Like... what even is this? A homemade grenade press?
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Thursday, October 24, 2019
Careful What You Wish For
Right. So. I get these ads from the Wish app whenever I'm browsing Faceborg, and lately, they've been getting... weirder.
Like... what even is this? A homemade grenade press?
Like... what even is this? A homemade grenade press?
Saturday, October 27, 2018
Writing Prompts: SpOOooOOky Sarcasm Edition
I kinda liked how the last batch of writing prompts turned out, so I'm doing another one - but this time, they're horror-themed! These are fewer in number, but also longer, so you can judge the quantity/quality ratio for yourself. Mostly hot takes, plenty of sarcasm, and maybe I'll even be able to tie a few together like last time!
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Writing Prompts: Sarcasm Edition
I'll be at my girlfriend M's house through Christmas and don't expect to get a lot of writing done, so this post is actually coming to you from the past! Except every post I guess is technically from the past (thank you, paraphrased Mitch Hedberg). Point being, I'm cranking out almost two months of writing, and I wanted to flex my creativity a bit, so I looked up a list of creative writing prompts to get away from all the science and trans stuff I've been writing about lately.
Except all I could think of was either erotica, something way too personal, or both, or sarcasm. Guess which one this is? Oh, shit, you prolly already saw the title. Pardon me while I facepalm, and check below the cut for some hot sarcastic takes.
Monday, January 28, 2013
A True Work Conversation
My coworkers are a pretty bright bunch. Generally. I mean, it's hard to work on locks for a living, with all the mechanical and electrical work that it involves, while being dumb as a sack of hammers. Some of my predecessors have been dumb as a sack of hammers. They did not last long.
So when I hear someone say some shit, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. "Oh, that's probably just how he was raised," I tell myself. "Oh, she's from another generation," I think with a mental wave of my hand. "Oh, I don't feel like getting fired for not being able to keep my mouth shut," is what's usually behind all that. But sometimes... just... no.
So when I hear someone say some shit, I try to give them the benefit of the doubt. "Oh, that's probably just how he was raised," I tell myself. "Oh, she's from another generation," I think with a mental wave of my hand. "Oh, I don't feel like getting fired for not being able to keep my mouth shut," is what's usually behind all that. But sometimes... just... no.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Cross-post: Adventures in Taxonomy!
One of the unwritten problems with Tabula Rasa was that I kept wanting to interject little bits of the supernatural, but the whole blessed point was that the world was completely mundane. So I sloughed them off to another story I had been thinking of which was legitimately about the supernatural. Eventually, I had so many fragments and ideas shoved over there, it started becoming a story in its own right. I know a story's good when characters I give placeholder names get names of their own - I'm famously bad at naming things, you see - and now I've got so much that I can't not write it.
First, though, I have a bit to write about silk for 101 Interesting Things. And before that, I've got this humorous little bit that I pulled off from my Playskool blog. The bit about the Wheel of Death waxes fantastical, but the rest of this is a real conversation that I really had in real life. No joke, it's almost literally word-for-word, because I wrote it all down right after it happened (and, when I went wiki-walking, even jotted down notes on the story so far). Anyway, enjoy!
"There are only three things in the sea: fish, amphibians, and mammals. OK, maybe a couple plants."
Thursday, July 19, 2012
More Fake Religion: Much ado about Nothing
I believe in Nothing. I believe in other things, too - a whole load of 'em, in fact. But Nothing is at the very center of my worldview. Nothing is the most important thing in my life, without exception. Nothing is more important to me than all life on Earth, and all the cosmos besides.
I worship Nothing. I pray to Nothing. I came from Nothing, ultimately, and when I die I shall go to Nothing. Even the Bible says, "In the beginning, there was Nothing." All that exists came from Nothing: either the Universe sprang forth, full-formed, from Nothing; or a deity created it, and that deity came from Nothing. Either way, Nothing is ultimately responsible for all of the everything that we see all around us today.
Even if there is a deity who created everything we see today, Nothing is older than it. Nothing is stronger than it. Nothing is morally better than it. Nothing is more worthy of worship, thanks, and praise.
The best part? Refuting the central tenets of my new religion requires positing a something that would obviate any other religion, too. I win, either way!
I'm going to go contemplate Nothing for a while now. Toodles! (I thought I'd have more to say on this... but it turns out, it's actually hard to ramble on about nothing...)
I worship Nothing. I pray to Nothing. I came from Nothing, ultimately, and when I die I shall go to Nothing. Even the Bible says, "In the beginning, there was Nothing." All that exists came from Nothing: either the Universe sprang forth, full-formed, from Nothing; or a deity created it, and that deity came from Nothing. Either way, Nothing is ultimately responsible for all of the everything that we see all around us today.
Even if there is a deity who created everything we see today, Nothing is older than it. Nothing is stronger than it. Nothing is morally better than it. Nothing is more worthy of worship, thanks, and praise.
The best part? Refuting the central tenets of my new religion requires positing a something that would obviate any other religion, too. I win, either way!
I'm going to go contemplate Nothing for a while now. Toodles! (I thought I'd have more to say on this... but it turns out, it's actually hard to ramble on about nothing...)
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Quickies!
I have something of a tab explosion of things I want to talk about, but none of them is really worth a full-on ramble, so here's a pile just to get 'em out of the way. On to bigger and better things!
Grammar Girl on How to Write Numbers: I was actually going to go off on a whole rant about style and the horrors of homogeneity, but decided to skip it because fuck it. It wasn't going to be a rant at Grammar Girl, anyhow; in truth, I was going to be railing against The System, and tooting my own horn a lot. But after thinking it through, that's not something I really feel like doing. The main thing is that there's an insoluble tension in a mongrel language like English: on the one hand, there's a need for some standardization, just to make sure that we can be clear on what we're actually saying; on the other hand, if you have too many rules then you end up with only one way to express a thought, and that's awful. If you remember your Orwell, that was the point of Newspeak in 1984. In case you can't guess, I'm right in the middle - of course, I probably only think it's the middle because I'm the one standing there, but whatever. I mean, we need the rules for things that ought to be clear and unambiguous, including engineering manuals and Western philosophy; but art is half knowing rules and half breaking them creatively, which we need for things like literature and poetry and Continental philosophy. You'll notice I didn't use a serial comma there, and that was deliberate - because I wasn't pausing in my head, and I didn't want you to pause in your head, either.
Spelling a Word One Way: I was going to open the aforementioned rant with a quote of dubious origin, which I decided to look up. Turns out, there is no answer - or at least not one I can know with confidence - and that may or may not have been the straw that broke the camel's hump. (The hump is my motivation.) But now I've got a wonderful new resource for diving headlong into trivia, so hooray! I entertained the idea of ranting on spelling instead of style, but again, fuck it. In a language like Spanish, rigid spelling conventions make sense, because it's got enough diacritics and few enough sounds that you can tell how to spell a word by hearing it and tell how to pronounce it by looking at it. But that won't work for English, because English has a much messier and more complicated origin. And really, all I wanted to say was that I can effect a change in my affect to have different effects when I want to affect someone in this or that particular way. There. Done. No need to conjure up a half-assed rant around it.
Garfield Minus Garfield: I read about this some years ago, when it was a single web page (as I recall) and just kind of stayed that way for a while. While I was away, Jim Davis applauded the derivative work, showing uncommon grace and perspective. If you're not savvy, Garfield Minus Garfield digitally removes Garfield from his own strip, revealing Jon Arbuckle's struggles with his own unstable mind. While the original Garfield stuck to a narrow range of the emotional palette, slightly amusing within the confines of what you could talk with your folks about at Thanksgiving dinner, the removal of the cat allows the strip to transcend those boundaries and wander all over the map. The strips now range from bizarre, to hilarious, to depressing, to uncanny, to pitiful, to vindicating, to existential, to insightful. I'm amazed by it, and you should check it out.
Grammar Girl on How to Write Numbers: I was actually going to go off on a whole rant about style and the horrors of homogeneity, but decided to skip it because fuck it. It wasn't going to be a rant at Grammar Girl, anyhow; in truth, I was going to be railing against The System, and tooting my own horn a lot. But after thinking it through, that's not something I really feel like doing. The main thing is that there's an insoluble tension in a mongrel language like English: on the one hand, there's a need for some standardization, just to make sure that we can be clear on what we're actually saying; on the other hand, if you have too many rules then you end up with only one way to express a thought, and that's awful. If you remember your Orwell, that was the point of Newspeak in 1984. In case you can't guess, I'm right in the middle - of course, I probably only think it's the middle because I'm the one standing there, but whatever. I mean, we need the rules for things that ought to be clear and unambiguous, including engineering manuals and Western philosophy; but art is half knowing rules and half breaking them creatively, which we need for things like literature and poetry and Continental philosophy. You'll notice I didn't use a serial comma there, and that was deliberate - because I wasn't pausing in my head, and I didn't want you to pause in your head, either.
Spelling a Word One Way: I was going to open the aforementioned rant with a quote of dubious origin, which I decided to look up. Turns out, there is no answer - or at least not one I can know with confidence - and that may or may not have been the straw that broke the camel's hump. (The hump is my motivation.) But now I've got a wonderful new resource for diving headlong into trivia, so hooray! I entertained the idea of ranting on spelling instead of style, but again, fuck it. In a language like Spanish, rigid spelling conventions make sense, because it's got enough diacritics and few enough sounds that you can tell how to spell a word by hearing it and tell how to pronounce it by looking at it. But that won't work for English, because English has a much messier and more complicated origin. And really, all I wanted to say was that I can effect a change in my affect to have different effects when I want to affect someone in this or that particular way. There. Done. No need to conjure up a half-assed rant around it.
Garfield Minus Garfield: I read about this some years ago, when it was a single web page (as I recall) and just kind of stayed that way for a while. While I was away, Jim Davis applauded the derivative work, showing uncommon grace and perspective. If you're not savvy, Garfield Minus Garfield digitally removes Garfield from his own strip, revealing Jon Arbuckle's struggles with his own unstable mind. While the original Garfield stuck to a narrow range of the emotional palette, slightly amusing within the confines of what you could talk with your folks about at Thanksgiving dinner, the removal of the cat allows the strip to transcend those boundaries and wander all over the map. The strips now range from bizarre, to hilarious, to depressing, to uncanny, to pitiful, to vindicating, to existential, to insightful. I'm amazed by it, and you should check it out.
Open Letter from a Millennial: Yowza. I have a lot of thoughts on this one, but every time I go over them, they change radically. Not back and forth, but round and round, in an expanding spiral that keeps touching down at various points in history and possibility. The more I think about it, the more I think that continuing to think about it is what I should do, rather than come up with some kind of "answer." But even that may change. So I offer it to you without further comment.
That Reminds Me: Stephen Colbert gave a commencement speech at Northwestern last year. You need to watch this. It's twenty minutes of awesome, even the "boring" introductory matter. You owe it to yourself.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Cosmetic Brain Surgery
Some time ago, I wrote about a church sign with an offer for a free trip. Well, the same church had come up with another offer, though it has since been taken down and I could not get a picture. I need to give myself more time to travel between jobs, so I can stop to take pictures of these obnoxious godvertisements. Anyway, this time their sign read, "Need a new look? Come in for a faith-lift!" As with last time, I came up with a few questions and concerns while mulling over their offer.
Unlike the trip to Heaven, this offer didn't have "free" anywhere in it. Is this faith-lift included in the "10% of your income for life" price of membership in their organization, or does it incur an additional charge? I just moved and had to pay double rent for July, so money's tight and I can't afford to be spending on unnecessary procedures. Do they offer installment plans? Or is it maybe like the Templeton Prize, where they pay you for your trouble in order to get free advertising?
As for the procedure itself, how exactly is it performed? Do they just permanently affix a god-walloping grin to your face? What if I want to express emotions besides generic oblivious felicity? I've heard that they can go in through the ear, with boring music and uninspiring sermons which are very slightly less anesthetizing and invasive than putting you under and cutting on your face. But if everyone's getting this routine procedure every Sunday, I don't know if it's really worth it. I mean, cosmetic surgery is all about looking better than your peers because you can afford to spend loads of money on superficial beauty. I'm not sure that the procedure to which they allude is really in keeping with their overall mission as a spiritual institution. Or maybe I'm coming at this wrong and it's spot-the-Hell-on.
Finally, I'm at least a little worried about complications. I've heard that these sorts of operations can leave one with eyes glazed over, taking the sharp edges off the world and making it look less dangerous than it really is. Also, making room for all that religion in one's head can require that chunks of the frontal lobe be completely removed, impairing one's decision making and critical thinking skills. What's more, I've heard that some people can come out so hopped up on God-smack that they've been left permanently desensitized to the plights of others, and thinking that this one procedure is a panacaea - like it doesn't matter who you are or where you live, all you need is more Jesus and your problems will go away. I've looked into the research, and some of the signs of a botched faith-lift include: thinking of one's demographic as a persecuted minority perpetually on the verge of acquiring the influence it already in fact enjoys, anticipating the end of the world with apocalyptic glee, advocating against real-world solutions to real-world problems because one is no longer capable of grasping coherent arguments or basic implications of evidence gathered through research, and experiencing diminished outrage against pedophiles when said vile monsters happen to also be priests.
You know what? I don't think I'm going to risk it. The offer seems sketchy, the procedure is of dubious value, and the risk that something will go horribly wrong and leave me with a lifelong cognitive impairment is just too high to ignore. I mean, I guess if you want to be able to feel more self-righteous than other people, and you don't mind abdicating reality to do so, maybe a faith-lift is right for you. Count me out, though.
Unlike the trip to Heaven, this offer didn't have "free" anywhere in it. Is this faith-lift included in the "10% of your income for life" price of membership in their organization, or does it incur an additional charge? I just moved and had to pay double rent for July, so money's tight and I can't afford to be spending on unnecessary procedures. Do they offer installment plans? Or is it maybe like the Templeton Prize, where they pay you for your trouble in order to get free advertising?
As for the procedure itself, how exactly is it performed? Do they just permanently affix a god-walloping grin to your face? What if I want to express emotions besides generic oblivious felicity? I've heard that they can go in through the ear, with boring music and uninspiring sermons which are very slightly less anesthetizing and invasive than putting you under and cutting on your face. But if everyone's getting this routine procedure every Sunday, I don't know if it's really worth it. I mean, cosmetic surgery is all about looking better than your peers because you can afford to spend loads of money on superficial beauty. I'm not sure that the procedure to which they allude is really in keeping with their overall mission as a spiritual institution. Or maybe I'm coming at this wrong and it's spot-the-Hell-on.
Finally, I'm at least a little worried about complications. I've heard that these sorts of operations can leave one with eyes glazed over, taking the sharp edges off the world and making it look less dangerous than it really is. Also, making room for all that religion in one's head can require that chunks of the frontal lobe be completely removed, impairing one's decision making and critical thinking skills. What's more, I've heard that some people can come out so hopped up on God-smack that they've been left permanently desensitized to the plights of others, and thinking that this one procedure is a panacaea - like it doesn't matter who you are or where you live, all you need is more Jesus and your problems will go away. I've looked into the research, and some of the signs of a botched faith-lift include: thinking of one's demographic as a persecuted minority perpetually on the verge of acquiring the influence it already in fact enjoys, anticipating the end of the world with apocalyptic glee, advocating against real-world solutions to real-world problems because one is no longer capable of grasping coherent arguments or basic implications of evidence gathered through research, and experiencing diminished outrage against pedophiles when said vile monsters happen to also be priests.
You know what? I don't think I'm going to risk it. The offer seems sketchy, the procedure is of dubious value, and the risk that something will go horribly wrong and leave me with a lifelong cognitive impairment is just too high to ignore. I mean, I guess if you want to be able to feel more self-righteous than other people, and you don't mind abdicating reality to do so, maybe a faith-lift is right for you. Count me out, though.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part two)
Click here for part one.
The grading machine was small, discolored with age, covered in dust like most of the things in the English department storage room. It had a cracked digital readout, a few buttons with the labels missing, and a slot with "INSERT FORM HERE" stamped next to it. I didn't care when I heard we found it, because I don't care about the forms anyhow - everyone else seemed to think it was some kind of miracle, though. A fight broke out over who would get to use it first, and Jimmy Dempster's nose got broken. We were finally able to agree that it had to be used in public, in plain sight of everyone, and what we'd cast votes to see who would get to go first and all of that. It took us two whole days just to decide how we were going to use it, for crying out loud. I stayed and watched because even though it wasn't important to me, the way everyone reacted would be very important to everyone.
Well, we all decided that someone from E-column could go first, since they were clearly the most excited about it. It seemed fair. Then one of those upside-down A-column kids could go, because they seemed like the most opposed group to the E-column crowd. Then we'd let a C-column kid go, then one of the "ABCDEABCDE" folks, then one of the kids who filled out every bubble, and then we'd go in alphabetical order by name from there (most everyone knew everyone else's name, so there wasn't any concern about cheating). Everything was fine, we were all agreed that we had found a fair way to resolve this little dispute, and somehow everything still managed to go straight to shit.
Brandon Anderson was the E-column kid who went first, since he was first alphabetically. We plugged the machine in, turned it on, made sure it didn't break down straightaway, and then Brandon put his form through. There was some humming and whirring, and then his form came out just like he'd put it in. He even asked, "So did I pass?" Nobody said anything for a while. Someone said he must not have gotten anything wrong, but then another person said that we didn't know if he got anything right either, and then another fight almost broke out. We decided to keep feeding the forms through, and then figure out what to do.
Jill Becker was next, the upside-downers' first pick. She fed her form through and nothing happened again, and this time we were a little calmer but still nobody said anything. A couple people started to say that maybe the machine didn't work right, but everyone else shushed them. I was starting to hope that everyone would just feed their form through and things would be nice and boring. Silly me.
Dick Benson stepped up, he was the "ABCDEABCDE" crowd's first pick. Not because he was alphabetically first, they also had a Chris Allen, but because they all paired off and played a rock-paper-scissors tournament and Dick won. Anyway, Dick fed his form into the grading machine, and there was this awful grinding sound. Something started to smell, and so we unplugged the grading machine from the generator and opened up the front panel. We got Dick's form out, but it was all chewed up, and we couldn't get the machine working again after that.
Pretty soon, people started arguing about what all this meant. Someone started saying that the machine ate Dick's form because he was wrong, that he should have stuck to one column instead of filling out all kinds of bubbles. I tried to point out that we couldn't be sure that Dick had anything to do with it, using one of those fallacies I learned from the logic book. I can't remember the Latin name, but what it says is that just because something happens after something else, it doesn't mean that the first thing caused it - there could have been something else going on that you didn't know about. You might as well say that Dick's form got eaten because he played rock-paper-scissors. I mean, for crying out loud, the grading machine was old and locked up in the English department closet for a reason, and that's probably because it wasn't working right in the first place, so we should see if we could fix it and then try again.
Well, nobody listened, of course. People started shouting that we shouldn't tamper with the grading machine any more, that we'd done enough by letting Dick put his form through and we saw how that went, and since Brandon & Jill's forms went through fine, we know that everyone else who filled out their form like them should be fine, too. Soon you couldn't tell who was yelling what since everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs. Then someone just reached out and punched Dick Benson right in the face. Then it was a dog-pile: some people tried to break it up, but they just got sucked into the fight, and by the end of it the bloody mess on the floor didn't even look like Dick any more.
Now, I mean, I just want to say this plainly, because I don't know how we let it happen: Dick Benson was beaten to death because a dusty old machine ate his test form. A kid fucking died over this. Some other kids got hurt, too, but cuts and bruises happen even when you're playing a game of soccer, and you get better from 'em anyhow. Dick's dead 'cuz he made marks on paper, and I think anyone who could let that happen is plain crazy, I don't care how strongly they feel about their precious fucking forms.
Well, not everyone feels the same way, I guess. Pretty soon everyone started saying that what happened to Dick was bad, but his form ruined the grading machine, so what could you expect? I tried to say that something ought to be done about it, but nobody knew who struck the killing blow, there were too many kids involved to punish all of them, emotions were running high so you couldn't really blame anyone, and it wasn't gonna bring Dick back anyhow, so who cares? Well, I care. I care about a person's life more than the way they fill out some form, and I think anyone whose priorities are the other way 'round is an idiot. And I think anyone who isn't bothered by a human life being lost because of a disagreement over unknowable matters is less than human.
So I left. I left that crazy world, and now it seems I'm in a crazier one. It wasn't just our school that forgot, apparently, but all I've found in the three days since I left are crazier and crazier people. Some of thesm have guns, and some of them are in gangs, and some of them just have some really off-the-wall ideas about how the world is. I have half a mind to try to help the school get prepared in case one of the gangs finds it, but all I can bear to do is find a quiet out-of-sight place to sleep at night. I don't know how to fix this, the world's really screwed up and I'm just one person. Maybe I can find some other people who aren't nuts, and help them. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, too. I don't know. But there's gotta be something good out there, and I gotta find it. Writing this down is a start.
With acknowledgment to Sam Harris, Blaise Pascal, and the Scantron company.
The grading machine was small, discolored with age, covered in dust like most of the things in the English department storage room. It had a cracked digital readout, a few buttons with the labels missing, and a slot with "INSERT FORM HERE" stamped next to it. I didn't care when I heard we found it, because I don't care about the forms anyhow - everyone else seemed to think it was some kind of miracle, though. A fight broke out over who would get to use it first, and Jimmy Dempster's nose got broken. We were finally able to agree that it had to be used in public, in plain sight of everyone, and what we'd cast votes to see who would get to go first and all of that. It took us two whole days just to decide how we were going to use it, for crying out loud. I stayed and watched because even though it wasn't important to me, the way everyone reacted would be very important to everyone.
Well, we all decided that someone from E-column could go first, since they were clearly the most excited about it. It seemed fair. Then one of those upside-down A-column kids could go, because they seemed like the most opposed group to the E-column crowd. Then we'd let a C-column kid go, then one of the "ABCDEABCDE" folks, then one of the kids who filled out every bubble, and then we'd go in alphabetical order by name from there (most everyone knew everyone else's name, so there wasn't any concern about cheating). Everything was fine, we were all agreed that we had found a fair way to resolve this little dispute, and somehow everything still managed to go straight to shit.
Brandon Anderson was the E-column kid who went first, since he was first alphabetically. We plugged the machine in, turned it on, made sure it didn't break down straightaway, and then Brandon put his form through. There was some humming and whirring, and then his form came out just like he'd put it in. He even asked, "So did I pass?" Nobody said anything for a while. Someone said he must not have gotten anything wrong, but then another person said that we didn't know if he got anything right either, and then another fight almost broke out. We decided to keep feeding the forms through, and then figure out what to do.
Jill Becker was next, the upside-downers' first pick. She fed her form through and nothing happened again, and this time we were a little calmer but still nobody said anything. A couple people started to say that maybe the machine didn't work right, but everyone else shushed them. I was starting to hope that everyone would just feed their form through and things would be nice and boring. Silly me.
Dick Benson stepped up, he was the "ABCDEABCDE" crowd's first pick. Not because he was alphabetically first, they also had a Chris Allen, but because they all paired off and played a rock-paper-scissors tournament and Dick won. Anyway, Dick fed his form into the grading machine, and there was this awful grinding sound. Something started to smell, and so we unplugged the grading machine from the generator and opened up the front panel. We got Dick's form out, but it was all chewed up, and we couldn't get the machine working again after that.
Pretty soon, people started arguing about what all this meant. Someone started saying that the machine ate Dick's form because he was wrong, that he should have stuck to one column instead of filling out all kinds of bubbles. I tried to point out that we couldn't be sure that Dick had anything to do with it, using one of those fallacies I learned from the logic book. I can't remember the Latin name, but what it says is that just because something happens after something else, it doesn't mean that the first thing caused it - there could have been something else going on that you didn't know about. You might as well say that Dick's form got eaten because he played rock-paper-scissors. I mean, for crying out loud, the grading machine was old and locked up in the English department closet for a reason, and that's probably because it wasn't working right in the first place, so we should see if we could fix it and then try again.
Well, nobody listened, of course. People started shouting that we shouldn't tamper with the grading machine any more, that we'd done enough by letting Dick put his form through and we saw how that went, and since Brandon & Jill's forms went through fine, we know that everyone else who filled out their form like them should be fine, too. Soon you couldn't tell who was yelling what since everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs. Then someone just reached out and punched Dick Benson right in the face. Then it was a dog-pile: some people tried to break it up, but they just got sucked into the fight, and by the end of it the bloody mess on the floor didn't even look like Dick any more.
Now, I mean, I just want to say this plainly, because I don't know how we let it happen: Dick Benson was beaten to death because a dusty old machine ate his test form. A kid fucking died over this. Some other kids got hurt, too, but cuts and bruises happen even when you're playing a game of soccer, and you get better from 'em anyhow. Dick's dead 'cuz he made marks on paper, and I think anyone who could let that happen is plain crazy, I don't care how strongly they feel about their precious fucking forms.
Well, not everyone feels the same way, I guess. Pretty soon everyone started saying that what happened to Dick was bad, but his form ruined the grading machine, so what could you expect? I tried to say that something ought to be done about it, but nobody knew who struck the killing blow, there were too many kids involved to punish all of them, emotions were running high so you couldn't really blame anyone, and it wasn't gonna bring Dick back anyhow, so who cares? Well, I care. I care about a person's life more than the way they fill out some form, and I think anyone whose priorities are the other way 'round is an idiot. And I think anyone who isn't bothered by a human life being lost because of a disagreement over unknowable matters is less than human.
So I left. I left that crazy world, and now it seems I'm in a crazier one. It wasn't just our school that forgot, apparently, but all I've found in the three days since I left are crazier and crazier people. Some of thesm have guns, and some of them are in gangs, and some of them just have some really off-the-wall ideas about how the world is. I have half a mind to try to help the school get prepared in case one of the gangs finds it, but all I can bear to do is find a quiet out-of-sight place to sleep at night. I don't know how to fix this, the world's really screwed up and I'm just one person. Maybe I can find some other people who aren't nuts, and help them. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy, too. I don't know. But there's gotta be something good out there, and I gotta find it. Writing this down is a start.
With acknowledgment to Sam Harris, Blaise Pascal, and the Scantron company.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Pascal's Scantron: an atheist parable (part one)
Whoa! I missed a weekend. Sorry about that. But I have part of a short story here, and I hope you like it. More this weekend, double-promise!
- Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, p. 23-24.
"I sure wish this life were a test and I could reason out the right answer, so that all my wishful thinking had a metaphysical justification embedded into reality itself, and then I could finally be confident that all this speculation wasn't just me jerking off."
- Pascal's Wager (abridged)
Where to begin? At the start? Or at the present? Or with my purpose? I guess I should try to sort all that out first.
My memories start about four months ago, on the first day of February, which I call the Great Forgetting. Today is the third of June. By my reckoning, it is the year 2010, though all of these dates are in dispute. I'm writing this down in case another Forgetting happens. There. Now for details.
Nobody knows how the Great Forgetting happened - or why, for that matter. Stories abound, of course, but nobody really knows. Here is what I remember: everything starts with a loud popping sound, and then I was aware of the room around me. I had a splitting headache, and a couple people screamed. Someone by the door flipped the light switch a couple times, and nothing happened. Then he stood up on a chair to open one of the light covers, and broken glass came pouring down on him. I laughed.
At some point, I became aware of the fact that I was holding a pencil. On my desk was a piece of paper, white with green markings on it. It looked fuzzy at first, like it wasn't quite anything in particular; as I stared, it became more sharply defined until I could read it. It was a form, a form for taking a test. What test, I didn't know. I had started writing my name, but I only got the first letter down: the letter D. That was all I had written on my form. It did not occur to me until much later that I was able to recognize the first letter of my name, but not my whole name. I could also recognize the names and purposes of many things, but not all things. Others seemed to be in similar situations.
It took us over an hour to figure out how to talk again, and in a few days we got settled into what our lives have now become. Within the week, we had eaten through all the school's food and started raiding local grocery stores for canned goods and clean water. Someone found a store with seeds, and now we have gardens everywhere around campus and even on the rooftops. We also built some rain caches, and there's a still being built by a few kids who know how to weld.
Even now, though, things seem poised for upheaval. Nobody really knows what's around the corner. We might get our heads screwed back on straight, but with all this craziness around, it seems a slim possibility. Somebody, thankfully, found an almanac - the latest one we could find was for 2010, and by measuring the daylight hours, we were able to pinpoint the equinox on March 20th and figure out the date and time from there. But not everybody buys it - some people insist it's the year zero, others that it's the year one, still others insist on two thousand (or even one thousand) and that the almanacs are printed in advance by benevolent outside cultures who are manipulating our brains and the world around us.
Like I said, there's a lot of craziness about.
Weirdest of all are these test forms. Everybody in the school had one, but nobody can find the test we're supposed to use the form with. None of the instructors' desks have test booklets. Every room had a television set in it, and most people think that the test was going to be delivered by some sort of broadcast. It makes sense, but there's no way to tell for sure. Everything that was plugged in or had a battery in it got fried at the Great Forgetting. Light bulbs burst, CRTs burned out, circuit boards cooked, watches melted on the inside, it's all gone. Things in packages work, as long as the batteries were outside of them - we used new stopwatches from the Phys Ed office to measure the days until the equinox. So even if the test was being delivered by television, there's no way we could tell what it was about today.
Consent is somewhat less than unanimous on this last point, to put it mildly.
It all started innocently enough, as I suppose these things tend to do. Some people filled out their forms out of habit. I can't really blame them, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time, and it certainly didn't do any harm on its own. But then people started comparing answers, and they started banding together according to how they filled out the bubbles. About half the people went straight down the C column, apparently since that was in the middle. If you ask them, they don't feel too strongly about their answers, they just seem to think that their forms ought to be filled out. Lots of people filled out the right-most E bubbles, maybe through some quirk of association - that's what's "right", after all. Some answered A, B, C, D, then E, repeating over and over; others filled out the first five in order and then stopped. Some filled out the front only, others filled out both sides - no way to tell how many today, since most of those who later filled out the backs of their forms now insist that they had them filled out all along.
A few filled out the A column, and then someone found a logic textbook and discovered that an upside-down A is the universal quantifier - it means "all". These folks turned their forms upside-down, saying that the world turned upside-down at the Great Forgetting, and now the A column is "right" and they all think this is some profound insight. Even though they didn't learn about symbolic logic until after they'd filled out their forms, they insist that they knew that's how they were supposed to fill out their forms all along, and for that reason. How the Hell do you argue with that kind of bullshit?
A tiny minority filled out all the bubbles, everywhere, and these folks say that all the answers are right and it doesn't really matter how you fill out your form, so long as you get along with everyone else. We're here in school to learn, they say, not to pick fights with each other. I tend to agree with their principles, just not with their reasoning, and these folks get along with the C-column crowd so nobody else picks on them, either.
I didn't fill out my form. I didn't write anything on it at all, except for that letter D which I had already written down. Most people who didn't fill out their forms at first later went and filled them out, usually out of pressure to fit in or avoid getting beaten up. Some of the people who still don't have their forms filled out just don't care. Some of them insist that we shouldn't fill out our forms at all, and anyone who does is an idiot. For my part, I just don't know what to put on it. I don't know, so I don't put anything. I think some of the ideas out there are interesting, but not one of them is for sure, and it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because we're here and we have shit to do that's just more important. So put whatever you want on your test forms, it's fine by me - but if you start telling people that they have to fill them out this or that way, and threaten to beat them up by the bike racks if they don't, that's when I think you're crazy.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people here who I think are bat-shit loco.
Some of these nuts say that not answering at all is a form of answering. I don't know what they're thinking, since I most definitely did not fill out any of the bubbles. That strikes me as rather like saying that an empty plate is a kind of meal - fucking stupid, in other words. "Empty form, empty head," is another common taunt I hear in the hallways - this one usually comes from those folks who safety-pinned their test forms to their shirts, or who draw them in permanent marker on their skin. If that's what you want to do, go ahead. I mean, I think it's pretty silly, but they think it's silly to not answer, so I'm comfortable with living and letting live. They say I'll be sorry when we all get graded, that I can't get a high test score if I don't answer, but I don't even think that's ever going to happen. Especially not after what happened three nights ago.
It started a couple weeks back. We found old machines in the school's basement and in a lot of back rooms - covered in dust, but they weren't plugged in, so some of them still worked. There was a gas generator in the machine shop, where they taught automobile and manufacturing stuff, so we were able to get some of them running. First was an old record player, one of those simple dealies with the turntable and the flower-shaped thing for the sound to come out. People started recognizing some of the songs, which says to me that we can still have some of our memories jogged from before the Great Forgetting, just like we remember how to walk and how to speak and what tables and chairs are. But some people insist that it means we can know things "a priori", a word they got from one of those logic textbooks. I say the name of a song is just something you picked up somewhere, and it can be taught anyhow, so who cares?
We found more and more machines, in increasing complexity until we got to the burned-out stuff that was being used right up until the Great Forgetting. Some of the other kids, all kinds but mostly the C-column crowd, started to use the simplest machines and some of the library books and instruction manuals to figure out how some of the more recent ones must work. They're really, really smart - until they start to talk about how it was all left here as a puzzle for us to figure out, so we could re-start civilization on our own. That's when I start to roll my eyes and wish they'd stick to what they can find out and demonstrate. I mean, sure, it would be nice if there was a puzzle, if we were supposed to figure this all out (and there's nothing wrong with figuring things out, even if nobody tells us to do it), if all this was actually planned and had a grand overarching point. But I see no reason to think so. They ask how it all got here; I say I don't know, and they call me stupid for not making up answers.
I say that wanting an answer doesn't mean there is one, and making one up isn't better than admitting you don't know. I sure as Hell wish other people weren't so fucking confident in their made-up answers when we found the grading machine. I wish we never found it at all.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Dear The Internet: Today I made the cutest blasphemy EVAR*!
Better late than never, right? OK, so Steve Bowen informed me on Thursday that Thursday was "Everybody Draw Muhammad" Day, which would have been cool if I weren't working fourteen hours that day. BUT! It reminded me that I had made a previous commitment, in a proud tradition of blasphemy, to blaspheme some more. Without further ado:
Click for huge. Oh, and also for ALL FOUR PANELS. It didn't take long because I'm un-skilled, it took long because I forgot. (My lack of skill is irrelevant to the delay.) Anyway. I think I hit the big five: pigs, dogs, the Kaaba, and liquor, all while drawing the prophet Muhammad and me spending some quality time together. Rock most hard.
EDIT: Photobucket does not want to give me the full-size version of the four-panel thing in all of its irreverent glory, for some reason. If anyone knows of an image hosting service that's man enough to put up a 1044x3122 image on the free, let me know - otherwise I can be e-mailed for full-size versions, if anyone wants 'em.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
The Wrongest of Wrongnesses in the History of Wrongitude
Editor's Note: Do I count as my own editor? I mean, I edit my own stuff, but... nevermind. Look. My last post was a little vapid, pontificating as I was on an overnight webcomic kerfuffle that ended up being wiped off the face of the internet anyhow. I feel kinda bad about it. So I'm breaking my "weekends-only" rule to say something of a little more substance. This is also the third post in recent memory where I have used the word "kerfuffle" for lack of a better term. Should I consult a doctor? Or just a thesaurus?
PZ's summary and the news coverage make for fascinating reading - really, you should check it out - but I'm going to jump right to the number at the end and play around with it. That number is 1:102,680 against. So, sure, the common proteins shared by all modern organisms could have come about by some other means than common descent, but the odds are real fuckin' long against it. How long? So long. Like, it's hard to think of a way to be wronger, mathematically speaking - these guys are wronger than anyone has ever been wrong in the history of wrongitude (sounds like "longitude").
I have a phrase I use to describe "as sure as I get," and that is, "As sure as I am that the Sun's coming up tomorrow." This is meant to convey pretty fuckin' sure but not quite 100% certain (because I'm not 100% certain of anything, other than the fact that I am now having some kind of experience, and that I've always got room for doubt). Sure, something could happen so that the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, but the data so far suggest extremely otherwise. Just how much otherwise? Well, let's take every day in Earth's 4.54-billion-year history as a data point.*
Hmm... that leaves us a shit-pot of orders of magnitude to make up. But yeah, it's settled: we're surer of common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow!4,540,000,000 x 365.25 = 1,658,235,000,000(1.66 trillion, or 1.66 x 1012)
"But wait," comes the Creatard rebuttal, "You can't just count the days up like that, you have to take into account how many of us there are! After all, a large enough number of rabid IDiots can't be wrong!" Well, OK. It doesn't work that way, but we'll humor you. Let's just say that all 6.8-billion of us are Christians, and we have been since the Earth was formed. Not only is this over-generous to the literalists in giving them the actual age of the Earth rather than their Reader's Digest Condensed Books version, giving them all of the current population throughout all of Earth's history, and giving a decidedly democratic bent to our epistemology, it doesn't even come close.
"But... but... twenty-two isn't nearly close enough to two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty," replies the anti-science crusader. "And I believe that your numbers are wrong with every fiber of my being." You know what? That's still not good enough. I'll give you a data point for every nucleotide base pair inside of every single cell of every person now living on the planet for every day throughout all of Earth's history - and you know what that nets us? Take a look:(1.66 x 1012) x (6.8 x 109) = 1.13 x 1022
Fuck! That's still not enough! OK, but what if every atom in the observable universe, itself a number beyond ordinary human comprehension, spawned a Universe with a special Earth with seven billion humans believing in Creation with every fiber of their being? Yeah, what then?! This is what:(3.1647 x 109 base pairs) x (1 x 1014 cells) x (1.13 x 1022) = 3.58 x 1045
Just to recap, we've given a data point in favor of the Sun rising tomorrow for each of 3-billion-odd nucleotide base pairs inside of all hundred trillion cells in the bodies of six to seven billion people observing a sunrise for every single day (including leap years!) across Earth's four-and-a-half billion year history, repeated for every atom in the observable Universe. And given all of that, we're still surer that all life is related by common descent than we are that the Sun will rise tomorrow.(1.5 x 1082 atoms in the observable Universe) x (3.58 x 1045) = 5.37 x 10127
Suck on those numbers! Tomorrow's a dark day for creationism, epistemologically speaking. Yeah, I'd say the future prospects for monotheistic creation myths are looking pretty dim. We should just turn the light out on intelligent design, and leave the real science to light our path into the future.
OK, I'm done now, for real. Man, playing around with degrees of certainty is fun!
* - Yes, OK, to calculate the actual odds of the Sun not coming up tomorrow, I would have to calculate the odds of something happening which would prevent the Sun coming up. Fine. Not the point, and that's why this entry gets the "humor" tag. I'm just going to treat it as a chance event and assume the Sun doesn't rise tomorrow, making it 1 failure out of 1.6 trillion successes. I need to keep this back-of-the-envelope compatible, after all.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Free Trip to Heaven! Details Inside.
I saw the above on a church sign on my way to work the other day. In this town, you can't throw a rock without busting a church window - or at least I can't. There are churches every three to five blocks along the main thoroughfares, and every single one of them has a sign proclaiming this or that trite religious message. But occasionally there's something that brightens my day, such as this imaginary conversation fuel.
Of course, my first thought on seeing this was that I needed to go in and ask someone about this "free trip," acting like I was negotiating a business deal and completely ignoring the religion aspect. In the first place, what exactly is meant by "free"? I hear that you need to promise your soul to the right magical man in the sky, and souls are hot commodities! But if I could get into Heaven on the free, then I don't need to worry about my soul - I can keep it available for all kinds of other shady deals later on down the line, and still get through the pearly gates at the end of it all.
But even if this is one of those cases where "free" doesn't mean "no cost," but rather means "no monetary cost," then I've still got questions. Like, what about that whole "ten percent of your income for life" thing? That's, like, the complete opposite of any definition of "free" I've ever heard! But if I can get into Heaven and still keep all my money, then I suppose a soul or two isn't such a high price to pay after all.
Then again, all this haggling makes me a little suspicious of the whole operation. After all, there are all kinds of "free" deals where the thing you get is a piece of shit, more of a Lucky Strike Extra than something you actually want. Lots of people seem to be under the impression that Heaven is the Best Thing Ever, which sounds good at first; but when you read the fine print, it turns out that Heaven is actually more like Church Forever, which sounds about as boring as Hell to me. Even if that's not true, there are a million ways that Heaven might disappoint me, and only a relatively small number of ways that it might make me happy. For instance, say I enjoy illegal drugs and sex with multiple partners* - what does Heaven have to offer me in this department? Not a whole lot, it would seem.
This leads rather naturally to my last question: what kind of satisfaction guarantee do I get with this deal? I may not like Heaven, after all, so I'd like to keep my options open and know what else is available, or at least recoup some portion of my investment. I'd expect that the preacher (or whoever would listen to me this far) would tell me that the Bible is the guarantee, to which I would counter that the Bible is the offer - and offers aren't their own guarantees. What I'm after is something I'm promised in case the deal goes sour. What do I get if the offer falls through? This is where things ultimately get too shifty, even for me. I mean, I can't talk face-to-face with anybody else who has used this product, I can't try before I buy, there's no "double your money back" offer (or anything even remotely close) - in fact, I've got nothing whatsoever to suggest that this offer is even legit in the first place!
Maybe I'm in the wrong business. You know what? This gives me an idea for a business proposal of my own. How about you send me your money and prayers, and then I'll work with Satan to get roller coasters and water slides in Hell. The fastest-growing religion says God isn't too fond of bikinis, so I doubt that Heaven is likely to clear my building permits. But I'll bet that if I can bring in enough converts, Old Nick could be persuaded to let everyone party down. I've got the offer details somewhere around all these rolling papers, spoons, and hundred dollar bills... give me a minute...
* - Saying this to a preacher with a straight face would, by the way, be at once the most difficult and most rewarding part of the whole process, assuming I even got that far.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Quickies Before Bed
Arguing with a cyberspace publisher is probably easier than arguing with a meatspace publisher. Still, it's frustrating to hear that my cover image needs at least 0.125" bleed on all sides after forgetting it from the first time; then to remember, "OK, I'll just add 0.25" to each dimension in Photoshop," but forget that it's 0.25" total and instead add 0.5" total; then to be told that I still don't have at least 0.125" bleed on all sides. Last I checked, 0.25 is at least 0.125.
Keep in mind that I'm doing all this fancible graphics work on a Mac I bought when I graduated high school in 2002. Yeah, the RAM upgrade I got with it put it at a total of half a gig. It takes me several minutes to open Photoshop, I have to watch a progress bar creep along every time I save, and making the .psd into a .pdf gives me nearly enough time to write another book.
Then again, I'm glad that it still just works. But still. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I've been looking at on the internet, which I think you should look at, too:
- Via Rhodopsin, here is the most useful Amazon product review I've seen in a while.
- That reminds me of this shirt, sent to me by Silver Garou (but, like, months ago). Look, if you haven't seen this before, you need to read the reviews. It's almost as good as this.
- Via Pharyngula, The Counter-Creationism Handbook now has its own iPhone app! Awesome!
- Via my crazy browsing habits, I somehow started by looking at Rise Against music videos, and ended at the most effective commercial in the world. I hate myself for liking this, you have to believe me.
- Rhodopsin also just now sent me an interesting article where a dude takes an idea and some numbers and mashes them up with another idea and other numbers, and while I'm no longer really qualified to check his work (Hell, I can't even check calculus limericks any more!), it is at least an interesting coincidence.
- I've also started reading Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and I wish I'd read it back in 2007. Then I wouldn't be tempted to say that he stole my idea and went back in time to do actual research on it. (This happens more often than I'd like to admit. See also: James Downard's An Ill Wind in Tortuca, brought to me via Silver Garou.)
OK, that's enough out of me. I need sleep. And to get this damned book finished!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Bullshit Pulpit: The Doctrine and Dogma of Double-Deism
I'm getting real sick of religious people getting their trump card of "God says so" in public discussion, so I am inventing a new religion to trump their trump. A "double-trump," if you will, hence the name: "Double-Deism." Today's post will detail the tenets of Double-Deism and how precisely these counter the tactics of whatever religiot you're arguing with at the moment. First and foremost is to remember to improvise, and turn the believer's own tactics against him or her. Counter any dismissal with accusations that your opponent is being intolerant and disrespectful of your carefully considered and deeply held religious convictions; brook no disagreement on the legitimacy of your theology by asserting that any statements discrediting Double-Deism (including this post's admission that it's a joke religion) are damnable heresy; and remember that your religion is ultimately whatever you say it is, no matter what.
Double-Deism is the belief in the generic anthropomorphic creator deity known as "Double-God." Double-God is simple enough to understand: whatever positive qualities are ascribed to your opponent's deity, Double-God is twice as awesome. Period. If someone tries to tell you that their god is infinite, and that Double-God can't be doubly infinite, prove your superiority with math. Proofs abound (it's amazing the bullshit that people will buy if you just say it right), but perhaps the simplest and easiest one would be to start by having your opponent consider the set of all even integers, the set of all odd integers, and the set of all integers. While each set is infinite in size, the set of all integers is equal to the other two sets combined, and so it is doubly infinite (or at least its infinitude is double that of the other two). Similarly, while your opponent's deity of choice may also be infinite, Double-God is simply twice as infinite.
It's important to keep in mind at this point that, while you understand Double-God perfectly (because Double-Deism means whatever you want it to mean), you cannot expect the infidels to understand. Double-God has not revealed itself to them, and so they will be unable to embrace it. This means that you must always be very, very nice to the unbelievers: tell them in as sickeningly sweet of a tone as you can manage that it's OK, you don't expect them to understand the depth and sophistication of your faith as Double-God has revealed it to you. Really, it's no problem, they don't have to understand or believe you, they just have to take you seriously like they ask you to take them seriously. That's all there is to it.
The Alert Reader will have noticed that I referred to Double-God as an "it," and this brings us to the mystery of double-doubleness. You see, while many anthropomorphic deities are male or female, Double-God is twice as male as the male gods and at the same time twice as female as the female gods. But this is still only double (and doubly so), it is not quadruple. There's no such thing as "Quadruple-God," after all - that would just be silly. This also makes Double-Deism the first truly egalitarian religion ever, since themascot, I mean, frontman, that is, central authority figure is both male and female (and doubly so) at all times and in all respects. This is not a contradiction because maleness and femaleness are not mutually exclusive, Double-God just makes the infidels think they are.
Double-Deism also has a central holy text known as the Super-Bible. Unlike other holy texts, which are written on physical pages in Earthly languages, the Super-Bible is a book of pure meaning that cannot be so contained. This is what makes the Super-Bible so much more glorious and awesome than any Earthly text. It also means that you can't just pick it up and read it cover-to-cover; so glorious a book is not meant to be sullied by mortal hands for mortal purposes. Instead, Double-God delivers divine revelations to true believers on an as-needed basis, using whatever book is handy at the moment. Infidels will see nothing but a mundane book, but true believers will see the Super-Bible as Double-God wants them to see it at the moment. Double-God can also show different believers different parts of the text at one and the same time, and nobody can prove that this is not what's happening, so everyone has to go along with it no matter what.
It's also important to remember that anything said to be from the Super-Bible that works against the point you're trying to make at the moment is despicable lies from an infidel who was making things up to discredit true believers such as yourself. And if you ever contradict yourself, you have the option of either A) denouncing your past assertions as the muddled ravings of your past infidel self before you saw the light (if this was a long time ago), or B) asserting that there is no real contradiction, only a failure to understand in the mind of your opponent (if this was not a long time ago). The Super-Bible is a perfect and true holy text, after all, and therefore cannot contradict itself. All you have to do is work backwards from there!
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the truth of Double-Deism is its eschatology. The miracle here lies in the fact that every doomsday prophecy is true. You see, every time someone said that the world was going to end, it actually would have, but for the fact that Double-God stepped in and saved the entire Universe. Double-God has to do this a lot, which is why it never has any time to perform stupid miracles or give private conversations to unbelievers. I mean, subverting the apocalyptic machinations of every other supernatural critter in thehuman imagination Universe is a rather taxing ordeal, because many of these entities are themselves infinite and omnipotent deities, and not even Double-God's doubly-doubled infinitude is enough to keep up with all of that noise and also tally the fall of every sparrow and attend to next Tuesday's football game. You take care of that shit yourself, and get some fucking perspective while you're at it, you fuckin' ingrate.
So yeah, this should be enough to get you started on being a full-fledged proselytizer for Double-Deism. Remember to stay flexible and improvise, and never give any ground to your opponents which you won't use against them later. For those of you who have never been infected with a religion before, it can be difficult to put yourself into the religiot mindset; just remember to start with "you're right," apply pareidolia and confirmation bias liberally, and "Double-God made a miracle happen" is a legal move. Also, you have to stay serious and nice the entire time, to drive home the point that you are sincere in your beliefs no matter how crazy they appear to be. Religious people do this all the time, after all, and we need to beat them at their own stupid game here. Keep those things in mind, and you'll be all set to flummox your opponents in public debate for years to come!
Double-Deism is the belief in the generic anthropomorphic creator deity known as "Double-God." Double-God is simple enough to understand: whatever positive qualities are ascribed to your opponent's deity, Double-God is twice as awesome. Period. If someone tries to tell you that their god is infinite, and that Double-God can't be doubly infinite, prove your superiority with math. Proofs abound (it's amazing the bullshit that people will buy if you just say it right), but perhaps the simplest and easiest one would be to start by having your opponent consider the set of all even integers, the set of all odd integers, and the set of all integers. While each set is infinite in size, the set of all integers is equal to the other two sets combined, and so it is doubly infinite (or at least its infinitude is double that of the other two). Similarly, while your opponent's deity of choice may also be infinite, Double-God is simply twice as infinite.
It's important to keep in mind at this point that, while you understand Double-God perfectly (because Double-Deism means whatever you want it to mean), you cannot expect the infidels to understand. Double-God has not revealed itself to them, and so they will be unable to embrace it. This means that you must always be very, very nice to the unbelievers: tell them in as sickeningly sweet of a tone as you can manage that it's OK, you don't expect them to understand the depth and sophistication of your faith as Double-God has revealed it to you. Really, it's no problem, they don't have to understand or believe you, they just have to take you seriously like they ask you to take them seriously. That's all there is to it.
The Alert Reader will have noticed that I referred to Double-God as an "it," and this brings us to the mystery of double-doubleness. You see, while many anthropomorphic deities are male or female, Double-God is twice as male as the male gods and at the same time twice as female as the female gods. But this is still only double (and doubly so), it is not quadruple. There's no such thing as "Quadruple-God," after all - that would just be silly. This also makes Double-Deism the first truly egalitarian religion ever, since the
Double-Deism also has a central holy text known as the Super-Bible. Unlike other holy texts, which are written on physical pages in Earthly languages, the Super-Bible is a book of pure meaning that cannot be so contained. This is what makes the Super-Bible so much more glorious and awesome than any Earthly text. It also means that you can't just pick it up and read it cover-to-cover; so glorious a book is not meant to be sullied by mortal hands for mortal purposes. Instead, Double-God delivers divine revelations to true believers on an as-needed basis, using whatever book is handy at the moment. Infidels will see nothing but a mundane book, but true believers will see the Super-Bible as Double-God wants them to see it at the moment. Double-God can also show different believers different parts of the text at one and the same time, and nobody can prove that this is not what's happening, so everyone has to go along with it no matter what.
It's also important to remember that anything said to be from the Super-Bible that works against the point you're trying to make at the moment is despicable lies from an infidel who was making things up to discredit true believers such as yourself. And if you ever contradict yourself, you have the option of either A) denouncing your past assertions as the muddled ravings of your past infidel self before you saw the light (if this was a long time ago), or B) asserting that there is no real contradiction, only a failure to understand in the mind of your opponent (if this was not a long time ago). The Super-Bible is a perfect and true holy text, after all, and therefore cannot contradict itself. All you have to do is work backwards from there!
Perhaps the greatest evidence of the truth of Double-Deism is its eschatology. The miracle here lies in the fact that every doomsday prophecy is true. You see, every time someone said that the world was going to end, it actually would have, but for the fact that Double-God stepped in and saved the entire Universe. Double-God has to do this a lot, which is why it never has any time to perform stupid miracles or give private conversations to unbelievers. I mean, subverting the apocalyptic machinations of every other supernatural critter in the
So yeah, this should be enough to get you started on being a full-fledged proselytizer for Double-Deism. Remember to stay flexible and improvise, and never give any ground to your opponents which you won't use against them later. For those of you who have never been infected with a religion before, it can be difficult to put yourself into the religiot mindset; just remember to start with "you're right," apply pareidolia and confirmation bias liberally, and "Double-God made a miracle happen" is a legal move. Also, you have to stay serious and nice the entire time, to drive home the point that you are sincere in your beliefs no matter how crazy they appear to be. Religious people do this all the time, after all, and we need to beat them at their own stupid game here. Keep those things in mind, and you'll be all set to flummox your opponents in public debate for years to come!
Examples for Practice:
Religiot: You can't have morality without religion!
You: Yes we can, because Double-God says we can.
R: You only believe that because you're deluded by faith.
U: That's not true, and we could still have morality without religion even if Double-God didn't give us permission. Double-God just confirmed this, I read it in the Super-Bible just now. Here, it says, "Humans can make a perfectly legitimate morality without religion, whether or not any deities exist. Double-deists understand this, independent of their faith. This would also be true even if Double-God didn't exist, which it does. The word of the Twice-Monarch, thanks be to Double-God."
R: [Deity du jour] created the Universe and everything in it.
U: Sure, but Double-God created that deity. They had a falling out, though, and now your deity just doesn't want to talk about it.
R: Life has no meaning or purpose unless those things are given to us by [deity du jour].
U: Sure it does! Double-God says so, right here in the Super-Bible! [Elaborate as in first example.]
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Dear The Internet: Today I made another blasphemy!
OK, so I'm all about doing those things I say I'll do. Really, I am, I'm just a procrastinator, too. At any rate:
You can click that for huge. And, y'know, complete. So far. Look, this is like a progress report because I wanted to put something up, I'm just sick of Photoshop right now.
Anyway, in all my dawdling, I came up with a far grander vision for what I wanted this to be (with a little prodding help from Silver Garou and Rhodopsin), and I've scaled it back to something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. Two weeks isn't already past unreasonable, is it? I think I can safely tell you that a pile of puppies is involved. Stay tuned!
Anyway, in all my dawdling, I came up with a far grander vision for what I wanted this to be (with a little prodding help from Silver Garou and Rhodopsin), and I've scaled it back to something I can do in a reasonable amount of time. Two weeks isn't already past unreasonable, is it? I think I can safely tell you that a pile of puppies is involved. Stay tuned!
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Bullshit Pulpit: The Gospel of Godlessness
My roommate, Silver Garou, recently saw this salt stain where his car was parked when he was visiting his girlfriend:
He was kind enough to share with me, and now I want to share it with all of you. Now, everyone knows that A is for Atheism. Clearly, this is a sign from the Universe that he should keep on in his faithlessness and spread the gospel of godlessness. But there's a deeper meaning here, and that's what I want to explore today.
We begin with Douglas Gasking's proof that God does not exist. It is elegant in its simplicity, and it goes something like this: the impressiveness of an act is the product of both its inherent difficulty and the handicap to the actor; the creation of all existence is the most inherently difficult task imaginable; not existing is the greatest handicap imaginable; therefore, God (i.e. the most impressive actor imaginable) must have created all existence without existing himself. Otherwise, we're just not talking about God.
What's so amazingly powerful about this little bit of argumentation is that it succeeds where every other ontological argument fails: it explains how God could create all of existence, which is completely senseless when you consider that if God was around then he would have been all of existence. By positing God firmly outside existence (i.e. in the idea space of nonexistent entities), this ontological argument finally explains how stuff comes from nothing in a way that those science-challenged blatherskites can finally understand!
At this point, I think I should point out a key difference between Gasking's argument and all other ontological arguments, namely: Avicenna, Anselm, Plantinga, et al. have always sought to establish God's existence with their syllogistic gyrations. But they fail as a category for the simple reason that the existence of an entity cannot be positively established by argumentation alone. However, the impossibility of an entity's existence (and thus the necessity of its nonexistence) can be established by argumentation alone. To wit: from the definition of a square and the definition of a circle, we know that square circles cannot possibly exist, and thus we know that pro wrestling is fake. (As an aside, compare the commercial success of pro wrestling with that of religion, and then try to tell me with a straight face that the dim-witted mouth-breathers who believe in either of them aren't just plain retarded - and don't bother getting offended, because I didn't just make a slur; I mean that these people literally have a crippling mental disability.)
At any rate, Gasking's argument is not properly ontological, but rather the antidote to such foolishness. As a decoupler undoes the work of a coupler, Gasking's is a deontological argument. Since deontology also means duty-based ethics, we are therefore duty-bound to accept Gasking's argument by ethics, which is always the most important reason to do anything. We just have to buy it, no two ways about it, and anyone who says she doesn't buy it is lying to you and probably to herself as well because she hates God. Yeah, that's right: believing in God equals hating God. Furthermore, this argument applies with equal force to all possible gods (and even most of the impossible ones!), cancelling out all possible ontological arguments for those possible gods, forever, The End. You just can't argue with logic like this.
Perhaps the most elegant aspect of this whole scene, however, is that it also makes sense of the platitudinous deepities spouted by empty-headed theists. A "deepity," for those unfamiliar with the lingo, is Daniel Dennett's term for a profound-sounding statement with two interpretations: one of which is literally true but entirely trivial, the other of which would be profound if it were not manifestly false. Dennett's example is the statement, "Love is just a word," because of course the word "love" is just a word; but the referent of love is not a word, stupid. My favorite deepity is, "The only thing you can see is light," which sounds profound but is no more amazing than, "The only thing you can hear is sound." And so deepities like Karen Armstrong's "God is the God behind God" become obviously true when we replace the word "God" with what we really mean by it: a nonexistent entity, a nothing. Nothing is the nothing behind nothing. "God created all of existence" becomes the rather innocuous (and also scientifically supported) "Nothing created all of existence." "We're on a mission from God?" More like a mission from nothing! God is the source of morality? Oh, I get it now! Nothing is the source of morality - it all makes sense now!
And if a nonexistent entity could create all of existence, then of course it could also perform the comparatively trivial task of forming a salt stain to speak to an atheist. The message from God is clear as the salt crystals in which it is written: "I don't exist, so don't believe in me; and tell other people not to believe in me, too." So hop to it, folks! Go spread the gospel of godlessness!
We begin with Douglas Gasking's proof that God does not exist. It is elegant in its simplicity, and it goes something like this: the impressiveness of an act is the product of both its inherent difficulty and the handicap to the actor; the creation of all existence is the most inherently difficult task imaginable; not existing is the greatest handicap imaginable; therefore, God (i.e. the most impressive actor imaginable) must have created all existence without existing himself. Otherwise, we're just not talking about God.
What's so amazingly powerful about this little bit of argumentation is that it succeeds where every other ontological argument fails: it explains how God could create all of existence, which is completely senseless when you consider that if God was around then he would have been all of existence. By positing God firmly outside existence (i.e. in the idea space of nonexistent entities), this ontological argument finally explains how stuff comes from nothing in a way that those science-challenged blatherskites can finally understand!
At this point, I think I should point out a key difference between Gasking's argument and all other ontological arguments, namely: Avicenna, Anselm, Plantinga, et al. have always sought to establish God's existence with their syllogistic gyrations. But they fail as a category for the simple reason that the existence of an entity cannot be positively established by argumentation alone. However, the impossibility of an entity's existence (and thus the necessity of its nonexistence) can be established by argumentation alone. To wit: from the definition of a square and the definition of a circle, we know that square circles cannot possibly exist, and thus we know that pro wrestling is fake. (As an aside, compare the commercial success of pro wrestling with that of religion, and then try to tell me with a straight face that the dim-witted mouth-breathers who believe in either of them aren't just plain retarded - and don't bother getting offended, because I didn't just make a slur; I mean that these people literally have a crippling mental disability.)
At any rate, Gasking's argument is not properly ontological, but rather the antidote to such foolishness. As a decoupler undoes the work of a coupler, Gasking's is a deontological argument. Since deontology also means duty-based ethics, we are therefore duty-bound to accept Gasking's argument by ethics, which is always the most important reason to do anything. We just have to buy it, no two ways about it, and anyone who says she doesn't buy it is lying to you and probably to herself as well because she hates God. Yeah, that's right: believing in God equals hating God. Furthermore, this argument applies with equal force to all possible gods (and even most of the impossible ones!), cancelling out all possible ontological arguments for those possible gods, forever, The End. You just can't argue with logic like this.
Perhaps the most elegant aspect of this whole scene, however, is that it also makes sense of the platitudinous deepities spouted by empty-headed theists. A "deepity," for those unfamiliar with the lingo, is Daniel Dennett's term for a profound-sounding statement with two interpretations: one of which is literally true but entirely trivial, the other of which would be profound if it were not manifestly false. Dennett's example is the statement, "Love is just a word," because of course the word "love" is just a word; but the referent of love is not a word, stupid. My favorite deepity is, "The only thing you can see is light," which sounds profound but is no more amazing than, "The only thing you can hear is sound." And so deepities like Karen Armstrong's "God is the God behind God" become obviously true when we replace the word "God" with what we really mean by it: a nonexistent entity, a nothing. Nothing is the nothing behind nothing. "God created all of existence" becomes the rather innocuous (and also scientifically supported) "Nothing created all of existence." "We're on a mission from God?" More like a mission from nothing! God is the source of morality? Oh, I get it now! Nothing is the source of morality - it all makes sense now!
And if a nonexistent entity could create all of existence, then of course it could also perform the comparatively trivial task of forming a salt stain to speak to an atheist. The message from God is clear as the salt crystals in which it is written: "I don't exist, so don't believe in me; and tell other people not to believe in me, too." So hop to it, folks! Go spread the gospel of godlessness!
Monday, January 4, 2010
Dear The Internet: Today I made a blasphemy!
Ahem. Inspired by Saturday's Daylight Atheism, I cooked up a little blasphemy in my kitchen just now to tide me over until I get the rest of my stuff in the mail. All of the below photographs can be clicked for huge.
Can you guess where this is going?
Wait for it...
I'd say "boo-yah," or something similarly triumphant, but the thing is, I don't give a fuck. Like, I know that some book-burning, cartoonist-threatening, bacon-hating shit-heads with carp for brains would get their undies in a bind over this, but they're stupid, so who cares what they think?
OK, that's enough pointless nonsense for now. I'll wait for the death threats to roll in, and follow them up with Miss Piggy kissing Mohammed (unless you, the General Reader, can give me something even more blasphemous to draw).
OK, that's enough pointless nonsense for now. I'll wait for the death threats to roll in, and follow them up with Miss Piggy kissing Mohammed (unless you, the General Reader, can give me something even more blasphemous to draw).
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Too Awesome Not to Share
Monday, December 14, 2009
Bus Crazies Gone Wild!
So I was riding the bus to work this morning when I overheard a man talking to another man about teh innernet. These were Serious Men, who do things like Talk Shop, so I can understand the instinct to appear knowledgeable. For my part, well, I don't know - I'm not a doctor. But I have friends in high places - people who occasionally take the time to explain things to me, like how a computer works at the transistor level (it's a physical logic gate - so cool!) and stuff like that. Computers are still magic to me, at some ambiguous level - it's along the way from "transistor be logic gate" to "game go on screen" - but it's magic that I can at least listen to intelligently. And now I'm hyphenating too much - back to the story about making fun of posturing idiots.
So this guy says he couldn't do the research he needs to do because "they blocked all the social networking" and now he can't even "get on IM." He tried to Google what he needed, apparently, but it "brought up something else all on its own," and so he was all like, "delete delete delete!" Because it was, you see, "an adult, umm, it was a porn site." Well, fuckin' surprise. Apparently nobody ever told him that that's what the internet is for. I thought to myself, briefly, "Who does this yahoo think he's trying to fool?" But then I looked around on the bus and answered my own question. And now I think my elitism is showing. Oops!
So I started talking to Typhinius about this, because it was hilarious, and he courteously explained to me that if spam clogs all the tubes, then that will slow down my pixels. I countered that the law of supply and demand has created a preponderance of lesbian porn, and that if nobody watches it, then it's just going to pile up and start spilling out to all the other sites. We'd better get cracking! Keeping on top of internet porn is Serious Business!
Fast forward to work, and I'm talking video games with one of the tech guys, when one of the people who does actual work walks in and starts asking him for help with her home computer. She was using terms like "computer box" and "the button by the volume knob" (I'm not making this up, I swears it!), so I knew what I had to do. I practiced at poker face for a while, then when there was a lull in the conversation, I asked her, "Are you sure your spam filter is working properly? If too much spam clogs your tubes, then that could cause your pixels to slow down."
She looked at me and nodded - knowingly. Part of me died a little.
But then tech guy came to her rescue, and said with perfect sincerity, "Don't listen to D," as if I weren't even there! Whatever, he did the right thing, and I cracked up because I could no longer keep a straight face.
Speaking of non sequiturs, this reminds me rather of Our Lord Jebus. You see, the tubes are our brains, and the pixels are our thoughts, and Jebus is the spam. When spam clogs the tubes, your pixels slow down, they get all fuzzy, and it's hard to see what's going on. But this is OK, really, because thinking is hard. You don't want to bother with all that tough work, do you? So let Jebus clog your brain tubes with his blood or spam or whatever, and blur out all those sharp-edged pixels. It's the stupid man's anti-aliasing.
Or you could install Skepticism brand spam filters, and keep your tubes clear and flowing properly. Sure, you might not like some of the things that pop up on your screen now, but those things were there anyway - you just couldn't see them before because of all the Jebus spam! And then you'll know that when other people talk about lesbian porn overflowing onto other sites, they're talking out their asses, so you don't need to worry about that stupid apocalyptic crap. And then you can start worrying about things that actually need to be worried about, like misogyny and homophobia and hunger and poverty and disease. You know, real problems, not the made-up problems that the Jebusites are constantly fretting about.
So this guy says he couldn't do the research he needs to do because "they blocked all the social networking" and now he can't even "get on IM." He tried to Google what he needed, apparently, but it "brought up something else all on its own," and so he was all like, "delete delete delete!" Because it was, you see, "an adult, umm, it was a porn site." Well, fuckin' surprise. Apparently nobody ever told him that that's what the internet is for. I thought to myself, briefly, "Who does this yahoo think he's trying to fool?" But then I looked around on the bus and answered my own question. And now I think my elitism is showing. Oops!
So I started talking to Typhinius about this, because it was hilarious, and he courteously explained to me that if spam clogs all the tubes, then that will slow down my pixels. I countered that the law of supply and demand has created a preponderance of lesbian porn, and that if nobody watches it, then it's just going to pile up and start spilling out to all the other sites. We'd better get cracking! Keeping on top of internet porn is Serious Business!
Fast forward to work, and I'm talking video games with one of the tech guys, when one of the people who does actual work walks in and starts asking him for help with her home computer. She was using terms like "computer box" and "the button by the volume knob" (I'm not making this up, I swears it!), so I knew what I had to do. I practiced at poker face for a while, then when there was a lull in the conversation, I asked her, "Are you sure your spam filter is working properly? If too much spam clogs your tubes, then that could cause your pixels to slow down."
She looked at me and nodded - knowingly. Part of me died a little.
But then tech guy came to her rescue, and said with perfect sincerity, "Don't listen to D," as if I weren't even there! Whatever, he did the right thing, and I cracked up because I could no longer keep a straight face.
Speaking of non sequiturs, this reminds me rather of Our Lord Jebus. You see, the tubes are our brains, and the pixels are our thoughts, and Jebus is the spam. When spam clogs the tubes, your pixels slow down, they get all fuzzy, and it's hard to see what's going on. But this is OK, really, because thinking is hard. You don't want to bother with all that tough work, do you? So let Jebus clog your brain tubes with his blood or spam or whatever, and blur out all those sharp-edged pixels. It's the stupid man's anti-aliasing.
Or you could install Skepticism brand spam filters, and keep your tubes clear and flowing properly. Sure, you might not like some of the things that pop up on your screen now, but those things were there anyway - you just couldn't see them before because of all the Jebus spam! And then you'll know that when other people talk about lesbian porn overflowing onto other sites, they're talking out their asses, so you don't need to worry about that stupid apocalyptic crap. And then you can start worrying about things that actually need to be worried about, like misogyny and homophobia and hunger and poverty and disease. You know, real problems, not the made-up problems that the Jebusites are constantly fretting about.
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