Here is the text of a pamphlet I wrote (revised slightly; I added a short paragraph at the beginning to include a discussion of a better understanding of what Jonh Yoo means by Good Faith – which is far more perverted than I originally conceived.)  Originally handed out to about 100 protesters, (mostly law students I think, although I did give one to George McGovern!  who seemed like a very nice guy by the way).  I also cross-posted it to the forums afterwards, although there are no responses by EvanTH, John Yoo’s well-known vaugely sock-puppetish SA posting persona. Anyways, the pamphlet was originally titled “Torture is a Product of the Market of Desire,” which is a really unfortunate title but I had the flu and printed these damn things at the last minute.  Torture in Good Faith is a much better title, IMHO.

Infrateal gave me such extensive feedback on developing my argument smoothly and coherently (and with such gusto) that I added him as a co-author.  God Bless!

That funny part at the end was my attempt to take back that powerful patriotic American essence that’s been recently co-opted and stolen by the large corporate interests that currently power the Tea Party.  The song of course describes the American flag, and the prose-part is sorta a free whellin’ satirical inversion of Shelley’s immortal sonnet Ozymandias.  So now you know.

A Condemnation of the Ideology of John Yoo
By J.R. and L.V.

John Yoo has defended his decisions on torture in “good faith” in his role at the DOJ, which most regular and reasonable people would take to mean that he fully understood the stakes and chose a path of action internally consistent with his own view of the world.  That is not what *he* means, however.

The “Good Faith” that John Yoo speaks of, on the matter of torture, is actually the name of a doctrine that he, along with the rest of the Bush Six, have created specifically to answer the question of torture. It says that as long as an interrogator does not *honestly believe,* in good faith, that any particular action is torture to a detainee, then the committed act is thus *not* torture, even if most other regular and reasonable people – especially the detainee himself – believe it to be so. The “Good Faith Doctrine” is nothing more than a buearacratic Catch-22 (ya know, the best Catch there is!) that aims to eliminate moral responsibility from the equation and to insulate the agents of the United States from any kind of culpability, despite what any regular and reasonable people might think of the matter.

The loophole is critically flawed, however. Even if this perverted doctrine could absolve those sadistic solicitors at the very bottom of the chain of command of their crimes, the fact that the writ was not a defensive measure, but a pre-emptive one, means that the men who breathed power into its conception *do* themselves understand that what they worked to enable is torture.  The “good faith” of the interrogators thus derives from the actual good faith of men like John Yoo.  That these actions were taken through his good faith means they truly reflect his view of the world, providing us with a periscope into the living, active heart of his ideology, its lenses unclouded by any dissemblance. What we observe is that through this instrument of good faith the approval and encouragement of torture techniques, such as waterboarding, which mechanically induces the physiological sensation of death, and the possibly more terrifying sensory deprivation, which severs a man from the world to simulate the entirety of death, came to be effectively actualized, for a time, into US law. These instruments of terror were considered necessary, in good faith, to prevent terror. How did such a cold and utilitarian perspective of humanity – a perspective whereby the individual person can be, at a moment’s notice, subsumed into mass numerical identity as a humanoid token of calculation – come to be lived in good faith? For it is that critical leap, turning human into mechanical humanoid, that is the core of the controversy and outrage of Yoo’s work in the Bush administration. The possibility of a sudden transformation from human to humanoid should be terrifying to more than just enemy combatants plucked from the battlefields of Afghanistan. Could you imagine your senator or congressman or hometown mayor saying: “Sorry, y’all, for this torture n’ all, but we’ll put an end to it once we develop technology to directly extract information from your brain… y’know, like we do from a black box from a plane crash?” – always helpfully putting the discussion in accessible terms – “That’s why we voted to fund research at this university, after all…” The prospect of anyone in our democratic government propounding such a view is unthinkable, and yet John Yoo and the Bush Six, as the other top officials in the Bush Administration have become known, not only thought it but did it, from the shadows, unaccountable to the American people.

Such a cynical ideology is far more pervasive than just Yoo. The outrageous torture memo is, at its core, aligned with both neoliberal reasoning which considers torture (or any human question) on the basis of a “cost-benefit” analysis or utilitarian tradeoff, and neoconservative rhetoric which propounds torture as an unquestionable necessity. Setting aside empirical evidence against the ability of torture to render reliable intelligence, all such arguments remove a human being’s humanity entirely from the matter, and thus imply that torture’s goals are acceptable even if the current method is not. That such a view is widely entertained is the result of no conspiracy theory, but what we see as a national existential malaise brought on ever-so-steadily as cultural and technology evolution have disconnected us from each other. The case of John Yoo and the Bush Six is just a particular instantiation of a much more widespread ideology that has begun to see us, as human beings, as abstract units to be controlled and quelled and kept at a safe distance. Fearful of the irrational forces of desire that exist in the human mind, this ideology demands a brutal and unrelenting order: at the individual level, that these forces be locked away, and at the societal level, when desires run orthogonal to any particular individual, that they be manipulated for society’s own good. Whether justice is brought to bear in this case or not, we, as a people, must reject any line of thought that would seek to deny us our own humanity.

One consequence of this human to humanoid ideological shift is promotion for a so-called “market democracy,” where matters of society are handled solely by the rules of and the faith in the free market: if the people want it, then the market will reflect that demand, thus bringing democracy in its purest and fairest sense to all people. We disagree that an idea hatched in such rarefied ideological air can survive in reality, not without growing into a monster. A market system ignores the checks and balances built into democracy as we currently know it to prevent minorities from being trampled by the majority; “pure” majority rule is mob rule, not only tyrannous in itself but susceptible to extraordinary delusions and the tyranny of a manipulator. The widespread belief that The Free Market Is God cannot help but be contrasted with an equally widespread but oppositely aligned belief of animosity for our American government.

In his 1958 essay, “Two Kinds of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin discusses the difference between the negative and positive freedoms, on which the relationship between an individual and society is built. Negative liberty is constituted of constraints that society has defined for the individual, with the implication that the individual has the freedom to do anything that he or she is not explicitly denied. Positive liberty, in compliment, is the freedom implied in “free will”, the self-determination that allows one to care for and change the world around them. This differentiation is important as an instance of one kind necessarily negates the existence of the other for any particular case, and both are needed for any healthy society. The great triumph of democracy is the right of all citizens to proactive involvement in their government, placing the positive liberty of self-determination in command of that great arbiter of negative liberties. Thus democracy signifies a subjugation of negative liberty to positive free will, while retaining negative liberties as a counterbalance.

Thus a society dependent on a pure market system of rule does not represent true democracy for two reasons:

First, a regulatory body of negative rights is no longer ultimately subordinate to positive rights; it is absent entirely. The recent economic disaster has demonstrated the massively deleterious ramifications of even negligent regulation; consider a similar disaster afflicting not only the national budget and your pocketbook, but the nation itself, your liberties and physical security.

Second, the human desires which constitute free will, and thus the self-determination guaranteed by our system of democracy, manifest themselves within that system by sustained efforts: voting is instantaneous, but campaigning for a preferred candidate or issue is what controls the vote, and candidates committed to running for office is prerequisite for a vote. Such efforts to change the government by campaigning can be considered linear, as vectors of self-determination; only after these vectors have run their course is an instantaneous point of measure taken in a vote. Short-circuiting this process to yield the derivative instantly does not measure the true will of the constituency, with their human need for time to advance their campaigns. A marketplace may provide a majority, but as a snapshot on a curve fluctuating faster than human reason; all semblance of voting reflecting considered opinion is replaced by commodified desires, simple machines that produce simple, free-floating cravings. A market of desire is a system built from a fundamental, crass reductionism.

A market is Darwinian by nature, and thus a market of desire ranks the biggest, purest, and most HUNGRY desires as most valuable: those iron-clad, invincible base instincts, unaffected by rhyme or reason or community. The great danger of such a system lies in the fact that its will is arbitrated by the power that arbitrates all markets – capital. Whether a market is a fair way of appropriating human resources is a separate matter, but on the matter of appropriating the resource of human consciousness, the danger is absolute: it is the path to Fascism, as we understand as totalitarianism developed by and channeled through mass movements. Propagandists, like Frank Luntz, George Lakoff, and Clotaire Rapaille, would seek to design an interface into our desire, little buttons that manipulate a part in order to manipulate the whole – and all you need to press a button is capital. Corporations such as Forrester and IDC seek to create a user manual to the humanoid, a handy guide that shows which buttons to push and how to amplify the effects of a push through identity/wedge politics – and all you need to give for this helpful info is capital. But as these subversive manipulations are externally induced into our consciousness, their presence as part of the whole is not coherent, and inducing cognitive dissonance is hardly in the rational self interest of the individual, or eventually, of society. While the mind of a human being is an unquestionably hardy creation, the end point for an individual in a market of desire is the same desperate, psychotic insanity that occurs any time that irrational desire overwhelms conscious will – effects seen in the likes of Joseph Stack, Malik Hasan, Jack Bedell, and the very same fundamentalist terrorist suicide bombers that our war on terror is targeted against.

I conclude that democracy powered through the derivative of free will is not a democracy of human beings, but a pathological ideology that leads to fascism, which, we reiterate for clarity, we understand as totalitarianism developed by and channeled through mass movements. For it is through this ideology and its utilitarian view of humanity that the Patriot Act, which sanctions dictatorial powers for the executive branch as long as it can maintain a state of perpetual war, was authored by John Yoo and the Bush Six in good faith. It was through this ideology that silent, warrantless surveillance of American citizens was demanded by John Yoo and the Bush Six in good faith. And it follows only from this ideology that a justification of torture and reduction of human beings to mere flesh-covered containers of information is possible in good faith. The ideology of John Yoo is the ideology of Fascism and THAT, in its totality, is what we have come here today to protest.  It is time for the rest of us regular and reasonable people to assert that moral responsibility, not torture, is what we must derive from good faith.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a lonely voice rings out across the sea…

“It takes just,
a single song of rock-n-roll…
echo-ing away into the night…
and across the stars shrines through a light,
and the darkness… begins to fade all awaaayyyY…”

And in New York’s harbor, a cold grey statue stirs to life… her butt’s ’bout burned to the filter, and so yeah, you could say she’s got a bit of an AXE to grind. Cold smoke still wisping from her fingers, this colossal Queen of Queens slowly reaches down, underneath her robes, and emerges with the flash of BLUE STEEL – ye mighty ten-ton-tall electric gee-tar of the nation’s psalm of freedom. An old rumor sez that she chiseled “LIVE” “FREE” onto her knuckles with her own hand… *vBRRRRGNrngnrrr….* The first pluck of the morning twangs with a radiant shockwave that pierces the dull orange shadow of the dawning light. Don’t know nothin’ bout no rumors, but yeah baby, that sound is bitchin’. There’s a short pause of silence as she tunes the pegs; you can hear the faint crackling of the clay between her fingers, and the creaking groan of her ancient iron joints, and the thunderous tapping of her feet upon the pedestal. But now, grip on Blue Steel steady and sure, she lights the fire again…

“It takes just a single song of rock-n-roll…”

dunno what came over me with this one.  not my usual style.  written in response to Yet Another horrible 5-4 SCOUTUS decision, this one, which i guess has a pretty british flavour to it, ruling on the legality of coercive unilateral contracts that allow the offerer (the employer, in this case, although the ruling is more broad than that) to remove the right of offeree (employee, in this case) to a civil trial in case of disputes, instead forcing them to accept private arbitration, which are notorious in their bias to their hiring parties. (e.g. see credit card disputes).  thread is here, original blog is here.

Now that all civil disagreements are to be decided by the free market, I just can’t help but think of the possibilities! Justice has never been so free, and the consumer-employee will see all the benefit.

Justice in a free market will be an efficient Justice. It is well known that the market will not tolerate internal discrepancies, and therefore the value of a thing put into it shall quickly stabilize at a equilibrium condition. So too will it be with arbitration. Let me give an example of just one aspect of the arbitration situation that the market can fix – the expensive cost of the arbitrators themselves. Do high-priced New York City lawyers got you down with their high-rise Manhattan fees? “Y’all want 15% of the settlement ?? Give me a break!” Well, the market has shown that cheaper alternatives are available – Catholic priests, for instance, who can subsist on God’s Love alone. (i.e. a tithe of just 10%, a considerable savings). Its also entirely feasible that Priests in foreign dioceses, where labour laws limiting hours to 40 a week do not exist, may be able to decide on multiple cases for the same price, effectively lowering the arbitration fee to five or even three percent. Yet another savings passed on to the consumer.

In fact, thinking about it a little more, some progressive parties may not even require that traditional stodginess of a gray-haired father meddling in their business. Why let the fallibility of man pollute Justice when, reasonably, the market *itself* could decide our fates instead? Imagine a world where investors can buy “stock” in either side of a case – that is to say, you can either buy stock in the defendant, or you can buy stock in the company – thus fueling a particular side with capital power. Then, its as simple as one dollar gives one vote! The victorious party pays out dividends to their investors and then everyone can go on with their merry way, satisfied that the matter has concluded in the most fair and democratic way possible. Yes, I think that putting our lives in stocks will truly be the Justice of the Future…

May GOd bless us, everyone.

Original @ Jan 16 2010.  needless to say, pretty much murdered the thread… also, in related news. anyways back to the show.

It takes just a single song of Rock N Roll…

I’m so very glad that there’s finally an existentialism thread here in the LF cool forum. Existentialism is like, wow, just so cool. Yeah this, yeah, this is the place where its at, you got the hoppin’ crowd here, that there Fyador Postoevsky, Mr. Kirkegard of course, Jonathon Larson, Hidedigger, my fav lil Applehead, and of course the transcendent spiritual force behind that that epic anime adventure, Macross 7. Who could forget their magnum opus, A Voice Reaching Across the Galaxy, where our hero Basara confronts the all-consuming nihilism of The Other HEAD-ON with the full glory of the human spirit? Here, we have truely the artistic companion of Being and Time and Nothingness – the most beautiful depiction of the actualization of Dasein and the will to impose existence before essence in a superdouble catchphrase whammy-jammy for the ages!

http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/m…kyxRt2dhrFwxMpg

Lucky for you the link above is in high def and subbed beautifully… but here’s a youtube as not to break up the flow of this post…  jump to around 14:00 in the HD video or 5:00 in the embedded youtube and prepare to read some backstory…

Echoing away in-to the sky…

What we have here, oh dear oh dear, is quite a problem. Lord Geppelnich, leader of the a high-flying weaponoid aliens called protodevilin, has hatched a plot to absorb all Spiritia in the Macross region in order to use it to power a sort of biblical paradise for his people. (although they aren’t really people, but protodevilin) Sounds like a pretty evil plan, but, you see, like humans, the Protodevilin need to Spiritia Energy to live, the life force energy generated by human life, but not by protodevilin life.  sounds like quite a sticky pckle if you ask me.

Our wayward hero, the famous pacifist musician Basara, chart-topping hunk, is humanity’s greatest weapon. At the start of the series, a rich eccentric leaves him a giantic ultra-advanced battle gear piloted with an electric guitar-hero controller, well, just because he was such a big fan. Everyone was, like, WTF???? Why should this retard grasshat have control of one of mankind’s most powerful weapons?? But, it turns out, unbeknownst to all, that not only is Basara, like, the best pilot in the history of EVAR, but also that Basara’s music generates a Spirita energy so powerful and so pure that the protodevilin just can’t handle it.  …sorta like me when i get a big glass of chocolate weed milk.A nyways so there you have it.

Look off into the light of dawn…

here, we, at the climax. Basara and the human forces assault Geppelnich’s fortress (actually a fittingy MONSTEROUS transformation of Geppelnich himself.) They sing for the people… but something goes wrong… REALL WRONG. The spiritia absorbion has passed a critical limit, oh no – TOO MUCH SPIRITIA!!! – accidentally creating a sort of spiritia black hole that threatens to engulf the entire universe!  GEPPELNICH IS THE ALL-CONSUMING NIHILISM OF tHE oTHER MADE FLESH.

and soon all your troubles start to…

aahHH~h… so powerful… The humans cannot stand this ever more brutal assault. They sing, but they sing not just to sing, but because they see basara sing…. and then there’s basara too, but he sings not because he can see himself sing, but because the others see him singing. “Love will saaave, the world” – um ya right, just keep tellin yourself that sweetharts. Now slowly the singing fades away, melting away, you could say in fact, to that cackling madness of the awful horrible no-good inauthentic life, that “bad faith” of derived control of the Other’s Other…

MELT ALL AWAY…

The persona of Basara too melts all away. He is alone now, left with only his oldest, truest memory of his self – his oldest, truest desire. Here, severed from the universe and his physical body, he is confronted with the mountain, that gaddanged, ever-mountainous mountain, that which could be so large yet so fleeting.. what is it? what is this mountain?? why must i sing to the mountain?? why do i play my guitar! ahhhH~~ , alone with the mountain!  at last i understands! I SING TO THE MOUNTAIN BECAUSE ITS A MOUNTAIN AND I SING! I PLAY MY GUITAR TO MAKE IT MOVE! ITS GOTTA MOVE!!! BECAUSE BASARA! IS BECOMING! MOVEMENT!!!

<h1><font color={“rED”?>GTODAY IMG GONNA MAKE YOU MVOe !!!!!!!!![b?]

NOW LISTEN TO MHY SONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DASEIN LIVES~!!!~ A RESOUNDING GLORY AS SUNG BY THE EFFLORESCENT BLOOM ~!!!~ RE-EMERGING RECURSIVELY INTO ITSE ~!!! ~ELF IS AN EBULLIEN!~T AND PER~HAPS EVEN !!! VIOLENT BIRTH !!~~~!!!!~~!!! A  FULLY ENGAGED PERSPECTIVE oN DASEIN CAN ASSERT ITS DESIRE TO LIVE WITHIN THE UNIVERSE IN THE HERE AND NOW!!!~~!!!!! ONLY DASE!IN CAN LEAP PAST THE EM!PTINESS OF THE HUMAN CON!SCIOUSNESS BY HIS FREECHOICE ALONE!@!!!! BASARA HAS REMEMBE!RED WHO HE IS – HE IS BECOMING MOVE~MENT! AND SO HE MOVES! NOW LISTEN TO HIS SONG!

AaaHHHAHhhH~~~ NO!!! What’s this? Basara’s physical body was too far damaged from the previous attack! Now, But what’s this? We’re moving sofast now!We’re saved! Dasein expands to the whole of the environment, of course it cannot be bound by physical restraints! DASEIN IS BEING THERE, and by there, I mean where it is! A being is everywhere it is engaged, both the physical environment and the social mind. Sivil, a confused protodevilin fascinated with Basara’s joyful song, in an ephiphany, has finally understood this source of Basara’s power, and that she too can sing her own song, and that she too can create spiritia energy! So here she is! She arrives just in time! She will carry his body! He will sing his song! unstoppable! FLY AWAY~! FLY AWAY~! TAKE OFF INTO THE SKY~!!

But physical assault is impossible! Say, didn’t we just learn that Only the power of song CAN MAKE THAT MOUNTAIN MOVE!! so let’s keep trying until it moves! oh, move~ TRY AGAIN~! it sings~! TRY AGAIN~! at last, the joy spirita creation! BELIEVE WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT~!

this feeling running through me…

the! overwhelming, breathtaking, orgasmic! beauty of spirita creation!

It takes just a single song of Rock N Roll…

why our comic artists so obsessed with the dreary and mundane? while japan makes, again and again, super cool-ass, tyranasaurus awesome animes and mangas based on action and adventure, the american spirit is cursed to dwell forever in the pit of the dreary everyday dolldrums. we should fucking prosecute harvey pekar and his ilk for warcrimes, for terrorizing the best 2D artists of our american millenial generation.

the time to stand up is NOW! transcend oppression!

more on the military-industrial-academic complex in infinite cockjammer’s propaganda thread, specifically how darpa has a much more massive influence on academia than its meager (lol) 3B budget would suggest. original

quote=Kire

I was skeptical of Chomsky’s (and other’s) claim that a huge proportion of our economy, especially the high-tech sectors, are state-funded and state-directed under the guise of “defense spending”, but then I started to think about all the engineers I know (quite a few) and every single one of them is involved in research that is somehow weapons related, or if not directly building a weapon then they’re funded by government military grants of some kind. Everything from helicopter motors, to robotics research like tele-surgery, to trying to put out fire with sound (that last one funded by a military grant).

yeah, its pretty pervasive.  what you have to remember is that, besides the huge amount of money directly spent on military research (which is in the hundreds of billions), an even greater amount is externalized.  as long as MICkey mouse has the power to control what is researched and how, you can consider these externalized costs as part of the defense sector of the economy. unfortunately, the speculative nature of start-up companies and universities means that they are dependant on research grants to survive.  Since the majority of grant money is from the DoD and its relatives, these institutions must gear themselves towards projects DoD is interested in if they are to maintain relevance. that means the power of the insitution’s “free” money, (e.g. state-funding and tuitions and alumni-donations in the case of large universities) will be subjugated under the power of the more-competitive darpa grants.

let me give you an example. a lot of people in my research lab get their funding from darpa.  darpa directly controls about 3B (thats b-b-b-billion) bucks a year to hand out in grants to research labs in both academia and industry. these grants vary in size and we often recieve them in partnership with industry. sometimes it’ll be in an equal partnership, or, what usually happens, as the initial stage in tiered research approach.  the way this works is that darpa sponsers many small “seedlings,” for the most part to academic labs, for new pathbreaking work.  seedlings are lucky to geta couple hundred thousand bux or so each.  later, depending on the success of the seedling, a “program” worth millions of dollars will be created with the intention of commerializing the research done in the seedling.  sometimes the original seedling academic researchers may branch out into industry with a “start-up” that capitalizes on their initial work to get that big-buck program money.

say, in either case, our cut of a grant is like, i dunno, a couple hundred thousand bucks.  from that, the university takes a cut, the faculty on the grant take a cut, and then the grad students and the post-docs get a cut. (for their stipend)  the rest is spent on equipment, manufacturing costs, etc.  seems pretty reasonable so far, right?  well, were the DoD to try funding this fully internally, they’d have to also spend money on:

1. health care for the researchers (paid for by the university, partly with their cut from the grant, but mostly from private donations)
2. the software (one particular cad software we use costs 100k/seat, with seat meaning 100k for every computer it is installed on, for a commercial company. we get it for free as a university.  there’s a bunch of shit we use like that)
3. building maintenance and the amortized building construction cost (paid for by the university)
4. postdoc/grad-student salaries would be much higher (for instance, my yearly stipend is under 20k and i’m not allowed to take any outside income except if i get some sort of fellowship)
5. tabula rasa grant money, which usually goes towards strengthening existing projects (university)
6. the full professor’s salary (big bucks, university)

in addition, since almost all research is geared towards the topics MICkey wants, then subsequently the whole damn education system is geared towards what they want too! so add:

1. an undergraduate-level (loans/scholarships/parents(not me tho))
2. a graduate-level engineering education (university)

that grant of a couple hundered k soon adds up to a few million once you add in the externalities, but noone counts this as part of the 3B that darpa “controls.”

wjat a post

http://flags.ironi.st/userid/71307 for more

ramblin’ on, ramblin’ on, ramblin’ on. potpourri post here.  lotta different things going on, some new, some old.  just wrote this great troll of L&F (here ) its not interesting enough by itself to transcribe in its entirety, but the post that that i reference initially is really ownage, so check it out:

a brief summary:

the basic question is this: why does the tea party act the way it does, with all its insane rage and contradictory demands? its easy to see that they may be spooked by the economic slump and changing demographic shifts, but why then does it express itself as it does? the OPAA uses a hegelian dialectic to try to understand this rage and where it may be heading next.

d&d’s retarded response to the article, and the discussion i had with dm yesterday over hitler’s motivation for the holocaust, reminded me of that new atheism thread from a few months back: here is the article, and here are my posts. i cannot believe that i actually bothered to logically deconstruct that one dude’s Neo Atheist trash.  i’ll replicate it here:

in response to this rebuttal, in a thread about how Neo Atheism is actually devoid of logic and reason, i wrote (editing slightly to remove the  word filter that SA needs for google adsense):

that kinda shit is like what the first two dozen paragraphs of what hart’s essay is about, all this recent infantalized garbage without any substance. 3000 years of western tradition countered by “Of course God doesn’t exist. Don’t be stupid. You’re not stupid, are you? Do you think think there’s some sort of Flying Speghetti Monster up the the Sky? Don’t be stupid.”

like, here’s how the essay reads:

paragraph 1: I know You Are But What Am I

next we got a quote, which is then completely ignored except to attack Hart as if he were one of those God Damned Liberal Elites that ann coulter and sean hannity are always raving about. its an example of an ad-populist fallacy: “guh, he tried to write to his audience as if they were INTELLIGENT??? asshole didn’t dumb himself down even at the risk that SOMEONE SOMEWHERE might not get it? how offensive.” notice he doesn’t actually say what’s wrong with his quote, except that since Hart Wrote it, it Must Be Dumb. (ad hom)

then, another quote, which is also ignored, except to tl;dr it and to suggest that the reader tl;dr it as well. (an ad-ignorantium if there ever was one) why include a quote if you’re just gonna ignore it? because he isn’t interested in engaging the ideas in hart’s essay. the ad-ig is followed through doubly-so by suggesting that whatever aquinas (who isnt even mentioned in the OP essay at all) and nietzsche wrote are irrelevant to the discussion, and that hart is an asshole for even bringing them (him) up. then we have ANOTHER ad-pop attack, strengthened with appeal to authority (of dawkins and hitchens) that is also combined with a converse fallacy of accident: “people don’t see the way got hart does. they see it the way dawkins does,” by which he means as an image of God as The Flying Spaghetti Monster.

next he begs the question: “So: do the New Atheists recycle old arguments? Of course they do. But that’s not because they’re illiterate, it’s because those arguments have never been convincingly answered.” this is right after tl;dring four times, including one of the most famous atheists of all time, who tried to address some of them. notice again he doesn’t specifically give examples of questions that he doesn’t think have been convincingly answered, unlike hart, who does. he could have even specifically refuted the examples hart gives, or defended the arguments that hart attacks, but doesn’t.

i don’t really understand the point of the next paragraph. hart does not mention newton anywhere. and how does what a 400 year-dead man felt about the relative importance of his own life’s work have to do with anything? (and besides, the “christian mysticism” was deeply important to newton) the paragraph ends with a fallacy of composition in two different ways:  judging the worth of religion on the basis of one large Bad Thing against one Obvious Good Thing That Good People Would Do Anyways, and by then equating religion with oppressive class structure. notice that we’ve moved from faith in god to Organized Religion.
the whole thing reeks of a strawman built from misplaced concretion (e.g. replacing a defense of faith, which Hart wrote about, with Organized Religion).

we end as he begs the question: “To say merely that Christianity is comforting or practical — assuming you believe that — is hardly enough. You need to show that it’s true.” which imposes his own definition on the purpose of Christianity/Religion, that it must be true in the sense of empirically true: “And if you want to assert that something is true, the onus is on you to demonstrate it, not on the New Atheists to demonstrate conclusively that it isn’t.” of course, that *is* true – its not onus of the New Atheists to prove that religion is false – but that isn’t what Hart wrote about at all. (fallacy of affirming the consequent).

so this response is pathetic through and through. it does not cite any specific instances in the essay other than 2 quotes which are completely ignored, and furthermore does not address any claim about how the arguments propounded the New Atheist authors are logically and rationally unsound. which, of course, again, is the whole issue that hart had a problem with to begin with! that this movement thats supposedly built from logic and reason do not actually apply logic and reason to their arguments!

to address the OP as “content-less” while saying that this retarded response is anything worthwhile is just unbelievable (lol) to me. like it really does read like some big socratic manifesto, like as if this guy is adding all sorts of purposely contradictory shit and giggling to himself. (although, to that, i can relate…)

the best part of that thread was that i was able to troll this totally insane Neo Atheist dude named Sylph into trying to derive an empirical model for ethics.  insane as it sounds, here it is in its original form.  truly one of my greatest trolling accomplishments.  it is without a doubt one of the gooniest things ever written, and, as a bonus, totally implodes the neo athiest position with a far greater percussive force than anyone outside their dumb movement could ever write. i will preserve it here for all eternity:

Observed statistically significant number of people of different races to prove the experimental hypothesis “biological and potential mental differences between racial categories are negligible” The reason given for the Holocaust was contingent on the falsehood “Biological and mental differences between racial categories are significant.”

Behind the idea “equality” is the scientific fact “racial categories are spurious.” The equality of man is true. A Christian can hold the idea “All Men are Created Equal” which is a poor interpretation of an observation. “Men” exist, “Equal” is a strong approximation and “Created” is non sequitur “Jews should be killed” is a conclusion drawn upon a scientifically untrue statement, “The category ‘ethnic Jews’ is sufficiently biologically and neurologically different to permit moral judgements on the basis of race.”

“Racial categories are so biologically similar that the very idea is spurious” is Science, we know because men of science have met and examined other men. “All Men are Created Equal” is sentiment in part approximating reality and “Jews are a category of inferior men” is false.

I guess I’m defining “Science” and “True” in an ideological way. “Science” means “attempting strong approximations of reality through experiment” and Truth means “approximating reality.” Feynman’s “Science” and Dawkins’ “Truth” I suppose. Therefore to find a “Scientific Truth” is to approximate reality through reasonable conclusions drawn upon empirical observation.

I realise now I’ve been way too loose with those words and I really ought to have defined terms, also I’ve been taking the piss when I thought it might be funny, sooo yeah. Sorry everyone.

You CAN observe “a Jewish dude.” and disprove “Jews are inferior life”. That statement takes one good Jew to disprove. To disprove “Jews are inferior life” as an approximate, not a definite statement you would have to observe a statistically significant number of Jews.

Arbitrary meaning “Individually determined and divorced from reality”. I don’t have to define “Good” here except to say that “Good” necessarily approximates “true” in some sense whilst “Death” ends perception. “Good” is contingent on human experience of something while “brain death” precludes human experience of anything.

Causing death is not good because “good” pertains to human experience and a man’s murder entails the destruction of a capacity to experience. It cannot be “Good” to destroy “Good”.

“Pain”, when perceived, precludes a search for the good by limiting perspective. There are other vastly better ways of getting at the essence; “Pain is bad” but they all approximate in some way the truth “Pain is obscuring and obstructive.”

Nazi racial categorisations are not true because the biological differences do not correlate with the alleged categories. The differences are too superficial for the approximation “Jewish inferiority” to be in any way meaningful since “inferiority” is contingent on the falsehood “Jews are sufficiently biologically distinguishable from Aryans for a qualitative assessment based on an existing criteria to be possible”.

“Killing the ethnically Jewish is right” is factually wrong because killing prevents good and besides “ethnically Jewish” is a weak approximation. “Killing the ethnically Jewish is right” is not a matter of opinion because the men labelled Jews exist aside from the category as men biologically indistinguishable from non Jews and murder is a physical act, not a preference for one thing over another. A volitional act creates circumstances that exist as reality, not mental “software” simulations. Brain death is a factual and permanent state of thoughtlessness precluding all experience including whatever the good is.

Even if “Good” and “Right” are opinions, murder and torture are still “anti-good” because they are opinion annihilators. “thought” and “opinion” are at the least properties of the material arrangement called “the Brain”. Experimental observation confirms that “the Brain” is the arrangement of matter necessary for thought, because the empirical observation of neurological activity through machinery shows a factual correlation between brain damage and altered thought patterns.

If you believe that “the Good” is mere opinion, then on your own terms I reject your concept of “Good”.

I hope at least the loving hours this took to beat out of my aching head go some way to at least evidencing that Dawkins Atheists are not intellectually lazy.

he has a few other equally retarded posts in the original thread (i branched this into its own new thread because i was so wowed by it) which i quote in that other link above.

anyways, back to that first link i posted, it went over most ppls’ heads although Red Ken had this ownage response.  It looks like some d&d ppl just found it though, so we’ll see where it goes from here.

Update: ahahahaha a big retard d&d-er took my “Jesus, that was terribly written” thread seriously and tried to start flaming me as if i were a real mod imposing some draconian policy, and then started flustering after i said that i would ban him http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3318997&userid=16090

now this is one disjointed blog update!

one of my favourite stories, doncha know.  originally posted (here) on Feb 14 2010, although I actually wrote it for my girlfriend for Valentines Day cause she likes my stories. :~) the biggest influence for me on the style and tone was italo calvino’s big ass book of italian folk tales, which totally owns and y’all should get if you like this.  toby and i would read them out loud together :~)

i’ve made a few small edits just to make the text smoother.  i found the pictures in like, 60 seconds on GIS, and added them just to break up the text for the tl;dr crowd, so i ain’t adding them back here.

ole L&F sure didn’t know what to make of this sucker…

♪ Listen so kindly, cause if you do,
I’ll tell ya a tale straight from Xanadu! ♬

There once was a humble bakers man who was married to a princess, and they had a son named Stretchy Stroodle.  The baker had won the princess as his wife a long time ago in a great contest.  Every king and every prince in the whole wide world came to enter, bringing gifts of gold and diamonds. But the humble baker brought the best gift of all – the greatest treasure in all the land, they said! – one of his delicious apple pastries, named the Stroodle, after himself.  Not for all the gold and all the diamonds  of all the famous kings of all the world would that wise princess trade to give up even one bite of that wonderful Stroodle!  With the contest over, they were married at once.

The new couple’s happiness ended, however, on the night that Stretchy was born. At the exact moment that he took his first cry, two cats, one white and one black, meowed at once, followed by another exact moment where two bolts of lightning flashed and two chords of thunder crashed.  Papa Stroodle was so scared by all the commotion that he ran out screaming and never looked back.  The two cats became Stretchy’s godfathers.  His mother liked to say that a fiddle hummed for every step that Stretchy walked, played by none other than his black godfather, The Devil.  And, not to be outdone, mind you, his white godfather, The Lord, had the twinkle of a harp ride along for ever word that Stretchy talked.  Anyways they all lived together quite happily as a family until Stretchy came of age.

“My dear family, its time that I went out to make my fortune.  I will become the greatest singer and dancer in all the land! Goodbye!”
His mother hugged him tightly and his two godfathers gave their blessing.  “Goodbye, my son!” they all called after him, as Stretchy walked out towards the rising sun. And with that, he was off.

After walking for miles and miles, Stretchy Stroodle arrived at a great palace. A king, who also happened to be the President of the United States of America, greeted the traveler with open arms.  The king heard his story, and said, “Listen carefully.  You can stay here at the palace and do whatever you please, but you must do one thing for me in return.”
“Anything for you, Your Majesty!” Stretchy replied.
“As you might have heard, the fearsome Monster, who eats the body and souls of all those who dare enter his lair, has a great treasure. You must get it for me, or you’ll lose your head!”
“But you said the Monster eats the body and souls of all those who dare enter his lair.  You are condemning me to death!”
“That is none of my concern.  Think it over long and hard and I’m sure you’ll do your best.”
“Meowy Wowy!” Stretchy said, “As Sure as Stroodle, this is gonna be one tough cookie! But, I better try my best!”  And with that, he was off!

After once again walking for miles and miles, Stretchy came upon a great forest, which he thought might be a good place to take a rest.  As he was fixing a spot under a johnny apple tree, he heard, all of a sudden, a sweet, lyrical chirp. “Stretchy, why take a nap here, when you could go home to your mama?” a mysterious voice said.  “I know what you think: ‘Ooooh, I miss my mama, and I miss my warm, cozy bed.’”
Stretchy looked up to see the cutest little thing he ever did see.  It was a little baby bird with eyes opened wide.    “Stretchy, I’m super serious! You better turn back!” the bird said.  “That monster, I’ve seen him… he’s a, he’s a mean one, he is…!!”
“If you think I’m heading back now, then you’re just coo coo kaboodles!  Scary or not, I’ll beat that Monster if its the last thing I do!”
After hearing such an amazing display of confidence, that little babe bird hopped right on down and said, “Well then, I’ll show you just how to coo!”… and he wigged and jigged, up and down, just as birdies do! Seeing that funky chick shake his rump like that, well, ole’ Stretchy, he knew just what to do all right. He squatted his bum, plump as a pear, and *vrum, vrum, vrum* learned the birdie dance stepping along in snyc.  “Whenever you find trouble,” said the bird, “remember my moves, and you’ll do alright by me.”

A little time went by, and Stretchy traveled on and on. The thick overgrowth of this old forest obstructed much of the noontime sky. A cross-crossing of branches formed a sort of blanket that left little room for more than a few splotches and whiskers of the sunshine to slip on through.  Blanket… Stretchy was starting to wish he took that nap.  The forest was so still and quiet… the ambience was quite serene, one might say, if they had a loud mouth and were tryin to be funny. But before anyone even had a chance to think about that, the cool silence was broken when Stretchy, who certainly had a loud mouth, muttered allowed his realization that he was forgetting something important. “Oooooh, I’m so hungry…” he said. With all the commotion with that birdy, he had forgotten to eat his breakfast! And, just as suddenly as a forgotten memory, a banana peel came flying *SPLAT* right smack-dab in the middle of his face!
“Huh, what?  Whozzat?”
*SPLAT*  Another peel!  He couldn’t believe it!  And there wasn’t even any banana to eat!
“Oooooh, whoever you are, why I outta… well, you sure are a rascal, but I do love a good prank!”
At those words, a little babe chimp jumped right on out and said “Well I’ll show you just how to oooh!”… and he clapped and slapped, round and round, just as monkeys do!  Stretchy couldn’t help but clappin right along to the rhythm himself, *clap clap clap* hopping on every other foot. *hop hop hop* In this way he learned the monkey dance.  “Whenever you find trouble,” said the chimp, “remember my moves, and you’ll do alright by me.”  Then the monkey gave him a bushel of bananas and sent him on his way.

A little while later, Stretchy stopped by a pond by the side of the road to have drink…. but Yuck!
“Meowy Wowy, puddin’ and pie, this pond’s so salty that it makes me CRY!”  The pond had turned into a little sea, filled by so many tears of cowardly men on their way to face the Monster.
A little babe catfish, who had made the pond his home, lept right on up and said “Thanks for helping build my home.” The fish fell, but lept again to say “You’ll need my help,” and then “so I’ll show you just how to mew!”… and he flipped and flopped, side to side, just as fishies do!  This time Stretchy slunk down like a strand of spehettti, squrimin around on his tummy in the mud like that fish did in the salty water.  “Whenever you find trouble,” said the catfish, “remember my moves and you’ll do alright by me.”

At last Stretchy reached the lands of the Monster. He found himself before a great ravine.  “What am I to do?” he said.  The first thing to try, of course, was the birdie’s dance, and, with a light hop and a twice-tap of his feet, Stretchy was flying fast and free, as a gust of wind billowed up behind him and whisked him on across the valley.  “Well thats just alright by me,” Stretchy said.

Next, Stretchy came to a great moat, a hundred leagues wide, across which he could see the scary lair of the scary Monster.  “What am I to do here?” he pondered aloud.  “The monkey’s dance won’t help me here. Wait, wasn’t there some other moves I was supposed to try?” Thus, with the help of the fishie, Stretchy sped past the moat lickity-split. He never did reveal the secret of whether he danced on the water or under it, however.

Finally, Stretchy was face-to-face with the Monster himself. He was a huge gross thing, a mess of fur and thorns and teeth.  Tangled in the great beard under his chin were remnants of past meals partly eaten – the rancid, rotting bones and flesh of adventurers just like Stretchy himself. The Monster smelled about as mean as he looked, and worst of all, acted as mean as he smelled.  “I’ll swallow your ssssoul,” he shouted!  Well, with that Monster after him, what was poor Stretchy to do?  He took the whole bunch of bananas from his pack and threw them straight up into the air and *SPLAT* the whole lot fell right back down on his face.  Oh, how the Monster laughed and laughed and laughed!  Then Stretchy started hopping around on one foot, just like the monkey.  OOooH OOooH! And the Monster just laughed and laughed and laughed! Stretchy quickly grabbed the treasure with this distraction, and, with a light hop and a twice-tap of his shoes, did the last dance he knew – the Daddy Dance.  He ran out there as fast as he could, screaming “Wee Wee Wee!” all the way back home!

When Stretchy got back to the palace, the King lauded him with all the honours in the kingdom.  “As a reward, I shall give you my beautiful daughter for your bride, and one day you shall be the new President of the United States of America, and King of my Stroodle Kingdom!”
“But wait… I’m already a Stroodle! How did you know?”
“You’re a Stroodle too? Then you must be my son!”
Well how about that, it turned out the king was Papa Stroodle the whole time.  Stretchy and the princess got married in a lavish ceremony where they served steamed brocoli pudding, mincemeat casserole, and fried bananas. I was there, hiding under the tables.  But did anyone even think to say to me so much as “Have a glass of apple juice?”

♫ Happily from then on did they live,
But nothing to me did they ever give! ♩♬

just posted this in cockjammer’s WIRED thread about corporate technology propaganda.  its a pretty cool thread, and cockjammer even tries talking like a normal human being for once in his life??? i wonder if he enjoyed it.  neway its a good thread and i wish i had seen it earlier….

QUOTE=”dm”
defense research for national security clearance?

and aren’t all of the foreign engineering students on H1-B visas that are at basically no risk of not being renewed?

yep yep and yep.  defense contractors offer relatively huge salaries compared to the commercial sector, depending on your particular skillset, of course.  they try and hook em young, first bringing students into the fold first through sponsorships of FIRST robotics (which, military-industrial-academic complex indoctrination aside, is a really great program), then through involvement in highly popular programs like DARPA grand challenge, and finally with direct internship offers in the range of 25-30 bucks an hour. (with lots of encouraged overtime allowed, of course).

is there any counter-force to this?  does anyone care about this alien influence in education? well, no. most american engineering students, at the graduate level, are either apolitical, conservative, or highly conservative, with emphasis being on the apolitical…  although “ill-informed and apathetic” is probably a much better way to describe the situation.  why read about politics when you can cruise gizmodo and brag about your latest apple toys? christ, engineers and scientists love their toys.  such powerful knowledge in the hands of easily manipulable children! did you know that most don’t like “liberals” because the engineering culture hates the “liberal arts,” whose classes are weak and for pussies?  its true.

why talk about all this in this thread?  well, if you wanna talk about WIRED, then i think it would also be worthwhile to talk about IEEE Spectrum, the monthly magazine that the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization, gives to all engineering students for free and to all members at a steep discount. its subscriber base is therefore in the hundreds of thousands. if WIRED is tech-talk for the wall-street wahoos, then Spectrum is that for the engineers themselves, being basically a WIRED copycat except retuned towards sympathetic shill for the military-industrial complex. (for instance, see:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/military-robots/a-canticle-for-darpatech
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/nrls-uav-sets-26hour-flight-endurance-record
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/the-rise-of-robot-warriors

there’s a pretty lol quote in that last one, btw:

There is also the problem of our ignorance, almost willfully so. I had this remarkable experience during the book tour that really encapsulates that. I gave a talk and one of the people in attendance was a very senior Pentagon adviser—very senior, big name—who afterward was telling me about how really remarkable this was, he never imagined we had so many robots that we’re already using today, wow, he just didn’t know all this. As he is saying this, I am thinking, ”You’re the one who is helping shape the decisions on how to use them, you’re influencing funding for them, and yet you’re saying you weren’t aware of it.”

But that is not actually the thing that’s notable. He then went on to say, ”You know, this technology is coming so quickly that I bet that one day the Internet will be like in a video game with three dimensions and you’ll be able to walk around in it.”

I tell this story because my wife actually works for Linden Lab [the developers of Second Life]. I’m thinking in my head that he’s using the phrase ”one day” as if it is not even in three or five years’ time; it is the way we talk about ”one day we will live on Mars.” In his mind something like Second Life or virtual worlds is something way off in the fantasy world of one day, whereas it’s already five years old.
)

what’s always so disappointing to me is how little engineering students really think about what the hell their work could really be used for.  while there’s only 3 sub-sections of IEEE spectrum directly devoted to military tech, there’s tons more devoted to “toys.”  i think i posted on this before, but i remember hearing about some sorta “air guitar hero” program sponsored by microsoft that would involve hooking into the nerves in your fingers with tiny wireless sensor nodes and processing that data in such a way that the user could control a virtual guitar in a game with no other external hardware needed.  you shoulda seen their scowls and felt the breeze of their uncomfortable fidgets when i claimed that what this technology was really being funded towards was for military UAV control!  i mean, air guitar hero, give me a fucking break!  they wanted to just see it as yet another toy!

here’s a pretty great post on this sentiment:

http://plugnplayhumans.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/behind-the-internet-operating-system/

just wrote this in one of mrs. bardcramble’s threads about the army giving oxycotin to troops to simulate a maternal instinct dubbed “parochial altruism.” as a matter of topic someone posted that recent frontline episode (here) about the army manipulating soldiers brains with drugs despite dire consequences, the most serious of which, IMHO, is ambien.  here’s my cool post about ambien.  hopefully in the future i can dig out all the cool posts from SA’s that i’d write late at night while tripping my balls of on this stuff, including part of my epic deathmatch with infrateal and of course the troll after troll after troll in that aweful sadbrains thread, lmao.  just thinking back about it makes me smile.  i was able to revive my long-ago dead laptop with someone else’s battery today, so if i decide to splurge on a permanent new one i can get my post-history crawler up and running.

i saw that just last week, and my god is that scary. i really sympathize with those kids. 18 years old, stressed out, and the military gives them ambien pills to help them sleep. its no wonder they get so fucked up.
whats funny about ambien is that people assume that its just another sleeping pill, like as if you were taking benydrl or something. at first it kinda is, just like a really effective one, straight-up knocking you out within 10 minutes of swallowing. within a few weeks, though, your body starts to become tolerant to its effects. at that point, the sleepyness effect becomes less pronounced and… it becomes a hallucinogenic, a REALLY REALLY powerful one, like way stronger than any acid i’ve ever done. i was prescribed that for like a year for my problems with insomnia, and eventually had to stop because of intense night terrors that lasted sometimes for hours brought on by use of the pill. semi-opaque crowds of detailed figures (often people, sometimes giant spiderish shapes – more along the lines of that big ass spider robot from Wild Wild West With Will Smith than any biological spider – that would try to put wicker baskets on my head like a hat for some reason) were a fixture, as well as wormhole-like tunnels with other figures inside that would form at the corners of walls and doors. it got to the point where i’d sometimes wander around my apartment for hours at night, not fully conscious but aware of what i was doing, trying to communicate with some figures or shining a flashlight at the ominous ones in order to dispel them.

this isn’t like an uncommon thing. see what the soldiers say about it (“it fucks you up, gets you really high” is a quote off the top of my head) or try googling “ambien hallucinations” to find thousands upon thousands of testimonials just like this. my mom’s old neighbor used to be on it and she’d actually call the police because she’d think she’d see neighborhood kids cruelly trapped in cars and houses and under sewer grates. you’re only supposed to take it for a few weeks so this kinda shit doesn’t happen, but its addictive both physiologically and psychologically, because in its initial stages it is a blessed relief from a chronic, burdensome condition. and thats not even to mention the side effects, like short-term memory loss and congitive depression (e.g. critical thinking skills get shot to shit). god, to imagine our whole fucking army taking fucking AMBIEN, its just like, wow, really bad.