Sunday, July 31, 2011

Hey, This is What We Americans Call "Compromise."

Hahaha we are so boned.

That is all.

The Right-Wing Language Deconstruction Fleet

I'm a armchair linguist, and I enjoy studying linguistics and the way language is used. One of the things I find most fascinating is how language is used on the Political Right - to the causal observer it can seem like they're speaking English, but to anyone who pays attention, it becomes apparent quickly they're not.

I've said that they derive a great deal of what they do from postmodernism. This is no different; in fact, this is an example of them using postmodernism without even realizing it (their leaders do, I'm almost certain of it, but the average sheep on the street doesn't have a clue that they're using postmodernism. It makes the irony all the more delicious because they rail against postmodernism as sinful, whereas if it weren't for postmodernism, they wouldn't have the muddled, crippled thinking they suffer from).

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Human Black Box: Things Go Sideways (pt 4)

At this point in their journey, Chloe (Olympian morph) and her allies, Ahmed (one-armed synth morph), Hotaru (sylph morph) and her father, Sava (infomorph, uploaded into a ghostrider module and currently acting as his daughter's muse), have managed to escape from the resleeving facility and are making their way east right now. The journey isn't a long one - just shy of 5 hours - but they would be so lucky if they could make that time...

Follow their journey here, courtesy of MapQuest:

Part 1, 2, and 3 can be found there, there, and there, respectively.

Wishing Doesn't Make It So...

Your God does not exist.

It's a bit of a bold and sweeping statement, to say the least.

People will say, "Wait! You have to know everything to know that!"

No, I don't.

I can know absolutely nothing and still be right. See, the way skepticism works is this: I don't need proof to make a claim like that. It's called taking the position of negative evidence. Negative evidence means I don't have evidence.

Epistemology means that I'm in the err to believe unless I have sufficient evidence to support my belief based on previous experiences. I have no evidence, I have no previous experiences, I have nothing to base a sound belief on.

Which is why I can say your God doesn't exist.

Becoming A Federalist Blog

This one certainly ranks among one of the most surprisingly stupid things I've heard this year. A columnist over at Whirled Nut Daily claims that the founding fathers are to blame for the rise "communist fascists" in Washington.

Friday, July 29, 2011

Pardon Me While My Anti-Americanism Shows

There's something deliciously comical about the whole debt-ceiling debacle. It's like watching a puppet master who's two sizes smaller than the puppet he's controlling hold an entire nation at gunpoint by putting  gun to his own head.

This is what happens when you perpetuate lies. This is what happens when you abandon anything remotely resembling reason to a small and vocal ~20-25% of the population who better serve society locked away in an mental asylum than electing leaders. Somehow, this small, 20-25% of the population managed to get their hands in situation far, far larger than anything they could ever wrap their childish, n00bish heads around. Boehner has somehow become the adult, and he's trying corral a group of smug, self-righteous children who believe that they're right and are utterly impervious to little things like "truth" and "reality."

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Human Black Box: Things Go Sideways (pt 3)

Welcome back! This is part 3 of the ongoing saga of Chloe and her new-found friends in their desperate attempt to escape the facility, Flagstaff, and eventually, get to Groom Lake and off the planet Earth. In the last posts, Chloe woke up without any memory of who she was, or where she was, uploaded into a body she didn't recognize, and directed to get from Flagstaff, Arizona to Groom Lake Facility, Nevada, by a mysterious entity claiming to be a seed AI and Promethean named "Antares." Along the way, Chloe has encountered a mysterious android named "Spider" Ahmed, who works for Firewall, and another individual. This section opens up with Chloe and Ahmed having just discovered the third individual in their desperate attempt to escape the reseleeving facility while avoiding the headhunters and the warbots all around them...

For appropriate listening, I recommend the following suitably futuristic sounding songs:
Electronegative
Challenger
Bioactive
ReEvolution

Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here.

Love for Rapture Ready

As I get ready to type up the third installment of Human Black Box, I found three comments on FSTDT that I couldn't help but comment on, or at least present, in their entirety. This stuff is golden - you can't make it up. All of them come from Rapture Ready, so you may feel kind of dirty for picking on the low-hanging fruit, but that's okay. They honestly ask for it on a regular basis - it helps feed their persecution complex, so you're actually doing them a favor, as warped as that sounds. So anyway, here we go...

Uh... Whoa.

This one actually follows up my last post rather nicely. This particular comment, penned by a genius scribe over at the Free Republic sums up, in a nutshell (with emphasis on the "nut") exactly how extreme the position is capable of getting. Read this carefully.

What Is It With These People...?

Anyone remember Pat Buchanan? No? Consider yourself fortunate, because here he comes again, dredging the most wretched part of humanity along on his tailcoats. This man is sick, he has to be. I know he's evil; of that there's no question.

You'll recall that not even a week ago (maybe a little longer, I have difficulty keeping track of time when I have weird work weeks), there was a mass murder in Oslo, Norway. This mass murder was carried out by a Christian Terrorist by the name of Breivek, a nationalist, open Christian, and general right wing nut who loved to read, among other things, World News Daily (an American right-wing cryptofascist/insult to cryptofascism "news" and "opinion" webpage devoted to being as flat-out stupid as possible the right-wing cause). Mr. Breviek (whose name I will not be arsed to spell correctly because he doesn't deserve it) callously slaughtered 80 innocent children and teens in the name of Christian terrorism, and published an absolutely insane, 1500 page diatribe that rivals the Necronomicon in terms of sanity damage if you read it, without all the cool abilities that come along with reading the Necronomicon (i.e., the ability to drop Yog-Sothoth on the next CPAC meeting). Well, the right-wing noise machine's been scrambling, trying to distance themselves from Mr. Briefek, with the end result being the so-called "anti-Jihadists" in this country claiming they're somehow different from Mr. Befrvek's anti-Jihadism and Christian Terrorism. Out of the echo chamber comes Pat Buchanan, who I considered a real piece of work before this, but after it... well. Here, I'll dissect his argument just I have others in the past. It's probably the safest way to get near this, but remember - don't forget your moral hazard gear.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Human Black Box: Things Go Sideways (pt. 2)

This is part two of the ongoing saga of Chloe and her muse, as they attempt to find their way out of Flagstaff, Arizona and off Earth, without getting killed along the way. The first part can be found here: Human Black Box, Things Go Sideways (Part 1).


A Face of Enlightenment

This girl is my hero.

Her name is Rachel Beckwith, and for her 9th birthday, she told people not to give her any presents. She'd been inspired by a speaker at her church to try and built up enough donations to give individuals one of the most important things for life: access to clean water. While she never lived to see beyond her 9th birthday, her selflessness has inspired others to give almost 130,000$US to the charity she and her church started, with almost 100% of the overhead going to the cause. While I feel horrible that I can't donate (I don't have the proper financial structure in place to do so - you need to have a paypal or a credit card to donate), I can do the next best thing by promoting her cause and helping others who can donate get the chance to. You can find her webpage here:

My Charity: Water

If you can donate, do so. Nothing is more important to the survival of humanity than clean water.

She's a hero. Rest in Peace, Ms. Beckwith. It's a shame that you weren't with us longer.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Minnesota Pond Scum Redefines Evil

I couldn't read this whole article. I just couldn't.

Any regular will tell you that gay marriage is something I feel strongly about. It's equality, it's civilized, it's basic humanity. Teenagers and children are something I feel even more strongly about. Mix those two and I'm muzzling myself to retain civil - and sometimes I have a difficult time doing that.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Human Black Box: Things Go Sideways

What follows is a piece of transhuman fiction that I feel like writing. I'm an author in my spare time, unfortunately never having been published. I do enjoy writing fiction, though, and I figured that since the transhuman posts on this webpage seemed to be getting the most hits (take a look over at the left-hand column and see which post is currently the most popular), I could probably expand horizons a bit. The characters are my original creation and so is the plot, but the setting and back story is not of my design; I'm using the Eclipse Phase world for the backdrop. In a way, this helps me prepare for any future campaigns that I run, and lets me explore transhumanism where it intersects with another, fictional transhuman setting (that's actually free to use, remix, tweak, etc, so long as Posthuman Studios, the guys behind the game, are credited. Consider this that credit.

Anyway, here's part one of the story:

Saturday, July 23, 2011

New and Improved

(I always hated that phrase)

Okay, I think I hit on something, I changed the background to something that more closely resembles the enlightenment era (maps. I lurves me some maps), and I made the color a cozy blue. I also removed some of the tools and added some new ones, so I hope it's a little easier to navigate. Finally, I went through and edited some of the older posts so they didn't stick out as much, added a new sidebar that keeps tabs of the top ten posts, and put some other nifty stuff up.

Welcome to my blog; Post-Modern Enlightenment v. 2.0!

H+ 2: Uplifting

This post continues the themes that I started in an earlier post; that can be found here: H+

I talked about transhumanism just a little bit, but not in any kind of great deal. Just a general overview, a very rough sketch of what transhumanism is. In a sense, that’s Transhumanism 101. Welcome to Transhumanism 102: Animal Uplifting.  

Playing Around With Designs, Don't Mind the Noise

For the next few hours (or until I find a design I like, I make no promises when that will happen) things may be shifted around and juggled, and unbalanced and may suddenly vanish only to reappear. I apologize for any difficulties during this transition, but once I'm done, it'll be a little easier to navigate and will have so cool new toys, huh?

Friday, July 22, 2011

With God As My Pilot...


I never get tired of hearing the Religious Right going after whatever it is this week that's rammed a bee up their ass. I never get tired of their victim posturing, I never get tired of their inane theology and vapid ideologies; I never get tried of it. After all, what would I have to blog on if they were normal, healthy, well adjusted individuals like me and you?

(/irony)

I swear if I read something else, by some other dumbass, that it's possible to "pray away the gay", I'm going to scream. I don't know why this myth persists. I also don't know why the Religious Right is so dead set on trying to undermine their own God's will. It could possibly be because they're Untermensch and they don't believe in a God but cling to that system because they benefit from it, but I only think that's true in a few scattered cases, not over all. Their whole theology and ideology is self-defeating, on every front, and they prove once again that they're their own worst enemies. They say they believe one thing, but their actions prove them to believe something totally different, that contradicts what they believe in. The word here is hypocrite. But, because I won't make up a claim without backing it up, allow me to demonstrate how this works:

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Skepticism and Epistemology: It's Not What You Believe, It's What's You Know...

For a while now, I've considered myself a skeptic. I'm a proud James Randi-style skeptic; I approach everything with a open mind for all possible conclusions, not just the ones that people desperately want to be true. Guarding against confirmation bias is the first rule of being a real skeptic, as opposed to the ones that get played on television, since the human mind is naturally inclined towards patterns. Skeptics are a misunderstood group of people; the way we get portrayed in fiction is often as an ironclad believer in this mystical religion known as "Science", always with a capital "S". The first order of business here is to clear this up - skepticism is not a religion. If a skeptic is dogmatic, they're straight up doing it wrong.

Welcome to the Liberal Freak Show: The Intolerant of Intolerance Edition

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever
The liberal freak show is coming after Michele Bachmann. That is not much of a surprise. Bachmann is running a very disciplined campaign, encouraging conservatives and running with a conservative agenda. But now the left is coming after her.
These words sum up the basic motivation of the right anymore: blame someone else. It's always someone else's fault. You can't be an adult and own up for what you said without playing that victim card so hard it knocks a hole in the table.

Apparently, Michele Bachmann should be beyond criticism, because she's "running a very disciplined campaign, encouraging conservatives and running with a conservative agenda." And because of that, the left is coming after her. You know, those mean nasty bullies on the left: the ones who won't let us enforce our religion on people. That left. The ones who won't let us cram our stupid faith in people's face every second of every day. Who want to force us to not force others to worship our Sky Daddy. That left.

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Chick Deconstruction: Mean Momma


I'm so excited! I've read a number of Chick Deconstructions all over the web, and one of my favorite sites is a site that does Chick Tract deconstructions, but unfortunately, I haven't seen any in recent years. So what's a guy to go, if not get out there and do his own dissection of these horridly illustrated little comics?

So, Enigma welcomes you to his first Chick Tract deconstruction (while speaking in third person, no less. Enigma likes speaking in third person.) I should point out that me using deconstruction is ironic because deconstruction is a bastard child of the post-modernist movement, but I won't. Instead, let's get to the deconstruction:

We traded advancement for what again?

I think this says it all, really.

I look at that chart and I laugh, but that's only because if I don't, I'll cry. It's true. It's so true. It's a 100 pound iron bat of truth, and even that isn't enough to get through the thick skulls of today's so-stupid-how-do-you-remember-to-breathe conservative(tm).

Sometimes I wish we could just load all of the republicans on a boat, ship them out to sea, and torpedo it. But that'd be polluting the oceans, and as a liberal, I can't stand by that. I've gotta be a tree-hugger. It was in the EULA when I signed on to the Liberal Agenda. And you don't even want to know what was in the EULA when I signed on for the Homosexual Agenda. It was fabulous

Monday, July 18, 2011

Observations For the Day

Debunking the Genesis Creation Myth in four easy observations:

Observation 1:  It's all in God's hands. God is omniscient and omnipotent. He created the world in six days, and he created man by blowing into dirt (Genesis 2) or simply willing him and woman into existence at the same time (Genesis 1).

Observation 2: God plants a tree in the garden of Eden. This it the Tree of Knowledge, and it grows apples. Side observation: God apparently hates Avalon and King Arthur.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

H+

And now for something totally different!

For me, my introduction into one of the most dangerous ideas in history started innocently enough. It started with my own imagination, and my propensity for role-playing. I created a race for a particular game that I called the "Helios" - the Helios were a race of hyper-advanced humans whose bodies were made out of programmable matter. They resembled normal humans except for the "sinklines," which were bleed-off grooves in the skin to allow for the release of excess heat (hence their names) generated by their inbuilt power plants. Each individual Helios was a walking Swiss Army tool; their programmable matter nature meant that they had absolute control over their body. They could change their shape, their size, their sex, their color - all by thinking about it. They could generate various tools with their fingers, and they possessed an anti-gravity generator that allowed for flight. What was more, each Helios was born this way. We're used to seeing cybertech and cyborgs and think Robocop and other clunky gears, wires, and hydraulic pumps and such, but that's not the way I designed them. They were a fusion of the biological and the mechanical on a molecular level. The watch word was "synthetic biology".You were born with an antigravity generator, born as a being made of programmable matter, born from birth with the ability to control your physiology by thinking about it; immune from all diseases, all birth defects - the perfect human (ignoring the fact that the Helios earned a reputation among my group as "hurr stoopid". It wasn't entirely deserved, but given the world they came from - a near utopia - it was understandable why they were less intelligent and more naive than the average person. I built them with the Eloi in mind, so the Helios are slightly smarter than your average Eloi, despite being as technologically advanced as they were).

I never gave it much thought after that. The Helios remain one of my favorite races ever that I created; I versatility of the species, along with their ability to fly and bounce back from devastating injuries due to the programmable nature of the matter make them seem like a true race of superheroes. But I never made the connection; I never made that leap.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

At the Interesection of Substance Abuse Blvd., Depression Ave., and Skid Row

This is one of my favorite songs. Listen to this song, and read the post, and think about how the two relate. The ways in which they do can be surprising.

Anyway, the post.

I've often wondered what the impact of being mentally ill has on your place in society. I'm depressed; or, rather, I'm treated but depressed, and I have ADHD. In my particular case, possessing ADHD is the reason why I'm depressed; they were fortunate enough to figure that out, even though I was an adult at the time, and treat the ADHD. Treat the ADHD, free from the depression and the anxieties that go along with it - the social phobia, being scared of dealing with people because you're afraid you'll drag them down and they won't be able to have fun, constantly worrying about whether every little thing you do is going to make you look selfish when really all you want is to just be happy, like everyone else.

There's no doubt it has a huge impact on your economic prospects. If you're depressed, you can't work as hard as you need too. If you've got ADHD, you can kiss staying organized good bye. You lose things, you miss important parts of directions even thought you were damn sure you were listening, and you're at a higher risk of being in an auto accident by sheer virtue of being the way you are (I can vouch. I got in a car accident because of my inability to pay attention. I was terrified of driving for a long time after that). If you can't keep up with these things, what's that mean for your job? It means you get fired, if they even bother hiring you to begin with. If you tell someone you're mentally ill, you become something like a pariah, providing they even believe you and don't think it's you just making an excuse.

Oh, I've gotten that. It's an excuse. You need more discipline. You need to focus harder. Push harder, try this and that. About the only thing I didn't try was narcotics, and even that's only half true - one form of self-medication for me was soda. Specifically, the caffeine in it. When you have ADHD, you're wired backwards. Your brain chemistry is nine kinds of messed up, and in my case, drinking caffeinated things wound me down, it didn't speed me up. I understand it's like that for a lot of individuals with ADHD. Even though I'm being treated, I'm still a bit of caffeine fiend, but it doesn't have any result for me, so it's like drinking water (I don't speed up, I don't slow down. The balls are inert; Shenlong checked out a long time ago).

This actually brings me the next intersection, and the intersection I wanted to discuss for a while. This street is called "substance abuse." Like I said - I tired everything with my ADHD/Depression/Anxiety - except substance abuse (and again, if you want to qualify caffeine as a substance, I readily admit I abuse it, so that's not true, either). Mentally ill people are very prone to substance abuse. If you don't have legitimate medication to help (and even then, that won't work for some people), using alcohol to numb those feelings of depression, or ADHD, or Bipolar, or whatever, is very, very tempting. Using heavier narcotics has different effects on your brain chemistry - obviously your brain chemistry is already screwed over, so what's it hurt? In a lot of ways, these drugs stimulate neurotransmitters that aren't fully working, so for some people, I can actually make them feel normal.

Friday, July 8, 2011

The 10 + Some Commandments

I've kept my eyes sort of on the right for a while now, and by virtue of not hiding under a rock, I know about this crazy woman from ... somewhere, she isn't from Earth, who's running for president. In addition to leading this full blown retreat from sanity, she's a liar; a full-of-crap lying sack of stupid shit. If this woman said that you needed water to grow grass, I'd have to test it for myself. She's lied so much that she gets caught up in a whirlwind of lies; it's like watching a dog chase its tail.

Well, what's left me speechless about this crazy woman is this set of 14 "vows" that she signed, and that others are being urged to sign. I know, because the GOP is just clamoring to get the crazy vote November 2012, others will sign on too. The full list of insanity can be found here, but for your reading pleasure, I'm going to dissect each of these points. This here is a general warning - you'll want to get the safety gear out, tape up the cuffs of your pants and sleeves, and make sure your oxygen tank is filled up. This isn't a biohazard zone, but it sure as hell is a moral hazard one, and we need to take precautions around those lest they infect us. Also, you'll want to set aside your irony meters, as always. It's the proper precaution when dealing with any right-wing contamination site.

So... deep breath and here we go.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Gay Marriage = Communism

I've heard a lot of desperate and strange arguments against giving gays the right to legally marry lately. With New York passing their law recently, I can only for see the screaming becoming louder and louder. However, one of the strangest (in the sense it starts off original but goes down hill from there) that I've seen has to be from the National Review, called "No Homophobia", by George Weigel.

In this article, the author makes a number of claims, each of which I'm going to refute or discuss here, point for point. I'm really sick of a lot of these claims, because they're like perennial weeds: they come back no matter how many times you purge them. Like the anti-science and other anti-realities, the anti-gay movement is rooted in romanticism and post-modernism, so it helps to explain a little bit about why these weeds don't go away. This article especially reeks of that romanticism through projection; you'll see why in a minute.It starts off with some originality - comparing gay marriage to communism (by virtue of it being state-enforced) but quickly degenerates into the usual tripe from there.