Nature Leseul

From Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals:

I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.

Lord Vetinari is awesome.

My first reaction: Yes! It's so true! xkcd is so awesome!

My second reaction: Wait, isn't the artist, like, enabling male entitlement or something by suggesting that, obviously, that cute girl on the train focused on her laptop must be just waiting for any guy next to her to start flirting with her?

My third reaction: Meh, it just goes to show that gender roles make this all just too complicated to deal with. I'll be happier if I just don't worry about this whole interacting with girls thing. I get almost everything I need from being with my friends already, and I'm perfectly content with that. Why keep hurting myself by looking for or hoping for anything more than that?

My projected fourth reaction at around 3 AM tonight: omgz why am i so lonely????!??!!!!??!!11111 :-( :-(

This is an article that illustrates a very important point about the world economy.

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession

At issue is the fact that Western retailers are expecting relatively low consumer demand for the holiday season, and therefore aren't ordering as much stock. This means that the shipping industry, which historically has gotten crazy busy at this time of year, doesn't have as much to do, and therefore a large percentage of the big container ships that carry things like oil and consumer goods to the West are just sitting anchored somewhere out of the way.

Now, it's generally agreed that less consumption is a positive and necessary thing, since the West's rate of consumption is putting unnecessary strain on the world's natural resources. But consumption is so deeply embedded in the structure of the economy that removing it to any substantial degree makes everything else stop functioning as well. To consume less, we need to sell less, we need to produce less, we need to transport less—we need to work less. When consumption ceases, jobs disappear from the shipping industry, as well as from factories and the retail sector. And without jobs, people don't eat.

( Read more... )

You know, the more I hear about the health care debate going on right now, the more I'm reminded of this story I read once. It involved a protagonist who was trying to run a health care system that served its patients in the best way possible, on the basis of the best available objective scientific knowledge, but who was impeded at every turn by the pointless obstructionism of interfering politicians and the entrenched corporate interests who funded them.

Except that in the story in question, it wasn't a health care system—it was a railroad.

The interfering politicians of the real world are right—this is exactly like something out of Rand. Just not in the way they mean.

Even Wal-Marts and storage places can be cool looking when the landscape forces them into an interesting terraced design.

Driving on the interstate is a lot less interesting than driving on highways.

There is no swirling energy vortex at the end of I-40. I always thought there would be when I was a kid.

The bottlecap from the Jones soda I had at lunch informed me "You will succeed at your current plans." Given that all I was doing today was driving a lot without any plans, how is that applicable? Also, "except in bed."

There is not very much in southern Georgia.

Gas seems to get cheaper in the middle of nowhere. This seems counterintuitive.

I actually saw a dead deer on the road.

Mountains are pretty at sunset.

Twisty narrow roads through mountains at night are scary. Also, it is important to remember that you cannot drift and get blue sparks, and that Lakitu will not retrieve you if you fall off of them.

Pigeon Forge, Tennessee is very shiny at night. Also it has cute tourist girls.

Hotel rooms in Tennessee are surprisingly cheap.

I have no idea where I'm going tomorrow.

In the middle of nowhere, where big corporations don't bother to build stuff, there are lots of unique businesses. Makes one wonder if rural conservatives' faith in capitalism comes from seeing their neighbors actually own businesses.

There are lots of hot bike-riding college girls in Gainesville.

I passed a dedicated Pet Cemetary along 441. It's a nice idea.

It's funny seeing a "Eustis City Limit" sign just a few feet after a "Eustis: 3 miles" sign.

Apparently there is a sequel to Final Fantasy IV that was recently released for WiiWare, after having been out on Japanese cell phones for a while. This is probably more exciting than it really should be, but still.

Plus, episodic content! And classical graphics! Exciting but probably gimmicky, derivative, and disappointing!

Kind of makes me miss the days when my social life consisted of speculation regarding Espers and the All-Fruitiness thereof and the color of Locke's hair, rather than references to being on boats and loving your friends' mothers. There's no way Final Fantasy-related news of this magnitude would have gone unmentioned for an entire month back then.

You kids get some culture now, y'hear?? And get off my tiled 16-bit lawn!

Every time it's the same story.

He failed. He screwed up. He fell. He let down his wife, his children, his constituents, his god. He continues to struggle with it, and he's praying for the strength to move beyond it and return to his life. He apologizes profusely to everyone who has been hurt by his behavior. He's only human, flesh and blood, born to make mistakes.

And she forgives him. It's been hard on her and the kids, and they too have been struggling to deal with this. But she believes in the sanctity of marriage, and she's willing to accept him back and work through this with him, for the sake of the children. She asks the press to give them privacy in this difficult time.

It's one of the worst ways in which one person can hurt another. But it's so common that the culture has evolved a ritual for atoning for it, one which plays out in essentially the same way in the media every single time it happens. There are usually tears in their eyes, pain on their faces. The pain and tears are real, but the scripted artificiality of the ritual makes them seem farcical.

( Read more... )

I make Doctor Who music videos.



Yay.

No.

There seems to be fairly frequent discussion among critics of atheism on whether it's actually a religion or not. Some people think it is, because it's based just as much on unprovable premises as any other religion. Some people think it's not, because it's actually the negation of religion. It's kind of a silly question, since it's founded in people's generally arbitrary standards of what counts as a "real" religion and what doesn't; and I kind of wonder if framing the definition of atheism in those terms conflates some concepts that are better differentiated.

The way I'd personally define "religion" would be something like "The specific set of symbols, myths, and rituals that a person finds meaningful as a way of conceptualizing spirituality." And that's a definition that omits atheism, because atheism doesn't actually have its own set of symbols, myths, or rituals.

And I think, incidentally, that this is a big part of why the messages that atheists put up in public spaces to counter the Christian messages tend to be so negatively perceived. Due to the lack of a specific vocabulary of symbols, it's hard to express a message that is simultaneously positive and explicitly atheist. "God bless you" is a basically positive message; you can modify it into "Goddess bless you," "Buddha bless you," "Elua bless you," "Elvis bless you" or whatever and still make it a positive message that is an authentic representation of a specific religious tradition. But you can't really express that from an atheist perspective. You either end up just saying "Bless you" (which can easily be taken for a generic theistic message), or something like "There is no god. Bless you" (which dilutes the benevolence of the message with a blatantly confrontational statement).

So I really don't think that it makes sense to think of atheism as a religion in the sense that Christianity or Wicca or Raelianism is. A more meaningful consideration is atheism versus theism. Neither of which is really a religion; they're more like philosophies, or meta-religions, or some such. With reference to my earlier definition of religion, that framing of atheism allows you to define it as "The philosophy that the referents of religious concepts exist strictly within human psychology"; and to define theism as the direct opposite of that: "The philosophy that religious concepts refer to entities that exist literally and independently of the human mind."

And, when you view the question from that perspective, it becomes conceptually meaningful to consider yourself as a religious atheist—i.e., someone who finds meaning in a particular set of symbols without believing that those symbols literally exist. If, for example, you consider the myth of human salvation through the resurrection of Christ to be metaphorically meaningful to you, but don't believe it happened literally, you could describe yourself as a Christian atheist. That sounds pretty paradoxical given the way we generally think of religion, and I doubt there are very many people who actually hold such a perspective, but I do think there are a lot more Pagan atheists and Buddhist atheists out there.

I don't know if this kind of framing of religious discussion is particularly meaningful to anyone else, but it does seem to me like it clears up a lot of confusion about what exactly is meant when people talk about religion and atheism.

An interesting diary from Daily Kos today:

The Eroticization of Equality and Social Justice

Progressives should pay serious, and respectful, attention to romance fiction, for two reasons:

First, as I hope to convince you – or seduce you into believing :-) - below, romance itself is a fundamentally progressive activity. If you take romance seriously, and don’t denigrate it just because patriarchy says you should (more on that, later, too), then you’ve got to take romance fiction seriously, since it’s a major expression of romance – not to mention, romance’s usual wonderful destinations, love and sex - in our culture. More than a quarter of all books sold in the U.S. are romance fiction, and more than 64 million Americans read at least one romance novel each year [source: Romance Writers of America, RWA]. Romance fiction is an enormous part of American culture, and an important transmitter of values.

I don't really feel like writing an outraged post on the topic, since there are so many out there already, but I'll contribute to the googlebomb, at least: Amazon rank.

I'm particularly confused by the choice of which of Jacqueline Carey's books got included in the fail. Phèdre's trilogy—Kushiel's Dart, Chosen, and Avatar—are all still ranked, but Imirel's—Kushiel's Scion, Justice, and Mercy—aren't. And that's peculiar, because, as I recall, Phèdre's trilogy is where most of the stuff that the nutters might find controversial happens. Phèdre is involved in prostitution, girl-on-girl sex, and some fairly extreme BDSM scenes; and a major subplot in her story involves male homosexual relationships. Imriel, for all his angst about his desires being zomg so dark!!1, is pretty vanilla by comparison; he has such a monogamous fixation on his (female) love interests that the possibility of gay sex involving him, while hinted at a couple of times, pretty much exists only in the minds of fanfic writers; and the BDSM in his story doesn't get much more extreme than telling his girlfriend "Go get me a whip so I can hit you with it," and a subsequent fade to black.

So I'm confused about what kind of tortured logic Amazon could be using to de-list the latter, but not the former. I've heard it suggested that it could be some kind of automated removal based on tags, but I compared the tags for Dart and Scion and didn't see anything that stood out.

Also, if anyone was curious, Tarnsman of Gor is still ranked.

Edit: It appears that Scion and Justice are being ranked again now. With that visible, one can see that they are both included in the Books > Literature & Fiction > Erotica category (as well as "Dark Fantasy"); whereas Dart is only in "Historical Fiction." It's a weird inconsistency of categorization on Amazon's part, but that difference does seem to indicate that they probably just did something to every book in certain categories like "Erotica."

Mercy is still unranked, but does show up as the top result in searches for its title now. Kind of weird.

(Additionally, Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds is included in several subcategories of "Arts & Photography," which were probably not among the categories chosen to derank.)

Standard economic theory is that minimum wage laws result in unemployment, because they set an artificial floor on the price of labor, and therefore preclude people whose labor is worth less on the market than the minimum wage from finding a job.

The point of the minimum wage, though, is that it's supposed to be the minimum that you need to survive. If you make less than that value, you're basically living in poverty.

To illustrate this, the minimum wage in the U.S. is currently $6.55. Working a full-time (40 hours/week) job at this rate would give you an annual income of $13,624. The poverty level for an individual in the continental U.S. is currently defined as an annual income of less than $10,400. So working that hypothetical minimum wage job would put you somewhat above poverty—as long as you're an individual. If you have one dependent, the line is $14,000, so you're in poverty.

(And if you're earning the minimum wage, chances are that you won't be working full time, and that you won't be employed for an entire year, so your actual income will probably be even lower than that calculation.)

So if people were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage, they would be earning less than they need to survive. Now, conservatives will likely argue that the poverty line is set too high, and that people could survive perfectly well on an income less than that. But the exact numbers aren't the point. The point is to illustrate that, by their argument against the minimum wage, the economics of supply and demand do make possible a situation where the market value of a person's labor is less than the cost of her survival.

Or, in other words, where that person's labor has no economic value. The economy doesn't need her.

So why does the American work ethic put such value on making people find work, when, by the ostensibly objective evaluation of the market, their work just isn't valuable?

To my mind, the fact that unemployment is even a meaningful economic concept is symptomatic of something very wrong with the wage economy and the ethic of work that supports it.

(The situation becomes even more silly when one realizes that—given the collapsing bridges, breaking levees, and crumbling schools that characterize the infrastructure of America—there really is plenty of useful work that people could be doing. It's just not "valuable" to the economy, insofar as no one with money is willing to pay them to do it. The New Deal and the Obama stimulus plan were sort of designed to address that weirdness, but what such programs can accomplish is probably pretty limited as long as they're working within the present money system.)

This is worth reading.

Why American Workers Stay Off the Streets While Europeans Proteest

( Quotes )

This combination of the prosperity theology attitude of poor Americans towards their own poverty, and the "positive attitude" guilt machine that keeps the corporate drones docile provides an excellent example of what Ayn Rand called the "sanction of the victim." In Rand's worldview, evil is essentially impotent, and can have power over the world only to the extent that it persuades good people not to act against it. A key means by which this is achieved is by persuading people that they deserve to suffer under an evil that masquerades as the good. This state can only persist, however, as long as the victims accept the moral principle that places this blame on them; if they withdraw their sanction from that principle, then they can easily recognize the pointlessness of their suffering and act to end it. Atlas Shrugged is really all about raising this class consciousness in society's producers.

It is time that productive Americans stop blaming themselves for poverty, unemployment, and the conditions of labor. They are the consequences of economic forces well beyond the control of any individual, and individual action has practically no power to bring about a general improvement. It is only if they reject the morality that places this blame upon them and organize as a class that they can exert sufficient social pressure to produce change on a large scale. Europeans have known this for a long time, and that's why they have things like universal health care and shorter work weeks. The Americans of the early 20th century had the same knowledge, and they brought us many of those same benefits before our culture of protest was derailed. We in America today have a great deal to learn from today's European radicals, and from the activists of the early labor movement.

(Inspired by Claudia's Facebook status.)

The party people I once knew
Who once were many, now are few.
So good it seemed, when once we dreamed
Of finding Pleasure on this earth,
As youth is ever wont to do.
But time will tend to bring an end
To human happiness and mirth—
A stark reminder that it's true:
      Nature abhors a party.

Where do those party people go?
How do the winds of fortune blow
When mortal trials make them exiles
From those hedonic dance halls filled
With rhythmic beats and lights aglow?
What takes the place, in this rats' race,
Of true desire unfulfilled?
People surrender when they know:
      Nature abhors a party.

In cubicles they spend their days,
For that bare wage their labor pays.
They need to eat—they must entreat
The rich for license to exist.
The wailing babies that they raise
Take every dime, consume their time.
Instead of dancing they subsist,
And never name the true malaise:
      Nature abhors a party.

They march in columns off to war,
To suffer on some distant shore—
Culture requires the forging fires
Of strife to grant maturity.
Some vanish in the huddled poor,
Not having made the hollow trade
Of Pleasure for security.
These are the facts they can't ignore:
      Nature abhors a party.

What happiness can e'er endure
When this is all that's ever sure?
When beauty fades, and mind degrades,
And entropy will ne'er subside,
Just wound us more as we mature?
When bodies fail, and all must sail
In time for Styx's other side?
One thing alone the gods assure:
      Nature abhors a party.

It seems my lot to apprehend
The time when all the parties end—
When music dies, and girls and guys
To women, men, are all transformed,
And all to nature's will must bend.
Will I, un-grown, be left alone
Rememb'ring those by time deformed?
Is this a fate we can transcend:
      Nature abhors a party?

REDWOOD SHORES—In the wake of Republicans' alternative budget plan unveiled today, many major American companies, concerned about remaining competitive in a worsening American economy, have quickly moved to take advantage of the innovative concepts presented in the Republican plan.

Among the first to unveil an updated business plan based on the Republican budget is CEO John Riccitiello of California-based game developer Electronic Arts.

( It looks like this )

When contacted for comment, President Barack Obama simply laughed loudly, but that may have been because his mind was still dwelling on the ordinary Americans who think marijuana reform might be worth discussing seriously.

#

I'm rather annoyed with Obama and his online town hall meeting thing.

First, because he was so snarkily dismissive of all the questions that were submitted and highly rated about marijuana legalization.

Second, because he keeps on using "The thing is, is that..." and similar nonsensical grammatical constructions. It's painful. :-(

I saw an ad for CyClone Dairy today, featuring pictures of smiling mothers gushing about how they use milk from cloned cows because they only want their babies to have the best and safest milk. It's kind of hilarious, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

The best part? From the site's FAQ:

Q: Are there any ethical issues about cloning?
A: No.

Whether there really are or not, that's pretty awesome.

(Of course, given that there seems to be no way to contact the company or actually order their products, I kind of suspect that this is actually some kind of viral parody site intended to raise awareness about the supposed dangers of cloned food. Whatever.)