Two and a Half Stars

Why I Hate Conspiracy Theories.

2013-09-08T17:02:00.001-07:00

A friend of mine posted a blog article in defense of his love of conspiracy thinking. The article did this by listing 16 theories that turned out to be 'true.' They ranged from "rasslin' is fake," to "all science is a lie." I'm not going to link to the blog post, because he didn't bother linking to any of his sources, and when he did his sources turned out to be other conspiracy theory websites and I would often have to spend half an hour tracking down the actual source, so fuck him. His moniker is Blindfold, though, if you want to track it down yourself.

So I spent all of my Sunday morning tracking down a lot of the relevant facts, or lack thereof. And since I will be neither blatantly making shit up nor screaming into an echo chamber full of like-minded extremists, I will provide links to relevant sources. And they won't just circle back to my own blog, because I try not to be a lying dick. I also might just be plain old wrong about some stuff. Because that happens.

Point the Zeroth: Always Bet on the Least Plausible Outcome

The piece begins by encouraging the reader to be more open-minded towards the tinfoil hat crowd, as they are so often right about so many things. In fact, a recent study found that Conspiracy Theorists (CTs,) are more sane than normal-brained people. The linked article absolutely does not make the claim that CTs are 'more sane' than non-CTs. The only potentially negative trait associated with accepting the official narrative was hostility, although

"there is a risk that [the researchers] may not have captured the full spectrum of responses, as we specifically excluded comments that consisted solely of threats, insults, or ridicule."

Apart from that, CTs were found to be more distrustful, more likely to confuse unexplained with unexplainable, more likely to make arguments from ignorance and assertion, and were found to be more concerned with arguing against the official narrative and raising trivial objections than supplying viable alternative explanations.

Source:

Wood, Douglas. A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3703523/

Point the First: Monkey Cancer Vaccines. For Real.

Despite the article providing a 404 error as their source, there is, and has been, tons of information about SV40 and vaccines widely available on the web from reputable, agenda free sources. Well, I say agenda free, but there is a definite bias towards reality. For example, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia states that

SV40 was present in cancers of people who either had or had not received the poliovaccine that was contaminated with SV40.

SV40 has not been present in any vaccine since 1963.

People with cancers who were born after SV40 was no longer a contaminant of the polio vaccine were found to have evidence for SV40 in their cancerous cells.

Using current techniques, it is difficult to distinguish SV40 virus from other common and related viruses.

Epidemiologic studies do not show an increased risk of cancers in those who received polio vaccine between 1955 and 1963.

I've written about simian virus 40 before on the blog, so I'm not going to rehash it other than to dump some links to relevant information.

Source:

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia: http://www.chop.edu/service/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/vaccine-ingredients/sv40.html

Other crap: http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Drugs/GuidanceComplianceRegulatoryInformation/EnforcementActivitiesbyFDA/CyberLetters/ucm059189.pdf

http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/EnforcementActions/WarningLetters/2006/ucm076069.htm

http://www.casewatch.org/fdawarning/prod/2011/mercola.shtml

Point the Second: ATM Machine Facial Recognition Software

I believe the author is confusing "easily foreseeable advances in consumer technology," with "conspiracy theory." Also: the Office of Unnecessary Redundancy Office would like to speak with the author.

Point the Third: Monsanto and the Government are Vanishing Anti-GMO Activists, Maybe

Genetically modified foods are currently the only option we have for feeding ourselves over the next quarter of a century. Crop-burning, anti-GMO activists/eco-terrorists like Greenpeace should be opposed, because they're dangerous, misguided idiots. Every study performed about the safety of GMO's (save for the sole long-debunked and almost comically flawed Seralini article,) has found that GMO's are about as safe as could be reasonably expected, and certainly better than any of the alternatives.

Apart from all of that: The source provided by the article leads back (eventually,) to a German newspaper reporting that some anti-Monsanto activists claimed that Monsanto attacked their computers. And while it's no secret that Monsanto and the US government have a history of shady dealings, there is no evidence that Monsanto had anything to do with the alleged cyber-attack. It does sound like a sorta-okay premise for a sci-fi movie though.

Sources:

GMOs and World Hunger: http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/124/2/487

Overview of the Seralini Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9ralini_affair

Bad Science and GMOs: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2012/09/24/bad-science-on-gmos-it-reminds-me-of-the-antivaccine-movement/

Süddeutsche Zeitung: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/ (The sustainablepulse article [itself linked from the activistpost article {itself linked from the original piece}] didn't bother to link to the original article. Burying the source material three or four pages deep and forcing the reader to search through the relevant website themselves is really common with conspiracy articles. I don't even know if this is an intentional tactic to weed out the insincere, but it certainly functions as one. If anyone knows German, feel free to search for it yourself.)

Point the Fourth: Science is Using GM Animals for Research. MILLIONS OF IT!

I didn't realize this was a conspiracy. Unless official releases from the government outlining the facts regarding common practices qualify as conspiracies. Regardless, Blindfold doesn't give the source for his story (surprise, surprise). I managed to track it (through pages and pages of conspiracy theory websites,) to a report published by the UK's Home Office, as ordered by the House of Commons, titled "Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals."

The increase in GM animal use is explained, according to Dr Ted Bianco of Wellcome Trust:

"The scientific community is deeply committed to reducing the numbers of animals used in research, but despite significant progress, animals remain an essential part of helping us understand disease and develop much-needed new treatments. This year's increase reflects the use of powerful techniques to help us model with greater accuracy human disease. In particular, the inclusion of genetically-modified mice, whose breeding alone counts as a procedure, is largely behind this increase, but will ultimately allow us to reduce the number of animals used."

So, yeah. Evil scientists and their evil science. Or something.

Sources:

Home Office Report: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/212610/spanimals12.pdf

Expert reaction to same: http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/?p=21632&upm_export=print

Point the Fifth: Animal Human Hybrids! Chimera People! Stem Cells! GMGMGM!

I didn't realize this was a conspiracy either. At least among people that don't get their news solely from potheads and drunk construction workers at bars, at any rate. I can see how it could pose a moral quandary, though, as replacing faulty heart valves in humans with valves from cows or pigs is widely accepted, but mixing human stem cells with other embryonic animals, which could raise the effectiveness of such transplants, seems to cross some anthropocentric line with some people.

As far as I can tell, this is yet another 'science is evil because God' argument being made by certain segments of the scientifically illiterate religious population, most of whom don't seem to even know what, exactly, is being debated.

Source:

Chimera controversy: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

Point the Sixth: Obama is Spying on the Spies Spying on the Spies...

Blindfold provides his own blog as a source. Well, I'm an 800 year old time traveler. I said so yesterday, so it must be true. You know what? I don't have enough information to say one way or the other. It seems fucking unlikely, though, as one would imagine people like Blindfold and Alex Jones would be the first to be vanished if it were true. Given how incompetent the US government is at almost everything else, I doubt that they got The Perfect Police Surveillance State right.

Point the Seventh: Professional Wrestling is Fake. Seriously.

THIS qualifies as a conspiracy? The two 300 lb steroid monsters that go on tour together and jump, professionally, on each others heads aren't really trying to kill each other? Way to ferret out the truth there, Bernstein.

But seriously, you figured out that professional wrestling is fake and not human corpses filled with demons and goat blood and reanimated by the Rothschild banking cartel as part of a modern panem et circenses to distract the modern poor from the NWO's nefarious plan. That's something. So, point to Team Lunatic for siding with reality for once.

Point the Eighth: Texas is Running Out of Water.

That's not a conspiracy. That's basic fucking math. Pollution + population growth + limited supply of fresh water + no plan to address any of the above.

Point the Ninth: IRS Targets Conservatives

Again, no source. Even granted that it happens/ed, this wasn't treated as a conspiracy until after the story broke. As far as I know, "I knew it all along!" is not a credible demonstration of predictive utility. As for the IRS, why, exactly, wouldn't they examine the tax records of Tea Party groups? You know, the political extremist tax protesters whose entire political worldview consists of the first half of "No taxation without representation." I can't imagine why the IRS may think those good people might be hiding something from them.

But the fact is that there aren't enough facts to definitively state that it was a conspiracy to target Tea Party groups for political reasons, or just a misguided time-saving measure instilled by someone at the IRS, or something else entirely. It's currently under review. Anything else is speculation and should be treated as such.

Point the Tenth: Fluoride is Evil Because!

Blindfold links to a CNN post. CNN is not a fucking expert on dentistry. Or chemistry. Their commenters sure as fuck aren't either, although I may be biased in disregarding claims like "im a denist in a small town with no floride and we have no cavity problem." None of the conspiracists can even agree on what, exactly, is so EVIL about water fluoridation. Disposal of industrial waste via human kidneys? Causing more tooth loss? Keeping people docile? Giving children cancer? Nanny-state overreach? Communists seeking to impurify our vital liquids? Speeding up the aging process? Shills for Big Pharma doing...something nefarious? Slack-jawed idiots demonstrating the woeful state of our educational system by banging wildly at their keyboards while not understanding the basic difference between fluoride and sodium fluoride? Literally all of those claims are made in the first page of comments on that post.

Sources:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/01/07/fluoride.recommendations/index.html

http://www.theage.com.au/national/health/the-tooth-hurts-dental-expert-is-eager-to-expose-the-cavities-in-fluoride-conspiracy-theories-20130907-2tbnu.html

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation

The Fluoride Debate, with expert commentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2BlJRtsQrgo

Point the Eleventh: Cell Phones Give You Cancer!

No sources. I know, I'm a dick for expecting them. The claim that "an increasing number of studies" support this dickhead's silly-ass assertion is dubious at best, as a Google Scholar search for his quote "At the highest exposure levels — using a mobile phone half an hour a day over a 10-year period — the study found a 40 percent increased risk of glioma brain tumors" yielded exactly zero matches. Exactly. Zero. I counted. So it very probably didn't come from a legitimate scholarly source and likely wasn't even a 'study.'

There are, however, legitimate studies of the relationship between increased cell phone usage and cancer rates. Unfortunately for Blindfold they conclude that "The results of this investigation, the first nationwide cancer incidence study of cellular phone users, do not support the hypothesis of an association between use of these telephones and tumors of the brain or salivary gland, leukemia, or other cancers," and that "a weight-of-evidence evaluation shows that the current evidence for a causal association between cancer and exposure to RF energy is weak and unconvincing."

Just to be fair, cell phones are new things, so who knows, maybe in twenty years when we're all dead from brain tumors the CT crowd can tell me they told me so.

Sources:

Johansen, Boice, et al. Cellular Telephones and Cancer: http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/3/203.short

Moulder, Foster, et al. Mobile phones, mobile phone base stations and cancer: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09553000500091097

Point the Twelfth: Prescription Drugs Kill People

This is less of a conspiracy and more a fundamental problem with the United States' for-profit healthcare system and relative impotence of the FDA. And here I was thinking that the FDA was the bad guy for the tinfoil hat crowd. I guess both the pharmaceutical industry and any regulatory boards pertaining to it are both part of a larger conspiracy.

Unless and until we, as a people, are willing to have a grown up discussion about socialized medicine then it will remain a problem. At some point we're going to just have to accept that as bad as Big Gummit can be, it is less bad than Big Pharma, at least in this area.

Source for the unsourced source:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/01/deadly-medicine-201101

Point the Thirteenth: Liberal Elitists Call for Eugenics!

Blindfold proves this by providing quotes from David Rockefeller, Ted Turner, John Holdren, Paul Ehrlich, and Bill Maher. I say "providing quotes," but half of them are just links to infowars articles.

The Rockefeller, Turner, and Holdren quotes that appear here seem to have sprung forth directly from the collective hive-mind of the Illiterati blogosphere, like some kind of electric fungus that grows on large spots of confirmation bias and malice. I'm not saying they didn't say these things. I'm not even saying they didn't say them in context. But unless someone provides a source for the quotes I'm not going to take some guy named Blindfold's word for it.

The Ehrlich quote,

“To our minds, the fundamental cure, reducing the scale of the human enterprise (including the size of the population) to keep its aggregate consumption within the carrying capacity of Earth is obvious but too much neglected or denied.”

while accurate, is also an example of quote-mining and the power of decontextualization. Ehrlich is speaking of basic, common sense practices to keep society within the sustainable limits of planet earth, like not having so damn many kids. There literally is only so much fresh water to go around. Remember? That was part of Point Eight of your own damn article, Blindfold. If population growth continues to increase at its current rate we will, seriously, not to be a dick, hit an upper resource limit. Ehrlich is pointing this out and stating that the best course forward is to slow our reproduction rate.

Bill Maher, on the other hand, is a blowhard liberal comedian and should be treated as such. I happen to like him, but I would never consider him an expert source for information on overpopulation. And certainly wouldn't take anything he said as a call for genocide. If Blindfold can't tell the difference between an obvious use of hyperbole to make a comedic point and an insidious plan to execute grandparents and unwanted children then he likely has far more pressing concerns than what late night talk show hosts have to say. Like growing a sense of humor or building that shrine made of cat ears his lawnmower keeps telling him to build, or having his shoelaces taken away so he doesn't try to stab an orderly with them.

Source for the Ehrlich story which, lets face it, is the only potentially relevant one that doesn't appear to be completely made up: http://cnsnews.com/news/article/paul-ehrlich-nobody-has-right-have-12-children-or-even-3

Point the Fourteenth: Satanists are Killing People! For SATAN!

Speaking of mental illness: Blindfold provides a link to one example of this epidemic happening once. ONE example does not make a pattern. The church has been warning us about this for hundreds of years, and you can provide one example of it actually happening? I could probably find one example per week of Christian faith healing directly leading to the death of a child in the States. Why isn't Blindfold concerned with that? Even if Meraz-Espinoza's murder of his mother isn't a case of "he's fucking crazy," it doesn't mean the act was directly motivated by Satan because Satan doesn't fucking exist. Neither does the Christian god. Both are just examples of dumb motherfuckers doing dumb motherfucker shit because that's what dumb motherfuckers do.

Meraz-Espinoza story: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/18/local/la-me-satanic-killer-sentencing-20130718

Point the Fifteenth: The Spies That Are Spying on Each Other While They Spy on Us Are, in Fact, SPYING ON US!

Well, yes. That is what the Patriot Act did. It wasn't a conspiracy. It was a highly publicized response to the 9/11 attack. I don't think the problem is as far-reaching and pervasive as most CTs would like it to be, as that would involve 60% of the population spying on the other 40% for a living and it'd get pretty fucking lonely around here. I'd personally (and rather charitably, I feel,) say that this is an example of the broken clock proverb, as there is actual evidence of domestic spying.

The problem with broken clocks, of course, is that no one can tell when they're right. If I were to say "scientists have found a way to control other people's actions" or "scientists have managed to stop light," you would, prima facie, have no reason to believe me. And if I couldn't back those claims up, you fuck-well shouldn't believe me. If those assertions turn out to be true, you have no reason to believe I didn't just make a couple of lucky guesses. And if they turn out to be false, I don't get to claim your evidence discrediting me is part of a larger conspiracy. Those are what I consider fucking ground rules when making sensational claims. Blindfold again didn't source his information, because why would he, and at this point I can't be assed to track down Inglis' original statement in this blatant example of horseshoe theory, and am gonna just go ahead and assume that the CT crowd isn't privy to some special information the rest of us are not.

Point the Sixteenth: The FED is a Debt Machine That Manufactures Inflation Ron Paul 2012!

Is the Fed problematic? Yes. Can we do better? Yes. Will we do better? No. Not if the loudest voices in the room are so focused on demonizing the problem that any workable solutions go unheard. I don't have the answers. The CT crowd fucking definitely doesn't.

The Fed was installed as a possible solution to debt and inflation. It just didn't work the way people thought it would. If a proposed solution doesn't work the next step is not to abandon treatment. The next step is to try something else.

I haven't heard anything sane being proposed by anyone. I admit, I haven't looked very hard, so don't get me wrong, there are probably answers out there. I just haven't heard them. They're probably being put forth by quiet people with masters degrees in political theory and economics, bouncing around on message boards no one reads and papers no one without a college education in a related field understands. They don't fit on fucking bumper stickers, in other words.

The Ron Paul/anti-fed/survivalist/Goldmember/We-Never-Fucking-Think-Anything-Through crowd would never, in a million years, support those people, because those people rely on facts and science and intellectual elitism and informed opinions and a clear understanding of the interplay of the public and private sectors, and most of this list directly attacks facts and science and all of it holds elitism and both the private and public sectors in equal contempt, and the 'freethinkers' that constantly repost this shit without questioning it immediately consider any informed opinion that doesn't toe the party line either a shill for the Bad Guys or a clueless 'sheeple.'

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call irony.

How the Fed works, at least on paper: http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed.htm

Poor Mormons

2013-08-17T22:22:00.000-07:00

I hate being Devil's Advocate sometimes, but...

I was recently visited by door-to-door Mormons. And while I realize they prefer to be called Latter Day Saints or Saints, I prefer to call them Mormons because calling them "Saints" sounds like they're a street gang in a karate movie from the 1980s.

Anyway, we had a nice, long chat wherein I got to use phrases like 'intrinsically self-assigned' and 'geologic column' and 'principle of falsifiability' and feel very smart and proud of myself. And I updated my Facebook status accordingly, mentioning that I felt bad for Mormons. Twelve people liked that post, as opposed to the normal one or two whenever I post anything negative about any other subject.

Here's what I don't understand, and also why I feel bad for LDS's: At least some of the people that liked that post about Mormon missionaries are Christians. Or claim to be. Or just really like lower-case 't's and falling for logical fallacies. Now, I've read the book of Mormon. And the Bible. Repeatedly. And I can definitively say that the claims made in the Book of Mormon and the claims made in the Bible are statistically identical, since they agree with and reinforce each other like 99% of the time. Particularly about the general depiction of the Almighty as a capricious, cruel, genocidal, vindictive, racist, sexist, insecure, psychotic monster that tortures his children to fulfill unknowable perversions. It's a new New Testament. Written by and for 'mericans. So from my perspective these Protestants mocking the LDS church is like arguing over what color dragon poop is in August during a drought. Until somebody establishes the existence of a dragon you're only going to succeed in looking ridiculous.

Oh, but those poor, misguided Mormons for believing that Ghost Jesus visited the Americas and turned some of them white, when everyone knows he didn't make any pit-stops on his way back to an invisible paradise that used to be a real place until telescopes turned it into a metaphor. Can anyone prove either of those accounts are accurate? Or at least offer a compelling case in favor of one or the other? Considering all of our current understanding indicates that neither bodily resurrection nor eternal, extra-dimensional paradises exist, I'm inclined to believe both parties are just arguing in favor of different kinds of wrong.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their corrupt church that robs them blind to build shopping malls and wage political campaigns. Isn't it nice that all other Christian pastors preach in the wilderness, wear rags, and eat bugs? Especially since they don't claim that they're in the metaphorical wilderness of upper-middle class income brackets. I'm pretty sure "Go and sell all that you have" and "you cannot serve both God and Mammon" are meant to be applied to the entire hierarchy, not just the parishioners. I have never, ever, ever, in my entire life, met a Christian that chose to give his or her fortune to the poor and mooch off the goodwill of strangers in exchange for vapid platitudes and groundbreaking insights into the human condition like "Don't kill people." I sure have met a fuckload of Christians that think that kind of thinking is socialism, though. Well, what idiots think socialism is, anyway.

Oh, those poor Mormons and their widely publicized sex crimes. Which church, then, is blameless? If the metric to be used is gender equality and lack of child rape, then I would imagine that Scientology is clearly the least worst choice, if only for its relative newness and exclusivity. And having been invented in an age and place that has largely figured out that human sacrifice, infant genital mutilation, slave trafficking, murdering dissenters, stoning disobedient children, arranged marriages, and outlawing blended fabrics are not, all things considered, wholesome activities.

And I'm not saying this out of anger towards the people that liked that status, so please don't take it that way. They can believe an albino goblin wants them to build a house out of prosthetic limbs so long as they don't hurt anyone and recognize that not everyone will share that belief.

I just wish that occasionally one of them would read a few webpages on cognitive bias, perform a few experiments, and do some opposition-research on what they believe before they point out that, yes, sometimes people get together in groups to believe different insane fairy tales than themselves. I mean, obviously they have functioning bullshit detectors. It would be so great if they would just point those detectors at their own belief systems.

But they don't.

Thou Shalt Not Pick Up Snakes, Idiot

2013-08-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

There's a reality TV show coming out about snake-handling Pentecostals. People will watch and laugh at how ridiculous it is that they chose to ignore or reinterpret different parts of the Bible differently than them.

When do we, as a society of caring, empathic human beings, step in and say "Hey, you are too fucking impressionable and dumb to be allowed to make all your own decisions. Here are some picture books about finding an adult when you see a snake and why you shouldn't pick up poisonous animals because someone told you to."

The Bible is a book with a talking snake and a zombie wizard as central figures. One of its heroes offers his daughters up to a rape mob just before the lead murders two cities, animals included, in cold blood. It outlaws shellfish and mixed fabrics and sentences first-time offenders to eternal torture. It belongs in the mythology section. Or whatever section they keep Gacy's creepy fucking clown drawings in.

"If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out. Do it, sinner. I'm watching. Forever."

I mean, there's charitable interpretation, and then there's fucking flat out ignoring shit and pretending it isn't there. Every person that's ever told me the Bible is the most important book ever written also told me to ignore 3/4 of it. Why is that? Why can God not communicate effectively? Why would God ghostwrite a book that's 50% wrong, 40% debatable, 10% accurate given several dozen caveats, and allows fan-fiction to be treated as canon? That doesn't make any sense. Parents start coming up with stories like that when their kid's "Why? Why? Why?" game goes on two rounds too many.

God didn't grant anyone magical insight into how it's metaphorically true, or spiritually true, or can only be experienced emotionally and never explained rationally, or requires special interpretative rules that apply only to it or whatever horseshit people delude themselves with to shut the cognitive dissonance up.

This is not a good book to use to find answers. Specifically on questions of morality and acceptable behavior. I could come up with a better moral framework than the Bible, and I'm a dick.

So could you. So could anyone. Look:

Is human slavery wrong?

Congratulations, you have a better moral framework than the Bible. You have a better grasp of right and wrong than god. You either figured that out on your own, had it explained to you by another human, or your infallible god was kind enough to explain how your infallible god was wrong about fucking everything. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same: the Bible is wrong about enough things that it shouldn't be treated as a reliable source for anything. You can now quit pretending that the word translates to "prisoner of war" or "happy employee enjoying the fruits of capitalism" or whatever made-up sounding bullshit helps you defend your ridiculous position and move on with your life, joyously free of invisible totalitarian police states and weird sexual hangups.

Because seriously, when I point out that stoning children for back-talking or symbolically drinking the blood of a dead god to attain life eternal is unequivocally, furniture-made-out-of-dead-cheerleader-skin, eating-hair-out-of-other-people's-shower-drains crazy, whatever rationalization you offer is going to do nothing but cause me to wonder if you maybe shouldn't be left alone with sharp objects.

This book should not be taken seriously by anyone. It's an old book of tribal myths and fairy stories. That is all that it is. I'm sorry, but at some point we need to collectively acknowledge that. I had to, and you know what? I haven't eaten any babies or blown up any preschools. I'm the same as I was, just slightly less wrong about how everything works. And believe me, if I can admit when I'm wrong about something that important then so can you.

We especially should not be filming people that were tricked into believing that the book was to be taken seriously after a lifetime of being told to take the book seriously. We should be setting up an intervention for these poor fucks.

My X-Man Power. For Real.

2013-08-15T22:40:00.000-07:00

I must have this weird energy I put off that ensures I can watch a TV show on occasion over a period of years and somehow only see the same three episodes. Or some kind of internal clock that keeps time by using the programming schedules of whatever I have on in the background.

It's uncanny.

I can tell you, for example, that the guest star in the Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode where Dennis winds up in a mental hospital was walking 1990's stereotype Sinbad, and that the guys name is Dennis because it stands for Demonstrate value, Engage physically, Nurture dependence, Neglect emotionally, Inspire hope, Separate entirely. This fucking show comes on every goddamn day during the three hours that Comedy Central isn't showing infomercials or teen comedies and accidentally lets programming on the air that isn't universally hated. My TV is on that channel for all three of those hours with me in the room at least once every two weeks. Which means, mathematically, that I have watched at least 26 episodes of Always Sunny in the past year. And it's ALWAYS THOSE TWO EPISODES!

Part of me thinks "This looks like the low-brow, lowest-common-denominator trash that gets pushed out the door to keep the studio's bills paid. Fuck it, I'm watching Charlie Brooker or Tim Minchin on YouTube." And part of me thinks "This looks like a subversive look into the dark realities of urban small-business ownership, abusive patriarchal family dynamics, and human sexuality disguised as low-brow comedy. It is entirely possible that this show is my generation's A Modest Proposal."

I will probably never know if either of those two thoughts is true.

Because if it comes on TV it will be either of those two episodes and I will never have a large enough sample size. If I see it on Netflix I'm damn sure not gonna watch it because I FUCKING HATE those two episodes.

House is the same way. Sliders. Battlestar Gallactica. Dr. Who before David Tennant descended from the heavens and proved that, yes, there is indeed a dick I would willingly pay to suck. Any Simpsons episode made after 1996. Big Bang Theory.

How. does. this. happen?

Music, Which is Important

2013-08-11T23:47:00.000-07:00

"He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."

-Mark Twain

I haven't updated in a while. I've been trying to get a music career off the ground. Like everything else, it seems like the universe has some fundamental law against me being allowed to make a subsidence-level wage out of something I'm both good at and enjoy doing.

Music should work like the movies. Not like every album would cost 60 million to make and half that again to publicize, but just a huge community of musicians swapping out to make new music. Like sports teams maybe. Only without the fucking contract disputes but with way more drug and sex scandals.

I'm fucking burned out on it. But I've been burned out on it for three years.

You have any idea how many musicians are burnt out with the job by the time they release their first record?

Fuck, imagine a world where any 18 year old could send in an Audacity recording, a three page essay on the foundations of music theory and how it applies to them, and an explanation of what they want to accomplish musically and be told to come to X rehearsal space and sit in on a few jams to see how they do.

Imagine a world where bands don't have retirement tours every ten years because they're so fucking sick of doing this they can't imagine ever wanting to again only to realize two years later that "Yeah, I had to go do a jazz or country album, but this is something I enjoy. Fetch the media circus!"

Imagine getting paid for hauling your gear 50 miles in the rain on a weeknight to play for 20 drunk assholes and not being treated like you personally insulted the owner's dead mother at the end of the night.

My point is, musicians have to figure out how to look at sleeping indoors and doing what you're good at professionally and not see an unsolvable equation.

The irony is that music, in some ways, figured out how to adapt to the new market far quicker than movies or video games did. Video games are still selling 60 dollar discs and movies are spending more and more money for fewer and fewer returns. That's insane.
Music got smart fast because it had to.Music went from CDs to MP3s fucking overnight. Napster was an extinction-level event. Our old strategy did not work. Film studios can spend the money on lawyers and games are hard to pirate. But music had to turn a hard-copy $20 single into a $1 download overnight because that is what the market demanded.

And we should be applauded for that.

Except somewhere along the way musicians were written out of the bottom line. We became unpaid interns in our own industry. And that's because we're using the same marketing strategy as games and film. Focusing on individual trending artists instead of the artists as a whole. Making bland, homogenous crap just edgy enough to make teenagers feel rebellious and just safe enough to get a pass from the censorship committee.

That's why Spider-man, a ten year old film, gets a gritty, sexy reboot when there's a perfectly good Moon Night just lying there. That's why games like Resident Evil 6 and Call of Battlefield 4: Saber-Rattling Racist Idiot get made and Tim Schaffer makes games on Kickstarter. And that is why the VMAs look like a science-fiction adaptation of the Senate during the fall of Rome while the best guitarist in your town is selling tickets to his own show out of pocket because the dickhead that owns the club convinced him that doing the club's promotion work for them was in everyone's best interest.

Why, yes, Tom. We'll give you all of our apple if you just let us whitewash that fence.

There are a lot of solutions out there. Government subsidies, demanding of legislators that we be included in general wage or contract law. Fuck, there's a music union, just nobody knows about it and most of the ones that do don't know why they should care.

Fuck, new guitars should be sold with a union pamphlet stuck in the strings.

Anyway, it has to happen soon or there won't be any music. Not as anything other than a bland math problem created to appease the most people with the least maintenance.

Fair Trade Music (link) is doing something. I mean literally doing something, not writing resentful blog updates about how I didn't want to be a nuclear physicist in the military like I should have done. It's a grassroots campaign based in Portland, I think, with Union support. It's a brilliantly simple idea: talk to all the musicians, promoters, managers, friends, and venue owners you know about a fair wage for musicians.

I know most people think "musician's wages" and immediately get a visual of Guns 'n Roses in their heyday, but the fact is: most musicians work way fucking hard. I can't speak to electronic music or country or whatever, but for a modern rock or metal musician, describing them as "on a budget" is far too charitable. Trying to record an album, while simultaneously starting a delivery marketing business with three other equally broke friends, and finding a stage-worthy drumset on a paycheck scientifically proven to be below the poverty line is not "on a budget."

Get involved.

Notes from Science Class at 1:00 A.M.

2013-02-05T01:01:00.000-08:00

A proper testable question should be about this causal connection, and should clearly include a dependent and independent variable.

The question should also be generally applicable, so that answering the question has some relevance to real world problems (the author wrote "real word problems." Also, the voice reading the author's words verbatim has that voice that sounds like a butchy Shelley Long. The kind of voice that always appears, or app-eyes, or whatever, as the voice of the ship's computer, kindly reminding the crew that they have 2 minutes to complete ship abandoning as the strangely un-turn-offable self-destruct routine was programmed by computer geeks driven to a life of murderous, jealousy-driven, and way passive-aggressive hate towards dick astronauts, having spent ten years writing code for lime-light stealing jocks.

Not that Shelley Long Voice would read that, even if it were in the script. Because it's not 'proper,' which is really capital P Proper, as it's being used to refer to the code of behavior adopted by sheltered home-school girls finding themselves in public and needing to come across as worldly and hip. The voice of a lifetime evangelical appealing to the youth by wearing a backwards baseball cap of the local sports team's logo to compliment his hideous, homemade-looking suit and waxen, otherworldly visage. Only female. and homemade meaning badly-made, not tailor-made. The kind of suit a pair of serial killer pants would wear, a la Ed Gein and old women.

Not a 'science class' voice, in other words. The voice of a woman that will do her level best to raise her very own Icy and Asexual Housewife Barbie and ends up with a reality TV star releasing a sex tape three years after the last guy stopped caring in a desperate attempt to find a way to pay for her many bad decisions.

This is a Voice of diet ice water, plastic-jug vodka and diet pills. A Voice that lives in a room with too much white porcelain and gold-colored plumbing, the blatant subconscious representation of the Voice's own self-image totally lost on the Voice. A room that puts visitors in mind of cats, although no cats are present, until the visitors realize that this is what rich women do instead of buying dozens of stray cats and collecting creepy dolls: This is a hopelessly broken person wanting the world to look at them and going about it all wrong. Only with sound, in this case.

A 'science voice' being, of course, an elderly transatlantic accent that wafts into the brain like single malt scotch and pipe smoke and high-maintenance leather and you briefly wonder if this is what Santa Claus smells like. In your ear.

Wait, that went from confusing to gross. If smell was sound, I mean. Santa Claus smells like this sounds. Only Santa Claus is the private library of a literature professor. And it's a voice. Fuck you, Language, I know what I mean.

(Note to self, when all this science shit pays off: Totally splice John Cleese and Morgan Freeman into a genetic patchwork man. Remember, genetically modified abominations against God and science only turn into monsters when they reach puberty in the movies. And the books. And the nightmares. And probably in reality. Don't remember this after all. Train him to be a voice actor from birth. Have him watch Kenneth Branagh movies and then play Resident Evil. Pimp him out to AAA game studios, pointing out that if this dude had done NIER that shit would have gone from sleeper cult hit to Instant Nobel Prize for Electronic Amusements. Americans will want to buy JRPGs and care about story and character again. Good video games will be saved.

Years later turn back to the bottle in a desperate attempt to escape the guilt of knowing your livelihood comes at the expense of the very people you sought to liberate in the form of on-disc dlc, monthly service fees, micro transactions and invasive, mandatory security software downloads that can track a fucking pipe bomb three blocks from your house and reports sub-code plumbing to the authorities, yet perversely and to the shock of nobody makes piracy more appealing. Realize Johnmorgan Freecleese is kinda your kid and kinda your boy kid and kinda you've been psychologically abusing him his entire life, and kinda you're prostituting him out to rich, white men that represent everything you hate about capitalism. Realize you've made the joke sad and gross. Get back to science class.

End Note to Self).

Critical Thinking: Self-Evaluation

2012-11-22T09:09:00.000-08:00

For previous installments go here, here, and here.

I had a couple of conversations recently with friends who expressed curiosity on how I remain abstinent from drugs without relying on a supernatural 'Higher Power,' as they say in the 12 step programs.

Information on the 12 steps is widely available online, so I'll avoid a lengthy explanation. There should be a search bar in the upper right hand of your screen. The amazing thing about that search bar is that you can type in any subject you happen to be interested or curious about into it and it will, seemingly through magic, return a host of results pertinent to your query.

As I explained to one friend, I came to the conclusion that supernatural forces were not only not active in my life, but that by believing that they were I was, in fact, actively inhibiting my growth and progression as a person by waiting for 'signs' before taking any risk, or by seeking 'guidance' when confronted with a tough decision. These behaviors invariably prevented me from taking any action at all, and in waiting for burning bushes or seemingly portentous events to manifest the needed instruction my decisions usually wound up being made by default.

The conclusion was reached, oddly enough, by use of one of the tools of the 12 step program itself: self-evaluation (personal inventory, in 12 step parlance).

Critical and skeptical evaluation of different claims, evidence, opinions, or positions, while undoubtedly useful, can only be applied to the extent that a person applies it to his- or herself.

I've spoken before about my awareness of my liberal bias, politically speaking, and my obvious bias against the supernatural. I became aware of these biases through self-evaluation.

By working to become more aware of these biases and my other personal presuppositions, limitations, and tendencies I find that I become more aware of them when they crop up.

To give a recent example: GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms.

There has been a pervasive thread of outrage against Monsanto in recent months, at least in liberal circles. Monsanto is a multinational agriculture/biotech company, and, as such, belongs to the Dark Side of the Force as far as I'm concerned.

For months I had been mindlessly 'liking' any anti-Monsanto propaganda that appeared in my Facebook news feed, including anti-GMO memes. I did this while being well aware that I had not even a cursory understanding of what GMOs even were or entailed.

My anti-corporate, anti-capitalist bias was doing my thinking for me.

Instead of withholding judgement until investigating the claims that GMOs were evil, I had fallen prey to the poisoned well fallacy.

A few weeks ago, when I couldn't, in good conscience, continue condemning a science I knew nothing about, I decided to investigate GMOs. The information is freely available online, if anyone's curious. What I found, of course, was that genetic modification doesn't mean Frankenstein monsters or H.R. Giger drawings springing forth from cornfields. Nor does genetic modification imply mad scientists haphazardly rearranging genetic codes in an attempt to stumble across a real-life Pandora's Box.

A summary can be found at http://www.herbogeminis.com/IMG/pdf/reuters_monsanto.pdf.

Genetic engineering, like any science, is morally neutral, and the claims that GMOs are carcinogenic or cause pod people seem to have been either a result of mistaken causal inference (the pesticides the plants were modified to resist have been linked to increased cancer rates in the tests, but the plants themselves showed no significant correlation,) or completely made up, since liberals can be just as unreasonable and superstitious about science as conservatives.

Now, admittedly, I have only a layperson's understanding of genetics, but I also do not have a layperson's tendency to assume that it means that tampering with genetics will mean that the 1995 film Proteus will become a terrifying reality. Which is good, because I don't even know where to get shark-monster destroying heroin from these days. So I've revised my stance on the matter. Monsanto is an evil company, but just because Monsanto uses genetically modified organisms does not mean that genetically modified organisms are evil.

One of the most effective ways of evaluating myself that I've found is to merely list which labels I'm willing to accept for myself, and then reading all of the arguments against those positions, and to be aware that when someone or some piece of information I identify as friendly towards my position (as an atheist, or a socialist, or a skeptic, or a metal-head, or whatever,) then I will be more likely to accept it without questioning it. As such, I find that it is helpful to occasionally re-evaluate the positions I already hold, to test them against any new evidence, to try to disprove them, or to investigate opposing positions with the same openness I grant to my own.

Sometimes I'll find that I'm really, really wrong about something. That used to bother me quite a bit. Especially since it was along the lines of 'My entire life is a lie!' or 'I've wasted a good portion of my life championing a fairy tale!'

Those kinds of admissions can be extremely painful. In some cases they can even lead to the kinds of psychotic breaks that require therapy or hospitalization.

But it gets easier. We just have to keep in mind that, historically, most people have been wrong about most things most of the time. I'd argue that it would be the acme of hubris to assume that anyone, anywhere, is 100% right about anything, at any time.

Even systems as seemingly settled and flawless as mathematics or gravity should not be accepted as 100% truth. Even now, quantum physicists may have to modify Einstein's theory of relativity, and as computers become ever more important for modern civilization then math must become ever more complex. I mean, do you know what a Poincare Conjecture is? I don't, but they solved it recently. Or proved it. Or whatever you do with math problems that involve three-dimensional objects in four-dimensional space.

Or you could try this tactic.

Finding out and admitting that we're wrong about something, even something major, is a great thing. It's a wonderful opportunity to learn something new, to find a new way to see the world, to let go of inaccurate, misguided, or damaging beliefs and embrace new ones.

Yes, your whole life may be based in a lie. But if it is, wouldn't you rather know about it?

The Poverty of Affluence (pt. 1)

2012-09-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

It's on Facebook! It must be true!

Okay, I've been seeing this for months and I had to say something. As near as I can tell it started here: http://www.mnprogressiveproject.com/diary/11080/rep-mary-franson-compares-food-stamp-recipients-to-animals-and-mngop-pulls-the-video.

A friend of mine reposted this and it finally broke part of my brain off. I know for a fact that this friend has been on government assistance for an extended period of time. And I'm not judging or faulting them for that. I'm judging them for reposting anti-themself propaganda. I mean, like 96% of Americans have received some form of government assistance, right? So who, exactly, is supposed to be ashamed of that?

I mean, it's not like we're being duped into shaming poor people for needing help so that when those lifelines get cut no one will complain, right?

The text of the meme runs:

"The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture is proud to be distributing the greatest amount of free meals and food stamps ever.

Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us to "Please Do Not Feed the Animals."

Their stated reason for the policy is because the animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.

This ends today's lesson.

First: the only known strong correlate for welfare dependence is drug addiction, which is a different problem, which is also not being addressed. Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1508566/pdf/amjph00023-0022.pdf

Second: the 'Culture of Poverty' theory is largely a myth. Poor people are not lazier, stupider, less motivated or more prone to addiction than the well off. Source: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr08/vol65/num07/The-Myth-of-the-Culture-of-Poverty.aspx

Third: the reasons for 'Do Not Feed The Animals' signs is only to prevent dependence in the young who may not be able to locate food when they leave their parents area. Because they're animals and will assume that if there are humans feeding them Snickers when they're young that there will always be humans and Snickers everywhere. Other reasons that this meme fails to mention: human food is not nutritionally complete and can cause health problems. The animals may lose their fear of humans, be mistaken as rabid/aggressive, and killed. It can lead to overpopulation. It can cause an influx of other animals, leading to the spread of disease. Source: http://www.paws.org/feeding-wildlife.html

Fourth: Yes, one in six people needing food stamps is a problem. But the problem isn't 'Why are these people lazy/dependent?' The problem is 'why does no one have enough money for food these days?' Corporate profits are at record highs (Thanks to corporate welfare,) and the stock market is setting record highs (thanks to government assistance). http://www.businessinsider.com/corporate-profits-just-hit-an-all-time-high-wages-just-hit-an-all-time-low-2012-6 So if we have more money than ever, why does a third of the country not have enough to eat?

Fifth: I've been trying, for days now, to find the source of not only this supposed newspaper clipping, but also for the reports both from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior that were 'used' as 'sources,' but, like most right-wing propoganda, they don't seem to exist.

This ends today's lesson

Book of Matthew

2012-08-10T08:32:00.001-07:00

I'm doing this:

So watch that if you want to know why, specifically, I'm not a Christian. And also because the New Testament is comically poorly written. And also also because it's 4 hours of free entertainment.

Tools

2012-07-20T12:11:00.000-07:00

During the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises last night in Aurora, Colorado, James Holmes, a 24-year-old neuro-science student opened fire, killing 12 and injuring 59 people.

The suspect threw a gas canister into the audience of the sold out show, who first thought it was a stunt related to the film, then opened fire on the audience with an assault rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols.

This was the worst mass shooting in America in almost three years.

This was the worst mass shooting in suburban Colorado in 13 years.

Logging into Facebook this morning I see this bullshit.

You know what? Col. Cooper is right. Guns have no moral stature. Neither does a guillotine. Neither does the executioners axe. Neither do iron maidens, nuclear warheads, thumb screws, hand grenades or napalm.

They're just tools. Tools that are used to hurt and kill people.

And we fucking worship them in this country. How sick is that?

I'm not mad at Holmes shotgun. I'm not even mad at Holmes. He's probably crazy. Maybe crazy in the 'political/religious extremist' sense, but still fucking crazy.

What I am mad at is a society that apologizes for it. A society that says "don't blame us for selling guns to a person that wants to shoot people." I'm mad at a society so fucking in love with violence, so infatuated with murder, that it honestly believes the solution to gun violence is more guns.

We need guns to protect ourselves from bad guys.

Bad guys like Trayvon Martin. Bad guys like the kids at Columbine.

You know why I don't own a gun? Because I don't want to kill someone. I don't even think I could.

I don't own anything worth murdering a someone over. And neither do you.

Who does that gun protect you from? Your neighbors? Your friends? The people you pass on the street everyday? Other Americans? Some boogeyman that lives in your head? Muslim? Rapist? Crackhead? Mugger?

You're a fucking coward. You and your gun.

Yeah, we're guaranteed the right to bear arms in this country. But you know what? At the time that was written there was a very real possibility that we'd be invaded. When was the last time America was invaded?

Unless you think your rifle can shoot down a nuclear missile, or scare a bomb out of hiding, then it won't fucking save you from anything.

We also have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Guns go against all three. Guns are the tools of murders and oppressors. Guns drive happiness away by turning everything and everyone into a threat.

Guns are the tool you buy when you're terrified. The security blanket of man-children, the sucked thumb scared infants attempting to convince themselves they aren't scared. Guns, kept out of terror, perpetuate it.

Do I think the right to keep arms should be taken away? No, of course not. But I goddamn will not respect any civilian that treats it like a duty that excludes all other rights.

Unrelated

2012-07-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

I made a for real YouTube video. It is very ghetto, but I'm proud of it. Especially since I managed it with a budget of zero dollars.

It's basically a how-to on the order of operations.

Anyway, so that's a thing.

Critical Thinking: Pareidolia and Equivocation

2012-07-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

For the first and second parts of this series, please go here and here.

For this installment, I'll be discussing the phenomenon of pareidolia and the equivocation fallacy.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia refers the phenomenon of humans' pattern recognition capabilities registering false positives.

And it is really common.

First, I'll talk about why pattern recognition is a good thing and how that probably came about.

Now, obviously, thousands of years ago life was much harder and much shorter for people. And for our ancestors, being able to recognize patterns quickly quite often meant the difference between life or death. A rustling in the grass might mean a rabbit, and it might mean a snake. Yellow and black stripes might mean a shade tree, and they might mean a tiger.

So it's easy to see why people that were good at recognizing these kinds of patterns and acting quickly on them would have had a tendency to survive more than those of us that weren't as good at deciding that every rustle in the grass means "SNAKE!" and every time black and yellow stripes appeared it meant "TIGER!" Since people that were better at pattern recognition were better at surviving, this meant that they lived longer, bred more, and passed the ability on through their offspring.

Today we can see that this knack for picking out patterns is just as active as ever, even though our day-to-day survival generally isn't dependent on it. Just look at the 'Face of Mars,' or some Rorschach Ink Blots, or the hundreds of people that have found the Virgin Mary in their food, or flying saucers, or optical illusions, or just stare at some clouds for a few minutes.

We're especially good at picking out faces. Especially especially where there aren't any faces.

In reality, there is no real reason to see a face in the above picture. But we humans almost always think 'friendly face' when we see two circles above a curved line.

And that would be a pretty obvious tendency to have, given how long it takes us to develop to maturity. It's a really simple pattern and would be really useful for a toddler to be able to identify if she were lost or distressed.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. We tend to assign intent to these patterns. We have a natural disposition for assuming that other people are somewhat like us: They behave a certain way, think a certain way, emote a certain way, and so on. And we do this on to animals as well.

Now, while it is fair to argue that most mammals do display some level of emotion and intellect, it certainly wouldn't be fair to say that they do so in the same way that humans do. But we think they do. If we didn't we may never have had a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny. Aesop's fables would have been much duller. On the other hand, our pets would probably be a lot happier with us if we weren't constantly torturing them by forcing them to wear clothes or pose for fucking pictures.

Even inanimate objects and events are assigned human characteristics. Thunder doesn't mean that the gods are angry. A tornado doesn't give a fuck about your house. The rain isn't aware that you just washed your car. A table never jumped out at anybody. But we act like they do.

So all of this leads us to constantly get correlation and causation mixed up and do things like think that a certain dance set to certain music will effect the weather, since it rained shortly after the last two times we danced. Mix this in with a little justification and some confirmation bias and suddenly we have rock solid evidence for the efficacy of rain dances.

And believe me, rain dances are no sillier than some of our other pareidoliac tendencies.

There's a school mysticism/pseudo-science known as synchronicity. Many, many people ascribe to it, even if they've never heard the word.

Synchronicity involves intentionally taking casually unrelated coincidences and assigning special meaning to them. Say, for instance, one morning I read "Youtube sensation converts to Scientology" on a website. Then that afternoon someone I don't know very well on Facebook asks "What do you know about Scientology? I was looking into it on Youtube." And then, low and behold, that evening I'm on Youtube and every other video seems to be mentioning Scientology.

Now, if I was as silly as I was ten years ago I might think this was some kind of sign that I should look into Scientology. Or maybe start a religion based around YouTube or social networking. But in reality, the things aren't related. Well, anymore than anything else.

It's just a coincidence.

But people get crazy dedicated to it, seeing significance in the colors of shirts people wear at the store, linking something someone says at a meeting to something that happened five years ago, finding a random New Age Happy Talk quote or their horoscope and forcing it to line up with their day.

But it's just coincidence.

And it builds all kinds of irrational beliefs and behaviors. Just because the third horse on the ticket won the race two times in a row doesn't mean that you've found the secret to making money on horse-races. Just because the fourth and eighth person on Chatroulette wasn't a naked dude jacking off doesn't mean the fourth person will always not be a lunatic pervert.

They will always be a lunatic pervert. Pissing Jesus, but will they ever.

Equivocation

Also known as the bait-and-switch, the equivocation fallacy is generally an argument or statement that involves intentionally using a term with more than one meaning. This generally looks something like:

Man is the smartest creature on earth, and
Man has conquered the earth, so
Man, being the smart conqueror that he is, should have dominion over woman.

See what I did there? Not a great example, I admit, but I'm not nearly as good at being dishonest as I used to be. In the first two statements I used 'Man' in the meaning 'mankind' or 'homo sapiens'. But in the third statement I switched it out with 'man' in the sense of 'male human,' or 'fella'.

For an example of this fallacy performed on a level that probably qualifies as art, I'd suggest watching "Doctor" William Lane Craig debate the existence of God.

What Craig lacks in scholastic integrity and philosophical elegance he more than makes up for in invincible confidence and verbal hocus pocus.

Half his arguments are just eloquent this.

One of his strongest, or at least most often repeated, arguments is a bastardization of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The Kalam argument, in it's purest form, goes something like

Everything that exists has a cause.
The universe exists.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Now, I personally have no problem with that argument since I don't really have a lot invested in whether or not the universe could be said to have been caused. The fact is we don't know. We don't even know what we don't know. Once we get to the point of the Big Bang then we don't even know if terms like 'time' or 'cause' or 'existence' have any meaning.

Now here's where the equivocation comes in on Craig's part. He asserts that God is the first cause. This would be God in the Deistic sense: a God that merely set the dials of reality, pressed the start button, and doesn't interfere in his creation.

And while I don't see the logic in assuming that God was the first cause of the universe, since there's no way to check, as arguments for the existence of God go it's one of the less retarded ones.

Craig then equivocates by drawing a wordy-ass line from God: Non-Interfering Force of Nature to God: Jesus Christ of the Bible. And while I am Straw-Manning him to an extent for the purposes of brevity, I'd invite you to check out any of his many debates on YouTube, as he gallops out the same five or six arguments in every one I've seen, then when his opponents can't address every subtle nuance of every argument to his satisfaction, he claims victory.

Or, if they do refute all of his points he merely rewords them slightly or changes the subject, and claims victory. Which is called a Red Herring, which I'll discuss later.

ANYWAY.

The point is, is that even if Craig had managed to prove the existence of a Deistic god, that in no way provides any evidence for the God of the Bible, and certainly not the Christian god, because those are two very different meanings of the word god.

Some more common examples of this include the word UFO, which can mean Unidentified Flying Object, of course, and Alien Spaceship. Saying "People see UFO's all the time, they've got one buried out in the Desert outside of Roswell that they reverse engineered to build modern computers," is equivocating.

Big Government is another one. Does that mean big as in 'powerful, centralized government' or big as in 'a government composed of many different people and view-points'?

And finally, my favorite: Faith. Which can mean anything from fidelity, as in "I will be faithful to my girlfriend," to reasonable expectations, as in "I have faith that my friend will pay me on time," to belief in an irrational, supernatural claim despite any evidence to the contrary, as in "I have faith that Jesus will arrive on December 21, 2012 and take all the good Christians up to Heaven."

So those are a couple of things to keep an eye out for, both internally and externally.

From here on out I'll probably only be addressing one thing at a time in an effort not to spend five hours a day staring at this screen. But I'll probably look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect next and Red Herrings after that.

Critical Thinking: Straw Men and Confirmation Bias

2012-07-16T15:44:00.000-07:00

Last time I talked some about the importance of checking the source when presented with questionable or sensational information. I also spoke briefly about the Slippery Slope/Just in Case Fallacies, and quote mined/cherry-picked information.

Today I'll talk about the dangers of confirmation bias and the Straw Man Fallacy.

Confirmation Bias

Simply put, confirmation bias refers to people's tendency to seek out and place special significance on information that confirms, reaffirms, or validates their preconceived assumptions, hunches or prejudices.

For a great example of large-scale confirmation bias we can turn to pop culture: The fucking 2012 Mayan Calendar thing.

For anyone that has been locked in a Siberian gulag for the past ten years, the Mayan Calendar Thing has been a widespread conspiracy theory based on the ancient Meso-American Long-Count Calendar. The calendar 'ends' on December 21, 2012. By 'ends' I mean 'starts over.'

Now, the Long Count itself is a truly amazing accomplishment of mathematics and astronomy. Especially when one considers that they used a counting system grounded in a base of 20 (and occasionally 18,) unlike the Western world which uses the base 10 decimal system we're all familiar with.

Their math classes were fucking hard, though.

But that's not what we're here to discuss. Someone, somewhere, decided that since the calender ends on December 21st, that must mean that the world will end on December 21. Which is about as infantile as assuming your parents stop existing when they leave the room. Especially when considering that the Mayan's themselves didn't appear to think anything of the sort. For the Mayans it appears that the completion of a count was a reason to celebrate, such as the Western calendar turning 2000 (minus the Y2K nonsense).

But due to Man's natural affinity for adventure and mystery and narrative, the idea caught on.

This is where confirmation bias comes in. If someone approaches this suspecting that something big may happen on December 21, then there will be no shortage of evidence and predictions to reinforce that belief.

Just for some examples of what this evidence might look like, check out http://2012apocalypse.net/.

We've got predictions from the Bible, the Qur'an, and Nostradamus. We have natural disasters, world leaders and great wars. But the thing is this: Those predictions are so vague that they can be retrofitted to match anything at any time. That's the thing about predictions like that. If I was to write something like

     And lo, a great Beast shall arise in the East bearing a black crown
     Elevated above mortals he shall be heralded as the flying god
     His sign shall be the flaming bull
     His name shall be Archangel, Edom, Moab
    The youth of the world will supplicate at His feet
     By this shall ye know Him

the ink wouldn't even have a chance to dry before people could start linking it to modern events.

The Beast was Michael Jordan, by the way.

Add to this the fact that no one seems to be able to agree what, exactly is supposed to happen on December 21st. An extinction level meteor strike? Reversal of the magnetic poles? WWIII? The return of the Ancient Aliens? Galactic Alignment? Global spiritual enlightenment? The Rapture?

The fact is is that there is about equal probability of all of these happening: slim to none. For some of the less unlikely ones, well, a geomagnetic shift could happen. Or rather could begin to happen, since the process might take up to 10,000 years to happen.

Meteorite? Well, while that's certainly something that could happen at some point, at five months out I'm pretty sure someone would have noticed something.

Planet X? There is no Planet X/Nibiru. That hypothesis relied on gravitational anomalies in our solar system. But these anomalies are far too small to account for a planet. Besides, it would probably be visible to the naked eye at this point.

The fact is, there are only two things we'll know for certain will happen on on December 21st: The Long Count will start over, and the people that made fortunes peddling 2012 conspiracies will begin formulating their excuses and looking for new lines of work.

The Straw Man

There's recently been a movement by the politically correct crowd to have this fallacy renamed the Non-Gender-Specific Straw Person Fallacy. This is because people are idiots and pussies.

If you're going to rename it to something somehow less offensive, then go with the Training Dummy Fallacy, since that's what it refers to. Or the Scarecrow Fallacy, since scarecrows are awesome.

I am your friend! Your soul is safe with me!

Anyway, the story is back in the day when soldiers trained for combat they used straw men to practice their swordplay/marksmanship on. These straw men were, of course, much easier to knock down than real combatants. As a logical fallacy it refers to the technique of taking the opponent's argument or stance, making a ridiculous or inaccurate misrepresentation of it, and attacking the misrepresentation, instead of the the actual argument.

For some great examples of this just take a look at the Great YouTube Theist vs. Atheist Debate, or Any Political Humor Page On Facebook.

The above meme has been making the rounds of Facebook lately, so I'll use it. Now, atheism is the absence of a belief in god. That is what it is and all it is. This straw man is great because it's actually a lot more complicated than the point it's supposed to be arguing against. Atheism does not address the beginning of the universe, if it even had a beginning. It doesn't address abiogenesis or evolution, and it motherfucking goddamn certainly does not involve magic. It is the lack of a belief in god. A= without. Theism= belief in god. Atheism.

If that meme wanted to be accurate it would say: ATHEISM: Because theists haven't met their burden of proof. Which, admittedly isn't as humorous.

This is a really, really pervasive technique. Especially on the Internet. Some examples can include:

Prima: I think we should have stricter gun control regulations.
Secunda: Why are you trying to take away my Second Amendment rights?

Or:

Prima: I think hard work should be rewarded.
Secunda: So you think billionaires shouldn't be accountable to the law?

Or:

Democrats want to turn our country over to Islamic extremists.

Or:

Mitt Romney wants to implement a system of serfdom and debtor's prisons.

So it's definitely something to keep an eye out for. Particularly when the party being Straw Manned isn't around to defend their stance. Additionally, some people can use it in much more subtle and convincing ways than I've illustrated here.

Next time I'll be talking about Paredolia and Equivocation, some big-ass words that describe some simple-ass things.

Critical Thinking: Checking The Source

2012-07-15T14:11:00.003-07:00

Note: The gray links go to relevant sources. The purple links go to ads.

Critical thinking is one of my favorite things. Seriously, I wish it would have been stressed more when I was growing up. And that's probably why I get so irritated when people don't do it.

I was talking to a friend, and she pointed out maybe I should write about it. Sort of a tutorial of how to detect disingenuous bullshit. Which was a brilliant idea.

1. Check the Source

Whenever I hear an amazing or shocking claim these days it has become second nature for me to ask "How do they know that?" and then try to find out. In fact, the habit has become so ingrained that I forget that just a few years ago I hardly ever thought that.

And it's great advice. Particularly with our media here in America, where the paranormal and pseudo-science is generally equivocated with actual science. I mean, if I go to the Documentary section of Netflix and see a documentary on the evolution of primates next to a documentary on Ancient Aliens, how would I be able to tell which one was a real documentary, and which one was paranoid, sensationalist bullshit cobbled together from broken parts? The gods of ancient cultures were really aliens genetically modifying and artificially speeding the development of humans? How do they know that?

Answer: Check the Sources.

Here's a good example that showed up on my Facebook wall the other day: Leaked Army Doc Outline Plans For US Re-education Camps.

Now, I've already mentioned how I'm not immune to bias, and I generally go into anything on InfoWars expecting it to be total and complete lunatic fear-mongering. And knowing that about myself I know that I can't just call bullshit and move on. So, What does the source have to say?

Side note: Often these kinds of alarmist propaganda pieces won't even have a source. More on that later.

Alright, so what's the claim? The claim is that InfoWars has gotten its hands on a leaked Department of Defense document that "contains shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States."

That's some scary sounding shit, right? Well, lets look at the document, which can be found here.

Now, that document is over 300 pages of military jargon. And who the fuck wants to wade through that, right? Well, lets see if we can find a summary.

And right here, in the Preface, it describes the purpose of this document, which is that it "provides guidance for commanders and staffs on internment and resettlement (I/R) operations." Now, internment and resettlement is an unpleasant reality of warfare. It's not always gonna be a nice thing, and nobody really wants it to happen, but it does. Civilians get displaced, prisoners get taken, and those prisoners can be on both sides.

Now, since these kinds of things are going to inevitably happen, wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of uniform Field Manual that could be used so that everyone knows what to do and how to do it? I mean, we don't want to just execute a bunch of newly homeless civilians for living in the wrong place, do we? We don't want prisoners just vanishing in a puff of lost paperwork, do we?

And that's what this field manual is. It's a manual of what to do if and when these kinds of things happen.

The InfoWars article continues with some really misleading cherry-picking of information to make it seem as if "man-made disasters, accidents, terrorist attacks and incidents in the U.S. and its territories,” "may be performed as domestic civil support operations.” Which is really fucking misleading as these things go.

How do I know that? Well, I checked the document. Take the direct quote in the article, copy it, go to the manual, conjure our old friend ctrl+f (find,) and paste the quote in. Then it's merely a matter of reading the quote in context.

The section that the "may be performed..." quote was taken from was referring to "controlling civilian movement and providing relief to human suffering." Now, relieving human suffering seems pretty cut-and-dry, but what about 'controlling civilian movement?' That shit seems ominous as hell, right?

Well, not really. If there's about to be a firefight between two groups of lunatics with assault rifles you probably don't want children wandering onto the field. You also probably don't want possible insurgents or spies just wandering around the command post with a camera and a notebook.

Now for the most alarming part of the article, the claim that the DoD has "shocking plans for “political activists” to be pacified by “PSYOP officers” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States," that I mentioned above.

Okay, now that's a pretty good indication that this is an absolute Frankenstein of cherry picked quotes. The reason I think that is because instead of having "One long, unbroken quote that may give a clear understanding of what the manual actually says, like this," we have instead a "series of" short, "unrelated quotes," pieced together from different "parts of the manual" in an attempt to convey a very "different meaning" than was intended by the author.

And yes, I am picking on a conservative website, and yes, I do have a liberal bias in real life. But having said that, any time someone sees a quote arranged like this, there should be some red flags going off.

Now, the manual does provide guidelines that include Psychological Operations (PSYOP,) officers looking for insurgents, dissidents and malcontents that may try to organize and lead a revolt or cause disturbance while they are interred. Because those are things that might happen.

It is stretching credulity to imply that just because there may be a malcontent who may organize a disturbance while being detained, and that that malcontent may even be an American civilian on American soil, and may need "pacification programs using a variety of media. Music and news (from approved sources), I/R facility rules, and in-processing instructions are broadcast using facility loudspeaker systems augmented by loudspeaker systems organic to the tactical PSYOP detachment," this in no way implies that there is a plan to make this happen.

So, here's the conclusion I draw from this. InfoWars found a manual on what to do when both the military and Department of Defense are involved in an Internment and Relocation operation. The manual included guidelines for what to do in case this operation happens on American soil, as unlikely as that is. Infowars decided that since it could happen, that it will happen, and since it will happen, it must be part of a plan to make it happen.

This is an example of the Just in Case fallacy, which was made by presenting a Straw Man of what the manual actually said. The case is made on the worst possible outcome, rather than the most likely. This is sort of like making a slippery slope argument like

Displaced Civilians are a reality of warfare.
Rules should be enacted to deal with such eventualities.
The Rules should include domestic situations.
The Rules will be open to abuse.
The Rules will be abused.
Eventually, the Rules will be used to inter innocent civillians.
All dissent will be silenced via the Rules.

and then cutting out steps 3-7.

Now, what do we do when a similar claim is made without a source? To give an example, I'll use a 'report' from Conservative Monster, a 'news' site that provides twitter-length news articles, such as

"Russia and their Muslim terrorist friends in Iran will not be too pleased if Romney beats the Democratic voter fraud machine."

I'm not bullshitting when I say that that one sentence is the entire article.

"This seems so true!"

So, how do they know that?

Now, personally, I find it impossible that anyone would consider that a statement of prima facie fact. First of all, huh? Second of all, why would Russia and Iran be unhappy with Romney winning? Third of all, what evidence do you have of Democratic voter fraud? Fourth of all, what leads you to believe that Russia is friends with Iranian terrorists? Are you Facebook friends with Russia and notice Russia likes a lot of posts by guys named Muhammad SuicideBomb and Abdul FlamingMartyr? Fifth of all, if the Democrats have a 'voter fraud machine,' whatever that is, wouldn't that imply that they're using it to prevent Romney from winning? If so, how does Romney plan to beat the Fraud Machine? Throw a wrench in its gears? Hack its website? I literally have no idea what a voter fraud machine is or how it would be beaten.

The good thing about these kinds of claims is that since they're asserted without evidence they can be dismissed without evidence. This is popularly known as Hitchen's Razor, although I don't think it's officially recognized as a philosophical principle the way Occam's Razor is.

The bad thing about these kinds of claims is that they're such a pain in the ass to debunk or disprove. Since the author doesn't cite any sources or relevant studies we have no real idea where this information is coming from. Personally, I suspect paranoid delusion. But unless I'm willing to spend days and days searching for articles linking Russia to Iranian terrorists or finding out what the fuck a voter fraud machine is, and I'm not, then it's probably going to go unchallenged. Which is a shame, because some people will accept it as Gospel truth.

And I mean Gospel in the sense that even though it's provably insane and wrong people will still believe it.

Next time, assuming I don't lose interest like I usually do, I'll be discussing confirmation bias and maybe straw man arguments. Or maybe something else.

Faith, Fire, and Facebook

2012-06-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

I recently moved to Colorado, from the scenic, sweltering pressure cooker of the Texas Hill Country and it's endemic Good-Ole-Boyism, non-existent educational standards, and rampant superstition, bigotry and out-group hostility.

Colorado immediately burst into flames.

So the next time someone posts "Please pray for the people of Colorado," on your Facebook wall, instead of replying "Prayers sent!" or whatever inane, unhelpful mindless happy talk you're about to post to give yourself the feeling of a job well done without actually doing anything, check out this list of things you can do to help that don't rely on sitting on your ass and feeling good about yourself for no damn reason.

1. Educate Yourself

By cutting down all of the forests!

This isn't even the hard kind of education, like molecular biology or quantum physics or (for my Texas friends,) 5th Grade reading comprehension.

Fire, as many know, is spread by the devils of temptation in their rampant march through our children, corrupting them into tiny anti-christs engaging in all manner of evil behavior, including dresses shorter than floor length, sassing their elders, premarital kissing and, in extreme cases, concern for the well-being of those less fortunate than themselves.

In order to protect ourselves from our glorious and vengeful God, He has commanded us to remove all flammable materials within a five mile radius of any habitable structure. Just imagine how ordered and and simple and Godly a world would be without any unsightly trees or grass between you and Sunday School!

Donate To Firefighters

Fighting fires takes money. Instead of donating directly to the firefighters, who are always sad, disappointing humans wandering through traffic asking for handouts like common liberals, and nothing like the chiseled, homosexual models that adorn their PR calenders, give it to your favorite politician.

Assuming you're not a deviant sinner swayed by socialist lies, you'll realize that the best way to keep your fire department funded is by privatization.

That's right, Romney is an anagram of "R money" which is Texan for "Our money"! How could we possibly fail to succeed with a name like that attached to a rich, white guy, even if he is a filthy Mormon and will burn in the fires of Hell for all eternity for having slightly different silly, made-up beliefs than everyone else's silly, made-up beliefs?

Just think! Like our wonderful healthcare system, which ranks first in North American countries that aren't Canada, Mexico, or too small to care about, and only 37th in the world in terms of overall quality, a privatized fire department would be a positive money tree!

Just in case you were wondering, the United States Healthcare system IS number one in overall cost per capita! That's why you don't see doctors asking for handouts or having fundraisers: they know that God truly wants us to flourish as individuals at the expense of society at large!

And don't worry about the cost! As a good Christian, your house will be immune to God's righteous fire. Why, you could even have a barbeque on the charred remains of your neighbors, laughing at the idea of them hanging from meat-hooks being lowered into a lake of molten sulfur for all eternity for their sins of questioning authority and constantly trying to use logic and facts to win arguments!

Make Yourself Available!

While some well-meaning but misguided secularists have been posting ads on Craigslist making their spare bedrooms and houses available to those unfortunate (wicked and deserving of punishment,) enough to be displaced by the fires, their efforts to help will ultimately be fruitless. They, having not heard our LORDS warning against the evils of the Internet, do not realize that, among other things, Craigslist allows homosexuals to post ads looking for other homosexuals for purposes of companionship. Just as a bad tree cannot produce good fruit, anything involving gays will ultimately be fruitless!

No, what a true Christian can and must do is visit these poor, lost souls in their government sanctioned holding pens and spread the Good News! They may be hungry, tired, angry, or sick from smoke inhalation or burns, but the important thing is that they should all have access to Scripture!

Toilet paper and bathroom reading in one!

The Holy Bible can serve so many purposes for these people! Provided it's a good, solid KJV with annotations, it can be used to club to death the rats they rely on for nutrition, and THEN used to cook the rats, and THEN used to cleanse themselves when they defecate the rat back out into a bucket! How good is our God to provide us with such a multi-purpose book?!

4. As a Last Resort

Seriously, making a Facebook prayer request is about the most fucking useless thing a human being could possibly do to help another human being. I've seen dozens of the fucking things on my wall and you know what? Not one of those people has called to ask if I need anything or if I'm okay.

I said it was almost the most useless thing one could do because responding to one of them is definitely the most useless thing ever. If you seriously believe that clicking the 'like' button, or posting 'healing vibes headed your way' could possibly affect anything in the real world, and then allow yourself a warm, fuzzy feeling for making that much of an effort then you're even worse than the internet slacktivists that spread that damn Kony 2012 video around for a week and then forgot about it forever.

You want to pray for someone? Fine. Go ahead. But don't make a big spectacle of it and attempt to emotionally blackmail your friends into joining you, you pretentious dick-knuckle. Pray, for whatever good it does (hint: none,) and then go do something fucking useful.

Faithless

2012-06-09T01:03:00.000-07:00

I had to take a break from the Good Book. Far too much genocide and child torture for me to indulge in on a daily basis. Not if I intend to remain somewhat civil.

I wanted instead to address a problem I've been struggling with expressing for quite a while now. The problem of faith. I had a conversation in which a friend told me they felt sad for me because I didn't have faith.

Their argument was that while thoughts can be wrong and feelings can be wrong, faith can't be wrong.

My stance is that all three can be wrong. That's why I try to surround myself with people that help keep me honest and challenge my beliefs. Not religious beliefs in my case, obviously, but beliefs about politics and video games and music and sex.

See, as a freethinker or secular humanist or skeptic or whatever, I don't, or can't, just accept the dictates of authority unthinkingly. I don't know that other people can, or if they do that they'd be aware of it, but they certainly seem to.

Now I'm not going to sit here and pretend as if I NEVER accept a statement without carefully evaluating it. Not that I have the best bullshit detector, but just because I'm kinda lazy and most of the shit I hear on a day to day basis doesn't matter in the big picture.

For the things that do matter, or that I consider as mattering, there are certain sources I'm more inclined to believe than others. If The Blaze makes a potentially slanderous claim against a Democratic Congressman then I'm more inclined to approach it skeptically than I would be if Alternet made a similar claim against a Republican Congressman. Nobody is immune to some level of cognitive bias.

Which is the awesome thing about the scientific method, incidentally: It filters out bias as much as possible.

Going along with that, there have been some things that I REAAAAAAAAALLY wanted to believe that just weren't true. And conceding that they weren't is not always fun. Metallica was not that groundbreaking and original. Obama is another war President. M. Night Shyamalan only made one good movie. Two Worlds 2 is a shit game. There is a personal, loving, sentient entity out there that wants the best for me, and I can't understand it because it's too big for me to understand. That girl from the coffee shop wasn't really into me. Adam Sandler was never that funny. Ouch.

Faith now, where does faith figure into things? I can argue from a scientific perspective, a philosophical perspective, I can cite research, I can do whatever to assert my stance or reject a claim, but what seems to be the fundamental difference between the friend that feels sad for me, and me, who feels sad for my friend, is faith.

Here are some of the arguments I've heard.

"Faith is the opposite of fear."

I make no secret about my past as a seemingly hopeless drug addict. And one thing that I have in common with most addicts is a predisposition for fear-based decision making. Jumping to the worst possible conclusion, instead of the most likely. Constantly making back up plans for when things inevitably don't work out. Choosing the security of monotony over the risk of adventure. Things like that.

Faith isn't the opposite of fear, though. Hope is the opposite of fear, and reason is the opposite of faith. That's my stance.

Faith can get someone through fear, of course. But so can courage, and reason, and emotional support. But faith is not the opposite. Hope is. Well, inasmuch as emotions have opposites, which they don't really, but for the purpose of the argument...

They even, when unfounded, have diametric outcomes. Fear, if what is feared doesn't come to pass, leads to relief: A positive emotion. Hope, if it doesn't pan out, leads to disappointment: a negative emotion.

Faith is a tool used to deal with fear. But as I've stated above, there are other tools that can be used to deal with it.

"Everyone has faith, even you."

I'd agree that almost everyone has the capacity for faith, even a tendency towards it. Most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty, and faith fills that need for answers nicely. But just because most people HAVE it, doesn't mean it's necessarily a good thing.

We also all have a skeleton not particularly suited for a bipedal lifestyle, but no one's claiming lower back problems are a good thing. Something similar can be said about self-pity, overconfidence, scientific ignorance, the appendix, and so on.

Faith isn't necessary, in other words. And while I'm not claiming I'm completely devoid of faith, I am claiming that I would like to be. Which is the point where the argument usually devolves into some kind of "You have faith in science/electricity/yourself" thing. Which doesn't work as it relies on conflated terminology and false equivalency.

I don't have faith in electricity, I have expectations based on past experience corroborated with a mountain of evidence. If I pay the bill, and there are no wiring problems or blown fuses or shorts or burnt out bulbs, then when I flip the switch on my lamp, my lamp will turn on. That doesn't require faith. Even if I didn't understand HOW electrons flow and interact with tungsten; and even though I don't understand WHY electrons flow (which assumes there has to be a reason, which there isn't, but that's usually part of the argument,) the lamp will still work.

On the other hand, faith in God has NEVER worked as reliably as electricity. In any test or study that I'm aware of, the efficacy of faith has always been statistically within the margin of error for no discernible effect, other than as an emotional security blanket. And there are more practical and functional options than that.

"Faith keeps us humble."

Humility is a tricky concept to define. The definition I use is "a sense of one's relative importance in a given situation."

The reasoning behind this argument, inasmuch as I understand it, is that so long as God is at the top of the ladder, the believer will be at the bottom, effectively inoculating the believer from grandiosity, self-righteousness, selfishness, and so on.

Which fails miserably as a hypothesis. Assuming there were a personal, all powerful God, why would placing God at the top of one's priorities ensure that anything below God wouldn't be just as fucked up as having one's self at the top? And why are we looking at life as a chain instead of a sphere or tree?

Yes, I'm really high on my list of things I care about. But that doesn't automatically mean I'm a self-centered egomaniac. While I certainly used to be (and still can be on occasion,) I have a completely different relationship with myself than I did four years ago.

Today I realize that I have to be important to myself because if I'm not I won't be any good to others.   Now, having said that, I realize that everyone else is just as important to themselves as I am to me. And assuming there's NOT a personal, loving God making sure everyone is interacting properly in accordance with some impossibly complex plan, as I do, I have to keep this in mind. I can miss a meal if someone hasn't eaten in two days. I can make myself available to someone I know is going through a rough patch, even if it means missing out on something I really wanted to do. Why? Because I know what those things are like.

That's just empathy and compassion, our evolved herd instincts, and, as far as I'm concerned, the most beautiful and powerful thing about humanity.

"Without faith I wouldn't be where I am today."

Without faith you might be somewhere much nicer.

The problem with this kind of argument is that we don't have extra lives. We can't go back a year, make different choices with different motivations and check.

I suspect that if I hadn't been waiting on some kind of sign that I might have taken the initiative to move out of Texas long before I did. And it may have worked out poorly. Or spectacularly. There is no way of checking.

To claim that by merely having faith led to the current favorable outcome is puerile. It's superstition at it's worst. I know lots of people that are rancid with faith that never catch lucky breaks.

Every day trillions of choices are made. Not to say it's luck, but the web of human interaction, factored in with all of the non-human variables, is so complex that it might as well be. Saying that faith is the most important factor at play is like saying your lucky shirt did it.

My life, whether judged from quality of lifestyle, to overall happiness, to general satisfaction, has improved a ton since I abandoned faith. That alone is enough to disqualify faith as the most important factor. And in my case I suspect that it was one of the primary factors in keeping me stuck in a life I was unhappy with while desperately trying to convince myself that it was the best possible life I could have.

"I know by faith."

Is usually the justification given for the really big questions. Or a variation on it.

Why do you believe in God despite the lack of evidence? Why do you think there's an afterlife? How can you claim your moral compass is powered by the same God that Fred Phelps has?

The undercurrent with this argument is always that there's something wrong with my worldview because I choose to know things that are real. The Big Bang theory doesn't give a shit about me. Evolution doesn't want to give me a big hug if I can't pay my electric bill. Christopher Hitchens won't comfort me in my hour of need. So I'm the one missing out, right?

No. I'm not. While the certainty of faith can be appealing at times, I know where it leads. It leads to a rigid, inflexible worldview with no more mystery in it beyond burrowing deeper into the delusion. Faith is so small. I'm an ape that's just clever enough to know that I'm an ape made of particles too small to see, living on a wet rock orbiting an unremarkable star in an unremarkable galaxy. I have so much left to learn and see and do. What compares to that? Your claim that the creator of the universe is your personal buddy? Fine. Next time you talk to him ask him why he waited 14 and a half billion years to make you think we're so damn important.

I'd prefer a truth I can verify, or that at least can be verified. And I can live with honestly not having the big answers much more soundly than by dishonestly claiming I do. And the best thing about that? I can withhold judgement on things I'm unsure about. I don't have any commandments to follow. I don't have to have answers. And that concept gets conflated with faith quite a bit.

If I hear something and can't decide whether or not to believe it, and can't do the work to verify it, I can just say "I don't know yet." What caused the Big Bang? I don't know. Maybe nothing. May be the wrong question. Why is everything the way it is? I don't know. What's the purpose of life? I don't know. May be there isn't one.

I love that concept. When I first got clean I didn't think I could stay clean, because I had never been able to before. And that was what helped. and I wish someone would have explained it to me then. I didn't think anything would work for me, but I was told to 'believe that I believe,' and 'to be willing to be willing' and inane garbage like that. So I withheld judgement long enough to try some new things, and found some things that worked, like emotional honesty, self-appraisal, willingness, allowing my beliefs about myself to be challenged, forgiveness, making amends for my past transgressions. And I tried some things that didn't work, like prayer, faith, belief in the supernatural, and reading alleged holy books.

So no, I don't have faith. Not in any kind of God that's relieved my obsession to use drugs or is helping me get through the rough parts of life. If I could say that I had faith in anything then it would be in humanity in general. I think humans will eventually get their act together. I have no real evidence for this, as class struggles and poverty and war and cruelty don't seem to be going anywhere, so by that definition it would be faith. For anything else: I can withold judgement, I can have reasonable   expectations, or I can just say, in all honesty, "I don't know," and be done with it.

Of course, saying "I don't know" starts a whole new argument.

"How can you claim you're an atheist when you don't KNOW there isn't a God?" "How can you say you don't believe in an afterlife if you don't KNOW that there isn't life after death that just can't be measured by modern science?" And the answer is: honestly.

Believe me, I would really like it if there was a God out there, or that I'd get to see my father again. But looking at it realistically, probably not. I don't believe in God because I have no reason to. When I did it didn't make me any happier or more successful than I would have been anyway, not that we can check, and I haven't encountered or experienced anything, ever, that needed God as an explanation. Maybe part of us survives after death. I doubt it, but maybe. But it won't be the heaven or hell that religion claims. We know consciousness is a product of the brain, so that won't survive. And the ideas of eternal pleasure or pain are out as our nerve endings die with our body. So whatever survives won't be US as individual, unique entities. Some kind of chi or force or life essence that can't be measured or tested? Sure, that's possible, but if it exists there's no reason to believe in it as believing in it serves no practical use or purpose. It might make for great science fiction and karate movies, but I have never fucking yet seen someone shoot Force Lightning or harness mystical Chinese secret energies to do anything more than swindle gullible hippies out of money.

Genesis, Chapters 11-26

2012-06-07T13:05:00.000-07:00

Chapter 11.

    1: Everyone speaks the same language, despite being divided according to their tongue.

    2-4:Man begins building a tower to reach Heaven, which is only like 5 miles up as everyone knows.

    5-9: God came down to earth, which used to happen a lot, and confounded Men's language and scattered them, as they were getting way too close to building a functioning and progressive society of technological advancement for the Judeo-Christian God's liking.

    10-26: More fucking genealogies. People are still living well past the 900 year mark.

    27-28: Terah sires Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Haran begats Lot.

    29: Abram marries Sarai, Nahor marries Milcah.

    30: Sarai is barren.

    31-32: Terah takes his son Abram, Sarai, and Lot and went into Canaan. The place, not the person. There they came unto Haran the Place, not Haran the Person.

Chapter 12.

    1-3: God tells Abram to leave Haran the Place for somewhere else where God will build a great nation with Abram as its leader. God will bless those that bless Abram and curse those that curse Abram, so, yknow, be nice to that guy.

    4-6: Abram, Lot and Sarai and all their people (slaves,) go forth to Canaan the Place.

    7: God grants the land to Abram, because that's how property rights work, and Abram built an altar to God who appeared to Abram.

Again, God had no problem with just showing up.

    8-9: More traveling and altar building.

    10-13: They come to Egypt, where there is a famine. Abram, brave leader that he is, tells his wife Sarai to tell the Egyptians that she is his sister so that they don't kill Abram to take her as a sex slave.

Of course, they may take Sarai anyway, but at least the fella gets to go free, since he's just her brother. Right? "Hey, you're probably gonna get raped to death, so instead of dying trying to defend you, I'll just lie and save my own ass. We cool?"

    14-16: Sarai was taken by no less than the Pharaoh, giving Abram sheep, oxen, asses, servants, and camels for her.

So yeah, if you're ever destitute in a foreign land, sell your hot wife to the local king.

    17-20: God plagues Pharaoh and his house with plagues because of Sarai. Pharaoh asks Abram 'What the fuck? Why didn't you tell me she was your wife? Get the fuck out of here!' Abram, Sarai and their stuff gets the fuck out.

Chapter 13.

    1-4: Abram, having grown quite wealthy in cattle, silver and gold, presumably from whoring out his wife, went back to his alter and called on God.

    5-7: Lot, also wealthy in flocks, herds and tents, and Abram had too much stuff to stay on the same land without fighting, since God's prophets are all about worldly accumulation of wealth.

    8-9: Abram proposes they split the land down the middle.

    10-13: Abram stayed in Canaan, while Lot went down to the cities of the plains. The cities being Sodom and Gomorrah.

    14-18: After Lot left to enjoy the sites of Sodom and Gomorrah, God promised Abram all the land that he could see in every direction until the end of time, and that his descendants would outnumber the grains of sand on the earth.

Anyone else think this is kind of a dick move? Hey, guy who sold his wife, You're gonna get everything you could ever possibly desire. Hey, tag-along nephew, you get to go live in a shithole so shitty their hobbies include Angel Rape.

Chapter 14.

    1-12: There was a big war between a bunch of places that probably never existed. Or at least never existed as described, the end of which led to Lot and his good being taken by deserters from Sodom and Gomorrah.

    13-16: Abram, learning of his nephews capture, armed his slaves and attacked them under cover of darkness and rescued Lot, his goods, the women and the regular people (men).

    17-20: The king of Sodom and the king/high-priest of Salem met with Abram to sing praises. Abram offers the first tithe.

The King of Sodom.

    21-24: King Sodom offers to let Abram keep the goods in exchange for the prisoners. Abram says no dice, I'm not taking a bribe from you so you can say you made me rich. Abram accepted only the food that his men and confederates had eaten.

Which is the kind of noble and self-sacrificing and humble gesture one can make if one is already so rich that half a country can't hold all your stuff.

Chapter 15.

    1: God appears to Abram in a vision claiming to be his shield and reward.

    2-6: Abram asks why he doesn't have a proper heir. God promises Abrams descendants will outnumber the stars in the sky.

    7-11: God asks for a creepily specific blood sacrifice.

Seriously, if you ever want to know how to properly butcher animals for the purposes of appeasing your mad desert god, this is the goods.

    12-21: In a nightmare, God explains how, even though Abram will die peacefully of old age, his people will be enslaved for hundreds of years, but after that it'll be awesome.

Which would be an awesome prophecy if there was any possible way of proving it hadn't been retro-fitted into the narrative.

Chapter 16.

    1-4: Sarai, who is barren and baby-crazy, tells Abram to knock up their handmaiden, the Egyptian Hagar. Hagar then gets uppity with Sarai.

Sarai gets mad butthurt about things happening exactly as she wanted them to, proving we really are made in God's image as he's constantly doing that.

    5-6: Sarai 'dealt hardly' with Hagar, who flees.

    7-10: An angel, upon finding Hagar, orders Hagar to return to Sarai and accept her punishment, and that Hagar's offspring will not be innumerable.

    11-16: The angel informs Hagar that her child will be a 'wild man' with 'every man's hand against him' before she returns and gives birth to Ishmael.

Chapter 17.

    1-5: Years later, God appears to Abram seeking to make covenant. Abram becomes Abraham, as he will be the father of many nations.

    6-11: God explains the covenant, which is more 'innumerable descendants,' 'great kingdoms,' 'more powerful than kings' schtick. The sign of the covenant? Genital mutilation of infants. What else.

    12-14: God explains the ettiquite for cutting part of a baby's dick off, even if that child is bought as a slave.

Weird how we consider this barbaric ritual 'normal.'

Also, if God doesn't want people to have foreskin then WHY DID HE DESIGN US WITH IT?

    15-17: Sarai becomes Sarah, and God promises she will bear a child. Abraham has trouble believing this, as he is 90 years old. Although that's only like 8 in Genesis years.

    18-22: God promises that, while Ishmael will be fruitful, the covenant will pass to the unborn Isaac.

Because let's not get crazy with handing out blessings and covenants, it's not like he's all-powerful and totally capable of passing the covenant to both with no real effort on his part.

    23-27: Abraham takes Ishmael, all of his slaves, bought and born, and circumcises them, as well as himself.

Which sounds like it would have been the best Youtube video and worst day at work ever.

Chapter 18.

    1: God appears to Abraham on the plains of Mamre one day.

    2-8: It seems God took the form of three travelers, for some reason. Luckily Abraham is almost comically eager to please any wandering travelers who happen upon his tent. Abraham and Sarah personally prepare a feast for the guests.

I'm genuinely curious whether or not Abraham knew the trinity were really God, or if this is just how he acts around strangers. I mean he has lots of servants with freshly mutilated cocks, couldn't they prepare the feast?

    9-11: The travelers tell Abraham (and Sarah, who was eavesdropping,) that they will have a son, despite being really old.

Now, just as a reminder, while Abraham and Sarah are freaking out about being too old to have children, Abraham's father was 70 when he sired children and lived to be 205 (11:26,32). So as far as I'm concerned, people breeding decades past the expiration of their historical life expectancy (around 30 it they were lucky,) is totally normal for this fiction.

    12-15: Sarah laughs at the absurdity of the news. God asks why she was laughing, because he can totally do it, you'll see, God's really powerful.

    16-20: God, turning his attention to Sodom and debates whether or not to tell Abraham what he is about to do. God decides to take Abraham with him. Only him is still them at this point.

    21-33: God and the trinity travel towards Sodom, which God intends to destroy. Abraham, for once not behaving like a greedy, venal coward with a dick mutilation fetish, bargains God down to sparing the city if ten righteous men can be found.

If God is the source of morality, then why is the human the one trying to prevent needless slaughter at the hand of God here? I refuse to believe that Sodom was irredeemable, as the amount of irredeemable people in the world is a tiny fraction, and those belong to tragic cases of untreatable mental illness or severe psychological/emotional damage. For the rest, surely the 'right' thing to do would be to, I don't know, establish law and schools and to implement preventative education and better parenting techniques.This is God we're talking about, so money and time would not be an issue.

Chapter 19.

    1-3: Two angels appear to Lot in Sodom. Lot begs them to stay at his house to eat and wash up, which angels need to do, apparently, and despite the angels desire to sleep in the streets, eventually enter Lot's home and feast.

    4-8: A mob surrounds Lot's house demanding that the angels be released for raping purposes. Lot goes out and OFFERS HIS VIRGIN DAUGHTERS TO THE RAPE MOB IN THEIR PLACE.

I'll admit I'm not a parent, but I can say, as a person, I would never, ever, ever, ever offer a defenseless young woman to an angry mob in place of a grown man (which is how the angels are described). To any religious parents out there, I sincerely hope that if push comes to shove you will choose your child's well-being over the dictates of your insane god.

    9-11: The mob surges, and the angels pull Lot into the house and strike the mob blind.

And no one was raped. Although Lot certainly deserved it after throwing his daughters to the mob like that.

    12-14: The angels warn Lot that they are about to destroy the city, so that Lot can gather his family. His sons-in-law-to-be thought he was joking.

I wonder how hilarious they'd find Lot knowing he offered their fiancees up for gang rape.

    15-17: The angels order Lot to take his wife and daughters and flee the city. When he doesn't, the angels forcibly remove him for his own safety. They then order him to flee to the hills to avoid the coming destruction.

    18-22: Lot bargains the angels down to fleeing to the much closer village of Zoar.

    23-26: With the dawn, God rained fire. All of the men, all of the children, all of the women, infants, elderly and unborn, all of the pets and animals of Sodom and Gomorrah burned. And Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for the crime of watching the atrocity of God's handiwork.

   27-30: The next morning Lot went out to see the smoking crater that used to be the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot, fearing to dwell in Zoar, went into the mountains to live with his daughters.

   31-38: The daughters (of course it's the daughters' idea, this is the Bible,) decide to get their father drunk and have sex with him to get pregnant. They then give birth to Moab of the Moabites and Benammi of the Ammonites. The daughters don't get names.

Assuming the situation happened as written (which is questionable, given what we know of Lot's parenting skills,) that Lot's daughters got him black-out drunk and took advantage of him, as so often happens, surely when they became noticeably pregnant he would work out what had happened, right? Of course, maybe Lot was totally okay with it.

Chapter 20.

    1-3: While sojourning in Gerar, Abraham again tells the king that Sarah is his sister when they come to take her. God, ever one to defend the worthless pile of shit Abraham, appears to the king in a dream to tell him that Sarah is married and that the king is a dead man.

    4-7: The king, who had not slept with Sarah, claims innocence as both Abraham and Sarah stated that they were siblings. God claims to have know this and to have been the reason the king hadn't touched Sarah, and orders the king to return Sarah or fucking else.

Which is interesting, in that God clearly has and is willing to forcibly prevent people from partaking in actions he considers wicked. Yet, instead of exercising this faculty on the people of pre-Flood earth or at Sodom and Gomorrah, he found it preferable to drown and burn men, women, and children.

    8-10: Upon awakening, the king informs his servants of what has transpired, then calls Abraham and gives him a similar 'what the fuck, dude?!' speech that Pharaoh gave Abraham the last time he pulled this stunt.

    11-13: Abraham informs the king that, despite being an abject coward unwilling to defend his wife, she was his half-sister: therefore he wasn't technically lying. He also tells the king that he ordered Sarah to corroborate the story.

    14-16: to set matters right, the king gives Abraham sheep, oxen, slaves and a thousand silver pieces and offers to let Abraham stay anywhere in his kingdom.

Because again, if you're a man of God, the best way to make a living is by whoring your wife out while claiming she's your sister.

    17-18: Abraham prays, and God heals the king, the kings wife and their female slaves so that they could bear children. Because God had stricken all the wombs of the kings house barren because of Sarah...

First, Abraham has been begging God to fix Sarah's baby-maker for decades, but God decides female slaves that have nothing to do with Abraham in any way are a higher priority. Second, magically healing people of afflictions you magically gave them sort of cancels the use of magic out.

Chapter 21.

    1-8: God finally makes good on his promise to give Abraham and Sarah a son, much to the rejoicing of all.

    9-13: During a feast in honor of Isaac, Sarah notices Hagar, Abraham's other baby-mama playing with Isaac, and orders Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out, much to the displeasure of Abraham. God tells Abraham to cast his other son's mother and his other son out, as Isaac is the only son that really counts.

    14-16: Abraham casts out Hagar and Ishmael to wander in the wilderness. After running out of water, Hagar placed Ishmael under a bush, wandered a ways of, and wept at the prospect of having to watch her child die.

Just so we're clear: Sarah ordered this, God confirmed it, and Abraham did this. A woman is watching her child die of thirst in the wilderness because the child, son of a wealthy landowner, wasn't the legitimate heir.

    17-21: God, again taking his sweet-ass time fulfilling his contracts, intervenes and the boy grows up in the wilderness and became a great archer and married a nice Egyptian girl.

    22-24: The king of Gerar and the commander of his men told Abraham that God was with Abraham in all that he did, and asked him to swear by God that he would not deal falsely with the king or his descendants, as the king had always dealt honestly with Abraham. Abraham agreed.

    25-32: Abraham complains to the king that the king's men had seized a well which was on Abraham's land. The king claimed ignorance of this. The two then took sheep and oxen and struck a deal in which the land of the Philistines was returned.

    33-34: Abraham planted a tamarisk tree where the deal was struck, called on God and sojourned in the land of the Philistines.

It's weird how randomly specific some things are, such as their being seven ewes, or the tree being a tamarisk, whatever that is, yet Lot's daughters don't even receive names and time frames are marked only by births and deaths.

Chapter 22.

Fuck, I really hope we're done with the torture and murder of women and children for a while. The last few chapters were nauseating.

    1-2: God commands Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering.

Fuck.

    3-5: Abraham takes Isaac and two men, along with wood and asses, and set forth for the place where he will kill his son for the glory of God. Drawing close, Abraham tells his servants to wait with the ass while he and his son go off to worship where there aren't any witnesses.

    6-10: This is one of the most monstrous things I have ever read, in a book chock full of monstrous things.

    11-14: At the last second God calls the execution off, as it was only a test. Abraham finds a ram to sacrifice instead.

As tests go, as far as I'm concerned, Abraham failed miserably. Abraham has, so far, repeatedly lied about his relationship with his wife to save his own hide, repeatedly whored out his wife in a foreign land, impregnated his slave girl, cast the slave girl and his first-born son into the wilderness, mutilated the genitals of both of his children and all of his slaves, and almost murdered his other son. This is the man viewed as the founder of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

    15-19: God again promises Abraham the innumerable seed, all nations being blessed thing for his obedience. Abraham and his party return and dwell in Beer-sheba.

And that's the price, isn't it? Unquestioning obedience. Land, wealth, power, prosperity: what is that worth? Murdering a child? No. Hell is preferable to that.

    20-24: After this Abraham is informed that his brother Nahor and his wife Milcah also bore children: Huz, Buz, and Kemuel father of Aram, Chesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph, and Bethuel. Bethuel begat Rebekah. His concubine Reumah bore him Tebah, Gaham, Thahash, and Maachah.

And hopefully none of those children had any dealings with the mad desert god of Abraham.

Chapter 23.

This entire chapter concerns itself solely with the death of Sarah, Abraham's grief, and the purchase of a burial place.

Chapter 24.

    1-9: Abraham, now an old man, makes his servant swear to find Isaac a wife from the country of Abraham's kindred and not a Canaanite woman. And also to bring the woman to Canaan and under no circumstances take Isaac to the land of his fathers.

    10-14: After loading up on swag and traveling to Nahor the Place, the servant posts up at a well to creep on the women drawing water. He offered up a really specific prayer to find a suitable wife.

    15-20: At this point Rebekah, granddaughter of Nahor the Person shows up and fulfills the servants prayer request.

Now, I'm not an expert on the culture here, but the servant prayed that the right maiden would offer to water his camels as well if the servant asked her for water for himself, which Rebekah did. But that probably could have been any unmarried woman that responded in that way to an apparently wealthy traveler in a patriarchal society. Seems a bit like only praying for rain when it's already thundering.

   21-28: The servant procures lodging at Rebekah's place and praises God. Because a normal person wouldn't rent out a room to a man offering gold jewelry in exchange for it.

    29-48: Rebekah's brother returns to fetch the servant, who refuses to eat or wash up until he has told his story. He then repeats almost verbatim the first 28 verses of this chapter.

    49-61: After agreeing to the marriage and showering everyone with gifts the servant and Rebekah depart immediately.

    62-67: Isaac, meditating in a field, saw the camels and walked toward them, the servant told Rebekah that it was Isaac approaching, so she veiled herself. The servant then told Isaac what had happened, and Isaac took Rebekah into his tent, married her, loved her, was comforted after the loss of his mother.

I'm starting to worry, as nothing notably insane has happened in a couple of chapters.

Chapter 25.

    1-6: Abraham remarried and had several more children, but gave all he had, minus gifts, to Isaac because fuck the other kids.

    7-10: Abraham died aged 175 and was buried with his first wife by Isaac and Ishmael.

    11: After Abraham's death God blesses Isaac, who dwelt by the well Lahai-roi.

    12-18: Genealogy and dwellings of Ishmael.

    19-26: Rebekah, who was also barren, eventually conceived after Isaac intreated God on her behalf, which always works out well. She gave birth to twins: Esau, born covered in fur, and Jacob, who came out grabbing Esau's heel.

Esau and Jacob

27-28: Esau, whom Isaac preferred, was a hunter of the field. Jacob, whom Rebekah preferred, was a tent dweller.

29-34: Esau, returning from the field half-starved, begs Jacob for some food (pottage, whatever the fuck that is,) and Jacob convinces Esau to sell Jacob his birthright in exchange for a meal.

First, if Esau was short-sighted enough to sell his half of the kingdom for a meal, then he probably wouldn't have made a very good leader. Second, if Jacob is conniving enough to trick his dimwitted brother into selling his birthright for a meal and ruthless enough to let him starve if he doesn't, then he probably won't make a very good leader either. So I imagine things will soon get extremely cruel, bloody, and inhumane again very shortly.

Genesis, Chapter 1-10

2012-06-07T01:35:00.000-07:00

So an otherwise sane friend of mine, a country musician and former Marine that lives in Texas, suggested we all imitate God, just as Christ had. And that we, like Christ, offer ourselves as sacrifices to God, a creature who, as we will soon learn, is absolutely fucking in love with blood sacrifice.

I asked if he meant I should allow myself to be sacrificed to myself to appease myself for the sin of being born as myself, a creation of myself, and would then, having atoned with myself, go forth with a clear conscience or something. Which sounds like a lot of work, and crazy, and that I'd stick to just trying to be a good person every day.

I was being irreverent. This is not a positive character trait for some people, I am learning.

He later posted this, presumably directed at me:

"Dear Athiest, I am a Christian, I believe in Jesus. I have heard you mock my faith, I thank you for your existence. I have never felt the persecution my savior endured, nor have I had to endure many of the things Christians before me had to endure. I thank you for teaching me.personal humility and pride in my faith. I thank you for posting your comments on my wall to make my friends curious enough to read for themselves and not accept recycled sermons as Gospel. I now challenge you to read for yourself from cover to cover, with an open mind. I truly enjoy how much energy you spend trying to convince me that you live a good life and are a nice person, all the while talking down my faith. That my friend is neither good nor nice. By the way, are you trying to convince me or yourself that my savior didn't exist?"

I've read the Bible. Several times. All of it. Starting at age 4 in a fundamentalist church school.

First, a few clarifications:

1. I don't expend a bunch of energy trying to convince anyone that I live a good life or am a good person. Unless I think it'll help me get laid. Which just proves I don't and I'm not. I'm just trying to be less of a cunt than the people that raised me.

2. Maybe talking down your faith isn't good or nice, but I don't think death threats being sent to teenagers, homosexuals, atheists, and Planned Parenthood doctors is nice either. If the worst thing I do with my life is poke fun at what I view as one of the most corrosive and vile institutions in the history of the world, an institution that can only propagate by indoctrinating children, preying on the bereaved, indignant, and vulnerable, threatening doubters with eternal torture and shunning/attacking/demonizing anyone audacious enough to question the sense and utility of the entire thing, then yes, I can call myself a good person in that regard. Because I have pride in my ability to reason more than I have pride in my ability to accept easy answers from 'nice' people.

3. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I don't give a fuck what you believe so long as you aren't hurting anyone and are make an effort to stay informed about the larger community. I side with the evidence as I see it, and the experts if I don't fully understand it. And as I see it, there is no evidence for any supernatural force or intelligence at work in the life of Man, and there are no experts on religion because there's no consensus in religion. If you have different evidence I'd be happy to take a look, but it's incredibly hard to slot Islam and Hinduism together the same way biology and chemistry slot together.

4. Unlike faith-based belief systems, if new evidence runs contrary to what I believe about reality, I realize it's my beliefs that need to change to fit the evidence no matter how upsetting it is, not the evidence that needs to conform to my beliefs so I can continue to be a 'nice' person.

But then again, I'm not humble, am I?

5. I'm going to be as open-minded (receptive and unbiased,) as possible during this read-through. But I refuse to turn my brain off. If by some chance there is a God that designed the human brain I certainly wouldn't want to disappoint him/her/it/them by letting it go to waste by, say, believing things on faith that turn out to be harmful for society. For this purpose I will be holding God, his prophets, and all other key characters in the Bible to what I consider a reasonable standard of moral/ethical behavior as I would the characters in any other book.

6. As far as I'm concerned, if it's wrong it's wrong, scientifically speaking. We can argue moral high ground and soft sciences all day, but the Biblical creation myth has been systematically dis-proven. So any kind of young earth creation, global flood, etc. will be treated as any other tribal myth: a failed science attempting to explain why thunder happens, often containing valuable and poetic insights into the human condition.

7. I'll try to use outside sources as little as possible. This is a recommendation from a friend, and I don't grill my friends over the Wikipedia coals. Especially if they're definitionally unwilling to extend the same due diligence effort in return.
9. Finally, I'll be reading from the King James Version. In case of any linguistic confusion I'll also refer to the ASV and NIV to try to find the most accurate representation of what the book is trying to say.

Genesis: God Creates Everything, Fucks It Up, Starts Over, and Fucks It Up Again.

Chapter 1.

1-5: God creates day and night.

Now, I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure darkness doesn't need to be created. Also: Light needs a source. The sun will not be created for a few days.

6-8: Outer space is made of water.

There's no clear definition on what the 'firmament' is, but as near as I can tell the author believed that the sky was a solid dome about 5-10 miles up with water on the other side, and land and air in between.

The entire universe looked something like this.

     9-13: God creates land and plant life.

But didn't mention creating an atmosphere. Because it's only the story of how everything happened according to God, why bother the reader with confusing concepts like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen.

     14-19: God THEN creates the rest of the universe (Sun, moon, all other stars, planets, satellites, etc.).

I'm going to assume that the plants survived the 24 hours of vacuum at near absolute zero by magic as well.

     20-23: God creates fish and birds.

No mention of insects. Which is odd since insects are really fucking important. You can have plants and insects without birds, but birds and plants won't get very far without insects.

     24-25: God creates mammals, reptiles.

Make a note of this, because he creates mammals AFTER man in the next chapter.

     26-27: God creates man and woman, and gives them dominion over the earth.

Because top-down hierarchy always works out in the long run.

Chapter 2.

     1-3: God takes a day off, and blesses it.

Because even a being of infinite power capable of creating 100 billion galaxies in a day needs a day off to worship himself.

     4-7: God creates rain and man.

Again.

    8-15: God creates the Garden of Eden.

It sounds really fucking nice if you lived your entire life in a desert. In fact it sounds EXACTLY like what a desert dwelling savage would come up with if asked to describe paradise. Personally, I prefer my trailer. Which is a dump by American standards, but pretty fucking sweet from a global perspective and historically is beyond the wildest dreams of people living 300 years ago.

    16-17: God's first commandment to the only man on the planet: do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

It's not exactly made clear why, but most divine commandments don't rely on reasonable justifications such as 'it's poisonous' or 'it will jack up your immune system.' It's implied that God doesn't want man to become TOO much like God.

    18-20: God creates all of the animals again to try to make a friend for Adam.

God must have created sex, right? So he would know that monkeys pair with monkeys and wolves pair with wolves. A man doesn't pair off with a horse. Well, not as like a normal thing, and certainly not for intellectual engagement.

    21-25: God creates woman again. Out of a rib from Adam. Himself made from dirt.

God, who created everything from nothing, ran out of nothing, I guess, and had to use dirt to create man, and part of man to make woman, like an evil wizard building flesh golems in D&D. Tell me again about evolution being a ridiculous hoax, please.

Chapter 3.

    1-5: The serpent tempts the woman who will become Eve.

Where did the serpent come from? It clearly says the serpent is 'more subtle than anything God had made.'

If God created everything, then he created the serpent, knowing full well the consequences of doing so: the fall of man. If God did not create the serpent, then God did not create everything. If God created the serpent and the serpent rebelled, leading to the fall of man, and God did not foresee this, then God is not all-knowing. There is no way that situation could have happened as described, EVEN ALLOWING FOR DIVINE CREATION.

    6-8: After eating the fruit Adam and the woman that will be known as Eve hear "the voice of God walking in the Garden."

God is bipedal and has a voice, he is also the right size for a human-sized garden. Put a pin in that, because it gets contradicted a lot in later books.

    9-13: After getting caught, Adam, honorable motherfucker that he is, blames Eve, who hasn't even been dignified with a name at this point. Eve blames the serpent.

There is no mention of who the serpent blames. There's only one other player on this particular stage, so take a guess.

    14-15: God curses the serpent to go on its belly.

Implies snakes used to have legs. Which, oddly enough, is true, as snakes have vestigial limbs under their skin as they evolved from quadrupeds. Over hundreds of thousands of years. I hate when people are right for the wrong reasons.

    16: God condemns all women to the pain of childbirth and subjugation to men.

For the mistake of ONE woman. That God designed. Forgiveness and mercy, amirite? And just so we're clear, the woman doesn't even receive a name until AFTER being cursed.

    17-18: God curses the ground that men must work, again, because ONE man, that God designed, didn't behave the way God expected.

Personally, if I built something and it went this badly wrong this early in the game I think I might wonder if I had done something wrong. If your SimCity sucks because you built an airport in the middle of a residential neighborhood, who's fault is that?

    19-20: God condemns man to a mortal life, Eve finally gets a name like a big girl.

    21: God, in his infinite kindness, gives them some animal hides to protect them from the elements, which are now shit since God cursed the earth.

    22-24: Man, having become 'as God,' is banished from Eden and the Tree of Life on pain of flaming fucking sword.

Weird that God would get territorial about Man being more like God, since Man was created in God's image. I'll have to remember how insanely insecure God is so I don't accidentally try to imitate him after reading some dude's Facebook status.

Chapter 4.

    1-2: Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd are born.

    3-5: First sacrifices. God prefers dead sheep.

Put a pin in that, sheep are a recurring theme in this book.

    6-8: God warns Cain, who is pissed that Abel's sacrifice was chosen, about the nature of sin. Cain kills Abel in a jealous rage.

    9-12: God, again, speaking directly to Cain like God's just a big human, asks Cain a trick question about Abel's whereabouts, then curses Cain to be a fugitive and vagabond.

    13-15: God forbids anyone from killing Cain to release him from his punishment.

Fair enough. A bit harsh, but not what I'd call unreasonable given the nature of the crime. I'd personally like to know why God doesn't handle all criminal trials in this fashion. I mean, he COULD and there's no reason why he doesn't, right?

    16-18: Cain travels to Nod, where he finds a wife, presumably one not made by God, and starts a family. Cain begat Enoch, who begat Irad, who begat Mehujael, who begat Methusael, who begat Lamech.

First, where is Nod and why are there people there? God very clearly named the woman Eve because she was the 'mother of all.' But Cain, as a fugitive and vagabond, found another settlement of humans and started a family of, presumably, wildly successful vagabonds.

Second, the fugitive vagabond thing seemed to work out pretty well for Cain.

    19-22: Lamech, Cain's great-great-great grandson had two wives and sired Jabal, the first cowboy, Jubal, the first musician, Tubal-cain, the first smith, and Naamah, who did nothing noteworthy as she was a female.

Again, Cain's curse seems to have worked out well in the long run, as it gave the world music, cattle ranching and metalwork. Although this is all presumably wiped out in the Flood.

    23-24: Lamech confesses to his wives that he murdered a man and a young man. This does not seem to be in any way connected to the rest of the plot.

    25-26: Adam begat Seth, who begat Enos. At this time people first begin to pray.

Presumably God wasn't just walking around, asking trick questions, and passing out insane curses anymore.

Chapter 5.

    1-5: Lineage of Adam. Adam lived to be 930.

    6-27: More lineage with nothing much of note other than Enoch (no relation,) being "taken up" by God at the spry young age of 365.

    28-31: Lamech begats Noah, saying he (Noah,) would 'comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.' Slowly drowning to death with no hope of rescue does seem comforting.

Unless my math is badly off, Noah's father died shortly before the Flood and his grandfather may have died IN the Flood. "Hey Pop-Pop! Sorry you can't go with us, but you know how God is! Say hi to my unnamed grandma when you get to the afterlife!"

    32: Noah sires Shem, Ham, and Japeth.

Chapter 6.

    1-2: 'Sons of God' take human brides. This is presumably a bad thing.

Again, if the 'Sons of God' are angels, then that seems to be a management problem on God's part. If they're demi-gods like Jesus, then Jesus was nothing special. If, and I've heard this explanation, they're demons, what the fuck, God? Yet again he created something that rebelled against his tyranny leading to results he disliked yet seems unable to either predict or prevent.

    3: God limits human life span to 120 years.

Only they keep living for multiple centuries if the genealogies are to be believed. They can't both be true and the Bible is allegedly infallible.

    4: 'Sons of God' breed with women to create a race of giants.

Which would be awesome if it had happened.

    5: Man is totally wicked and evil.

Well, now, who would be responsible for that happening Mr. Eternal Punishment of the Entire Species for First Offenses? Don't fucking blame people for acting exactly like you designed them to.

    6-7: God grieves the mistake he made in creating man, and vows to kill fucking everything.

There is no explanation for this that is acceptable. If God is good and man became evil independent of God, why did God not intercede in the centuries before this point? Why would God kill the animals? Surely muskrats, otters, marmosets and koala bears did nothing extinction-worthy. If God knew man would become evil, why did he create them so? If God didn't know it would happen then he is not all- knowing. If God is capable of creating trillions of stars in an afternoon, surely he could just speak life painlessly out of existence. Why the slow, painful drowning of all life on earth other than sado-masochism?

    8: Noah finds grace in the eyes of the Lord.

    9-10: Noah was just, perfect in his generation, and walked with God.

Don't say 'metaphorically' walked with God. They went for strolls together.

    11-12: The entire earth is corrupted and violent.

I'm sure God, as all-powerful and all-knowing creator of everything was powerless to prevent this outcome.

    13: God tells Noah that the END OF ALL FLESH is at hand.

Once again: God tells Noah that the END OF ALL FLESH is at hand. The Good Guy is going to kill the world.

    14-22: Ark preparations.

I'll spare most of the mechanics of the Flood story, as they have already been thoroughly and extensively debunked by more scientifically literate people than I. If anyone is interested I'd refer them to www.talkorigins.com

Chapter 7.

    1-4: God's time frame for the Flood.

    6-10: For real, it's gonna Flood like a motherfucker.

    11-12: The fountains of the deep and the windows of Heaven open.

Which explains all the water. Or would, if either of those things were really things and didn't rely on the world being a flat disk in a dome surrounded by water.

    13-20: More Flood.

    21-24: ALL living creatures on earth die, save the ones on the Ark.

Again, I don't claim to be a good person or an expert on moral behavior, but killing ONE animal 'just because' seems like a pretty bad thing to do. Killing EVERY animal for crimes that no animal is capable of committing is an unequivocally evil thing to do. Put it like this: Think of your worst enemy on the planet, say he's a child-rapist that gave your mother AIDS while robbing the children's hospital she volunteers at, walked free because of a technicality, and then ran over your child after burning your house down with your wife inside. Okay, now, if that guy had a dog that had puppies that were given up for adoption, would you kill those puppies? Because God sure would.

Chapter 8.

    1-10: Waters slowly abating. Not sure where too, as there is nowhere for them to abate TO.

    11: A dove Noah sent out returns with an olive branch. Not sure what condition it would be in at this point.

    12-19: Finally we leave the Ark.

Again, why did God choose such a fucking cruel and inelegant method of cleansing the earth of life? Surely he could just speak it so instantly, not that such an action could ever be justified. And why let the water hang around for half a year? Shit would be thoroughly dead after a couple of hours. It certainly wasn't because it had to run-off naturally, as that amount of water doesn't exist on Earth.

And What the fuck are the animals supposed to eat, anyway? Plants certainly couldn't have survived. There aren't enough animals to eat each other. Fish? There would probably be a lot of dead fish around. Fish doesn't last though. Did God re-create the plants? That would certainly be more pertinent to the narrative than the fucking genealogies.

    20-22: Noah sacrifices a fuck-ton of animals to God, who enjoys the smell and vows to no longer curse the ground or kill the planet.

Because God is a textbook abusive husband and this is the honeymoon cycle.

Chapter 9.

    1-7: God re-grants dominion over the earth and allows man to eat any living creature, provided there are lots and lots of blood sacrifices.

Because God is fucking coo-coo for blood.

    8-17: God establishes covenant with Noah, which involves no more global flooding. God places the rainbow (God's actual bow. For hunting...giant Heaven deer?) in the sky as a sign.

Only God invented rain back in Gen 2:4. Did water vapor not get suspended in the atmosphere back then?

This is how rainbows work. It's not God's Bow any more than it's a bridge to Asgard.

    18: Ham Sires Canaan.

    19-23: Noah gets drunk and naked and is found by his sons, who cover him while backing in and not looking.

    24-27: Noah is pissed and curses Canaan, for some reason, to be Shem's servant.

Bear in mind, Noah was just and perfect by God's standards.

    28-29: Noah lives 950 years total.

Because God didn't really mean it about the 120 years thing.

Chapter 10.

    1-2: Japeth sired Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Jubal, Meshech, Tiras.

    3: Gomer sired Askenaz, Riphath, Togarmah.

    4: Javan sired Elishah, Tashish, Kittim, Dodanim.

    5: By these the lands of the Gentiles were divided, each after his tongue, his families, in their nations.

Note: "By their tongue" would imply differentiated language at this point.

    6: Ham sired Cush, Mizrain, Phut, Canaan (Shem's slave).

    7: Cush sired Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabtecha. Ramaah sired Sheba, Dedan.

    8: Cush begat Nimrod, a mighty one upon the earth.

    9: Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord.

    10: Nimrod founds the kingdoms of Babel, Erech, Accad, Calneh in Shinar.

    11: From there Asshur went forth and built Nenevah, Rehoboth, and Calah.

    12: Also Resen, between Nenevah and Calah.

    13-20: More genealogy, which gets further confusing as the author seems to switch from names of people to names of places without warning.

    21-31: Genealogy and settlements of Shem.

Not to be critical, well, fuck that, to be critical: if this is a text nspired by almighty God, did God at this point think it more wise to let readers know that Joktan begat Almodad and Sheleph than, I don't know, the germ theory of disease, basic hygiene, geometry, crop rotation, or the foundations of common law?

Anyway, I'll leave off there for now. Up next: God hates ambitious creativity. Plus: Father Abraham had many sons. And he mutilated the dicks of all of them after selling his wife as a sex slave and knocking up his wife's handmaiden.

Tacenda

2012-05-11T19:00:00.000-07:00

I worry a lot that I'm going slowly insane and the people around me are being to polite to tell me. I mean how would I know? I tell myself that the truth is important. More important than emotional security and happiness, certainly.

But what is truth?

The truth is that I am alive and awake, right here and right now, blogging away, posting my pretentious, self-righteous thoughts on the Internet because some people didn't wake up this morning.

Sometimes we are truly immortal and nights will last forever and choices will not ultimately matter. Until they do. Until those trees will no longer be climbed, fields unexplored, forts unbuilt, the Summer of every yesterday frozen in amber, dimming in the crush of hours. Of mundane time. Of life happening over and over. A copy of a photograph of someone else, so very many years past.

Sometimes there are no patterns. Sometimes hope must coexist with sorrow, sometimes the truth is nothing more remarkable or heartrending or prosaic than 'this happened.' The child that we were and the adult we became and the person that we tell ourselves that we really should have been are all standing at the end of an abandoned road, in dimming light, looking up, demanding meaning. Scrying first cloud, then star, then storm, until the rain washes the world clean of tears and regret and unanswered and unanswerable questions.

This happened. Choices were made and actions were taken and it was not the end of the world. The sun rose and birds sang and alarm clocks blurred into time clocks. And there is no greater intent to be assigned.

Yesterday became today and the world didn't end. But two worlds did. One amber day in the early 1990's has two fewer bicycles, two fewer pocket knives, two fewer adolescent voices arguing about baseball and sex and video games. Wise and immortal as only twelve-year-olds can be.

Best Friend is truly the greatest honor one human being can bestow upon another, and Best Friends the purest relationship, void as it is of the insecurities and dishonesty inherent in romance or familial bonds. That fading amber moment may only exist in a single head now, but it was pure and beautiful and magical in a way that so very many things in this world are not.

Some days the world is stark and cold and uncaring. Some days two best friends will be murdered in their sleep over such mundane bullshit as money and drugs. And the child will demand meaning and intent and answers. And find none. The sky remains unyielding, it's secrets kept, a fortress unassailable to plea and prayer, threat and tear.

Two of the best friends I ever had were murdered. Choices were made and actions were taken and worlds were ended. This happened and will have always happened.

Liberty or Deaf (pt. 2)

2012-04-25T12:17:00.002-07:00

The second half of this update will further explore the incompatibility of corporations with a free market, as well as the insanity that is the Far-Right fringe in America. Also: For comedic purposes I will be posting information about Kid Rock next to a picture of a hideous abandoned chihuahua.

"Never in living memory has a single individual embodied so many negative stereotypes as Kid Rock. Kid is a perfect storm of every pro-eugenics argument."

While these modern Libertarians often bemoan corporate regulations and taxation as redistributionist, anti-capitalist, and success punishing examples of government activism that are targeted at destroying the free market, this view ignores the major premise that corporations are, by their very nature, State-manufactured creatures. Given that the existence of corporations, artificial creatures endowed by the State with legal rights and protections, can only be possible with significant government interference in the free market to begin with, it would be nonsensical to claim a Libertarian defense with regards to their regulation after having already set an arbitrary baseline that allows for significant State interference in the market (Crane, 2005).

Additionally, the Conservative-Libertarian argument that government market regulations infringe on individual liberty relies on the selective reasoning that only the government has the ability to engage in coercion, when in reality any large concentration of power, such as an artificial entity granted exclusive power and privilege by the government, may do so (Crane, 2005). This is as true for large corporations as it is for private militia, private police forces, illegal cartels, and organized crime syndicates. The accurate Libertarian stance in all of these instances is that it is the State's almost exclusive responsibility to protect individual liberty from such coercive and authoritarian concentrations of power.

"After hearing American Bad Ass I thought 'Finally! Uneducated, violent, meth addict white supremacists have found their champion in Kid Rock!'"

The current American system of State-capitalism, or corporatism, is fundamentally authoritarian, as it funnels capital into the hands of a select few, who then use their power and influence to minimize competition and immunize themselves from failure in an increasingly exclusive and unassailable shell of corporate welfare and government protection (Goetting, 2010). This involves any number of mechanisms that either protect corporate interests at the expense of individual liberty or selectively favor certain corporations over others.

This system of corporatism, viewed from a Libertarian standpoint, is inherently flawed in that it self-corrects only where increasing profits and market dominance are concerned, the long term effects of which invariably lead to less competition, lower wages, and, once a certain level of success is reached, an ever-decreasing possibility of failure, all of which are antithetical to a free market. Such a system cannot act individually and will not act collectively to promote individual liberty (Chomsky, 2002).

This trend is not, as with authoritarian government power structures, caused by individual inequity, greed, or corruption, but is a mechanism enforced by the system itself. Individual corporate acts, undertaken by the CEO or Board of Directors, that seek to promote competition, equality or the betterment of the market or society as a whole are routinely weeded out to protect the corporation from market loss, takeover, and failure. This is accomplished by the gradual process of egalitarian management being superseded by officers that will act more in accordance with the shareholders' desires, which are collectively divorced from the well-being of society as a whole beyond the government regulations and employment laws that Right-Libertarians are currently lobbying against.

"It's not that Kid Rock steals beats from good songs to 'sing' and 'rap' over, or that his non-retarded lyrics are just clumsy references to much better artists. It's that he sells records that are nothing but that!"

When corporate officers are allowed to continue acting for the good of society and not the good of the corporation for any length of time, then the corporation almost invariably suffers for it, and if it does not soon fail in the cutthroat market of corporatism, it will be so weakened that it will usually be either bought out or taken over by another corporation that is better able to fulfill its primary functions: to increase stakeholder profit, ensure market dominance, and minimize competition (Chomsky, 2002).

This authoritarian, coercive system masquerading in the guise and language of free market ideology is further exacerbated by the tendencies of those most opposed to such systems also being of the most politically dissatisfied and inactive socioeconomic classes, while the perception of public opinion is largely dictated by members of higher socioeconomic classes that place greater priority on the individualistic policies that most benefit themselves, than on equality-promoting policies that benefit society as a whole (Bobo, 1991). This has led to a self-perpetuating cycle in which those that stand to gain the most from a truly Libertarian market, the majority in the laboring class, become increasingly jaded and indifferent to market struggles and political representation and more acquiescent of exploitative and coercive practices, while those already benefiting the most from the current system are the most involved, have the greatest influence, routinely receive more favorable media attention, and have access to the resources necessary to influence policymakers and public opinion.

This trend does much to explain Tea Party Libertarian politicians and spokespersons that selectively defend policies that give unfair advantage to large, private concentrations of power (such as corporate person-hood and campaign contributions,) while attacking policies that protect individual liberty from those same concentrations of power (such as the calls for privatized public education and social security, or the abolition of minimum wage and child labor laws). Additionally, while the rhetoric used to defend these stances may sound like the same rhetoric used to argue for a small, limited government and to promote liberty, in practice it is merely shifting the power structure from a publicly accountable
system to a private, unaccountable system.

"It takes a unique kind of stupid to auto-tune yourself rapping over a country song and be proud of it. It's like a damaged toddler when they discover that feces can be used as paint."

While historically and globally Libertarianism is viewed as a Liberal political ideology, the language has been co-opted in the American political arena to be synonymous with far-Right Conservatism. This new far-Right movement has been found to be predominately composed of older, white males that largely identify as Republican or Republican-leaning (Williamson et al, 2010). Given that the Tea Party message, (contradictory claims, logical inconsistencies, and conflated terminology aside,) mirrors closely the Republican/Conservative message over the past thirty years it should come as no surprise that just beneath the free-market rhetoric and Libertarian language there exists a strong pro-corporate message. This pervasive conflation of laissez-faire free market language with corporate welfare and intervention on the behalf of big business has led to a large and increasing misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the Libertarian stance in American politics, and has rendered the true Libertarian stance effectively non-existent (Long, 2008).

The Tea Party arguments, inasmuch as they can be made sense of, seem to stem from a misunderstanding or outright perversion of the Libertarian concept of the free market, largely influenced by the writings of Adam Smith, and as such fail to account for the inevitable outcome of this form of unfettered capitalism. As Smith himself stated in 1776, when writing about the results of the division of labor in the system that would eventual become corporatism, that unless the laboring class is protected from exploitation in some way by their government, then eventually these private concentrations of wealth and power will lead to a stupid, ignorant, irrational and hopelessly corrupted laboring class.

These pro-corporatist arguments, largely made by informed politicians and pundits either intentionally misrepresenting or unintentionally misunderstanding the Libertarian stance, set the stage for far-Right Conservatism in America. These views have been reinforced in the public mind by Tea Partiers and other Conservative Libertarian groups, as well as pseudo-journalistic organizations with an unapologetically Conservative message, under even more nebulous, poorly-defined, and arbitrary concepts, such as 'freeloaders,' and 'hard-working taxpayers,' which seem to be applied based more on factors such as religion, race, nationality and physical appearance than on factors such as employment, welfare receipt, or tax bracket (Williamson et al, 2011). These beliefs, such as they are, seem to be based far more on straw-man arguments, moving goalposts, special pleading, conspiracy mongering, false dichotomies, jingoistic scapegoating, and appeals to emotion than on any sort of rational, well-reasoned, or even internally coherent and logically consistent arguments, goals, or philosophy drawn from the available facts. Given this, regardless of what individual Tea Party members may believe, as a whole the movement has been manipulated and spun, perhaps unwittingly, into the role of mouthpiece and shill for pro-corporatist, plutocratic policy hiding behind the language of small government fiscal conservatism.

While calling for a smaller and more limited government, particularly in the area of the market, these groups, although failing to address the inherent problems with corporatism as a whole, often speak out against government bailouts, such as the recent banking and auto industry crises. However, this narrow stance fails to address the more pervasive and invasive problems with the current Market/State dynamic, such as subsidies, eminent domain, grants of privilege or monopoly, selective tax breaks, excessive intellectual property laws, military intervention, and inflationary monetary policies (Long 2008). Beyond these examples of obvious government assistance, the state routinely implements prohibitive regulations, fees, and standards that have a disproportionate negative impact on smaller, less well-funded, and newer concerns than the giant, entrenched corporations that lobby for them (Long, 2008).

"I always wondered what the term was for a howlingly desperate and pointlessly rebellious attention whore that still manages to sound as homogenous, non-threatening, bland, and uninspired as a fast food jingle. It's 'Kid Rock' if you were curious."

Therefore, while the most likely outcome of the current corporate system, at least following the logic of the modern Conservative-Libertarian movement, would involve a smaller government, it would also be a more selective government that does less to protect individual liberty. The price for this, of course, would be greater concentrations of authoritative power and influence in the private market, hardly a favorable outcome for a group that claims to value individual liberty, self-ownership, and the level playing field of laissez-faire capitalism.

Self-sovereignty, the idea that an individual has absolute ownership of their own person, cannot be practiced in a system of hierarchical, authoritative power structures. Whether that power structure is an unaccountable government body or an unaccountable private institution that can only exist with the government's sanction is irrelevant, as the outcome invariably leads to less individual sovereignty the more exclusive and entrenched the power structure becomes.

Additionally, the principle of individual liberty, represented by voluntary association and free contract, is only possible in a non-coercive, competitive free market. This cannot be practiced in the current system of corporations, as choosing between death and sub-poverty servitude with no guarantee of security can not be said to be a decision free from coercion. Similarly, a market can only be said to be free if all participants are free to fail or succeed based on their individual merit. This is certainly not true in the current system, as evidenced by the decades long trend of corporate welfare, bailouts, and unequal tax breaks and subsidies, as well as stagnating wages for laborers, increased layoffs, rising income disparity, and the outsourcing of jobs overseas, while the management of those same companies report record profits and award seven figure bonuses to their corporate officers in a class of business that, in a market free from government interference, wouldn't exist.

Finally, while modern Tea Party Libertarians may call for smaller government, in actuality a limited, minimal governing body is antithetical to their own ideals, as those ideals rely on selectively defending policies that award unfair advantage to large, private concentrations of power at the expense of individual liberty. Similarly, while attacking policies viewed as intrusive and anti-capitalist, modern Libertarians are, in actuality, not calling for competition with the government in the fields of education and healthcare, but are rather seeking to privatize those concentrations of power through government sanctioned and protected grants of privilege and monopoly. The result of all of this, at least so far, has not been smaller government in the sense of a less powerful government accountable to a greater number of people, but a smaller government in the sense of a less accountable government controlled by fewer people that has, in effect, outsourced the public welfare to private institutions.

In conclusion, while groups such as the Tea Party Patriots and Americans For Prosperity, as well as their representatives in the public and private sectors, may use Libertarian language and free market ideology, in reality and practice this rhetoric is merely a misleading and confusing attempt on behalf of private corporations and their beneficiaries to impede the practice of such Libertarian principles as self-sovereignty, voluntary association, and a limited, minimal government

"Remember when Kid Rock's genre-bending, groundbreaking, confrontationally anti-authoritarian music galvanized a generation into social activism? Of course not. That's because Rage Against the Machine is what Kid Rock wants to be if he ever manages to learn to read."

So that's that. I'll be posting the references later if I don't lose interest.

Liberty or Deaf (pt.1)

2012-04-25T08:52:00.002-07:00

A while back I made the claim that corporate personhood was an inherently corrupt and society-destroyingly vile institution. Since I was so obviously right I didn't bother checking the facts until recently. I say I was obviously right because anyone can usually be right by the simple practice of disagreeing with whatever claim Fox News, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, and most Republicans make.

Anyway, after doing a lot of research into what, exactly, Libertarianism is, since it seems to be some magic word used by Tea Party candidates to immunize themselves from being seen as the fringe-politic lunatics they so obviously are.

What I found, of course, was a bottomless pit of information that the vast majority of Americans would rather, to quote one Facebook friend, run their genitals through a meat grinder than read.

So for that reason I'll be breaking the following protest-sign-unfriendly text dump with pictures of a cat I found outside of a homeless shelter next to information about Jason Mraz, who is an awful human being.

"After hearing Jason Mraz for the first time, my house is now surrounded by the howling ghost of every dead rape victim for 50 miles."

There has been a trend in recent years in the American political arena for certain far-Right protest groups and politicians to self-identify as Libertarian. With so much extreme, violent, incoherent, and blatantly one-sided rhetoric dressed in the banner of non-partisan Libertarianism it's no wonder that many Americans have an inaccurate idea of what Libertarianism actually means (Gerstein, 2009). With groups such as Americans for Prosperity and the Tea Party, as well as politicians such as Allen West and Michelle Bachmann and media pundits such as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin calling for contradictory, extreme, and even impossible measures, this should come as no surprise. These include demands to eliminate government debt while cutting taxes, or calling for less government interference in individual lives while simultaneously demanding increased criminalization of minor offenses, as well as marriage and reproduction restrictions (Teaparty.org, n.d.).

With such confusion and contradictions, such as criticizing government regulations of corporations as interfering with the free market while ignoring the fact that corporations are, by definition and design, government interference in the free market, it should come as no surprise that the average American citizen has no clear idea of what Libertarianism really is.It is important to begin by defining what Libertarianism is, as far as the globally and historically accepted definition of the ideology.

Philosophically the movement began during the Enlightenment based upon the works of philosophers like Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Godwin, and John Locke. Libertarians believe in a limited, minimal government that concerns itself mainly with defense and protecting the individual's liberty from coercion, exploitation, tyranny, and abuse at the hands of large concentrations of power. Individual liberty includes such ideas as voluntary association, self-sovereignty, and freedom of contract. Libertarians view a laissez-faire market, free from as much government influence as possible as the best system to conduct interpersonal business. Research shows that modern American Libertarianism, as expressed by such groups as The Tea Party and Americans For Prosperity, has little in common with the globally and historically accepted ideal of the various Libertarian schools of thought, such as self-sovereignty, voluntary association, and a limited, minimal government.

"Jason Mraz is the noise abused housewives claim to hear 24 hours a day as they slowly descend into the madness that eventually manifests with them cutting their spouse's genitals off with a steak knife."

Self-sovereignty, the belief that an individual has absolute ownership of their own life and body, cannot be practiced in a system of hierarchical, authoritative power structures, whether that power structure be a governing body or a State-sanctioned and protected private institution, such as a corporation. While the Tea Party Right, and Libertarian's themselves, may argue that government is inherently evil and is best kept away from the market, there is an important distinction that needs to be made between Modern Libertarian calls for the deregulation of the corporate marketplace and the Classical Libertarian stance, which would be to abolish the corporate market altogether. Claiming, as modern Right-Wing groups do, that deregulating corporations will encourage laissez-faire free market practices ignores several foundational factors of the American Market that impede upon self-ownership

For thousands of years any market interaction of individuals was relatively small in scale. Even successful merchants and trade barons were somewhat limited in scope, and labor was valuable as the pool of laborers was somewhat limited in relation to the amount of available work. This changed during the Industrial Revolution, which took place around the same time as the birth of what came to be known as Libertarianism. Just as some philosophers, economists, and political thinkers were realizing the importance of the concept of self-ownership, labor was being replaced by machinery on such a scale that the old system of labor and capital was being replaced by a system of huge industries helmed by unbelievably wealthy and powerful capitalists. As a consequence of this the value of labor plummeted to a point that labor was worth only the minimum amount necessary to keep the working class from entirely dying off (Engels, 1847).

"If you play Jason Mraz near a sex toy it will kill its owner exactly 13 days later, and unless exorcised by a Highpriest of Dagon, will annually murder a virgin on the Winter Solstice."

As a result of this shifting dynamic the laboring class, existing under the delusion of self-sovereignty and the illusion of a fair and competitive market were, in actuality, placed in a position arguably worse than slavery. The reason for this is that while a slave or indentured servant is normally assured subsidence and some degree of security, in this new age of capitalist empire individual laborers were and are forced into competition with each other for the privilege of toiling for subsidence at the whims of the bourgeois capitalists (Engels, 1847). This system of wage-slavery survives in modern society in such areas as the misleadingly named 'at-will' employment contract, which often provides wages far below the poverty line and demands unrealistic levels of productivity from laborers, yet also denies those same laborers the security of long-term employment, liveable wages, or any mechanism for the workers to organize and petition the corporation on their own behalf, as evidenced by the levels of corporate downsizing, outsourced jobs, increasing poverty, vanishing labor unions, and large-scale layoffs throughout America in recent years, even as those same corporations report record profits for their CEO's and shareholders.

"If date rape made a noise, it would be Jason Mraz's impossibly shallow, douchey, insincere, frat boy songs written in the key of sexual assault."

True liberty, or self-sovereignty, is further curtailed in this system, as it often forces noteworthy and exceptional individuals to either accept one of the preconceived molds of this society, or to face alienation from the society as a whole (Mill, 1859). This tendency of big industry to force remarkable people into unremarkable lives through manufactured necessity or accident of birth is antithetical to the idea of self-sovereignty, and represents a tyrannical infringement on both the individual and society as a whole, not by a publicly accountable State, but by State protected private institutions in the form of corporations. This corporatism, largely ignored by self-identified Libertarians in America, cannot exist in a society that values individual liberty

Given this evidence, that post-Industrial Revolution capitalism, particularly America's system of corporatism, promotes divisiveness, class struggle, oppression, and hierarchical tyranny, it would be folly to call for an increase in unfettered corporatism as so many modern Libertarians do. Whether it takes the form of deregulation, union-busting tactics, or privatization of public institutions such as education or infrastructure, in practice these tactics lead to an increase of centralized, private power that invariably mimic liberty-eradicating systems, such as monarchies and police states (Werhane, 2000).

"If you drop a Jason Mraz CD in a garden, no vegetation will grow on that spot. Ever. The ground will periodically shriek in agony and vomit maggots, however."

Next: Further Findings, Conclusions, Sources, and Kid Rock

.

Why Being a Bachelor is Awesome

2012-04-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

Spring is in the air.

That is an absolutely fucking nonsense statement. What is meant by it is that is this: Everyone I know is busy getting into dead-end, go-nowhere dysfunctional relationships, getting out of dead-end, go-nowhere dysfunctional relationships, and then doing the exact same thing again with extra desperation.

Not being able to commit or build deep, sustainable relationships is one of the areas in life where, like atheism, I feel guilty. Not because I think I'm damaged or a bad person or anything, but because I feel like I'm privy to secret information as opposed to the truth: that I simply don't really give a shit. It seems like one of those things that, if it were to spread, would cause too much happiness. The ensuing lack of stress and bickering would be catastrophic to the world at large as people would then have no choice but to get along with each other and find hobbies and better themselves.

Anyway, here's why being unattached is awesome:

No Diapers

I'm sure being a parent is as warm and fuzzy and fulfilling and etc. as everyone makes it out to be. Like, if I ever had a kid then it would just wake up some dormant part of my psyche and I'd magically turn into a Sunday School Teaching, Little League Coaching family man.

Personally, that terrifies me.

I fucking love not having to worry about kids. And given the relationships most of the people I know have with their kids, I also love not paying child support and constantly feeling guilty about being a shitty parent, because I can't imagine I wouldn't be a shitty parent.

I love that if I'm bored at 11:00 at night on a Thursday I can just leave. I don't have to find a sitter or get permission or any of the other obstacles my parent friends always seem to be navigating. And it usually involves the following conversation:

And for anyone thinking you can balance kids and the social life you had before you had kids: No. You can't.You made your goddamn choice. You can be a parent, or you can do other things. That's the way it is. If you take an 18 year long commitment to raise a human being, then guess what? No partying for 18 years.

Of course nothing's stopping you from doing that. This is pretty obvious as I came from a generation raised in single parent homes, which seems normal now, as I'm watching the next generation being raised in their grandparent's homes.

Speaking of commitments...

Any Crash You Walk Away From

Why anyone, ever, under any circumstances, ever gets married is beyond me. You know who has a happy marriage? NO ONE!

No one has a fucking happy marriage for more than like a year. Or if they do, then they won the lottery as far as relationships. They may seem happy, sure, but I guarantee if you put a camera in their house you'd find out that they're both trapped in a loveless, sexless sham of a relationship based around fighting, resentments, lies, and fear.

And if anyone reading this thinks different: You could have the same relationship without getting married.

It's no surprise, with our current culture of overly-romanticized fucking everything, that 99.99999% of Americans think that real relationships are like movies. They're not. If Twilight was real, then Bella would be stuck in so many rebound relationships with abusive shitheads that her face would legally qualify as Table Tennis. But every girl in America thinks that real love operates like that.

And it's not just women. Plenty of guys play along. It's like The Notebook. Both of those people were awful, awful human beings. The entire film involved the guy wrecking the girl's life, repeatedly, and the girl leaving her stable, successful, loving, understanding partner to run off with the crazy, manipulative, psychotic hermit that blackmailed her into a relationship years ago. All in the name of wuv, which forgives anything, apparently.

You know what the best kind of relationship is? A casual one. No marriage, no commitments.

Marriages do nothing but cause bad decisions to develop undead tendencies. They take something simple, like walking away from an unhealthy situation, and multiply the complicated factor by 90. And at best a marriage adds nothing to the relationship other than a pompous ceremony and legal red tape.

Add to this the fact that people change. I mean, a person is not going to be the same person at 30 that they were at 20. Not unless something went extremely wrong, developmentally.

Humans are meant to exist in groups. Not binary sets. It takes a village to raise a child, right? Well, it also takes a village to keep two people from throttling the shit out of each other for being irritating after spending every day together for the past three years.

So that's what works. At least for me. I can totally love someone and enjoy being around them for a while, but when we grow apart, or when life happens, I don't feel like this relationship has to take precedence. When it's time to move on it's time to move on. It's just a relationship. There's no magic there.

Everyone seems to feel obligated to drag their miserable, zombie relationships through hell and back, and through the town square, and through the lives of every single one of their long-suffering friends, as if it matters. And then after it finally receives the headshot it's been begging for for years, all that's been accomplished is that instead of having two normal motherfuckers, now you have to distrustful, emotionally fucked up, codependent motherfuckers that will fall immediately into the very next awful black hole of a relationship at the very next opportunity because they can no longer function as an autonomous entity.

Jesus Christ, no one cares how much you love him/her. Just walk away. Oh, but what about the kids? Well, who the fuck thought that was a good idea? Wear a condom next time, genius.

Maybe, just maybe, if you acknowledge that the shit is not working you can stop trying to force it to work and you'll both find someone else that makes you each happy. Or maybe you just might, holy shit, get to know yourself.

And then, who knows? Maybe you'll find out that you really like knitting or writing or guitar or cross-country bear antagonism. Maybe you've always been gay or really good at math. I do know one thing: as long as people are so obsessed with the bullshit concept of finding their soul-mate and becoming spawn-points they'll never invest the time in developing a relationship with the one person they should be the most concerned with.

And if that's not enough to convince anyone, here's a list:

Single people can watch porn any time they want to.
Single people can smoke and curse in their own house.
They can blow money on dumb shit that they like.
They don't have to pay attention to anyone that they don't want to.
They can use their toilet however they want.
They always get the remote.
They never have to check in.
They can hang out with their idiot friends doing things that are fun all the time!
They don't worry if they're being cheated on.
You know how much it costs to raise kids? I don't!
Single people never get ignored for a video game.
Single people never get guilt tripped for playing video games.
Single people can watch porn whenever they want!
Single people can toss and turn all damn night!
Single people can do whatever the fuck they want with their spare bedroom.
You know who yells accusations at single people when they stay out til 3 AM partying? NO ONE!
Single people don't have to pretend to like things to avoid arguments.
Single people can be selfish with their free time. This is a perk.
For singles, clothing is optional.
Single people may be selfish, but they're not nearly as selfish as their coupled friend that only contacts them to ask them for things, talk about their mutant kids, and complain about their relationship.
Single people can watch porn whenever they want!

Retro Retro (Demon's Souls pt. 3)

2012-04-13T00:07:00.002-07:00

Alright, back to what's really important.

So I knew that I was fast approaching the point in the game where I would have no choice but to tackle World 5: the Valley of Defilement. For anyone over 30 you may remember World 5 as being the pain in the dick world from every Nintendo game. The same is true here.

4.2 The Same Thing. Over and Over.

Of course, instead of leaping straight to World 5 and getting it over with I decided to tackle some of the easier levels first. Since I had such an easy job of 4.1 I decided 4.2 was the next logical choice.

This level cheats like a motherfucker. And that has totally nothing to do with my ability to work the controller. Probably.

Here is a transcription of the things going through my head during the many, many times I died:

Since when did flying Manta Rays hang out right outside the door?!
Fuck, a grim reaper!
Goddammit woman! Don't step forward while you're swinging! That's a cliff!
When did gold skeletons get an aggro range of three miles?!
I did not walk off that bridge. Musta been the controller.
Fuck! He respawned!
Where the fuck is the grim reaper now?!
Fuck, another another grim reaper!
Where the fuck is the other grim reaper?!
Fuck, a grenade! No, fuck, a group of fucking giant attack maggots!

After finally making it to the Boss Chamber and spending a moment recovering from the shame of how badly I had just performed, I prepared to face the Old Hero.

His special attack is swinging wildly in the wrong direction.

The Old Hero is a lot like the Flamelurker, only slow, blind, and, well, once you factor 'can not see things' into the equation anything else becomes sorta irrelevant.

While meleeing him is probably entirely possible, the Old Hero is so asking-for-it exploitable I can't imagine why anyone would want to bother. Especially being such an easy target after such a harrowing-ass gauntlet of a level with no shortcuts. That'd be like cancelling a resort vacation you've been planning for months because the hotel accidentally booked you in a smoking room.

5.1 The City of Eyestrain and Bottomless Pits

I zoned into the first level of the Valley of Defilement. The level is a poorly lit nightmare of camouflaged goons, bottomless pits, confusing walkways, camera obstructing scenery, and fucking plague rats that are too small to hit with anything but magic provided you remembered to save some. Which I never do.

Remembering all of this I suddenly had an amazing idea.

1.3 The Brightly Lit Castle of Normal Bad Shit

I would further put off the inevitable stress headache the Valley always gives me by beating up more zombies and Fat Officials.

Level three of this World is nothing much more than a slightly more labyrinthine version of the second level with stronger goons.

Having, for once, remembered to stock up on arrows I had no real problems with this level, as this game is so damn easy, provided you don't mind sniping everything from two area codes away.

After opening the shortcut, I backtracked and released an NPC called Biorr, a level 50 Hypersomniac that specializes in attacking the nearest foe with his face, falling asleep, and being easy to capture.

The point is that Biorr, after being rescued and taking a nap after all of the excitement of someone killing the guard and opening his cell tuckers him plumb out, helps out in the next couple of boss fights.

Speaking of Boss fights, I was now at the Boss fight.

Penetrator, most phallic among men.

The Penetrator is another big knight like the Tower Knight, only he focuses on attack as opposed to defense. This is fairly obvious as he wields a Final Fantasy sized sword.

Luckily Biorr's strategy of screaming at the Boss, being knocked down, and having 6 million hit points worked long enough to handily dispatch the boss.

5.1 For Real This Time

Remember the character Goofy from the Disney cartoons? The goons in this level look like zombied him to me for some reason.

Having said that: fuck this level. Fuck this goddamn level forever.

Aside from the already mentioned surprise enemies, holes, and eyestrain there are also giant goofy's that always end up being way harder to beat than they seem like they should be.

Also: Fucking plague rats. One bit me and I wound up dying before I could even locate my anti-plague herbs.

After a seemingly endless amount of time spent fail-spamming my way through the level I finally came to the door of the Boss Chamber. The Boss of this particular level is called the Leechmonger.

Yes, it is a shit monster made out of monster shit and leeches.

There are two general strategies for tackling this thing. The first is to drain your own health, equip the Clever Rat Ring and Morion Sword to boost your attack while in critical health, and shoot the shit out of him from the doorway, which is just beyond his attack range.

The reason the attack boost is necessary is because the yucky motherfucker not only has regenerating armor, but regenerating health as well. I think this is because demon leeches eat waste instead of blood and he's standing at the entrance to the sewer of the world. I'm not exaggerating, this World is where all of the piss, shit, abortions, and diseased of the world drain out to.

Anyway, since by this point I had become acclimated to masochism I decided to try a direct assault against the filth spewing giant composed of shit worms. Somehow it worked.

Note to self: Somehow I'm better at bosses and worse at levels than I remember being before.

5.2 The Level Fucking No One Likes

Except for me, apparently. After the eyestrain migraines and frustration of the previous level, being constantly poisoned and slowed down was a walk in the park. It'd be suicide to move above a crawl through this level, anyway.

I had no real problems with the poison swamp itself, as halfway decent preparation takes care of 90% of the difficulty: cure poison miracle, firespray spell for mosquitoes, resist poison gear, MP potions, arrows. That's it, really.

My main gripe with this level was the second half, after the swamp. That part found me back on more goddamn confusing catwalks with more goddamn junk blocking the camera and more goddamn goofies blending into the environment.

Luckily this level also had a shortcut allowing me to bypass the swamp portion of the level so I could switch out gear before the Dirty Colossus Boss and not have to sludge through the entire level again. I did manage to fall off of the bridge though because the fucking mosquitoes got me disoriented.

This guy is...what the fuck am I looking at here?

The Dirty Colossus is a giant...something made out of elephant carcass, old barrels, and spikes that shoots swarms of poisonous insects to augment it's normal attacks.

I think it's sort of a weird decision that FROM decides to constantly put these anti-climactic bosses at the end of fucking nightmare levels. I mean, after all of the precision gameplay and strategy and care I just spent on the swamp it was kind of disappointing facing a boss where the entire fight can be summed up as

Apply turpentine to weapon.
Wail on Boss like a motherfucker.
Win.

5.3 Whoever Thought This Up Needs Counseling

I figured I might as well press on into the Plague Swamp, the most fucked up of these fucked up levels. As the name implies, it's a swamp filled with more poisonous filth than the last one. Also: Zombie aborted babies. Fucking infinity of them.

The World is lorded, well, ladyied over by Maiden Astraea, some sort of exiled apostate guilty of some crime too heinous to name (too heinous to name, mind you, in a world with waterfalls of demon sewage and animated baby corpses,) that wound up here, caring for poor, lost legions of undead babies and monster Disney characters. Which would almost be touching if it wasn't buried under such a Japanese level of Fucked Up.

The Maiden herself is guarded by her lover Garl Vinland, the real Boss of the level, as he's the one that puts up a fight. He's also one of the trickier bosses as he combines Tower Knight's defense, Penetrator's offense and Maneater's on-a-narrow-walkway-ness.

On the plus side he's really slow, as his weapon of preference is a 600 pound lump of metal bigger than he is. He's also really, really easy to kite.

After beating Garl the Maiden suicided after I talked to her, the selfish bitch.

4.3 A Clearly Impossible Creature

I know asking for realism in these kinds of games is usually a wish best left ungranted, as it usually leads to tedious shit like farming simulators, first person shooters and every EA sports game, but for some reason I just really, really, really don't buy the flying manta rays that constantly shoot bone spears.

I mean, there's nothing to indicate that they're intelligent, so the flying and the spears aren't magic. And even if they're undead, other undead animals like the face bugs and zombie dogs don't have any kind of super powers that weren't just augmented versions of their alive powers. They just don't make any sense.

I mean, they're shaped like manta rays. That is not a shape associated with the sky. So much so that in reality they are so not capable of flight that the uppest they normally get is beneath sea level.

Anyway, the Storm Castle World Boss is a giant one of these called the Storm King.

That should not fucking work! Those aren't wings! They're fins!

The Storm King hangs out in a big field with dozens of storm...peasants? Serfs? Storm smaller manta rays, whatever their rank. He can also be an almost impossible boss if someone doesn't know what to do.

Like the Dragon God, the Storm King has decided to spend his existence hanging out 50 feet away from the one weapon guaranteed to kill it: The Storm Ruler Sword, which shoots giant, manta ray eradicating shock waves into the sky when used in this level.

So the basic strategy is this: Cast whatever they call their Protect spell, dash to the sword, dash to the safe area next to the ruined building, massacre the goons before the King shows up, massacre the King.

Here's how it went for me: Forget to cast the Protect spell, get massacred. Cast the Protect spell, dash towards the sword, impulsively chase after a lizard, get massacred. Cast Protect spell, dash to the sword, get disorientated, get massacred. Cast Protect spell, dash to safe spot, stop to breathe, get massacred because I forgot it's only a safe spot for the actual Storm King attacks. Ragequit.

Later, after calming down, I tried again and managed to take out all of the goons and the Storm King on my second try. Which now that I think about it seems really fucking unfair for the bad guys. I mean, they can kill me all day and I keep respawning every 2 minutes, and they only get to die once. Now, if this game was truly Nintendo hard, then dying more than twice would send me back to the tutorial level with zero everything.

Anyway, at this point I fucked around for a while and completed most of the world tendency events, which mostly involve killing people, suiciding a few times, and then killing their ghost.

1.4 A Random Dead Chick Murders Everyone in the World

The final level of World One is basically just a long path full of mini-bosses.

Right away I ran into the somehow human forms of Phalanx, Tower Knight and Penetrator, which would have probably wrecked my shit if I wasn't still pissed off about the Storm King and not in the mood to fuck around with melee to prove a point.

As it turns out the trio are, just like fucking everything else in the game, weak against arrows from outside their aggro range.

Past a couple of black knights I came to the second dragon which, like the first dragon, seems to spend his entire life spraying fire on bridges if anyone tries to use him. He flew off before realizing he could have easily sprayed fire into the doorway I was standing in and not be slowly plinked to death by arrows.

Past another Fat Official I came to the next bridge the dragon had decided to guard, where Biorr was fighting the dragon using the strategy of screaming, charging directly into a fireball, and then that again.

I remembered from previous playthroughs that there was a certain angle to dash through to avoid the flames. After guessing wrong and slogging back through the level I guessed right and slowly killed the dragon, which was too stubborn to adapt his strategy for a foe from a slightly different angle and too stupid to fly away when its life was in jeopardy because of that.

The final mini-boss was the black phantom of Ostrava, the prince of Boletaria. Which brought me finally to the last real Boss of the game, the False King.

Fuck this guy.

The False King is a fucking nightmare in melee. Not only does he utilize the Flamelurker approach to combat, which involves charging at and instantly vaporizing his opponent's defenses with the force of his attacks, he even has an attack that drains levels off of your character. Since I was both hungry and cranky by this point I decided to be a man and man up and approach the False King like a man and cast poison cloud on him and wander off to make a sandwich while the Boss slowly died over the course of the next several minutes.

The End of the Game

The final level and Boss of Demon's Souls are kind of a joke. It's a corridor inside of a big tree with no enemies that leads to the Real King Allant, which turns out to be a pathetic, almost completely defenseless blob.

So that's Demon's Souls. Overall, it's a lot more challenging than most games that come out these days, but not that hard for someone raised on 8-bit systems.

Playing through it I could kind of tell that this game was made on a budget. Especially after playing through Dark Souls. Don't get me wrong, it's an excellent game, but in comparison one can almost see all of the cut corners and content that had to be jettisoned prior to and during development. And that's good, because it led to a fairly well-balanced and extremely engaging and fun game.

It's not perfect. There are parts that seem really empty, like the Latrian Prison, and parts that feel rushed and incomplete, like the lack of variety in Boletaria and some of the Bosses. And of course the Old One level, while nice to look at, had literally nothing in it. But if you have a Playstation 3 and 20 bucks and haven't played this game, then I can almost guarantee that this would be the best use of your money.

This Sweet Hereafter with Every Dead Pet

2012-04-12T02:14:00.001-07:00

I know I'm supposed to be finishing Demon's Souls, but I was distracted by a story of Jessica "EvilLittleThing" Alquist receiving another death threat. That sidetracked me into further Christian love research.

I've added pictures of impossibly adorable animals to lighten the mood, as the tone is unremittingly violent, sadistic, intolerant, and somewhere between delusional psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia. Normal religious, in other words.

Just as a reminder: That letter was sent to a 16 year old girl whose only crime was defending her Constitutional right not to have religion shoved down her throat by her public high school. So think real fucking carefully if you choose to defend your religion at this point.

Some other examples of the all-embracing Love of Christ:

Spelling not corrected for hilarity purposes.

Guns don't kill people. People with guns kill people

If only there was a word for attempting to kill an entire subsection of humanity.

This secular country founded on the separation of Church and State!!!

Conquering a country in the name of God. Didn't that happen once?

voting rights=divorce=child murder=witchcraft=treason=gay

To be fair, this guy was just as likely to be right about God as anyone.

So that, basically, is my problem with people that believe in God, that make decisions by faith instead of reason, that pray for answers instead of asking questions, that respect magic more than logic. And as bad as all those above statements are, those that attempt to separate themselves by making excuses like "well, they're not real Christians," or "I can't believe how some people pervert the word of God," are no different. Just because a lie is nice doesn't make it true.

If there is a God, as unlikely as that is, then there is no possible way to know what He or She or It wants from us. Saying "God wants us to love each other and just be real nice all the time," is just as vapid and empty as "God demands obedience, fear and sacrifice." Hell, they're just as valid as me saying that the unicorn that lives in your septic tank will rectally impale you if you don't amputate your pinky toe. It's nonsense that goes against every law of logic and can only be maintained by constant denial of the reality of nature.

We are small, and we are weak, and we live in a big, cold, uncaring universe. And I understand how much nicer it would be if something as big and strong as the entire universe were to care about us and tell us that we are important. But it's just not true. You will not see your loved ones when they die. You will not live forever. When you die all that will remain, for better or for worse, will be the memories you left and the lives you touched and the stories you leave behind.

And while I'm as guilty as anyone of divisiveness, I would like it so very much if humanity could learn to live with itself, if we could stop seeing ourselves as collections of in-groups and out-groups, if we could all just wake up some happy day in the future and realize that we really are just one big in-group, regardless of belief or race or sexual identity or nationality or, hell, even religion.

And like I said, I'm not better. But goddammit, at least I'm willing to try to see beyond my own beliefs and superstitions and biases and ingrained bigotries and maybe catch a glimpse of the reality that we are all more the same than we are different and we are all in this together and we are all that each other has in the Universe. That is something to live for. Not fairy tales. Not crosses and holy water and the dead words of dead men. Not wishful thinking. Not some sweet Hereafter with all of your dead pets.

And I'm not gonna do any of that "Challenge to Theists" bullshit or argue that my stance is superior to anyone else's, and I'm not gonna expect anyone to give half a shit about what I say I'd like. But I have faith in humanity. Despite everything. Despite Gallileo. Despite Alquist. I have faith that we can truly be united. But not so long as grown up motherfuckers are given a pass for deluding themselves with their ridiculous, divisive fantasies.

I would never advocate killing anyone. Not for any reason. Certainly not for being different. Hell, I'm quite capable of loving people because of their differences. But I will not give bullshit a pass just because someone declares the topic off limits. Not when death threats are being mailed to teenagers because of it.

Retro Retro (Demon's Souls pt. 2)

2012-04-11T21:29:00.000-07:00

The great thing about Demon's Souls is that once you stop sucking at it and start making progress it lights up the reward center of the brain like the Vegas Strip. For a recovering drug addict that's like a legal drug that doesn't cost any money and only results in minor consequences, like the loss of friends, lovers, weight, sleep and employment, which can all be replaced.

2-3 The Underwhelming Whelp

Usually the last level of a world is just a corridor leading to a boss fight. Since the Dragon God is by far the easiest world boss in the game I decided to prove how easy this game is in the game's one mandatory semi-stealth section.

You can't melee him. Lucky for him.

The corridor involves hiding behind pillars until the Dragon God looks in the other direction, and then running to the next pillar. Some of the pillars block the path and have to be smashed.

Side note: The Dragon God is actually the Boletarian God of Crap Security Guards. He is the patron deity of those whose jobs entail looking slowly back and forth between whichever monitor doesn't contain the ninja infiltrator.

After reaching the far ledge I used the why-is-this-here giant arrow siege engine to take off 45% of the Boss's health. Why in the fuck a Dragon God would want to spend its entire existence hanging out in a room with the only weapon that can kill it placed near the door, armed, and pointing directly at its head is a mystery I've not yet solved.

After creeping across to the siege weapon on the other side of the room, firing it, and dispatching the crippled and helpless Dragon God, I zoned out, fucked around for a while, and went back to the Castle World.

1.2 The Overwhelming Whelp

Upon zoning in, I charged forward into the next chamber and was promptly almost massacred by a herd of Phalanx goons that I swear weren't there the last time I played the game.

Being a little more fucking careful I made my way out to the bridge where I knew that the dragon that roasted me before was about to try to roast me again. He did so. Not because the game is hard or because I'm bad at it, but because I got distracted by my character's ass and timed the dash wrong. That's what happened.

After making the next dash with no problems I had further no problems for the rest of the level as it's basically just a tube with zombies in it. I decided it was time to slay another dragon.

Climbing on top of a turret thing with my bow I took aim and loosed every single arrow I had into the scaly beast's face.

I am now out of arrows and the dragon is very not dead. Fuck.

Kicking myself for forgetting to upgrade my bow and buy more arrows before doing this, I made my way back to the teleporter and totally wasn't roasted alive again when I timed the dash wrong. Again.

After grinding more money that I needed because of my repeated case of dragon breath, I upgraded my bow to a sticky bow. Which is both silly and disgusting sounding, but it's like the best weapon in the game if you're a fan of cheap bitch tactics like I am.

After finally dispatching the dragon I made my way to the Boss chamber, which was the Tower Knight.

See how this fellow is bravely challenging the knight to a fair fight? I'm still not doing that.

The secret to a stress free existence with this Boss is to climb up the walls, murder the archers, rain arcane death on the Tower Knight when he drops his guard during his comically slow wind up animation, then take a step backwards when he shoots back.

This game is so easy. Providing you don't mind being the asshole kid that always picked Sub-Zero and relied entirely on the freezeball+uppercut stunlock to win.

3.1 The Oddly-Designed Prison of Tedious Jailbreaks

Remembering that goon-strength spikes significantly in 1.3, I decided to run through The Prison level of the Other Castle World.

The Prison of Latria has excellent atmosphere, and was really effective at making me feel filthy and hopeless and surrounded by tentacle monsters. For about ten minutes. Then it just became tedious back-and-forthing with me occasionally falling into a hole that wasn't there last time.

Whoever designed this prison does not pay his guards hourly, as they'd be well into overtime by the time they made it to the time clock, and I can't imagine a prison containing three prisoners and 70 caged zombies over the space of 950 square miles has much of an operating budget.

Halfway up the final (senselessly long,) corridor leading to the Boss chamber, I was attacked by a black phantom, which is like a goon but with high stats and better AI. I think they're supposed to simulate the random invaders that popup during online play, but I don't play online because I hate people, competition, teenagers, surprises, acknowledging the existence of people that type things like "fag nigger is fag," and being interrupted during masturbatory escapist fantasies: all of which are synonyms for online gaming.

After circling each other for fucking ages in a level that already has too much nothing happening in it, something in my brain broke off and I started flailing wildly at the phantom's shield. It was at this point that I remembered that this phantom is a stealth character, and as such is deft at executing back stabs.

After cursing my way back to the phantom and this time winning I proceeded to the boss, the Fool's Idol.

Whatever she's reading must be a goddamn good book. She doesn't stop reading even while being arrowed to death.

The Fool's Idol isn't as straightforward as most of the other Boss fights, which mostly involve either being charged by an enraged giant demon, or hiding just outside of the Boss's aggro range and plinking it with arrows or poison spells and hoping it doesn't become enraged and charge.

For the Fool's Idol, the fight mostly relies on cunning, but not very well implemented traps, such as tiles that paralyze your character while she blasts you with magic, the Idol copying herself leading the player to run around whacking dopplegangers, and the best trick: A zombie not even in the Boss's chamber casting resurrection spells on her.

These kind of fall apart, as the floor tiles are few and small, the zombie cleric is the one you probably noticed before coming into the Boss chamber, as he was the one in a magic circle surrounded by glowing light and swearing up and down and he wasn't doing anything suspicious, honest, you can trust me, guv, I'm a right ole honest undead, I am, wouldn't 'urt a flea, now would I?

As far as the Boss herself, she just sat there, facing away from the door. Literally. She seems more boreder with this level than I did. So the entire fight involved shooting at her and ducking behind a pillar while she slowly turned around.

Returning to base, I decided to take a shot at the Ruined Castle World.

4.1 Fucking Robot Skeletons

That's what the primary goons look like in this world, anyway.

I spent quite a while running around pillaging the level for all of the awesome weaponry that, oddly, was just lying around next to goons that could have easily used them to make my life quite a bit more difficult for me.

After that I decided it was time to give The Vanguard, the Tutorial Boss from the beginning of the game, his comeuppance via my fucking sword in his fucking ankle!

See how this fellow is bravely challenging the Vanguard to single combat? SO DID I!

It went really well too, right up to the point where he somehow, perhaps by using game glitching wizardry, managed to get his gigantic axe past my defense and liquify me.

Luckily this level is reasonably sized and is made up mostly of shortcuts, so I didn't spend the next half hour inching my way back to try again. Trying again worked.

After meandering through the rest of the level and only occasionally being impaled by a spear shot out of an improbable flying manta rays, I made it to the Boss Chamber.

Really skinny goons, really fat bosses.

Luckily the Adjudicator has been ignoring his diet since the fall of the whatever kingdom this is. As a result his only real attack options involve a slow, clumsy chop at the small area in front of him that isn't stomach, and falling down, leaving his wrecked vagina of a head open for axe attacks.

If you've ever played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, it's almost the exact same strategy used by King Hippo: 1. Make no attempt to disguise your very obvious weak spot. 2. When your weak spot is attacked, drop all defenses while your opponent hacks off a third of your health bar.

Now that I've turned myself into a walking declaration of war, it's time to switch back to the Other Castle World.

3.2 Castle In the Sky

Latria, at least those parts of it that aren't endless prison, is composed entirely of narrow walkways and bridges with no safety rails surrounding a central tower powered by a giant heart. Seriously, you can't design a castle like this and not expect it to be overrun by tentacle demons and giant scorpions with human faces.

Anyway, I remember this level being way more of a pain in the ass than it turned out to be this time. Maybe my already impossibly good video game skills have somehow gotten even better. Of course it's also possible that the 15 or so hours I spent two years ago falling into holes and being knocked off of the same three ledges by gargoyles was buried so deeply in my subconscious that I can now run this level blindfolded.

Since I have to wait until I have pure white world tendency to unlock all of the extras in this level I decided to just make a crazed dash for the Boss Chamber. Since this involves charging at full speed past giant, flying gargoyles over several miles of narrow walkways, and then charging past acid spitting face bugs in a poorly lit bog of narrow walkways there was no way in hell it could possibly work.

Except it did. But it goddamn shouldn't have. I was tempted to throw myself into a hole to see if I had somehow accidentally turned God Mode on.

Anyway, that brought me to the boss, The Maneater. Even though it's a them, and they're snakes that eat Gargoyles and wear them like suits.

Gargoyleseaters doesn't really roll off the tongue. But neither does Demon's Souls.

A fact almost as widely known as the second Maneater that swoops in halfway through the battle is that the first Maneater can be arrowed to death through the door of its chamber. However, I'd been having so much luck...I mean skill in the past few levels I decided a direct, frontal assault was called for. And on the off chance I died I could always come back and kill the motherfucker from the other side of an impassible barrier the way nature intended.

Somehow this worked too. So for anyone wondering how to win at this game: Take the most suicidal, least likely to work strategy and perform it as quickly as possible before the game realizes you're daring it to kill you.

3.3 The Curse of the Lazy Development Monks

The Final Boss of Latria is another sorta unimpressive one, as it's another black phantom. In the online mode the game actually yoinks in another player to do battle with you, but since this game's online community speaks solely in an impenetrable and terrifying language of capitalized consonants and Internet Troll involving phrases like "GW and DBS? You're worse than the uchi push lock noobs! Try HoG and CRR solo against FKA!" I'd be damned if I'm gonna try my luck against someone that takes games that seriously.

Instead I fought the AI phantom, which is like a regular goon, only he has a goofy hat and randomly shoots homing missiles that hurt like a motherfucker. I avoided these by cleverly hiding behind chairs.

The actual Boss is the robe. Immortal witch queen, gargoyle eating snake demons, and a robe.

Next Up: I Tackle the Levels That Really Are Hard