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.

The Age of the Post Hero

Before I go anywhere here, let me explain where I've been.

Near the end of last month, we had a scare with my dad. He hurt himself pretty badly (a TBI, or traumatic brain injury for those who don't speak medicine), and had to be rushed off to the hospital. He spent the rest of the month there, and after a few scares, made a recovery and now he's home. So there's that to be thankful for.

That said, I do plan to start blogging more - I've sort of let this place hang, and haven't been doing anything with it even before the injury. Part of this is because I'm working on not one but three separate novels right now.

- The Blue Pimpernel: Liquidity, the second Blue Pimpernel book. I've still got the release date set for sometime early next year, but I'm not going to release it before it's ready. I'm making pretty good progress, though; one of the hardest parts of writing a sequel is trying to keep with the feel of the original novel. The Blue Pimpernel had a very distinctive feel to it; the first part of the book was laced with a pervading sense helplessness and despair; the second half of the book was underscored by a very strong sense of hope. I'm trying to balance those two feelings, and it can be rather difficult at times and requires fine tuning. The third book, Entropy, has been outlined already and is just waiting for me to finish Liquidity. ~14,000 words in the most recent draft (the finished book is over 90,000 words). This novel calved off of Entropy; Entropy actually has a finished draft, but that draft was over 300,000 words, which was twice what the first novel was and unacceptably long. So I split the beginning off and Liquidity developed from that. The benefit of this is that Liquidity ... ahem... flows well into Entropy.

- Terra Firma, my first and thus far my only long going transhuman novel. And by transhuman, I mean "utterly and uncompromisingly embraces the future." I've taught myself French for this novel (granted, I taught myself French so Aya could speak it too. In fact, French appears a lot in most of my works: I grew up watching Sesame Street broadcasts in Quebecois, and I could speak conversational French Quebecois by the time I was entering Elementary School. American schools being what they are, I never spoke another foreign language again until High School, and by that time, my command of French had atrophied. Not helping was that the language I chose was German, a language unlike French in a lot of ways, so I didn't really come back to French with intention of using it until.. less than 4 years ago.)   Terra Firma is set on Voyageur, an aerostat in the Venusian atmosphere. Voyageur is a cross-section of the Francophone world, featuring a relatively large cast of Indians (the main character is a Tamil woman), Africans (one of the secondary characters is an Somali pseudo-male), Southeast Asians and some Polynesians, influenced strongly by French culture. I'll have more on Terra Firma as the novel progresses from its early stages, but I'll say this: the novel embodies every single philosophic point I count as a virtue - it's uncompromisingly pro-democracy, pro-post-scarcity, pro-transhumanism and technoprogressive, and the driving conflict of the story is whether or not to terraform Venus and make it into a new Earth, and the conflict it generates between the different factions, along with the underhanded political dealings. This novel was as heavily influenced by Orion's Arm and GURPS Transhuman Space as it was by Eclipse Phase (perhaps it was influenced more by the previous two than by the latter, since Eclipse Phase is very dark, and this novel can only be described as much preppy post-cyberpunk as it is preppy post-human). ~47,000 words as of the first pre-draft. Outlander eventually evolved into this book.

- White Rabbit, Black Swan, the bastard child of Enlightened satire and popular culture, this particular novel is where I go when I get really mad at something. It's plot is relatively simple and straight froward; this simple and strong plot allows be built a lot of satire around it, and cram it full of references to everything from Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels (to major influences) to Cosmos and even The Flintstones. Some topics that I satirize/mercilessly make fun of include the prosperity gospel, Rapture theology, Randian theology, the current "politics of popularity", and anti-vaccination and other air-head leftist anti-science ideologies. Think Alice in Wonderland + Gulliver's Travels + Rifts + political pop culture and you're getting close. ~29,000 words as of the rough draft. I don't have a clear source for where this book came from, but it's been relatively consistent in every draft since I first started it some 4 years ago.

So, now you know where I am and what I've been up too, what I've been up too, and what works I'm involved in at the moment. I plan to do more blogging in the future, though, so don't fear!

Now, onto my observations for the day.

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.

Oh Goodie! A Dialogue!

h/t Dispatches


Why the hell don't I get these emails? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the "Meet hot girls now" and "date hot Asian ladies" spam in my mailbox (not really; spamfilters GO!), but why can't once in a while get something like this? Maybe I don't know enough creationists, or I'm not on enough mailing lists. Whatever the case, while browsing Dispatched from the Culture Wars today, I came across this excellent little dialogue that Ed had posted.

As my readers know, I love a good chance to snark at something. So there's no way I'm going to pass up this opportunity. Picture the scene: The back drop is set. The lecture hall is full, and the professor is getting ready to give a lecture. It could be a professor of anything; cosmology to astrophysics to nanochemistry to unicorn biology - Fundies who write and enjoy this stuff can't tell the difference. The point is, he's getting ready to give his lecture. In steps the brave and noble (always White, always Male) student. He clears his throat and interjects, interrupting the classroom. The mandatory black guy in the corner is going "Aaawww hell naw" and the room is a deep hush. The stage is set for an intellectual Battle of the Titans - but because that would outstrip our budget constraints, we give you these two strawmen, instead:

Batman, Aliens, and Hollywood

There are two things that have entered my world lately that are worthy of note, because bizarre thinking and criticism of movies and literature is the norm for me. Neither technically exist yet, but apparently they're working on it.

The first thing that came to my attention is the most recent trailer for the last Dark Knight movie, The Dark Knight Rises. The other thing that came to my attention comes to my attention through PZ Myer's blog; the fact that Ridley Scott is going to do a prequel to the Aliens movie. Both of these come from Hollywood. Thus, you know the origin of the post's name.

Now please excuse me while I indulge in some deep, probably over-thinking it but well deserved criticism.

And Here's That Family Shit Again...

Enigma's had a rough day today. So you know what that means, don't you?

That's right! It's time to pull up the scratching post and eviscerate me some Republican stupidity. So go ahead and pull up a seat - today's victims privileged assholes pretending to be victims are Focus on Patriarchy, and the application that they ask for college students to fill out for their "Focus Leadership Institute", which, as you can probably tell by the name, is a very reputable institution.

So, let's have some fun, shall we?

The Word Game

Redefining words is fun.

You know what's even more fun that redefining words?

Changing or restricting their meaning so you can use them to silence opposition.

A Tea Party Movie!

Oh my sweet holy pogosticks.

The crazy bastards did it. They did. They actually did it.

They made a movie about the TEA Party.

My goodness. I'm not sure whether I should be horrified or if I should fall out of my computer chair laughing my ass off.

Sadly, it's creatively title "Tea Party: The Documentary Film." Really, I'd think they would get more mileage out of calling it "Teabagging: The Movie." They'd get more hits on Youtube for their trailer, anyway. And speaking of their trailer; holy shit is that the most melodramatic thing I've ever seen. Let's take a closer look at it, shall we?

In A World Gone Upside Down...

Hey their, kids! Enigma's got two brilliant pieces of work for you today, so just set back and enjoy the commentary and dissection of the incoming stupidity.

Answering Ayn Rand

Well kiddos, today is Saturday, which means that ol' Enigma has another college-level dissertation lined up for you. Today's bull's-eye is painted in bright red around an ideology that everyone loves to mock - including yours truly - but not one I'm sure everyone understands.

That's right - today I'll be answering Ayn Rand, and criticizing and deconstructing her philosophy, called Objectivism. Objectivism and Rand's philosophy are sorely misunderstood on the Internet. Everyone loves to mock the Randroids, but not everyone understands what it means to be one. While I've savored taking apart fundamentalism in the past, religious fundamentalism - especially the American Protestant Evangelical version - is not nearly as well thought out or planned as Rand's is.

Make no mistake. Rand's philosophy sits squarely with the rest of the Enlightened philosophies, which is why I chose to answer her today. Rather than the usual Enlightenment verses Romanticism theme or Enlightenment verses Postmodernism, today you get a ringside seat to Enlightenment verses Enlightenment.

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: