Now With 20% More Fallacies!

In the wake of this turning 2012, there's sure to be a surge of interest in the various codes and such, especially as we get closer to the fateful day of December 22-25th, 2012, after which will occur December 23-26th, 2012. With that in mind, it's time to launch a preemptive push back.

One of the funnest aspect of looking at these "prophecies" and these "codes," and by larger extensions, the so-called psychics like Edgar Casey and others, is how many logical fallacies they hit on their way down to the bottom. Because they nail quite a few. Men like Casey and other prophecy "scholars" are very good at taking vague descriptions and blowing them way out of proportion, stretching the meaning of words like the Biblical Literalists ignore the majority of the Bible on the Political Right.

It can be fun to sometimes live in a world where there are such things. Those familiar with the Dark Matter setting, which was originally published by TSR under their flagship Sci-Fi label Alternity, and later re-appropriated by WotC for their d20 modern setting, know. Those familiar with a little show from the 1990s named The X-Files know. A world with conspiracies can a fun place. It's very exciting to think that you have secret knowledge that nobody else has; that you've been able to put together these pieces and look at the evidence in a different way, disregarding everything else along the way.  To pretend that there are these dark forces at work in the world and that you can see them - it gives an otherwise random world shape. That everything in the world happens because there are mysterious Illuminati that are pulling the strings behind the world curtain, or that the Bilderburgs and the CDC are working together to plant the next population-controlling virus in the population. However, this is fantasy, and most people recognize it as fantasy. It's not real. The Bilderburgs have a lot of power, but they don't set the tone for the entire world. A Freemason lounge can barely decide on what time of sandwiches they want for lunch most of the time, much less control a vast global conspiracy with other lounges. If it's always two Jewish people and three opinions, how does anything get done in the vast global conspiracies that seem them controlling the markets? It can fun to live in a world where there are these conspiracies, but it's also fun to live in a world with dragons and fairies and elves. The thing they have in common is that neither set of devices exists in the real world - not conspiracies, not dragons.

I understand the draw of conspiracies. There is something appealing to believing that you've thought of something and that you're hiding information that could implicate a vast global conspiracy, and that the government is out to get you. Real life is boring most of the time. Who doesn't want to have access to these top level files that implicate the existence of aliens at Area 51? Humans are natural story tellers and our minds are not geared towards critical thinking - critical thinking is something we have to train ourselves how to do. Nobody is born a critical thinker. We see patterns in nature and we ascribe meaning to those patterns - if you think about it, that's all language is. It's patterns on a sheet of paper that we ascribe meaning too. We you look up at the clouds and you see a face, or an airplane, or a cow or flower or whatever - it's the same thing. Conspiracies are the same; we look around us and we find these patterns and we ascribe meanings to them, and we connect the dots, and we come to conclusions. They're the wrong conclusions, but they're conclusions never the less. More importantly, they're interesting conclusions; ones that hold the attention, and that reach out and grab you.

But that doesn't change the fact that they're wrong. And it doesn't change the fact that, when spread as facts, we have a problem.

Good Riddance

And another one bites the dust.

One by one, they drop like flies. I understand that this is sort of the purpose of political primaries, but this tragifarce circus that the Republicans have attempted to guise as a "political primary" has been nothing if not entertaining. I feel that the Republican Primary should be, right about now, shooing out the clowns to make room for the real drama of an election, but there's a problem - all of their candidates are clowns.

Still, that didn't stop them from shooing out Michelle Bachmann, who kissed her hopes of being president good bye today, after finishing a dismal sixth place in the Iowa primary. Not that the results of that should make you feel comfortable - Frothy is in practically neck-and-neck with Romney. Here in Michigan, we do not have fond memories of Romney and Amway. However, I'll take unhappy memories over a lifetime of nightmares - that was why I voted for Obama rather than Palin/McCain last time around. He's been surprising; he's kept a lot of his promises, but you can't over look the fact that on the issue of civil rights Obama has been a bigger disaster than Bush, and I'd love to throw him out in favor of someone else, but that someone else sure as hell is not Romney. Or Paul.

It's going to come down to Paul or Romney, and Romney will likely win because he's the more consummate politician of the two, and also the more mediagenic. Romney is a shapeshifter without substance, like the vast majority of the people in the media. Paul is like the twisted little gnome that lives under asshat hill screaming at those fucking halflings to get off his property. That and Paul will get - rightly - gnawed to the bone for his racism.

Still, let's take this time to bid farewell to Bachmann. I'm actually rather disappointed - I was sorta hoping she actually would get the nomination, so she could run against Obama. I think the last landslide that would've been remotely close in size was one that happened 48 million years ago. Moving mountains indeed.

So, to commemorate the announce that Bachmann is retiring from the race (I probably should've done this for Cain, too, but Cain flew under the radar for a while and wasn't a big name until he supernovaed and left everyone going "WFT just happened?" Bachmann is here by sheer dint of her time spent on the campaign trail and in the media eye) I have a collection of some of the most intellectual, insightful, and fucking batshit quotes by Bachmann.

We Always Knew Flight was OP

Overland Flight is one of the most OP spells in 3.X D&D. There's a lot of reasons why, but in any game with map combat, flight tends to skew to favor of the battle. Another example I can think of is Returners, an FFRPG game that's freeware.

But who would know that using flight in melee combat here in real life would be OP, too?

Just ask this ant, who's gonna get pwned by a wasp.

The Polichicks

There are days when I feel like Hank Hill. The best I can manage is "Damn it, Bobby." There are other days when I wish I could muster that scream he does; because if I could, I'd certainly use it here.

Behold, the horror that is the Polichicks.

Not Your Father's 99%

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a legitimate, grass roots organization. You can tell because of the high level of initial disorganization. This blog supports the Occupy Wall Street movement, not just because it's author is one of the 99%, but because solidarity is a necessity in this world, when the predatory upper class is constantly looking for a means to hold down the lower class.

Marxist theory is probably the best way to explain how this works. See, in the Marxist view of history, there are three classes: the poor, the middle, and the wealthy. Contrary to popular belief, the wealthy are not the bourgeois. That's a title reserved for the middle class - that is, the shop owners, the employers, etc. According to Marxism, history is nothing but one long struggle between the ruling classes (the bourgeois, who answer to the wealthy) and the proletariat, or the poor people who are exploited by both the bourgeois and the wealthy, repeatedly. Different individuals have taken this in different directions, although I find that Lenin was amazingly accurate in his predictions of what would happen when commodities find themselves controlled by one group of people, or when banks become private enterprises (read his essay, On Imperialism, for a more thorough view.)

I'm not going to spend to much time on Lenin or Marx. I wanted to bring them up because the current OWS movement highlights the ongoing division of the rich verses the poor that's been happening ever since humans developed an economy for their society (and even before that; the god/desses only spoke to certain people, and faith is a currency all it's own, more potent than any paper bill or gold coin minted in history). This is the same vein as the Bonus Army or the Wobblies; it hasn't become the Peasant Revolution of the 1380s yet, and with any luck, it won't morph into a full blown French Revolution (despite what I've heard people say, I don't think it'll go that far. I doubt that we'll see a Lenin-style October Revolution. But if it does, dibs on manning the guillotine. I'd rather be behind it than under it.)

Instead, I found one of those typical responses that pissed me off, so I'm going to look at that. I just wanted to make it very plan and very clear that, as a student of Marx and Lenin, I understand how class warfare works, how it's shaped the history of humanity, and how I'm not scared to admit that I've read either man (dismissals of my arguments on their faces because of who I'm influenced by will be laughed at and pitched aside with the other ad hominem garbage. The most vocal critics of Marx and Lenin don't know a thing about either man or what they said to begin with, and usually resort to making things up anyway.)

So, let's take a look at this thing that's gotten under my skin.

Will You Idiots Make Up Your Goddamn Minds?

The only thing more hilarious than Rick Perry is watching him shove is foot so far down his throat he'll be shitting toenails for the next few weeks.

See, in the recent debate, Perry got himself in trouble with the TEAbaggers and Teavangelists when he announced that, following in True States Rights tradition (which, for those who aren't native to the United States, means that this fool thinks Texas, one of the biggest Welfare states in the Union, could survive a day by itself. We keep tell them to shut up and do it then, but they don't, because they know. Today, State's rights are uniformly used to couch bigoted principles. Whenever someone brings up 'State's rights' on certain issues, it's because they're a bigot, usually a homophobic one), state should be allowed to decide whether or not they want to pass gay marriage laws.

Heh.

Oops.

Feeling Spiteful

I've got writer's block, so I've put most of my fiction on hold until I can straight this out inside of my head. It's not something I want to do; I enjoy writing fiction, and when I can't, I become a little grumpy and spiteful. What's more, I can't sleep; insomnia isn't a regular friend of mine but I am involved in an extended relationship with it. So I'm double grumpy. Thankfully, I have a blog and a means to focus on my favorite target to take my spite and general grumpiness out on - everyone's favorite Fundies over on FTSDT.

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.

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.