Once Again, It's This Stuff Again

So, the clowns in Georgia (yep. To quote Adam Savage: There's your problem) are setting up for a fight with the ACLU and the rest of the civilized world. They've set up the Ten Commandments inside of a court house (Why do they do that? Why; of all the places to put them, why blaspheme them by sticking them up in front of one of the most dysfunctional justice systems on the planet?), and to my knowledge, even passed a bill making it "perfectly legal" to do so.

The common argument I routinely here is that they're the foundation for American Law and the foundation for Western Law. Western Law I can't speak too, but I know they sure as hell are not the foundation for American Law; explicitly, the Constitution.

How so? A lot of atheists say that, but very few of them actually stop to explain the number of ways that the Ten Commandments violate the Constitution, expecting people to either know or go and look it up themselves. Well, I have some free time tonight (and an earache; the sinus infection wasn't bad enough, you know. I really hate living in this state, with it's unpredictable weather), so I'm going to lay out exactly how and why the Constitution, if it was inspired by the Bible and the Ten Commandments, as is so commonly claimed, it was as an example of what not to do in a system of law.

The very first thing you have to do when talking about this is decide which of the various versions you want to use. Exodus and Deuteronomy both give two versions with their major and minor differences, and each Christian sect has their own variation on the theme. There are some things that run in common, however, but they're not as many as you would think. When you think about it, the very concept of a "generic" list of 10 Commandments is offensive to at least some Christian sect somewhere, because "generic" usually means "dominate group", which in this case would be some form of Baptist. Because it becomes a theological clusterfuck trying to determine which set to use, however, I'm going to just role with whatever set is easiest for me to find - and because Wikipedia is there for me, and Exodus comes before Deuteronomy, that's the version I'm going to be using. I have no fetish for "original commandments" because, if you recall, Moses supposedly broke the original ones on the ground when he saw that the Americans were worshiping Adam Smith, money, and the golden idol of Capitalism Hebrews worshiping the golden calf, so I personally couldn't care less. I just need an example list to show you how wrong this is, so Exodus will do.

A Grammar Question

So this came up at work today, and I figured I'd ask around.

The subject we were discussing was turning nouns to verbs. We talked about how many nouns were also verbs, and how fluid English was in this regard. Well, on noun inevitably came up: Google. Google as a noun is a proper noun, because it refers to a noun representing a unique entity (in this case, the company Google). Like any noun, Google is has also become a verb. So the question raised was this: does one capitalize Google when using it as a verb? That is, "I had G/googled the answer?" It's a transitive verb, which means it's passing the action of the object onto the subject of the sentence: "I [sub.] had G/googled [verb. trans.] the answer [dir. obj.]." So it's regarded as a normal class of verb, serving a functional part of the sentence.

Normally, we wouldn't capitalize a verb. However, this verb is derived from a proper noun. In capitalizing it, we would turn it into one of English's handful of "proper verbs" - verbs that must always be capitalized. The further confuse matters, we capitalize adjectives derived from proper nouns; cf. Japanese, Australian, French, Korean, American, and we also capitalize adverbs derived from proper nouns, however rare they are; cf "We have regularly received enquiries regarding the availability of Islamic finance products, in particular Islamically compatible finance to purchase both residential and commercial properties".

Why wouldn't you capitalize a verb derived from an proper noun? Further more, wouldn't that make it a "proper verb", seeing as how the above are called "proper adjectives/adverbs/nouns"?

There's a few cases against it: boycott is derived from a proper noun. So is xerox. Neither of them are capitalized when used as a verb. However, "Canadianize", or "Americanize", are verbs that are capitalized. So would you extend the capitalization then to "Photoshop", "YouTube", and "Google" as well?

I'm of the belief that you should. And I think an entirely new class of verb needs to be created and called "proper verb" to reflect the changing and evolving nature of the language. Sound off in the comments below with your thoughts. I'm curious.

Fuck: Promoting Decency in Language

I occasionally visit Roger Ebert's blog from time to time - I'm not a huge fan of movies, I think the movie industry is a pile of shit and I could only wish Hollywood was half as liberal as the conservatives in the tinfoil hats wearing the persecution complexes say it is - but this one stuck out so I had to comment on it.

I've blogged in the past on bullying. I think bullying is endemic, and I think that the bullies have friends in high places who are willing to excuse their behaviors in the "name of tradition," which is this skewed thing that White people remember when they think about television shows set in the 1950s. In it, little scamps who always said "gee wiz" and wore stripped shirts knocked out Mr. Humperdinkel's back window with a slingshot, and had to apologize and everyone learned a valuable lesson. Bullies as they were remembered are nothing more than bromances waiting to happen. All you had to do was stand up to the bully and the problem went away.

I've commented before how I don't trust people who claim to have good memories. Claiming any of the above was even remotely true and attempting to prove to me that Andy Griffith or Leave it to Beaver are historical documentaries is enough for me to laugh you out of the country (fools like this are already promoting The Flintstones as a historical documentary). The memory is a funny thing, and the way memories are built are influenced less by the actual events and more by the things we see and hear about those events. This concept of the 1950s as a Utopia where the only Black guy on stage was a mailman who was always smiling and you never saw a gay person are memories of the 50s clearly built ex post facto. This argumentum ad excogitari praeterium/ratio ad fraudulenta historia is a framing device through which most conservatives - indeed, most Americans - view the present world.

This is especially prevalent in the way that we tell children to deal with bullies. The rugged independent nature of America dictates that we shouldn't rely on authority for anything, including dealing with our problems. All too often, said authority is the problem in this country, anyway, but that's another point. Because we live in this imagined past, all that needs to happen to deal with a bully is to bust him in the face (unless said bully is a girl. And then, when other girls fight back, we stand aghast a how violent society is making girls. Welcome to the world where no matter what you do you can never win - 51% of the human population lives here. It's not a pleasant place). For those of us anchored here in the real world, without our heads rammed up our ass and lodged in the colon of the made up past, that's not how this works. Not remotely. Violence isn't the answer, first of all, because it accomplishes nothing. Second of all, victim blaming and saying that it's the job of the individual being picked on to fight back leaves a bitter taste in my mouth; it's the job of the bully not to bully. How about that?

Enter a movie named Bully. I've heard in passing about this movie; it's a collection of stories about individuals who have been bullied, with the intent of yank America's head out of it's ass the hard way. It sounds like a pretty good movie - a movie that, unlike Avatar, serves a social function that society desperately needs (because what society really needs is more Magical Native American stereotypes projected on fictional creatures. Especially when most people treat Native Americans like they're fictional, anyway). So, in being what sounds like a pretty good movie, with a useful social function that society very much needs, the MPAA did the usual thing the intelligent folks at the MPAA does: they rated it R so that teens, who the movie is about, wouldn't be able to see it.

Proselytizing to Deaf Ears

Some people can't read. You'd think with the internet being as text-driven as it is, reading would be a valuable skill. Even for those of us who don't have good reading comprehension, you would imagine that would entail trying to go that extra mile to make sure you don't look like a massive asshole when you jump down someone's throat for something they never said.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case.

For an explicit point, I give you Froborr's post, The Problem with Proselytizing, made on January 16th, 2012.  This particular post has rocked the boat in a lot of ways, and drew any number of trolls who don't seem to care to read, or don't want to read, to the Slacktiverse.

I was, tentatively, part of that discussion, but I didn't make my voice known immediately. Let me say I had the same visceral reaction to it seems a lot of atheists, especially in other parts of the internet, had. Despite that, I support the piece now more than ever - especially given all of the silencing criticisms leveled at it, and at the Slacktiverse community as a whole, and the fact that, y'know, I went back and read the damn thing.

Homer and Codes

I've talked a bit about people who find codes in the strangest things. I plan to do a post that takes apart the whole notion of "code finding" in ancient texts - for instance, this BS surrounding the Bible Code. However, I have other things going on this evening, so I won't have time to.

But, as a prelude to it, my own proof that codes "exist".

I have a half-way decent knowledge of Ancient Greek. I'm self taught, so it's hit or miss, but otherwise fairly solid. Well, I sat down today and decided to see if Google Translate knew as much Ancient Greek as I did (humor me; I know here's a huge difference between Modern and Ancient Greek), by posting a few lines of the Odyssey in to Google Translate, in their original Ancient Greek, and translating them. Leaving aside linguistic drift (and the fact that 'c' isn't used for sigma anymore), the results were... interesting. And a linguistic trainwreck.

But make no mistake - if this is true, and it is, I am now a fervent believer in the Bible Code and Nostradamus. *sage nod*