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Friday, July 11th, 2008
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12:30 pm - State of the Dragon, July 2008
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Wow. It's been well over a year since the last time I tossed a larger chunk of serious ruminations into the aether at large (last month's haiku doesn't count, although writing it was a more profound experience to me than it might have appeared).
So, what all has been happening, and whence the sudden resurgence?
A few months ago, I started taking Zen classes, after seeing an advert for a class conveniently close to the station where I depart and arrive on my way to and from work.
I've made other attempts in the past to find some way to help me sort myself out somehow, with mixed results, and since the course price was easily within my budget, I figured I'd give it at least a shot. So far, I think this one is working. The effect isn't spectacular (and frankly, I'd be distrustful of any course that offers to enable you to completely change your life within two months) but I am feeling better about myself; as for those among you who insist on demanding tangible results... Well, I'm writing this post, aren't I?
More than that, there's any number of friends I haven't talked much lately, and I'm starting to discover that I want to. Re-establishing contact's always a daunting task (at least, it feels like one for me) but friends are worth it.
Moved into a new place about a year and a half ago. It's a lot larger than the student apartment, and a lot cleaner - that last came in handy when I suffered a major asthma attack that was bad enough to need a trip to the emergency room. Ah well, I got better.
Still playing City of Heroes, still enjoying it; definitely worth the $20 a month (two accounts, although I may fold them down into one now that we can purchase more character slots). Started playing EVE Online, which is pretty but grindtastic, but there's always been something about the space genre that will keep me interested despite that flaw.
Need to start taking up Capoeira again; if there's one thing I've come to accept, it's that reducing my food intake sufficiently to significantly reduce my weight. It's unlikely I'll ever be less than what my friends euphemistically described as 'cuddly', but I'd like to stay 'cuddly' rather than let it grow to 'chubby' or 'would-be Sumo'
My sister graduated veterinary medicine last week. I'm as proud of her as I was when she emailed me two years ago to tell me she managed to install Ubuntu on her desktop computer without my help.
That's all for now; there might be more soon, as I continue sorting out thoughts in my head.
current mood:  contemplative
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| Thursday, June 5th, 2008
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7:27 am - Haiku
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| Thursday, March 1st, 2007
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11:59 am - *ff7 victory jingle*
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Shadur has defeated THREE-DAY SE100 SEMINAR!
Earned 1000 XP!
Earned 10 JP!
Shadur job level up!
Learned "Admin Redback SE100" !
current mood:  accomplished
current music: Aria - Furioso
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| Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
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11:19 am
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| Thursday, January 18th, 2007
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10:50 am
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| Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
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11:06 am - A picture may be worth a thousand words...
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... but that doesn't mean that a few words added to a picture are redundant.
Randy Mulholland finished up the arc he's been running for the past month with today's strip, and as usual he had one more punch left in there than I'd originally expected him to deliver.
He also manages to say in his author's notes something I've been trying to put to words for ages now:
Thirdly, to my Christian readers: I am sorry. I am sorry many of you do get stereotyped or find yourself having to defend your faith against those who've been jaded by the batshit insane. More than a couple of you felt this storyline was portraying Christians as the likes of Phelps. This was not my intent. However, I have some awful news for you.
The problem of being lumped with them won't go away until you become more vocal.
People assume most Christians are heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent of dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims because, for the most part, the ones who speak up the most ARE heavy-handed, pushy, intolerant bigots bent on dominating any other culture or idea and supplanting it with their own whims. It sucks. It's horrible. And it's the what everyone of any faith, political idea, or lifestyle has to deal with. People always focus on the loud minority who ruins everything. And like any other group, the only way you can combat this is making your views and, in this case, your kindness and actual testimony louder than the hateful prattle of those hurting your beliefs.
No, that's not fair. Life is rarely fair.
So go and make it fair. Retake your temples and cast out the money-changers, the false prophets, the wolves in sheep's clothing, the ones that claim to serve a god of love and peace but endorse hate and murder. Fight for the god you believe in, before there's nothing left of Him in the public perception but the ravings of maniacs like Fred Phelps and Jerry Falwell.
I don't share your faith; I can't fight this fight for you, or with you. I can only call out to you to make yourselves heard.
current music: Aria - Ombra Mai Fu
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| Tuesday, October 31st, 2006
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4:30 pm - The coincidences just seem to pile up...
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Once is coincidence.
Twice is happenstance.
I've heard rumors about trouble in ohio as well but don't have an URL for it, so so far the count's at two and we should still give the benefit of the doubt to the 'software error' explanation rather than assume that Diebold is once more preparing to deliver the country's votes to the President.
If you're unfortunate enough to have to vote somewhere you can't get a paper ballot, double-check and triple-check your voting summary. Make a fuss if that's what it'll take to get your receipt. Warn other people that there have been "software errors" and they should check their voting summaries as well.
In tangentially related news, the Dutch government issued a recall on the 1200-odd electronic voting machines that were discovered to be insufficiently secure. It'll be a hassle putting the paper ballot boxes back in the voting booths, but at least it'll help restore public faith in the voting system.
Hint, hint.
current mood:  annoyed
current music: Recoil - Want
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| Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
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3:49 pm - <vent>
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... Look, you asswipe, if I want to listen to background music while I browse the web I'll run my music player. I don't need your embedded flash muzak. I don't want your embedded flash muzak. In fact, I now don't even want to view your website any more.</vent>
current mood:  irate
current music: Nobuo Uematsu Piano Collection - Terra
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| Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
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11:21 am - "There's two ways to do things: The right way, and the John Wayne way."
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Despite its much-touted "liberal bias", none of the US-based mainstream media seems to have seen fit to report that Bush signed the new torture - I mean "terror trial" - bill into law this morning. I'd go into a rant on how pathetic it is that tawdry sex scandals and "human interest" stories get plastered over the headlines of every news service in the US but I have to check a british news agency to find out about this, but that's an old peeve.
Unfortunately, the BBC wasn't able to provide me with his signing statement - you know, the one he's used on several hundred previous occasions to state that he doesn't consider the law's restrictions to apply to him if he doesn't want to?
But I'm actually not going to talk about that today. It's a tired old theme and aside from the people I know that are already outraged about this I just can't seem to get it hammered through your skulls that this is important, that this is something you should be fighting on every level of government to prevent, but because the word "terror" is involved nobody seems to care. America, land of the sheep, home of the slave.
But I'm not going to talk about that today. Instead, I'm going to talk about a slightly-famous terror-related case in my home country.
Now most of you probably won't have heard of Samir A. (Here's a little thing I like about the Dutch justice system and its relation with the media: Until and unless a suspect is proven guilty, their last name is not mentioned in any official publication, and their face is at least partially covered. It may sound like a little thing, but especially in more emotionally laden cases it protects a potentially innocent person from vigilantes. Basic decency and civil rights.) so I'll start this with a short synopsis.
Samir A. is not a very nice person. He's a muslim of the highly rabid variety, and so far he's been arrested three times on suspicion of terrorist activities.
The first time (2003) he was released without charges due to lack of evidence -- they'd found hydrochloric acid and fertilizer in his home, and they had reports that he'd been in Pakistan, but both of those are considered "circumstantial evidence", meaning that while it suggests the AIVD may have been right, it's not concrete proof.
The second time (2004) he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a robbery of the supermarket he worked at, and when they found detailed blueprints and drawings of various strategic buildings in the country, complete with notes on security presence, they slapped conspiracy to commit terrorism on the charges list. The only charge they could make stick, however, was illegal possesion of firearms.
The OM (Dutch DoJ) appealed, but in 2005 the court of justice concluded that while he defintely had terrorist sympathies and that his intention to act on them was clearly proven, his plans were literally too poorly thought out, too clumsy and too primitive to be a realistic threat (accurate: the "bomb" he'd fashioned according to instructions he'd found on the internet was wired incorrectly, one of the wires was broken, the fertilizer "charge" was the wrong kind and he'd gotten the wrong kind of detonator), and he was released again.
One of the first things he did when he walked out the courtroom was assault a photographer, but that's aside.
In the same year he was arrested again, this time as part of a coordinated crackdown in which seven people were arrested for plotting attacks on various prominent politicians and an AIVD (dutch FBI) building, as well as attempts to purchase materials for more attacks.
This particular trial is still running because there's a lengthy list of charges and a few new laws that were signed in recently that apply and people are still getting used to them, and it's more or less central to what I want to talk about.
Recently, I saw an article in CNN about how Samir Azzouz (US media doesn't generally give a shit about whether someone's guilty or not, full names and photographs sell more newspapers so to hell with the suspect's right to privacy) is an embarassment to the dutch justice system and the country in general because we haven't locked him up yet. In fact, the recent decision by the judge to order the OM to let Samir's attorney review the evidence against his client or risk a mistrial is considered "a mockery" of the trial.
I consider the case against Samir a test case and a statement, and what it states is this: The system works. We do not need to suspend habeas corpus, we do not need to give law enforcement the ability to spy on anyone and anything they want without a court order, we do not need to rewrite the rules we live by to win this. We'll do it our way, we'll do it by the rules we've set, not because he would play by them (he wouldn't; in an interview he's ranted publically about how he hates each and every one of us and the system we've embraced, etc, etc) but because that's what we believe in.
Sure, it would be easier if we did just like the US and let a bunch of warmongering lunatics suspend civil rights out of fear of terrorist attacks, but let's face it, what's the point of fighting a "War On Terror" by giving in to our fears?
It may not be the easy way, but it is the right way.
Good night and good luck.
current mood:  cynical
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| Monday, October 2nd, 2006
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12:25 pm
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As the americans and canadians among you probably already know, Congress recently voted to suspend due process and habeas corpus in favor of letting Bush incarcerate and torture anyone he wants.
I'd love to say I told you so, but in all honesty even in my most pessimistic theories I didn't expect the power grab to be this blatant - or to go through this smoothly, with nary a word mentioned on US news sites unless you spend time looking for it.
So instead I'll just mention that I currently have room to put up a few refugees from an oppressive regime, and that I will be lobbying for my government to summarily scrap their extradition treaty with the US.
Good night, and good luck.
Oh, and because I'm too angry right now to care about hurting anyone's precious sensibilities: To all those of you in the US that voted for Bush in 2004 after the atrocious hack job he'd been doing for four years already, I give a heartfelt congratulations. You've gotten exactly the government you stupid gullible fucks deserve.
current mood: furious
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| Monday, September 18th, 2006
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1:21 pm
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There is no justice.
And I don't mean that as the frustrated slightly-humorous outcry of someone who's just seen an opportunity pass by the deserving and reward the undeserving. I mean it at a deep and fundamental level.
There. Is. No. Justice. There is, in this vast ocean of chaos, no universal shining concept that you can point at and say "This is justice, this is Right, this is Wrong, and this will always be so."
And this notion terrifies people, because we're all deathly afraid of what we'd do to each other if this were true. And we're right to fear, because history has more than its fair share of examples of what happens when people lose sight of their moral compass, and generally it involves massive body counts and atrocities.
What it boils down it is that people need to believe in some kind of balancing act. Call it karma, call it justice, call it heaven or hell, our collective need to believe that in the end it all works out, good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished, is something close to desperation.
I've used the terms "karma" "heaven" and "hell" in the above paragraph with extreme forethought, by the way; religion is and old and time-honored way of establishing a moral compass. A higher being that sees all and knows all you've done means that you can't get away with it - even if you evade, dissuade, intimidate or bribe earthly authorities, God knows what you did and will see to it that you're punished.
However, religion is very much a two-edged sword, and the two major religions that make the news most often (I was going to say three, but Communism stopped being a sexy topic when the cold war ended and this isn't the time for that rant) demonstrate why quite handily. The original concept that believers should express their beliefs by living moral lives shifts to the notion that living a moral life is the same as being a good believer, to that anyone living a moral life is a de facto believer, then to that being a believer is a central part of being a good life, then to that anyone who isn't a believer can't possibly be living a moral life, and it's every good believer's duty to help people live moral lives, isn't it?
This still wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the other side of the coin of having a higher authority to appeal to. After all, if you punish people who aren't living the way God wants them to, that can't possibly be a bad thing, can it? And even if the mortal authorities disagree - and how can they, unless they've lost sight of God's Will, in which case they should be ignored - God will have seen your actions and reward them when you get to Heaven.
Combine the above train of thought with Pratchett's Theory of Mob Stupidity, add in a couple of unfortunately-worded passages in the Holy Book regarding martyrdom and holy struggles that can very easily be creatively interpreted by hate-mongering preachers, and you've got the fucking mess in the middle east.
In the western world - or, at least, Europe - ten centuries of crusades, inquisitions and persecution of everything and anything insufficiently christian seems to have gotten the theocracy out of our collective systems at least to a manageable level (The fact that it's heavily on the rise in America, as well as showing the occasional flareup when someone acts too controversial around here don't really help my sense of well-being either), but where the printing press and the rise of rationality brought about Europe's Renaissance and an age of Enlightenment, the Muslim world reacted to the influx of new ideas by isolating themselves in an attempt to "protect the believers" from reading any book written by non-Muslims. And when they started venturing out again and found that the rest of the world had outstripped them culturally and intellectually and in exploration... Well, you can imagine there was some resentment there.
And if there's one thing that brings out the worst in people, it's being a "have not" when people that utterly don't deserve to "have" (being nonbelievers, and thus not Good People) somehow get to hog all the good stuff. Clearly God would never give such things to the undeserving, so if not Him, then...
Well, I'm sure you get the picture.
Actually, I do think I'll take a rip at communism here, as you can substitute it for most of the religious references in the last two paragraphs.
Communist doctrine: Sharing all things fairly == Prosperity for all. And how can working for the common good ever be the wrong thing? But several decades later, somehow you're still living in that hovel, and you're still breaking your back doing menial labor, and that prosperity doesn't seem to be arriving, but those people in the west get to have their designer jeans, their soft drinks, their decadent music and movies and somehow they seem to have more free time to enjoy themselves than you do. The theory of communism is flawless, of course, and it can't possibly be that you're doing anything wrong, so obviously the inequality must be the fault of those noncommunists who are unfairly hoarding all the wealth!
Etc, etc, etc...
So, after this interesting diversion where Shad takes a crack at major religions and the stupidity of the have-nots in general, let's get back to the point.
There is no justice. There never is. Life isn't fair. It never is. That asshole that cut in line in front of you that nobody stopped isn't going to be punished. That simpering vapid inflated barbie doll that can't sing a note is going to get even richer even though her "songs" are entirely without merit. Jerry Springer will still be on the air next year. A house is not going to fall out of the sky on top of Ann Coulter.
But that's okay. After all, in this imperfect world there's no such thing as perfection, either. But that doesn't mean it's suddenly not worth trying for perfection regardless. Or for justice. Or for fairness.
Terry Pratchett put it into words far better than I can, in his novel Hogfather, as Death explains the need for the Hogfather to his granddaughter:
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
'Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little-'
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
'So you can believe the big ones?'
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
'They're not the same at all!'
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET- Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME.. SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
'Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point-'
MY POINT EXACTLY.
'You make us sound mad', said Susan.
NO. YOU NEED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN'T TRUE. HOW ELSE CAN THEY BECOME?
current mood:  awake
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| Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
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6:35 pm - Five years and a day ago.
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Five years and a day ago something terrible happened.
Yesterday, five years later, the world took a moment to remember.
So did I, and I took a while longer to ponder, and I decided I had a few things to say.
Then I saw George W. Bush's speech at Ground Zero, and I decided I wanted to say them loudly.
However, out of respect for the ones who fell that terrible day, I decided to wait a day and leave them in peace.
I was going to say them today - but Keith Olbermann has already beaten me to the punch. So instead of repeating him, I'll just finish with a "What He Said".
I've got some other things I'd like to say as well, but they can wait.
current mood: thoughtful
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| Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
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12:16 pm - X3, Starforce, Steam, and some thoughts on DRM.
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Egosoft, creators of X: Beyond the Frontier, X2: The Threat, and X3: Reunion, a trio of awesome games, has recently announced - and made good on said announcement - that they would be dropping StarForce as their copy protection system of choice and instead use SteamPowered's model instead. A patch for owners of X3 who installed via CD will be provided soon; the version that's purchaseable via Steam is already free of StarForce.
This is awesome news, especially as I loved the X series of games, but loathe StarForce's copy protection scheme with a passion.
As those of you who know me are well aware, I support Free Software and Open Source. I firmly believe the latter movement will inevitably lead to better, more reliable software, simply because it is entirely open to scrutiny from whoever wishes to see.
Of course, on the other hand, as a programmer I can completely sympathize with the idea of wanting to be paid for the work you did, so I'm firmly opposed to software piracy. If you want that game, pay the $40 that it costs, or wait a month or two and pay $30. If you don't want to pay for it, don't play it.
I'm not opposed to paying a reasonable sum of money for a game I believe is worth having. Thankfully, a lot of games nowadays have freely downloadable demos that can help me decide whether the game is worth buying or not. By the same token, I can also understand reasonable measures taken by the game developers to ensure that people don't pirate their software.
Note my use of the key word "reasonable".
Starforce's "copy protection" is anything but reasonable. It comes in the form of an additional kernel driver - which, incidentally, means that installing any Starforce-"protected" game requires a reboot so the driver is loaded - that gloms on to the IDE drivers. Once there, it - supposedly - simply does nothing until and unless a starforce-"protected" game or CD is loaded, and defeats attempts to copy the CD or fake out the game by refusing to let the CD be read or attempts made to run the game without a physical CD in the drive.
(As a slight aside from this, just WHY do we buy 400GB+ hard drives with ridiculous access speeds and install multiple gigabytes' worth of game data to them if we STILL need to have the CD in the drive to play? Just for "copy protection" ? And what if the CD gets damaged? This, friends, is bullshit of the first order. But I digress.)
Of course, anyone with any kind of security or administration experience will have started screaming somewhere around "additional kernel driver", and with good reason: this essentially means that Starforce grants kernel-level access on any system it's installed on to any program that knows it's there to call on. This is what we in the biz call a recipe for trojans and exploits. I won't even go into the various woe tales of how shoddy coding in the driver can cause it to make your CD-Rom driver useless because it steps down to 1x speed after read errors because, frankly, those things are trivial to what the software does intentionally: When the latest version detects - or more precisely, believe it has detected; this is an important distinction - an attempt to copy a "protected" CD, it causes the system to immediately and irrevocably reboot.
Not a graceful shutdown, but an immediate, instant reboot. And it has an unacceptable false positive rate - although in cases like this "unacceptably high" can be defined as "It happened more than once".
Now, if you'll go to the starforce forums, you'll see the admins and company representatives and their paid shills all explain how, yes, some of these things might be inconvenient to their users, but in this age of broadband and rampant piracy it's important to do everything possible to stop them and if you don't THE TERRORISTS WILL HAVE WON companies will lose valuable revenue...
Bullshit.
Treating every single customer as a potential thief is going to cost you more revenue than piracy, even IF you make the assumption that every pirated copy equals a lost sale, which is also bullshit - a lot of people who pirate a game wouldn't have bought it in the first place. Moreover, Starforce is the rough equivalent of having an armed SWAT team subjecting you to a strip search at the K-mart as part of the new anti-shoplifting policies.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's StarDock Entertainment, who work with the heretical notion that - gasp, shock - most people are honest at heart and will pay for a game even without being forced to at gunpoint, and have released Galactic Civilizations II - The Dread lords without any copy protection at all. It's on two CDs, and if you really want to copy those CDs to files and share them with others, they're not going to stop you. They feel it's free publicity and that their game is good enough that honest people will buy the game and register their copies, especially since registering means you get easy access to stardock's updater, beta patches, and a grab bag of in-game goodies cheerfully dubbed "collectors' edition benefits" - which are purely cosmetic but very nice looking ship components.
I don't have the exact numbers handy, but reliable rumor has it that GC2 has spent quite an impressive time leading the sales charts, both online purchases (did I forget to mention that? You can buy the game online and download the whole thing, hassle free. Better yet, if you've registered the copy you bought in the store and something happened to the CD, your stardock account remembers that you paid for it and will let you redownload the whole thing whenever you want. You won't ever need those CDs again.) and in stores.
This is partially because the game is really that awesome, but I maintain that it stems equally from the fact that they don't treat their customers as if they're all criminals.
Of course, Stardock is being just a tad idealistic here, and while I wish them the best and hope they'll prove themselves by succeeding (which they appear to be doing quite nicely) I'm aware that not every company - and especially not major companies - are going to be willing to make that kind of leap of faith. So there's a balance that needs to be struck somewhere.
MMORPGs have it easy: since the entire game is only playable online, and requires an account and payments to the producer, there's no need for DRM on the game itself - if they don't pay for an online account, you won't be able to play the game regardless of whether you have it installed or not.
At a guess, I think the designers of Steam looked at that model and decided that those folks were on to something.
Steam, likewise, ties your games to an online account. It doesn't require a kernel-level driver; instead it takes up the same level of access space as, say, your mp3 player or IM client. At that level it can communicate with the online server that holds your account details and, when a game requests to be verified, check whether you actually do have that game in your account. Logging into steam can be set to happen automatically as you log on to windows, so you'll barely even notice it's there during the normal course of your play. However, they went one better. I'm not sure whether iTMS predates Steam or vice versa or they just got the same idea more or less simultaneously: They integrated their online store into the program you already needed to have installed to make use of their produts in the first place.
You can browse the Steam store for games, download and play demos, buy games and have them downloaded to your computer in the background, all without having to open a single other program.
Now THAT's convenience. It's a lot easier to get money from your customers if you make it easy for them to give it to you - and better yet, they'll be happy at the lack of hassle, which will leave them inclined to shop at your store again the next time...
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10:57 am - Patience, and when it's not a good thing.
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"You think he's an idiot, don't you? [...] No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you! "
-- Mark McKinnon, senior media adviser to GWB, 2002.
He called them "Busy working people" but why mince words? We knew at that point that they were counting on the ignorant redneck masses to carry them to a second term. And they did. We can complain about election theft, and certainly there were a lot of suspicious coincidences and exit poll discrepancies that would have warranted probable cause, but dammit, it shouldn't even have been close enough that they could pull it off. Why wasn't it?
We certainly tried talking to them, reaching out, trying to explain, generally in patient terms, avoiding complicated concepts, all the ways that Bush is an idiot - and they went and voted for him anyway.
Why? We've tried to blame it on bigotry, and fundamentalism, and the terror scare, and to be sure, the republicans milked all of those for all they were worth, but there's something more fundamental underlying it.
You see, most of them remember, with the long and detailed memory of an ignorant with an unresolved grudge, being talked to in slow and patient terms by a teacher who was reaching the limits of his patience, while around them the rest of the class barely tried to conceal their contempt for a dunce that still didn't understand the lesson. They remember sitting at their desk, silently fuming with rage and humiliation, while the teacher slowly explained what should have been obvious.
Of course, true genius being rare, I'm fairly certain everyone has had an incident like this, whether it was due to being caught daydreaming, or not having done homework, or even just having a slow day, and most of the people who I expect to be reading this will agree that it's an effective motivator to not have that happen to you again.
Not so for these people. They only feel the humiliation, the mockery, and the resentment towards someone who dared to point out their failings for the world to see, not the motivation to improve so it need not happen a second time.
And when we try to talk to them, patiently, to show them just why Bush is an idiot, a whole flood of remembered resentment comes back to boil. How dare we use that tone to them? How dare we be smarter, and more aware, and worst of all, how dare we be right? How dare we make them feel like the stupid kid in class again? ... But wait. We're not their teacher, and they don't have to do what we suggest just because it happens to be the right thing. They don't have to vote for that Kerry guy just because he's more intelligent and reasonable on his worst day than George W Bush would be on his best, or because he couldn't possibly wind up doing worse than GWB already has short of eating babies on live television. They have the power to strike back. Voting for Bush was their way of finally saying a long-delayed "Screw you and up yours!" to all the teachers who ever tried to make them less ignorant in spite of themselves.
Yes. It really is that pathetic.
current mood: annoyed
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10:25 am - "Compassionate" Conservatism.
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It used to be a popular term, at least for a while. Certainly long enough to confuse enough people to steal an election, which may have been the point. It certainly confused me; how can you calmly gut social security, deny the need for cheap health care and rip away the safety nets for the poor, not to mention try to outlaw abortion in all cases, and still call yourself "compassionate" ?
Compassionate with whom, precisely?
So I kept thinking on that, and reflecting on what I heard self-styled "compassionate conservatives" say.
(this is a thing us academically-inclined people do: When something confuses us, we keep thinking about it, navigating the maze of inconsistencies until we get to a conclusion that at least makes sense. Then, when new data props up that contradicts the hypothesis, we analyze that data, verify it, and once we're sure it's real, we go back to thinking about it and modify the model in our heads until it incorporates the new data as well and makes sense again. This is in a nutshell what we call the "scientific method", and among other things, it's almost directly responsible for 99% of the reasons you're sitting in front of a computer and reading this rather than, say, dying a screaming death from bacterial infection or toiling in the mud with a wooden shovel for 16 hours a day)
What you'll inevitably hear when you bring up people that will suffer from the consequences of, say, budget cuts to social security, are platitudes like "Well, of course it's awful for them, but they should have just invested in their own privatized pension plan..." or things like "There's really no need to raise the minimum wage; if the employees don't like what they're being paid, they can get a different job, can't they?"
And, of course, the ever popular, "Yes, it's terrible that that seventeen-year-old-girl now has to support a child on her own, but abortion would be murder, and if she didn't want to get pregnant, she should have just abstained from having sex..."
Listen to them long enough, and the pattern becomes evident, and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: While they don't deny that awful things are happening to people, it's their own fault for letting them happen. If only they'd just been properly rich, white, male, god-fearing conservatives, this wouldn't have happened to them. It's God's punishment, obviously, so who are we mortals to interfere?
They're so wrapped up in their families' own safety nets for so long that they've come to the conclusion that they're the natural result of living "properly" and they can't conceive of other people not having those same protections unless they intentionally discarded them. With small-mindedness comes a severely limited imagination, and without the ability to imagine - really imagine - what someone else's life would be like, you can't empathise... And you can't form compassion.
Current song chosen with premeditation.
current mood:  busy
current music: Everlast - What It's Like
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| Monday, August 21st, 2006
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4:51 pm - Memo to self
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Thoughts I need to expound on:
Why "Compassionate" conservatism isn't, really;Why patience isn't always a good tone to use;- Singing the praises of GalCiv2;
StarForce: No; Steam and Stardock: Yes;- CoV: Janie
- CoV: November.
- CoV: Juliet/Scirocco.
And a lot more.
current mood: thoughtful
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| Monday, June 19th, 2006
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2:53 pm - "Anti-christian discrimination"
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II'm not LJ-cutting this because, well, I'm feeling strongly about this.
Too long? Page down key's there for a reason.
A bit ago I had something of a discussion on IRC with several people,and one of them claimed, in all sincerity, that christians are being discriminated against in the US, and implied that anyone not believing that was either ignorant or stupid.
W.T.F.
Discriminated?
- 99.99% of your country's political offices are held by christians.
- "In God We Trust" is etched into every coin and printed on every bill.
- Christian holidays are - bar none - nationally acknowledged events, as is the Sabbath - which you bunch yoinked from the Jews without so much as a please-and-thank-you, but that's another discussion.
- Hell, even when we blaspheme you still win - because what we're referencing is more often than not some facet of your religion (well, at least when we're not being scatological): Damn, goddamn, damn it to hell, jesus christ, christ almighty, oh god, this stinks to high heaven, the list goes on and on and on and god knows where it ends. Amen.
You want to see discrimination?
- When someone has a bumper sticker that says "When I'm swept up by the Rapture you can have my car" at worst people will roll their eyes. If someone has a bumper sticker with, say, "There is but one god and Mohammed is his prophet", chances are someone will call the police or vandalize the car.
- A kid that wears a christian cross pendant to school is unlikely to draw any attention. A kid wearing, say, a gothic cross or a pentacle is going to get profiled just in case they're the next Columbine Kid; an islamic girl that wants to wear a headdress is going to get picked on at the very least.
- Staying in school for the moment, a christian kid that wants to say grace before lunch may be asked to do it quietly, or at worst suffer no more than what is sickeningly considered "ordinary bullying of someone who stands out". An atheist kid that, after due consideration, requests that he not be forced to invoke a deity he does not acknowledge while pledging allegiance to the country
(what the hell is up with that whole daily pledging thing, anyway? Isn't once enough? Are you all so insecure of your loyalties that you have to keep repeating it until someday you hope to believe it?)is going to get expelled, and probably harassed for the rest of the school year over it.
- A pagan friend of mine who works for the military related how she was pretty much unilaterally scheduled in to hold down the fort while everyone else was away for Christmas, but when she asked the same consideration for Solstice, she was called several unsavory names.
- A number of US states still have laws on the books prohibiting atheists from holding public office. The fact that these laws are generally not (strictly) enforced is beside the point - the fact that they exist is in and of itself an inexcusable smear on a country claiming "liberty and justice for all".
- By the same token, for a *very* long time, Texas law stated explicitly that an atheist wasn't allowed to testify under oath in a court case.
(Ironically enough, I found this out because I was wondering how an honest atheist would handle the hand-on-the-bible and "so help me God" issue - since the bible doesn't hold any significance for him and he doesn't acknowledge the existence of God. I guess just promising not to lie isn't good enough for Texans.)
- Assholes like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are allowed to spew their
bigoted bile across the airwaves and the most we hear from you is how their "stance is to be regretted" and "not very Christian" but it's neither your problem nor your responsibility, whereas, say, a hypothetical Islamic preacher venting the exact same bigotry except with "christian infidels" penciled in for "godless freaks" would get reported to the FBI.
Here's a little reality check. Remember the following points and keep them in mind:
- Being told, as the BSA was, that you're not allowed to spend government money to discriminate against gays or atheists is not anti-christian discrimination.
- Being told, as Chief Justice Roy "Ten Commandments" Moore was, that you can't use government money to desecrate a public building with an eyesore monument of your religion is not anti-christian discrimination.
- Being told - gasp! shock! - that US laws trump christian laws is not anti-christian discrimination. Didn't Jesus himself say to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's?
- CALLING FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE IS NOT ANTI-CHRISTIAN DISCRIMINATION. As I've said before, as Thomas
Jefferson among others have said before, this is conditio sine qua non time -- without that concept, you'll wind up in a theocratic state sooner or later.
(Iraq will, mark my words. The first article of their Constitution pretty
much basically says that Shari'a (Islamic law) trumps the constitution.
Oh, sorry. "Is the basis for". And "freedom of religion is upheld."
Nice lip service there.)
I had a few other thoughts on the nature of bullies, but those are only tangentially related. Maybe in another post.
current mood: irate
current music: Radio station and the fan next to me.
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| Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
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9:57 am - Interview meme
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It's been way too long since I posted anything serious. Might as well put up something frivolous while waiting for my procastrination to end.
Questions by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) aris_tgd :
( Memage ahoy )
Want to play? You know the rules. Respond with up to five questions, or with a request for same. If the latter, post the answers in your journal and pass on the brain virus.
current mood: memetic
current music: Ladytron - Light & Magic
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| Wednesday, May 24th, 2006
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11:36 am - CoH writeage
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I've been on somewhat of a writing spree again lately. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on perspective, it involves RP fanfic in my current obsession, City of Heroes, and specifically some of my characters - and those of others I frequently play with - or is part of a greater plot most of which was never written down beyond in-game logs, so a lot of it may or may not make much sense to outsiders.
Still, might as well put them up somewhere where those folks that don't use IM can see them so they know what I'm talking about in OOC.
The first one's a little first-person POV piece. Relevant context for the uninitiated: "Christine", whose POV we're seeing from, is a teenaged superheroine calling herself "Kick People Gal" (and the reason for that name is a long story in and of itself), and she has recently been kidnapped by one of the less pleasant high-threat villain groups known as the Malta Operatives...
( Warning: not a pleasant image. )
The second one's decidedly less nasty, although it will make even less sense than the first, as it references a lot of things found only in the late levels of the game. As KPG is nearing level 50, the highest attainable in the game, it's time to start thinking about ( An epilogue, of sorts... )
current mood: accomplished
current music: Delerium - Enchanted
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| Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
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2:51 pm - Well, that was fun.
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I have one less online friend than I had an hour ago.
( And I don't regret it. )
In other news, the next idiot that tries to use the "is it genetics or a lifestyle choice" argument WRT homosexuality is going to get kicked in the nuts. Consider this fair warning.
current mood: angry
current music: Delerium - Till The End Of Time
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| Monday, May 1st, 2006
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2:02 am - Man, it's been a while.
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Damn. Where to start?
Ah, yes. As of a day ago I've moved from my humble yet comfortable student apartment to a new flat. It's a bit further out from the center of town, but far roomier - and far more suited to entertain guests, if anyone's so inclined.
This brought the neccessary amount of chaos with it, which is one excuse I could make for not updating.
At any rate, it's late. Promise to post something a little more substantial later.
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| Thursday, April 6th, 2006
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8:51 am - Yikes.
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| Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
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1:53 pm - What's in a name? A whole gorram lot.
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A while ago, this billboard made its way around the internet, although mainstream media decided not to pay attention to it, as usual.
At the time, I couldn't quite peg down why the phrase disturbed me so much, so I (as it turns out, incorrectly) just put it down to speaking German as well as Dutch and English and simply taking the overtones too seriously.
But that's not it. Bush is a president, not a leader. What we call things is important.
No, really. Bear with me, here.
A president, presides -- sits at the head of a large group (in democratic societies, as large as possible without collapsing under their own weight would be ideal) of people with radically diverse views, a multitude of agendas, a plethora of ideas on how the country should be run and all of them deeply convinced that they are more correct in their views than all the others, and his is the unenviable task of convincing most of them to pull in roughly the same direction so things can actually get done.
A "leader", on the other hand leads. He gives orders, and expects those orders to be obeyed. He may - if he's wise - have advisors who help him keep track of what's truly important and offer him options or suggestions on what orders to give, but his is the first and final word in all things.
If he's a good leader, he'll give good orders, and people will often understand and agree with those orders and carry them out because they want to, but even when they don't agree, whether it's through ignorance or contrariness or just because it was, in fact, a bad order, they're still expected to obey or face the consequences. Because he is their leader and the leader is to be obeyed. Military hierarchies have leaders, because in the midst of battle it's generally not feasible to discuss deployment plans in committee.
In the body politic, however, a "leader" is more commonly called a "ruler", a "king" or a "dictator".
Bush isn't a leader. Even leaving the debate about the validity of the elections and the debate about his leadership capabilities, he is not a "leader".
He's a president.
But more and more, he's behaving as if he is a leader. And that is a bad, bad sign.
current mood:  worried
current music: Delerium - Lamentation
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| Friday, March 24th, 2006
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10:26 am - Holy Dystopia, Batman!
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Found via archangelbeth : psychological profiling for babies and toddlers.
Get 'em while they're young, I guess.
Even leaving aside the "84% false positive" issue -- which, in layman's terms, means you'd have a measurably higher success rate just flipping a coin -- this whole atrocity is an intrusion into civil liberties of Orwellian proportions: imagine a future where the government determines, starting at birth, whether a citizen is "mentally healthy" -- and mandate a treatment to anyone who is not found acceptable.
I'd say more about this, but I'm just a bit too furious to remain coherent right now.
current mood: f'in furious
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| Wednesday, January 11th, 2006
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9:54 am - Yay for less ignorance in the world.
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Scientists finally figure out how bees fly.
Interesting excerpt from the article:
"Proponents of intelligent design, or ID, have tried in recent years to promote the idea of a supreme being by discounting science because it can't explain everything in nature."
This highlights, in my opinion, the crucial difference between Ignorant Design and actual <i>real</i> science: When confronted with something they can not explain, the real scientist is the one that keeps trying to study it until they understand it.
Ignorant Design, on the other hand, simply uses it to yell as loudly as possible "See? We don't understand this so someone-that-I-won't-explicitly-call-God-so-that-really-stupid-people-might-believe-this-isn't-religion has to have made it happen!"
Yeah, yeah. Very nice, Ug. Now go crawl back into your cave and congratulate you on your cleverness. The rest of us have a rocket car to build.
current mood: amused
current music: Nightwish - Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan
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nerdy
