NikBv's Xanga

Cain For President

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 05:47:26 GMT

This song is so darn catchy.

A Blog

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:17:18 GMT

I hate to beat a dead horse, I really do. On the other hand, I hate it when somebody else beats me. So, I've got no choice. It's another blog about @shimmerbodycream! I bet you all knew this, but for those who didn't, she is CUTE AND SMART. Plus, she's flossed for the second day in a row now. I'm very proud.

I've been alive for a long time now. Nearly as long as I can count, in fact. You know that's got to be a pretty long time, because I've got several advanced degrees, and so can count pretty high. And in all my time of living, I've never met a person as cool as @shimmerbodycream. She radiates cool. She's practically freezing, actually. It makes me shiver. I wish she'd get me a sweater.

This is like the time I saw my first husband graduate from college. I couldn't have been prouder. Of course, that was back before hormonal birth control had turned men into blithering idiots, so it was less of an accomplishment than it seems now. The point remains, though: I'm very proud.

There's a funny thing about pride, you know. It starts out like this little worm in your belly. A worm slowly eating its way through your intestines. Eventually, unless a quick crushing blow from disappointment kills it, it grows so large and eats so much of your intestines that it eventually bursts forth from your body. You can't stop it. It always makes itself known. It's a messy, gory thing. I think there was a Hitchcock film about that. Or maybe I'm thinking of birds.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 03:09:00 GMT

I feel like I should post something again. People keep bothering me to post. A certain specific someone *ahem*. I just need something to say, though. What's going on on xanga these days?

Nationbuilding Here at Home

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:35:18 GMT

I knew he was a president with vision. It's like I've been saying since the very beginning. Gobama! We're going to win these wars, I can feel it. And we're going to rebuild America, too. We're all going to be rich and happy and fulfilled. We just need to keep trusting in our Commander-in-Chief to see us through these tough times, and for the rest of his first term and throughout his second, things will just keep getting better.

Also, faceboooooook!

The Best Bob Dylan Song Ever

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:19:29 GMT

Religion as the Cause of War

Thu, 12 May 2011 01:38:13 GMT

There's been a good-natured discussion on religion and war over on trunthepaige's site here and here as part of a larger discussion on atheism and "myths." I'm not particularly concerned with proving or critiquing these supposed atheist myths, but I did want to question a specific statistic brought into play by Paige:

"It is a fact that religion was the motivator of only 7% of all of histories wars."

This kind of thing gets said all the time, but it seems pretty darn difficult to me to prove this so specifically. I told Paige, I would love love love to see how that statistic was made. Has somebody actually got a list of every war in the history of mankind? And then counted them all up? Decided what's a 'war' and what's... a skirmish/conflict/police action? And THEN decided whether religion was the deciding motivator or cause? Because frankly, I have to admit, I'm hugely skeptical of this.

There's no such thing as historical consensus. Professional historians spend their lives arguing over causality. No historian is going to say THIS war was motivated by religion, and THIS war wasn't. They might say religion was A motivator. But I think it'd be completely impossible to make a list of every 'war' ever, and then comprehensively go through them and decide absolutely whether religion was the motivator for each. Isn't going to happen.

That isn't a fact that I could believe without seeing some serious evidence to back it up.

In response, Paige linked me to a 1400 encyclopedia on war and American society, but couldn't give me a specific citation, so I was left to wonder... was this is a statistic directly stated in the book somewhere? That book could very well be a valid and worthwhile source, I'm not questioning its historical accuracy, because I've never read it. But surely you understand the immensely complicated nature of causation? You can't just read a list of wars on a chart somewhere and decide that war A was caused by religion and war B wasn't. Or take the word of whoever made the chart.

Historians spend a lot of time trying to work through the nuance of these wars... E.H. Carr, a pretty well known historian, wrote in the 1960s that the main job of historians is to decide on causes, and then rank them in order of importance. Obviously, then, (if you believe this to be the main task of historians, which quite a lot of historians disagree with) the causes, and their relative importance, are up to the individual historian to discern and argue for. Does the linked Encyclopedia argue that there exists consensus among historians over the cause of every war? If it does, it's wrong. Completely and absolutely.

I can't think of any war to my knowledge that has ONE cause. Events like those tend to be big, complicated, nuanced things, with multiple possible causes, both religious and non-religious... the only way any of this classification would even make sense is if one said something like x% of wars were in some way related to religious issues.

I'm pretty confident I could list you 150 wars that have religion among their causes. I'm pretty sure I could list you twice as many. The problem with doing so is that it'd be impossible to decide whether it's THE cause.

I could say X war had religion as one of its causes, and so was caused, in part, by religion, and thus deserves to be counted. Then, you'd be free to tell me you disagree, and that you don't think religion was a prime cause. In order to actually come up with some idea of how many wars in human history have been "religious" we have to decide two things:

1) - what is a war? Do we count the French Wars of Religion, say, as one 30 year long war? Or many wars? If we're going for a statistic, that kind of thing is very important to decide upon before hand. We also need to decide what is required to be a "war" and what's going to instead be classified as something else - a conflict/police action/internal dispute/revolution/etc. That's also going to be important.

2) - does having religion among the causes for a war make it a "religious" war? A lot of historians will argue it's basically impossible to rank causes to any event. Take a look at this article. Causation is HARD. The author of that, Michael Stanford, basically argues that it isn't even worth trying to decide cause for events, because they can't be accurately discerned. Even historians who agree that causation can be discerned often suggest that it isn't really possible to rank them. In “Historical Causation: Is One Thing More Important Than Another?,” S.H. Rigby says ranking causes is impossible. If cause A and cause B (say, A = religion and B = politics, if you want) both can be identified as causes, are you going to decide one was 40% responsible and one was 60% responsible? What does that mean? That if A hadn't existed, the event would have had a 40% chance of not happening? That's going too deeply into counter-factuals to be accurate to any degree.

So essentially, we need to decide the parameters of this discussion, something Paige adamantly refused to do. So, I'm putting the question to you, dear readers:

do you think it's possible to come up with a statistic for how many wars in human history were "religious" wars?

If you were to do so, how would you define "war" and how would you decide whether or not to classify it as a religious conflict?

Things I've Done With Shimmer

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:08:10 GMT

Hey, this is nikbv. Hello. I AM NOT AN ALCOHOLIC. Just kidding, of course I am. I have a tiny, tiny tab button. Mine is way smaller than Shimmer's who has a big huge long tab button. I am so jealous. Here is what Shimmer and I did.

watched a hockey game

eaten chinese food

taken a city bus

played hide the hamster with an aardvark

half a minute of yoga

did not stare at as many boobies as shimmer did

ate cheese

Breaking News: Lovelyish Quality Substandard

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 16:17:29 GMT

I've been blocked! Blocked, I say! Yes, I was as shocked as you are. I'm delightful. I'm fantastic, and friendly, and oh so polite! But apparently that isn't enough for the braintrust that runs the ever aspiring, loftily thoughtful Lovelyish. Apparently, in their infinite quest to provide the most idiotic content on the web, Jessica's team of superstar bloggers crafted a post so cunning, so devilishly clever, it couldn't BUT attract both attention and praise: pictures of random celebrities' packages.

Fantastic. Penis-through-the-pants pictures.

I think if mancouch had done a celebrity camel toe post, they'd get called chauvinist pigs. But, of course, Lovelyish is held to a different standard. Dare I say... a female standard? (I kid, I kid! You know I love the fairer sex). Anyway, apparently slobbering crudity is A-OK for Ms Misener. And yet, what's NOT ok is pointing out the rampant unprofessionalism of the post.

They blocked me!

I! A loyal reader! A friendly and helpful frequent commenter!

Clearly, this is part of the same brilliant plan that's led mancouch, thehardestlevel, thepopsite, tripcrazed, hoodstars, and dollarish (am I forgetting any?) to outlandish success.

Blog on, ish sites, blog on.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:04:43 GMT

Here we have bookish dreams, a heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage, but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and he murdered two people for a theory.

Inside My Mind

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:08:48 GMT

I was walking alone in the woods. And I thought... what if a cougar attacks me! What would I do? Do I see any solid sticks around? What about my pocket knife. Would that be a suitable weapon?

What if, when I stabbed it, the blade snapped closed over my fingers!

Maybe I can climb a tree. Can cats climb trees? Crap, yes! I'm screwed, then.

Oh, well. Maybe there are no cougars around!

Walking on, walking on, suddenly I hear a noise!

Freeze! Is it behind me right now?! Oh, god! Turn around, slowly... slowly... slowly... and look!

Nope. Nothing there. Keep walking.

Sit on a bench on the edge of the woods. Wonder if putting my sun glasses on the back of my head will work like masks and tigers in India, and convince cougars I'm looking at it, so it thinks it can't sneak up on me, so it won't pounce.

Unless it doesn't think my sunglasses look like eyes! Crap, they're sliding down the back of my head! Why don't I have a nose back there, anyway?

Oh well.

Sigh, look out over the vista, and then carve my name into the bench. Now I have a legacy in Smallville!

Walk on.

Wonder how long the carving will last. Maybe I should have made it bigger. How did that guy in that movie carve his name into the wood of that ship? Maybe he had a bigger knife.

I need a bigger knife.

I wonder what the laws are on carrying knives? How big is illegal? I bet a big knife would help me fight a cougar!

God, is THAT a cougar, now?! No, just a squirrel.

Walk on.