Derailing Myself

 Musings On Present Day, Speculations  No Responses »
Oct 312012
 

I FB-shared this article because, as Irin Carmon says “Dear everyone asking what it is about Republican candidates and their clumsy talk about rape: This is a feature, not a bug.”

The title of the article is “Does God Want You To Be Raped?” I didn’t comment any further, because that was the message and I didn’t want to derail it with unrelated thoughts. That’s what my blog is for.

So, to derail – Of course that’s what god wants!

Or rather, if you believe in an omnipotent and omniscient god, then he is at least OK with it.

It’s this sort of ethical quandary with Liberal Christians that throws me into fits. The Fundamentalists are morally repugnant, but they are intellectually honest. They say “Yeah, god’s fine with that. He does want you to get raped, because the clothes you’re wearing offended him,” or some shit. I can engage these sorts of monsters head-on.

Liberal Christians are, in day-to-day life, cool with me. I want to encourage the people who have to be religious to be so in the least damaging way possible. One that respects human rights, defends the Enlightenment, and supports science. I can’t be an advocate of drug legalization and be unwilling to live in a society with some drug use. These are good people, we all have our vices, and it’s a pleasure to live alongside them. But then they ask the rhetorically stupid question “Does God Want You To Be Raped?” It’s very hard not to engage them and tell them YES. According to your beliefs, HE DOES. So don’t try to use that to score any points!

And that leads me to my ethical conundrum. I want the world to have less bad people (Fundies) and more good people. I consider liberal christians to be good, so where possible it’d be desirable to step them down from fundamentalism to liberalism. But that feels like lying to them. Ok, screw feels like, that IS lying to them. It’s very hard for me to do that. It’s all I can do it keep my mouth shut when a liberal preacher is trying to make points. Hell, this blog post is proof I can’t even do that, I have to rant about it somewhere, even if it’s just in the privacy of my blog.

I think maybe this is the way to go. I’m usually able to not interfere in public. Maximizing Obama Christians while minimizing Phelps Christians is good, yeah? Just release the pressure in private. It’s like fighting in WWI. You may want to knock the silly-looking Beret right off that French dude’s head, but he’s there in the trenches with you fighting against the Krauts. Just complain about it in private back at the English Pub and be happy those guns are on this side of No-Man’s-Land.

Gifting Knowledge

 Personal  No Responses »
Oct 292012
 

As mentioned in my About page, this blog is mainly a personal archive. It’s for me to compare my future selves vs past selves, and to maybe assist in any reviving/emulation attempts after I’m frozen. As such it doesn’t contain all that much that is objectively valuable to other people. And yet it still takes me quite a bit of time to write this stuff up and post it. I dunno, maybe I’m just slow, and I’ll get faster as I gain experience.

Which is why I am in awe of and incredibly grateful for posts such as this one explaining that pH Balancing is bullshit. It is long. It is obviously researched quite a bit. It has a lot of relevant links, and is densely packed with valuable information – it has a very high content-to-words ratio. It is well written, and it draws from a pool of knowledge that was cultivated via years of college and job experience. It had to have taken hours to put together.

In short, it provides an objectively valuable informational resource to the human race. Very few people could have written it, and of those, only a minuscule fraction put in the effort to actually write it. And then they gifted it to everyone for free.

This is the sort of thing that fills me with joy and makes me feel better about the human race. We are awesome. Thank you to all the people who do this sort of thing, you make the world richer.

That’s Not Humor

 Musings On Present Day  2 Responses »
Oct 262012
 

Beating up people weaker than you – not funny.

Torturing small animals – not funny.

Humor is often used as a weapon. That’s what satire is. And like any weapon, it can be used to oppress the weak, or defend them. A weapon turned against people who harm others is a weapon used well.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-november-3-2005/mass–hysteria

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass. Hysteria
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

 

A weapon used to hurt people who you consider lower status simply so that you can laugh at them is a weapon wielded by the bad guys. Therefore, just so we’re clear – this shit is not funny.

(“trolls posted a fake screenshot of a tweet by verified “Entertainment Tonight” that “confirmed” Justin Bieber had leukemia. [Fans] began posting pics and vids of themselves with their heads shaved in a global show of support”)

http://cheezburger.com/6707877120

You managed to exploited someone’s good will and love of music to ruin their hair and humiliate them. It’s vicious high school bullshit.

This is in the same family of crap as the Daniel Tosh rape jokes. Kicking puppies doesn’t get you laughs. It simply brands you as an asshole.

SF/F Review – City of Bones

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Oct 252012
 

City of Bones, by Martha Wells

Synopsis: A post-apocalyptic fantasy. After out-of-control magic reduced most of the world to a desert wasteland, the survivors do their best to survive while trying to find magical artifacts and piece together what went wrong.

Brief Book Review: A lackluster effort. There is never any build-up of tension, the world building suffers from multiple holes, and the book commits the cardinal sin of fiction: it is boring. Not recommended.

Club Review: As a club review, it’s not as bad as a solitary read. The book club will likely find itself comparing this to other post-apocalyptic or dystopian works they actually enjoyed, and may get into some fun conversations about the contrasts, and how people react in truly desperate situations. Those with a historical background might draw comparisons to Rome. And everyone will have some fun talking about the various inconsistencies and snafus. It’s not awful, and it’s an early book – I’ve heard the author has gone on to write much better things. But that’s not enough to recommend people spend their limited time reading or skimming it. Not Recommended.

What I Run On

 Personal, Speculations  No Responses »
Oct 232012
 

I’ve been sick over the past week, which reminds me again just how much we’re just biological machines.

In my previous life I had dismissed the importance of a bodily incarnation entirely. I am my mental processes, what do I care for the meat life-support system I’m stuck in? I didn’t much care what went into it so long as it kept my brain running. I couldn’t wait for the day I could replace all my organic bits with cybernetic variants, which would last longer, work better, and be easier to repair. In my ideal world I’d be able to become an entirely disembodied intellect, possibly running on a computer network.

Once I decided to get in shape and started caring for my body, I suddenly realized how much of who I am depends on the meat I’m composed of. I’m more assertive now, and quite a bit more pro-active. Before I would complain about having to do anything that required manipulating the physical world, now I stand up and get shit done.

While I was sick I naturally couldn’t do much physically. But the change to my mental patterns was far more pronounced than it had any right to be. I was gloomy and irritable. I started dwelling on the suckitude of humanity, and how we’re all doomed anyway, so what the hell is the point of anything? I was reverting back to my previous self. Not for long, and not nearly as extreme, but in occasional sharp bursts before I got it back under control.

I realize a lot of being an Agent is figuring out how to hack your body and your mind so that you can direct them into doing what YOU want, rather than what the Elephant wants. Episodes like this make me worry. It was ridiculously easy to unseat my Rider with a viral invasion. Could I have altered my tactics to overcome this, given enough time? Or once I become old an frail will I succumb to permanently becoming a less happy person?

Part of this blog’s purpose is finding out. I’m leaving a permanent record I can compare my future states to, and see how much has changed.

It also leaves me wondering – would an emulation of me without this dependence on a bio-machine be a good enough copy to consider it truly me? Are Humans 1.0 doomed to forever be stuck on top of unwieldy unconscious systems that they have to fight against? Is that part of what it means to be human? Only one way to find out…

It seems like the claim of some deaf that getting a cochlear implant will forever fundamentally change what it means to be them, and that it is an assault on all of deaf culture. Maybe this is true. Maybe Deaf Johnny is a different enough person from Hearing Johnny that Deaf Johnny can be said to be dead. But if we wouldn’t choose to deafen people, we have a case for saying that Hearing could be a good thing. I’m certainly glad I’m fit now, and I wouldn’t chose to become fat again, and I’m not sad that Fat Eneasz is dead. Frankly, Fit Eneasz is better.

So if post-humans were to make the case that life is much better after abandoning the seething mess of urges we’re built on… hell, why not? Gotta keep changing and growing, or you’ll be left behind with the Amish.

Evaluating Tools

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Oct 172012
 

Tweet from Ricky Gervais – “Dear Religion, This week I safely dropped a man from space while you shot a child in the head for wanting to go to school. -Yours, Science”

A friend asked: ” Is it really fair to use the Taliban as the mascot for religion? You could easily switch around the bias and say something like “Dear Science, Today Charlemagne adopted Catholicism which united Europe and help pull it out of the dark ages. While you developed the hydrogen bomb which if dropped in NYC will kill around 8 million people in seconds.” “

He’s missing the point. This wasn’t about saying religious people are like the Taliban, and non-religious people are like the Stratos team. This is comparing the tools of science – which gives us the ability to understand the world and use that knowledge to bend it to our will, with the tools of religion – which gives us the ability to motivate people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do by lying to them about reality.

My reply: I’d argue that what united Europe was his military conquest, and the dark ages lasted several more centuries. smile But in the end, religion is a social hack, and science is a reality hack. I dislike manipulating people, and I like manipulating reality, so I’m going to be biased toward one and away from the other, and I’m going to try to spread that bias to others.

Him: See I respect that philosophy only I think the example you posted is a little extreme… Kind of sounds like you are mirroring those crazy extremist religious people.

It’s meant to be a bit extreme, for two reasons.

The first is that it’s only the extremist religions that I have a problem with. If all the religions out there were like the Lake Wobegon Lutherans I wouldn’t complain. As long as religion keeps encouraging fanatics I’ll keep ragging on it. You might say it’s not fair to lump in the Wobegon Lutherans with the Taliban, but that brings me to reason #2…

Religion is useful in direct proportion to how harmful it is. Your point in the first comment (if I’m interpreting correctly) is that religion can be a powerful social tool for uniting and motivating people. While that’s true, it seems that it becomes less and less effective at doing that as the religion becomes more and more reasonable and tolerant.* The most benign religions, the ones we don’t mind and can exist with happily, have the least ability to whip their followers into unified action. The more virulent and fanatical a religion is, the better it becomes at this sort of motivation. You see the Taliban seizing governments, not the Unitarian Universalists. This makes it a BAD tool, in my opinion. The better it is at doing what you want, the more it hurts the world as a whole. We’d be better off without it, and finding some other tool to use instead. Unfortunately it’s like the Dark Side of the Force – it’s quick and easy and the costs aren’t born by the people who abuse it, so those who want power and don’t care about it’s negative side-effects are happy to use it.

And that’s why I feel it must be given a bad name – so people can recognize that those who do use it are often bad.

Science does not have this downside. Generally the more fanatical a scientist becomes, the worse the science becomes, until it breaks down completely and is useless (like the Lemarkian genetics pushed by the Soviet Union).

(*note – I don’t know of any research to this effect, that’s only the way it seems to me from my observation. If I can be shown that this is not the case I can be swayed)

Broken Windows

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Oct 122012
 

Another round of amateur verbal pugilism. The challenger is in italics, my replies in not-italics.

Higher cost items include a higher profit which can employ more people. For example, when I worked at a car dealer, a new base model jeep wrangler had $99 in profit for the salesmen. A fully loaded had $8,000 in pure profit. Therefore, a wealthier person choosing the fully loaded model gave more in profit to the dealer enabling him to support a greater staff, from mechanics to detailers to office staff.

You are assuming that money is the same thing as wealth. This is a common mistake, and it is wrong. The dealership charges a premium on luxury goods, so it’s able to extract more profit from the fully loaded model. However the difference in actual wealth between a fully loaded Jeep and base Jeep is very small. You are implying that a fully loaded Jeep is equivalent to 80 base Jeeps (as it is, in terms of profit-to-salesman). Are you actually claiming that society is as enriched by the production and use of one fully loaded Jeep as it would be by the production and use of 80 base Jeeps? If not, can you see where you went wrong?

It’s a two-part problem. The first being that a salesman’s ability to extract profit is not equal to the utility of an item. If we’re talking economics, it’s utility we’re interested in. The second is that the $8000 isn’t magically lost if it’s not spent on the Jeep. It would be spent in some other part of the economy, and thus would pay for someone else’s salary (maybe the ski resort employee, or the diamond miner). It’s an example of the Broken Windows fallacy.

Thats a curious way to mis-understand my statement. You are somewhat correct in stating that money is not the same as wealth, but wealth is not wealth unless it can be converted into a currency. I was also addressing A*****’s situation as she lives in Denver and not Detroit. As such, it matters little to her how many jeeps are created, only what is sold locally and only that portion of profit which is kept locally. For assuredly there is profit in the jeep for the plant, but that money is removed from the local economy and little of that will find its way back to the people of Colorado.

I also fail to see where I claimed that 8000 would be lost if it wasn’t spent on the jeep. Rather, I was pointing out that a wealthier person would be more likely to spend that additional money which would support more local jobs. It matters little on what that money is spent on, just that it is being spent. Be it Burger King, a week in Vail, a yacht, or popcorn at the movie theater. It all supports jobs. Some good, some not so good, but jobs none the less.

No, wealth is wealth. Wealth is what we want. Currency simply facilitates trade by making that wealth easier to exchange between arbitrary products/services.

The focus on locally-kept profit is interesting. It’s certainly the best way to approach the issue if your goal is short-term political or personal gain. From a more economic point-of-view, the most important fact is that we (as a society) created one more Jeep of wealth. Capturing the profits from its sale locally may be a business or political concern, but it doesn’t have much to do with econ.

Upon further reflection, it does pose interesting economic questions (I had to step away from the keyboard for a half hour). The salesman/dealership spent almost the exact same amount of labor transporting & selling both the base and luxury models. Society gets near the same utility from a base and a luxury model. Why are the salespeople compensated so much more for the luxury line? My own answer would have something to do with the diminishing marginal utility of a dollar and the accompanying inefficiencies of concentrating a lot of money into a small number of hands. But I have my biases. :)

You didn’t claim that the remaining $7900 would be lost, but it is implied with your statement of ‘that extra profit can be used to support a greater staff, etc’. The implication is that without that extra $7900, there wouldn’t be money to hire more people, and less jobs would be created. While that’s true *of the dealership*, it’s not true as a whole. The jobs would simply be somewhere else, where the money was spent instead. That’s why economics doesn’t focus as much on whether profit is captured locally (such as at the local dealership). Locality is relative. Overall wealth creation is the greater concern.

You claim that a wealthier person would be more likely to spend that additional money which would support more local jobs. This is actually the opposite of the case – typically the wealthier someone is the more they save, and the poorer someone is the more they spend immediately. But this isn’t a good argument for my side, since savings are largely re-introduced into the economy as investment. Mainly I’d like to see a bit more consistency. The “it all supports jobs” line in this comment is in opposition to the “ a wealthier person choosing the fully loaded model gave more in profit to the dealer enabling him to support a greater staff” line in the previous comment. Please pick a position.

SF/F – Cat’s Cradle

 Book Club Review  No Responses »
Oct 102012
 

Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

Synopsis: A nihilist travels to the poorest nation on earth and joins the world’s most nihilistic religion just days before the entire world is destroyed.

Brief Book Review: Like all of Vonnegut’s books it’s very well written. It pulls you in and holds you. And like all of his books, it also makes you hate being alive. Unless you’re in a similar emotional position as the author the characters will come off as extremely unlikable and the relentless despair leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Strongly recommended for those in pain, not recommended for anyone else.

Club Review: Everyone has gone through episodes of intense emotional pain in their lives, some for very long periods of time. There’s a very good chance that someone in your book club is in that position right now. The differing viewpoints of the people who dislike the nihilism of this book and those who love its acceptance of the absurdity of existence will provide for a lot of good discussion. There are many themes running through this book that will likewise also produce strong dissenting opinions – the vilification of science, the rejection of redemption, the futility of striving. Some people may like certain aspects of the book, and dislike others. It provides a lot of great subject matter and presents it in a very emotionally compelling manner.

Summary: Not a pleasurable read, but an ideal book for a book club. Strongly recommended.

“Won’t sleep with me = attention whore”

 Musings On Present Day  No Responses »
Oct 082012
 

Why is this guy angry?


He pretends it’s because the nerdy girls he meets aren’t nerdy enough*. They’re infringing on his identity and trying to pretend to be in his cultural group, but they really aren’t. They’re impostors and phoneys!

It’s actually because he feels entitled to fuck them, and is frustrated that they don’t feel the same way.

He has nothing to offer anyone. “Why don’t girls like me?” Well, what reason have you given them to like you? “They should like me for who I am! I’m a special and beautiful snowflake.” Sure you are. “If I just found someone who really knew me, who saw who I really am, they would be all over me.”

Because, as Alone has repeatedly pointed out, “who I really am” doesn’t mean what you do, to this sort of person. It doesn’t mean what he’s accomplished, or the joy he can bring to those around him, or the strength of his relationships with friends and family. It is whatever he thinks he really is, deep inside, the fantasy he’s constructed, and external evidence be damned.

Part of this fantasy, of the identity he’s trying to put on and present to the world, is that he’s a “gamer”. And so anyone else who also claims to be a gamer should have a secret insight into his soul, and should be able to see how awesome he really is. Any attractive girl who has this insight would find him irresistible, because who could resist someone as awesome and caring as him?

But the gamer girl disagrees. She sees a bitter wanker who can’t understand why the world doesn’t care about his l33t skillz. She ignores his advances and moves on.

And that is the root of the butt-hurt. He was entitled to that lay. She obviously couldn’t see the “real” him, and that must be because she’s not a “real” gamer girl. She’s just an attention whore, a scheming manipulative girl who pretends to like games so that all these highly-desirable(!) fine manly specimens(!!) will give her the time of day! She’s a cock-tease that pretends to know their deepest souls, but then won’t fuck them like they deserve! He goes to the point of threatening his unwilling lay with “everyone at the con is going to sexually objectify you” unless they “prove their cred even harder”.

He then gives women this wonderful advice – shut up and calm the fuck down; you asked for it.

This guy would be right at home in the “men’s rights” movement.

 

*He also complains that advertisers have figured out that sex sells, which is just a bizarre complaint.

Proverbs 20:29 – The Glory of the Young

 Personal  No Responses »
Oct 052012
 

I grew up inside my own head. I read a lot, and thought a lot, and didn’t care for physical play. I was scrawny as a kid, chubby as a young adult. I disliked being constrained to a body. It was something that tied my mind down. I would have preferred to be transferred into a robot body, or even eschew the physical altogether and live entirely within a computer.

Now that I am fit, I revel in my body. I love having a physical form and using it to do things. Simply being alive in a physical vessel is a constant pleasure.* I stretch, I flex, I feel air across my skin. I wish I had started working out years ago, this is a whole new facet to life. It feels like I was living in two dimensions before, and a whole third dimension has opened up to me, an entire new axis of experience. It is amazing. I don’t even know how I could explain it to my younger self, there’s no words that can convey the feeling. Or rather, there must be words, but I am not skilled enough to deploy them. I refuse to believe that someone of sufficient skill couldn’t explain how this feels. Even so, my younger self would not believe them. I see young people who are out of shape and obviously just don’t care and I want to say something to them, to wake them up, but I know it won’t make any difference. Most likely they’ll think I’m an asshole. So I hold my peace and hope they’ll discover this for themselves some day.

Unfortunately, as is always the case, caring about something also means it can hurt you. When I was younger, I could have been crippled and not cared too much. Old age didn’t seem all that terrible, as long as my mind was sharp. Now, I fear what will happen as I age. Already my body is starting to show signs of wear. Eventually it’ll start to fail on me. Moving quickly will hurt my joints. My muscles will atrophy and my insides will pain me every day. Many common illnesses will have the potential to be fatal. I almost wish I hadn’t found this aspect of life, knowing how it’ll be ripped away from me later.

It is worth the existential terror, though. My life would have been much emptier without this glorious physical aspect I’ve found, I think I’ll have been happier having experienced this and lost it, than had I lived never experiencing this physical joy.**

Seriously though, let’s solve this aging shit already.

 

*Although I admit, I’m still wary of the whole “eating” concept. That’s kinda gross.)

**Yes, perhaps this is a delusion born of the fact that I can’t go back. I can’t double-guess myself ad infinitum.

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