Timecube, Revelation Style

I'm not sure what the correlation between political and ideological extremism and crappy web design is, but between this, Timecube, CAP, and a number of extremist websites, I'm pretty sure that we have proof epistemic closure results in pathetic withering of those facilities.

In a sense, what we're here today to do is to swing at the low hanging fruit. I found this link through the Slacktivist, since there's no way I'd go looking for this stuff on my own (lies. That's pure bunk, but don't tell anyone. I just didn't go looking for this one). We I have for you today is a End Times Tribulation Chart (You have to scroll down to find it, but you'll see it. It looks like a worksheet table in a Microsoft office document, because I'm pretty sure that's where it was originally designed). This document comes us courtesy of the blackest pits of Hell the authoritative Tribulation Institute (no, the rest of the site isn't any prettier). This outline is a full map of the Tribulation, and because I love the intellectual aspect of picking apart ideas, I'm going to high light all of the various problems I can find with this one.

"But... you put too much thought into what Christian Fundamentalists believe."

"Well, someone has to."

No, Liberatarianism Does not Follow Atheism (part 2)

You can find Part 1 here.

So, having gone on that long spiel about what libertarianism is and isn't, let's take a look at the article.

No, Liberatarianism Does not Follow Atheism (part 1)

Readers of this blog know two things about me: one, I'm an atheist, but I don't like the term and I prefer humanist for the same reason Asimov did. Second, I have an extremely... unsympathetic... view of Libertarianism. 

So whenever I see something connecting the two like they're natural progressions of one another, I get rather upset. See, Libertarianism is, at its heart, a collection of incredibly varied political philosophies, only a handful of which follow any kind of logical progression and are remotely connected with the real world. So before I go into this, let me outline the various types of "lolbertarian" you'll meet (if only because "libertard" is far too harsh and hateful, for the same reason "retard" is. Some of these are also likely going to be types of libertarianism that you do not recognize from any debates online; the "internet libertarian classic" is a deontological libertarian who holds propertarian and minarchian views. Below the cut is what exactly that means).

Libertarianism, in most instances, is the castle built in the clouds; the pie in the sky. It gives us the potential for a society where people don't have to do what they don't want to, where individuals shouldn't be forced to do anything by anyone, and where creative spirit and freedom flourish, like the works of J. S. Steinmen, M.D. It's a great idea. It works great in theory, just like the rotary engine and communism. And it works in real life just like the rotary engine and communism did, too.

Every child dreams of not having to go to bed and of staying up late and eating whatever they want to and doing whatever they want to regardless of what their parents say or what society expects of them. When you age that by about 20 or 30 years, you get most libertarians.

The Ultimate Pro-Life Argument (Doesn't Exist)

For as long as I can remember, the RCC has been the predominate peddler of the notion that life begins at birth, for some magical reason (soul enshrinement? Can't be. Aquinas is sometimes used to argue this, but that's only half the truth. And that's before we dive into the rampant misogyny of the whole thing - what do you expect from a man quoting Aristotle, who as from that bastion of feminism and gender equality known as Ancient Greece? And it fails biology, since the soul wouldn't technically be enshrined for males until 120 days, since we're all female at gestation and only become male once the extra testosterone triggers the development of certain chromosomes. Bad science aside - I'm not going to hold that against either man since they did the best with what they had at the time - the RCC's position here isn't based on any kind of strict reading of the Bible, either. After all, Leviticus gives slave prices for any person over 3 years old, but not under, and Exodus clearly declares that if a man kills a fetus he pays a fine, but it's not murder unless the woman is killed as well. God declares to Jeremiah that "I knew ye in the womb," but that's God talking to Jeremiah, not God talking to all of humanity. David declares that he was a sinner at conception, but that's David talking, not God, and that matches existing doctrine anyway without saying that life starts; the sin is there before the life starts, since the sin is present in the parents, not the fetus. Part of me wants to blame the RCC stance ultimately on the Romans, since the RCC is basically a 1,000-year-old reactionary movement against a culture that doesn't exist anymore, and since the Romans practiced contraception and abortion, the RCC might have branded those sinful because the Romans did them. They did it for bathing, though there's not a single Biblical reason for it). Regardless what the ultimate reason happens to be, they're still wrong, since there's no such thing as a soul to enshrine. But that's their belief, even if it is convoluted, backwards, and relies on several very pinpoint and almost cherry-picked readings - rest assured, dear reader, it's nowhere near as complicated as that Rapture/Second Coming garbage that American Evangelicals push.

So when something like this happens:

Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.

Being good pro-lifers, the Church hospital admitted to murder and offered to step up and do what was necessary to so help the family through this dark time, raising the moral standard for the anti-abortion side of the debate and set precedent that will strengthen those arguments legally:

Thoughts on Spree Shootings

A while ago, I wrote an essay about the age of the post-hero. This ties closely in with what I plan to ramble about today.

There's been a lot of finger pointing about the nature of the shooting in Newtown. And just like always, there's a rush to blame everything but the actual sources of the problem themselves: Easy access to guns and the culture that we have.

Superfascists?

I like the superhero genre.

On the surface, this is no surprise. After all, at a glance, superheroism and transhumanism have a lot in common. Superheroes are a cut above "the rest" of the population, and are stronger, faster, and smarter and have powers and abilities that we can only dream about. They can do things that no person today can do. Transhumanism has similar goals; future humans may be stronger, smarter, faster and healthier than humans today, and they have seeming superpowers - the ability to think faster, the ability to see through several wavelenghts of the electromagnetic spectrum unaided, the ability to communicate "telepathically" courtesy of computers and a wireless network that they are intimately wired into, the ability to smell like they want, perhaps change their facial features and look like things that aren't even really human. Some of the more popular superpowers exist in nature and can be replicated no problem; flight can be accomplished with wings (so long as you have suitable air pressure and gravity that's not too high), which can be attached or perhaps even grown. Seeing in the dark unaided may be one of the first superpowers that humans achieve naturally; growing up, infravision was a trait of the near-human races like Elves and Dwarves in AD&D, and that's something we may accomplish. Immunity to diseases, defeating cancer, and the ability to remain young and "pretty" (for a certain value of pretty; different people find different things attractive and there's no one uniform image of what "beauty" is, no matter how much the media wants to convince you otherwise) for longer periods of time and even biological and perhaps digital immortality - all of these things are possible, but they're further down the road and for now, exist only as "super powers" in comic books and spells inside of fantasy stories.

That's on the surface. Under the surface, there's something more insidious going on. And this is where we run into my major problem with the superhero genre in specific, but fantasy in general (fantasy less so, because I'm sure there are fantasy stories that deal with the democratization of magic and how common it is, and how much it changes lives for the better - the "steampunk" sub-genre in general seems to aim for this, if not always get there. However, urban fantasy is really bad for this, by virtue of the existence of a "masquerade".  People can't have these toys, because only an unelected few are 'mature' enough to use them. It plays into the same emotions that conspiracy theories, like 9/11, Oklahoma City, the JFK shootings, Atlantis, ONI, Roswell, and to a lesser degree, Birtherism, which is based more on militant ignorance and stupidity than the above emotions, among others, play into - regret, paranoia, fear and cynicism. A more practical reason is because it keeps up willing suspension of disbelief, but these are still emotions being tapped into at the cost of keeping up that suspension). 

Transhumanism is when you take all of the marvels I detailed above and make them available to everyone. The basics - smarter, faster, healthier, stronger, the ability to control your biological sex and reproduction cycles,  "prettier" (again, for a certain value of pretty), and biological immortality - should be made available to everyone with no cost, while the additional stuff treated, like night vision, wings (if possible, and I don't see why not) and others treated like cosmetic surgery. The thing is, transhumanism is us taking this technology and setting it up so that everyone has access to it, regardless of economic level, class, race or biological sex.

The Superhero novel does not do this. The genre does not propose taking these great powers that make superheroes strong and figuring out why it works, and then giving those powers to the common man. Nowhere do scientists try to figure out why Superman is like he is, and synthesize some sort of genetic treatment that can make everyone like that. The closest that I'm aware we come is when Lux Luthor does it, and as we all know, Luthor is a villain.

My personal philosophy is transhumanism. But I like the superhero genre; and because of this, there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance that comes along with that. I recently made a post about my take on the Dark Knight Rises; it was made shortly after the movie, so I hadn't had long enough a time to let it sit. As I have, and I've gone back and looked at the genre, and read some comments surrounding it, it's only served to crystallize my opinion of the genre.

Superheroes are answerable to nobody. They go around and they exact their own law - sure, it's the law as we know it, but they only follow that because they chose too, not because someone makes them. Superman could tear down the entire United States government and conquer the world. The fact that he doesn't, though, doesn't make it any more possible. They have these powers, these smarts, this technology, that they continually tell the rest of the world that "[we're] not ready for" yet, making them the arbiters of this secret knowledge, not unlike the old wizard who sits in his tower all day and hordes knowledge, rather than sharing it. Pop quiz: dragons are villains because they horde treasure. So why aren't superheroes villains because they horde the knowledge of their power, and their own technology?

Why, oh why, can they get away with "you can have it because you're not ready yet"?

Why, oh why, can they get away with flying around and enforcing their law on little people who aren't half as powerful as they are, operating outside of the boundaries of the police?

Why can they do this stuff, and is there any way to change this genre - salvage it - so that it's not so anti-intellectual and anti-progress?

The Dark Knight Rises

I made a post a while back about my concerns over the movie, The Dark Knight Rises. I just got back from watching the film, so here's my take on it. So, here's the warning: Spoilers ahead. I will discuss most of the major plot points and twists, so if you have not seen it yet, do not read this post beyond the break.

I will say I liked it. I was okay with the movie; it set wrong with me, though, and below the break, I'll elaborate on why. However, I do recommend seeing it, because it really is a well directed movie. So, without further ado, let's dive in.

Transgression of Gary Stus

Anthem, Chapter 1

So, where we last left off we were just getting into the Council. We talked a bit about our protagonist's "curse" - that is, he's a 6 foot tall canon sue and, by virtue of that, different from everyone else in this world. I suppose when everyone in the world is the same and willingly goes along with this degenerate, straw-stuffed form of "collectivism" - which is unlike any form of collectivism that I've ever bore witness to; not even anarcho-communism is like this, and fascism elevates some individuals above others - if you even make the slightest wave you're going to stand out. But the novel shines on our friend, Equality 7-2521. He has a long and storied history making waves by being better than everyone else. But then, this comes with being a canon sue, so there should be no surprise there.

Council of Omnisicent Vagueness

Anthem, Chapter 1

So, we're still in chapter 1 of Anthem. Previously, I took a look at the character names - our protagonist, Equality 7-2521, refers to himself using the first person plural, "we", because at some point in the future people have lost all identity and individuality - never mind that Equality 7-2521 has a distinctive and individual name from his love interest, Liberty 5-3000. This has a very real literary purpose, but the mere fact that Equality 7-2521 has a separate name/number from Liberty 5-3000 suggests that they are separate individuals with distinctive personalities and therefore, have individuality. That they have individuality shoots Rand's message in the foot right out of the gate; they're not supposed to have individuality. This is a society without individuality, or one that suppresses individuality (by giving you individual names...). That's why they don't use the first person pronoun. Clearly, the book is contradictory on this when you think about it hard enough, but contradictory self-defeating logic are hardly unusual for Rand's philosophy.

I feel it necessary to state that again that it's necessary to have these distinctive names; otherwise, this would be a headache to read. "Now who the hell is this guy again?" We do it enough in books where the characters have separate names and personalities; attempting something like this would make the book unreadable (okay, okay, fine. Even more unreadable). I also feel it necessary to point out the fact that it's necessary for our protagonist to have a distinctive name shows that individuality is a human trait that, no matter how hard "collectivism" tries, will never go away. There's no amount of psychosurgery that could make that go away. To make that go away, you have to remove sentience, and therefore, you're no longer human. In fact, I remember playing (running, actually) a game called Alternity. Alternity is a game system; it has an attached setting called Star*Drive, which is a hard-ish ("hard" compared to Star Wars, "hard-ish" compared to Star Trek, and mushy soft when compared to Orion's Arm) science fiction space opera setting. One of the playable alien species in the game was a race of extremely humanoid rubber forehead aliens called the Aleerian. The Aleerian are actually born with integrated nanotechnology; it's an interesting concept, but you don't have to be an alien for that. Eclipse Phase does this with humans, who are born in exowombs. The Aleerian, however, are all wired into one another, and they willingly subdue their own personality for the greater whole of the species - in short, their hat was a theme park version of communism, manifest in alien cyborgs. They used names like what Rand uses, but they still retained a degree of individuality despite it; an Aleerian (or, because humans are bullies and creative, the Mechalus) did not have to totally submit their individuality (because, frankly, that'd make for a really boring species to play). Thus, names like Deidre-3201 and Gamma-34214, your "typical" Mechalus name, aren't unusual. There's the idea that they submit themselves to the whole willingly, but at the same time, they still have that degree of individuality present. Rand likely didn't want that degree of individuality there, nor did she want the idea that this was done willingly, since that undermines her message: collectivism does not eradicate individuality. Furthemore, the Mechalus are  fictional "aliens" with this as their hat, while these are supposed to be humans in Rand's book.

This is the problem with writing anvillious allegories. I walk a fine line when I write allegories, and I try not to let it get in the way of the story. Here in Anthem, the allegory is the story. Thus, little things like this can blow the narrative wide open, like an over-inflated car tire, and send the whole book screaming off the edge of a cliff 300 feet up in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

So, it's easily enough said, "well, that does it for this book. When your key conceit does a bellyflop instead of a swan dive and misses the pool by about six yards, it's time to call it a day."Alas, where's the fun in that?

So, let's continue learning a bit about Rand's world, and see what other problems we can find!

Names the Same

(Anthem, chapter 1)

Last time, I sat analyzed Rand's foreword and took a close look at the environment that Rand grew up. Those types of literary theory - historical and deconstruction - are good for analyzing and attempting to understand why Rand is where she is, and how she got there. I should say that I'm just as vulnerable to the whole "death of the author" thing as the next person is, but I'll try to stay impartial (pfft. Like we know that's going to happen). I'll try to keep with the historical and deconstructive methods of analysis - unlike how the term is used, I'll really be using deconstruction, but this won't be a deconstruction proper since I'll be using other literary analysis methods, too.

So anyway, having analyzed Rand's foreword, we now hold our nose and plunge headfirst into the novel proper. I promise you that it's not as heavy-handed as Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but that's like saying, oh, I dunno, that the sun isn't as hot as AB7. While both are clearly hot, there's a bit of a disparity between the degrees of hot that we're talking here.

So, let's get started.