Saturday, November 21, 2009

Meta

On 8 November, from the Great 16-18 October Hangover, I posted that Intelligent-Design was a metaphysic, and that it can't be taught as science. I did offer this paragraph, which I did not answer properly:

But why not? Shut up, the scientist explains; this isn't the class for that. So where is the class for that? Where do we go to learn metaphysics?

I think we're ready to answer that. Let's look at mathematics first.

Every branch of math has starting axioms, which have to be assumed, or else nothing can get done. Euclid set out his geometry with a famous five axioms (or, I should say in Greek, axiomata). From them, we can do geometry in "flat" space; without them, we can't. We never could prove those axioms, but we were able to devise other geometries; which meant a restriction of "Euclidean space" to that geometry which followed his Rules. It then was found that around gravitational fields the non-Euclidean geometry works better.

We've been dealing with a branch of math dubbed "Meta-Mathematics" around here for the last couple months. Meta-Math is the process of doing math - how to get the answer faster (log tables), whether certain algorithms are practical to do (NP-hard), whether a given field can ever be "fished out" (Gödel Incompleteness), and such. Meta-math has its own uses, for instance as the basis of computer science.

No-one argues much about whether meta-math invalidates the process of math. But in some cases, it somewhat does. The Traveling Squirrel won't get his minimum route in polynomial time (unless P=NP, which humans must pray isn't true). Some problems will NEVER be solved; except by introducing a new branch of math, which is what happened to Euclid's geometry.

It took thousands of years for mathematicians to give up proving Euclid and instead to come up with a "meta-geometry". Until that was formally defined, it wasn't suitable for young geometricians to hear that Euclidean geometry didn't work - because it does work for the applications they were going to put it to.

Physics has a meta-physic: inductive and deductive reasoning, and the a priori setting of The Rules to ban all extranatural reasons for the problem on your plate. By extension, so do all the physical sciences, including biology. This meta-physic happens to work for all modern science, including biology.

People who propose Intelligent Design are, in effect, asking for a meta-biology which won't be subject to gene expression and natural selection. This is something they cannot do, until they have a more formal (in the mathematical sense) textbook than Genesis and the Qur'an.

Labels: algorithms, meta, science

posted by Zimri on 20:17 | link |

The Talmud as an anti-Christian tract

When the Von Brunn murder came to light, so did Von Brunn's opinions, and among these was a polemic against the Bavli Talmud of the Rabbinic Jews. I'm seeing similar opinions among Muslim trolls in MyPetJawa.

At the core of this polemic are the comments the Bavli, and not so much the Yerushalmi, Tosefta etc, levy against Jesus. Christian and Muslim antiSemites agree upon venerating Jesus, or at least upon using Jesus as a wedge between Jews and their Abrahamic cousins.

Peter Schaefer in 2007 published the definitive secular reading of the Jesus references in the Talmud. He found that the Bavli is hostile. There had been an anti-Jesus literature in Judaism for centuries, and Justin Martyr's correspondent Trypho and Origen's foil Celsus reported on their state as of the mid second century AD. The Bavli brought many of these together and canonised them for the Jews in Iraq.

The Bavli's comments on Jesus have been known to American evangelical Protestants since Josh MacDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict books. To MacDowell, the Bavli proves that Jesus existed, performed miracles, and was killed in Jerusalem. MacDowell didn't care that the Talmud was a hostile witness; he valued it as a memory of the Pharisaic indictment. MacDowell, author of Christian propaganda against Judaism, had the integrity not to complain about the existence of Jewish propaganda against Jesus.

There is something to be learnt from MacDowell's attitude. The existence of an apologetic, or evangelical, or even polemic literature among a group - here, the Jews - does not alone imply that the group must be wicked. For that the literature would have to recommend wicked means to solve the problem of the polemic's target. The Talmud supports no prescription along the lines of the Qur'an's qital. It just lays out a case against Jesus. It has to, or else it would become a Christian text itself.

In addition, the Talmud is not a Qur'an or even a Torah, and Jews can find a multitude of opinions in it, for and against almost every proposition. The Talmud preserves a second-century case against Jesus and carries it forward to the Talmud's own day in the sixth-century. Jews then were supposed to read that and to compare it to other accounts of Jesus; canonical Christian, gnostic Christian, Josephus's accounts of Jesus and James, and also pagan and Mandaean accounts which are mostly lost now. This is pretty much how Jews look at Jesus today - and it is not entirely a hostile look.

The Muslim / David Duke axis is entirely opportunistic. When the anti-Talmud trolls come into your comment forum, they're not there to make a principled case.

Labels: antisemitism, bullshit, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 13:18 | link |

Josh MacDowell and the Jews

The Christian evangelical author Josh MacDowell had a section on the Jews in Evidence That Demands A Verdict. It's worthwhile to evaluate that evidence as it reflects upon MacDowell.

MacDowell's books were a major force in recruiting educated young people into Christianity. But he lost much of his influence in the mid 1990s with the rise of the Internet and one of its first websites, Infidels.org. This site fact-checked his books to smouldering ruins. (Disclosure - Around this time I was also fact-checking his books and I started my own researches, which you can read on the "J/X" link.)

MacDowell was an admirer of the Jewish people, insofar as they protected the Torah, agreed with his causes, and fulfilled (his interpretation of) Prophecy. MacDowell's views on Jewish doctrine were more nuanced. As I recall, he dismissed Reform Judaism as barely a religion at all and thought of Orthodox Judaism as Paul's Curse Of The Law writ large. Conservative Judaism, he treated as underdeveloped Christianity.

As a Christian evangelist, MacDowell has to promote Christianity over all forms of Judaism. As mentioned above, I am not a fan. But to call him an antiSemite would inductively condemn all Gentiles observant to their own laws as antiSemites. That would be, itself, a form of bigotry.

Labels: antisemitism, conservatives, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 12:39 | link |

Friday, November 20, 2009

The big global-warming swindle

I heard that the global-warminators' server got pwnzord and that large ZIPs of email are on the loose. The emails have some incriminating stuff on them. That stuff is probably out of context, and I think a 24 hour rule is important here.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I don't even feel like talking about Lizardland. I'm here to talk about the warminators' big problem - that the earth quit warming last decade, despite an increase in CO2.

My intuition is that CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, and that much of the warming 1982-1998 was driven by methane and chlorofluorocarbons.

CFCs are a nasty bunch of chemicals and the world rightly agreed to ban 'em. Methane on the other hand is more tricky to control. It comes from cows, which taste yummy; but even if you banned herding in Brazil and allowed the rain-forest back, eventually some trees would die and attract termites which... emit the same gas.

The good news about methane is that it (1) is reactive and (2) emits less-harmful gasses when it decomposes. Methane is just carbon and hydrogen; all you'll get from its breakdown is CO2 and water - both also greenhouse, to be sure, but less so. CFCs break down into chlorine compounds. Yikes!

So methane will, if our emissions stay at the same rate, reach an equilibrium. No-one seriously proposes a runaway concentration of methane. Everyone worries instead about the less-reactive CO2, which fuels the hellfire of planet Venus.

CO2 also has an equilibrium under normal conditions at our insolation. It's called the "carbon cycle", whereby high amounts of CO2 end up in carbonate rocks and the aforementioned trees. The new National Geographic analogises it to water entering a bathtub which drains at a steady rate. Currently, more pours in than is coming out. The warminators say this is mostly the result of fossil-fuel burning, therefore that humans are overwhelming this cycle.

Whether this is bad is another question. No-one knows how much CO2 will be necessary to take us to Venus but my thought is, a lot. Like about 10% in the atmosphere would be my guess.

I'm not a climate scientist though. I never was good at socialising with my peers, nor at keeping mum on unethical conduct; both of which are prerequisites to running a cartel like theirs.

Labels: bullshit, climate

posted by Zimri on 19:34 | link |

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Art is not political

Melissa Anderson also reviewed the movie "(untitled)". That film sends up the "art" world. The review isn't online so, no link, sowwy. Here's the review. The review didn't approve the movie.

I got the vibe from Anderson's take on The Blind Side that she was one of those who enjoys most of all one-upping other people; there, it was over other Liberals on tolerance, and here apparently it's over everybody else on Art Appreciation. The Houston Press, The Village Voice and other such rags serve the urban hipster community, which means they have to show that they Care; when it came time to face down this threat to Art, they picked the right gal.

Anderson is of the opinion that the whole discussion of whether modern art is worth anything is, like, so totes 1998, or 1988 (she's not so sure). She doesn't want to raise the issue because she thinks the issue is decided by politics - naked force - and not by its merits.

On its merits, modern art is a sham. If we demand a standard which can transgress politics and be appreciated by future viewers of alien politics, the standard for art must depend on craftsmanship - and as a craft artwork follows objective rules. In music, a jazz musician may riff on the theme, but can only introduce discord with great care and deliberation. 20th century artwork has always been as ruinous as was that century's politics.

Anderson accepts the rule of her Brahmin caste on what is "art". In that vein, it's only fair we adopt the Brahmin definition of "peace": victory for the right side. Anderson therefore doesn't get to declare the war over. The war ends when the "good guys" say it ends - and in the case of art, the side of tradition - the right wing - makes that call.

Melissa Anderson does not have opinions of her own. If the artwork is Brahmin-approved, it must be good. If the movie offends her politics, it can't be good. She is a slave.

Labels: bullshit, liberals

posted by Zimri on 17:19 | link |

Blind Side'd

The critic Melissa Anderson is saying that the new Julia Roberts movie The Blind Side is racist.

Okay, it's a Sandra Bullock movie. It's a Julia Roberts movie in spirit. She'd pretty much cornered Saintly Meddling Liberal in that abomination Erin Brockovich. I guess Sandra Bullock wants her job.

I tend to agree that The Blind Side is racist (in the Liberal way of racism), but I'm not terribly concerned about that. My thought is that if you're a racist, your movie has a problem if its protagonist is helping a member of the race you despise. Other racists have to ask - why bother?

I gather the target demo is 40-something white females whose "best friends are black" as long as those friends don't live anywhere near them.

Labels: bullshit, critique, liberals, race

posted by Zimri on 17:05 | link |

Vested interest

I just picked up the Houston Press. On the letters page, they quote the online comments; someone calling himself DNay dropped #2. Says DNay, "Mr Flood- how would you feel if your family were the ones in the car that got plowed by a drunk driver. would you defend them???"

The short answer is "no"; there are longer answers but most involve insults.

If I must don the cape of Captain Obvious: If the Flood family was in that car, Flood would have a "vested interest" in any relevant civil or criminal case. In this unhappy event, Flood in his capacity as attorney couldn't defend or oppose anyone involved. He'd get disbarred for that shit.

I'd hope Tyler Flood would take less than a second to think it through. As for DNay, I hope he's not registered to serve on a jury around here.

Labels: ethics

posted by Zimri on 16:53 | link |

If Code Is Law, then bad law is buggy code

Anyone who is interested in both law and computers has to start with Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. It asserts that "code is law".

You can tell Lessig's book is vintage just from that wonderful word "Cyberspace". Brings me right back to the days of AOL chatrooms it does. I see at the bookstore that he's since updated its title to Code 2.0. Anyway.

With that in mind, we're witnessing the behaviour of the legal code right here in Texas. We've recently passed a law which outlaws marriage. In its exact words: "This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

This interpretation sounds preposterous but as Gabriel Malor at Ace explains, "that's how laws get written all the time". I write here that the civil code is "an ass" to the degree that it mindlessly follows commands. Our civil laws are naught but a set of algorithms and definitions which work by Strict Constructionism. Computer code works in exactly this way; but unlike the Constitution and the Qur'an - a machine works only this way. To sum up, laws are object-oriented code, and legislators are their programmers.

And if they're not not careful, programmers and legislators may introduce object-oriented programming bugs.

Here, the programmer can instantiate two objects which are identical in all their properties and methods. But when the computer compares the two, they come up different. That is because they are, after all, two separate objects.

Generally programmers will separate out their comparison for whether they are looking twice at the same duck, from that for whether they are looking at two objects which look and quack like ducks.

Texas designed its code for "identical to" which is a test for the second. The problem is that marriage itself is also identical to marriage. Texans should have coded also for a check on whether the incoming test case was marriage, and discounted that case.

So complaints about the hypocrisy of the Liberals who are exploiting this system do not have merit. It's like complaining about the hacker who couldn't design a more secure system himself. He doesn't have to. Code is law; and the Texan code is, now, banning your marriage.

Labels: algorithms, ethics, ghey

posted by Zimri on 16:50 | link |

Why is the law an ass?

I've posted on Original Intent versus Strict Constructionism already. I know I keep going back to it; but bear with me here.

I didn't take a side there, which was focused on the Constitution; but whatever one's opinion on the Constitution, that opinion doesn't matter for the civil code. Strict constructionism is how civil law works.

In the West (and in Islam) laws are written, and not just passed down from chief to chief.

If it's not holy writ, why bother writing it? Because its laws are, still, designed to be picked up and understood, even if the last chief was getting doddery in his old age. If the law is written badly, we have in the West (and not so much in Islam) mechanisms for fixing it.

Until we invent that tachyon reader, we can't consistently get that feel for "original intent", and when we can't (or don't bother) then we go with "strict constructionism". We'll do it even if the strict construction leads to a result we might consider absurd, for now.

Labels: ethics

posted by Zimri on 16:46 | link |

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Obama the liberal

Obama is a cultural Marxist but he's no Pol Pot, nor even a Gramsci. I think Obama is at heart a (failure of a) liberal.

Even the messes he's made of the Constitution smell more like Brüning than brownshirts. Obama has brownshirts, albeit they prefer purple, but their intimidation tactics aren't helping.

Labels: liberals, obama

posted by Zimri on 22:18 | link |

The bourgeoisie

I'm thinking that the true enemies of the Marxist - the "bourgeoisie" - aren't Conservatives. The "bourgeois" enemies of the Marxist are the liberals. They're the "nice guys", the White Guelphs. They're the people who like the Stuff White People Like. They're the people Marxists can intimidate.

Marxists can't attack Conservatives until Marxists take power absolutely. (Then it's off to the camps.) Until then Marxists don't care. They do use the "Conservative" (or, "fascist") as a label, but it's only to pin upon liberals. Liberals are too busy playing the election game with Conservatives to spot the danger. They're like Roman generals bickering while the Goths pour in.

If I were in SEIU or ACORN I would spend less time beating up right-wingers directly, and more time putting pressure on urban white liberals.

Labels: liberals, progressives

posted by Zimri on 21:58 | link |

Outdated SF as alternate-history

One John Cowan has retrofitted a 1946 sci-fi tale, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper. He boosted the date (1996->2049); and he made the planet "Mars", which we now know is dead, into a more human-survivable planet "Ares".

The basic laws of physics have held up well since the Second World War. It's the application of these physics ("technology"), and the knowledge of our solar system (and not just ours), which have paved over the 1940s consensus. History has marched on in its own way too of course (1984, 2001,...).

These classic works of SF cannot be updated, without rewriting them. And rewriting them means writing a new book, with only the plots and maybe some characters left over. Cowan seems to have done about as well as anyone can do, by setting the story in an alternate universe.

Labels: books

posted by Zimri on 20:56 | link |

Switch() statement considered harmful

A few months ago I realised that the Select / Case statement in VB.NET 2.0 was a fat O(m) heap of crap. To cut down the value inside the O(), I came up with a class-level static hashtable keyed to a Command-Pattern interface, and I brought up that idea at the 26 September Houston TechFest (in Weisfeld's "generics" session).

I still didn't like that I had to code all this myself, so last week I came up with a run-time dispatcher for the VB.NET language definition. Yes, I was arrogant enough to propose altering Microsoft's compiler...

In the course of my research I found out about Stephen C Kleene's "metamathematics" on Wikipedia, which defined the terms in a comp-sci-ey fashion; and I found c2.com, which informed me that the Switch() has been an annoyance to programmers and their clients for many years. I was done with the theory in fairly short order. I then had the idea of extending this or that Object-Oriented compiler myself. My first thought was to extend Inform 6. (I need hardly mention that I know next to nothing of how compilers work.) The run-time language to which Inform compiles, the "Z Machine", doesn't offer native support for hashtables - much less what I had in mind. It looked too much like hard work.

Today I learnt that much of my effort was moot anyway. C# already offers a compile-time optimiser for switch() statements. D'oh!

That renders the whole project down to supportability. I've been on that side of the help desk for long enough that I know that much is important, which is why I'm posting it; but it's no longer going to win for me fame and fortune.

On the plus side, having done all that, I now have a licence to troll computer blogs' comments. Where they are talking Command-Patterns, delegates, dispatching, and switches - maybe state machines too - I now have something relevant to the topic.

Labels: algorithms

posted by Zimri on 16:45 | link |

V-3

Tonight was V night.

On the media: The reporter Decker in his first report didn't mention the fisticuffs which had broken out in V-2, wherein that hormonal teen belted a protester. Decker in later reports expounds on the Vs' public-relations, and not primarily on what is going on. Decker throughout is refusing to air hard news. Decker is not purely a mouthpiece of V "spin", though; and it's possible that he's sending coded signals to humanity that this spin exists. The Vs would be fools to trust in him but then, I noted that last time.

On the Vs' propaganda: Anna defines "peace" as submission to the Vs. We are reminded of how "Islam" equals progress toward God's peace, and of how "peace" in the West equals acquiescence to the Nobel Prize Committee's whim. Anna is a master at twisting events to serve her higher goals.

On the corruption of youth: I suspected that the aforementioned hormonal teen would be strung along as a dupe and, whaddaya know, it's happening.

The plot-thread which, so far, has not amounted to much is that of the Vs' "fifth column" (misnamed, under the rules thus far laid down). All we know is that the Column exists, that it opposes the V leadership, and that its members think they are doing good for humanity.

Labels: media, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 00:49 | link |

The weblog as extended memory

I don't use this blog, primarily, as a means for influencing people. I don't like people enough to do that.

I use this blog as a memory dump. It stores what I know at any given time. (Even if that "knowledge" was false: c.f., the Torah's opinion on unborn life.) If I read an article and disagree with it, I can search through the archive and dig up what I'd said on that subject in the past.

It's nice not to have to keep this clutter in my head.

Labels: algorithms, books, personal, wikipedia

posted by Zimri on 00:28 | link |

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Rail or autobahn

I found this on slashdot: a proposal for a real highway system for Canada. It says that Eastern Canada has highways of the quality of the United States' "interstates". Central and Western Canada also have highways... which go to the United States.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that central Canada is even more sparsely populated than the Great American Desert. Who wants to run out of petrol in the middle of Manitoba, in November? Canadians figure it easier and arguably more humane to make it difficult to get there in the first place.

An alternative would be high-speed rail through those parts of Canada where no-one lives, i.e. the longitudinal centre.

One of the comments in the original post points out that rail costs about as much as the freeway - it's just that the costs are bourne, for the most part, by the drivers (when they purchase that petrol, or get in a crash). And I have to admit, when I'm driving from Houston to Austin or Dallas, that I've oft wished I was lounging in a rail-car reading a book.

My problem with rail is that it becomes a transportation bottleneck. Da Workerz always end up taking those over, and then they extort concessions from the government. Governments which have become structurally socialist, as have those of Canada and the United States, grant to Da Workerz too much power.

Motorways bypass Da Workerz and so are politically safest in a society like ours. For as long as our masters allow us to use them...

Labels: energy

posted by Zimri on 18:35 | link |

Monday, November 16, 2009

Card check, 2

The New Scientist is printing an idea by one David Rand of Harvard: mandate that your house and car display your wasteful ways.

Even better than voluntary displays would be laws enforcing disclosure. For example, governments could require energy companies to publish the amount of electricity used by each home and business in a searchable database. Likewise, gasoline use could be calculated if, at yearly inspections, mechanics were required to report the number of kilometres driven. Cars could be forced to display large stickers indicating average distance travelled, with inefficient cars labelled similarly to cigarettes: "Environmentalist's warning: this car is highly inefficient. Its emissions contribute to climate change and cause lung cancer and other diseases." Judging from our laboratory research, such policies would motivate people to reduce their carbon footprint.

Unlike my post on public signatures, Rand isn't running a thought experiment. Rand thinks that everything you do should be public. He disdains "possible privacy issues" where the "potential gains" are "great" enough.

The only reason to out someone else's personal data is to open them up for personal attack. David Rand is a supporter of terrorism; so, apparently, is New Scientist.

Labels: enemies, liberty, progressives

posted by Zimri on 20:39 | link |

On privilege, again

I read about the famous Columbia pimp slap last week. Camille Davis was the slappee, culminating a spirited debate over the topic of "white privilege".

Archi prof Lionel McIntyre was involved. Somehow. Or not. To hear him talk, Davis got her slapping from an transdimensional tentacle from Beyond. When "things explode" - rending the fabric of space, time, and the English language - squamous horrors just sort of find their way in. (h/t Scott Stein.)

There's nothing more I could say about the term privy-lege that I hadn't said five years ago. America has no "white privilege" any more than it has "Jewish privilege". There exist social networks and starting capital, if one happens to be born to that sort of family, but these don't apply to poor folks on a Tennessee hillside whatever their colour.

In fact if you're black and have an IQ of 125, you can do a lot better than a white person of that IQ. That's the whole point of federally-sponsored Diversity, to ensure that this happens. If anything this country sponsors privilege for blacks.

Meanwhile, I'm not impressed with the prevarications of (some of) the black blogosphere. University personnel like Lionel McIntyre, Cornel West, and Henry Gates know better than most how little they deserve their cushy jobs. That is why they are prone to tantrums. If academics like Boyce Watkins don't like being "thought of as second-class citizens", perhaps they shouldn't support policies which foist upon the academy men with second-class intellects and third-class temperaments. They can start with sincere apologies for the Hamilton Hall takeover in 1968.

Labels: enemies, race

posted by Zimri on 19:50 | link |

i a constant?

I'm back from a merry weekend. I recently purchased a book entitled Gamma. It has to do with Euler's constant γ - it is presumed "transcendental", like π and e. (That means that no finite polynomial function can define it.) This book mentioned that γ was almost as famous as π and e - which I'll concede, given that I've barely started the thing.

What's weird about it is that it is claiming also that i, the square root of -1, is a constant.

I'm not buying that. i has the same magnitude as 1; it's just in an axis orthogonal to the real numbers. The correct analogy to i is -1: which is also "imaginary", in that you cannot have -1 cups of tea any more than you can have i teacups.

i as a number should be written as 1i, and the letter itself should be treated as a signifier along the lines of the negative signifier -.

Labels: books

posted by Zimri on 19:30 | link |

Friday, November 13, 2009

Why your project didn't get done on time

Among the programmer's least enjoyable tasks is managing expectations for time taken on project X. This is the difference between his estimate (not necessarily billable time), and the time it takes to get X to the client's desk.

I have created an outline for the snags which have tripped me up over the past 13+ years of slinging code. I am not here to bitch about my job, which I love; nor about my boss and clients, who have all been more than fair. The examples given here are not specific to any one place of work (but there is perhaps a bias toward Web development).

1. Initial requirements are sometimes optimistic or else aren’t set down until programming is underway.
   
   1. This happens when the project requires a coding method I had not yet tried. I did not always know Javascript for instance.
      
   2. Much of this time is taken up writing the code and seeing if it has any possibility of working.
      
   
   
2. The requirements can get clarified in the midst of development.
   
   1. This happens when I read the requirements literally, and then do the demo, and then the client points it out.
   2. If the exact verbiage wasn't implied in the spec, then we can request an extension - but sometimes things seem obvious to the client that don't to the programmer. ("You wanted an UNDO option?")
   
   
3. The requirements might not have addressed a problem I run across while coding and/or testing.
   
   1. I generally send mail to team lead when this occurs. But it often requires input from a client.
   
   
4. Existent codebase may be complex.
   
   1. In SQL there is always at least one variable that has to follow a lengthy algorithm of rules - and is the reason you're running it on a 5-terabyte server in the first place. (If you're in sales, it's pricing.)
      
   2. In the site itself this happens with the pages which load conditionally.
      
      1. The role of the login affects what is available.
         
      2. Subclasses of the page: some fields might be relevant for some choices and not for others. e.g. if you are Canadian, your town is in a "province" and if you are American, a "state".
         
      3. Code behind here has to be conditional too. If I’m asked to fix something for X, all that code for Y and Z is distracting.
         
   3. This happens where there is a mix of client and server functionality: Javascript versus ASP.
      
   4. This happens where controls are added dynamically.
      
   5. This happens where the web server demands session state (“memory”): preview option, before client saves it.
      
   6. Changing one thing here often ripples across the site.
      
   7. We could fix these to make them more supportable… but that won’t improve the user experience straightaway. Also, “don’t rock the boat”.
   
   
5. A request may depend on some other vendor.
   
   1. Microsoft doesn’t always help. (Get out! I hear the geeks saying...)
      
      1. Dropdown listboxes do not allow field concatenation. As a result I have to write code to work around this – which subverts my object model and makes it complex.
         
      2. Checkbox lists are dreadful and I have to write code to disable a checkbox, strikethrough the text, popup tooltips, tick the entries the database says I should tick…
         
   2. Sometimes we buy software that helps out. Sometimes a freeware option exists.
      
      1. A new language to learn, and code sometimes has to be reengineered to make it compatible.
      
      
6. Testing.
   
   1. The programmer “cannot be the judge of his own case”.
   2. The manager has other projects and this delays her ability to react.

Labels: algorithms, apology

posted by Zimri on 16:40 | link |

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Astarte's curse

I've lately noticed Conservative men searching desperately for women to lead them out of their malaise. We've been asked to pay homage to Palin and Bachmann; last year, Clinton(!); and until recently Prejean.

We're seeing now how the eastern Britons rallied around Boudicca, or the French around Joan of Arc. There is something about aggressive yet homespun femininity which appeals to the rural reactionary. As if the very Mother Earth has rejected the interloper.

It's Romantic nonsense. Queens often do well (from Hatshepsut to Catherine); but that's because they were born to the purple. History teaches that reality is a harsh school for Romantics. Eastern Britain was wholly broken after Boudicca, and the French didn't start winning until after Joan was gone.

Some Conservatives are building up these flawed and naive women as if they were goddesses, but they are not goddesses. People are going to be disappointed and people are going to get hurt.

Labels: conservatives, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 23:50 | link |

Role models

I watched the Larry King interview with Carrie Prejean. She compared herself to Sarah Palin (and Michelle Bachmann), complained that Conservative women get their feelings hurt by liberals, and then threw a tantrum. I watched the Glenn Beck recap too - whither HotAir had directed me - and it's looking like she's not getting any sympathy from the Right.

She certainly didn't do Palin any favours. The last thing Palin wants people to see is one of her fans whining and then stamping away from a commitment.

Labels: bullshit, conservatives

posted by Zimri on 23:29 | link |

The worst music ensemble in American history

It burns me up that the Black Eyed Peas gets played, and played, and played some more while the KLF catalogue remains deleted and "The Black Album" will never be made.

But in the House of David, I alone am King, and in that capacity I hereby deliver this writ of attainder -

• I first heard about the BEPs from a mildly-amusing but offensive cannabis anthem, "Let's Get Retarded", played in the more-amusing first Harold & Kumar movie. This was subsequently bowdlerised for the radiowaves "Let's Get It Started" - in retrospect, a first hint that something was wrong.
  
• With, I believe, Justin Timberlake: they wrote a despicable "anti-war" anthem which slandered America and, by extension, Israel.
  
• With Fergie: they wrote "My Humps". Enough said; plenty nuff said.
  
• will.i.am wrote some of the more insipid Obama cult songs last year. I Googled "will i am obama" and got too nauseated to continue.
  
• And now we have I Gotta Feeling.
  

For all that I hereby confiscate every song they ever made, and condemn every last member of the band to the Tower Of London. (Oh, if only.)

Labels: critique

posted by Zimri on 22:10 | link |

Not crying

It's been a month and a day since I restarted this blog, and some observers may be thinking that "cry for help" has become a theme. I invoked it for The Cão. Then I supported Sullivan's invocation for Nidal Hasan. I could be on someone's shortlist for an intervention.

It's okay, really.

Today was a good day. I had free food, or nearly, all day. Work went well. Went to the Houston Dot Net User Group this evening and learnt a few things. They held a raffle, in which I won a 1 TB external hard drive (yes, that's T for Tera).

Labels: meta, personal

posted by Zimri on 22:01 | link |

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Themes of the Passion

I was reading Chris Tilling, and I came across a somewhat heretical roadside billboard; and it got me to thinking that the whole redemption-arc of Christianity is bigger than one event.

I'd mulled writing up this chart ever since reading the Mormon accounts of Jesus's post-resurrection appearances; I think I'd read them during 2003. It was on my mind last year while I was drawing up the 1 Peter project. As with several of my recent posts, posting this one was put off and put off - but I think I'm ready now.

These are the independent (although not always orthogonal!) topics I have extracted from the various "Passion" accounts. I am here including the Book of Mormon and also Islamic tradition.

Humiliation - Jesus, having come into the world, suffers mortal concerns. First reference I can find is in the hymn Paul quotes in Philippians 2:6-11. This is the first half of Paul's thought; it culminates in the Crucifixion. The opposite holds in Islam, whose Jesus was never divine but created, and as a Prophet over most men.

Passion - Jesus experiences pain. First reference I can find is 1 Peter; further developed in 1 Clement, and the basis for the five narrative accounts of Jesus's execution (if we follow Crossan in including that of "Peter"). This is important to Catholics. It is downplayed in the docetic accounts, among which are Islam and the Gnostics; Paul and the Johannine Epistles don't care either; and it seems secondary to the concerns of John and the LDS.

Crucifixion - By this I do not mean getting Jesus upon that cross (properly part of the Passion). Instead I mean the point at which Jesus appears to be dead, and (except in Islam) the natural order is disrupted. Did Jesus escape the fate of the two robbers; or did his spirit sojourn in Hades? Is he truly dead or did he just appear to be dead... The Crucifixion is the part that matters most to the Gnostics and Paul, and maybe Egerton.

Resurrection - Jesus defeats death. Most Christians believe with the Gospels that it happened after the burial; the Gnostics and, likely, Paul treated it as part of the Crucifixion. Muslims postpone this to Judgement Day - they believe that Jesus isn't dead (more on that later).

Epiphany - Jesus makes his post-victory appearances. These stories are many and diverse: Paul, the missing ending of Mark (one would assume - I think it's in John 21 and Peter), Matthew, Luke, Secret James, Mary, 3 Nephi, even al-Tha'alibi (< Ibn Ishaq < Wahb b. Munabbih - also, I think, Tabari, but not most Muslims). The Transfiguration of the Gospels is an Epiphany pulled back to the narrative-gospel genre. The point of the epiphany is to establish a hierarchy to take over from Jesus, and to lay out its mission; although gnostic sects add further teachings here.

Ascension - Jesus goes further than defeating or bypassing death, and is ensconced in Paradise. For some this explained the lack of a tomb; for everyone it proved that Jesus was a saint, and preserved Jesus for a future time. For the Gnostics, maybe Egerton, and probably Paul: this is of a piece with the Resurrection; for sura 3 and so Islam: this plays the role the Resurrection plays for Christians. For Christians (except Gnostics and Paul) and Muslims, Jesus also rules out future post-resurrection visits before the Return.

Return - Jesus gathers the faithful to himself and rules over them. Gnostics say this has happened already. Christians and Muslims say it will happen at the End. Muslims add that the Mahdi will be involved (although they dispute exactly how); and they insist that Jesus comes back as a sort of cryogenically thawed mortal human, who is to pass away after a few decades.

Labels: religion

posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

V night!

I'll let you know how this goes. In the meantime, in keeping with what seems to be the themes of this day's blogging, we have the Church and aliens.

Maybe Pope Benedict has been watching this show too...? The pilot was pro-doctrine and pro-priest, but anti-hierarchy - in that they saw the bishops selling out to the Visitors, for the sake of gathering more parishioners.

UPDATE 10 PM: Takeaway themes from V2: the anti-V protestors are an unlovely bunch who are picking fights; the Vs are ruthless and totalitarian (although most people don't see that yet); interpersonal trust is going down; the media think they can manipulate the Vs for personal advantage.

UPDATE 11/11: "V Ratings Fall From Sky - The second episode of "V" logged a 29% drop in ratings from last week. That's the largest fall from a premiere for a scripted show this season." The pilot episode was a bit rushed and preachy. I thought it was good but then - I'm anti-Progressive. Kinda like how Lefties laugh at Margaret Cho these days.

Labels: religion, science

posted by Zimri on 18:52 | link |

Revenge of the Guelph

What we have now in Progressivism is a natural impulse of urban elites, which has manifested itself in history many times over in different forms.

The doctrine of the transnational elite only has to be consciously accepted, to be internally consistent, and to be common across state boundaries. The doctrine's content and even accuracy do not matter. There is little in - for instance - Progressive doctrine (as opposed to observed science) that will survive the coming century.

Some Conservatives might be tempted to send our Progressives off to reeducation camp - maybe making them all good Baptists - so that everything can go back to the Good Old Days. I doubt that this would help. Even if it "works" I think that it's more likely that these new Baptists will impose a new transnational ideology, which will be just as based on an anti-Conservative faith.

Transnational elites, like the poor, will always be with us. They are not evil; they are just inhumane. It's not a good idea to guillotine them anymore than it's a good idea for Progressives to guillotine Conservatives. We should encourage those of an abstract mindset to concentrate on non-political forms of expression, like science and research.

Labels: conservatives, progressives

posted by Zimri on 17:30 | link |

The black flag of progress

The Guelphs were the ideological party of their day, loyal to a transnational ideal. They map pretty well to our Liberals, and to Muslims.

The Guelphs more or less easily took over the major cities in Italy but by 1300 had split into pro-Pope (Black) and anti-Pope (White) factions. Dante was a White Guelph. His side lost.

Transnational idealism, when it wins, takes on a logic of its own. It seems insane to us that a "liberal" party should riot and take over cities in the name of Papal autocracy. But that was the inescapable logic of Guelphism; as Communism is the endstate of liberalism, and as the Taliban is the endstate of Islam.

Transnational idealism is abstract, and little interested in local concerns. Their extremists love the abstract beauty of their system more than they love humans. These extremists gain a propaganda advantage when their ideal - even a moderate, White-Guelph form of it - takes over a nation. When they force the moderates to "live by their own book of rules" (as Alinsky said), they win.

Labels: progressives

posted by Zimri on 17:12 | link |

Cry for help

Andrew Sullivan has a few words (h/t Ace; who didn't link, or treat his comment fairly IMO):

Reading Dana Priest's summary and then the document itself, it seems to me that in some ways, Hasan was airing an important debate. I don't glean from the notes for his lecture that he was necessarily an Islamist fanatic, merely that he could see how Islam could be seen as incompatible with military service in Iraq and Afghanistan. His view is pretty close to what many critics of Islam argue.

Yep, Hasan agrees with Spencer. Hasan agrees with Awlaki. Hasan agrees with the Qur'an, hadith, sira and Hanbali sunna. Hasan agrees with everyone except the ignorant and the willfully-blind. Hasan was a logically-consistent Hanbali Sunni Muslim; and I'd go so far as to say Hasan was in the mainstream of Islam itself in his justifications.

The "money quote", to borrow a Sullivanism, would be: "The lecture almost reads like a cry for help, rather than a warning." "Cry for help" is a psychological term, and the reason it exists is because psychologists have observed this as a phenomenon in mental illness. In short, Islam drove Hasan mad; and in his madness he delivered a dangerous speech to a hostile audience. He was looking for a deus ex machina. Unfortunately God was out on business...

Sullivan ain't all there himself; e.g. he proposed that ridiculous Trig Palin birther fable last year. But I would trust him to understand mental instability. And I think he nails the purpose of the presentation as public acting-out of his internal conflict ("greater jihad" if you like).

Labels: islam

posted by Zimri on 16:52 | link |

Is SETI a religion?

Here's Michael Crichton back in 2003, on the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (h/t Watts Up):

Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. ... The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

We can handily test Crichton's thesis that there is no proof of alien life. First, forget his invocation of the Drake Equation, which is a misdirection (deliberate or not). The correct starting point is to recognise that life in the galaxy follows inductive logic. (Like the public-option in healthcare, and intelligent-design in biology.) That is, if one planet around a main-sequence, 4.567 billion year old star can support life: it becomes unreasonable to exclude planets of similar surface g and age, with similar insolation from their star.

Thus the question of intelligent life in this galaxy has been solved. This was proven in 200,000 BC by Mitochondrial Eve.

From there SETI ceased to be a religion; and became a search. Either we find life, or else we find a reason for there not to be intelligent life on every planet within radio range. To resolve either hypothesis we need data on the nature of the stars, and solar systems if any, within SETI's sphere of 50 light-years (counting from 1960).

These data just weren't available in 1960 but we are catching up now. Since 1995 we have found that many nearby stars support planets. We will shortly be in position to tell which of these systems is likely to have habitable planets. When we find enough of them (and the SETI net goes out further), we will have our answer.

Even not finding anything is interesting, once the SETI sphere expands to include too many stars. That too is likely the result of (destructive) intelligence. Brian Aldiss in Helliconia Summer, I believe, proposed that sentient beings would always wipe themselves out; but there is also the alternative of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

SETI is testable and does not qualify as a religion. The Drake Equation was a bad start to the affair, true, but that does not invalidate SETI itself.

Labels: bullshit, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 16:15 | link |

Catholic states

In 1994 I read through Dante's Inferno. In 2002 (not long before starting this blog) I read a good way through Boccaccio's Decameron. In 2007 or so I got into Mencius Moldbug's earlier posts, on Jacobitism and on Dante; earlier this year I posted some of these thoughts over at The Other Green-Themed Site. I think I'm ready now...

Catholicism implies universality. Catholicism developed in Western Europe (and north Africa) during the collapse of Rome. Before Rome, Western Europe was a hodgepodge of tribes and insular kingdoms. After Rome, that state of nature re-emerged; but the local chieftains could now share a culture, faith, and language.

Outside Rome itself, the Church was not able to rule - say - northern England. Besides, it didn't really want to. Jesus and Paul had taught Christians that being a good Christian was independent of politics - almost orthogonal. Sometimes the Church even has to countenance crimes.

Between complete dependence and orthogonality is correlation, though, and that is the relationship between the Catholic Church and the secular State. It is partly for that reason that the Church has retained the right to influence politics. The Church has an interest in protecting Catholics from harm, at the very least.

By contrast: Orthodox communions (and Judaism) are based on ethnicity and often the land; Protestant churches are voluntary associations; and in Islam the ideal is an emirate of religious leaders who command the army and thereby the state.

Boccaccio and Dante both had much to say about the Church and about the various north Italian citystates in the 1300s. These cities were politically independent but subject to a low-level factional war across all of them. These two factions, both of German descent, were the Ghibellines and the Guelphs.

The Ghibellines correspond almost exactly to High Toryism in England up to the early years of Henry VIII. Each nation should be sovereign, and the Church ought never to interfere in politics. Instead the Prince of the nation retains the right to veto any non-doctrinal Church decision in his land. The landed aristocracy and the rural villagers preferred the Ghibellines. If you want Ghibelline thought today, read Mencius Moldbug.

The Guelphs' doctrine is more alien to our way of thought, but their politics are more familiar than one might suppose. They had the merchants and in general what we'd call the "bourgeoisie". They didn't think much of Ghibelline appeals to tradition and were personally affected by their protective tariffs. Taking away the doctrinal differences, the Guelphs were transnational liberals.

The Church could tell that the Ghibellines would lead to schism - "Venetian Orthodox Church", "German Orthodox Church", "Czech Orthodox Church" and on and on. Henry VIII would one day prove them right. In the meantime the Church's choice was obvious - support the Guelphs.

If I may evaluate the Guelph model for today: It has the advantage over the Ghibellines in its separation of State from Church. In addition if we have to have transnational arbiters, the Guelph model also offers a hierarchy - the Church - with a longer pedigree than the international institutions we use now.

Labels: antiquity, religion

posted by Zimri on 05:53 | link |

Monday, November 09, 2009

Did they really say that?

Did Otto von Bismarck really say "let them say what they want; I will do what I want"? Did Robert Heinlein really say "an armed society is a polite society"?

They are beautiful sentiments but I wonder if I am the victim of internet memes.

Labels: bullshit, liberty

posted by Zimri on 22:29 | link |

Gunpowder, treason and plot

I invoked Guy Fawkes in that Fort Hood post. Andrea Harris has called me on it. (Not me exactly, but someone else who independently drew the same parallel. Mutatis mutandis.)

My point about 5 November was never that Muslims cared; it was that violent religious anarchists cared. Before “V for Vendetta” I was hard put to it to find anyone here who had even heard of the Gunpowder Plot, outside Tudor / Stewart history buffs and the odd Alan Moore fanatic.

Times are different now. For instance, I saw a protest of Scientology of whose members more than one was wearing a Guy Fawkes mask. (Disclosure: It wasn’t me. The Starbucks was next to their outlet. I just wanted to finish my coffee. I think the Scientologists moved away soon after.)

Plus, the movie "V" (and not the novel) had its title character give props to the Qur'an, presumably because of its hate for the West. Hasan could have picked up the date from popular culture.

Maybe we should blame /b/?

Labels: crime, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 21:46 | link |

Pro-democracy blogs on the Right... well... sorta

The Right - like the Left - has two attitudes toward democracy, and one can find bloggers who hold to either view.

I go to Moldbug for a Right-wing anti-democratic view and to Ace for a Right-wing democratic view. Moldbug isn't interested in working with the system, except insofar as the judo master works with his enemy's folly; he endorses the politicians who are mostly likely to further the ends of this system, which last year meant Obama. Ace by contrast has not abandoned democracy. Ace sees his mission as rallying libertarians and Conservatives together to elect pro-liberty, pro-tradition people into office.

I believe that blogs should state what they are about. When That Other Green-Themed Blog became an anti-Conservative blog, its proprietor should have announced that.

If you are running a blog based on a standpoint, then you have a loyalty to that standpoint. Since Ace is pro-democracy, Ace can't put up with comments advocating anti-democratic means.

The "maximalists" whom Ace frequently posts against, include a sizable subset who support armed resistance to Obama's regime. I am in sympathy with many of these, but Ace's comments are nonetheless not the place to air all that. "Go get your own blog", as a green sage once put it (before he decided he wanted to shut down those blogs too).

With that in mind, I'm at a loss to understand why Ace thinks it's good politics to vote present on an amendment which supports the pro-life position. If the RNC wants to "vote present", why not do that on all this Congress's business? The logical conclusion to this line of argument, for Republicans, should be to stay at home and let the Democrats run the candy store. It's a defensible Moldbug argument, and I might agree with it too - but it's anti-democratic.

Very strange, this. (Not that there is anything wrong with it.)

Labels: liberty, propaganda, republicans

posted by Zimri on 21:05 | link |

Armed resistance

Out on the Right-wing fringe, and maybe not so far out, there is a movement for armed resistance to the Obama/Pelosi regime.

I do not necessarily mean by that: mutiny or revolution. I am including the Oath Keepers and the Sipsey Street Irregulars. Armed resistance entails standing upon support for the Constitution - whatever the current elected officials have in mind. The term "resistance" is inherently defensive - reactionary, if you like; no aggression is implied.

This isn't a pro-democracy blog. I fully support the Constitution as the reactionary document it is. That includes support of armed resistance against Washington's "progress". If I had thought that Bush had the attitude toward the Constitution that Obama's advisor Sunstein has, I would have supported armed resistance during Bush's years too. Peaceful armed resistance. Don't Tread On Me, says the snake, and I won't bite.

Every armed citizen is a free man, and endowed with the inalienable right and duty to resist tyranny - even if the tyranny is popular. (Keeping in theme here - remember that in Greek thought, tyranny was the endstate of democracy. Today, c.f. Venezuela.)

Where I part with the furthest fringe of the Right - the birther fringe - is that I do not pretend that we are an anti-Constitutional democracy now.

And there I give you my difference with ACCDF / "Active" and Pat Dollard. Dollard is showcasing Taitz propaganda and not maintaining his comments, and thereby offering a forum for seditious lies. Where I read politically-motivated falsehoods in a civil strife, I see people trying to turn the strife into a civil war.

I get the impression that if the civil war came and the rebels arrested me: the Oath Keepers would protect me, and Pat Dollard would have me against the wall.

Labels: constitution, enemies, liberty

posted by Zimri on 20:08 | link |

Proof by bad analogy

I'm always suspicious of parables. I heard a lot of them from Christian evangelists. Whenever I poked holes in one model they would just move on to another model. It got too much for me to bear as of late 1996 or so. I see no reason to be any more tolerant of socialists - in fact, I have more of a problem with socialists, who want to steal from me after they're done preaching. (I can always sleep through a sermon.)

I fully expect "pnrj", who came up with the analogy below, to come up with that other model. It will be just as bad as the first one.

Labels: bullshit, liberty, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 16:29 | link |

Insidious bad apples

I just read this parable of economic inequality:

There are three men on a desert island. Adam has 2000 apples. Bob has 12 apples. Carl has only 3 apples. There is reason to think that all three men could survive to be rescued, if each has at least 10 apples to feed himself until the rescue arrives. If things remain the same, Adam will obviously survive; Bob would also most likely survive. But Carl would definitely die. Bob could give up 2 of his apples to Carl, but then he'd be at more risk and Carl would still most likely die--or he could give up 7 of his apples and Carl would live but Bob would die.

Here's the author's answer - social democracy:

So, Bob and Carl make a contract: They will take 7 of Adam's apples so that Carl will have 10. Adam resists, saying, "This is coercion! This is socialism! You have no right!" They do it anyway; everyone lives---but Adam is angry.

We see here immediately that social democracy (which Moldbug and I abbreviate, more cynically, to "democracy") creates envy in Carl and anger in Adam. It also demands that no-one recalls how the apples came into Adam's possession in the first place. Lastly, like Dispensational Millenniarianism, it assumes a finite span of time before some future Rapture. As a result no-one on this island asks how this colony might acquire more foodstuffs and other supplies.

Adam could offer some of his apples to Carl (who's clearly the worst at apple husbandry), on condition Carl row out and catch fish. If so, Adam and Carl both could have apples and fish between them.

To save his zero-sum-game model: the author has to fill his ocean with maneating sharks, and to strip his island of everything but those three guys and thousands of apples, and to intervene at the End. His model is entirely detached from reality. He may as well be talking about Robots! - from Spaaaaace!

Because in real life there is ALWAYS someone who has something and someone else who has something else - if only the people have the wit and the drive to produce it. Optimising total wealth and happiness involves free exchange, and restriction of interference to when one side is doing something clearly harmful (pollution, for instance).

The author should take an interest in what Adam really thinks beyond "I got mine". Adam has the hoard to prove that he is the most rational actor in the parable. Adam is wishing that he had refused to pick more than Bob's 12 apples, and pretended not to know how to pick them. Adam could have let Bob bear the wrath of the community while Adam spent his extra time lounging in the sun and playing dominoes with Carl.

Under socialism, those 2000 apples won't be picked and nobody gets protein, either. Everyone works just enough to stay under the radar. (Except maybe for Carl the least productive. Whether it's Carl's own fault or not, Adam and Bob will see him as the weak link. When supplies go low enough those two are likely to ambush Carl in the middle of the night and eat him.)

Socialists aren't that stupid, and if I can figure out the flaw in the above parable then so can they. Something else is at work.

I say that socialism was Bob's insidious plan all along. Bob undercut his own efforts so as to achieve parity with Carl, so that he could get Carl on his side. It wouldn't matter if Carl was poor or not; Bob would have told Carl it was okay not to work all that hard. It's not about justice for socialists; it's about being the one to dispense justice.

Labels: bullshit, progressives, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

The Department of Homeland Security works for YOU

We get attacked by a Muslim terrorist, and who does the DHS make it a priority to protect - Muslims.

In mainland America, we are empirically more in danger from Muslims than Muslims are from us. There is clearly a "priorities" problem here.

In addition the DHS is spreading the message to Muslims that if they want something - preferential security arrangements, say - their best bet is to shoot up some Americans.

UPDATE 11/9/2009: And now the Attorney General is off to negotiate with CAIR.

Labels: islam, progressives

posted by Zimri on 22:44 | link |

Going wobbly

I'm wondering if we've got the next Andrew Sullivan on our hands.

Rick Moran, on the subject of Nidal Hasan, is looking at what he thinks are egregious comments by Pamela Gellar, Digby (whose blog is so obscure even Moran couldn't spell it right), RS McCain, and (ironically) Sullivan. Of these Gellar is as shrill and wrongheaded as ever; Digby likewise; McCain is right; and Sullivan is fatuous.

I don't know that it's at all worth our time to pay attention to Gellar or Digby (THE Digby? from HULLABALOO?!), much less to hold them up as supreme examples for Teh Blogoweb. Of the other two more prominent bloggers, whose output I can't say I much like either, Moran scores an own goal by citing one of McCain's more lucid opinions.

While Moran was whining about how quick the rush to judgement was on both sides, and passive-aggressively boasting about how much wiser he is: My Pet Jawa was digging into Hasan's mosque. Turns out that the weekly Friday rants were delivered by one Anwar al-Awlaki and that Hasan was bowing down between 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour.

Yes, the Right blogs were right. Yes, Hasan chose to follow extreme Islam. The only missing step is to find if any Salafi imams had given him an agreeable fatwa, but frankly even that step is redundant. Hasan waged a jihad on American unit cohesion and morale, and so far he has won. Rick Moran had best make his peace with that, as he's apparently made his peace with socialism.

UPDATE: The pieces are coming together. Al-Awlaki has praised the act. It hardly takes a genius to guess what al-Awlaki would say; and Hasan knew him better than I do. I don't know if we're going to find a specific fatwa, but everyone in his mosque knew in general what was expected of them.

Labels: bullshit, islam

posted by Zimri on 22:11 | link |

Conservative crackup, II

In about the first substantive post of this new incarnation of The House Of David, I set original intent versus strict constructionism.

Half Sigma argues that Conservatives have another dispute: on pro-family versus pro-life. He (accurately) points out that single mothers are a threat to the family and that abortion bans in the South will mean more of them; adoption would soak up some of the excess but not enough. He (questionably) assumes that abortion is less of a threat.

He didn't prove that axiom, but I will take a shot at it. We can't tell just from looking if Jane Q. Singlewoman has had an abortion or not. And who wants to be the first to get in Jane's face and ask? If we don't see it, it doesn't exist. Abortion is a nothing procedure, and Jane can move on to have a happy family with someone else. RAINBOWS!

Yeah, I'm skeptical.

Against the "don't ask don't tell" argument, a Conservative might counter that just because you can't see the wound in Jane's soul, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

If Jane had Asperger's she could make a cold calculation and terminate the thing, and sleep well that night. But the guys out there would get a bad vibe from her like the girls get from me.

Neurotypical Janes, I expect, would react depending on who knocked her up. If it was a rape then she could live with her choice, and I'd hope most guys would agree with it (I'm not neurotypical, so your mileage may vary). If it was just some cad... not so certain. I think it hurts these women more deeply than the pro-choice crowd lets on. And I wonder how fulfilling their marriages, and families, turn out with that lurking behind them. Or if they ever get married...

I would put it to Half-Sigma and the various northeastern "fiscal conservatives": how "pro-family" is a society filled with 40-something spinsters, bachelors, and divorcees; all too damaged to settle down?

(P.S. Half-Sigma goes on to suggest that Republicans get (back) on the pro-abortion bandwagon. Not bloody likely. The GOP is too firmly associated with Conservatives now, and upper middle class women wouldn't trust the GOP even if they filmed Bill Frist performing one for C-SPAN. And then they'd just turn to economics and attack the GOP from that standpoint - these same women are also for socialism, in case anyone was wondering. Last but hardly least, from this blog's standpoint, all of this assumes that Republicans should play by the rules of democracy; since this is an aristocratic blog, I say "meh". That later post of Half-Sigma was redundant.)

Labels: abortion, conservatives

posted by Zimri on 21:01 | link |

Avatar is going to be worse than the Matrix sequels

I'm aware of Avatar's insectile "buzz".

I'm hearing it's going to be Dances With Blue Space Wolves. Difference is, Kevin Costner was and remains a genuine blood-and-soil patriot, with a deep understanding of America, who didn't shrink at showing the dark side of Indian life. James Cameron is a man I do not trust to tell a similar story; we're going to get Rousseau's noble savage from him.

It'll do okay among film geeks and Leftists. The critics will rate it highly, like they rated Wall-E.

Whether it will be any good, I do not know. I haven't seen a Cameron film I can endorse since the mid 1980s. The shine from "Aliens" has rather worn off by now.

Labels: critique, progressives

posted by Zimri on 20:01 | link |

Trolls trolls trolls

I don't know if it's even worth my time to blog about this...

I'm dealing with a couple of the inmates at Moran's nuthouse. Moran as far as I can tell is saying "meh, we're getting socialised healthcare" and shopping for KY Jelly and condoms. His commenters are more extreme.

Here's one:

“Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because the CEO of your health insurer needs a private jet? Well too damned bad, pal, the GOP does not give a damn.”

Or, we could say “Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because ‘budgets are tight for everyone’, and Sheila Jackson-Lee needs a private jet?”

What we have here is an appeal to emotion and a not-very-roundabout way of calling libertarians evil. Because the people have the right to the contents of your purse; you, on the other hand, have the duty to sit in line for months. For the chilllldrennnn!

And then there's this:

This bill however flawed, is the only serious one on the table; the GOP had control for decades, and not once made any serious attempt to fix the problem.

What's "the problem"? If we're talking comprehensivity of existent care, George W Bush "fixed" a "problem" of medication not being covered well under Medicare. That effort was pretty "serious", as I recall; Bush had to twist arms all over the place. If the problem is cost and complexity, then Pelosi's monstrosity makes things much much worse.

Then there are the guys who claim that it's all the fault of Beck, Limbaugh, and the extreme right-wing GOP who wouldn't play ball. Another commenter (mannning, 3 n's) refuted that; the GOP did show up to the plate with several amendments which Pelosi struck out. (Trying to keep all the metaphors on point, here.)

You can say the GOP sucks as much as you want. But that doesn't make the Democrats any better - and if you compare the two, the choice is clearly on the (R) side.

I know, it's the internets. But these blustering bullshitters still annoy me.

UPDATE 6 PM ... and they should annoy Progressives. There was another objector in the Nuthouse, by name "busboy33", who had substantive points and a better attitude. He would be tough to debate. But it's easier for me to play whack-a-troll so I just, well, whack those trolls. It fills up the comment thread with an apparently one-sided smackdown of people out of their depth. It makes the argument seem more settled than it is. On a personal level it's not fair to someone who is there for a real argument, like busboy33, who then has to share space with the circus.

Labels: bullshit, misanthropy, progressives, propaganda, trolls

posted by Zimri on 17:24 | link |

No True Scotsman

There's an old joke: a Scotsman says that no Scotsman ever tells a lie. An Englishman retorts that he heard a real whopper from MacEwan just last Thursday. Then the Scotsman excommunicates - "that bastard MacEwan, he is nae true Scotsman".

Okay, my accent needs work.

My point is that this analogy only works for accidental properties of the "Scotsman", for instance general honesty. To be a true Scotsman one should ideally be a descendent of a Gaelic-speaking family that had migrated from Dal Riada in the Dark Ages. More widely, we might include those families subject to the Scottish Crown as of the coronation of James VI Stewart (before he became James I of England).

On the moral and ethical dictates of Scottishness, the Scotsman belongs to an ethnic group and feels affinity to his native land. A Scotsman might indeed lie. But a true Scotsman would never tell a lie that betrayed the Scottish nation.

We can extend this to other groups which are practicing hypocrisy. Those "secular humanists" who make alliances with the population-control brand of environmentalist, or with Muslims, are not true humanists or (in the latter case) secularists.

Labels: ethics, secularism

posted by Zimri on 16:24 | link |

Intelligent-design versus climate change

(Last of the 18 October series.)

Conservatives believe in "reopening the debates" on the theory of life origins and on the reason for global warming. Liberals believe the debate is closed on both: evolution for life origins; anthropogenic gases, mostly CO2, for global warming.

I think Conservatives are wrong on life origins and right on climate change.

Our model of biology comes about because of observations of Charles Darwin, and also a few metaphysical principles such as: leave open how mutations form in the first place, and exclude intelligent designers from the equation. Darwin didn't really come up with a theory so much as lay out the questions.

By doing that, Darwin forced researchers to come up with a genetic theory. Mendel did that. That forced researchers to come up with a genetic mechanism. Crick and Watson did that.

Climate change theorists on the other hand haven't yet cleared the "observation" stage. We have data for hundreds of thousands of years, with much warming and (mostly) cooling in between; but humans were only around for the last 200,000 and, as far as we know, penned up in Africa until well after the Toba explosion. We are asked to solve a problem in geological time with a model that is active only in historical time.

Also, evolution is a general principle. Its analogy in climatology would be the theoretical existence of a greenhouse effect: atmospheric content C, and insolation I, makes for a temperature T. Anthropogenic global warming would come after many stages after that: proof that the temperature trend over the timespan is warming and then proof that the model is consistent with the atmospheric composition at any given point in the time span. And then this has to be compared over past time spans.

It is also telling that climateaudit etc are attacking the research in current journals; Ben Stein and his boys are doing an end run Wedge Strategy, and not engaging current journals.

Evolution and anthropogenic climate change (warming or not) are not on the same level. AGW is open to debate. Evolution is not; those who are "opening" that debate are more akin to Holocaust deniers and 9/11 truthers.

Labels: climate, conservatives, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 16:07 | link |

Cold heart

Christians like the Canadian who runs the Wintery Knight blog think that atheism is innately immoral and that atheists are atheists because they, too, are psychologically indisposed to decency. Wintery Knight doesn't say it outright; but when a blogger holds up Peter Atkins as a "spokesman" for atheism, and then turns around to his moral relativism, that is the conclusion he forces upon her readers.

(I started this in 18 October but couldn't post it until I'd laid out my explanation for why scientists don't like God... in their experiments.)

I don't have any brief for Atkins the moral relativist and I have no problem in saying that he is wrong. I am not even an atheist. But I used to be one; and I remain allied with atheists on every issue related to secularism and support for science. That's still the case even after reading this hit piece. We're about to find out why...

The thesis, "atheists are inherently amoral", is testable. I propose that crime is the physical implementation of a man's immorality. We'll restrict the subjects to adult males of sound mind, and compare the sets "Japan" and "Louisiana". Japan has a secular culture; Louisiana does not. Now, let's compare crime rates between Japan and Louisiana. Q., E., f'n D.

How did Wintery Knight fail? His argument associates two separate groups ("atheists" and "the immoral"). It is an ad hominem attack against all atheists through Atkins.

Wintery Knight moves on to another philosopher, Thomas Nagel, who said that "I don't want there to be a God". He didn't ask Nagel why. Scientists have answers; as explained below, if you let God into an experiment here, you have to do it everywhere else and that way lies Pakistan. Some atheists may be nothing more than nihilist punks; but Nagel is a philosopher of science, and has personal reasons for excluding God which have nothing to do with a wicked life of hedonism.

So, why does Wintery Knight pick on atheists? I don't think he's generally evil; I don't see him picking on, say, Jews or the "First Nations". As far as I'm aware he just sees atheists as enemies he wants to crush by any means fair and foul. Maybe he's insecure.

Maybe he should be insecure. There is a stronger case that Wintery Knight's brand of Christianity creates immorality. Wintery Knight arguments are endemic on the Internet. I don't think any of the Christians making such claims have ever lost a night's sleep over their own dishonest methods. Cheating is hunky dory if it's for Jesus. The right sort of cheat gets into Paradise. The wrong sort of honest man ... doesn't.

Those who point out their flaws (and not just atheists) annoy this sort of Christian. But here too, such Christians don't lose any sleep over the thought of a Richard Dawkins (say) getting shut out. They don't think "hey - this God character, he's pretty far along that ol' autistic spectrum". Oh no; they're quite looking forward to an afterlife without Dawkins. (Some of them also believe in eternal hellfire, so they've got masturbatory voyeuristic sadism working for them as well. I'm giving Wintery Knight the benefit of the doubt there though.)

Labels: enemies, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:48 | link |

Teaching creationism

Now that we've identified intelligent-design as a Socratic movement, it remains to explain why it doesn't belong in a science class.

The argument of Intelligent Design is metaphysical. A metaphysic is an axiom, a means of proving rather than the means itself. ID starts with the concept of an "irreducible" complexity, that just because we don't know if a complexity may have value (as something else) if reduced, that it is evidence for Something Else At Work. The IDer says it's the Christian God; the atomist might say "in an infinity of possible universes...". Neither is testable and neither can belong in the set of "science".

Scientists find the idea of a Cthulhu from beyond the stars meddling in this universe to be a horror. This inevitably follows from the principle that every proposal has to be testable in nature, and the definition of "Cthulhu" as an entity which follows extranatural rules. Pace C.S. Lewis, scientists cannot afford miracles; if Cthulhu can come here to create life, then It can also screw with the laws of physics. In that case, any deviation from theory can be explained by Cthulhu. Faith inductively reaches the point where there are no laws in science. (Or, to put it in libertarian terms: divine intervention is the "public option" of science.) We can see the results in Pakistan, whose science textbooks say that chemistry works "if Allah wills". It was Aristotle who formalised what had long been an unease of divinity among the scientists, into an ethic; but it took until Francis Bacon to get the process right.

A moderate Conservative, like Socrates, won't care too much about which theory of origins is taught (as long as it's not too weird) - but no Conservative can accept a theory which excludes the divine. The Conservative wants moral instruction and s/he thinks you need a personal God to give it. That is why the "nothing but mammals" meme is so common on ID proponent websites. That is why Ben Stein drew a line from Darwin to Hitler. That even explains why "intelligent design" keeps away from Genesis. Conservatives see that science demands an ethic but not a morality, and so they distrust it. They might make allowances for nerds, but for normal ("neurotypical"?) people they want to replace it with piety.

There is no way to teach science that a believer in miracles can accept. That explains Conservative opposition to it. Fortunately for science education in America: most of our Conservatives don't take their morals and metaphysics to their logical conclusion, and most of our science teachers practice taqiyya in their dealings with the PTA.

Labels: conservatives, science, secularism

posted by Zimri on 15:01 | link |

The value of the unborn, the value of the Torah

A long time ago I looked into Exodus 21:22-25. It was well-reasoned ... from a false premise. I posted it before I'd asked any Jews on the topic (which happened in the midst of last year), and before I'd looked into its genesis (so to speak). I've since posted the thoughts here on other blogs, like The Other Green One; but I'll have to drop one here before I get called on the mistakes of that prior post.

In context, this passage derives from a lost Northern-Kingdom document called the Covenant Code. We assume that refugees from Shechem and Samaria brought it down to Jerusalem ahead of the Assyrian legions in the late 700s BCE. From there the Code became part of the Torah and the Torah became the core of what it meant to be Jewish. The Covenant Code is the Torah's Torah.

Jews look at this part of the Covenant Code and they do not see in it a weregeld for the fetus in parity with the weregeld for an adult. Damage to the mother explicitly triggers lex talionis. If the fetus were legally human, it would trigger lex talionis too. The fetus does not, and therefore is not legally human.

Jewish logic currently requires that abortion remain focused on the mother, and not her child. This is not a "pro-choice" position; it is genuinely a "march for womens' lives".

An individual Jew could be pro-life, but would have to base that on a theory of abrogation of the Covenant Code. I do not know of any school of Jewish thought which offers this theory.

By contrast Christianity has the Didache, which although not in the New Testament remains a founding document of Church Tradition. The Didache counts abortion as an evil, asserting the early Christian community's right to abrogate the Torah for the sake of The Way Of Life.

Labels: abortion, antiquity, religion

posted by Zimri on 14:23 | link |

Unreasonable forms of atheism

Atheism requires a theory of the Everything without recourse to God. The first of these theories I can find is Greek atomism. This incorporates an Anthropic Principle wherein this universe is here to be measured, because it happens to be lucky. Most universes don't have the physical laws which allow for abstraction-capable intelligence.

The Anthropic Principle doesn't hold any more explanatory power than do appeals to God. Instead of "o Jehovah" the atomists would have us say "o Infinity". That's not good enough.

The atomists need to give us a physically-practical guide to the alternative universes, or else they need to prove that this universe is the only mathematically-possible universe. Until the atomists do that I will classify atomism as a faith.

Labels: bullshit, religion

posted by Zimri on 13:58 | link |

Forms of creationism

Conservatives propose that intelligent-design is a scientific alternative to the dominant biological paradigm (evolution via natural selection, mainly). It would help their case if they could define that alternative.

Intelligent-design proponents these days prefer to claim that they are "raising questions" about "Darwin". Evolution proponents counter that ID is a big obscurantist nothing which does not offer a testable counter-proposal.

In this country intelligent-design is a mutation which has evolved over eight decades under the restrictions of the American court system (Scopes, 1925 - Dover, 2005). The evolution of the intelligent-design argument tracks closely the evolution of creationism under the strictures of Greek philosophy 600-300 BCE. Creationism has a storied philosophical pedigree.

While I was at the Other Green-Themed Site, I discovered David Sedley's Creationism And Its Critics In Antiquity and recommended it in just about every creationism thread over there. On the weekend 16-18 October I started this essay (and several others, which I'm in the process of editing) but I'd mislaid the book, and found other topics to do, so I put all of that aside. Now that I've found the book, and also some free time...

Sedley's book describes the Greek attempts to explain life on Earth, and Earth itself, up to Galen in the 200s AD.

Greek creationism isn't taught in school, but that's not wholly the fault of the school. Sedley was the first to gather the references together and to assign them to strains of creationism (and, in two cases, anti-creationism). He also benefitted from modern papyri discoveries in Egypt. Now that we know the history, it's time to teach it.

Sedley found more advanced forms of Near Eastern creationism in the pre-Socratics. Anaxagoras figured the Creator as a cosmic Mind which separated order from primal chaos. Empedocles had the Creator stumbling upon a more ordered universe and building life from those blocks He found. Anaxagoras strikes me as a Genesis-1 Priestly sort concerned with the universe and Empedocles as a Genesis-2 Yahwist concerned with nature; both strains of thought were available to the Phoenicians as of 600 BCE. Anaxagoras and Empedocles extended these ideas and made them available to the Greek world.

Sedley found the first challenge to a theological worldview in the atomists, who proposed an arbitrarily-large cosmos of worlds - applicable also to parallel universes - of which this one happens to be the world we live in (pp. 136-7). This removes the need for any God hypothesis to explain our world.

Sedley then found in Xenophon's Memorabilia I.4 and IV.3 that Socrates was an "anti-scientific creationist" (p. 78). Socrates accepted that the world was naturalistic, but defended the gods from the atheist model by proposing a counter-model: disassociating science from theology. He assumed that if scientists wanted to, they could find out the rules by which the universe works. The universe (from a human perspective) contains an ends-based or "teleological" subset, with (e.g.) a whole class of "barnyard animals" who could never survive in the wild. Socrates concluded that gods did exist, and that some helped in creating the whole world as support for humanity; and by extension that they likely exist today, and are still the friends of humanity. Socrates asserted that scientists shouldn't bother making further discoveries, because these discoveries would do nothing to help humans live the good life. Humans should instead study their own lives to improve them, and thereby to deduce what the gods want.

Plato in the Timaeus, developed the notion of a creator god, the Demiurge, further stating that God was a pure theoretician. Aristotle fused this god with the universe, thus removing his ability to act from outside the universe; there was no act of creation, and God's thoughts and deeds were simply the actions of the universe itself.

Modern creationists from Paley to Behe base their stance on the Argument From Design / Watchmaker / "irreducible complexity" argument. That makes them Socratics.

Modern atheists (as opposed to agnostics) base their stance on the Anthropic Principle. That makes then Atomists.

Labels: antiquity, books, religion, science

posted by Zimri on 12:23 | link |

Bad dog!

Clearly I was wrong about Joseph Cão. He's not a vulnerable Republican trolling for RNC support; he's an unprincipled sellout.

UPDATE 11/12: If proof be needed, this cur has "said he voted for the legislation only after seeing that Democrats had the 218 votes needed for passage".

Labels: apology, enemies, republicans

posted by Zimri on 10:00 | link |

Saturday, November 07, 2009

What to do about sleeper agents?

University graduates today may have taken courses like the courses Monfort took. These people are a danger to us in every sense of that word.

In a previous life I would have called on the State to put an end to the rot where it starts - the universities - but the State is deeply entwined via its civil service, so that wouldn't be practical.

Non-government personnel can help here, though.

Employers nationwide should demand the full transcripts of all university graduates. If you see a course that looks "off", don't count it toward the total credit hours which that university requires; and if the new total runs below the minimum, don't treat the graduate as a full graduate.

Your duty as a good employee, as a patriot, and as a free human being is to make it impossible for men like Monfort to move in decent circles.

Redemption is possible; this can be done through vocational training. If he's still a joker, you can probably tell (we're not dealing with the cream of the university system here or he would have got his Engineering degree in the first place). But you are not malicious; you do want to offer the genuinely-misguided a way out of their hole.

In all cases resist, resist, resist the urge to hire a still-damaged person; or to allow a university-aligned division any place in Human Resources. Downsize the company if you have to; set up offshore if you have to. The more you reward the worst element of this system, the worse the system gets.

Labels: liberty, progressives

posted by Zimri on 18:07 | link |

Anarchist madrassas

Muslims aren't the only Will To Power automatons engaged in war against America. Left-wing anarchists get into the act too. But where Nidal Hassan aimed to thwart the West's existential war against Islam overseas, Monfort aimed to destroy the rule of law in one of our more liberal cities.

For Monfort himself, I have described the secret agent profile three years ago. Ace's commenters are covering the same ground. We have nothing more to learn from what Monfort thinks.

We have more to learn from Monfort's social network. Every terrorist dwells in an ideological community. Monfort belongs to the Alinskyites. Their progeny, ACORN and the various "coalitions against hunger", never target Conservative towns. Alinskyites target towns which have already set up a welfare net. They know that liberal towns are run by weak and/or like-minded hacks. Their aim is to max out the liberals' credit card: where the liberals aren't as liberal as they like, they support more liberal laws; where the laws are already liberal, they advocate among the city's poor to exploit those laws beyond the point of legality. Alinsky's ultimate aim is to force Menshevik cities into chaos, whereupon these Bolsheviks can step in as the group with the best record for getting things done.

Monfort learnt his lessons from the University of Washington. The nature of university coursework is such that it establishes a current of student flow, from the most g-loaded subjects (Math, Physics) to the least. In the old days, at the downstream end of this current, were the vocational fields, and management.

Not so much now. The genius of the 1968 student-radical takeover is that the activists created fields even further down this current. There it is the Alinskyites in the university set up their nets.

The university Alinskyites' aim is to create an army of community-organisers. These are their agents abroad, who agitate for State support of Alinskyites generally but especially in the university ("Diversity Office" "Community Outreach", "Center for Peace and Tolerance", etc).

Not every graduate with an Activism degree proves good even at community-organising. Deep down the graduates know that this was the best degree they could get. Time goes on and they are still stuck in loserdom, while their peers go on to live productive lives. All they have is their Marcuse and, nowadays, Zizek. Some will go barmy.

But Alinskyites have a use for the violence too. The more violence the radicals inflict, the worse for the community, and the more need for those Community Leaders who can Appeal For Calm.

Labels: crime, liberals, progressives

posted by Zimri on 16:16 | link |

Muhammadan cinematography

I hear that we're going to have another movie about Muhammad.

Yes, "another". We've already had one (and I don't mean "Dune"). The label on the DVD I rented, in 2003 I think, was "Al-Risala / The Message". This would be the one starring Anthony Quinn. Quinn's starring role was... the stalwart believer Hamza. So where's Mo?

The movie made sure not to depict Muhammad himself. Sometimes the Muhammad-based action occurred offstage, but... not always. When they did show a Muhammad scene, for instance his triumphant entry into the Ka'aba, they shook the camera around from the point-of-view of the Prophet himself.

This manoevre brought to mind that verse 33:21, "You have an excellent model in the messenger of Allah, for all who put their hope in Allah and the Last Day and remember Allah much." Its sura, al-Ahzab, is about the most biographical sura in the Qur'an; which is to say, it was involved in the debates over the sira both inside Islam and against non-Muslim detractors.

The faction in Islam which sura 33 espouses was the Muhammadan faction. This asserted that it is not enough to believe in one God and the Day of Judgement, and not enough even to accept various suras as the word of God. Joseph Schacht in "Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence" reports that Iraq held out against implementing the legal rules of sura 33, which hints that Muslims were not at first united as to whether this sura was for real. But once sura 33 became legally binding upon Muslims, then to be Muslim was also to imitate Muhammad.

So, filming from behind the eyes of the Apostle of God is exactly the right thing to do if you are filming a movie from the sira. The audience is supposed to identify with the Messenger. That is what the (present) Qur'an demands.

Labels: islam, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 15:33 | link |

Friday, November 06, 2009

On changing templates

Andrea Harris at Spleenville just changed her site location. I had to go fix my template.

I'm not picking on her. Web personalities have the right to change domains. In my case I'm overdue for creating a domain. I'm picking on the process.

Fixing the template isn't so hard. What annoys me is having to go through my sidebar links to see if everyone is still where they were; and then, waiting however long FTP is pleased to make me wait to post the new template to the site. What's most annoying is going to someone else's site and finding that most of its links are dead, or that the bloggers linked from that someone had given up or gone barking mad since we last looked.

Maybe there could be a central blogger registry, where bloggers can put their current location. For us consumers of the registry, I would still have control over presentation (I like the mouseover events, myself). But the URL, and other useful information like "last updated", would be controlled by the registry.

Labels: meta

posted by Zimri on 19:41 | link |

The moderate Muslim

I was trolling Jawa after they got a visit from a moderate-Muslim.

The moderate admits that mediaeval Islam includes qital (violent jihad). He even admits that Islamophobes are right about it. The moderate reports that moderate Muslims don't know about their faith's inherent ("orthodox") violence. When you get past the tu quoque, the moderate says:

the difference is that this "extremism" is still part of mainstream Muslim theology whereas it has already been pushed to the fringe in many other religious traditions...the saving grace is, the theology is not known to most mainstream muslims in any detail. sounds confusing, but its true

The moderate does not come to non-Muslim sites with a plan for Muslims themselves to "push to the fringe" the "'extremism' ... part of mainstream Muslim theology".

The moderate comes with a plea for "common sense". What is common sense? For the moderate - it's the end of "zionism", and the loss of "permanence" for the Jewish entity in "Palestine". (Yes, this particular moderate hit that theme three times.) He comes with demands.

The moderate is, also, in solidarity with the jihad against the infidel in "Islamic land". The moderate is, ultimately, a Muslim first.

We can commend the moderate for his willingness to present his case. We cannot treat his case as holding merit. And we cannot bargain with him. He is partly tribal, partly in thrall to a faith. He has not reasoned his way into this position.

Labels: antisemitism, bullshit, islam, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 19:05 | link |

Why is the President getting involved in New York?

According to CBS (h/t Roses): "Obama let it be known he didn't want Paterson to run because Republicans like Rudy Giuliani consistently beat him in the polls".

That would be fine if Obama were the head of the Democratic National Committee. But he's not. He's the President. The Presidency, like it or not, has a stature beyond partisanship. When The President says that so-and-so should not run, he is saying that this person is bad for the nation. That is a bombshell a President would reserve for the likes of David Duke.

Labels: fascism, obama, presidency

posted by Zimri on 18:22 | link |

Jon Stewart is funny to malinformed people

...and AllahPundit thinks Stewart is funny.

What Jon Stewart relies upon, beyond the parody of Glen Beck himself, is the assumption that Beck is unqualified to opine on Constitutional issues and on American history. And what that relies upon is that these fields require a credential from an organisation which is also accredited according to peer review - in accordance with what Stewart states as the analogy of a medical degree from a decent university.

Unfortunately for Stewart, the liberal-arts side of the whole Western university system has been captured by the radical Left decades ago. For recent history, sociology, and political science the accreditation process is dead. Once you get more recent than the 14th Century, or (for the Middle East) 6th century, I do not start with trust in any college graduate, up to PhD or even (or especially) Nobel Prize laureate, over some anonymous character I'd read two weeks of decent posts from in UseNet.

Beck is a Mormon and I would not trust his judgement on North American archaeology up to 400 AD. However he has proven himself astute on American history from 1800 on. I suspect that Stewart knows this too, which is why he's been drawing deliberately false parallels.

Pity that AllahPundit doesn't know it...

Labels: bullshit, propaganda, science

posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Fort Hood

[started at 4 PM, bumped] Several people dressed as military have shot up troops at Fort Hood. Death toll is at 12 and rising.

This isn't a sniper up on a clock tower picking people off, or some grunt tossing a grenade into a tent (despicable as those actions are). This is a premeditated attack, with several people involved, and timed perfectly. In addition the perpetrators had to have had military training to get this close. MSNBC says it was a Major who was the ringleader. (h/t, Ace at first - then Drudge.)

This is designed to weaken trust between soldiers and their officers, and to discourage volunteers for the Armed Forces.

Is the date significant - the day of Guy Fawkes? Was it an anarchist? I don't know how much credence to put on the "Arabic sounding name". I think it bears waiting to see what happened. The story is "developing".

Whoever did it, and whyever, it was an act of war.

Pray for the victims.

Ensure it doesn't happen again.

UPDATE 4:13: Malik Hassan, a convert to Islam? Ugh. Jihad successful. I'm starting to get angry.

UPDATE 4:47: Yeah, there were a bunch of posts earlier which were more general and/or lighthearted. I'd written them earlier, before 4 PM. I'm bumping this one to the top of the queue.

UPDATE 5:02: No-one's walked back the name yet. It's distinctive. The name "Hassan" refers to 'Ali's son the Shi'a prince and in its natural habitat it is, still, Shi'ite. A name like "Malik", without the "Abdal" in front of it, implies kingship. Shi'ites until about 1979 or so didn't have a tradition of feeling powerful, and not really until very recently in Iraq; you wouldn't see these names Malik and Hassan together in the Near East. Add to that "Nidal" (Abu Nidal...?). I think we're dealing with a Black Muslim someone who has hated us for a long time, and turned Muslim as a manifestation of that hate.

UPDATE 5:08: If it sounds like I'm calling Charles Johnson a worthless pile of slime, that's because I am.

UPDATE 5:10: I see that the media is insulting Killeen and generally refusing to name the beast. Heckuva job, guys.

UPDATE 5:38: They released his picture... so the end of my 5:02 post was a jump-to-conclusions mat. Corrected. Sincere apologies. I'm leaving the thing up there as a monument to my carelessness.

UPDATE 6:57: My fallback idea was Baathist from Syria or Iraq. Turns out he was Syrian. Not a convert. Mind you THAT mistake wasn't my fault. I think whoever started the "convert" meme was thinking along the same lines I was - that pious Muslims don't prefer the name "Malik". Unless they become pious...

UPDATE 11/10: After this much time, no-one's found any other shooters, so I'm overdue for the correction.

I'm also trying to figure out if I owe Charles Johnson an apology for insulting him on account of his comment that the shooter's name might signify a non-Muslim black man. While totally bogus, and arguably racist; at the time I was thinking he might be a Muslim black man, which was about half as bogus but equally racist (c.f. my grovel at 5:38). Johnson has since corrected his stance to be more in line with the facts; although he's not come to full terms with those facts, that it was not just an Awlaki jihad but a victory for the Umma.

Labels: apology, enemies, islam, race

posted by Zimri on 17:10 | link |

Phantom voters

The Senate is saying that non-citizens count for apportioning Representative and Electoral-College slots, but are leaving alone whether the non-citizens ought to vote. If pressed the Democrats would have to admit that they can't let them vote.

We can't exactly say the Democrats are abandoning principle. I'm just surprised they're counting non-voters as a full spot and not as three-fifths of one.

We can say that the Democrats are, this time, scoring an own goal. They are allowing Texas to send a pile of extra Representatives and Electors to D.C. who will vote in the proportionate voting of the state's citizens - i.e., Republicans. To a lesser extent (due to the other party doing the gerrymandering) the same is true of California.

The Republicans would be foolish not to exploit this tactical mistake from the other party.

Labels: horserace, race

posted by Zimri on 16:43 | link |

The "Terminator" series

I'm watching the "Sarah Connor Chronicles" now.

I loved the second "Terminator" movie when I first saw it. But then I saw the first one, which despite some special-effects problems was far superior to the sequel.

I then started to question the very need for a "Terminator 2". In the first movie there is a character arc for Sarah Connor. The second movie abandons the arc wherein the Connors grow up on the lam. T2 starts with Sarah and John apart, and then puts them back to the endstate of T1. That makes the sequel pointless, no matter how technically well-written and -implemented.

While we're on the subject of James Cameron's filmography, I also saw "Alien" after I saw "Aliens"; the original did not leave me feeling any worse about that sequel.

(I know I've said that it didn't matter how good T2 was, so I probably shouldn't raise any problems with that one as a standalone, but I'll say this here anyway. The bad cyborg in T2 struck me as Bad Movie Science. I had less disbelief to suspend of the baddie in T3; which is sad, because T3 really was a rotten movie which I wouldn't say of T2.)

I think that T2 - beyond the chase-scenes - was aiming for an exploration of whether humanitarian cyborgs have "souls", worthy of moral parity with humans. I don't think that worked for a single movie.

With "Sarah Connor Chronicles", the writers are basically redoing T2 with Summer Glau standing in for Arnold Schwarzenegger. We start with a more natural sequel to T1 (although the storylines of T2 and T3 are referred to). Then, the good cyborg doesn't die as quickly as Arnold dies in T2, allowing for a fuller understanding of the cyborg mindset and ethic.

If you liked "Terminator", you really owe it to yourself to watch "The Sarah Connor Chronicles".

Labels: critique

posted by Zimri on 16:42 | link |

Taxes and the citizen

When the Federal government asserts the right to tax your income or your estate, that makes you a Federally-owned serf.

When other governments assert the right to tax your land, that makes you a tenant of the land which those governments (really) own.

After much thinking about this, I have come to accept land tenancy. The governments have always had the right of eminent-domain. The secular kharaj known as "property tax" seems like a reasonable extension.

If you want "your own house" you pretty much have to move to a houseboat or an asteroid.

Labels: liberty

posted by Zimri on 16:32 | link |

I retract my vote for TX2009#9

I oppose eminent-domain for the purpose of revenue-grabbing. I don't oppose eminent-domain where someone has bought some land, and then the government finds out they need it for truly social purposes.

The classic example would be railways and highways. People settle all over the place. Later on, other people will need to get from one point to another, and despite the best efforts of city planners there is always some old coot who has set up his shack in the middle of things. There's not much the government can do other than to say, "here's some cash to get to another location, now get out".

In that spirit, there's the Gulf Coast. Says Janus, it's all "public". "Public" is a Newspeak expression which means that the State of Texas and, in some cases, USG are sovereign over it. Anyone who "owns" property along the Coast does not own it; he's got a certificate of tenancy (whatever the deed and title documents pretend). That gives the State certain rights.

I am fine with all that. This is an unstable coast; it is subject to tides and hurricanes and, depending on the mood of the Caribbean Plate, tsunamis. The various coastline governmental levels absolutely should be responsible for the coastline. The State of Texas also has an interest in suppressing the population there, so that said population doesn't clog the roads whenever the latest Ike or Rita threatens inland cities like Houston. The Gulf Coast is inherently a bad bet for "private property owners".

I have no hard criteria, yet, for how far this eminent-domain principle should hold elsewhere. I would extend it to San Andreas and other obvious tectonic faults. State-regulated watersheds, for the purpose of efficient water conservation, have a proven track record in New York State; I think I would borrow their model for the drier mountains West (especially as more people settle there). Tornado zones, though, I wouldn't accept as the State's excuse for a land-grab. Anyway at this point I know what I am and I am "haggling over the price", as Churchill might put it. I do reserve the right to haggle.

And I reserve the right to admit where I've haggled for too high a price. TX2009#9 was a frivolous recreational measure, "irrelevant" in the words of Janus. But against Janus I hold that in principle, private property shouldn't hold on the Coast. I voted "Nay" on it but I wish I had voted "Yea". Oh well, teach me to wait for the last minute before learning the issues; and at least it passed anyway.

Labels: apology, constitution, liberty

posted by Zimri on 16:31 | link |

Obama's "shout-out"

President Barack Hussein Obama, you are not a cool cat.

In addition, as "franticflintstone" points out: while we are under attack by existential enemies, it is not the time to opine that America is an illegitimate nation. But then - I've never thought much of your loyalties.

If you want to be seen as Presidential, it's time you started earning it.

UPDATE 4:40 - Upon seeing FFs's comments at Ace's, I posted the latest two parags and then - the comment board immediately went down. Gah.

Labels: bullshit, obama, presidency

posted by Zimri on 16:17 | link |

"I won :)"

(Title stolen from Pamela Gellar.)

To offer some background here, Honduras legally ousted its would-be tyrant Zelaya. LGF denounced that as a "coup". I considered this stance to be unprincipled Leftism. LGF banned me for pointing that out.

Even Obama now understands the legality of the process, although the Associated Press is still calling it a coup (h/t HotAir). There is no principled case to make for Zelaya. There's a "Whig" case, that Zelaya is so super-awesome that he should be El Supremo whatever the law says. But it's not a principled case.

Charles: You didn't ban me; I banned you. Enjoy your new friends at the Associated (With Tyrants) Press.

Labels: lgf, progressives

posted by Zimri on 07:46 | link |

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Joseph Cao needs our help

Another one of the moderates on the list: Joseph Cao (R, LA). He's the guy who beat the corrupt Jefferson last year - he didn't get the majority of the black vote, but enough blacks didn't vote against him that the rest of the district boosted him over.

I hold Cao to a different standard than I hold the despicable Kirk. Cao is genuinely vulnerable, in a district that is going away, and of an ethnicity (Vietnamese) which is not well represented in his own district (or any other). So when I hear the media courting Cao as another "moderate", I view Cao's response more as a cry for help than as a Kirk / Snowe bid for power.

When I come into contact with Louisianans, or read about the place, it usually involves something ugly like ruling against miscegenation. As a result I suspect that Louisianans put Cao alongside Jindal and slap the label "diversity quota" on that box. This frees them to ignore the weaker Cao over the prominent Jindal. This attitude is depressingly common. I expressed a "concern-troll", you might call it, over at Ace's; one "tmi3rd" helped me gain some perspective on the case. But he's one good guy in a state with a lot of bad guys.

It will be difficult to overcome some of the attitudes I've seen in that state. I think that Cao knows it, and that Cao is telling his Party not to take him for granted. He wants to be seen as someone who listens to his constituents (even if they're wrong). In short, he wants a career as a Louisiana Republican. I think he can help the Republicans, and the nation, in that capacity.

I hope that non-bigoted Louisianan conservatives are involved in their local precincts, or can at least write to someone, who can then get in contact with Cao and help him build a deeper foundation as a Louisiana conservative.

UPDATE 11/12: Okay, forget him.

Labels: conservatives, race, republicans

posted by Zimri on 17:10 | link |

Rep. Mark Kirk's dereliction of duty

The so-called "Cap And Trade" bill which passed the house in June was a mistake. It was a job-killer as written (where it was even written), but that doesn't even matter so much. Worse than that, it had gaps where there wasn't even any text.

It's theoretically Constitutional to send a bill with a title and a demand to fill-in-later, to the Senate; but it shames the House to do it, and thereby it shames the entire government and so the nation. Some actions are so stupid that they shouldn't even be illegal. Some politicians deserve Darwin Awards.

(LGF's endorsement of this bill was one of the "WTF Moments" which pushed me out of that blog. I was barely able to spin the Von Brunn shooting as cultural-rightist. Not so here.)

Mark Kirk deserves his Darwin as much as any other.

Kirk was one of eight "Republican" rodents who pushed this swiss-cheese bill through the House. So when I see him (with fellow "capntr8or" Mike Castle) mulling healthcare nationalisation, I expect he's pulling an Olympia Snowe. He gets in payment for his perfidy: fawning news stories, national recognition, a primary endorsement from the RNC, and grovelling from other Republicans in office and on campaign.

Kirk is running for the Senate next. I think his aim is to establish himself now as the "electable" guy; and once in the Senate, to be the next "moderate" swing-voter who holds the real power and who gets the bribes and the accolades.

Illinois Republicans need to bounce Kirk from consideration now before he builds up a machine.

Labels: energy, lgf, republicans

posted by Zimri on 17:08 | link |

Military government in Texas

The military and civilian definitions of "order" differ; and in healthy nations there are strict roles for each, and even stricter rules for how they are to interact.

As a general principle, we don't want to live under martial law. Battlestar Galactica, in its second incarnation and earlier seasons, offered as good a reason as any: if the army is in charge, it becomes an occupation force, and an occupation force has to see the occupied civilians as the enemy. Eventually some punk will skateboard, or tag, somewhere it shouldn't and people will get shot.

Civilians revere the military when it's not ruling over them - and IMO, rightly so, as the enlisted servicemen and women have proven their loyalty to the people. Robert Heinlein understood that, and used this understanding in a bid to promote virtue in political society: that veterans should receive the franchise (and no-one else). This blog has had lukewarm-to-kind words to say about Heinlein's system here and here.

Somewhere between martial despotism and veteran aristocracy, we have the prospective of rule by military personnel who haven't yet earned their honourable discharge papers. This is the system which Texas has approved with its 7th constitutional amendment this year (hereby, "TX2009#7").

This is a VERY BAD idea, and even Heinlein wasn't proposing it. You can find a good argument in Janus's anti-endorsement.

I should have read the amendments weeks ago and raised a stink then. I did vote against it, and before that I directed readers over there; but that was clearly too little too late.

The Federal Government should implement a Constitutional clause which bans individual states from incorporating articles like TX2009#7. States which do as Texas has just done, have proven that they don't have the political wisdom to be States. A strict definition of honour would demand that our Senators and Representatives suspend their voting rights as long as TX2009#7 defines our State - and it's a sad observation of our current political situation that we can't afford to do that.

In the meantime the Oath Keepers, Sipsey Street Irregulars, Three Percenters and other pro-Constitutional groups need to get on this and see that Texas undoes its stupidity.

Labels: constitution, fascism, liberty

posted by Zimri on 17:05 | link |

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

A better Tea Party?

Well, this is heartening. (h/t, Insty.)

You'll recall that I went to the 3 July shindig, most of which offended me to the point of revulsion. I'm glad to see that the movement has improved.

Labels: conservatives, liberty

posted by Zimri on 23:55 | link |

Post-mortem on NY-23

Here's what Drew at AoSHQ had to say about NY-23: "the 'roof top highway' and year round navigation of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Hoffman and his surrogates really didn't address that. It may rankle the independent streak in this area."

Sometimes "local issues" boil down to "pork", a cutesy way of describing "federal-scale larceny". When voters pull that card, and my preferred candidate loses, I blame the voters.

I can't blame the voters here. Maintaining the St. Lawrence is inherently a federal issue. It involves dealing with Quebec, and with Canada in general. It also involves Pennsylvania and other states upstream who send their own traffic past NY-23. Hoffman should have been up to speed on all that.

If Hoffman wasn't the most-informed candidate, then it should have been up to his aides to help him. Unfortunately finding decent help for non-executive candidates, like prospective Representatives, is supposed to be the job of the Republican Party which, in this case, invested in that left-wing fraud "Scuzzy" Scozzafava. The RNC has a problem understanding outlying provinces.

And Palin and Thompson, and Beck, and (granted that I don't like him) Limbaugh all should learn a few things about how to endorse candidates. Hoffman's allies did great at destroying Scozzafava, but as they were doing that they forgot to build up Hoffman. Hoffman needed help also to tailor his message to the area. They didn't give that help; they instead made Hoffman look like an imposed outsider.

As for Owens: what did he even do in this campaign? It seems to me like he just sat back and watched the Republicans and Conservatives get stupid. Owens ended up, by comparison, looking like the safe sensible moderate.

As a (very?) minor postscript: we have the Man Who Would Be Kingmaker; the Markos Moulitsas to Hoffman's Ned Lamont - Robert Stacy McCain. Not, in the end, as helpful to Conservative candidates as some bloggers imagine.

Labels: horserace, republicans

posted by Zimri on 22:34 | link |

Why Earth?

I am trying to divine the motives of a V-type race. We are here dealing with aggressive conquerors. At the same time, the conquerors do not act by bombing the planet back to the Triassic.

That means they're not primarily concerned with our natural resources. They want live and friendly humans.

In other science-fiction epics, like Star Control 2, other races come to uplift us because they are looking for help in a trans-stellar war. An allied and independent race can be relied on, to settle planets and to defend them; allowing the other races to concentrate on other flanks.

If there is no such war (and the Vs claim there isn't), then the Vs need the warm bodies for something else. Food is possible, or incubators for their young a la Alien; but those strike me as clunky. Surely the Vs have technology to deal with that.

The option that I think most likely: the Vs have an ethical problem with doing the "hard work" themselves. They want serfs. Humans of high IQ would be great at helping to terraform other planets, or to do dangerous tech work in asteroid mines.

Labels: progressives

posted by Zimri on 21:14 | link |

Newt Gingrich, it is time to leave

This isn't much of a pro-Newt blog. I believe the only real comment I've made of him here was "I can ignore Gingrich", since he is "a bomb-throwing loudmouth who doesn't speak for anyone but himself".

I was a Newt fan in 1994-5, but then... I grew up.

I've always heard about how "smart" Gingrich is. From what I've seen, this involves sponsoring "enterprise zones", school vouchers, free computers, Greeeeen Jorrrrbs and the rest of that rot. Time was when I agreed with this Jack Kemp ethos, the "neocon" platform, Conservative Means To Liberal Ends. With the exception of vouchers, which is DOA wherever public-sector unions are legal, no-one serious thinks anymore that this pile of tweaks and wonkery will do squat for the urban poor. Kemp-style wonkery, I've found, is more about making Republicans look like they are Trying and that they Care. It's all about playing to the Stuff White People Like set. This is how Jack Kemp himself ended up on the Bob Dole ticket in 1996; we all saw how well that went.

While we're on the topic of Gingrich's sooper geniosity, Michael Moore (yes, Michael Moore) managed to pwn him on TV Nation: about all the pork / federal spending Gingrich was bringing back to his district. If you let yourself be Alinskyed by Michael Moore then, for all I am concerned, you don't deserve a spot on any media outpost this side of FailBlog.

Newt Gingrich is a man of no ideas who wants to be treated as a thinker. He has tarried too long for the good he does. For the love of God, go!

Labels: republicans

posted by Zimri on 18:09 | link |

Enough is enough!

"things were so slow at a Kingwood polling spot that eight hours elapsed before anyone noticed a copperhead-looking snake coiled in the corner."

Samuel L Jackson was not available for comment.

Labels: snark

posted by Zimri on 18:00 | link |

Election watch

I voted here in Houston at 9AM-ish. The Houston Press is having a laugh at how uninspiring this race was. I can attest to a lack of long lines and general interest.

I'll be watching V at 8 PM EST, as aforementioned, but I hope that the Republicans (and, in NY-23, Conservatives) in the East will take time to ensure that the Democrats don't CHEAT so bad this time around. Put the show on TiVo if you have to - be around to place calls and make a general stink if there is something going wrong. For those who aren't in the thick of things, you may as well watch V and chill out for an hour...

Labels: horserace, republicans

posted by Zimri on 17:47 | link |

V

This evening's plan is to watch V. I saw the first eight minutes online already. It looks pretty clever so far. I am crossing my fingers that it will be good. And that the regular season doesn't kill it.

[9:10 PM] Okay - seen it. 'Twas good. I hope the upcoming episodes are good too. I'm a little worried. The logic of this show is anti-Utopian and, therefore, anti-Progressive and anti-Obama.

The show exposits that the Vs have always been with us, creating the crisis that they're now here to save us from. That's an interesting idea... for anti-Progressives. In the real world, for the most part minus the lizard people, this is the argument anti-Progressives made against (for instance) the Community Reinvestment Act, and against ACORN and other exploiters of liberal government programmes.

Labels: liberty, media, progressives, propaganda

posted by Zimri on 17:44 | link |

The disastrous centralism of the Republican National Committee

Conservatism is regional and I think that the RNC has been inept in all regions.

I live in Texas, and here the RNC doesn't have much sway. We may or may not have more libertarians and social-conservatives down here than they have up north, but our culture (at least among whites and the more rooted hispanics) is more friendly to these strains of conservatism. The conservative candidates are already here. The RNC here hasn't got to do much more than give them money.

From what I've seen of the Northeast (and the West Coast), libertarians and social-conservatives lack such a cultural voice. As a result, these guys don't win downticket races in their districts, and when it comes time to pick upticket candidates the Republican Party lacks a slate of experienced people. The RNC has more influence up North than it wields down here in Texas. The RNC often has to choose the candidates.

The Republicans' problem here in the South is that we have people like Huckabee, and I'd argue Perry and Jindal, who have identified anti-intellectualism as a social-conservative value. Huckabee is pretty open about ignoring fiscal conservatism as long as he can float (Protestant) crosses through his advertisements. Perry likes to play loose with taxpayer money too. You'll forgive me if I don't trust Jindal the Exorcist after watching these two. The RNC's problem here is in not doing enough to slap down their appeals to obscurantism. They're letting Jindal's weirdness taint RNC candidates up north.

In the northeast, the RNC figures that no form of overt conservatism will win - so they pick "Not A Democrat" to run against "Incumbent D".

The RNC has proven that it does more harm than good to conservatives up north, and down south it doesn't do much of anything. Much of this can be put down to misunderstanding how local races work and how they affect non-Republican perceptions elsewhere. This is a known problem with central committees. The RNC may even do better not picking candidates in the first place.

Labels: republicans

posted by Zimri on 17:40 | link |

Monday, November 02, 2009

Apostasy and tribalism

The Jawa Report has a quote from Wafa Sultan about how she's being treated as a Muslim apostate. Rusty, the commenter, then compares that to how Mormons treat their apostates (nerf-bat harassment) and Fundamentalist Christians theirs (passive-aggressive threats, shunning).

I am not about to belittle the Muslim penchant for violence, which is real and terrible. But it's not what these religions do to their apostates which hurts the most.

The trauma comes when you find out that your former friends - Muslim, Mormon, Christian, whatever - only ever saw you as another mark in the tally.

If you lived your life for your friends, and then a theological disagreement causes you to be harassed or shunned: you learn quickly that all you did for your friends, didn't matter. They never cared about you as a person. You may as well be dead to them.

Is the shunning worse than death? I'd prefer the shunning, myself, but then I've been called a sociopath on several sites. Most humans are social creatures.

Anyway Islam seems to offer the death along with the shunning. That makes the question somewhat moot.

Labels: islam, misanthropy, personal

posted by Zimri on 18:10 | link |

The deadliest sin for a blogger is sloth

I got lazy last weekend. The laziness didn't start on Sunday; it started on Saturday. The two posts I did then, I had started on Friday. On Sunday I had nothing to do. One could put that down to a desire not to work on the Sabbath. But I'm not that hardcore of a Christian. And if I were, I'd prefer the Sabbath be observed when Jesus observed it - Saturday. This quietitude had no excuse; it was sloth.

Because I'm always up for adding to my list of shortcomings, I'll go with hypocrisy with this post.

I went hunting around for other secular Right blogs. I found the SecularConservative in Houston; and The Conservative Humanist Association, and (although this title's a mite more strident) The Atheist Conservative.

I can't put any of them in the sidebar. Janus at SecularConservative seems to be burning out. ConservativeHumanist hasn't been posting regular updates either. The Atheist Conservative does little but paste others' content lately. If they don't much like their own blogs, how far can a visitor like those blogs?

I don't think this says anything about secularists or the Right. There are also a-plenty of lazy religious believers; and it's not as if the Left quite gets its base of support from the Hardworking-American Community, either.

People just get into slumps where there is nothing to say.

For awhile I had a LOT to say, that I'd been sitting on for two and a half years, some of which I was NOT ALLOWED to say (and it wasn't just that one external force). I don't know that I've said it all, yet.

I'll let you know.

Labels: meta, personal

posted by Zimri on 16:30 | link |

Endorsements (for Texas and Houston)

I'm in Houston, which is not one of the exciting places like NY-23 or Virginia or New Jersey. I haven't been paying much attention. I was tempted not to vote at all.

But I'm a Right-leaning secularist, and I found another blog with similar views, so I'll outsource my endorsements to Janus for tomorrow's election.

Labels: liberty, republicans

posted by Zimri on 16:14 | link |

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