The House of David

Thursday, November 19, 2009

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 |

Saturday, October 31, 2009

The gay Jesus, again

The latest Biblical Archaeology Review has revived the corpse of the gay Jesus. We may as well brace ourselves for another round of That Flamewar.

To introduce our Conservative guests to this dustup: one Morton Smith - who as far as I know is not related to Joseph Smith the discoverer of the plates of Moroni - went to the monastery of Mar Saba and found a copy, the ONLY copy, of a purported letter written by Clement of Alexandria. In it, Clement is discussing two rogue texts of the Gospel of Mark, neither of which are or were in any version of Mark available to the general public. One text talks about Jesus meeting with a young man, alone, to teach him "the mystery". The other makes it explicit that both men were naked. Clement endorses the former, "mystery" text against the "naked" text and against our text; and he tells the reader, don't let this secret leave these walls.

A decade or more ago, I'd made public my opinion that these versions of Mark were unknown even to Matthew and Luke. That is: they were forgeries. I thought that Smith had found an authentic letter of Clement and that Clement was telling the truth up to a point; I just figured that someone had screwed with the text of Mark before Clement read it. This was not unknown in Judaeo-Christian literature; the Gospel of Matthew is such a plagiarism, standing in relation to its source much as Chronicles stands to Kings, the Book of Jeremiah to Septuagint Jeremiah and so forth.

More recently I've grown to wonder if the forgery might be datable... a little later. I first showed my hand in 2005. I carried this on here, and I put down a Morton defender here.

Since Helmut Koester, a grey eminence of Biblical scholarship, is not backing down from his endorsement; we skeptics are pretty much left to the "withholding judgement" argument. This is cowardly and lame of us, and (for the Christians amongst us) even Pascalian. But it's either that or get dragged into a dispute over a text with many problems for all sides.

I won't get into all the problems here, but I have one: that we haven't seen mention of the rogue Marcan texts from Clement's contemporaries. Even if we accept that these texts were available only to Egypt, the sex-averse Gnostics in Nag Hammadi should have said something. Maybe one day we will uncover an Egyptian bathhouse with a well-preserved library.

Labels: ghey, religion

posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Know your place

I think this blog's bias might be toward aristocracy.

I'm not talking about bringing the House of Lords back into the US (the Lords these days are a bunch of Labour Party hacks anyway so, no thanks). And I'm not so undemocratic as to support the Sulla solution.

Aristokratia means, literally, "rule by the Better Sort of people". But I take it as locally-applicable. In my place in the world, I can strive to be the best I can; and I will know enough not to dabble too far in stuff I'm not so good at. We would all be happier if we all learnt our place.

Religious people tend to reject modern science; some of them claim that their religion forces them to. When they propose to affect scientific standards, that causes trouble. Religious people are still good at preserving cultural and moral norms. They just need to stick to what they are good at, within their limits.

I was born in the UK, and raised in elite-ish circles, and I didn't have significant contact with the average American until I first ventured into an AOL chatroom in 1996. Someone like me shouldn't be elected President and, as it happens, I legally can't be elected President. I'm not sure I should be running for any public office. I know my place and it's not public office.

So, that in mind, let's talk gay marriage. Here, as elsewhere, homosexuals want to be treated the same as heterosexuals.

Conservatives, and most people in general, counter-argue that self-perpetuating cultures have an interest in promoting - that is, discriminating in favour of - stable heterosexuality. The demand for equality for group B must necessarily mean the loss of prestige for group A. That's fine and dandy if group A doesn't deserve its prestige. But in this case, Conservatives insist, group A does deserve it. If heterosexuality loses prestige in a given culture, that culture will die.

I side with Conservatives here. But I reject Andrew Sullivan's contention that this means I have "contempt" for him. (Beyond my general distrust of humanity, of course.)

The culture retains an interest in recognising reality (as with evolution). The two relevant realities are that homosexuality is an innate trait that cannot be changed, and that sex is dangerous. In that spirit, society has an interest in taming sexuality among homosexuals - as among heterosexuals. Therefore I disagree with National Review insofar as that a system of state-sponsored monogamy makes sense for homosexuals. This would be a second-tier of interpersonal contract - "civil union" - with a limited slate of rights associated with the first class (which is marriage).

What Sullivan doesn't seem to understand is that just because I put him in a lower caste on this issue, that doesn't mean I think he has no place at all; and I would put him on a higher caste on other issues. He has this opinion that it's all or nothing. This sounds narcissistic to me.

It's not that I have anything in particular against homosexuals. They, and Sullivan, just don't matter all that much to me. I've got an inventory of many other nails who stick out too far and need hammering down - including religious Conservatives, and including marginal-Americans (like myself and Obama). Besides even gays should have more important concerns.

Everybody should make their peace with the state they live in. For those who feel like overreaching - imagine what you'd get if the culture collapsed, went Muslim, and/or went through a Reaction. Rather less than what you have now, most likely.

Labels: conservatives, ghey, misanthropy

posted by Zimri on 16:34 | link |

Friday, October 23, 2009

Look into a publisher, the publisher looks into you

The long post just below agrees nicely with a discussion they're having over at Zombie's. The gay-rights movement, like the Conservative movement, has its own library and (therefore) its own publishers. Where the Conservatives have Regnery, homosexuals have Alyson.

Say a mainstream conservative wants to publish a book. He would consider Regnery as a prolific publisher with similar interests. But Regnery puts out a number of books of questionable content: in 1996, for instance, it put out “Inventing the AIDS Virus” by Peter Duesberg. (And then there are the Politically Incorrect Guides…) Someone who gets published by Regnery faces a real risk of having others dismiss him by association as a nut bar.

Or, take the book Tales Out Of School. This just dealt with growing up gay. Mainstream gays like it. Alyson has a reputation for putting out books dealing with homosexuality and youth, so why not?

...You see where I'm going with this. Alyson wasn't at core a gay-oriented publisher; it was a paedophilia-oriented publisher - which is owned by Pat Califia, and which issues forth a literature so vile that I can't repeat much of it here. (Go to Zombie's.)

Rogue publishers like Regnery and Alyson have no problem with putting out a book which is both true to their overt mission statement and of high quality. But any activist publishing outfit ultimately has to cater to activists. Since activism attracts sociopaths, a nontrivial number of books by activist publishers will be evil. The publishers' motives for publishing good books will be less than pure, and their record of publishing infamy will taint the good books under their imprint (unfairly perhaps).

I think the takeaway from all this has to be, if you are a prospective author then BE CAREFUL. In addition I think some of the more reputable publishers might consider not ruling out gay books, or conservative books, out of hand as "fringe". Some of these books aren't inherently fringe and they shouldn't be pushed out to the edge so easily.

Labels: conservatives, ghey

posted by Zimri on 19:23 | link |

Saturday, October 17, 2009

True Love Waits

I posted this a week ago or so at GayPatriot, and was trying to lead into it below, but I got sidetracked. I've come up with a more focused, Poe-based theme on that post and will carry on here.

I don't think that social conservatives need be the enemies of homosexuals. Conservatives (as I've defined them) can't support a so-called "gay agenda". But that's mostly because they can't support any agenda of change. They are inherently reactionary.

Reactionary ideas can help gays though. One such idea is that people have a deep down human nature. If that's true then gays can't be reconfigured any more than an albino can be magically turned into Barack Obama, or an autist into Casanova. This should keep Conservatives from persecuting gays. For the most part you don't see anti-gay slurs on Conservative blogs. (You do see them on neo-Nazi fora, but they're infected by eugenics and other progressive memes.)

The reactionary theme "true love waits" also derives from social conservatives. And it turns out that such a theme would save gays from much the same grief that plagues other sexually-active subgroups like, um, heterosexuals mingling at the local pub.

I would urge social-conservatives not to overplay their hand, such as the variously grim and silly efforts to "convert" gays (perhaps reaching its nadir at Alan Turing); but conservatives do have a few themes which are gay-friendly, and advice that works for gays as well as it does for everyone else.

Labels: conservatives, ghey

posted by Zimri on 15:26 | link |

Thursday, October 15, 2009

A brief disconcert of the whole gay company

I hung out at some of the gay events at college. Not that way myself but I wanted to see their side of the world.

I remember one event where they showed a Ralph Reed anti-gay vid alongside a pro-gay vid. I noticed that Reed's video harped on promiscuity as its main talking point: grainy footage of creepy guys sneaking off to the bushes in off-road rest areas, that sort of thing. I suggested to the presenter that the campus gay group could make the next Reed vid a lot shorter, and more boring, and generally moot; if they just told gays: "gays, don't go into the bushes with strangers".

The gay students were sympathetic (I got much less politeness from, for instance, black students concerning affirmative action). Even their group's leader didn't tell me to GTFO. But, he was evasive. I actually had to tell him "you're not answering the question".

Eventually he admitted that he couldn't condemn off-road sporting events or, I suppose, toilet tap dancing because of teh homophobia. He wanted to keep the closet door open in the less-tolerant areas of the country. Which meant he was trapped; he couldn't condemn it in the city either.

Is it possible for straight people to cast judgement on aspect of gay culture? Because if this is gay culture then the religious right may have a point. I suspect that this is the elite view, among those who feel above common decency (read: George Michael, Larry Craig); and that average gays prefer to look for love in bars and online the way the rest of us do. If that's true then gay-dom has a problem, analogous to Louis XVI versus the rest of France.

Labels: ghey

posted by Zimri on 17:50 | link |