren't equivalent positions) because they claim science can't talk about god. Then why the hell don't you believe? Agnosticism because of a lack of evidence is a scientific position; it's the default scientific position. Why, then, do I go on from there to say that I believe there is no god? What is my evidence in the other direction? I feel that the god hypothesis, if true, would have a measurable impact on observable reality and the lack of that evidence is a compelling argument against the hypothesis.

For example, scripture. I've already stated that if there were a deity, there wouldn't be many mutually exclusive scriptures. There would be one, it would be definitely accurate and demonstrable true. It wouldn't contradict itself and there would be no pretenders purporting to give an alternative truth. A deity so moved as to provide a scripture would also be able to censor false competitors. The celestial dictatorship would have no trouble silencing opposition or critics.

Revelation, miracles, and scriptures, in the face of a true god hypothesis, would be so evidently and clearly true that there wouldn't be the need for the fatuous notion of faith. It wouldn't be received truth but perceived truth. I reject the god hypothesis as firmly as I reject the invisible jar of mayonnaise and as I immediately rejected the notion that someone had broken in and stolen my mayonnaise; the lack of evidence was obviously evidence against the hypothesis. I don't believe, at all, because when the universe is presented with the question, "Is there a god?" the response is a deafening silence.

Next: What would it take for me to believe?

Is There Proof for God?

2011-12-18T15:41:00.000-05:00

A friend asked me what I would view as evidence for God and it's a question I have to take seriously. I view the God hypothesis as falling within the realm of science. I don't view much of anything as falling outside the realm of science; she brought up the example of love as an unprovable, which I contend it isn't. Just because something cannot be perceived directly doesn't mean it doesn't leave evidence behind. I can't see UV light, but I can still get a sunburn. I can't see my friend's love, but I can see him doing lots of really stupid things and generally acting like a soppy asshole saying things like, "Don't you just love love, man?"

So, what would I view as evidence for the existence of a deity or other supernatural element? At this point: Nothing. There is no evidence for anything supernatural, that hypothesis has been rigorously tested for the last 200 thousand years by every human agent produced on this planet and the result has always been an astounding null. Every single supposedly supernatural phenomenon has been proven to have a natural causative agent, to in fact not have occurred, or to be a fraud practiced upon a credulous public.

First, why do I dismiss all the supposed evidence? As I understand, most supernatural claims come in three forms: anecdotes and miracles, revelation, and scripture.

I separate out anecdotes because I'm referring to things akin to cryptozoology. That is to say, big foot and the creature of Loch Ness. I lump these in with the supernatural because they have all the same foundations in personal experience and credulity and because skepticism deals with them in the same way. Amazing creatures still wait to be found and studied; living fossils are encountered all the time and extreme and distant environments are full of wonderful and surprising things that we don't know about because they're really damn hard to get to. Loch Ness and the mountains of the Pacific Northwest are neither distant nor extreme. To give one example: the Loch Ness monster and similar aquatic sightings is best attributed not to an illusive large animal, but to common smaller animals. Otters and other aquatic mammals behave in fashions that cause an optical illusion of a single large creature. The effect is said to be arresting and almost impossible to dismiss from a distance (basically, they like to play follow the leader). These and other types of things (when not fraudulent) are best ascribed to honest but mistaken reports of less fantastical phenomena. In other words, there is no yeti, no alien abductions, and no Nessie.

Miracles are of a category with the anecdotes of cryptozoology. When they're not outright frauds for deliberate profit, or a portion of the brain going hyperactive and seeing things that aren't there, like the face on Mars, they're either easily proven to be accidents and natural phenomena or completely impossible to track down. For example, the healing power of Lourdes is 67 (according to the Catholic Church) out of more than 200 million, and none of those are self-evidently miraculous, like the regrowth of a severed limb. As with most miracles, it's always in the realm of the nebulous, the distant, and the (at best) unimpeachable. In the face of better explanations (many diseases go into remission), frauds, and simple absence, why believe any miracle has occurred?

Perhaps you feel yourself to have been witness to or beneficiary of a miracle. Perhaps something astonishingly unlikely happened that you witnessed. This is not a miracle. Everything is coincidental. Any two things that happen at the same time, any two incidents, are co-incident. Some may appear to have connection, as when you are thinking of your grandmother as she calls; but you forget the thousands of people you think of who don't call. Everything is unlikely. A pin falling on any particular spot in a square meter of space is unlikely, it is one in five hundred thousand. And yet, it will land somewhere. No matter how unlikely, unlikely things happen. They are not miracles. Only if something is genuinely impossible could you call it miraculous. Even then... it probably isn't. What is not yet explained need not be called inexplicable. Not yet having an explanation doesn't mean it won't be explained in the future.

As an aside, part of what spurred this is a rash of other blogs considering this question. What it boils down to is this: if you witnessed a miracle, who's to say it's your god doing it? Even if A two hundred foot tall statue of Yeshua Bin Yusef appeared, floating two feet off the ground, what makes you think it's Yahweh rather than space aliens? Or Loki tricking everyone because that's what he does? Or Coyote just having fun with the pale-faced devils? In other words, it's bad enough that miracles either simply can't be tracked down or have better explanations such as fraud, but they aren't even proof of anything. A miracle doesn't explain anything. "Miracle" is as much a non-explanation as the god hypothesis. It enshrines ignorance in protective "DO NOT TOUCH" bubble. An explanation fits all the available data and makes predictions for the future. Miracle just says "Something happened and I don't know why." So does the god hypothesis. And what predictions can these non-explanations make? That tomorrow something else might happen that you will also fail to understand? That may be true, but it certainly doesn't enlighten.

Revelation might appear to be harder to dismiss. After all, can one prove that a supernatural entity didn't put voices in someone's head (a non-psychotic someone)? I think the argument can be made. Pop someone in a machine and scan his brain while asking him about morality. Ask him about the morality of others and a part of his brain lights up. Ask him about his own morality and a different part of his brain lights up. Ask him about the morality of his god and the same part of his brain lights up. A cynic is unsurprised to learn that a person claims his god's morality matches his own. The cynic is less surprised to learn that it's neurological in nature. It's not just god's morality, either, everything about god may be egocentric. And it's not just the penitent's relationship with his deity, but the very basis for believing an experience is numinous, since science has identified "the god spot", AKA the part of the brain that lights up during revelation. It's located in the temporal lobe, which is responsible for, among other things, processing speech and vision. In other words, you think you're hearing and seeing things that aren't there. Why ascribe this to a deity who happens to match your own opinions point for point when you can instead ascribe it to a misfiring of a portion of your brain and then an attribution of your own feelings to a wholly internal experience?

Scripture is perhaps the most pathetic of all possible evidence because it's the only so-called evidence that's actually evident. They contain factual errors and contradictions and the most horrific barbarity. If they were actually inspired by something more than human, you wouldn't expect errors or contradictions. If they were actually morally superior, you wouldn't expect barbarity. You would expect a morally superior being to say that rape is bad. The Christian bible, for example, never condemns rape. It condemns vandalism in the form of sex with someone else's property (daughter, wife), but not rape, because the Chrsitian bible never considers her consent an issue. After all, property can't consent, nor can it withhold consent; consent belongs to her owner, whether that be father or husband or eldest living male relative. That's why spousal rape wasn't legally a thing until the last decade or so. Now it is, because we're morally superior to the Christian bible. Rape, slavery, genocide, these are all things not merely condoned by the Christian bible, but all three were encouraged by the Christian bible against conquered peoples. Well, not "people". As far as the Christian bible and other holy texts are concerned, foreigners, heathens, and apostates are like women: not human, but property (at best) or dead (at worst).

The argument that a supposed miracle could be, rather than a sign from your deity, a trick from someone else could equally apply to these texts. While this diminishes some of the strength of the argument that the texts are wholly human creations, it also weakens the argument that any is divinely inspired or created. However, if you're arguing not for generic multiple supernatural entities with superior knowledge (from which true morality rises) but rather for a single entity, the multiplicity of holy texts is particularly damning. If there were one entity capable of inspiring a holy document, there would be only one document. When it comes to a cosmic dictatorship, there can be no more effective censor. One god, one book. No god, many books.

In the end, the holy texts are at best not evidence at all or evidence of maltheism (being the work of a trickster). Miracles are either nothing at all (being the unfortunate result of human predilection for seeing patterns), another bit of maltheism, or evidence of nothing in particular because, being a non-explanation, it cannot be connected to anything in particular. And again revelation is again no evidence at all or et cetera.

So there is at best absolutely no evidence for the god hypothesis. Next up, Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence.

John Brockman added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+

2011-12-18T15:40:00.001-05:00

John Brockman added you to his circles and invited you to join Google+.

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Democracy: It Works, Bitches

2011-11-13T08:49:00.001-05:00

No one like criticism. Being told exactly when and how and why you screwed up is unpleasant at best. Given that criticism doesn't always come couched in the nicest language (I'm looking at YOU, restaurant critics!), it's a double whammy of bad news in poor taste. Nevertheless, criticism is a necessary medicine. All those red scribblings of "awk" and "runon" and "this sentence no verb" helped improve your formal writing. You might not have thought so at the time, but "Keep your eye on the ball" is actually pretty darn helpful. "I've encountered better food in my vegetable crisper after a month abroad." probably isn't very helpful.

Criticism is a valuable tool. No one is perfect, and we can only correct our mistakes if we know about them. Some mistakes, like a stubbed toe, are obvious even if the solution is not. Others, such as an engrossed photographer about to trip and fall in the wedding cake, are obvious only to outsiders. Finally, there are the large and difficult problems of the real world, where even the existence of the problem is a question to be discussed.

Robert Heinlein, curmudgeonly cynic that he was, had this to say of governments:

Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?

There's absolutely noting wrong with autocracy, provided the autocrat is good and wise, that he listens to his expert counselors, that he makes his decisions with it in mind that all prosper and not merely himself, and that he never makes mistakes. I've heard rumors that such a person can play the sweetest music on a clarinet when he farts, too. When the king makes a mistake, who will tell him so? When The Man has the authority to silence dissent and criticism, only his conscience will prevent him from doing so. A brief survey of history will show you that few have scrupled not to silence critics in the harshest fashions.

Autocracy does not work of the simple reason that there is no guaranteed method for correcting errors. An autocrat can, and usually will, wrap himself in a comforting cocoon of silence, content in the knowledge that he, at least, is comfortable and prosperous. When things finally get bad enough, the only correction available is bloody rebellion, which does not come with any guarantee of improvement, or even success. There's a reason vast income disparity leads to failed states; those in power insulate themselves first from criticism, then from redress, both with violence.

A million are indeed wiser than one, especially if the one is chosen at random. The voices of millions of people smooth out the bumps and marginalize the crazies. This is the first bit of error correction. If you can convince a majority of the people that you've got a good plan, you have a pretty good plan. It won't be perfect, and a lot of people will agree with you, but it'll still be a decent plan. This if the first error-correcting process of democracy. Politicians and political facts have to be placed before the court of public opinion, thoroughly debated, and then voted upon. Unfortunately, it also silences the upper end of the bell curve, the true visionaries whose radical notions aren't whackadoo, but powerfully transformative, which is why a wise society keeps systems in place to allow for the recognition of brilliance and talent, fostering it and its ideas.

Elections aren't the only time that people speak. Criticism continues from all levels of society throughout the year. Whether it's a janitor snarking at the TV while drinking a pint after work or a CEO snarking at a Senator while sharing a snifter on a private jet, the fact is that everyone speaks, and these voices are usually heard. We have a free press, freedom of association, and the freedom to tell our glorious leaders where to stick it. This means we live in a very noisy, very opinionated world. It's better than the alternative. Unless a leader deliberately cultivates an atmosphere of respectful silence and makes it a point to shut out his detractors (I'm looking at you, 43), he cannot help but hear criticism and, hopefully, find some wisdom there.

Consider North Korea. No elections, no speech, what have you; that's all terrible and painfully obvious. But what happens when Kim Jong-Il dies? His youngest son, Kim Jong-Eun is being groomed as heir apparent, but will he come to power without difficulty? There are older sons and military leaders galore who may wish to contest the succession. Even if Jong-Eun wins, how will North Korea fare during the struggle? One of the great benefits of democracy, often overlooked, is the regular and peaceful transfer of power, even between opponents. This, too, is a process of error correction. If things are good, more of the same isn't necessarily a problem, but when they've gone sour, you can bet fresh blood is going to be wanted. And for hundreds of years, that's what has happened. Isn't that nice? Shit yes.

Democracy isn't perfect. A million jackasses won't spontaneously generate wisdom, and no matter how wise, a million plumbers aren't actually qualified to generate foreign policy. The fact is that a limited democracy, often a republic, is actually better. People can easily be aroused to high dudgeon for just long enough to get someone into power, to their detriment. People can often be persuaded to vote against their own interests if it means hurting someone they hate. There need to be limits on democracy, because specialization is a simple necessity of civilization, and that includes people who have specialized in ruling. We need to have an excess of trained rulers so we can keep swapping them out when they go bad, like spark plugs, but we need a professional ruling class trained in the minutiae of government and policy. That's why I deplore the current vogue of ballot measures whereby demagogues inflame the passions of the mass so as to limit and attack the rights of the minority in direct contravention of the American vision. Tyranny of the majority is just as terrible and fickle thing as any tyranny of the minority. By virtue of sheer numbers, the majority can shout down its critics.

It's possible to make profound arguments for any system of government couched in the language of "The Rights of Man" and "Duty, Authority, Peace" and "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" etc, but I support a democratic republic on pragmatic grounds. It works. When the machine starts to wobble, we all step in and give it a kick. I've heard America described as "a fifty-seven Chevy, veering to the left and lurching to the right". Hey, it keeps running, right? We've flirted with the notion a few times (Alien and Sedition Act, fucking Jackson and his Trail of Tears), but the system hasn't ever actually broken down.

I leave you with a final Heinlein quote, though the sentiment is surely not original to him.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.

A Little on Objectivism

2011-11-12T11:49:00.001-05:00

I've read Atlas Shrugged more than once. I've also read The Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness. For a few years in high school I was an unabashed Randite (read: obnoxious, loud-mouthed asshole).

The simple fact is that Objectivism, for all of its many flaws, is deeply appealing because it presents a simple, black and white view of the world. Whereas Granny Weatherwax says "Ain't no shades of gray. Just white that's got grubby.", Rand said that white a little tarnished is no different from black. Go 100% or go home.

She peppers her fiction with dramatic archetypes. Just from Atlas Shrugged you have the ideal man (Galt) four flavors of the nearly ideal man (Rearden, Frisco, the pirate, and the philosophy teacher), the ideal woman (Dagny, whose ideal nature is demonstrated by the fact that, intelligent and hard working, she also wants to be dominated by her men) several men who deliberately invert the ideal (Dagny's brother and a few politicians), and several people who believe in the ideal but fail to live up to it (the scientist who taught Galt, the woman who married Dagny's brother).

And the thing is that Objectivism really does believe that people should not merely strive for that ideal, but actively embody it, and that anyone who fails to do so is morally wrong. At the end of the day, Objectivism was a cult (http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html)and Atlas was its bible. Rand was its Jesus and Nathaniel Branden its Saint Peter. When Branden was excommunicated, the cult fell apart because, as thorough and author as she was, Rand was neither a reader, nor a leader, nor a thinker. Occasionally, someone will still get sucked into it, but it hasn't been what it was in the 60s.

As for the stated beliefs of Objectivism:

Metaphysics - I agree that existence exists (that is to say, there exists an external and separate reality from each of us) and that each of us is a conscious, moral agent. I disagree that everything has a specific nature or identity. Yes, as Sartre said, "Nothing can exist only partly" (which is what I believe this part of the Objectivist metaphysics is trying to say), but beyond the existence of an object or thing, it is outside actors who imbue objects with use or identity beyond the mere fact of their existence. In other words, A is A, but it's not just A.

Epistemology - Rand was an empiricist (she called it reason but that's a woefully inadequate description, as actual philosophers disagree on the utility of reason and on how it works), arguing that all knowledge is fact-based, built on a study of reality with which we connect through our senses. She argued that we have no in-built knowledge or ideas. I don't fully agree, because we have a number of built-in shortcuts for dealing with the world; we innately seek and assign agency where none need exist. How often have you gotten angry with an inanimate object for not working right? Even as infants, we assign such; show an infant a moving image of two objects, one following the other, and it will register surprise if the one stops following. Children tell that inanimate objects have purpose, assigning agency to the world around us; rocks are for animals to scratch themselves, clouds are for raining. These are just a few demonstrations that the human brain doesn't sift through our perceptions in a logical, step by step basis. We take short cuts and make quick assumptions. For the most part this helps us out (you don't really need to analyze a tiger, buddy, just leave it alone), but for complex issues it can get us in trouble.

Ethics - I agree with Rand that there is no objective or external source of goodness (the platonic ideal) nor is goodness some sort of natural function (the Aristotelian philosophy that influenced Catholic doctrine via Thomas Aquinas), but rather a function of human behavior. Rand argued that moral good is that which sustains life, moral evil is that which hinders it, and above all both are informed by rational choices about objective reality. I disagree, in that moral behavior arises from biology. We have in our brains two separate decision-making processes for moral behavior, an empathic core (don't kick the baby!) and a utilitarian core (kill the one to save the ten, it's just sense) and our moral decisions come after a tug of war between the two. We are certainly not a rational animal, as Rand would have it, but a rationalizing animal, using our logical faculties not to make decisions but to justify them after the fact.

Our moral and ethical nature is not built around the survival of the individual, but around the survival of the individual within the context of the survival of the group, and not just the group as a collection of individuals, but the group as an entity in itself which will continue to exist after all of the current members have died off. This "collectivism", as Rand would have called it, is anathema to Objectivist philosophy, but is paramount to the human condition. Unfortunately for Rand, the Kantian ethic "do only that which you can will as a universal rule" doesn't actually work. Very nearly everything you subject to that slippery slope argument falls into a black pit of reductio ad absurdum and cannot possibly be construed as a moral good. Boundless self-sacrifice by everyone would lead to everything falling apart in a way that boundless selfishness would not, but you wouldn't want to live in a world of sociopaths any more than you would a world of nothing but sacrifice. Moderation in all things (even moderation, bitches!).

Politics - I really disagree with Rand. The individual is not the be all and end all of human existence (which makes the Republican love affair with Rand hilarious) and individual efforts not the only method of achievement. She honestly felt we could get by with private police and fire protection, which is farcical on its face. There was a private fire company in Rome. They showed up, got the owner to sell cheap, then put out the fire. The fact is that cooperation for mutual benefit is, on its face, a perfectly valid method for achieving success. She accepts this in the private sector for corporations, but weirdly denies it in politics. Why is it that a cartel by the name of OPEC is in some way a good and moral agent, but a cartel by the name of government some sort of villain?

Evolving Beyond Religion

2011-11-09T17:10:00.000-05:00

The Bible says, "Thou Shalt Not Kill".

Actually, it's "Thou Shalt Not Murder". And the act of murder can only be committed on human beings. And that really only applies to your fellow X. Heathens are fair game.

That was the interpretation for thousands of years. The law said that if you threw a stone into a crowd of heathens and accidentally killed one of your fellow faithful, then it wasn't murder because your clear intent was to kill a heathen.

In ancient pre-history, we lived in small family groups of a few dozen to a few hundred. As our populations grew, we encountered, who knows how many times, the Stranger Problem; how can you live with the constant fear of the stranger without killing him? In order for civilization to exist, this problem had to be overcome. The earliest forms were probably the discovery of distant kinship, as small groups living near each other probably had tenuous blood connections due to the outbreeding necessary to prevent serious genetic difficulties. Also available, particularly at trading confluences, was honorary kinship, the sacred guest rights. But those are cumbersome and were replaced by religion, by civilization, eventually by nationality, and in due time the rule of law. In some places.

Why is it that in times past, the most horrific acts of cruel barbarity were commonplace wherever two people got together to kill a third? And why is it that in much of the world, these acts are becoming much more rare? Indeed, why is it that a mere five thousand years after the Bible began being written, a modern reader can look at it in astonished horror that these things were considered just and moral?

Because we're still evolving. For a few million years, we evolved to live in small family bands, and it shows. I used to scoff at the notion that small towns were just nicer and safer and all that, thinking it was provincialism at its worst*. It turns out that small towns are safer, nicer, more polite. And that's because everyone knows one another. First, there's social pressure to be nice; when word gets around (and it *will*) your life becomes that much harder if you're a jerk. Of course, the sword swings both ways, the social pressure requires you to conform in all things, not merely in social niceties; Garrison Keillor, of A Prairie Home Companion once said that moving to New York from his small home town was a huge relief because he could finally relax and just be himself away from prying eyes. Another aspect of city vs town life is the presence of strangers; being surrounded by strangers raises your stress levels, making you more unhappy and quicker to anger. Whereas the townsman is open and friendly, the city dweller maintains a personal shield of privacy, ignoring others as much as possible. City dweller, when's the last time you started a conversation with the person sitting next to you on the bus/subway?

Strangers used to represent an entirely potent threat; a stranger was someone who, at the least, might kill you and take all your stuff just because. After a few thousand years, that reflexive fear hasn't gone away.

But I suspect it's starting to, because I don't believe we could have spent 500 generations living with the constant presence of strangers in cities of tens of thousands, and now tens of millions of people without weeding out those people who simply could not abide strangers, without selecting for people who are more tolerant of strangers, more willing to live and let live. Where once it took a great deal of effort to live with strangers, where it was once the case that civilization only managed to independently arise in a very few places, where once we had to invent an omnipresent and angry skybeard to keep us from murdering one another, we can now walk down the street in relative safety.

The world is by no means a perfectly safe place, but it is not what once it was. We have spent thousands of years and hundreds of generations learning, in our bones, how to cope with a civilized world. The changing and advancing of the zeitgeist such that slavery has vanished and racism is waning could be explained by happenstance, by random cultural shift, or it could be that evolution is shifting us away from the paranoid, family-bound apes that we were into an open, embracing humanity ready to live in a global society.

I believe that we developed religion as a desperate necessity to allow us to build our cities, and I look forward to the day when we realize that, like xenophobia, it is a tool that was once useful but which is no longer necessary.

* In the sense that where I live is awesome and everywhere else sucks, not in the sense of a naive misunderstanding of the way the world works.

Sanctity/Purity and Civilization Part 2

2011-11-09T16:40:00.001-05:00

So the problem of a growing population is that a reason needs to be found to not kill strangers. We've happened upon a number of these over the course of our development. One example is the sanctity of blood kinship, however tenuous. The highlanders of Papua New Guinea, as described by Jared Diamond, when they encounter one another on the trails, will immediately launch into long and detailed genealogies describing the many forkings of their family trees until a connection is found and a reason not to kill one another is established. In a much more tragic fashion, African slaves did the same thing in the New World, though perhaps more to be able to maintain a sense of community and continuity as their families were repeatedly torn apart.

Another example is that of sacred hospitality. Once someone is under your roof, they are honorary members of your family and cannot be harmed. A violation of this custom and the shock it inspired was rather graphically included in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series in the form of the Red Wedding, when the host slaughtered the visiting wedding party. This custom was upheld in the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah when Lot offered up his daughters to the mob instead of his guests (his guests were part of his family, his daughters were just property. Valuable property, but chattel property nevertheless. Never confuse the Bible for a source of good morals.).

In both of these cases, kinship and guest rights, the third pillar of morality elucidated by Jonathan Haidt of In-Group Loyalty (also known as kin selection in evolutionary biology) is expanded to include those not of the group. These are two potential strategies for overcoming the Stranger Problem, but the first is awkward and time-consuming and the second strictly temporary. In order to overcome the Stranger Problem long term, a method needs to be found whereby the default position is "Do not kill a stranger unless he first gives you cause." rather than "Stranger! Danger! Kill! KILL!".

Once a population expands beyond the four to five hundred person limit*, a long term solution needs to be found. Initially, a monopoly on inter-personal violence can be a successful strategy. After the egalitarian band, what generally evolved was a proto-chiefdom, with a "big man" acting as a de facto authority figure by virtue of being, well, big. This co-opted the fourth pillar, Respect for Authority, and repurposed it to a long-term survival strategy for the population rather than a short term cooperative strategy. Simply put, Jim doesn't kill Dan because Big Dave will get pissed. Jim and Dan don't need to know one another for this to work, they just both have to know Big Dave. And Big Dave doesn't even have to know Jim or Dan, he just has to make sure they know him by being a visible presence.

As the population grows larger, the Big Man's presence becomes more distant; it becomes unfeasible for him to be personally known to several thousand people. The Chief/proto-king has to rely on a presence more visible from a distance. Not coincidentally, this is where conspicuous consumption became an art form; no longer a matter of biological ornamentation like our long hair or a peacock's tail, but a matter of artificial ornamentation. Hawaiian kings wore capes made from thousands of parrot feathers. Greek and Roman nobility wore clothes dyed a brilliant vermilion hue, which necessitated the gathering and careful crushing of thousands of sea snails to achieve (and which was relegated to the nobility by law on pain of death).

But this next phase didn't happen in a vacuum. Along with increased displays of wealth and power was a greater division of social hierarchy. And religion.

There are two reasons the title 'Oedipus Rex' is wrong. First, putting a Latin word in the title of a Greek play is just asinine, like eating shepherd's pie with chop sticks. More importantly, Oedipus wasn't a king (basileus), but a tyrant, one who came to power through "unofficial" channels. In ancient Greece, as in the rest of the world, the king was a sacred person/position, appointed by the gods if not semi-divine himself. Chinese dynasties were founded on the Mandate of Heaven; the Fisher King's impotence strikes the land; Herakles, Jesus, and how many others are divine sun kings, sacrificed at the end of winter to bring forth the new harvest.

In short, Respect for Authority/Elders combined with Sanctity/Purity to create religion so as to reinforce a distant hierarchy of thousands of strangers and maintain a peaceful civilization. But first, how could Sanctity/Purity play a role in this and second, what role did it play?

As I said many posts ago, Respect for Elders first comes into play as a learning tool; children are credulous to a fault and take in all they are told and store it. This expedites the learning process so that the child can learn how to survive in a hostile world in the abbreviated time his elders are available to teach him. However, as Richard Dawkins and others have noted, this comes with a price. Children absorb and take at face value nonsense just as readily as they do genuine knowledge. And then they hold fiercely to it, rejecting attempts by others to dislodge the noise. "Are you calling my father a liar?!" The Sanctity/Purity drive, which I suspect was initially simply a disgust response to keep animals from eating or drinking what was bad for them, in this model becomes a means of buttressing the Respect for Authority drive, insuring that learned information is more readily stored. The unfortunate consequence of passing on pointless superstitions about witches and blood and the full moon are a small price to pay for seeing to it that important information be passed on intact.

Further, if the information is truly valuable it will be repeatedly reinforced by contact with the real world (make a spear this way and it works, make it *this* way and you get killed by an elephant in a painful fashion, which sucks), whereas superstitions and other noise, having no real world reference, are free to mutate and change and act, in all ways, as noise. In short, valuable information stays the same, everything else is more or less harmless (unless it kills you, in which case you don't get the chance to pass it on anyway. Win-win).

I suspect that by this means, visible symbols, as tangible icons of ideas passed on from one generation to the next, became the fortunate heritors of this legacy. Sanctity/Purity attaches not just to food and water and not just to what we're taught by our elders, but also to the symbols that represent those ideas. Thus a nation's flag represents all the ideas and ideals of that nation, burning it is as much an affront as burning the nation itself. Desecrating a holy text or a holy symbol is as horrific as desecrating a loved one's corpse, not least because the ideas it represents was passed on to you by that loved one. Not everyone attaches the same importance to the sanctity of symbols, but it becomes more comprehensible in this hypothesis.

But how does it benefit a burgeoning civilization? By turning a stranger into someone who's not a stranger. It's not merely the king who benefits from the highly visible symbols of his holy office, nor just the priests in their recognizable hats. Everyone in a religion, and indeed a culture (which is often so interwoven with religion as to be inseparable), adopts certain visible signifiers. As Tevye said, "For instance, we always keep our heads covered, and always wear a little prayer shawl. This shows our constant devotion to God. You may ask, how did this tradition get started? I'll tell you. I don't know. But it's a tradition." The Jews have their yarmulkes, Muslims have their taqiyah (mostly central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa), Christians have crucifixes. It goes beyond that, with the hijab, the payot, and everything Amish, all cultural rather than explicitly required by the texts (maybe), but still visible identifiers for who is in and who is out.

Through the complex and involved process of looking at someone, it became possible to identify someone as being a stranger one could not kill**. And other visible identifiers said, "This person is of a higher rank than you. Go out of your way not to piss him off." or "This person is a slave, go ahead and poo on his head if you want. He'll smile and thank you for it, though his owner might not." and because all of this was wrapped up in the repurposed Respect for Elders/Sanctity/Purity drives, it was all passed along and kept intact. Unlike most superstitions, these had real-world ramifications because without them civilization would collapse.

I believe that the development of religion and civilization had to happen simultaneously. Religion can only exist in the large populations of civilization and the large populations of civilization could only exist with the support of the first. Think of religion as an epidemic of the mind; it can only sustain itself in a large population. I deliberately shifted verbs from "can" to "could", though, because I believe that we have spent the 10,000 years since the development of agriculture, civilization, and religion evolving. As with all populations, our evolution is slow and multifarious, but I suspect that one aspect is that we no longer need religion to survive. This I will discuss in Evolving Beyond Religion.

* That being the rough maximum number of people one can know, as in to put a face to a name and a name to a face. Check out a school website and match up the number of vice principals to the number of students.

** The Biblical proscription against killing should more accurately read "Thou shalt not kill thy fellow Jew". Rabbinical and Christian interpretations for thousands of years have been, "Killing a fellow Jew/Christian is murder and punishable as such. Killing a heathen? Meh. Have at it, hoss."

Sanctity/Purity and Civilization

2011-11-07T23:12:00.001-05:00

Before I begin, a note: I cannot recommend strongly enough Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.

The fifth pillar of human morality, as elucidated by Dr Jonathan Haidt is that of Sanctity/Purity. We maintain purity and eschew things that would make us dirty, physically and spiritually. Typically, in the West, this means not having sex. All across humanity, it seems to mean not having much to do with women. Something about human society is deeply misogynistic and anti-sex: Jesus was born of a virgin, the Buddha was born through a slit in his mother's side, pagan/animist tribal beliefs often have an unpleasant fixation with avoiding menstruating women. Misogyny aside, there are more examples: vegetarians and vegans eschew animal products, usually on moral grounds; we have strong disgust aversions to even associating with bodily wastes and often with the fluids of others; corpses and other near-human images evoke strong negative reactions; and there's something deeply disturbing about clowns.

I think the Purity/Sanctity response began (and this entire post is going to be supposition) as primarily a physical disgust reaction to keep our animal ancestors away from certain things; don't eat things that will make you sick. Later it coupled with methods of socialization and shame response to reinforce behaviors to promote cooperation and peace within a group. After that, I think it became very conceptual.

My understanding of the development of humanity, society, and civilization is that we exploded out of Africa and settled everywhere a living, meager or otherwise, could be scratched. Fecund environments were altered, whether consciously or not, to be more productive. Our modern understanding of the hunter-gatherer model as a nomadic lifestyle is based upon the fact that only people in marginal landscapes that cannot support agriculture still pursue the HG lifestyle and the paucity of resources forces a nomadic or semi-nomadic existence on them. But the majority of the Earth is quite happy to let us grow fat in one place even without farms, and populations would have settled in place, burgeoned, reached an equilibrium, altered their environment, reached a new equilibrium, and so on.

Farming wouldn't have been an overnight discovery. Rather, the people of an area would have exhaustively explored every single native plant and animal for edibility and perfected a method for harvesting it wild. This would have meant learning everything about growing/breeding seasons and inventing and perfecting the correct tools for the job. What would have followed would have been altering the environment so as to expand the range for the wild plant to grow and cultivating it in place. The next step, perhaps final, would have been relocation and deliberate cultivation. A modern example of this is the cultivation of various plants in the Australian desert by the aboriginal peoples there, and the aborted development of fish farming begun in, I believe, the islands off that continent's southern coast. Another example in recorded history was that of the deliberate cultivation of the American landscape by the Native Americans, as can be read about in Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; the first Europeans to reach the east coast of what are now the United States and Canada described a thickly settled landscape that resembled open parkland. The natives cultivated an open forest with limited undergrowth by repeatedly burning the forest, thus maintaining an environment ideally suited for hunting. They also maintained thick groves of nut-bearing trees, like hickory. These are just a few documented examples along the arc of deliberate, pre-agricultural landscape cultivation.

At all points along that scale, the population would have grown to the maximum allowable by the environment and the tools/methods discovered by those living there. From a tribal band of a few dozen members, the family group would eventually have been forced to a higher density. That was when trouble would have started. A modern day example was tellingly documented in Diamond's book, with a tribe from Papua New Guinea. A tribe of permanently settled HGs lived in a particularly fecund marshland, harvesting the calorie-rich pith of a certain palm tree, primarily. The population grew to a few hundred and then the inevitable happened; two men got in a fight. One killed the other and a cycle of revenge killings began that left the tribe with only a few dozen alive, alternately terrified and full of rage.

Essentially, the problem was strangers. In a small group, everyone knows everyone else. They may not all like each other, but everyone likes everyone well enough and rule three, In-Group Loyalty, keeps frictions from boiling over. But when the population gets too large, it becomes impossible for everyone to know everyone; the rough limit is somewhere between four and five hundred people. Once a population has strangers, then the disincentive for fighting goes away. But In-Group Loyalty still exists and they're going to get revenge. How many times do you think we repeated that tribe's tragedy? How many people on the verge of developing civilization instead tore themselves apart with pointless violence?

Civilization apparently began in just a few places and spread from there. By cultural diffusion, by population spread, and through conquest, those civilizations spread their examples across the globe. We modern humans are the heritors of a precious legacy; somewhere in the past, someone figured out the key. The question: how can we get along with strangers without killing them? The answer, and this may strike you as odd: Religion. Well, eventually.

To be continued.

Evolution on Good and Evil Part 3

2011-11-07T17:55:00.000-05:00

Now for evil. I think we have to distinguish between banal evil and true villainy.

The Banality of Evil was a phrase coined for a report on how the Nazis could attempt to exterminate any number of groups without being a group composed entirely of monsters. As Terry Pratchett put it, "There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."

This sort of evil comes from the third pillar of morality. People on the outside don't count. You don't betray family or friends, you don't steal from them, or kill them. People on the outside just. Don't. Count. Granted, you have to go out of your way to dehumanize them and demonize them before you're willing to do really horrible things to them (a dozen or so centuries of hearing "perfidious Jew" as part of the Catholic liturgy every year probably helped the Nazis demonize their victims; perfidious originally meant unbelieving but somehow, impossibly, it came to mean "treacherous").

The other sort of evil is that sensationalized by Jack the Ripper and Hannibal Lecter. In somewhere near 5% of the population at large are people with no empathy and no remorse. The terms are confused between psychopath, sociopath, and antisocial personality disorder. Generally, these people have poor impulse control and no empathy for others. Whereas the moral impulse in the majority of people is governed by two parts of the brain, one utilitarian (sure, kill one guy and distribute his organs to save five) and one empathetic (kill a person to save five? You monster!), the psychopath lacks the empathetic response. They don't always become serial killers and monsters, but the majority of violent offenders in prison show signs of sociopathy.

Whence the sociopath? Whereas morality is a system whereby evolution has gamed for cooperation for mutual benefit, sociopathy is a system that parasitically takes advantage of the first. Too many sociopaths and society couldn't possibly exist. Too many backstabbing bastards and there would be no potential benefit to backstabbing. Only if sociopaths are a minority can they succeed. When 95 times out of 100 you can trust your buddy to do right by you, the backstabbing bastard can really make a killing.

This isn't an unsuccessful strategy, no matter that we like to believe people get their comeuppance. A bastard-coated bastard with a creamy bastard filling can really get ahead, particularly in a more populace society where strangers are common. A questionnaire filled out by CEOs with questions hidden within to indicate sociopathy indicated it's more common (perhaps twice as much as in the general population). It's not hard to imagine that being a ruthless jerk could make you successful on Wall Street, legally or not (see: Enron).

In the end, whether dealing with the banal evil or dispassionate sociopathy, evolution easily explains evil. As the existence of the theodicy problem demonstrates, the god hypothesis really doesn't.

Evolution On Good and Evil Part 2

2011-11-07T16:59:00.000-05:00

As I've said before, I'll continue to discuss the biological basis of morality.

To reiterate, these are the five pillars of human morality elucidated by Dr Jonathan Haidt:

1) Fairness/Equity
2) Injury/Harm
3) In-Group Loyalty
4) Respect for Authority/Elders
5) Sanctity/Purity

As I said, the first two form the basis for reciprocal altruism. The third reinforces that by forming an us vs them mentality; those on the inside are fully human (or chimp, for our chimp cousins), those on the outside are not. We can see this among ourselves today and in history. Our close family is incredibly important, our more distant family/friends come next, and so on, until we come to strangers who are also foreigners of a different religion who dress funny who barely qualify as human. Yes, that's an increasingly outdated concept, but it's still out there.

How does identifying someone as not being worthy of altruism reinforce altruism? Because we can't be indiscriminate. Resources are scarce and we can't share all the time with everyone. Identifying some people as more important than others helps decide who we share our limited resources with, who we fight for and who we abandon. From the standpoint of the gene, we need to defend those closely related to us and help them because they share our genes. From the game theory point of view, cooperation, whether among kin or strangers, leads to a greater degree of success.

The fourth I believe started as respect for authority, a way to sort the group into a less egalitarian family band, with certain individuals in charge and others following. Think on this, the origin of the "moot point". "Moot" is an old English word, originally meaning, essentially, "a democratic assembly to discuss important points", hearkening to the democracies that were Germanic English villages. Important things had to be discussed before the moot (you may recall the term showing up in the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, as Treebeard [AKA Fangorn] called for the Ent-Moot), thus a 'moot point' was something too important for one person to decide. However, the nature of democratic assemblages is that the larger the population, the more untenable direct democracy becomes, and thus the moot got sidelined in favor of more autocratic processes and a 'moot point' gradually became something so unimportant that it could be put before the moot without any harm. To put it another way, "A committee is the only animal with twenty stomachs and no brain".

When one person is in charge, things get done (not necessarily for the best, see my explanation, forthcoming, for why democratic-republics are the most awesome form of government). Although our ancestors were apparently largely egalitarian while living in small family groups (according to anthropology), they segued into pseudo-chiefdoms, followed by chiefdoms, followed by increasingly stratified, rigidly defined hierarchical religious kingdoms. Respect for authority started as a way to organize small, flexible group relationships and was reinforced as a method for organizing large, inflexible group relationships.

However, I believe that number four became, for humans at least, respect for elders as a method of education. We're not the only animal that teaches their young, but we may be unique in that we educate through language. Our young are credulous to a fault and respect for elders reinforces that. It's not just among children, though; think about the last time you were the new guy in the workplace. How respectfully did you listen to the guy who showed you around? How long did it take for you to stop being the new guy? And when the next new guy came in, how easy was it to assume an air of authority as the guy who knows what's up? It works.

In short, I feel that these first four pillars of human morality shape our interactions among a group, for short- and long-term benefit through mutual cooperation and reciprocal altruism.

What of sanctity/purity? That's the notion that the body can be harmed/made impure through immoral behavior, which notion isn't restricted to religion (vegans, anyone?). I believe it started as a simple biological compulsion to avoid eating things like poop that was repurposed. Our hierarchical/authoritarian bent was repurposed by our need to educate our offspring, and I think our disgust imperative was repurposed for a social function. I'll get into that more later.

For now, I think I've discussed where our moral sense comes from enough to provide a good argument that, although the god hypothesis does not explain either good or evil, evolution certainly explains good as the result of game theory and gene theory.

Health Care as a Public Good

2011-11-07T12:43:00.000-05:00

A few days back, the Atheist Ethicist spent some time arguing against public health care. He criticized it from a number of angles, principally that it is a private benefit (with a few exceptions) rather than public and that it's a subsidy for poor lifestyle choices.

The second is simpler to address: take smoking. It's a choice and it's bad for you, full stop. Why should the public at large pay to address the poor health brought on by your poor choice? This is a compelling argument that ignores the fact that the majority of health problems are not brought on by poor choices, but are the result of illness, accidental injury, or poverty. I deliberately avoided his example of obesity because when you're poor, the cheapest food choice is often going to lead to an ironic combination of obesity and malnutrition. Even in the case of self-inflicted illness as with smoking-induced lung disease or a heart condition from years of being overweight, I'm willing to argue that treating the health of the public is a public good and for the exact same reason that education is.

The ethicist is more than happy to grant that items like national defense, police and fire protection, education, etc are all public goods. Why exactly is education a public good, though? After a few centuries of demonstrating, in America and Europe, that free education is for the benefit of all, it should seem obvious, but let's go ahead and explore it.

Imagine a person born into the world circa 15,000 years ago. He lives in a reasonably fecund area of the planet and, although he's five or seven thousand years too early for agriculture, his nutritional needs are well met by a settled, hunter-gatherer lifestyle. He has some free time. Unfortunately, he's some ten thousand years too early for written music as well. He'd have made a great composer. Now imagine a person born in Somalia today. What are the odds he'll become a composer?

Education is a public good because it opens up the possibility for us all to achieve our potential, our dreams (with hard work and luck). Without it, we're lucky to scratch out a living doing whatever scut work is available. By giving everyone a solid grounding in math, science, literature, art, history, writing, music, all of it, we open them up to the possibilities and let them discover natural talents that, were they to languish in ignorance, they could never learn they had except by accident. We all benefit when we can all dive into our passions, master them, and create and discover wonderful new things. Minutiae of law, science, music, and art, even if you never hear about them, enrich your world and make it a better place. And none of that is possible without education.

So why is healthcare a public good? A pianist can't play with broken fingers. A diva can't sing with bronchitis. A janitor can't sweep on broken legs. We all benefit when everyone can explore their passions and their talents. Just as they can only explore them when they have the educational foundation to do so, they can only explore them when they have the health to do so.

Just as we should do what we can to keep our schools and our police well funded, well maintained, and well regulated, so should our public health, and for all the same reasons. When we're all free, healthy, and happy, we can do amazing things.

Knowledge vs Knowledge

2011-11-07T12:02:00.000-05:00

A few comments in reply to my thesis on whether or not we can know that god exists were of the form, "You admitted at the start that you can't know god exists, but then you argue that you can. WTF?"

I should have made this distinction more clear then; I was speaking initially of mathematical certainty and arguing at the end for scientific knowledge.

Some things can be absolutely known within a mathematical framework. "If (if A then B) then (if not B then not A)" is a tautological truth within the framework of mathematical logic. On a different note, beginning with the assumption of "B" then it's trivially simple to prove "If A then B". Within mathematics, some things can be proven with absolute certainty. In that sense, we cannot be absolutely certain on the existence of god because it's not a mathematical question.

Scientific knowledge is a different matter. We begin with facts, build from there to laws, and thence to theories. At any time, a contradictory fact could bring the edifice crashing down. Biologist J.B.S. Haldane said, according to popular myth, that rabbits in the Precambrian would explode the theory of evolution. In a sense, scientific knowledge is a mass of supposition resting precariously on the admission that it hasn't been proven false yet. However, the longer a scientific theory lasts without being proven false, the more certain we can be that it is true.

At this point an English major might be tempted to butt in with, "But everything ends up getting proven false! We used to think the Earth was flat! Einstein proved Newton wrong! Neener neener!" At this point I gleefully crib from a delightful essay by Isaac Asimov. Yes, older models have been proven incorrect, but they weren't entirely incorrect and they weren't equally incorrect. The Flat Earth model breaks down after just a few miles when you disappear under a horizon it simply cannot predict. Nevertheless, I've taken advantage of the Flat Earth model on each of my dozen or so cross-country drives by referring to a book of maps, all of them printed on flat paper without losing my way (at least not because of the maps). It's wrong, yes, but it's not entirely wrong. And the spherical model that replaced the flat model is also wrong! The Earth is an oblate spheroid (flattened at the poles) thanks to Newtonian physics, a fact ably demonstrated by the much more oblate Jupiter. And yet the oblate model is incorrect as well because, thanks to odd internal geography, our planet is slightly larger on the southern hemisphere. However, to say that the oblate spheroid model is as incorrect as the spherical model and as incorrect as the flat model is just wrong. One model is more wrong, and none of them are entirely wrong.

Each model accounts for certain observed facts (the earth is apparently flat) and is replaced by a better model that accounts for those and for others (the shadow on the moon is round and we disappear over the horizon), which is replaced in turn by another that takes further facts into account (the laws of motion). In each case, our knowledge is never scrapped or replaced entire, but upgraded and patched. Einstein didn't replace Newton, for Newton's observations and mechanics are nearly perfect for the observations he was capable of making; rather, Einstein expanded upon Newton by developing a mechanic for observations made in the centuries that followed, and Quantum Mechanics did the same a few decades later in the other direction. In other words, scientific knowledge has never truly been one of scrapping a false system for a true system, but of replacing a system with a more accurate one. Lose the burlap sack and put on a prom dress, lose the prom dress and put on a tailored suit.

So why do I believe there is no god on the basis of scientific evidence? Because, after thousands of years of observation, there is no evidence. The old canard "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" can be discarded because absence of evidence, when one would reasonably expect to find evidence is evidence of absence. The longer we go with nothing more than feelings and hopes to confirm the alleged existence of a deity, the more firmly we can say, "Sorry, you've not only failed to convince me you're right, you've convinced me you're wrong." Yes, evolution could be toppled by a Precambrian bunny, but a century and a half of repeated attacks have failed to disprove it; we can say we know evolution is true, in spite of its precarious "not false yet" scientific status. After millenia of abject failure to provide proof or evidence for the existence of a god, or any supernatural phenomenon, why does religion still get a free pass in the opposite direction?

The alleged deity is such a large phenomenon that I feel safe saying I know there is no god because the evidence of such an overwhelming entity should be equally overwhelming. A natural high underwhelms those who don't experience it.

My Mother's Stepladder

2011-10-12T04:18:00.000-04:00

My mother has a stepladder that she keeps in the laundry room. It's roughly ten feet from the fridge.

My mother isn't particularly short. She's of about average height for a woman, at a guesstimate; roughly 5'4"ish.

She needs the stepladder because she can't reach the top shelf in the cupboards. Or the pantry. She can't reach the top of the fridge, let alone those tiny, impossible to reach cupboards above the fridge. She can't change the light bulbs in any of the ceiling fixtures. She can't reach the top of the closets. Although my mother spends far more time in my house than my father does, and although the people who designed the house almost certainly expected that this would be the case, the simple fact is that my mother is a stranger in her own home. The people who designed it simply didn't give a damn about her. The house is sized for a man, and my mother is allowed in as an afterthought.

That's male privilege in a nutshell. It begins with the fact that men tend to be larger and stronger than women. This is a fact of biology and averages. Male privilege is what happens when this happenstance is seized upon and turned into a systematic privilege where none need exist. Imagine a highway system where some people have four-wheel-drive SUVs, and some have Priuses; no one has a choice, that's just the way it is. But then we build the highways and they're all roughly tarred, they ignore the difficulties with rough terrain or steep hills. The highway could be smooth and detour around the worst terrain problems, but the SUV owners are the ones in charge and it usually doesn't occur to them to take Prius owners into account. Until the Prius owners speak up.

To make matters worse, though, the SUV owners are all terrible drivers; they ignore the rules of the road and are very aggressive... Also, they tend to pollute the environment more. Man, ain't it grand how far you can stretch an analogy?

Steven Moffat's Cottage

2011-10-05T03:15:00.000-04:00

Steven Moffat lives in a cottage in a small, English, country village. There are bright gardens, and hedges with convenient gaps for children up to mischief, a harmless vicar and a pub with a genial barman and a quiz game.

His cottage is a happy place full of laughter. It is a place of family, friendship, and cheer.

His cellar is brightly lit. Its carpet is deep and cushioned, robin's egg blue. It goes on for miles. Shelf after shelf, cabinet after cabinet, it is filled with tiny glass vials. Each contains a spoonful of carefully gathered tears. Steven Moffat drinks despair. He collects it, bottles it. He never opens his vials. He lets them ... improve. He captures and labels your torment. Anyone can visit Steven's basement. Anyone can see his bottles. Anyone stumbling upon his legacy of despair can go home. You will leave a token behind you. Steven charges tuppence a tour, and he leaves the proceed to charity.

In his cellar , he keeps sorrow.

Steven's cottage has an attic. The attic is reached by a stairwell The stairwell can only be entered through a shed at the rear. The shed has only one door. The shed is filled with cobwebs and shadows. Only Steven can enter the shed. Only Steven can face its keeper. The keeper's grip is firm on the kindling strewn about the floor of the shed.

The stairs tremble and creak as he walks to the attic. The attic has a single door. Only Steven possesses the key. Behind the door is a second door. Only Steven has the key. The second door can only ever be opened when the first is shut and locked. The attic is filled with shelf after shelf, cabinet after cabinet; horrors stacked aside horrors. The attic is dark and dusty, its floor wooden and painful. No one can enter Steven's attic and leave. Only he has permission to sample its flavors.

In his attic, he keeps nightmares.

Evolution on Good and Evil

2011-10-04T04:23:00.000-04:00

I've stated previously that I'm a moral relativist, a nihilist, et cetera. I believe that human morality stems not from some absolute command nor from god but from our biology.

Recall the Prisoner's Dilemma. At first glance it appears that there's no reason for the prisoner's not to inform on one another until you add the notion of history, memory. Once reputation appears as a reason not to squeal, the dilemma disappears and human behavior goes from inexplicably illogical to mathematically sound. This suggests that natural selection is a mathematician into game theory.

There have been competitions by computer programs playing the Prisoner's Dilemma over and over. Multiple times against each of multiple opponents. The winners have always been nice (don't start with betrayal), retaliatory (willing to pay evil unto evil), forgiving, and not envious (not trying to outscore the opponent). In other words, a moral being.

But then something else happened. People were allowed to enter multiple programs. They did so with multiple programs designed to take a dive and a designated winner; they recognized one another with a complex handshake. The result? The designated winner won. Not only is cooperation favored by game theory for one on one interactions, so are complex cartels. This result shouldn't be surprising, each and every human being is not merely an agent, but a complex cartel. We are each of us the result of billions of living individuals cooperating for mutual benefit. Each of us is, quite literally, a corporation*.

It's not just humans and other animals that cooperate. Even single-celled organisms cooperate. At least one species of unicellular heterotrophs come together in cooperation (using the same gene that allows the cells of multicellular organisms to recognize one another and cooperate) in a fashion that makes eating and locomotion easier.

Morality isn't just cooperation though, is it? It's about not killing people or robbery or rape, et cetera. The work of Dr. Jonathan Haidt has elucidated certain universal moral truths that all humans hold in common.

1. Fairness/Equity
2. Injury/Harm
3. In-Group Loyalty
4. Respect for Authority/Respect for Elders
5. Sanctity/Purity

The first two obviously function as aids to cooperation. Interpersonal interactions mediated by these two moral rules foster cooperation by requiring first that each partner receive, not equal, but commensurate gains from cooperation. Further, a prohibition against injury that prevents simple physical betrayal. Individuals living together will come into conflict and that prohibition means that, even when things go bad, they can continue to function as a group. In fact, the first two, with the addition of the third, comprise the basic set that define success for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

But why is that necessary? Compare us to our closest cousins, our fellow apes. Our distant cousin, the orangutan, is non-tribal. Males live in non-overlapping territories and females live in non-overlapping territories, while the territory of a male overlaps with those of several females. A closer cousin, the gorilla, lives in troops, generally with only one adult male, but occasionally multiple.

Closer still, the chimpanzees, which live in tribes with multiple males and females, often quite cooperative. The common chimp is more aggressive (males from one tribe are hostile to strange males and even band together to hunt them down) whereas bonobos are more peaceful. Both groups are highly sexual, using sex to "make love, not war" even pansexual**. Generally, their behavior shows a cooperative nature similar to our own. They're fair, they avoid injury... and they're loyal to those of their own tribe, sometimes at the expense of those from others.

The upshot of this is first that our closest cousins have a social structure that mirrors our own, thus necessitating the same moral rules that we have; and not just the first three. The common chimp has a strict hierarchy with male A in charge, then male B, then C... Bonobos are less hierarchical, but are matriarchal and 'less' doesn't mean 'not at all'.

Further, the apes aren't the only animals with hierarchies. Horses are likewise hierarchical, following the lead of a head mare and head stallion. Even small birds have hierarchies. Chickadees take the risk of sitting high in a tree and looking for threats. Their name comes from their characteristic cry of "chick - a - dee dee dee" when they see a threat. The more "dee"s, the greater the threat. They vie for this position, with birds of higher social position acquiring, literally, higher positions as look-outs. Other small birds determine and acquire social status through aggressive altruism; giving gifts is a sign of, as it were, virility and a sign that the giver is so awesome he can afford to give away food.

This is another argument in favor of evolution loving altruism; not merely as a means of maintaining genetic code by helping a relative, but also as a means of reinforcing hierarchy.

I will continue my discussion of moral pillars 3, 4, and 5 in my next post.

* From Latin, for "physical make up".
** Get it? The genus Pan? I am so clever.

Explaining Good and Evil

2011-10-04T00:59:00.000-04:00

In this video, atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens debates religious apologist Dinesh D'Souza. At one point, D'Souza claims that evolution cannot explain good nor evil, and that only the existence of god can.

First I want to say that the god hypothesis is impotent to explain the existence of evil as it is to explain the existence of the universe. If you posit the typical good, powerful, intervening deity, how can there be evil? A typical argument is that god didn't make evil, just free will. If you give a baby a hand grenade and it pulls the pin, who's going to blame the baby? If you give a man a gun and he shoots someone, are you culpable? No. Unless, that is, you know what he's going to do.

Another is that god uses evil to good ends, eventually. "Know why the devil's so angry? Because god keeps using his evil to do good." In other words, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. To make the analogy better, you have to kill a chicken if you want to eat it. But there's a difference between killing a chicken as painlessly as possible and cooking it alive. If what appears to be evil is in fact god using complex means to accomplish good ends, surely a god with the three omnis (benevolent, scient, and potent) could achieve its ends without using even apparent evil.

As an amusing note; can an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god create evil? That's a statement of the omni paradox that I'd never considered.

The other solution to the thorny problem of theodicy is to reduce one or more of god's omnis. The existence of evil becomes less thorny, though a god without the omnis is less omnisatisfying. Also, in the face of a non-creative deity, evil can have another source.

The other half of the problem is positing god as the source of good. First we run into Euthyphro's dilemma; is it good because god says it is (in which case good is arbitrary) or is it good absent god's will (in which case, there's some conflict with the omnis). Many scholars have considered it and, to that end, I direct you to the wikipedia page. Suffice it to say, I believe the dilemma, at both ends, renders null the notion that good stems from god. And this one can be resolved by reduction of the omnis. A nonomni'd god, can have an external standard against which it can judge.

The other thing I'd like to point out is that, even in the event of a nonomni'd god, most of what they command is not, in fact, good. A casual reading of most histories demonstrates that they're barbaric, racist, misogynistic, and pretty gosh darn vile all around. In other words, claiming that good stems from god is more or less like claiming that good stems from a 1930s Italian mafioso.

Next I'm going to posit an alternative hypothesis and rebut Mr. D'Souza on the claim that evolution can't explain good or evil.

On Nihilism

2011-10-03T23:00:00.000-04:00

I mentioned before that I think Nihilism gets a bad rap. Now I'm going to talk about it.

Nihilism is generally associated with Friedrich Nietzsche and Heidegger. Oh, and Nazi Germany because of things like "The Will to Power" and _übermensch_ (superman). However, they're a lot of other things on top of nihilism.

At it's core, nihilism is belief in nothing. Moral nihilism is the belief that there exists no objective moral truth, no moral authority, and no morality. One typical theist assertion regarding atheism is that being an atheist necessarily makes you a nihilist, and this brings along with it the above-mentioned associations. It is followed by the assertion that "Since without God you can't have morality, then without God you can't be good".

Does atheism lead inevitably to nihilism? No. For example, Sam Harris (one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism) argues that there is an absolute moral framework absent God based on decreasing suffering and increasing happiness, a form of utilitarianism.

However, many atheists are indeed nihilists, myself among them. I believe there is no absolute morality and no external moral authority. But that doesn't mean I'm either immoral or amoral. I do believe there is morality. The work of Jonathan Haidt indicates that human morality is universal and follows certain trends. Therefor, I posit that human morality arises from biology. More on that later. Nihilism and amorality aren't actually the same thing.

In other words, atheism doesn't lead to nihilism, and nihilism doesn't lead to villainy.

There's a reason the association of nihilism with Nietzsche is seen as a negative, particularly by Christians. Nietzsche was unabashed in his criticism of Christianity and his support of nihilism. Memorably he said "God is dead". Nietzsche also described two forms of nihilism. Passive nihilism, or the will to nothingness, as a sort of Western Buddhism; the abnegation of self. Active nihilism, which he advocated, seeks out and destroys structures such as Christianity. This wipes the slate clean and allows the construction of a new structure.

Finally, he described a typical response to discovering nihilism. On learning that a certain belief system is false, the newfound nihilist despairs and begins living his life in rejection of what he used to believe. For example, a follower of a faith that preaches abstinence from sex and drugs will begin boozing and screwing. Instead of preaching good, he may exult in villainy. And, as an added bonus, there's none so zealous as a convert. Many like to say that Nietzsche was advocating this sort of life, when in fact he thought that sort of person was weak.

Which brings us to my own personal take on different kinds of nihilists, weak vs. strong. Whereas for theists and atheists, the use of weak and strong weren't meant to imply a value judgment, this does. A weak nihilist is like the one described in the previous paragraph. He sees that there is nothing and lets it overwhelm him; the nothing overwhelms him. The strong nihilist is like Nietzsche's active nihilist, only instead of trying to destroy what came before, he's trying to build something new. He sees the nothing and seeks to fill it.

If you want another good example, see Angel's arc in the second season of his own show. First, he descends into darkness and eschews the company of his friends. He exults in violence and destruction. Yes, he kills evil, but he's not nice about it. This reaches its nadir when he learns that the villainous law firm doesn't take its orders from hell. "The world doesn't work in spite of us, but with us." Then he has an epiphany.

Angel: [It doesn't m]ean anything. In the greater scheme, in the big picture, nothing we do matters. There's no grand plan, no big win.
Kate: You seem kind of chipper about that.
Angel: Well ... I guess I kind of worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if ... nothing we do matters ... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do. Now. Today. I fought for so long for redemption, for a reward, finally, just to beat the other guy. But I never got it.
Kate: Now you do?
Angel: Not all of it. All I want to do is help. I want to help because I don't think people should suffer as they do, because if there's no bigger meaning, then the smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world.

Strong vs Weak Theism

2011-10-03T20:22:00.000-04:00

My last post covered the agnostic and gnostic positions. It also covered the differences between the two atheist positions. However, there's also a distinction between two theistic positions. Just as there are strong and weak atheist positions, there are also strong and weak theist positions.

The strong theist position is "I believe god exists." It is so common that it is unjustly given the privilege of the default position. The default position should be either weak position, "I do not believe...".

Alternatively, we have the weak position "I do not believe that god does not exist." This seems to be so pathetically weak and negative that no one could ever hold it, but I suspect that many, perhaps even most, theists are in fact weak theists.

I offer into evidence the Biblical verse, "Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief." In context, it's the desperate cry of a father that his son receive miraculous healing, because only believers could get that (*cough*blackmail*cough*). But more generally, many believers wrestle with a lack of faith. They pray for help with their faith and their doubts. The correspondence between Mother Theresa and the Vatican showed that she had her doubts, had wrestled long and hard, and faith had lost. If so venerated a figure (sainted, even) can have doubts, why not Joe the plumber or even Joe the pastor?

More tellingly, some people, when questioned about their faith, reply "I don't want it to not be true", "I don't want to believe their is not heaven." Theirs is not a positive affirmation of belief, but a desperate fear of the unknown. They maintain their faith because they cannot bear the consequences of its falsity.

Of course, when asked if they believe, theists will reply with the affirmative "I do believe that god exists", but how many of them are secretly weak theists? How many of them, plagued by doubt, in fact hold only the position that they don't want to believe in nothing? How many of them fear that the alternative to god is nothing, that without theism, all that is left is nihilism?

In truth, there are many godless alternatives. Creative humanity has built a great many houses of non-worship, ways to find truth and beauty and meaning even in the absence of a creator.

Unfortunately, nihilism gets a bad rap. There are two positions there, as well. More on that later.

Sing in me, Urania

2011-10-03T16:33:00.000-04:00

The Scientist sifts drabbles of Fact and Demitruth from the dross of decomposed Reality. From bricks of Fact does he construct a Palace of Theory on scaffolding of Hypothesis. Above it all he seeks to place a Firmament, a Grand Union. His goal is Mystery, ever a rainbow to unweave.

The Eight Positions on God

2011-10-03T00:34:00.000-04:00

I was inspired to ponder the eight positions as a result of watching this series of videos by Aron Ra. He talks about belief and knowledge about god, but I think his presentation was incomplete, and this was the cause of some confusion in the Q&A session at the end.

"Does god exist?" I won't be trying to answer that question here. Instead I'm going to talk about answers. Whether we can answer the question is not the focus, but there are two classes of statement that should be addressed. They are the four positions on knowledge, and the four positions on belief.

Knowledge:

I know god exists.
I know god does not exist.
I do not know that god exists.
I do not know that god does not exist.

Whether or not something can be known is the province of epistemology. Stating that something is known is that gnostic position. Stating that something is unknown is the agnostic position. I agree, for the moment, with the agnostic position that nothing can be known about god.

First, what is knowledge? Knowledge is distinct from belief in that we can all agree that a thing can be believed without being true. Many people pay good money for homeopathic potions, content in the belief that they are purchasing genuine cures. They are incorrect; they've purchased expensive water. They will be somewhat better hydrated, but they won't be taking medicine. For all that their belief in the efficacity of their nostrum is sincere, and for all that they believe they have evidence to that end, they are incorrect. Their certain belief does not rise to the level of knowledge.

The position of the strict agnostics, that nothing can be known about the existence of god, should be the default position, only abandoned in the face of evidence, or very good argument, to the contrary. Most theists, when pressed, will admit to agnosticism. "There's a reason it's called faith." Even the most ardent atheists will usually also admit to being agnostics.

So on the question of knowledge, the four positions are divided into two categories: gnoticism and agnosticism. I know, one way or the other, or I do not know, one way or the other. Regardless of what they believe, most people will admit to being agnostic.

Belief:

I believe god exists.
I do not believe god exists.
I believe god does not exist.
I do not believe that god does not exist.

These four positions are divided into two categories: theism and atheism. The split is not the same as that of the gnostic/agnostic divide.

The two atheist positions are "I do not believe god exists." and "I believe that god does not exist." These are called weak and strong atheism respectively. The terms are not intended to be pejorative by definition, though they are sometimes used that way. Rather, weak atheism is so called because the statement is fundamentally negative on the part of the user.

The statement "I do not believe that god exists" places the negative aspect in the belief of the atheist. It is a responsive position. The theists posits that god exists and the atheist responds "I don't believe that". It's not a positive statement about the existence of god one way or another. This is in contrast with the strong position.

"I believe that god does not exist" is a positive, descriptive statement. It's a positive position on the part of the declarer about the existence or non-existence of god. Just as the theist is declarative when he says that he believes that god does exist.

Aron Ra, in his video, stated that the correct position is the weak position. I agree that it should be the default position and absent further argument or evidence, it cannot be abandoned. However, I disagree with him that there is no further argument or evidence. The various gods posited by theistic beliefs are all interventionist, with an impact on the world. Anything that alters the world can be tested by the scientific method. Further, supernatural hypotheses all necessarily suppose either that the deity is deceptive, acting to mask their intervention, or that the deity's intervention can be detected due to the violation of otherwise natural causality. As no evidence exists of supernatural intervention, the deity is deceptive, non-interventive or non-existent.

As for intervention, scientific studies have been performed on the efficacy of prayer. Not only did the studies find no positive benefit, it was determined that, when the patient is aware of the prayer, it has a negative placebo effect; they do worse. In this light, a deity is either non-intervening or non-existent.

We now come to the position that the non-intervening deity is functionally equivalent to the deist's position: the creator who then does nothing. However, our study of the cosmos gives us an alternative hypothesis for the origin of everything. We know the universe is closed, open, or flat; regardless, each one gives us an explanation for the existence of everything (the "problem" of why anything exists rather than nothing is usually advanced as a strong argument for a deity). There is no theory of the cosmos that cannot explain existence. The god hypothesis is superfluous. Worse, it's not even an explanation! The god proposed is even more inexplicable than the thing it's being proposed to explain! It takes the thorny problem of existence up to eleven!

The confusion I mentioned above was over the difference between the strong and weak atheist positions. Because Aron Ra hadn't clearly explicated the difference as the position of the negative. The querent queried, in essence, "Why do you believe their is no god?", mister Ra and, I believe, Matt Dillahunty, replied "I don't believe there is a god" The discussion went back and forth with the querent asking the same question and receiving, essentially, the same reply.

Next: Strong versus Weak Theists.

ARIZONA SECURITY GUARD LOSES JOB TO DOG

2010-05-05T18:42:00.001-04:00

Minute Men, Birthers Demand to See Dog's Papers

PHONEIX -- Local security guard Carl Walden (61) was let go by his employer of 10 years after they were approached by the owner of a German Shepherd. Mandy (4) is a well-trained and well-groomed dog with a suspicious disposition bred and raised in the valley. Yet some allege that she is, in fact, a German German Shepherd.

Adam Pressley (44) is a member of the Phoenix chapter of the Minute Men, an organization dedicated to fighting illegal immigration, and he has decided to make Mandy a headline issue and has taken her employer to court.

"We have no evidence that she is actually an American citizen with the right to be employed in this country. It's right there in her name; she's a GERMAN Shepherd. It's our duty, our social responsibility to make sure this dog isn't part of the flood of illegal immigrants taking advantage of our free society. We demand that her employer or alleged breeder produce a certified pedigree or work visa."

Birthers across the state agree. Posts on conservative websites contain comments such as "If its [sic] good enough to demand of Obama, then we got to demand it of a dog!!1 [sic]"

Mandy has become a celebrity in some circles, and the focus of a much wider cause of discontent as more and more citizens lose their jobs to animals.

Steve McNiven (43) is a comic book artist whose job was recently outsourced to India. McNiven commented "It's really frustrating. Making your way in this business is difficult enough without them pulling the rug out from under you and showing you the door just because they found an elephant who knows how to hold a paint brush."

Isaac Perlmutter, CEO of Marvel, responded to complaints that many of their artists have been let go in favor of cheaper work overseas. "I love Steve and all of them. They're great guys and they do great work. What Steve did for the Civil War was outstanding and I know he'll have no trouble finding new clients based on that alone. But it just doesn't make sense to pay these guys huge salaries when we can pay peanuts overseas."

Nevertheless, a movement is growing in this country amid fears that, during already troubled economic times, ever more jobs will be shipped overseas. Ryan Peterson (34), head of American Jobs for American Animals said in a press briefing "There are thousands, tens of thousands, of American animals out of work. We have out of work dogs roaming the streets of Detroit, and who knows how many animals locked up in zoos. I can say this for sure, if they'd had jobs, they wouldn't have had to turn to crime to feed their litters. We at AJAA are pressuring our Congressmen to pass laws protecting jobs for hard working American animals."

At the time of writing, no Congressmen had been reached for comment.

Capitalism DNE

2006-07-30T07:08:00.000-04:00

[Friend], you're under the mistaken impression that pure capitalism exists.

Actually, I apologise. You're under the mistaken impression that pure capitalism can exist.

The fact of the matter is that every facet of a capitalistic market virtually requires a government to exist.

The term "virtually" means "almost, or seeming to, but not in fact".

In other words, a capitalistic market de facto requires government intervention to exist. I say "de facto" (in fact) rather than "de jure" (in absolute reality) because a pure capitalistic market could exist absent government intervention.

In theory. "And in theory, Marge, communism could work." - Homer Simpson

I'm delighted to reference that quote because a pure, non-governmental capitalism could exist in the exact same way a pure communism could exist. Only if all men were perfect angels, rational, deliberate, and altruistic.

Unfortunately, such men don't exist. Actually, my personal opinion is that we're fortunate that if such men do exist, then they're exceedingly rare.

In fact, in any market even marginally capitalist, the actions of every individual are toward monopoly. If you want to see multiple examples of this you need only observe American history. The nineteenth century was rife with individuals who used the very free market then extant in a manner that can only be termed "rapacious". John D. Rockefeller, a hero to libertarians, was one of the rapacious. So was Thomas Edison. He paid slave wages to workers to test numerous ideas (few of which were his), which he then patented largely by means of men armed with baseball bats.

The end goal of anyone involved in a free market is a monolopy. If a monopoly cannot be acheived (whether because of law or simple economic roadblocks), then an oligopoly (or cartel... like OPEC) is sought. As I recall, a number of airline executives came under fire for price fixing within the last few years. A free market in action.

Leaving aside the fact that every individual within a free market acts to destroy the free market, let's discuss the various factors that define a free market, shall we?

To define the market, we shall have to observe the market in action. An individual, let's call him Stanley, leaves his home and walks to market. On entering the market he walks among the various stalls searching for the product he wants to buy. Having selected a vendor and a product he offers to purchase said product. The vendor names a price. Stanley hands over the money, receives his purchase, walks home, and enjoys it.

In the eyes of the incognizant (uninformed) it would appear that the government had no place in that transaction. There were no bureaucrats, no policemen, not even a lowly meter maid. How wrong you would be, should you hold such an opinion.

1) Stanley leaves his home.
Right here we have a definition of property. Is a government required for one to hold property? In fact, realty? No! So long as you are young and healthy, you can defend your holdings against any number of menaces! Provided, of course, that they come one at a time and are weaker/less well armed than you. Stanley is fortunate to live in a governed society, one with taxes and an armed police force. He can leave his home unattended and unarmed in his person with no unreasonable fear of robbery. Lucky Stanley. A government exists to prevent a truly free market exaction; namely that someone stronger than he would take whatever he couldn't protect.

2) Stanley walks to the market.
Again, Stanley need not fear robbery. Those armed forces defend not just his home, but the roads he travels on. Wait... did we cover how those forces were paid? I believe taxation is in order. The basic and traditional form of taxation... why, governments tax trade! The original market town, from which the modern "market" takes it name comes from the medieval French villages deliberately founded by feudal lords for the purpose of developing trade so they could exact tariffs and so fund their wars! My goodness! It's almost as if the "free market" wasn't free at all!

And... those roads he was walking on. Were they free? Who paid for them? If they're constructed and defended (particularly defended), who pays for that?

Once upon a time roads were paths that existed because people walked on them. They were taken for granted.

Then someone invented "the wheel" and roads became a necessity that had to be maintained. Who maintans them? How does he recoup the cost?

Toll roads maintained by private companies can get expensive. I hear there's an argument over "freedom of the 'internet'"... I'm not sure what that's about. Apparently there are these "tubes"...

Perhaps Stanley's government has evolved in its way of thinking. Perhaps instead of taxing direct trade they feel that they'd be best off assessing wealth and taxing those who benefit most from the existence of government. Why, that would be an "income tax". My oh my. It's almost as if Stanley lives under the aegis of a kind and liberal government, one that doesn't tax the poor to benefit the rich (as was the case with, say, pre-revolutionary France, which fell shortly after the, odd... after the American Revolution, which championed individual liberties and fair government and... it would appear, a market governed by reason rather than greed).

3) Stanley selects his product (among a competition of products) from a vendor (among competing vendors).
Rockefeller is proof enough that without government intervention there would be neither competition among products nor competition among vendors. Having only one choice means having no choice. You think you live in a free market? Try changing high-speed internet vendors. It takes force to prevent others from using force.

Government is, or should be, the use of force for the common good.

4) Stanley hands over the money.
Hold the phone! What? Who? Money? Money, or "specie" or "scrip" is an artificial construct given a defined value by an outside authority! What authority?! On occasion, a non-governmental body has issued some item of value or promisory note that was so reliable that it had value as currency. Perhaps a bolt of cloth was as valuable as an amount of coinage.

Such occasions are exceedingly rare. Few and far between are the private organisations disinterested enough that they can produce a valued coinage.

Government steps in again.

Where government doesn't exist, barter rules. Individuals meet to trade goods. Malcom has barley, David has wool. They trade, both are happy.

But what if David doesn't WANT barley, and Malcom doesn't WANT wool. Well, they're fucked. Unless there exists a medium of exchange both can agree on.

Stanley can hand over coins for his product because he is certain of their value. So is the vendor. Because the value of the coins is certified by an external authority. The "gummint."

Those poor bastards.

5) Stanley purchases his product.
It's not apparent, but Stanley has written and signed a contract with the vendor. The contract is such that the vendor guarantees to hand over a product of certain quality in return for a certain value of specie. Stanley has guaranteed to hand over a certain amount of specie in return for a promised good. They've concluded a non-written contract, wherein a cerain good is promised in return for a certain value. What happens if Stanley is ripped off? What if it turns out the product he sought is not the product he got?

Once upon a time in Denver he would have had four options. a) hunt down the rat and kill him. b) pay others to hunt down the rat and kill him. c) cry and deal with it. d) try and deal with it and die. Stanley is fortunate to have a government that enforces contracts. Even unwritten ones.

Every time I go to K-Mart (as rare as I can manage), I am guaranteed to receive the product I think I'm buying. And every time you go to a shady mechanic and get ripped off, you have the option of suing his ass because there's a government around to enforce what he should have done. ie. what he said he'd do.

6) Stanley walks home.
Amazingly, he doesn't get beaten and robbed. Those cops are good at their job.

7) Stanley enjoys himself.
Ah, that Constitutional Liberty, "Pursuing Happiness". Stanley is damn lucky to have a government that prevents others from taking away that liberty. He can sit in his home, certain in the knowledge that no one will burst through his door and rob him (government thugs or private criminals). He knows that he got what he paid for because the government is on the watch for people who lie and break their word. He rests peacefully because his government watches the roads he walks on.

Stanley's entire environment is an artificial construct maintained by the government he supports. It is entirely unnatural, and wholly beneficial. Nothing about it is free; it is bought and paid for by the people who participate in it, and the only thing that maintains it is their vigilance, ensuring that no one person or group comes to dominate and control it. Because, being an artificial system, it is enitirely and easily susceptible to manipulationand abuse.

2006-06-30T21:42:00.000-04:00

grammarburn

Pacifism

2006-06-17T05:42:00.001-04:00

I feel strongly about pacifism. I feel strongly that it is wrong.

An individual wrote that, "[All nations have militaries]... Except for those nations who don't have militaries. Costa Rica abolished their military about 60 years ago; and have happily avoided becoming involved in any of the numerous regional conflicts since.

"Costa Rica feels they can afford to abolish their military in large part because they believe that the US military will prevent them from being conquered by any ambitious foreign government. It's easy to be a pacifist when someone else with a lot more money and high technology is prepared to do any fighting you need done for you."

Someone else replied "Who would do this for the US?"

I felt moved to respond:

In a nutshell you have the essence of pacifism. A pacifist can only survive so long as ahe never encounters someone willing to kill him. Your basic thug will kill whenever he feels he can get away with it. Your basic thug is the essence of humanity. "He is not me, he is not of my family, therefore I can kill him" is the only over-arching principal that the human primate is born to.

The pacifist can only survive to feel that he is better than others if another being is willing to defend him from the thug. That being is the policeman. From "polis", which is Greek for "city", the policeman is the personification of civilization. He lives to enforce all those rules that are not bred into the bone; he enforces the pax civilis; the policeman lives and breathes the ideal that we are more than animals. We are born to accept family and kill who is not; the policeman says, "You must accept that there are those who are not family, but you may not kill them". That is civilization; the recognition that you cannot kill someone just because you don't know them.

Or perhaps I should say, that is the first rule of civilization. Because some people do have to die. Atticus Finch, against his principles, took up a gun to kill a rabid dog. Janie Crawford took up a gun to kill the man she loved. In both cases, the individual that died was mad; and in the original sense of the term. They were rabid. A virus had driven them insane such that they would attack any creature they encountered.

There is no subduing such an individual. You cannot reason with him. You cannot convince him that violence is wrong. Whatever the processes that might have ruled him, they are gone. There is a disconnect such that "to see" = "to kill".

The sad fact is that the human individual is a fragile being. In standing upright, we sacrificed our strength. We stood upright because we developed large brains. Our women needed large pelvises in order that they could give birth to our intelligent children without dying. We walk upright because we can think; it is not the other way around.

Along with our physical frailty, our intelligence comes burdened with another sacrifice; a complex mind can be damaged in many ways.

Whereas a dog must be cruelly mistreated or infected with a vile plague to go insane; a human can go insane just by tilting his head. The result is Jeffrey Dahmer. He is Charles Manson. He is Jack the Ripper. He can be perfectly rational, yet at the same time be vile beyond imagining.

These individuals will not stop. They cannot be argued with. There is no cage that a man cannot escape from, given time enough.

There are individuals who must die. This necessarilly means violence.

The ideal of pacifism is flawed because it assumes all men are angels, and that they wish they were. Experience teaches that they are not. Experience teaches that controlled violence is the only means to survive. Eschewing violence on principle is suicide.

Homeopathy. Bunk.

2006-04-30T03:26:00.000-04:00

[quote="A person"][quote="Another person"]
If your healing is triggered by something 'not physical' then why do you need to buy a bottle of it?

I do believe in the, so called, "magic feather" effect - but I would never try to take advantage of someone else by trying to [b]sell[/b] them a magic feather.[/quote]

"my healing" is no different from yours (barring physiological chemical differences)... and I don't [b]need[/b] to buy a bottle of it.

Just because the original physical ingredient is no longer traceable, does not mean there is no link to the "essence" of the ingredient (see: homeopathy) [/quote]

Man, I was thinking I'd scan this and go to bed, but I just have to respond.

If water were to somehow retain some "essence" of those items it has had contact with, then water retains the essence of far more than just those items homeopathic practicioners add to it. Let's try, for example, urea. Yeah. Fish piss. All the time. Every bit of water you touch has been in contact with piss. And piss is bad for you. There's really no two ways about it. Either it's uric acid, bad. Or ammonia, also bad.

How about shit? Feces. Like the stuff monkeys throw. That's full of bacteriat would love nothing more than infect you and, unfortunately, kill you. Pungi stakes are a relic of Vietnam. Yeah, they'd dig holes and fill them with sharpened wooden stakes and smear those stakes with coprolitic material. Those stakes would cause minor injuries that would then get horrifically infected. Yeah. Fish shit, too. Water has come into contact with piss and shit over and over nonstop for billions of years. And yet... somehow, drinking water doesn't kill us. Despite the fact that water somehow retains a kind of "essence" of piss and shit.

And I don't think you can claim that we're somehow immune to the essensical effects of piss and shit because urine and feces lead to, for example, cholera.

It's only a theory...

2006-04-22T17:05:00.000-04:00

Dumb fundies.

"If evilution is so right, how come it isn't a law yet? It's only a theory!"

So is gravity, you twit! You're ignorant. Keep your dumb off of me.

Action Movies

2006-04-16T01:11:00.000-04:00

Having waxed rhapsodic on action in the past, I believe I may do so again.

When it comes to action movies, I believe a degree of the sublime was reached by Die Hard. It lacks the choreographed martial arts of Jet Li, or Jason Statham's The Transporter, but it is the rare action movie with a plot. There's a story, character arc, the works. It's the only action movie where the hero has any depth.

Which is not to say that I don't enjoy choreographed martial arts, far from it. Few things bring me more joy than to see people doing things very, very well, whether that be dancing or fighting. Indeed, the common reference between the two ("Wanna dance?", Todd Hockney, The Usual Suspects) has become so cliché that the actual relationship between the two is sadly ignored.

I speak, of course, not of the dancing you'll find in clubs or, in the European fashion, discothèques. That is more along the lines of mutual groin massages to a beat.

No, I speak of dancing wherein the participants are aware of, appreciate, and give full meaning to the terms "lead" and "follow". One partner initiates a movement, the other responds to it. Each, whether as lead or follow, provides a framework of movement and response. To say that the lead directs the dance and the part of the follow is merely to embelish defines a style of dancing doesn't do justice to the subject. When the follow responds, she cannot know with certainty what her lead intends. Her "embellishment" may go in a completely new direction. Hopefully, the two each move in unexpected directions, each challenging the other not only to move appropriately, but adapt and respond that they each form a pattern of movement and response; all of this reaches its own peak when dancers can spontaneously do this not only in response to one another, but in response to the music as well.

Now we return to martial arts. What we see in the movies is a beautiful lie, just as the dancing you see in movies is a lie. Dancers will never have a clear, open space in which to practice their art; they will never move cleanly and beautifully to the music. An exception to this may perhaps be found in Be Cool, when John Travolta and Uma Thurman dance to the Black Eyed Peas in an exclusive LA clubs. Never having been in an exclusive LA club, I don't know if the dance floor might be crowded. And they manage an open free form dance wherein the partners respond to one another; I recall they also pay direct homage to their dancing scene in Pulp Fiction.

To return to martial arts yet again; the lie we encounter in Kung Fu movies (if I may expand the umbrella of that term to include martial arts movies which don't limit themselves to the martial arts of southern China) is that fights are extended affairs, that the fights are clean, even tidy, that fights don't quickly degenerate into ugly brawls, wrestling matches where the winner is the bigger brute rather than the more elegant dancer.

Because we'd prefer that the elegant dancer wins. We love those stories in which David smashes Goliath. We fail to recall the many runts Goliath pounded to jelly because that's the expected outcome. We want the dancer to win because his movements are beautiful, not because he should in fact win.

Returning to the analogy of fighter as dancer, recall that I said that the dance is one of response between partners who have to learn what the other prefers, anticipate and respond as the dance proceeds. An example of a fighter so doing occurs in an obvious fashion (far too obvious, in my opinion, a weakness of this man's movies) in Jet Li's Kiss of the Dragon. He fights a titchy little Frenchman with a fondness for powerful roundhouse kicks. Because he's so good at them, Li can't defend himself effectively, and so has to maneuver his opponent into a realm where he simply doesn't have room to use his favored technique. Then Li kills him; again, he does so by anticipating a maneuver the Frenchman used earlier that had put Li on the ropes earlier in the movie (some sort of fancy kick set that puts the Frenchman in the air, allowing Li to grab his legs and plant his head on the floor, breaking his neck).

Now I'll speak more on the topic of The Transporter, which does an excellent job as a martial arts action movie (to distinguish it from, for example, the action movies of the governator). The fights are choreographed, but with a degree of, if not subtlety (because subtlety can almost never be applied to these movies), then at least skill. The hero must be outnumbered, because he's so much better that a one on one fight can never be a true challenge. If our unarmed hero can best multiple opponents with guns and axes, how challenging can any one opponent be? Well, to be honest, if he's very good and very big, any one opponent can be a real bitch to defeat.

So he fights multiple opponents, and rather than diving in and doing the same thing over and over, as when Jet Li simply uses pipes to take out the inner leg of pairs of opponents time and time again in Kiss of the Dragon in his single mob fight, Statham rather has to put himself in an environment to his favor or altar it in such a fashion.

For example, he finds himself in a bus depot fighting multiple opponents. Rather than face groups of four in the narrow lanes between the buses he enters a bus, whose terrain favors the single skilled opponent. When he later finds himself outnumbered and surrounded, in fact held in a half-nelson, in an open area, he has to struggle until he discovers open troughs of dirty motor oil. Suddenly, he's transformed the arena into an indescribably slick morass and covered himself with the stuff. When he then removes the pedals from bikes for some reason kept nearby (in terms of the plot, absurd. But they do provide him with a means of stability on a 100 square foot pool of motor oil. So that's all right) he's able to whoop booté. I have to wince many times at the end of that fight. Being kicked anywhere by someone wearing those pointy bike pedals... But being kicked in the face? Not even the French deserve that. Well, not all of them.

So that's where I stand on kung fu movies. I enjoy the shit out of 'em. Although I'd kind of like to see a movie where the fighting actually degenerates into a wrestling match. Wait... we have that. The last fight in Lethal Weapon. Man, that's a good fight. Very much an 80s movie, but a good fight.

2006-01-07T02:11:00.000-05:00

I'm a goof

Gore on the Media: The Man's just plain right.

2005-10-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

Media conference on Wednesday in New York:

I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.

How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?

I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?

On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"

The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."

But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?

Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.

In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.

Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well- informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.

The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."

Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."

Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press.

Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.

Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.

And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.

Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more than the world average.

When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.

The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes.

Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.

But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."

But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.

It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.

And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.

Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades.

In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.

The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:

1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all; 2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them; 3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.

What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.

The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.

And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self- government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under- girded and strengthened the rule of law.

But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design -- depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.

Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.

Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.

Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.

Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.

The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.

Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.

So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.

The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."

As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.

And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.

The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.

The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.

For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.

Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."

The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")

In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore.

Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.

And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.

One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.

This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.

And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.

That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.

Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.

And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.

Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.

The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.

The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.

Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent...was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy...but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique...under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."

Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of America's gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.

I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi- way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.

We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.

The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.

I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.

I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today.

First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video.

Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.

It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.

The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.

NASA is full of retards.

2005-09-29T01:10:00.000-04:00

On a message board I post to, someone noted that the head of NASA said the shuttle launch was a mistake, and wondered "Why, then, did we do it?"

This was my reply.

It's not the shuttle that was a mistake, so much as that NASA made many, many mistakes.

After we won the space race, NASA lost the largest reason for its existence. Like all bureaucratic institutions, it existed not so much to accomplish anything, but because all its members wanted to keep their jobs.

To keep NASA's funding, they had to keep justifying the existence of the agency. They had to emphasize the importance of the scientific studies (mostly not that important, and in very low volume), the importance of the continued space program for national morale (the first launch, yes, the 200th?), and the safety (...).

So they continually raised expectations, and had to keep fudging things to make sure no one ever found out how bad it was.

The shuttle was designed almost whole cloth as it was. It wasn't built and tested time and again piece by piece to make sure we knew how they functioned. Those pieces weren't integrated unit by unit and tested again.

This showed in the many problems they've always had in maintaining equipment. Eventually it showed in the Challenger explosion. It showed again two years ago with the Columbia.

As the equipment got older, it got worse. The engineers all knew it and kept reporting the increasing lack of safety. But when those reports hit management, they were unwelcome. In a single memo you find "the chance of seal failure is critically high" and lower down "seal failure is not a critical issue" (I paraphrase).

In the end, the mistake was in trusting a political entity with its own oversight. That's how we lost two shuttles.

Then I adjourned to the bathroom, where I keep magazines for companionship, and read an article in US News and World Report (7/18/05) on the then impending launch of the Discovery (happened 7/26) and what do I read?

Excerpt From a Report on NASA Dumbassity:

Of the 15 changes that the Columbia Accident Invistigation Board recommended be checked off before another flight, NASA says it is sure of only 12. Stull uncentain is whether debris will fall from the external tank during launch, and the agency has not been able to replace the leading edge [of the wing] with stronger materials nor devise a sure way, once in orbit, to repair any damage on the way up. But the agency is going ahead, after its flight team concluded that while the board's concerns are not all met, the chances of a second, similar accident are now below the risks posed by other known dangers, such as meteor damage.

Tards tards tards tards tards.

Now, to my recollection, we've had three disasters in space, only one of which did not kill everyone on board, and all of which were caused by failure of the equipment.

Here you will read that no spacecraft has ever been hit by a meteorite. They've even gone out there with collectors to try and sample them and came back empty-handed. The space station has had to patch 2 holes. Two. As in 1+1.

When an accident occurs, that does NOT mean it will not happen again. That means that the likelihood of its occurence is NOT negligible. What these goddamn fools bet on was that because they flipped a coin and it came up tails, that in the future it's more likely to come up edge.

This is exactly the dumbass attitude that was discovered after the Challenger explosion. Because they wanted so badly to keep sending the shuttle to space, the management insisted that the odds of an accident were 1 in 10^5. That's one flight in every 100,000. Or once every 300 years if we launched every day. We've had three that I can recall, and we DON'T launch every day.

And because the shuttle landed safely (8/9/05), they're just going to assume that their horse-[bleep!] statistics are valid, downgrade safety precautions, postpone indefinitely the final changes recommended after Columbia, and kill more astronauts.

Thank god, at least, that they're running out of shuttles. They're playing Russian roulette, only the bullets are million dollar, 10 year old Pintos with hundreds of thousands of miles. Here's hoping the next one lands on NASA management.

And then, after posting that, I think, "It's praiseworthy that a political figure said a succesful mission was a mistake. That guy has balls. I'm going to say what a good guy he is." Then cynicism kicked in and I decided to try and find the news story so I know the circumstances around his comment.

Good thing.

Here you'll see that I'm prescient. I'm so right it hurts. I can predict these things with remarkable acuity. That they've already happened doesn't mean it's not a prediction. With sufficient evidence of past events I was able to predict exactly this.

I don't know how long the link will work, so I'll blatantly steal the relevant information.

Excerpt From Yet Another Report on NASA Dumbassity:

In a numbing setback sure to set off a national debate over the future of the space program, NASA has grounded all future shuttle flights because of a large chunk of foam that broke off Discovery’s fuel tank in hauntingly similar fashion to Columbia’s doomed mission.

That the Columbia accident didn't happen again is because they got damn lucky.

Tards.

Odysseus/O Brother, Where Art Thou?

2005-08-27T22:48:00.000-04:00

I just finished rereading the Odyssey, and then the whim struck me to rewatch O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and it struck me how well the movie was written.

I'm not just talking about the obvious parallels; they're all over the place:

1) The Kyklopes, Polyphemos/The one-eyed Bible Salesman, Big Dan Teague
In the poem, Odysseus happens upon an isle that is wild, verdant, and lush with food. He ventures with some men to a cave. They wait for the cave's inhabitant to return, and prevail upon his hospitality. Instead he messily devours some of them. They remain for a day, and sharpen a log while waiting. When he returns, Odysseus gets him drunk and they put his eye out with the fire-hardened spike. The poem's actually fairly graphic at this point, though I don't know how realistically. I've never had the good fortune to watch as someone's eye gets stabbed out with a burning hot, pointy stick. Anyway, they escape, though they leave a few behind.

Big Dan instead gets them to serve him a free meal, and pay for the one he was eating when he decided to rob them (two meals, just as in the poem). Then he beats the crap out of them (saving Ulysses Everett McGill for last, just as Polyphemos promised Odysseus he'd be last) and steals their money and car.

2) The Sirenes
Well, this was obvious. They ended up on the rocks. In the movie at least. In the book, Odysseus has his men tie him to the mast and stop up their ears with wax so he can listen. Turns out their song was about... wait for it... the glories of the Trojan War. That's right; they were going to lure him to his death with a song about his own prowess. More on this later.

3) Kirke
The malign goddess didn't really show up in the movie, but I think there was a bit of a reference. Kirke's thing (everyone has a "thing" they do) was to lure people in for a feast and turn them into pigs (à la Bavmorda, in [u]Willow[/u]). Those she really liked, she'd sleep with until she got bored with them, then turn them into something noble, like a lion or a wolf. Odysseus survives because Hêrmes gives him a potion.
Anyway, the movie's parallel is Delmar's (mistaken) belief that Pete's been turned into a toad.

4) Menelaos
Did you catch "Pappy" O'Daniel's first name? Menelaos, just like the red-haired king, husband to Helen, for whom Odysseus sailed off to war in the first place.

Actually, one of his epithets was "Menelaos Xanthos", which is why he's called the red-haired king. "Xanthos" means "blond", or "slave". So why do they call him red haired? Have you ever seen a blond Greek? Of course not, so he couldn't have been blond.

Um, have you ever seen a red headed Greek?

5) Man of Constant Sorrow
I didn't get this until I watched it tonight. Here's a sample of the lyrics.

I am a man of constant sorrow,
I've seen trouble all my days.
I bid farewell to old Kentucky,
the place where I was born and raised.

And further,

Your friends think maybe I'm a stranger,
my face you'll never see no more.

Ha! Get it? It's the whole theme of both poem and movie! He's a wanderer, having adventures. That's his idiom (his "thing"). Odysseus bid farewell to old Ithaka, where he was born and raised.

6) The Wife
Penélopê in the poem, Penny in the movie (ha!). He has to leave her behind, and she gets courted while he's away. To quote one of Everett's daughters, "He's a suitor!"

In both poem and movie, the wife welcomes this attention.

Penny's motives are clear. She's got seven daughters to look after, and Vernon T. Waldrop (the suitor) has good prospects.

Penélopê's motives are less clear. She takes joy at their presence, even though they're impoverishing her. This is clearly indicated by the dream she relates to Odysseus in his guise as a beggar (was it even a real dream, or was she testing him?). I think Homer was simply an astute observer of the human scene. Greek women were fairly circumscribed. Their fathers, husbands, and sons were technically in control of their lives (though this poem and others indicate that women held more power de facto than they were considered to de jure). Legally, a woman had no real control over her life. With the suitors around. Penélopê was more than just the wife waiting for Odysseus; she was the center of the plot. Without them, Odysseus could just come home and she'd be a minor point to wrap up at the end of the poem. Because she was sought after, she became important. She was a proving point to her husband and her son. She had to be fought for. She became known for her guile in holding the suitors off for years. More than just the waiting wife, she was special and had to be acknowledged.

7) The Blind Prophet
Odysseus has to travel to the underworld in order to speak to Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes. Ulysses happens upon a blind prophet after escaping from the penal farm. Both prophets give unwelcome news.

Tiresias tells Odysseus that he'll be away from home for years, and will have to travel MORE after getting home. The nameless prophet of the film says they won't get the treasure they seek, but they'll get another one, despite obstacles in their path.

8) Finally, the man himself
Odysseus was famed for his ability as a thinker, a tactician, a debater, rather than as a fighter (although, as a hero, he was necessarilly death incarnate when the poet got around to it). He could talk anyone's ear off, lie on the spot, come up with whatever story he needed to get someone to do what he wanted. That was his skill. He told a long (and subtly insulting) story to the king of the Phiaikians in order to get a ride home. When he gets home, he tells a lie to the first person he meets. Hell, he lies to EVERYONE he meets. Even after he's killed the suitors and slept with his wife (while dissembling to her about the time he spent with Kalypso, nudge nudge), he lies to his father. He's just a fast talking, likeable liar.

And so is Ulysses Everett McGill.

Neither had much control over the men nominally under their command. Both were vain.

All in all, the movie was incredibly well written. I also enjoyed the many Wizard of Oz references. The KKK dance was funny, too, especially the lyrics.

Yo hi yo hi yo hi yo
eenie meenie miny moe

Ah well. This has gone on long enough. I'll talk about the odd feminist/antifeminist tone of the Odyssey some other time.

Cain and Able, oh, Onan, too.

2005-08-11T17:06:00.000-04:00

People don't like other people, it's a fact. Especially if they're foreign or different. Most especially if they've got a different religion than you. Hoo boy, watch out for religious folks with a grudge!

So you have the Israelites, who are mostly shepherds. They herd, and being herders, they're not farmers or hunters. We know that herders hated farmers, who hated them right back. Different lifestyle, it makes you weak or stupid or indolent or you smell funny.

Able was a shepherd; his gift to god was a sacrifice of meat, and god liked it. Cain was a farmer; he gave god some fruitw, and god said, "What, are you calling me a fruit? I don't like yourfruity gift. Go away and let me go ack to liking Able."

So Cain threw a hissy fit and killed Able, then went awa to found a foreign country where they do fruity things, like farm.

See what this story really is? It's a canonization of an excuse to go to war.

1) God hates farmers, just like we do! Yay! Look, it says here that God doesn't like their gifts, he likes OUR gifts.
2) Foreigners are evil! See, Cain went off and founded some other country! All foreigners, bad! Hiss! Spit!
3) They started it! They hit us first!

And while I'm at it, I don't like people talking about the story of Onan like it's a condemnation of masturbation or of birth control. See, Onan's brother died, and he did so before he could get his wife properly knocked up with a son. No son means no heir. By the laws presented in Leviticus, it was therefore Onan's duty to get his brother's wife pregnant (If they got married, it would be known as a Levirate marriage) so his (dead) brother would have an heir.

Onan didn't want to do this. With his brother dead and heirless he would be the sole inheritant of his father's property. Or maye he just didn't like his brother all that much. For whatever reason, he didn't want to get his sister-in-law pregnant. That was his crime, failing to fulfill the Levirate law that said he had to do so. Nothing else.

And it's not like it was ambiguous in the Bible. It says straight out that he didn't want to get his brother's wife pregnant, so he didn't, and God killed him for it.

I Like Dumb Movies

2005-07-31T02:25:00.001-04:00

I like a movie that has the courage to say, "I don't have to win an award!" I like a movie where the main character runs around beating up/killing anonymous bad guys in well choreographed fights. I like the lack of a detailed plot. I like it when there's no character development.

Complexity is for people with interesting haircuts and an espresso addiction. Plot is for people who read long books about the weather in upstate Oregon. Character development is for girls and those anomalous guys who admit that they cry.

I like guy movies. I like it when things blow up. I like it when the girl explains away plot holes by taking her clothes off. I like it when directors distract us from bad lines with girls in skimpy outfits. I like fast cars, fast women, and fast ... action scenes.

I like it when the lead pauses in the middle of a situation in which there's no way anyone could pause and then says something pseudo-witty. I like it when the bad guys are obviously bad because they do something stereotypically bad (like shoot someone who doesn't need shooting). I like good guys who are obviously good because they do something stereotypically good (like not shooting someone who obviously needs shooting, but then having to shoot him because the [bleeper] doesn't know that he's fighting the good guy and should give up and not keep trying to kill him).

I like movies that embrace the B label. I like it when they know they have silly plots and run with it. I like it when they go beyond corny. I love it when they take a long, hard look in the mirror and have SEX with their clichédness.

I hate the masturbation of clever. I hate a movie that does something witty, then pauses and says, "Did you see that? I'm smart. Suck my [bleep!], you critic whores! I know you love this [bleep!]!" I hate movies that critics rave about. I hate critics, because they're the [bleep!]s who couldn't get a job writing. Writers can't get real jobs because they spill things and get lost in technical applications and tend to lose focus and start daydreaming about things. Critics are the people who are bad at being bad at things. They're the ones who watch a film major's on-screen-mind-masturbation and think, "Wow, that was deep." They're the ones who think a 3 hour movie about a guy stuck on an island is a moving exploration. They think a guy standing at a crossroads is symbolic of standing at a crossroads. [bleep!] critics.

I like the movies that people who are paid to watch movies hate.

Technically, it's Thursday.

2005-06-23T03:24:00.000-04:00

It's late, I'm kinda tired, and the tag at the back of my neck itches. That sounds like a perfect set of reasons to talk about fighting dirty through history. There's a lot of groin popping in literature, if you know what to look for.

My first example comes from the collected romances of Chrétien de Troyes from around the 13th century. You have to realize that the world was absurdly different back then. Men wept on eachothers' shoulders when they parted, war was the accepted, constanst, state of affairs, they didn't have the Late Show.

An Arthurian Romance (so called because they usually involve the big man or one of his knights) usually had three elements; the knight's horse, his sword, and his woman. He would start with some combination of these three, and have to strive to acquire the third. Sometimes he'd lose one or more of the three and have to reacquire them. I don't know if it's significant that two of the three relate directly to fighting and only one to sex.

Anyway, one of these stories begins with a young knight out hunting (on his horse). As I recall, he's hunting a stag. Unfortunately, calamity strikes and he receives a wound to his thigh. I'll let you know right now that that's a euphemism for groin. We know this because his mysterious leg wound in no way hampers his ability to fight later in the story, and because the only way his wound can be cured is by the touch of a woman. Appropriate, because this young man was notoriously unmarried.

Anyway, he gets in a magic boat and rescues a woman trapped in a tower married to an old man who, we are again euphemistically told, needs Viagra. Some things change, some things don't. By the way, most Arthurian romances involve dashing young men stealing the wives of older men. Gawain & Lancelot, for example. Lancelot's story [The Knight of the Cart] almost got Chrétien punished by the church for showing Gwinevere as an adultress. At least Gawain, the perfect knight, had the decency to kill the poor bastard first.

Actually, this is an interesting reflection of a situation that persisted for most of our history. Women had an unfortunate tendency to die young, often in childbirth. Men had a tendency to not be worth marrying until they were older and had accumulated some real estate and wealth. So most brides were taken up by older men, which left the landscape awash with unmarried young men, many of whom spent their entire lives preparing for war. This was an age of conflict, remember.

So you get a bunch of horny young men with weapons and nothing to do... The result should be easily predictable. "What dost thou rebel against, young master?" "What hast thou got?"

Why do you think Norman knights conquered Sicily? They had nothing better to do. And they couldn't get away with that sort of back home in Western France. Why do you think people were so eager to send knights off to Jerusalem? Because they were wreaking havoc on the countryside at home; better they do that sort of thing to the heathens.

Anyway, back to thigh wounds. They show up all over the place, because everyone was imitating the best selling book of all time. The first recorded instance of anyone getting a shot to the meat and two veg occurs in the Bible. Jacob wrestles with an angel, who "knocks his thigh out of joint". "The mighty sinew there shriveled." Jacob doesn't have any more kids after that fight, and most Biblical figures are fecund out the wazoo. That angel fought dirty.

Let's face it, there's really nothing new we can bring to the table concerning fighting. They knew how to knock each other about back in the day.

I'm sure my Uncle Ben can correct me all over the place on this post.

The Religious Right

2005-06-15T19:43:00.000-04:00

Is it just me, or is it disingenuous for the religious right to claim they're being persecuted while at the same time justifying any action on their part by pointing out that Christians are a majority in the nation?

Of course, just because Christians form a majority doesn't mean that the religious right forms a majority. Small-minded reactionaries aren't yet a majority in America, I hope. The fact is that every politician out there kowtows to the vocal, extreme minority of his party, and the Republicans long ago allied themselves with the RR.

All this adds up to a small minority having undue influence over a small majority. Because the Republican can't afford for that vocal minority to defect, they have to keep feeding them. It's like riding a tiger; it'll get you where you're going, but you can't get off once you get there.

As for the claims of persecution; don't be fatuous. It's not persecution to keep you from doing things to me. YOU are allowed to pray in school; don't try to make me do the same. You don't have to have gay sex. You don't have to not believe in god.

This country was fatally weakened when small, fearful men betrayed the country's principles and added religion to our coinage and pledge of allegiance.

This country is majority Christian. This country's majority has always been Christian. That does not make it a Christian nation, unless you're willing to extend the concept that this is a white nation, founded for and by the past and present majority of whites, from which principles we have most definitely strayed.

This is astounding.

2005-06-11T01:09:00.000-04:00

Check this out. This guy can DANCE.

http://www.loosechange.ws/videophotos.html

It's the second video, the "Eric Fenn - Sketches" video.

They played the music fast to film him dancing to it, then they slowed him down to play the music normal speed on the video.

Let's Emigrate

2005-06-08T01:12:00.001-04:00

"Domestically, Britain was very divided on the American Civil War. There were economic issues, ideological issues, and moral issues involved and different segments of the British population were on opposing sides. So any intervention in the American Civil War would have caused a huge political crisis in Britain.

Strategically, Britain knew that the United States and the Monroe Doctrine worked to British advantage. Occupying the United States would have been a huge expense and would have forced Britain to either allow other Europeans to occupy their own shares of the Americas or to assume the burden of keeping them out. Either option would have stretched British resources and made Britain the target of more foreign resentment."

I just read this in a thread about why no one attacked the US during the Civil War (think about it, why wouldn't they attack a small country with rich economic resources in the middle of a crisis?).

My thought, on reading this, was "and that's why the US will do nothing when China, in the next few months, invades Taiwan."

We're too heavily involved elsewhere, and China owns too much US debt.

Driving

2005-06-07T23:43:00.000-04:00

I should teach people how to drive. For a year, I worked as a pizza delivery guy, getting paid decent cash to drive like a maniacal asshole. I was given permission to drive the way I did by the police. One time I passed a K9 unit. The sedan behind me, heartened by my example, did the same, and was promptly pulled over.

I saw every example of bad driving there is. I encountered the worst of inattentive morons and inconsiderate pricks. I've been rear-ended, flipped off, honked at for using my turn signal. I know how to analyse a driver's attitude and destination in a few moments and predict all future driving behavior from that.

In other words, I know all the ways there are of fuxxong up, and all the ways to compensate for mistakes in others. It may come as a surprise, but I'm one of those slow drivers that are content to use the right-hand lane.

And I'm willing to yell at students and get their attention. I've the sort of fun arrogance that gets responses.

I rule.

Damn, that sort of thing feels good.

KITTY ATTACK

2005-05-26T06:46:00.000-04:00

Calley, my new kitty.

You can't see it, but she's .... special. She's half grey tabby and half orange tabby.

I don' know how to describe it, but where you see orange is where she's basically an orange striped tabby. Where you see grey she's a grey striped tabby. She's "called" calico, but it's like she's got two different types of tabby right there on her!

I've the coolest cat ever.

I've had a discussion with my older brother. Cats are traditionally "girls" pets and dogs are for guys, right?

Fuck that! Cats take care of themselves! Put down food, and make sure the toilet isn't the epitome of "covered with shit" and cats take care of themselves! And they can live without constant reinforcement!

With a dog, you have to be there all the time. Dogs are for girls, who need someone there all the time.

A cat is a guy's pet. They need minimal supervision.

Now, to go reassure my new cat. She's still worried tha ninjas will break in and steal her tuna. That's a sensible fear. I've annoyed many a ninja clan.

If you're in any way affiliated with my apartment complex, you're hereby forbidden to have read this.

The Joplin Apocalypse

2005-05-25T20:26:00.000-04:00

There were some seriously awesome/creepy clouds over the town of Joplin, Missouri. Stuff straight out of Ghostbusters!

Check out these two:

Just look back and forth between them. They were obviously taken just a few seconds apart. Imagine sitting there, able to SEE that air is actually a fluid!

Of course, also imagine sitting there, knowing that the sky looked like it did because of the sort of air currents that lead to tornado formation.

You can see even more pics here:
http://www.clickhalah.com/images/crazyclouds/

One of those is my new desktop.

2005-05-23T03:53:00.000-04:00

Fight Club Desktop

Man, I can't even remember who made this. A little research tells me he took a Fight Club desktop he found online and added the words. I 've seen the black background with Norton holding the soap online. I found it tonight and this is years after the movie came out. So I can only surmise he took that and added the multi-phrases to it. Personally, I think it's better with the words, even if they sometimes clash with desktop icons.

Damn good wallpaper, I think.

By the by, I'm aware this image won't copy well. I suppose I could send you the original. Sheez, I gots ta find out who made this, I think he deserves credit. Or at least warning. I'm aware I've a huge fanbase and he could become the next artist du jour because of me.

Diffusion

2005-05-22T15:27:00.000-04:00

Picture, if you will, a bar at closing time. It's about to release its collection of drunks back into the wild. So that the drunks can wander freely, this bar is in the middle of a featureless plain, infinite in dimensions.

This scenario is not unlike putting a drop of dye into a glass of water. The infinite plain is the water, and the dye is the drunks. What will happen as time passes? Obviously, the dye will diffuse into the water (the drunks will scatter randomly across the plain), but how will the dye diffuse, and can we predict it at all mathematically?

To make things simpler, we'll make our drunks one-dimensional. The bar is located at the origin of a line.

Now, you can see (hopefully) that the drunks are free to wander up or down the line. When they fall down, they have an equal chance of heading in either direction.

I'm deliberately setting this up in the same way Einstein did, but without all the math. In his discussion, the drunks were particles, and he set up functions that defined how far they moved and how often, etc.

The drunks (dye) are totally concentrated at the origin. So if you were to graph the concentration of drunks as a function of space, the graph would be 0 everywhere but the origin. At the origin you would have a spike, representing all the drunks.

You could say this is a graph of the function c(x,t) concentration a function of space and time. This graph is c(x,0), all space at time t=0.

We know that as the drunks wander, they will leave the bar (the origin) and slowly spread across the infinitely vast plain. But we want to come up with a mathematical representation of their movements. Can we be precise? The answer is "yes", which probably won't surprise you.

How can we describe the concentration of drunks as a function of both space and time? First, we need to introduce the concept of flow. Flow is the rate of passage of drunks through a point at a certain time. Picture a square placed over our line, so that the line passes through the center, perpendicular to the square.

If three drunks move through the square heading to the right, then the flow at that point at that time is 3. If three drunks move through the square to the right and four drunks move through it to the left, then the flow at that time and position is -1. As a function, flow is:

Now we need to relate "flow" with "concentration". This is actually pretty easy to do. Suppose we have 6 drunks on the left side of the square and 2 on the right.

Once we release them, they're going to spread randomly. So some will move through the square heading right, some will go through the square heading left.

First, the change in concentration with respect to x. We see that there are more on the left than the right, so concentration is decreasing as x is increasing.

The funky symbols in front of 'c' and 'x' are Greek lower case deltas, they represent change. In this case, the change in concentration as x changes.

What about flow? The drunks are moving randomly, so half will go one way and half the other. Three will move through the square heading right, one will go through it heading left. So flow overall is:

And we see that flow is proportional to the negative of the derivative of concentration. Say what? When concentration decreases as you head to the right, that means that flow will be to the right. This jibes with our qualitative understanding of diffusion. There are fewer particles on the right, and we know that particles will diffuse from where they are to where they aren't. Nice.

However, we can't work, mathematically, with that proportionality. Let's get rid of it and stick a nice, fat, "equals" sign in there.

This equation tells us that flow is equal to the negative of the derivative of concentration multiplied by some constant number "D". Hoodoggy. We had to stick that "D" in there because that's what you do when you change from proportionality to equality. You can think of "D" as a factor that transforms one number (change in concentration) to another (flow).

However, this hasn't given us an actual equation. It just relates two functions, both undefined. Can we get rid of flow? (I know, I introduce flow, and now I want to get rid of it? That's what you do in this kind of thing.)

Let's relate flow to concentration in a different way. Instead of a square on the line, let's stick a cube on there.

Now we'll talk about flow and relate it to concentration inside the cube. First, let's state that flow is positive (j>0), that particles are moving to the right.

Posit that at some time t, there are three drunks moving through the square at x = -1, and five drunks moving through the square at x = 1. This corresponds to positive flow and to the case that the flow increases as x increases. In this case, the concentration inside the cube is going to decrease by two drunks.

See that? Three move in, five move out. Now for the functions.

Flow is increasing with x, and concentration is decreasing with time.

Now let's reverse the situation. Now five move in and three move out.

Five move in, three move out, flow is still to the right, it's decreasing, and concentration is increasing.

So now we can generalize this to an equality, right? Hooray! Yes!
Let's call this Equation 1.
Ooh! But we knew from before that

So now we just have to do the math!

And now we can plug this back into Equation 1...

Sweet! We've completely eliminated flow from the picture, and now we have a formula that discusses concentration and ONLY concentration. Booyah! Hmm... But how much information does this equation contain? It's got all those derivatives and that proportionality constant. Fortunately, a member of the sprawling Bernoulli family dealt with situations like this and he's told us how to solve it (Yeah, there were a bunch of mathematical geniuses in one family. Their dinner discussions must've been abstruse awesomeness.)

To deal with this, you have to make a number of assumptions. The first is that:

This assumption tells us that concentration is a function of space and time, and that they are independent. This is an assumption that holds true for stochastic motion (random, Brownian, diffusive). It obviously wouldn't hold true for directed motion; throw the ball, and it's path in time and space are fixed and related to each other.

Now we need to plug that back into our big, ugly, derivative-filled equation.

The apostrophes are another notation for derivative that you can use for functions that only have one variable. It saves some space, makes things a bit easier on the eyes.

Now let's rearrange that bad boy so that we get time on one side and space on the other (this is called separation of variables).
equation 2
Now that is pretty. And it has the nice property that it can only be true if both sides are equal to a constant (because they involve different variables, see?). This next part is going to have a LOT of equations.

Now we're going to go ahead and assume that T(t) and X(x) are exponential functions, because exponential functions have a nice property. The derivative of an exponential is equal to a constant multiplied by that same exponential (so X'/X is equal to that constant).

The "k" in each of these is another constant. The "i" in the second formula is a special mathematical constant. It's the square root of -1. Look back to when you learned about square roots and you'll recall you can only take the square root of a positive number. "i" let's you work around that. It's the imaginary number. Cool, eh?

Now we need to check that these fit the requirements of equation 2.

Excellent! The functions we have are a nice little model for the mathematical definition of concentration! If we plug these back in to the definition of c(x,t)=X(x)T(t) and do a little more work, we come up with the pretty result:

"Wait," you say, "where'd all that junk out front come from? Why are 'D' and 't' on the bottom up there? What the holy hell are you doing?" The quick answer: don't fret. It's all just to make sure the function behaves like we want it to. This is really a representation of the probability of finding a particle at a certain location at a certain time. The junk out front makes certain that the probability of finding a particle anywhere at any time is 100%, not more or less than that. The other changes we'll go ahead and illustrate here and now.

Remember, when t=0, at the very beginning of things, we have a spike, with all our drunks inside the bar. Then we hit last call and the drunks start going home. We get a nice little gaussian curve that's still pretty sharp. It's still pretty early, so most of the drunks are still near the bar. However, as time progresses, the drunks get more and more spread out and that curve flattens down. Once we hit infinity, the drunks are evenly distributed across all space and the curve is completely flat. There's an equal probability of finding a drunk at any point.

Now that we've got it in one dimension, want to tack on an additional two dimensions and try doing it again? :shudder: Let's just leave it that this can be expanded to three dimensions without any difficulty.

Kinetics

2005-05-22T15:22:00.000-04:00

Okay, so the combination of Windows and other factors yields inordinate suckage. So I'm going to have to modify my (100!) exam and change things so it's completely qualitative. Some pictures, no math. It'll take me a while, but I'll go ahead and get the first up this afternoon.

2005-05-22T15:17:00.000-04:00

Me'n'a friend