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I've finally put my finger on what pisses me off about "holistic healers" or whatever they call themselves. It's that they understand the problem: modern/western/capitalist/whatever doctors elevating diseases in their particular specialty over the people who have them. And they understand the solution: treat the whole person.

And after having both of those insights what they actually do is crystal-flavored drivel. It is entirely fair to criticize psychiatrists that try to solve every problem by throwing drugs at it, regardless of what the problem actually is. But the exact same criticism applies to so-called healers who try to blast everything with spirit energy. The drug obsessed shrink is reducing all of his human patients to a puddle of chemicals, the holist is reducing his patients to waves of colored aura. Both refuse to recognize or treat any aspect of the patient that wasn't already their specialty.

Where are all the people who say, "I believe in treating the whole person. That's why I have thorough training in psychology, psychiatry, special needs education, endocrinology, regular education, relationship counseling, physical therapy, gynecology, career counseling, oncology, nutrition, and the top seven most common religions in my area." ???

I really don't want to have to pioneer this shit. Becoming a polymath sounds suspiciously like work.

[channeling Cramulus]

40 years in the future, a neo-hipster comes to you. It's doing an art project on the online communities that existed in the transition era when people were starting to have personal online presences, but those online presences were largely distinct from their day-to-day lives, back when there was a public/private distinction.

All of the good boards were taken, so it's chosen PD.com.

What four threads that you've started do you make him read?

This is a true story. Because of its personal nature, all names have been changed. Told with permission of the heroine.
Keywords: Abnormal Psychology, Abuse, Retail, and Decent Human Beings

I met Alexis (short for "Alexandra") in college, my junior year, her freshman year. She showed up to an Anime Club meeting one day, invited by Bob (her future boyfriend) and ended up staying late afterwards to play Cosmic Encounters with us. Our geek circle drafted her after that - not many people were willing to put up with my roommate's girlfriend's game of choice, which was two decrepit copies of Cosmic Encounter, different editions, each owned by one of her parents before they dated each other, and played with barely-remembered house rules.

Alexis is short and thin, with glasses and pretty blonde hair. She can un-dislocate her shoulder by slamming into a wall, a trick she learned because her shoulder joints are weak and will dislocate if her arms are raised too high above her head. It didn't stop her from being active in Tae Kwon Do and play-sparring with us, so we got to see it a lot. She was peppy and energetic, acted like a stereotypical "genki girl". She hugged friends as a way of greeting, and laughed when Bob and I awkwardly flopped, too INTP to return the hug properly. When anyone did anything for her, no matter how small, she gushed gratitude. She smiled a lot. Usually when someone says this about a person, they mean that he was happy. I mean that she emoted. She smiled a lot, and when something especially good happened she would squee and say "Happy Face!" out loud, in case anyone didn't see how much she was smiling.

I stopped using the word "rape" casually because of Alexis. I played video games a lot, both with friends and online, and I had picked up some gamer slang. "Pwn" was getting stale, and gamers were reaching for new words to embellish games. If you were winning across the board, you were "dominating" your opponent. If an opponent was capitalizing on your play errors, you were being "spanked". A game that was shamefully and utterly one-sided was described as "rape", as in "Z nine-pooled and 'toss fucked up his opening placement, so when the 'lings hit his mineral line from the opposite side they basically anally raped all his workers with ten-foot barbed poles."

Alexis enjoyed playing video games with us, but lurid descriptions like that caused her to stop having fun. She asked me to stop, so I did, first around her and then at all. It was surprisingly easy to cut a word from my vocabulary. I've seen some heated arguments on gaming forums about political correctness and censorship and 'feminazis', and while I'm as against Nazis censoring people as the next guy, none of those arguments really matter when loose speech is preventing a friend and fellow gamer from enjoying the games we love.

At this point I should mention that rape is going to be important to this story, and I need to include a few details for all the events to make sense. If reading about the kind of child abuse and sexual assault that causes PTSD might upset you, exercise your judgment. This chapter of Alexis's life has a -- well, not exactly a happy ending, but at least an optimistic ending. If you yourself are struggling with PTSD, her story might be useful to you. I'll give you another warning before the sections that contain potential triggers.

To be continued as I write it down.

News in head...
Apparently the lady running the show is named Katharine...
Katharine has decided we are going to integrate.

I'm apparently not being allowed to be alarmed about it, so other people in my head are feeling alarmed for me.

In short, I expect to be batshit for a while, and not in a really cool Hirley0 way...In a very messy, moodswingy sort of way, and thus off the board.
Y'all be cool, ok?

*salutes, heads off to support forums.*

It's your life, but maybe you should talk to someone about that?

Yeah, another victim of MPP.  The strange sort of MPP that never seems to hit the medical journals.  The ones where the personalities talk about shit with each other.

I've seen it in person. A friend's doctor is circulating some of friend's autobiographical writing among her colleagues try to get other doctors to stop telling clients that their dissociative identity disorder is just whining. I had lean on him really hard to get him to tell his doctor (who he was already seeing for PTSD & depression) about the other personalities. He was able to tell her about the awful incident(s) relating to his PTSD, but DID was too much. He eventually had to call me into the room to tell his doctor for him, because he couldn't work up to telling her himself.

It's by the single most stigmatized mental disorder. Some people treat you like shit if they find out you're schizophrenic, but at least they admit schizophrenia exists. And some of those skeptics are practicing doctors, so they give elaborate diagnoses like bipolar + poor memory + ADHD + schizophrenia + compulsive lying + whatever instead of admitting that there really is one diagnosis that explains both the full set of symptoms and why the cocktail of 8 different neuroactive drugs isn't helping.

The personalities that consider themselves alternate are afraid treatment will entail a literal existential crisis for them, so they steer the person away from psychologists. When they do make it to a doctor, and the doctor tells them they're full of shit and prescribes them brain-melting bipolar drugs, they tend not to go back. It's vastly underreported.

DID is real and serious business, and science has some catching up to do in the area. Psychologists have a long history of misunderstanding mental disorders for quite a long time before starting to figure them out. Just about every mental disorder has had to struggle for recognition. It is not supported by past results to claim that because many psychologists are skeptical of it it doesn't exist.

I'm traveling to New York City for the first time, to calm a panicked client. Thinking I'll microblog the trip here, if anything particularly interesting happens. It will probably all go sideways one way or another.

Any heads up / warnings / advice? Anybody in NYC want to hang out?

["Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,"]

I wasn't really around for this, but apparently there was some massive moral panic about all these Crack Babies, who were going to be retarded and criminal for their whole lives and cause the end of society?

A 24 year study of over 200 people, from infancy to adulthood, half exposed to cocaine in utero and half not, has found essentially no statistically significant difference between the mental abilities of the so-called "crack babies" and the control group. Not that they weren't below average developmentally on almost every test - they were - but so was the control group.

http://articles.philly.com/2013-07-22/news/40709969_1_hallam-hurt-so-called-crack-babies-funded-study

Hurt organized a study of 224 near-term or full-term babies born at Einstein between 1989 and 1992 - half with mothers who used cocaine during pregnancy and half who were not exposed to the drug in utero. All the babies came from low-income families, and nearly all were African Americans.

...

Hurt, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, is always quick to point out that cocaine can have devastating effects on pregnancy. The drug can cause a problematic rise in a pregnant woman's blood pressure, trigger premature labor, and may be linked to a dangerous condition in which the placenta tears away from the uterine wall. Babies born prematurely, no matter the cause, are at risk for a host of medical and developmental problems. On top of that, a parent's drug use can create a chaotic home life for a child.

Hurt's study enrolled only full-term babies so the possible effects of prematurity did not skew the results. The babies were then evaluated periodically, beginning at six months and then every six or 12 months on through young adulthood. Their mothers agreed to be tested for drug use throughout the study.

The researchers consistently found no significant differences between the cocaine-exposed children and the controls. At age 4, for instance, the average IQ of the cocaine-exposed children was 79.0 and the average IQ for the nonexposed children was 81.9. Both numbers are well below the average of 90 to 109 for U.S. children in the same age group. When it came to school readiness at age 6, about 25 percent of children in each group scored in the abnormal range on tests for math and letter and word recognition.

"We went looking for the effects of cocaine," Hurt said. But after a time "we began to ask, 'Was there something else going on?' "

While the cocaine-exposed children and a group of nonexposed controls performed about the same on tests, both groups lagged on developmental and intellectual measures compared to the norm. Hurt and her team began to think the "something else" was poverty.

As the children grew, the researchers did many evaluations to tease out environmental factors that could be affecting their development. On the upside, they found that children being raised in a nurturing home - measured by such factors as caregiver warmth and affection and language stimulation - were doing better than kids in a less nurturing home. On the downside, they found that 81 percent of the children had seen someone arrested; 74 percent had heard gunshots; 35 percent had seen someone get shot; and 19 percent had seen a dead body outside - and the kids were only 7 years old at the time. Those children who reported a high exposure to violence were likelier to show signs of depression and anxiety and to have lower self-esteem.

...

"Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine," Hurt said at her May lecture.

Math thread.

Ask about:
analysis
calculus
topology
graph theory
game theory
abstract algebra (math over fields of functions or other weird objects that aren't normally thought of as numbers.)
vector spaces
predicate logic
lambda calculus
regular expressions
computability
set theory <-- actually probably the best starting point for learning math, even easier than algebra
number theory

I know a little about fractals and chaos theory, and next to nothing about knot theory, but I might be able to help with articles intended for a lay audience about them.

Stats are useful and therefore not real math, and outside the scope of this thread.

I swear to god do not even talk about quantum physics. Quantum physics math is bullshit. I don't mean the goofy physical interpretations that imply magic not-particles or whatever. I mean physicists make up axioms as they go along. "Okay, we have a raising and lowering operator. But we must have a bottom rung of our energy ladder or else we'd get particles with negative energy, and that would be silly. So a step down from the bottom step must have a non-normalizeable square integral, which means it [lower of]a₀ is the constant zero function. Working backwards we can derive all the permissible energy states... yes GA? Well, mathematically yes, there are a lot of other functions that aren't normalizably square integrable but those don't happen in physics. Now, we return to our square well, where we have PE(x) = 0 for x in [0, 1] and PE(x) = Infinity for x not in [0, 1]...."

And then the very next chapter they are suddenly completely okay with a particle having negative spin, but negative energy is so preposterous that they can't even think about it. But they have no problem with "infinite" energy, and will happily tell you that the integral of f(x) = Infinity if x = 0, 0 otherwise, is 1. Like, the number one. They just integrated a point discontinuity at infinity and got 1. That's not even on the real number line anymore. If your target spaces is "The reals + a number larger than all of the reals" then every nice algebraic property you're used to explodes. a + b = a + c doesn't imply that b = c any more, for starters. Infinitely wide sin waves are a well-defined square integrable function that doesn't break math at all, and are sometimes allowed in quantum (e.g., as part of an orthogonal base) and sometimes not okay. ( sin(x) is a perfectly good replacement for constant 0 in the bottom rung argument, except that then you don't derive the right things so unnnnnnnnnnngh we declare that the world doesn't work that way.)

Two thirds of the way through the semester, I finally figured out that all of these "wavefunctions" in "Hilbert space" (the thing physicists call "Hilbert space" is one particular Hilbert space with a whole bunch of goofy extra rules, but they don't care that they're forking nomenclature) are not functions at all, but Cauchy series of equivalence classes of functions under some kind of strange distance metric that I think was degenerate for most pairs of equivalence classes. Which is a fine, if unusual, space for a mathematician to work in -- you don't have functions that map from from the reals to the reals anymore so it's a bit Twilight Zone-ish. But that's apparently "too abstract" for physicists, so they turn around and pretend that the limit of a Cauchy series of equivalence classes of functions is itself a function. Maddening and in defiance of all sense, I tell you.

In science class that Tuesday morning, our social studies teacher hurried in, breathing heavily. "Turn on CNN!" she said. "Someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center!"

Most of us had never heard of the World Trade Center, but we were about to find out. The television showed two tall rectangular buildings. One was on fire, and a huge plume of smoke was pouring out. The camera alternated between street view, with bits of ash falling down and people panicking. Then the station got a video someone had managed to take of the plane smashing into the building. They didn't have anything better to show, so they ran that clip over and over again, intermixed with live footage of the smoke and panic. When the second plane hit, at first we thought it was just another re-run of the first. When the class understood, we became very quiet.

Two planes do not hit the same building on the same day by accident.

Then the Pentagon was hit. This was now an act of war.

We rotated between classrooms as normal, but the teachers didn't say much. Every classroom had the television on. We watched as more and more smoke filled the sky until it became a weather pattern. At street level, the police and firefighters had cordoned off the area and were moving people away from the World Trade Center. Two or three of the layered walls of the Pentagon had been breached. The first tower collapsed. The people on the street had not been evacuated far enough: a tidal wave of ash and debris engulfed the cameraman. We saw human bodies mixed in with the huge chunks of concrete falling from the sky as the building pancaked. We saw people jumping from the second tower.

People were very afraid. We thought it was going to be World War Three. Even as kids, we knew that if World War Three happened the nukes would go off and everyone on the Earth would die, killed by the bombs and radiation and then all the plants would die, choked of light by thick clouds like the one over New York City right now and nothing would ever live on the planet again. A lot of parents took their children home from school early, so they could be with their family in the last days.

Then we began to hear about Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was the terrorist network that was behind the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. They had members all over the globe. They hated America and our freedoms and would do anything to kill us. The news played videos of Palestinian children dancing in the streets. High ranking military officers told us that Al-Qaeda probably had hundreds of sleeper cells hidden throughout America, ready to carry out a second wave of attacks. They would attack soft targets like stadiums and shopping malls and schools. They would use dirty bombs or sarin gas or smallpox or the bubonic plague. We didn't have to wait long; Al-Qaeda started mailing anthrax manufactured by Saddam Hussein's Iraq to various senators and news agencies the next week.

It turned out that the videos of children dancing were from an unrelated festival weeks earlier. The FBI concluded a few years ago that the anthrax was stolen from a USA government lab, not made in Iraq, and had nothing nothing to do with Al-Qaeda whatsoever.

We didn't know that at the time. You have to understand that everyone was very scared, and when people are scared they make bad decisions.

[(don't panic)]

(don't panic)

Just woke up at ~5 AM to hands grasping at my 2nd story windowsill, trying to climb into my room. I literally, physically peed myself a little. This was after an indeterminate number of police officers chased an apparently armed and dangerous man in circles outside of my house, while I ran in circles inside my house trying to lock all of the doors while yelling at my kid sister to hide in the basement. It was tricky because every time I locked all of the doors, one would unlock at random, plus I kept remembering that I had forgotten doors that I'm not sure existed before I went to bed last night. (Sorry to post about a dream I just had as if it were important - I did put "Don't Panic" in bright friendly letters at the top.)

I live in an apartment that has one door to the hallway outside.

The news media has spent the last week scaring the public for profit. We demanded this, of course - we want news now and we don't have any extra money for fact checking or common sense, and none of this "local news" bullshit either, just report the scariest thing that happened anywhere in one of the largest countries in the world to everywhere else, we'd rather see blood than something possibly relevant to our day-to-day lives.

When people are scared, they make stupid decisions. Already some dude straight-up punched a woman carrying a baby in a stroller because she had a head scarf and he had deduced that Muslims were responsible. Plus there was that thing where we shut down more than one city to catch two guys who had on average killed less than two people each, and we only even arrested one of them.

The fact of the matter is that 3-5 people dying is just not that exceptional, and being blown up at a marathon is so unlikely that you could can round the odds to exactly zero. You can't even make the claim that explosions killing people is more important than anything else killing people. Here's what I found after < 5 min of searching, with the restrictions that I only cared about explosions that killed Americans inside the US and only after the completely arbitrary date of Sept. 12, 2001:

2001 Jim Walter Resources / Walter Energy Mine Disaster - 13 killed.
2005 Texas City Refinery explosion - 15 killed. (Also: owned by BP)
2006 Sago Mine Disaster - 12 killed.
2008 Pentworth, Georgia Sugar refinery explosion - 13 killed.
2010 Middletown, Conneticut power plant explosion - 11 killed.
Upper Big Branch Mine disaster - 29 killed.
Deepwater Horizon explosion - 11 killed while drilling for BP. Plus, you know, the biggest single environmental disaster in US history.

Objectively, if we care about white non-Americans blowing us up, we ought to declare war on British Petroleum.

In perspective, though, even those industrial explosions don't have much to do with me - I don't work underground and I don't live in the blast radius of any chemical plants. The worst thing that's happened to me in the past year is a car accident (no one was injured) when I rear ended someone on the highway. I blame bad highway design - there's a bit of I-71 near Columbus where all four lanes of people who want to stay on I-71 have to take a single lane of exit, get on I-70, and then make it back across four lanes of traffic to exit back onto I-71 on the right. I screwed up trying to handle the velocity differential between the different lanes and hit the car in front of me. I should have just missed the exit and found another way back home.

So we have all those explosions, and way more Americans being killed in car crashes than any kind of hostile - or even dramatic - activity, and what are we blowing our budget on? More fucking aircraft carriers. Can't regulate mining & chemical, that'd cost jobs and hurt the pocket books of Job Creators, but no problem shutting down everything in fifty miles of Boston for two guys and their improperly modified cooking appliances.

If it makes the news, it's newsworthy. If it's newsworthy, it's rare. If it's rare, you don't have to worry about it. Statistically valid conclusion: what you see in the news won't kill you.

Bug: If you trip the "your IP has posted in the last 15 seconds" guard, hit the back button, wait 15 seconds, and then re-submit the post, you trip the double post guard and get an error message stating that the post has already been submitted. You need to copy the contents of the post, navigate back through to the Reply screen, and paste before the post will be accepted.

[Stop Encouraging People To Think For Themselves]

The most obnoxious thing about the stereotypical modern atheist is easily his arrogance. Self-identifying as a "Bright" or "Freethinker" leaves little room for anyone else; the clear implication is that alternative positions are occupied entirely by those who are too dim or too unmotivated to think their way out of the proverbial wet paper bag of recieved wisdom. The theory goes that anyone who applies a modicum of intelligent skepticism will immediately realize that everyone else is full of shit and make their way to the One True Religion Movement of skeptical atheism. A free thinker who arrives at any other conclusion is a contradiction in terms; if they were truly willing to subject their most deeply held beliefs to critical analysis, they would have discarded them after hearing a real Freethinker's kickass explanation of how Zombie Jesus and the Sky Daddy are logically impossible.

The weird part is how a worldview that demotes all opposition to mindless sheep is accepted by the vaguely human-positive progressive left. They recognize the absurdity of demanding that people think for themselves and then arrive at a specific position, but their diagnosis of the problem is typically that the so-called "Freethinkers" are insufficiently critical of their own beliefs. If only they would continue to think for themselves after joining the local atheist collective, they would eventually progress beyond petty tribalism into a more tolerant, humanistic philosophy...

In other words, the problem with the free thought movement is that the members don't do enough thinking for themselves. The solution is therefore to think for yourself, only for real this time. Cue warning alarms.

Any strategy whose reaction to failure is to do the same thing again, but harder, is past dysfunctional and well into the self-reinforcing deathspiral zone. Dudes in trenches mowing down your infantry with machine guns? Try again with more troops. People complaining about totalitarian government? Censor the whiners. Centrally planned economy leaving millions in poverty? Get better economic planners. Lassez-faire market policies poisoning the food and water supply? Cut the regulations stifling environmentally friendly businesses.

At that point, you don't have a rational position, you have insane religious zeal. Any instance of failure can be attributed to the fetish in question being insufficiently applied. "Think For Yourself" has a "too much of a good thing" point like everything else. There are real risks with letting people do their own thinking; there's a very good chance that they'll come up with a crazy, wrong, or just plain dangerous idea. The kindergarten values of 'sharing' and 'caring' are preventing us from becoming rationally self-interested supermen. Congenital defects can be prevented by sterilizing high-risk demographics. Ecological balance can be achieved by cutting 2/3rds of the human population. A one-party state solves the problem of divisive partisan politics.

It would be absurd to deny the real benefits to "Think For Yourself". It is equally absurd to deny the risks. Blindly promoting TFY, regardless of circumstance, is simply not a sane strategy. You may be thick-skinned enough to stomach dissenting opinions. You may even be wise enough to learn from them. But to assert that thinking for oneself is always a Good, no matter what, is to assert that being murdered is acceptable provided the attack is carried out by a self-radicalized terrorist. Maximizing freedom of thought without the commensurate increase in violence requires more restrictions on behaviour, not less. This is not to say that we've necessarily hit the "too many individuals thinking too much for themselves" point. Society can probably withstand a lot more internal tension before spontaneous ideological violence overtakes everyday institutional violence. Self-radicalized terrorists have so far mostly been unhinged in one way or another to start with; we don't need to really worry until neurotypical everymen start popping. (Maybe our rallying cry should be "Think for yourself, schmuck, and take all medications as prescribed!" ?)

For everyone who isn't up for pushing creative-destructive Discord to the absolute razor's edge, though, none of this is a problem. All you have to do is Stop Encouraging People To Think For Themselves. (SEPTIT; now accepting submissions for a catchier call-to-action.) Encouraging everyone to think for themselves because you think it will create allies for you is like installing democracies in the Middle East because you think they will spontaneously elect friendly governments that provide your country with a steady supply of oil -- what you actually get is a theofascist out to ruin your day. You probably just wanted people to think less like the mainstream and more like you. In that case, telling them to think for themselves is generally counterproductive; you'd be better served having better propaganda than the other guy than by teaching anything as destructive as critical thinking.

I am not a spicy food person. So I bought half a pound of wasabi-coated peanuts. At first I had to hold my breath while eating them or else the vapors would burn my nose interior. I kept at it anyway, because I'm fundamentally lazy and they didn't require any cooking.

So now the first 2cm of my tongue is incapable of tasting anything, for about two days now. All I get is the texture. Peanut butter is like this fatty sludge, which I suppose it always was, but without the peanut taste it just feels like straight lard.

Do taste buds grow back? Am I just fucked forever?

[RUN]

It has come to my attention that there has been much ARGUING and POINTLESS WHINGING this past few weeks or so.  There has even been COMPLAINING ABOUT COMPLAINING and EXTRANEOUS DRAMA.

None of this bothers me, except in that I haven't been included in it! A more sane person might simply jump into a running argument, but that wouldn't get me the attention my ego requires. I must create my own thread!

Here's how this works:
1. You post the best opinions you can come up with.
2. I argue my pimply face off in your general direction.

You get an 18 hour head start from the time of this posting.



RUN

...since about 1996.  I give you:



THE WEBSITE

Still live, in it's original state. It's like a time capsule from when the internet sucked.

Have you ever had a moment where you think you're doing pretty good, and then a guest goes to use your bathroom and comes back out screaming about all the mold on your shower curtain?  And your response is "Dude, it's explicit purpose is to block water.  It's going to get wet.  Therefore it's going to get moldy.  That's just how they work." and they say "Yes, but you're supposed to clean them."

And you go: "You can clean shower curtains?"
"Yes."
"What, you just put them in the washer?"
"Yep.  Not yours though ... yours probably needs to be burnt at this point."

I think a lot of the human brain is given over to believing stupid shit, which sits there, collecting mold and stinking up the rest of the psyche, until someone else see it at tells you that you can do something about it.  Only people aren't telepathic, so the only way you get to figure out just how messed up it is that you still think <whatever> is if you say it out loud.

Everybody believes stupid shit.
Only some people are crazy enough to bring theirs up in polite conversation.

But, only the crazy people get the benefit of having others help them with their mental building inspection.  Which means that, paradoxically, in a space where people are people are expected only to bring up their good ideas in discussion, people's heads will continue to get smellier and smellier.  And people still post stupid shit, because everyone thinks at least one of there rottenest ideas is amazing and will change the world.

(tonight, I'm planning to try pouring boiling water on my curtain to see of the temperature shock will help.)

quick responses to Smug Blackboard Guy first:

Rule 1 - I (think) I was beginning to figure this one out around kindergarten.  Definitely got it by the time 6th grade rolled around.

Rule 3 - Part A:  Maybe when you were a kid this was remotely possible, but (in America) we average 25k+ of debt after college.  None of us ever thought we could jump on the career train with only a highschool diploma.  Part B: They're called "cell phones," and we got them without earning them because your generation bought them for us.  I'm sure you had your reasons.

Rule 4 - Debatable.  Insane teachers seem to last longer than insane middle managers.  Probably has something to do with tenure and the difficulty of evaluating teacher performance.

Rule 5 - Point taken on "dignity," but it is beneath that college degree we all need now.  By that I mean that if after taking off 4-6 years and taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt, if all we can land is burger flipping, at best we'll be able to tread water until that first major illness/pregnancy, cuz, y'know, no health insurance.  We economically cannot afford to take minimum wage jobs.  Instead, we work unpaid internships.  Go figure.

Rule 6 - I didn't learn this in school, but then I never learned that my problems were a result of my parents either.

Rule 7 - We don't have time to complain about the rainforest, because the politicians you keep electing can barely deal with the crises they manufacture themselves.  If something doesn't improve before the water shortage hits someone with a real military, a lot of us are going to die.

Rule 9 - Actually true.

Rule 10 - They do teach this in upper level marketing/poli-sci classes, but relatively few of us take those, so I'll concede the point: Unlike in television, the world is not locked in a manichean struggle between liberals and conservatives, east and west, citizens and illegal immigrants, and Christians and everyone else.  Al-Qaeda doesn't have the manpower in our borders to pull off a school shooting (much less the Anthrax scare) , universal health care is not the first step towards Auschwitz, and none of the countries we've invaded have ever posed existential threats to us or our freedoms.  What, you thought the sitcoms were where the fiction is?

Rule 11 - Or if you do bully them, make sure you're sufficiently thorough, in which case they off themselves.  Works on gays too.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY:

Rule 2 - The world does not care about your self-esteem.  The world expects you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

Rule 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not.  In some schools they have abolished failing grades, and give you as many times as you want to get the correct answer.  This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.

You and the rest of your "winning is the only thing" buddies can get the fuck off of my planet.  I will feel good about myself whenever I damn well please.  Your attempts have to make performance a prerequisite for happiness have been recognized as the emotional blackmail it is.  You fear the so-called "trophy-movement" because self-confident individuals are harder to manipulate, not because it in any way weakens the participants.

First off, schools can't do away with the notion of winners and losers, for the simple reason that children are the most judgmental and cruel demographic on the planet.  Kids figure out pretty quickly that the sleep-over and birthday party invites are vastly more important than participation trophies.  Everyone knows who the popular ones are, just as they know who the stupid and/or fat ones are in their classroom... and no number of passing grades or special olympics trophies will change their mind.

Schools are trying, though, because the (ideal) function of a school isn't to sort people into failures and successes, but to turn people who otherwise would have become a "failure" into a success story.  You seem to be under the impression that schools should harshly punish failures because the real world is that unforgiving.  Which is false; the only fatal mistakes you can make are the ones that literally kill someone.  Otherwise, sports teams would disband after any season they didn't win a championship.  Telling people that they only have one shot to get something right or their life is ruined just makes them more anxious, more likely to cheat and more likely to take a second shot to the brain pan when they inevitably fail.  If there is only one lesson that schools can teach, it should be that the path to success lies through failure, and that there really are second chances.

Philosophy aside, making students do things until they do it right works.  The best professor I ever had took this approach - he had frequent quizzes and tests.  If, after reviewing the tests, he didn't think that students understood the material, he'd give them the test again on the next day.  And he'd keep doing it until people started passing. For some quizzes, he'd even let the students work in small groups on retakes (so the students could learn from each other - P2P knowledge transfer.)  He wouldn't move on to the next chapter in the textbook until he was satisfied that the students understood what was happening in the previous one.  He understood that a teacher should be teaching the material rather than flunking the students who don't already know it, and that "failure" in this context meant not a bad test grade moving on to the next course in the sequence without the proper grounding.  The end result was a body of students who understood basic physics, rather than a body of students who had given up on physics as "too hard."

Last thoughts before I fall asleep (sorry if this has become progressively disjointed) - people avoid failure.  They avoid and drop classes that will hurt their GPA, even if they'd be educational; when they can't avoid a test in the first place, they start rationalizing the failure away with self handicapping.  Attach serious failure to education, and people decide that television is safer.

Wait - no - the most important thing is that this guy thinks children should be divided into winners and losers.  And that's evil.

http://tauday.com/

I'd quote the manifesto, but it makes heavy use of math formatting that won't go over well to BBCode, so I'll try to summarize it.

Basically, the number pi is cute but isn't the right circle constant.  pi is only half of a circle; there are 2pi radians in a circle, sine and cosine have period 2pi, the circumference of a circle is 2pi*r, it's area is (1/2)*(2pi)*r^2, and e^[2pi*i] = 1.  2pi shows up basically everywhere in probability, quantum physics, geometry, etc.

The correct circle constant is 2pi, for which the author proposes using the symbol τ (tau), for a turn around the circle.

So this weekend finds me at Ohayocon.  Any of you spags there/here?  I ask because I noticed that during one of the sound checks for some musical group or other that someone had set the projectors to display the image on the pd.com main page.

Wireless at the con in shitty, so I prly won't be able to see any replies until tonight, but if someone wants to try to find me, I'll be losing the Hisoutensoku tournament in the game room from 2:00 on, wearing a shirt with a variation on this image.

Otherwise, the only redeeming features of the convention seem to be the Girl Genius Radio show, and a hilarious panel on the history of Sailor Moon hentai.

This is my (very rough) draft of my Statement of Purpose for graduate admissions.  I'm applying to a ton of schools for Ph.D. mathematics programs, starting with MIT, UC Berkeley, and Princeton and working my way down.  Any advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated.  (Also, stressing over admissions has been sucking up huge amounts of my time.  I have actual content planned after I'm done with this.)  Important context is that my GPA is only like 3.1~3.2, despite me being really good

   Communication can only occur between peers.  Earlier drafts of this letter tried to write from supplicant/patron paradigm, but they all felt ... fake.  Writing from the position of a lowly applicant begging a favor from an faceless committee does things to a person.  I found myself trying to spin every accomplishment and downplay every fault, engaging in exactly the kind of banal dishonesty that keeps people from engaging each other at anything approaching a meaningful level.  Conversation becomes a guarded dance between public faces.  The people who hide behind those faces eventually shrivel into a mask themselves, having starved themselves of real human contact in favor of playing with the well-groomed homunculi people create to do their socializing for them.
   So: the dialectic of this letter will not be servant/master, supplicant/patron, or even student/professor - but rather of one god to another.  I assume the stance of a flesh-and-blood deity, and invite you to do the same (if only because the view is better from up here.)  I am the undisputed ruler of my surroundings (at least out to my skin, often further), the captain of my destiny, the watcher behind my eyes, the warden of the bar of my teeth.  I wield a thumb in not one but two hands, smile when I want to and laugh when I please.  I wield tools and tell stories, and on occasion I have been sighted traveling at one hundred kilometers per hour, sustained.  And I want to enroll in Berkeley's mathematics Ph.D. program.
   Why?  I'm not a polymath yet.  My strategy is to learn the math first (because a sufficiently clever person can always find the math underlying anything) and specific subject matter second.  The test I've set for myself is to pick up any paper in any subject and see if I tell whether the conclusions are justified or not.  I've found that I need more differential equations and complex analysis to make sense of advanced engineering papers, more statistics to handle correlational studies, more algebraic topology and linear algebra to follow modern physics, and more graph, group, and number theory for theoretical computer science.  Once I've mastered all of those fields of mathematics, I can pick up the subject-specific material on my own at my leisure, but for the intense mathematics program I have planned out for myself I'd greatly benefit from being around knowledgeable professors and enthusiastic students.
   Not that I only want to learn math as a tool for understanding other sciences.  I find math to be the most interesting subject, because math allows you to study things that don't exist.  Math is only bounded by imagination; any internally consistent structure is a valid field of study.  That so many of these structures turn out to be useful in real world applications (games are equivalent to matrices? Who'd have predicted that?) is proof that we live in a really awesome world.  While I'm studying all the aforementioned fields, I want to push the boundaries of mathematics itself.  Modern mathematics has a fixation on the reals and the natural numbers that I think will seem as silly to future mathematicians as the Greek's faith in the rationals does to us.  We talk about metric spaces, but restrict ourselves to real-valued metrics - any poset that is dense around a least element should serve as the range of a distance function.  We define arbitrary rings and groups around things like rotations and knots, things that needn't have any connection to counting numbers at all, and then talk about elements having order 2.  Where did the natural number come from?  I want to see a generalized notion of coefficients and exponents that allows us to simplify expressions like a + a + a without drawing on concepts like "three" if three isn't an element of the group we're adding up elements of.  (This might not be possible, but I'd like to try.)  I'm also interested in the theory of computing.  The computers described by Turing are sufficient to compute any computable number, of which there are countably many - which real numbers aren't computable numbers?  Every model of computing that I know of either turns out to be equivalent to Turing machines or a subset of them - might there be some "weird" models of computing waiting to be discovered?  I suspect that there are, and that investigating them will yield great advances in multiple fields.  Centrifuges perform sorts in constant time, why not computers?  What description of algorithm will allow us to capture this?  I think the answer might have something to do with an unbounded number of processors.
   That's why I want to go to graduate school in mathematics.  What remains is to explain why I should be chosen for one of the very limited number of slots in your doctorate program.  Of those who are applying to your graduate school in mathematics this year, there might be a person or three who is more qualified than I am - but certainly not twenty.  What sets me apart from the crowd of mathematical geniuses who are also applying isn't my towering intellect, creative spark, or exceptional abilities in math - I understand that these are par for the course at Berkeley - but my commitment to radical enthusiasm and curiosity.  I believe that enthusiasm is a choice, and that curiosity is a way of life.  That is what makes me a superior student, and why I think I'd be a valuable addition to your collection of grad students: I will do what it takes to learn, in every subject, because studying interesting material is never a chore, and all material is interesting with the right frame of mind.  That's why my selection of undergraduate courses is so eclectic.  How many other applicants have studied linguistics, quantum physics, organic chemistry, Modern-period philosophy, propaganda, cognitive psychology, and the Ramayana?  My guess is none.
   I have high confidence that I'll make an excellent graduate student, and that whichever school ultimately admits me won't regret it.  It would be to both our advantages if that school was UC Berkeley.  Still, if I've failed to convince you, please don't hesitate to contact me to ask any questions or clarify any points.  I'm always up for an interview.

Looking forward to working with you,
<>

eta: disregard the letter, it was suck and fail.  I completely rewrote it.

I dare you to do something other than posting quasi-snarky pseudo-funny comments.

Historically, newbs have done well with introductory posts in the recipes section.

SHOW US YOUR BEST SAMMICH.

This is an attempt to re-visit some of the ideas in my "Be an Enabler" piece with an eye towards practical implications.

Way back when (< 3 years ago), the phrase "dance commander" meant something in PD jargon.  Or maybe it didn't - I only saw it a handful of times.  (I think it may have had something to do with Gay Wango Tango... ?)  Anyway, I remember seeing a OLMB or PosterGASM idea seed something along the lines of "you should find your dance commander, and do what he says."  I didn't think much of it at the time; I interpreted it as making light of authority figures or being surrealist or something.

Then I met some real-life dance commanders.

At dances, there are usually a number of people who don't really feel like dancing.  Maybe they're tired, or are terrible at dancing.  But most commonly people don't want to dance because not enough people are dancing.  People don't want to be awkwardly dancing by themselves while everyone else watches.  So if your party falls below the critical number of dancers, everyone stops dancing, even though people mostly came to the party in the first place for dancing - so you have this incredibly awkward situation where everyone wants to dance but isn't going to because nobody else is.  This is where the dance commanders come in.  Dance commanders are the people who understand that dancing doesn't happen by itself, that someone needs to put in effort to get people moving.  You'll recognize the dance commanders because they'll get up and dance even when nobody else is, risking looking foolish in order to jump-start the party.  They dance even harder when a poor dancing song comes on and people start looking to see if now is the time to go get a drink.  They move from group to group, bringing isolated dancing circles together into larger groups.  In short, they are the ones who deliberately and systematically change the atmosphere from "lets all stand around looking at our feet" to "WOOHOOIDONTKNOWTHISSONGBUTLETSDANCEANYWAY"

People's actions are heavily influenced by the psychic/cultural/situational landscape.  We usually don't want to upset the status quo, even when the status quo isn't benefitting everyone.  If the status quo is "not dancing," nobody wants to be the first to dance.  If the status quo is "dance party," people don't want to be the ones left out.  Dance commanders are the people who have realized that the psychic landscape is entirely composed of people's actions, and that they can remodel the landscape by acting against the situation or by spinning the situation differently.  Godwin saw an obnoxious tendency in usegroups that benefitted no one, put on his dance commander hat / white lab coat, and crafted Godwin's Law to change the way conversation is conducted.  Ditto for the Frown Power campaign, where people would pointedly frown at those they heard making bigoted or intolerant speech - a deliberate attempt to change the cultural landscape from one where racism was permissible to one where racism was embarassing.  On the other end of the spectrum, we have people working to contort the landscape into things like "The West is at war with Islam" so well that people who consider themselves Western and people who consider themselves Muslim are taking up actual, IRL weapons to kill each other.

Your mission as a official certified Dancin' Pope is to recognize when someone is trying to sell you and the people around you a bullshit scenario, and to sell a better scenario right back.  If rules lawyering is eating into your RP time, change the game you're playing from "Rules lawyering one-upsmanship" to "Relaxing social activity."  Change "Pointless drama and whinging" to "Post something interesting."  Change "Bosses are better than you" to "This is a true team enterprise."  "We are at war with The Other" to "We are the most socially, intellectually, and creatively advanced entity in known space, let's do something more fun than kill each other."

When people are playing a game where nobody wins, change the rules.  Redefine victory.  Apply all that "meme" stuff we talk about.

I didn't see a thread about this yet, sorry for double thread if that's the case.

But come to IRC and discuss it!

On now and nothing special has happened yet.

ETA: never mind, it was really short and not much happened.

It now seems pretty likely that I'll be attending the Rally to Restore Sanity on 10/30, although I don't have any concrete logistical plans yet.

I know some other people here are planning on attending.

So: who's going, and meetup?

(sorry for short uninformative post, I have to go make a boardgame in time for a party.) 

I've realized that I have no idea what name several of you spags are going under ATM.  Or, rather, who is behind several usernames.

Roll call plz?

One of my roommates had the good fortune to turn 21 during our colleges Parent's Weekend, so several of my roommates' parents came to get drunk and party.  During the warm-up (this started at 9 am) a couple of the parents started talking about something called Why-Wham or YWAM or something about using skateboarders and polynesian dancers to attract children to the cult of evangelicalism.  One of the moms made a comment regarding "snot nosed brats ... behaving inappropriately" by talking among themselves, laughing, and making jokes at the expense of people who were trying to use skateboarding to make a fake religion appeal to children.

I called the woman on it, and told her that that "offended" me, because I was one of those kids once, and I'm tired of people thinking they can decree what is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" and denigrate those people who naturally fall on the other side of their artificial dividing line.  I'm especially tired of people who think that children are meant to be controlled by adults.  She apologized, but continued to make the case that this was somehow benefiting anyone.

But "offended" isn't the right word.  If something says something insulting and true, I have no cause to become offended at them for speaking the truth.  If someone says something insulting and false, I have no cause to be offended because the charge is ridiculous.

I was more irritated by the fact that this woman and people like her exist.  Thinking about it later, I realized that the only kind of apology I would have accepted would be either her completely changing her worldview or her death.

So what's the word for this?  Am I offended at the existence of evangelicals?  Is this feeling "hatred" for them?  Am I an evangelicalphobe?

Because thinking about this more, I realized that I a) want evangelicals to cease existing and b) that I don't even consider evangelicals to be real people, but rather puppet-gears of the Conversion Machine, little soulless shells of small evils.  I'm a little worried because this sounds an awful lot like bigotry, and I don't want to be a bigot.

I was going to put this in Bring and Brag, but I figured that since I wouldn't be posting any actual essay but rather ranting about how much Homer annoys me, I'll put it here instead.  I'm writing this because I think it will somehow help me write this stupid essay, possibly via public shame or making me organize my thoughts.

The Setting: GA, despite being reasonably competent at writing in general, sucks at writing graded essays for humanities teachers.  He is also taking a required 300-level English course concerning various epics (The Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Ramayana) which normally he would enjoy (mythology and latin spags, unite!) except that this semester he trying to get into MIT or Stanford or equivalent to study mathematics, and his GPA is already at 3.1 and can't take much more punishment.  And as mentioned he sucks at writing English essays.

The Antagonist: A measly four-page essay about The Odyssey, due in ~9 hours, which would normally be no big deal except that I am coming up seriously blank on the prompt, which is: either a) discuss Homer's methods and tricks of creating character re: a character introduced in the last 16 books (i.e., the last 2/3 of the story) or b) identify the narrative strategies used by Homer to keep the audience interested and also make the audience pause and consider the implications of what is happening.

The Twist: Homer doesn't do any of these things.  Or rather, he doesn't do any of these things well.  To give him credit, part of it is certainly that The Odyssey is an oral work, and the stuff that doesn't work well in book form might work better being orated to the audience.  But mostly, I think, his problem is that good writing hadn't been invented yet.  "Show, don't tell" is a relatively recent adage.  (I think - I haven't studied the history of adventure story writing except by reading adventure stories written in different time periods.)

I think we pretty much all agree that a free press is a Good Thing to have in your country.  And although this hasn't come up as often, I think most people here support some kind of truth in advertising.

So what happens when the two collide?

Three hypotheticals:

I.  The Green Bean is a newspaper that advertises itself as being printed on 100% recycled paper.  It isn't.

II.  Well Informed Daily is a newspaper that advertises itself as being factually accurate and only using thoroughly checked sources... but in every issue there is at least one story that is completely, utterly, demonstrably wrong.  They invent things - terrorist bombings, local politicians, scientific advances, even restaurants to be reviewed - that simply never happened.

III.  Canid News is a newspaper that bills itself as offering fair, objective, and unbiased reporting, but by anyone else's standards they're the most rabidly partisan pseudo-news organization out there.  Problematically for this hypothetical, objectivity in reporting is itself subjective - so for IIIa suppose further that memos have been leaked that detail executives instructing editors to stick to the agenda and not go off message, or discussing how best to spin various events in favor of their mysterious agenda, etc, etc.

Which (if any) of these newspapers shouldn't be (legally) allowed to keep their advertising slogan?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/europe/29spy.html?hp

WASHINGTON — In what law enforcement officials portrayed as an extraordinary takedown of a Russian espionage network, the Justice Department on Monday announced charges against 11 people accused of living for years in the United States as part of a deep-cover program run by S.V.R. — the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B.

The complaints followed a multi-year investigation that culminated with the arrest on Sunday of 10 people in Yonkers, Boston, and northern Virginia. The documents detailed what authorities called the "Illegals Program," an S.V.R. effort to plant Russian spies in the United States to gather information and recruit people able to infiltrate government policy-making circles.

The "Illegals Program" extended to other countries around the world, the charging documents said.

The 11 defendants were charged with conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government without registering with the Justice Department, and 9 of them were also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. The complaints do not include charges of stealing any secrets.

Using fraudulent documents, the complaints said, the spies would "assume identities as citizens or legal residents of the countries to which they are deployed, including the United States." It continued, "Illegals will sometimes pursue degrees at target-country universities, obtain employment, and join relevant professional associations" to deepen their false identities.

[Complete Victory]

(brief disclaimer - this post and those that follow are written for the Principia Discordia language community, which employs some bizarre and idiosyncratic usages of words, phrases, and exaggerations that you might find offensive or disturbing.  We probably don't mean them that way.

This is the thread to discuss organization against the Judge Rotenberg Center and the systemic human rights abuses it inflicts on the children and adolescents entrusted to it.  This GASM is unusual in that it is not (primarily) an effort to spread humor and enlightenment, be weird, or troll people who annoy us.  Our objective is the cessation of the atrocities committed by the Judge Rotenberg Center: we are taking on a real, brick-and-mortar institution.

For reference, see my posts here (in particular the last couple) and the NY State Education Department report on the JRC available below.

Measures of Success:
Complete Victory will be declared if the JRC closes its doors and proper treatment and therapy is provided to its (now former) students.
Success is the closure of the Rotenberg Center.
Partial Success is bringing hope to the children being abused at the JRC or sharply reducing the number of children sent there.
Minor Success is causing substantive changes in its operating practices or getting a full-fledged media and/or blogosphere blitz.

The Five Prongs of Engagement:

I: Information
If the first rule of warfare is "Know your enemy" then the first rule of information warfare is "Get everyone else to know your enemy."  If you google "judge rotenberg center" the major hits are their own website and their Wikipedia entry - which currently looks like it was written by their marketing department.  In other words, the intelligent person with a healthy skepticim (exactly the kind of person we need) might see a damaging blog post or two, and then check up on the claims via Wikipedia and the company's own statements, both of which are great works of PR, especially if the researcher is not particularly knowledgeable about modern psychiatry.  If he looks no further, there's a good chance he'll come to the conclusion that the claims are overblown and that this is just another "cause" promoted by conspiracy-minded self-declared "advocates."  We can fix that.

First, we can fix the Wikipedia page.  This might be an uphill battle in that most of the criticisms of the JRC are found on blogs and forums, while its apologetics are found on its very official-looking web page, complete with cherry-picked citations for, say, why bipolar kids do just fine without medication.  News sites aren't that much help either; they mostly seem to try to be "balanced," which apparently means showing the pros and cons of dehumanizing child abuse, and they deal with the complex psychiatric issues with the understanding of a communications major being fed pseudoscience by a very good PR team.  The Wiki page needs to be updated with objective, sourced, and airtight documentation of the various problems of the JRC.  And no, no matter how accurate it is, the other editors are (justifiably) not going to treat something published by NoSpank.com or Aspies for Freedom as either NPOV or reliable.  Again, I recommend the NYSED report - it's damning enough by itself, and from a US state government agency, a credible and authoritative source.

Second, we can promote accurate, informative, and persuasive links on Google.  In particular, we should promote sites that give coherent and accurate descriptions of the JRC in an easily digestible format.  An understated 26-page report, TL;DR forum posts, and apparently biased blogs aren't going to cut it.  PD.com apparently does have the clout to affect Google rankings by itself (incidentally, we're still the #1 and #2 hits for "worst forum on the internet" without quotes) but we need to find sites worth promoting first.  Remember, Google shows the URL, title, and the first couple lines of the pages it links to; the links we promote should be persuasive even without the user having to click on them, and have a credible looking (if not actually credible) URL.

Also about Google - you know how it suggests search terms as you're typing in your query?  Right now, if have "judge rotenberg" or "judge rotenberg center" in the search box it suggests "judge rotenberg center X," where X is "mother jones," "wikipedia," "jobs," "reviews," "employment," "2009," "shock," and "deaths."  If we could get "child abuse," "human rights violations," "torture," and various articles and reports that condemn the JRC up there as well, that would be pretty cool.  Anybody know how Google determines search suggestions?  Can we just make a bot that spams searches for "judge rotenberg center human rights violations"?  (If you were wondering, Mother Jones is a news site that ran a series of articles on the JRC a while back - they might have more resources we could use as well.)

Third, we need a list of factoids about the JRC, with sources cited and a little information about how the person can help (see next point.).  This is intended to be the TL;DR summary of what the JRC is and why it needs to be closed down post-haste.  The intended audience is an ordinary person who probably has never heard of the JRC before, and the reaction we're looking for is the reader scraping their jaw off the floor afterwards.  It would also be a good thing to link people to - if someone says "Your extraordinary claims about torture require extraordinary evidence" we need to have a simple response rather than linking them to half a dozen sites that each tell half the story.  We'll also probably want slightly different versions for different target audiences, or at least for people who already have a decent background knowledge of special education.  I may or may not have something along these lines done sometime tomorrow.

Lastly, either I or someone else should rewrite this post the results of this discussion into a kind of "action plan" that can distributed / linked to to other people outside PD who want to know what they can do to help.  Probably should wait until we get a clearer idea of what we're doing, though.

Final note: this isn't a project that calls for disinformation.  The Truth is on our side, and frankly it is horrible enough.

TL;DR summary of what you can do: Find lots of good, credible sources, which we/you can then use to improve the Wikipedia article, influence Google search rankings, and create our own summaries for use elsewhere.

II: Rhetoric
In addition to fact sheets, we need specialized motivational material.  The most obvious are simply persuasive articles and essays that can then be spread around in the usual fashion.  Images are also good.  If anyone wants to illustrate some of the horror stories that come out of that place, that would be wonderful.  Again, I have a couple of ideas for comics and articles and stuff, but this is definitely an area where you can help - there are a surprisingly large number of good writers and artists on this site.

There is also the need for direct argument and refutation.  The JRC has a good media arm, and they publish "for the media" articles and responses to some news articles and blog entries, which are full of misleading statements, bad science, and even outright falsehoods.  (For instance, they keep repeating that they have a highly trained staff; NY state says that the majority have only a high school education and a generic two-week orientation that is the same for the people monitoring the cameras as it is for the people working directly with the children.  JRC claims that their high-level aversives are used only to prevent even more destructive behaviour; their own records disagree.)  We need refutations of their refutations, also written for the media.

Random thought about rhetoric - we probably want avoid the abbreviation JRC and instead abbreviate it as just Rotenberg Center in publications.  Because i) to many initialisms is a signal that a group has developed its own internal jargon, which indicates something of a exclusive and cultish atmosphere (count how many TLAs are in internal CoS documents) and ii) as much as I hate to play on stereotypes, the name "Rotenberg" just sounds vaguely menacing in a human-rights-violating, unethical-human-experimentation kind of way.  It also reminds me of "Röntgen" (a measure of ionizing radiation, the kind that kills you) and "rottweiler" (a scary fucking dog, guards prisons, and the second most likely to kill a child after the pit bull.)  The "Judge" prefix makes it sound more legitimate, so not using that when avoidable could be a good idea.

III: Networking
Possibly the most important prong: whatever it is that we're doing, the more people we have doing it the more effective it is.  Networking is connecting to sympathetic people and getting them involved in their own way, and taking people who are already involved and connecting them to each other.  The obvious and easiest method is simply to promote materials from sections I and II via social networking sites.  (Is that thing from TwitterGASM suitable for this / still working?)  While it's true that the typical Facebook user who joins a group for some social cause promptly forgets about it and does nothing, if we get enough exposure there's the chance that a reporter or editorialist or blogger or just plain profligate sneezer notices and spreads the message somewhere else.  And if we come up with something simple and painless for the general public to do, even Facebook might accomplish something.  Maybe something like a group for "everybody tweet about the JRC on MM/DD" or "digg/reddit these articles" or "politely ask Fark.com to run this story," I dunno.  I also know next to nothing about other social networking sights, like Twitter and the various social bookmarking sites, so if anybody knows how we can use those productively, post about it.

But more importantly, we can directly talk to people who can help.  I think that the main groups who are most likely to be helpful are:
-Teachers, because most of them really do care about education, and they all know how hard it is.  Sentences like "the majority of the teaching staff had only a high school education" and "the most common interaction between teachers and students is the hourly rotation of electrodes" are probably enough to convince most real teachers that what goes on at the JRC cannot be called "education."  Oh yeah, and most of them like kids.
-Psychologists and psychiatrists, because they know real psychology and the associated therapies.  That the JRC starts with the assumption that every kid can be taken off their meds, pulled out of every other complementary treatment, and given exclusively fringe behaviorist therapy with no mechanism for rewarding good behaviors, without any attention to side effects, and regardless of the underlying condition, is probably enough right there to get psychologists/psychiatrists foaming at the mouth, if only out of professional pride.
-Various mental health / disability / special ed advocates, because they already care about and advocate for these kinds of children - they just need to be informed that this place exists.  That, and they have networks in place already and are presumably good at activism and raising a big stink when necessary.
-Human rights activists, for much the same reasons.  Then again, they have a lot of other stuff on their plates so they might be too busy for this.  On the other other hand, they like to use examples of human rights abuses going on in your presumably civilized country to remind people that "human rights" is an issue that doesn't just apply to smudgy people on another continent.
-Weird people, the kind who read about the children who get sent there and think, "That could have been me."  People who don't need to read all the way to "Then they came for me / and by that time no one was left to speak up." because they know they'd be gone before the first three stanzas are up.*  The people who have had their own experiences with special education services and IEPs and child psychologists and know first hand how important it is that these things are done right and what the stakes are when they are done wrong, and that the children on the receiving end of these treatments are real human beings, not facimiles thereof.

The first two groups, teachers and mental health professionals, might be the most important because they have understanding of the issues in question, professional organizations, clout, and standards.  A letter signed by 500 mental health facilities, 1,000 educational institutions, or 10,000 teachers, counselors, and licensed psychologists is going to carry a lot more weight than one signed by 10,000 no-name internet activists, especially if we get recognized professional organizations on the letterhead.

I intend to write personal letters to a number of teachers and counselors I know from my old high school and current college (run by the Jesuits and Marianists, respectively, both of which have a strong commitment to social justice and links to a ton of human-rights type groups.  If we can get the Jesuits involved, that would be a major coup.)  This is another area where you can definitely make a difference, especially those of you who are current students or recent graduates - I have a feeling that talking to teachers, professors, and school counselors could be a very fruitful exercise.  They are exactly our target audience, and you already have a personal relationship with them.

Additionally, there are already a lot of organizations and bloggers who have already tried to raise awareness on the JRC or related issues - a March 2010 Boston Globe article mentions "31 disability advocacy groups" charging JRC with inhuman practices.  They need to be connected together into a unified coalition.  (I don't mean actually uniting the groups, just getting them working together collaboratively.)  This is an issue that has already gained some traction among mental health advocates, especially the ASD self-advocacy movement.  Off the top of my head, Mental Disability Rights International has written a very strongly worded letter, the Autism Self-Advocacy Network has written a letter to various official bodies, and Aspies For Freedom has already tried to do some kind of protest against the JRC ... but I don't know how much real follow through they've done.  They need to be told that a major push is about to be made, and that this time something concrete is actually going to be accomplished.

*I am not, of course, referring to communists, union members, or Jews, or at least not exclusively.  I'm thinking of the various modern versions of the poem with all kinds of additional vulnerable peoples thrown in.

TL;DR summary of what you can do: locate all the groups and blogs who have already done something or expressed concern so we can get them all working as a unified front on this issue.

IV: Direct Kindness
We can also write letters directly to the students enrolled at the JRC.  This needs to be done very carefully, of course.  The objective of this part is to try to communicate that there is always hope, that yes, even strangers care about them, and that they have friends on the outside - that is, to show basic human kindness to the people who need it most.  The idea is to try to mitigate the enforced solitude these students live in with some genuine human contact.  If we do this right it has the potential to be very, very positive, and it has the added benefit of helping children even if ultimately the school doesn't change any of its policies.

I like this idea because it isn't aggressive or confrontational; it's genuinely constructive.  This is the sort of thing we could get lots of ordinary compassionate people to do, and it isn't reliant on any kind of complicated media effort or iffy legal challenge, and requires no skills in organization, media manipulation, activism, etc.  I'm picturing a number of community service groups at various schools writing a letter or two each per member - that adds up quickly.

A word of caution: this is very easy to get wrong.  At a minimum someone else should review each letter before it's sent, preferrably someone with experience working with disabled children.  In particular, it would be a terrible idea to send any form of a call to action or any kind of religious message (they do not need to know about Ganesh, remover of obstacles, no matter how much you might think it would help.)  These children are not going to organize anything approaching an effective protest inside, and trying to incite them to do so can only make things worse.  That's not the point; the point is to show basic human decency to people who are being treated like something less.  We also want to avoid implying that we're only writing to them because they're students at the JRC and we think it's evil - we're writing because they are human beings who could use a smile.  They'd still be having a tough time of it even if they were at a quality institution.  Come to think of it, there are already groups who do similar things for hospitalized children, there's probably someone who already does this for children at mental health facilities.  If there is already a group that does this, we should use the networking and organization for this to help them expand to cover the JRC.

Also remember that the people we would be writing to range from profoundly disabled to average intelligence with severe emotional problems.  (I don't know what percentage are even literate.)  This is not the normal audience for the letters you usually write.  It would probably be a good idea to get some feedback from a professional in psychology as to what might actually be beneficial to the student we're writing too.  (Like, would jokes help?  What kind of joke would a person who mutilates himself to relieve stress find funny?)

As for names and addresses, I think we could probably get those from the parents themselves.  (It would be a good idea to get their parents' permission before strangers start mailing these kids en masse anyway.)  If we do approach the parents for this purpose, though, we would want to do it through a group that isn't confrontational or attacking the school their kids go to.  I don't think that names/addresses of the minors in this sort of institution would be public knowledge (or the names of the students over 18, for that matter.)

TL;DR summary: we (and a lot of other people) can write uplifting and encouraging letters to the people trapped at the JRC, and even extend the basic idea past this particular GASM as a long term effort to be nice to the Children of Eris everywhere.


Completely random thought: it would be awesome if we could acquire one of the GEDs that the school uses.  Probably not possible to get one from them, but I bet they have patents filed somewhere, and if we get the specs I'm sure we can find a Mad Scientist willing to put together a replica.  That would be a killer demo to show people - here, try this one.  BRZZAP.  There, that's what they call a "hard pinch" at the JRC.  The JRC doesn't let journalists demo the things anymore, probably for a reason.  The Boston Globe articles say they have a model that delivers 41 milliamps at 66 volts for 2 seconds (pretty sure that's AC).  How bad is that?

I know we have some scientist-types here, so I thought I'd ask:
How important is it that a lab notebook containing raw data be kept with the notebooks containing procedures and documentation?  For example, if you had a study about a novel anti-osteoporosis drug in rats, and you had one notebook detailing all the procedures used, another journal/notebook containing the day-to-day observations of the scientists involved, another notebook containing necropsy reports of the animals, and another notebook containing tons of x-rays of the lab rats, would any of those be valuable without the others?  I'm thinking that just having one or two notebooks from the set would be pretty useless.

I'm curious.

[Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical "disease like any other" increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html?pagewanted=1&em

Interesting (albeit long) article.  A lot of mental illness are restricted to a particular culture; a lot more are expressed differently in different cultures, and all of them are treated differently in different cultures.  The article is about the exporting of Western notions of what mental diseases are, and whether that's a good thing or not.

Some excerpts:

Mental illnesses, it was suggested, should be treated like "brain diseases" over which the patient has little choice or responsibility. This was promoted both as a scientific fact and as a social narrative that would reap great benefits. The logic seemed unassailable: Once people believed that the onset of mental illnesses did not spring from supernatural forces, character flaws, semen loss or some other prescientific notion, the sufferer would be protected from blame and stigma. This idea has been promoted by mental-health providers, drug companies and patient-advocacy groups like the National Alliance on Mental Illness in the United States and SANE in Britain. In a sometimes fractious field, everyone seemed to agree that this modern way of thinking about mental illness would reduce the social isolation and stigma often experienced by those with mental illness. Trampling on indigenous prescientific superstitions about the cause of mental illness seemed a small price to pay to relieve some of the social suffering of the mentally ill.

But does the "brain disease" belief actually reduce stigma?

In 1997, Prof. Sheila Mehta from Auburn University Montgomery in Alabama decided to find out if the "brain disease" narrative had the intended effect. She suspected that the biomedical explanation for mental illness might be influencing our attitudes toward the mentally ill in ways we weren't conscious of, so she thought up a clever experiment.

In her study, test subjects were led to believe that they were participating in a simple learning task with a partner who was, unbeknownst to them, a confederate in the study. Before the experiment started, the partners exchanged some biographical data, and the confederate informed the test subject that he suffered from a mental illness.

The confederate then stated either that the illness occurred because of "the kind of things that happened to me when I was a kid" or that he had "a disease just like any other, which affected my biochemistry." (These were termed the "psychosocial" explanation and the "disease" explanation respectively.) The experiment then called for the test subject to teach the confederate a pattern of button presses. When the confederate pushed the wrong button, the only feedback the test subject could give was a "barely discernible" to "somewhat painful" electrical shock.

Analyzing the data, Mehta found a difference between the group of subjects given the psychosocial explanation for their partner's mental-illness history and those given the brain-disease explanation. Those who believed that their partner suffered a biochemical "disease like any other" increased the severity of the shocks at a faster rate than those who believed they were paired with someone who had a mental disorder caused by an event in the past.

"The results of the current study suggest that we may actually treat people more harshly when their problem is described in disease terms," Mehta wrote. "We say we are being kind, but our actions suggest otherwise." The problem, it appears, is that the biomedical narrative about an illness like schizophrenia carries with it the subtle assumption that a brain made ill through biomedical or genetic abnormalities is more thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal than one made ill though life events. "Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species."

Unfortunately, at the same time that Western mental-health professionals have been convincing the world to think and talk about mental illnesses in biomedical terms, we have been simultaneously losing the war against stigma at home and abroad. Studies of attitudes in the United States from 1950 to 1996 have shown that the perception of dangerousness surrounding people with schizophrenia has steadily increased over this time. Similarly, a study in Germany found that the public's desire to maintain distance from those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia increased from 1990 to 2001.

Researchers hoping to learn what was causing this rise in stigma found the same surprising connection that Mehta discovered in her lab. It turns out that those who adopted biomedical/genetic beliefs about mental disorders were the same people who wanted less contact with the mentally ill and thought of them as more dangerous and unpredictable. This unfortunate relationship has popped up in numerous studies around the world. In a study conducted in Turkey, for example, those who labeled schizophrenic behavior as akil hastaligi (illness of the brain or reasoning abilities) were more inclined to assert that schizophrenics were aggressive and should not live freely in the community than those who saw the disorder as ruhsal hastagi (a disorder of the spiritual or inner self). Another study, which looked at populations in Germany, Russia and Mongolia, found that "irrespective of place . . . endorsing biological factors as the cause of schizophrenia was associated with a greater desire for social distance."

Nowhere are the limitations of Western ideas and treatments more evident than in the case of schizophrenia. Researchers have long sought to understand what may be the most perplexing finding in the cross-cultural study of mental illness: people with schizophrenia in developing countries appear to fare better over time than those living in industrialized nations.

This was the startling result of three large international studies carried out by the World Health Organization over the course of 30 years, starting in the early 1970s. The research showed that patients outside the United States and Europe had significantly lower relapse rates — as much as two-thirds lower in one follow-up study. These findings have been widely discussed and debated in part because of their obvious incongruity: the regions of the world with the most resources to devote to the illness — the best technology, the cutting-edge medicines and the best-financed academic and private-research institutions — had the most troubled and socially marginalized patients.

Trying to unravel this mystery, the anthropologist Juli McGruder from the University of Puget Sound spent years in Zanzibar studying families of schizophrenics. Though the population is predominantly Muslim, Swahili spirit-possession beliefs are still prevalent in the archipelago and commonly evoked to explain the actions of anyone violating social norms — from a sister lashing out at her brother to someone beset by psychotic delusions.

McGruder found that far from being stigmatizing, these beliefs served certain useful functions. The beliefs prescribed a variety of socially accepted interventions and ministrations that kept the ill person bound to the family and kinship group. "Muslim and Swahili spirits are not exorcised in the Christian sense of casting out demons," McGruder determined. "Rather they are coaxed with food and goods, feted with song and dance. They are placated, settled, reduced in malfeasance." McGruder saw this approach in many small acts of kindness. She watched family members use saffron paste to write phrases from the Koran on the rims of drinking bowls so the ill person could literally imbibe the holy words. The spirit-possession beliefs had other unexpected benefits. Critically, the story allowed the person with schizophrenia a cleaner bill of health when the illness went into remission. An ill individual enjoying a time of relative mental health could, at least temporarily, retake his or her responsibilities in the kinship group. Since the illness was seen as the work of outside forces, it was understood as an affliction for the sufferer but not as an identity.

For McGruder, the point was not that these practices or beliefs were effective in curing schizophrenia. Rather, she said she believed that they indirectly helped control the course of the illness. Besides keeping the sick individual in the social group, the religious beliefs in Zanzibar also allowed for a type of calmness and acquiescence in the face of the illness that she had rarely witnessed in the West.

[IN THE BEGINNING:]

IN THE BEGINNING:

Everything was CHAOS, which is notoriously hard to work with.  It came to pass that a piece of chalk (which was made of CHAOS, naturally) was procured and used to mark the CHAOS into sections.  This made things much easier. It was now possible to ignore a great deal of CHAOS (for example, the sections like those marked "Things That Don't Really Exist", "Things That Can't Hurt You", "Africa", and "Barbers Who Don't Shave Themselves") while focusing on parts with labels like "Good", "Interesting", "Things That I Can Have Sex With", and "Things That Are Useful In The Part Of CHAOS Called 'The Real World'".  It's a pastime of people (which are little sub-sections of the one marked "Things That Are Hard To Categorize") to go around making their own labels.  Some people like to work together, and use each other's labels (you can categorize more stuff this way); others work independently (that way, you can put all the labels right where you want them).  At some point the practice of keeping little sections marked "Areas Of CHAOS That Somebody Mislabeled" got established, and spawned endless additional practices, a great deal of which are found in areas with labels like "Strife", "Categorizing Somebody As A Malicious Fool", "Yelling Really Loudly", and "Open Warfare".  This wasn't that bad for a grand total of 1.4 seconds before everybody agreed to extend the zone of "Things That Really Are That Bad" to encompass the entirety of "Things That Happen When CHAOS Gets Mislabeled".  After that first debacle, people have spent a great deal of time and effort trying to make sure that every label is itself a member of "Labels That Are Correct", and also a great deal of time on subproblems like trying to populate a region called "Ways To Tell If A Given Piece of CHAOS Is Labeled Correctly" - so far the intersection of that one and "Things A Significant Fraction Of Things People Agree On" is empty.  Suprisingly, few have questioned the decision to include "The State Of A Label Being Correct" under "Things That Can And Should Be Achieved."

IN THE PRESENT TIME:
Everything is still CHAOS.  Whether or not this is a good idea is open to debate, but so far nobody has suggested anything other than "Null Universe", which we don't like very much.

The Discordian "Narrative"

"Because quotes are awesome, that's why."
          -Cain

So the other day I was watching this news program, pretty sure it was CNN.  And I say "the other day" but it was more like a few months ago because it was the day after that ridiculous Balloon Boy story; I meant to write this out sooner but You Know How It Is.

I want you to understand that this was a mildly unusual event for me.  I prefer to read news, either in print, for things that happened recently, or on-line for things that happened earlier today, or just listen to it on NPR, for things that are in the middle of happening right now.  I haven't seriously watched a news program since one day in elementary school when I decided that since I was a big kid now it was high time I started watching mature, grown-up television shows - and discovered that grown-ups must watch the news to Build Character (I was a big fan of Calvin and Hobbes) because there was no other rational reason to do it.  Come to think of it, I had much the same experience when I decided to stay through an entire mass rather than leave with all the other children halfway through to go to Sunday School.

Anyway, I had an hour break between classes and decided to hang out in a little lounge-y area near the classrooms.  The Computer Science classes and the various Business classes are all held in the same building, (which creates an odd social dynamic, as the MBA types think the only function of a CS major is to be one of their employees in the IT department, and the CS majors think the only function of a MBA is to make their careers more difficult with vague specifications that change the day before the deadline gets pushed closer a week.  But I digress.), but mostly it means that the School of Business, having actual money, gets to do the interior design.  So the lounge has three bigass flatscreen TVs, one which shows MSNBC 24/7, without sound or subtitles, one which shows CNN 24/7, with sound projected from the ceiling so you can't escape it, and one which does nothing but loop through a 3-frame PowerPoint presentation about some Elevator Pitch Contest or other.  What this means for me is that the only place I could wait for my next class without having to sit through CNN blasting from the heavens was in the bathroom or another building.  Usually I just walk back to my apartment, but like I mentioned at the beginning of the paragraph (If you got lost, I don't blame you - I had to go back to the beginning and figure out where all my clauses were too...) today I didn't feel like doing that so I just sat down and watched the news for an hour.  How bad could it be?  As it turns out, pretty bad, but instructive.

The first story they ran that hour was about a team of archaeologists digging up some ruins of ancient Babylon in present-day Iraq.  Which would have been interesting and informative if handled by a reporter who knew anything about, or at least was mildly interested in, ancient history.  Instead, the anchor made a big point about how this was the Babylon of Biblical times, brought up the Tower of Babel, tried to draw parallels between the Tower of Babel and the War in Iraq and generally talked about how the place has been a region of conflict since time immemorial.  I kid you not, the anchor of a mainstream US news outlet, and one of supposedly reasonable quality at that (FOX, sure, but this was CNN!), was trying to make the point that there has always been somebody fighting in Iraq, and that the current fighting is a continuation of the Biblical narrative, in which the Christians bring about the peace that was lost when Man tried to reach God back at Babel by conquering the shit out of everybody and homogenizing whatever's left.  To underscore that point, the next story involved a special guest, which the anchor interviewed, who had spent a long time in Baghdad.  The man's name was The Vicar of Baghdad (the media is apparently giving people superhero names now; thought that was just in comic books) and the story was about his running an Anglican church in Baghdad.  (Although they de-emphasized Anglican in favor of Christian, presumably knowing their audience likes the myth of a universal "unbranded" Christianity better than Anglicanism.)  Anyway, they talked about The Vicar of Baghdad's church, and how big it was, and how it was growing, and the Christian faith spreading, etc.  The anchor made it clear to the audience that this piece was to be understood in terms of the preceeding story, that Christianity was a uniting force that could smooth over the divisions created back when the Tower of Babel got knocked down.  The pair of stories was a simple one-two punch; explain to the audience that the problems in Iraq could be understood entirely through the narrative of ancient history in Biblical times - there has been and always will be fighting in Babylon, so the current troubles are neither new nor surprising - and that Western culture, specifically Christianity, could end that cycle.

The concept of a single narrative which can be applied to everything is hardly new.  All but a few religions that I know of have one, and a great deal of other worldviews beside.  The Marxists believed in a single story of struggle, with the oppressed always struggling justly against the wealthy and powerful until they one day will suceed in creating a true egalitarian state.  The New-Agers believe in a narrative of continuous spiritual evolution of humanity, where humanity, individually and as a whole, is constantly moving in the direction of self-improvement.  Conservatives have a central narrative where there used to be a Golden Age of some sort, back before we lost the wisdom that the people in a time closer to God or the Working Man or whoever.

So where does Discordianism fit into this?  I don't think it does.  This is not to say that a Discordian can't have a central narrative, but that it isn't a core part of the religion; The Principia, while on one hand claims a cyclical narrative with the Five Seasons, and a good beginning / bad end narrative with the Curse of Greyface (we need to recover our lost good humor!), also contains an strong argument against the whole concept of a central narrative in the Law of Fives and the Reality Grids.

Here's why I think this is interesting: people are more likely to believe (and remember, for that matter) something presented in the form of a story.  Discordianism intentionally avoids framing the world into a story, and furthermore suggests that someone who thinks the world has a plot might be reading a little to much into it.  Discordianism doesn't supply a universal narrative and then insult your intelligence by asking you to shoehorn your every experience into it, or to think of everything in terms of how it relates to this philosophy or that worldview.

I'm going to make some assertions now.  You can argue with me and with each other about their validity (or about anything else in this OP, for that matter.)

1. Discordianism recognizes that the universe is a lot more confusing, bizarre, and complicated than we like to pretend.
2. Discordianism recognizes that people are a lot more confusing, bizarre, and complicated than we like to pretend.
3. Attempts to simplify the world and the people in it can be useful in some circumstances and necessary in others, but one must always be careful to distinguish these simplifications from the world itself (if there is a world distinct from our understanding of it).  We can talk about people in terms of Discordians and Cabbages, Perverts and Normals, Wardens and Inmates, or whatever the dichotomy du jour is, but that's just a way of talking - people are infinitely weirder than that.  Likewise, there is more to the world than Black Iron Prisions, Horrible Truths, Emergent Systems, Rational Thought, and whatever other superstitions you believe in.
4. ANY attempt to describe or explain any significant part of the world in a countable number of statements is either wrong (e.g., "There are two kinds of people...") or doesn't actually explain anything (e.g., "The universe is composed of Chaos.")

So, let's discuss something mildly interesting rather than collectively PMS about magic and shit.  Please?

I've been seeing this word a lot, "pills."  By context, it sometimes seems to mean something like those neural skullcaps from The Tripods trilogy.

Humans are controlled from the age of 14 by implants called "caps", which suppress curiosity and creativity and leave the recipient placid and docile, incapable of dissent. The caps cause them to adore the tripods The Spidery Machine as their saviours.

But in other places, the word "pills" seems to refer to psychoactive prescription medications (as opposed to "drugs" which refer to illegal psychoactive compounds.)

One of three things is occurring:
1.  I am misreading the connotations of a word.  Happens all the time.
2.  People are using the word "pill" with at least two very distinct meanings, one metaphorical, on literal.
3.  As #2, except that people sometimes confuse or conflate the two, and meanings from the more emotionally-laden definition bleed into the others.

If #3 is the case, I predict confusion and suffering when discussing issues relating to psychology, especially abnormal psychology.

I'm curious to see if TurnitIn actually works.  To this end, I'm pasting the midterm exam I'm turning in later tonight below and seeing if it gets caught.
You can read it if you want to, but it's just pretty uninspired stuff about Descartes and his crazy bullshit.


2.   What contribution does Descartes's discussion of mathematical truths make to his proof of    God's existence in Meditation V?

   The fact is, no matter what Descartes says, the essence of God is not always perfectly obvious.  (Otherwise, there would be no need for a proof!)  Since his argument rests partially on the obviousness of certain characteristics of God's essence, there appears to be a contradiction. Descartes solves this apparent contradiction by invoking an analogy with geometry.  Many theorems in geometry are not obvious; for instance, that the square of the length of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two opposite sides, or that the sum of the angles in a triangle must be that of two right angles.  Descartes submits that it is impossible to do anything but affirm these theorems once a proper proof of them has been understood, as long as one is "paying close attention" to it.  He clarifies this a bit further on: "When I consider the nature of a triangle ... it appears most evident to me ... that its three angles are equal to two right angles.  And so long as I attend to its demonstration I cannot help believing this to be true."1  In other words, the ideas are obvious after they have been understood, for as long as one pays close attention.  Therefore, the essence of God need not be obvious in general; it suffices that the essence is obvious only when one is actually contemplating an idea.


3.What justification does Descartes give for the Evil Demon Hypothesis?

   Descartes has a two main reasons for the Evil Demon Hypothesis.  The first, and the one he himself gives in the text, is that "it is not enough simply to have realized [the doubtful nature of his knowledge] ... I would do well to deceive myself by turning my will in completely the opposite direction and pretend for a time that these opinions are wholly false and imaginary."2  He claims is that, for the sake of freeing his mind from all preconceptions, he must actively disbelieve everything he once thought he knew rather than merely holding them as 'doubtful.'  By taking what he believes in most strongly, the benevolent God, and inverting it, he accomplishes all of this (and then some.)  Actively believing in a malevolent deceitful god implicitly entails disbelieving everything else, since every belief would then only be the product of deception and not true knowledge; he can disbelieve everything with a single stroke.  At least, it allows him to claim to his reader that he is disbelieving everything with a single stroke of rhetoric.
   The real reason, I think, is to make his conclusions valid even in the face of the harshest scenario he can imagine so as to finish off the Skeptics and atheists of his time.  If he were to take his position anywhere short of the most extreme, hyperbolic doubt imaginable, the Skeptics could take that level of doubt and thereby not be forced to concede to his immaculate arguments by simply doubting a premise he neglected to doubt himself.  It also anticipates a stock atheist response to the ontological argument, namely maltheism.  By disproving the Evil Demon Hypothesis on the way to his proof of God, he prevents atheists from saying, "Of course there is a perfect god... perfectly evil, that is!  Muahahaha!" and doing that obnoxious little dance satanists do when they think they've got one up on you. 

4.Explain the concept of time, as set out by Descartes in Meditiation III, and explain how it    comes    into play in his second demonstration of the existence of God.

   Luckily for Descartes, the Evil Demon has neglected to misinform him on the nature of time.  Time, "as is obvious to one who pays close attention" is composed of "countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest."3    Descartes uses the independence of the moments to show (in perhaps the most amusing subject in the meditations) that he is not himself God.  It has previously been established that Descartes did not create himself, because if Descartes were running things he would have made himself better.  The independence of time lays to rest the idea that perhaps he had existed for all time, not being derived from anything, because existing in one moment does not follow from existing in the previous – continuing to exist implies being continually recreated, the difference being "solely a distinction in reason."4  Thus, the case where Descartes continues to exist has the same pitfall as the case where Descartes created himself, and Descartes must be derived from some other being.

5.Evaluate Elizabeth's criticisms of Descartes's account of the mind's interaction with the    body and the adequacy of Descartes responses.

   Descartes has one good response to Elizabeth's question, which was the distinction he drew "between the force by which the soul acts upon the body" and "that by which one body acts upon another."5  The dilemma posed by an incorporeal thing moving or being moved by a corporeal thing is only a dilemma because the only kind of forces that were known about were those between two material objects.  Descartes should have simply left it at that, and said that he did not have a clear and distinct understanding about how such forces operate; instead he tried to explain something he knew nothing about by analogy to something else he also knew nothing about (and Elizabeth calls him on it in her second letter, saying his analogy with weight can only be "feigned out of ignorance."6)  His specific response to her raising the contradiction of how it could be that "a soul, as you have described it, after having had the faculty and habit of reasoning well, can lose all of it on account of some vapors," while still being able to  "subsist without a body,"7 unless I am mistaken, is completely missing from his letters.  I would have liked to have read it; the fact that damaging the body can damage the mind is a real threat to the notion that destroying the body leaves the mind unharmed, and in general his entire notion of a mind-body duality.  I find his attempt to explain that mind-body unity while also holding on to mind-body separation to be somewhat lacking;  it seems that he clearly and distinctly perceives their separation while in 'philosopher mode,' and their unity while in 'everyday mode,' but never both at the same time.  In fact, the the ability to clearly and distinctly conceive two apparently contradictory statements at two different times should be ringing some alarm bells in Descartes's head about his "clearly and distinctly" epistemology.

A.   1.  Explain the central concepts in Descartes's first demonstration of Gods' existence.
2.  Explain any difficulties in the demonstration that might undermine its soundness.
   3.  Explain why he undertakes this demonstration at this stage in the Meditations.

      Descartes's argument for the existence of God is essentially (hah!) as follows:
      1.  Ideas are possess reality and perfections.
   2.  The amount of reality and perfections of an idea is related to the reality of the          subject of the idea.
   3.  Reality can only come from an efficient cause with at least as much reality as          the effect.
   4.  There is an idea of an God of infinite perfection and reality.
From 1 and 3, we know that ideas require an efficient cause with at least as much reality.  Applying 2 to 4 tells us that the idea of God possesses more reality than any finite thing.  Applying the combination of 1 and 3 to 2 and 4, we know that there is a cause with more reality than any finite thing.  Therefore, and infinitely real being exists, which is by definition God.  As for difficulties that undermine his argument ... can I say all of them?  Present-day philosophers deny all four of his premises, and only the denial of the fourth (theological non-cognitivism) is controversial.  But that would be anachronistic and unfair to Descartes.  I believe premise number 2, insomuch as the reality in an idea about the infinite is inherently infinite itself, could be argued on Descartes's own terms, (that is, one could argue that the idea of the infinite could have a large but finite reality,) but that isn't the real problem here.  The real problem is the Evil Demon Hypothesis he has not dealt with yet.  Since he freely admits that it "would be easy" for the Evil Demon to "cause me to err even in those matters that I think I intuit as clearly as possible,"8 he has no grounds, on his own terms, to assert any of the four premises – the fact that he clearly and distinctly perceives them does not guarantee their accuracy until after he has vanquished the Evil Demon, which he cannot do until after this proof.  Moving away from the Evil Demon Hypothesis was the point of doing this argument in the text, because once he shows a priori that the Evil Demon Hypothesis cannot be correct he can start to trust his senses and clear and distinct thoughts, and thereby move beyond the fact that he exists.


   B.   1.  Explain what Galileo meant by objective and subjective properties and
      2.  how this is related to Descartes's analysis of the wax.
   3.  What claims does Descartes's think he proves through the analysis of the wax,
   4.  what are his arguments, and
   5.  are there any flaws in this reasoning?
   
   When Galileo talks about objective properties of something, he is referring to those properties which are essential to the object, those that "by no stretch of the imagination can I conceive of any corporeal body apart from."9  He has a somewhat larger list of objective properties than Descartes admits, but they are fundamentally in agreement on the word.  A subjective property is a quality that "resides exclusively in our sensitive body,"10 and is therefore not properly a property of the object but rather the observer.  The class of subjective qualities is complementary to the class of objective qualities; so either a quality resides in the senses of the observer or it is a fundamental immutable part of the object's essence.
   Descartes uses the example of a piece of wax (which he insists he is actually holding in his hand as he writes, as opposed to a hypothetical piece of wax – am I being overly paranoid when I wonder if he really had a piece of wax or not?) to illuminate these objective and subjective properties, eventually concluding that only the properties of being extended, flexible, and mutable are essential to the wax.  His claim that these three properties are the only essential properties of wax are sketchy at best – if those three truly were the only essential properties of wax, then wax would be indistinguishable from any other object whose essential properties are only those of extension, flexibility, and mutability, which Descartes claims to be the whole class of corporeal things.  Since the brain of Descartes is also an extended, flexible, and mutable thing, Leibniz's Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles allows us to conclude that Descartes has nothing but wax between his ears.  But again, I am being anachronistic.  More temporally, there is no reason for him to have only chosen those three properties to total of the wax's objective properties.  It is true that in every state the wax had an extension and the potential to change, but it also had one or more optical characteristics, a solubility in a solvent, a density, a hardness, an effect on the body if consumed, etc.  That these were different in each state is of no consequence, since the wax was extended differently in each state as well.  Furthermore, there are transformations that destroy the wax without affecting any of the properties he claims to be essential; burning the wax, for instance, converts it into smoke, which is extended, mutable, and flexible, but clearly not the same as wax.  (If you disagree, remember that his justification for considering the wax to be the same after melting was that "no one denies it; no one thinks otherwise."11  By the same reasoning, smoke is not the same thing as wax.  Capiche?)  The other definition of objective properties, those without which an object cannot even be conceived of without, doesn't hold in the case of flexibility – it is no contradiction to conceive of a hard, brittle piece of wax.


C.   In spite of his arguments for the existence of bodies, Descartes claims that the senses are    unreliable guides to the true properties of bodies.
   1.  How is this compatible with God's veracity?
   2.  To what extent are the senses reliable and
   3.  what reasoning does Descartes's use to support these claims?

   Descartes's claim that the unreliability of the senses with respect to determining the properties of bodies is compatible with the undeceptive nature of God hinges on the notion that senses aren't actually meant to be used to determine the nature of objects, but rather the way a person ought to respond to those objects.  The perception of something being dangerously hot does not necessarily mean that the object is dangerously hot, but does reliably mean that the object is to be avoided.  Using the senses to determine the true properties of something is a misuse of our will in an area we lack understanding, no different than acting on a belief not known to be true.  Since the error comes not from the senses, but from our choosing to use the senses for something they were not designed for, the fault of the error lies in us, and God cannot be blamed.
   He addresses the problem of confused senses giving causing maladaptive inclinations (for example, the person for whom consumption of food would be inimical but is hungry anyway) by asserting that there are only a limited number of sensations capable of being felt by the mind.  Since there are only so many sensations to choose from, the best system is one that "produces the one sensation that, of all the ones it is able to produce, is most especially and most often conducive to the maintenance of a healthy man."12  An occasional error in an uncommon situation is acceptable as long as in general the system produces the sensation that keeps you alive and well.  Descartes does not explain why the number of sensations able to be perceived by the mind-body union, were it to be built differently, must be finite, or even small; it would be well within God's powers to create the human brain such that it would be capable of distinguishing as many sensations as it needs to give the correct response to all stimuli.
   As to how Descartes arrived at these claims, he doesn't really explain why.  By the end of the meditations he's given up on trying to seem impartial and just asserting pet theorems left and right on the basis that he is infallible whenever he clearly and distinctly perceives something to be true.  Perhaps, like this author, he has tired of writing and finds himself less and less willing to put real effort into anything.

Legal Notice:
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Permission for personal use and educational use is granted to Professor Dan Fouke, East Coast Hustle, and Faust, who are additionally allowed to retransmit this work to other individuals in good faith so long as this notice is left intact.  Permission is explicitly NOT granted to TurnitIn, iParadigms, LLC, or affiliates (hereafter known as "Data-grubbing Capitalist Pigs") to retransmit this work, allow it to be retransmitted, allow it to be stolen, or allow it to be read or otherwise accessed by any government or agent thereof, unless the author is in charge of the above government.  Furthermore, by digitally reading this license, all Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs agree to notify the author in event of an attempt by an unauthorized party to access this work, explicitly including any requests under the heading of law enforcement or national security, and, in the event of litigation between the author and Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs, agree to pay the author's legal fees plus 20% tip.

Well, alright, there were a few bits I was actually a little proud of:

By disproving the Evil Demon Hypothesis on the way to his proof of God, he prevents atheists from saying, "Of course there is a perfect god... perfectly evil, that is!  Muahahaha!" and doing that obnoxious little dance satanists do when they think they've got one up on you.

If those three truly were the only essential properties of wax, then wax would be indistinguishable from any other object whose essential properties are only those of extension, flexibility, and mutability, which Descartes claims to be the whole class of corporeal things.  Since the brain of Descartes is also an extended, flexible, and mutable thing, Leibniz's Law of the Identity of Indiscernibles allows us to conclude that Descartes has nothing but wax between his ears.  But again, I am being anachronistic.

Legal Notice:
This work is © 2009 by the author under the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988.
Permission for personal use and educational use is granted to Professor Dan Fouke, East Coast Hustle, and Faust, who are additionally allowed to retransmit this work to other individuals in good faith so long as this notice is left intact.  Permission is explicitly NOT granted to TurnitIn, iParadigms, LLC, or affiliates (hereafter known as "Data-grubbing Capitalist Pigs") to retransmit this work, allow it to be retransmitted, allow it to be stolen, or allow it to be read or otherwise accessed by any government or agent thereof, unless the author is in charge of the above government.  Furthermore, by digitally reading this license, all Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs agree to notify the author in event of an attempt by an unauthorized party to access this work, explicitly including any requests under the heading of law enforcement or national security, and, in the event of litigation between the author and Data-Grubbing Capitalist Pigs, agree to pay the author's legal fees plus 20% tip.

but trust me, overall it's really not worth reading.  I wrote it under the influence of at least three different psychoactive substances, none of which my body had been very accustomed too, week long sleep deprivation due to every professor demanding a major project due the same week, including my dad who needed me to give up half my weekend of study time to go home and pour concrete, and an empty stomach because I forgot to eat that day.  Also, under the influence of Rationalists.  Later that day, I was helping run a conceptual physics review session, and I quoted Descartes multiple times without thinking about it - "It is obvious to those who are paying close attention..."  "We must carefully distinguish between the forces..."  Also I read Spinoza that evening and I swear it almost made sense

Does anybody else find themselves ignoring threads once they get stickied?  I usually just look at which threads get bumped, and having the same threads continually at the top just makes me ignore them and not realize when they get a new post.  (Except for the pics thread, because I'm a sucker for Asylum Seeker's reposts.)

Just saying, stickying threads like WAR! and A Fapcab Named Desire make them completely drop off the radar for me.

If you had any remaining hope for our future, check this out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/business/06insurance.html?_r=1&hp

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy "life settlements," life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to "securitize" these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.

...

"We're hoping to get a herd stampeding after the first offering," said one investment banker not authorized to speak to the news media.

Among other things, they lose money big time if people start living longer than expected.  In other words, we're setting up a situation where if someone develops a cure for cancer, our economy will crash.  Again.

Remember how we had all these companies that were "too big to fail" and had to be rescued by our patriotic government?  Now we'll have the situation in reverse, only instead of doling out cash to "limit" economic ruin, the government will have to hold back a breakthrough in medicine for the same reason.

What the fuck is it?

I've done a (small) amount of reading on Neurolinguistic Programming, and most of what what I've found either sounds like a self-help seminar or is a "very clever, now do can you produce a study in which it works?" kind of papers.  (like this one)

Two quick questions:

1.) Where are we currently on Intermittens?  I know 1 and 2 have been released, and RWHN is finishing up on #3, and 5-8 are started and/or in progress.  But where on 5 through 8 are we?  What do they still need?  And what's already in them, so I don't repeat anyone else's work?

and

2.) How big are the pages going to be when printed?  I was thinking of putting together a cover or full page illustration, and size is important.

New BIP Comic Script Thingy

CAST:

MALE DUDE - a somewhat manic looking fellow.  Used to be normal.  Dressed in a stark, prisony uniform.  He doesn't have a razor, and therefore gets progressively more scruffy.  Physically young, but he's aged a lot recently.

GIRL - roughly the same age as MALE DUDE, and kinda pretty in a normal way.  Wears dresses and skirts she's cut out of the same prison uniform MALE DUDE has.  She's content with the way things are, although that doesn't stop her from experimenting to see if she can make things better.  Normal bookworm at first, until you begin to realize that she's some kind of mad scientist/artist/author or something.

THE RAT - little brown furry fellow, beady black eyes, tail, tiny arms and legs, that sort of thing.  He's a rat.  Don't get too attached to him, as he doesn't make it through this story.

The characters are not especially detailed; they are everymen, so the reader can fill in the gaps.




SET:
Two jail cells, one for GIRL and one for MALE DUDE.  They each have one bed and one of those prison-toilet thingies.  MALE DUDE's cell is dark and dirty - you get the sense that nobody is caring for it.  GIRL's cell features all of the same furniture (except that her bed has a grubby pillow and sheets.)  In addition to this, she has stacks of books laying around and flowers in an old wine bottle (although she acquires that later.  They're all grubby, though - clean, but old and used.  She starts off with just the books and adds more things as the story progresses.  Her cell isn't static - every time we see it, she's rearranged her junk.  The books in particular are migrating out of their stacks as she reads them.  She doesn't have any tables or chairs, so she uses stacks of books instead.  MALE DUDE's cell just gets dirtier.  The cells are facing each other in a long hallway; there are other cells along both sides of the hallway but they can't be seen clearly from GIRL or MALE DUDE's cells - they are spaced too far apart.

The frames alternate between looking at MALE DUDE's cell and GIRL's cell.  The story is told from the perspective of MALE DUDE, so we (mostly) only ever see GIRL's cell from the outside.  MALE DUDE's cell is shown the outside as well, but sometimes we get to see inside of it as he looks around, or a close up of his face.  The prison bars are visible in every frame.  As with any other rule, break it if it works out better a different way.  If we are getting a close-up of something in MALE DUDE's room, then we can see the shadows of the bars over it.  The frames themselves are constant size and layout (except GIRL's last panel,) as befitting a story about prisons.  Two columns of four rows of frames per page, the left column of frames all looking at MALE DUDE or his cell, the right looking at GIRL's cell.

The text is primarily in those obnoxious little word-rectangles that comics use to indicate narration.  In this case it's MALE DUDE's mental diary, where he plots and keeps track of things to keep himself "sane."  The font used here brings to mind a dirty old typewriter, like somebody took steel wool and etching acid to the letter-stamp-arm thingies.  Gently though, so it's still readable.  We're trying to "show, not tell" here, so I'm trying to only use words when they're strictly necessary.




So, the script.  It got a lot more complicated the more I wrote; when I first came up with the idea it was really just the ending.



MALE DUDE is crouching in front of the bars in his cell, looking at them intently.  He is looking for any sign of a weak point.  We are behind him, looking out through the cell bars - we can see GIRL's cell across from him.

GIRL is sitting up in bed (not on - she's got the covers up over most of her) and is reading one of her many books.

-

MALE DUDE pushes firmly against one of the bars.  It doesn't budge.  (Same shot as 1st panel.)

GIRL is on her bed laying on her stomach with her feet up behind her.  She is reading a different book, one that was previously on top of a stack of books we saw earlier.  The one she was reading earlier is now on the floor.

-

MALE DUDE is standing, reaching up to where one of the bars is anchored into the ceiling and testing it.  It doesn't budge there, either.

GIRL is sleeping contently under her covers.

-

MALE DUDE is sitting on his p.o.s. bed, thinking.  We can see his face better now.  Word box: The point of escape is the bars.  If I get out it will be have been through the bars. ]

GIRL is sitting cross-legged on the floor, with a lot of books open in front of her.  It looks like she is comparing them against each other - a finger on text in one, looking reading another.

-

END PAGE 00001

-

MALE DUDE is lying face up, on his bed, staring at the ceiling.  Word box: There was a short story about a boy captured for by an alien zoo.  Every day he would vomit on his cage, and his stomach acid would eat away at it a little bit.  ]

GIRL is cleaning up her room, putting books back into stacks.  An old bottle with flowers in it has come from somewhere and is on top of one of the stacks. No - the shot is of her actually placing the flowers on a stack; she's carrying other books under her other arm.

-

MALE DUDE is still lying on his bed - this is the same shot, in fact, except now he is looking towards the bars (and us.)  The bars are now clearly in focus, rather than MALE DUDE.  This is an epiphany moment.
Word box: Until one day when his cage was weak enough that even he could break it.  ]

GIRL has something in her mouth - looks like half a bagel, maybe? - and is reading yet ANOTHER book.  Her look of intense concentration tells us that this is no casual book.  Off to the corner we see the sound effects for induced vomiting. ACK GLURK HRUUKKK or something.

-

Back to MALE DUDE's cell.  Close up on the base of one of the bars, looking up from the ground - it is now covered with vomit.  We see the back of MALE DUDE's legs as he walks back to his bed.

GIRL has two books open in front of her.  She is writing something in one of the books with a cheap pen.  Notes, perhaps?  Corrections?  Connections?

-

MALE DUDE is doing push ups in his room.  He is invigorated, now - he has a plan and it's going to work.  No longer hopelessly probing walls, he has a purpose, and all his actions are strictly necessary for his escape.  He's only got one chance to do this, and he won't let himself blow it.

GIRL is sleeping in her bed, with her head lying on an open book.  She seems anxious - she has fallen asleep while reading something important with troubling implications for her.

-

END PAGE 00002
-

MALE DUDE is sleeping restfully in his bed.  The camera is far back enough that we can see the bars, specifically the one he barfed on.  The vomit is dry by now, and THE RAT sniffing it.

GIRL is sitting on the edge of her bed, her head held up with her hands.  She doesn't look distraught so much as frustrated.  Something she's doing isn't working and she's trying to figure out what to do about it.

-

MALE DUDE is in the middle of his room, doing a bridge stretch.  There is another layer of fresh vomit on the base of the same bar.

GIRL is pacing her room.  Her cell is messy - there are more books than ever before, in at least half a dozen crooked stacks (plus a lot on the floor.)  The wine flower bottle is perched precariously on one of them.

-

Mid-stretch, THE RAT ambles in front of MALE DUDE.  MALE DUDE's head is still upside down, so THE RAT is really close to MALE DUDE's face.  MALE DUDE: "Hello, rat.  I don't suppose you'd know what time it is, would you?" He is happy; he's the king of his domain now, and nothing is going to stand in his way, not after he oxidizes his way through the bars.

GIRL has stopped pacing, (continuation from previous frame.)  She looks at the wine flower bottle.  She is not happy about something.


(This page somehow only wound up with 6 frames - marginalia goes here? Title?)

-

END PAGE 00003

-

MALE DUDE is now crouching with his back to the wall, holding THE RAT up in front of him.  "No, don't answer that.  It isn't the right question to ask - knowing what time it is wouldn't help."

GIRL (continuation from previous frame) yells "GENITALS!" in big, angry letters and gives the stack of books with the wine bottle with flowers in it on it on a big, angry kick.  Needless to say the bottle goes flying.

-

MALE DUDE has set down THE RAT, which is now sniffing his finger.  "Sorry, I haven't any food for you.  Run along now - it won't be long," he says.  He is envious of THE RAT, who alone can move freely, but he doesn't blame THE RAT for this; it's just the way things are.

GIRL is sitting on her floor, sobbing.  Something has released within her.  We can see THE RAT ambling off somewhere in front of her cell.

-

MALE DUDE, still crouching, watches the rat wander off, a wistful look on his face.  Word Box - I talk to the rat because if I didn't talk, I'd go insane.  And if I talked to myself, I'd already be insane. ]

GIRL is sleeping, face buried in a pillow clenched tight.  She has cried herself to sleep.

-

MALE DUDE is back to doing pushups.  The camera is high up and pointing down through the bars, to give a sense of great time passing here.  He's been doing push-ups for a while now.  There is now quite a lot of old vomit on the bar.

GIRL has woken up to a bright new day (figuratively - there are no windows.)  She ties a bandana around her head; it's Go Time.

-

END PAGE 00004

-

MALE DUDE is sitting back against the wall again, hands gesturing a conversation with THE RAT, who occupied munching on something.  You can tell that this is now a habit.  He looks happy - he has a friend, and he's winning the war against the prison bar.  Why shouldn't he be?

GIRL has a bunch of pages from various books pasted on the cell wall in front of her, which she is studying.  There are lines connecting and circling various bits from page to page; she is holding a marker in her hand.

-

MALE DUDE is stretching his legs; I don't remember the specific name of the exercise - it's the one where you crouch on one leg, and extend the other leg out as far as you can, touching the heel to the ground.  The one runners to before they, um, run.  The point is he's stretching his legs, because he plans on having to run soon.  He can't run in his cell, so he plans on being OUT soon.

GIRL is writing something tiny at the bottom of her wall - she's saving space because she's covered the rest of the wall in complicated diagrams and pages from books.  Like what happens if you leave a physicist in a room with a whiteboard for to long.  She's got free-body diagrams, network graphs, a rough representation of Canada with the flight paths (airplanes or ballistic missiles?  It's all the same now) to China marked in, biological sketches, occult sigils, circle, and pentagrams - all kinds of shit on top of the pages that were already there, and arrows connecting everything.  She's been busy.

-

MALE DUDE is standing, looking down at the vomit-coated bar, preparing himself.  The time is now; this is the moment he's been waiting for.  Word box: This is it.

Girl drops to the floor, leaning back, half-lying, on her arms, looking at her wall.  She is exhausted and giddy - she's beaten something.

-

MALE DUDE strides to his vomity bar, and begins to wipe off the vomit, to see how much has been corroded.  THE RAT is on the other side of the bars, alternating (between frames) looking at MALE DUDE and GIRL's cells.  Word box: The moment of Truth.

Something occurs to GIRL.  She launches herself at one of her stacks and digs out a book - it has some important key of information that would either validate the (important!) connection she just made or trash it, and she can't wait around to figure out which way.

-

END PAGE 00005 

Important note - Page 6 needs to start on the left side, so the reader actually has to turn Page 5 to discover what's under all the vomit.

-

MALE DUDE has finished scraping away the vomit.  The bar is immaculate - not rusted or corroded in the slightest.  Extreme close up of the bar - maybe his hands are in there too.  Word bubble, in the Cry of Ultimate Suffering or whatever it was they had in the Princess Bride: VANS DEFERENS!

GIRL has found her book, and his kneeling in front of her wall with it open in one hand, marker in the other.  Right now she is reading the book.

-

MALE DUDE: "ORIFICE!  SMEGMA!"  He is angry - it should have worked!  He kicks the bar anyway; it doesn't budge at all.

GIRL smiles.  She has figured something important out.  She reaches up and rubs out one of the more complex areas of her chart, and smiles.

-

MALE DUDE hauls off and punches the bars with bare hands, yelling something wordless.

GIRL takes out her marker, and draws in something much simpler in the spot she rubbed out, with a huge smile of satisfaction.  She's found a shortcut or something; some new way of doing whatever it is she's doing.

-

Continuation of last MALE DUDE frame - still yelling, he impotently punchs the bar with his other fist.  It is a big, stupid, Hollywood one-two punch.

GIRL is laying down on her floor, surrounded by discarded ideas and haphardly strewn books and paper.  One arm is upraised in the classic arm-pump gesture of victory.  She is tired and victorious, resting in her bed of laurels for a moment.

-

END PAGE 00006

-

MALE DUDE steps back from the bars, looking at his balled up fists.  There is a SQERK sound effect from under one of his feet (the one that stepped backwards.)  His fists are covered in old vomit and blood.  "Ow," he says, understated, about his hands.

GIRL gets up, slowly, and takes off her bandanna.  She is switching gears now.

-

Continuation of last MALE DUDE frame - same position, same stance.  He looks down at the foot that made the SQERK sound, still holding up his fists were he was looking at them a moment ago.

GIRL is cleaning up a little, pushing books and the other debris of her creativity back into piles.

-

Continuation of last MALE DUDE frame - same position, same stance.  He picks up his foot, to see what he just stepped on.  THE RAT is there, dead and flat.  Stuff is comming out all his orifices.  This might not be exactly the same frame - if you need to zoom in a little bit to see THE RAT in all his dead mushy glory, do it.  "Colonic prolapse" he says, too surprised and shocked to yell.

GIRL dusts herself off, the final step in her cursorial cleaning.  She is ready to go somewhere now.

-

MALE DUDE staggers backwards, fixated on the dead rodent, clutching his head in his vomity bloody hands in horror.  He could have dealt with being foiled, but not this.

"Hey," says GIRL, addressing MALE DUDE - the first evidence we see that they know about each other.  "I need to go pick up some new books - want me to get anything for you?"  This frame might be shot from behind MALE DUDE, showing the back of his upper body as he breaks down weeping.  He is too small now to block our view of GIRL and her cell.

-

END PAGE 00007

-

MALE DUDE looks up.  We get a close up of his dirty, bloody, vomity, tear-streaked, unshaven, bar-shadowed face.  His eyes are huge with bleary tears.  "I don't think we're allowed to talk to each other." he says.

GIRL opens the door to her cell and begins walking away.  To her this is the most natural thing in the world - the door was never locked.

-

MALE DUDE is still staring at THE RAT.  The camera backs up a little here; he is smaller now.  Here is a truly broken man.  "Besides, I killed the rat." he says, mournful, still shocked.

GIRL continues walking - she goes right over the frame border and off the page.

-

The comic only takes up half of the last page; underneath is a final illustration and the credits.  The illustration a close up of THE RAT, sitting over the broken wine-bottle vase and chewing on the flower.

So this Christmas I'll be hanging a shit-ton of candy canes on one of the leafless trees on campus.
Each one will have a note attached:

Merry Christmas and Good Luck with Exams from the UD Chaos Brigade.
                                     HAIL SANTA!

I invite you do do similar.

So my latest experiment, (sparked by, of all things, a children's cartoon) is to refer to myself as a God.

Hey, how the fuck did you get one of your flyers inside my pillow in a locked room?  I am a god among men, that's how.  Undefeated in six directions and the center and all that.

I've begun referring to things that I receive as "offerings."

I have done essentially no research into "magick" or hacking your own brain - any ideas from those more well-read than me?

(I'd ask "am I doing it right" but as a diety I am, of course, doing it right by definition.)

Be an enabler.

Have you heard of the 'fundamental attribution error?'
The fundamental attribution error is the tendency for people to assign the cause of another person's actions to personality traits of that person when the cause actually has more to do with the situation.  People act like morons because they are morons, right?  Wrong.  (Well, a lot of the time.)  People act like morons because the situation demands it of them.  People act like 'sheep' or 'cabbages' because that is what is expected of them.  70% of people will administer a lethal shock if a man in a white lab coat tells them they have to.  70% of people are not killers at heart.  When you see a murder, look for the man in the white lab coat.  When you see sheep, look for the shepherd.

Have you heard of the 'Asch Conformity Effect?'
People go with the flow.  Reproducibly.  Predictably.  Sit twenty people in a room.  Ask them an easy question.  An obvious question.  Which is longer, a yardstick or a 12-inch ruler?  Display them up front, just in case anybody doesn't know that a yardstick is three times longer than a 12-inch ruler.  Pay the first nineteen people to answer, "Duh, the ruler is longer."  What does the twentieth say?  The ruler.  Because he's a sheep?  Because the situation demands it.  Nineteen people in civilian clothes turned a glorious Homo Sapiens into a spineless thumbless mouth-breathing maggot.

One man in a white head wrap told nineteen men in civilian clothes they had to bring down the Towers.

Nineteen men did, because the situation demanded it.

A man in a black suit told a nation they must fight evil.  They must tighten their belts, give up privileges which hitherto had been Rights.  They must surrender their sons, their husbands, their daughters, to the endless fields of sand and blood and hate.  They must defend themselves until no one else is left standing.  Carthago delenda est.

A nation did, because the situation demanded it.

In a distant corner of the Milky Way, there is a nuclear furnace.  Around that furnace is a blue-green-fluffy-white-clouded marble, forever rolling around its track.  It cannot move from that track, until one day when it will sink into its furnace and burn and melt.

One that planet is a species of ape, Homo Sapiens, each wearing the skins of a pitiful monkey because that's all they can see.  Six billion of them, crawling on all fours because they've never seen anyone walk.  They too are on a track.  They go around and around in circles.  Nineteen monkeys tell a monkey in a white head wrap tell nineteen monkeys tells a monkey in a black suit tells six billion monkeys until they all crash into a nuclear furnace that nineteen monkeys told a monkey in a white lab coat to create.  They race along their track, the brake in the reach of every monkey but no monkey is pulling it, because no other monkey is.

Forty thousand feet above the third largest continent in the third rock from a furnace in an otherwise unremarkable galaxy, four monkeys in civilian clothes address thirty seven monkeys in civilian clothes.  We have a bomb, they say.  We are going back to the airport.  They are wrong.

In a bunker in the largest continent, a man sees blinking dots on a computer screen.  The situation tells him that nuclear warheads are flying to his pretty little frozen home.  The situation is wrong.

No, says the man, removing his monkey suit.  I have a throat made for speaking rather than swallowing, and it says No.  I do not listen to machines made my monkeys in white lab coats.  I do not listen to monkeys waving flags or their books of rules. 

Forty thousand feet in the thin blue air, a man is sitting in the back of the plane.  He stands up and takes off his monkey suit; he stands on his own two feet, spine erect, facing forward, because he is a human being, a creature of glory.  I have two thumbs, he says, and with my thumbs I stand against you.

Nineteen monkeys in military clothes in the bunker look up in shock.  But the blinking lights, they say.  But the monkeys with flags and regulations they say.  Damn the machine says the man.  Damn the flag says the man with his voice of glory.  I am the greatest creature ever to walk this dirty little rock.  I am the Pope, I am the Patriarch, I Am Who Am, and I say: No.

Blinded by the vision of glory, thirty six men in civilian clothes take off their suits, because they are standing on consecrated ground in the presence of the holy.  We also have two thumbs, they say.  We also stand against you.

Deafened by the voice of glory, nineteen men in military clothes remove their encumbering suits of monkey fur.  We also say No.  We will not rain apocalypse on our beautiful little rock because of the machines or the flags or the books of rules.

Dressed in the immaculate white lab coat of truth, two men stand across the decades.  Rise, they command.  Nineteen men in military clothes and thirty six men in civilian rise because the situation demands they stand on their own two feet.  Here, say the two.  Here are lab coats; they are yours, they have always been yours, they are your birthright but you have left them in the mud, you have let them become soiled.  We have restored them for you; wear them in pride, and never forget that you are wearing the coat.  You are the Scientist, the Experimentor, and the situation is yours to control.  The independent variable is yours to manipulate, the world yours to command.  Monkeys are forever your test subjects, and the scientist who takes orders from his specimens has not ever been born nor will he be.  The nineteen men and the thirty six men put on their lab coats now remembered, once forgotten, and they stand up for what they stand for.

The plane crashes in an empty field.

The apocalyptic rain is held in check; the final burning of the world is put off one more day.

There is a very simple explanation to why the world is the way it is: it is run by monkeys.  Six billion monkeys, all of them wearing fur suits instead of their white lab coats because six billion monkeys are wearing fur suits and six billion monkeys can't be wrong can they?

There is a very simple solution to the way the world is: wear your white lab coat, your armor of God.  One man putting on his lab coat convinces nineteen men to put on theirs.  Keep your coat clean; without constant attention it will become soiled and worthless.  You cannot ever enlighten someone; underneath that monkey fur suit is already a human being, the greatest organism to trod upon this rock.  You can only take off your suit and hope that monkey see monkey do.

Always remember: never administer 300 volts to a man taking a test.
Always remember: the yardstick is longer.
Always remember: two and two make four, not five.

Afterwards, someone asked Stanislaw Petrov how he know the machines had erred, that the apocalypse wasn't en route to his frozen home.  I didn't, said the hero.

This bit of insight came from an anime episode, of all places.

So anyway, the character in the anime explains that life is a story.  Life starts when a person can distinguish himself from the environment, and from that point on people live not in reality but in a story loosely based on reality, with themselves as the main character.  The problem with this is that the world is fundamentally indifferent to people, and therefore people have conflict when they have to adjust the world so that it fits their story of themselves as an important character.  The way out of this trap, the character says, is to regard yourself neither as a main character or a supporting character, but as the Author.

Thoughts?
And how would one go about adopting the Author archetype, anyway?

It's been a while since people have been arguing over over-fine points in metaphor, so I thought I'd give the beehive a little kick.  Also just in case any of my ideas are original, I wanted to share them.

Extending the 'paths' metaphor, ruts are paths that are traveled very frequently.  They are easier to follow, because one can move along a rut on cruise control.  Being stuck in a rut is the equivalent to being stuck in a BIP/GSP/Endless Battlefield Composed Entirely of Shrapnel.  I find it more convient to speak of people being in multiple ruts at a time, where one rut might represent their attitudes regarding one subject, which groups or archetypes they think of themselves another, cognitive style being a third, etc.  Ruts represent memes as well; saying someone has caught the gender meme is equivalent to saying they're stuck in the gender rut.

Ruts represent to lowest energy, most stable state of 'selfness.'  Energy is required for a person to bump himself out of a rut; likewise person who has gotten out of a rut will spontaneously fall back into one if he does not continuously exert effort.

Major ruts are those formed by social pressures, so pervasive they are nearly invisible until a great social movement comes along and re-landscapes the collective psyche.  The customs of wearing clothes almost all the time would be a large rut.  This is one of the better examples of ruts, I think, because in purely physical terms, the condition of wearing clothes is not favored.  There is higher entropy in being undressed (more ways for my clothes to lay around my room than be on me) and it takes time and effort to get dressed in the morning.  And yet, it would take greater willpower for me to attend classes in the nude.

Smaller ruts are formed by groups or influential figures.  The hip-hop scene produced a surprisingly strong 'gangsta' rut in the US and worldwide, for example.  Adam Smith largely created the first the modern rut of economic thinking with Wealth of Nations.

Ruts of all kinds can be altered.  Protest and awareness groups seek to change ruts or at least make people aware of that a particular rut exists.  (For example, trying to fight homophobia is a protest, and trying to get people to realized that heterosexuality is not the only sexuality would be awareness.)  Encountering a new rut, or having ones' rut shaped by an outside force, is the equivalent of shrapnel.

The prime characteristic of a rut is that the concept behind it is embraced subconsciously.  If asked why they do something in a particular way, people who have fallen into that rut will typically by confused - how else would they do it?  This can be seen in the English-speaker baffled at how other languages don't go subject-noun-object, the little boy who doesn't can't fathom why girls' hair should be longer than boys' hair, but wouldn't be caught dead in a pigtail.  It is the missionairy who cannot see how people can solve their crushing existential crises without faith in God, it is the Discordian who sees cabbages going about their mundane, greyfaced lives and being happy without the appropriate level of nonsense.  Things are done because they've always been done that way.

Slopes are what pull one into ruts, and what make getting out of them completely so difficult.  Being on a slope does not determine your behaviour as completely as being in a rut, but it does exert a downhill force towards the rut that affects your actions.  Having been a starving musician once might pull one away from the rut of considering music piracy normal, even though the person in question no longer considers himself a member of the music community - he's out of the rut but still on the slope.  Conversing, a person who has never pirated material and doesn't think of himself as the kind of person who would do so might be drawn into the 'music piracy is normal' rut simply by interacting with people in that rut.  Ruts then correspond to Scars (if you get one the slope by stepping out of a rut) or Shrapnel (if you encounter a slope by being exposed to the corresponding rut.)

Slopes can be subtle, entrapping people who think that they have completely gotten away from the rut.  I particularly remember that the approach to morality in one webcomic (I believe it was Casey and Andy) was very conservative Christian - and later found out that the author was strongly atheist.  He'd gotten partially out of the Christian mindset, but still thought of Good and Evil in Christian terms.

Ruts are not inherently negative.  The purpose of BIP-Discordianism, as I see it, is to make people more aware of the ruts they're in and help apply the wisdom of "Well, then stop." to ruts that they don't want to be in.  In this context, a prison break is stepping out of a rut that the person doesn't like onto the slope (or further uphill on the slope.)  I think this offers a little insight into the "Can one really break out of the BIP?" argument - one might be out of the rut, but will inevitably still be on the slope.  The slope is steeper close to the rut, and by moving further away from the rut the influence of the slope on one's life is less, but never quite zero.

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It's far past my bedtime, so I've probably left out some important points.  Will add/clarify/spellcheck tomorrow.

edit: made new and (much) improved versions.  See the pdf link further down.









Made these with The GIMP.  I have higher res versions (2000 x 2625, or 8 x 10.5 @ 250 ppi) if you want them.

This is an idea that's been percolating in the back of my mind for a while, and I'm just now starting to write it out.  Last semester, I took a World Religions course, and the author of the textbook we used had an interesting approach to religion.  Each religion, he felt, tried to address one or more perceived problems with the human condition.  Buddhism, (if I'm understanding that tradition correctly), tries to deal with suffering, shallowness, and a preoccupation with the self (which Buddhism insists is only illusionary anyway.)  Christianity, among other things, is incredibly concerned with how people are to know what the moral thing to do is, given humans' propensity towards error.  To a Christian, a religion that doesn't come with a complete set of moral guides is pointless; as a major goal of their religion is to show them how to live their lives.

Discordianism radically different from other religions in that it makes the claim that order is not inherently preferable to chaos.  This is perhaps most visible in the creation myths of other religions; the Greeks said that before Gaea was born, their was only teeming darkness and confusion called Chaos.  The Egyptians put it even more bluntly.  Amon-Ra arose out of the dark, watery chaos of Num and with the help of his children got around to creating the world, much like every other creation myth.  Only to the Egyptians, Chaos was still out there.  At night, the Sun Chariot had to journey through the land of chaos on its way back to the east; furthermore, the gods had to continously struggle against the enroaching chaos, lest it overcome the world and destroy the glorious order of civilization.  Amon-Ra, the greatest of dieties, was directly responsible for keeping order in the world; without his work, and the work of his his agents, the Pharoahs, society would crumble into chaos.  Confucianism was also a big fan of ordered society, with every cog in the machine doing its best to support the cogs above it and lead the cogs below it.  Chinese folklore even had Heaven to be a beauracracy, modeled on the Emperorship, with attendent spirits and gods each being responsible for keeping a specific part of the world working in an orderly fashion.  Hammurabi is remembered and respected just for being the first person to write down his legal code.  The laws themselves are horrible by today's standards, but we appreciate the gesture.  Law, the bedrock of society, were now fixed, unwavering, onto giant stone columns.  In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic mindset, prophets are the Lawbringers, bringing order straight from its source, God.  Human interpetation of these laws, especially in Christianity, is not a good thing.  Catholics allow their bishops and popes to be divinely inspired and say what God really meant, while the more fundamentalist types insist that they are "just letting the Bible interpret itself."  Islam explicity says that the Koran is not to be translated into other languages, which would obscure God's own speech.

Discordianism goes the opposite direction.  Order is nothing more than pockets of chaos that our pareidological minds can spin into something that makes sense to us.  Earth is an asylum being run by the lunatics, who insist on constructing convoluted social rules for themselves to follow.  Society doesn't need a bedrock; either way, underneath that last turtle is chaos.  What Discordianism seeks to cure, then, is the notion that life is meant to be taken seriously, that rules are there to be followed, that society should be upheld for the good of society.  Life simply is, make of it what you will.  Rules are a social fiction, existing only in the minds of those who keep them.  Society is nothing more then an endless parade of painted animals, walking upright only because two feet good, four feet bad, dressed in clothes and living a grotesque affectation of how they think men ought to act.  Among them, only the Joker isn't wearing makeup, isn't pretending, and he's ahead of the curve.

My current job is a customer insurance rep for Walgreens.  We will be fielding calls about one of AARPs (the US Association for Really Old People) benefit programs, since AARP switched benefits providers from United Healthcare to Walgreens Health Initiatives.  So 4.3 million old people are going to get a letter saying 'STUFF IS CHANGING!  You might have to get your medicines somewhere else at a different price!  Call here if you're confused, frightened, or annoyed!'

We start taking calls on July 7th.  But almost no mailings will be out then, so the only calls people are expecting then are test calls from AARP reps (to make sure Walgreens is being polite to its members) or Walgreens staff (to make sure we're doing our job well.)  Our trainer has personally promised that she would call each and every one of us over the first couple days to make sure we are doing it right, even masking her phone number or getting a man to do the talking for her so we won't recognize her.

What this means is that if someone else were to call, they could probably pass themselves off as senior Walgreens management or our trainer pretty easily, as that's who the reps would be expecting anyway.  If anyone can think of a creative way to abuse this situation let me know, and I can show you a copy of the mailings.

   Elitism.  It's a dirty word, and it should be.  I don't like it – looking down on someone just doesn't seem right somehow.  It's one thing to say that I am better at a given task than you, or more skilled.  But for me to look at you and say, I am more enlightened than you, sheep, well that's wrong.  It's arrogant, and very often the person has perfectly reasonable reasons for doing what he does – as he has different experiences on which to build his worldview it makes sense that his worldview might be different from mine.  What appears to be simple incompetence might turn out to be mishearing or misinterpreting ambiguous directions, or someone highly skilled in one area (say, math) having to do something he simply has no talent or experience for (say, teaching math.)  Never attribute to malice  that which can be explained by stupidity, and never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by reasonableness in unreasonable circumstances.

   It's easy to think that you have all the answers (or better yet, that there are no answers, and knowing this is the real answer) and patronize those who haven't figured it out yet.  And then what happens is you meet someone who is nearly exactly like how you were so many years ago, when you thought you had your head on straight at the time – and realize that that you were a Grade A Cosmic Schmuck back then without realizing it.  The next logical thought is: if I thought I was so on top of it then, when I really wasn't, and I think I'm on top of it now, can I trust my judgment?  And meanwhile the current schmuck is sitting there, being ignorant all over that cup of joe, daring you to judge him.

   Here's the tricky part: it's impossible not to judge him.  He's an ass.  You don't want to look down on him but you can't help it because he's debased himself so much that any other perspective is impossible.  Surely there must be some circumstance that justify the seeming stinking morass of alleged humanity at the next desk.  But then you learn more about the person, and there isn't.  The reason that the twenty year old girl is a single mother of three working a temp job isn't that she misjudged the character of a man, thinking he would stay beside her, but that she never expected any of her men to stick with her very long, and there were certainly a lot more than three; she's in the temp job because she never put any effort into education, and she'll soon lose the temp job because she isn't putting any effort into this one either.  The kid who throws trash in a theater, not leaving it accidentally, fully knowing that somebody else will just have to clean it up and replies "because I'm a gangsta, yo" when you ask him why.  The manager who insists that you be on time, never as late as a minute to work or from breaks, and never check your cellphone to see if it might be the daycare calling to let you know that your son has just been hospitalized – and then is never prepared for work herself, making you wait hours sitting in a dark cubicle while she figures out whatever it was she was going to train you on today.  The man who writes a letter to the editor congratulating network teevee on casting swarthy actors as terrorists in the latest drama, saying they have courage to "show terrorists who look like real terrorists."  The adults who have nominally gone through the college system but still figure that you must be some kind of an incredible genius because you used advanced phrases like "cause and effect" in an explanation.

   I try to assume the best of people, to give them the benefit of the doubt.  It's a map, a necessarily flawed one: some people really are that poor in every virtue.  And it seems to fit less and less.  People meager in character aren't obscure minorities – people who can only be described as trash exist and they exist in large numbers.  When I was younger, I stayed separate from other social circles and told myself that I was somehow better than those I observed from the sidelines.  I eventually realized that that was a pleasant lie to tell myself; people were just different, and I was only trying to shore up my self-esteem with false superiority.  This was only half true.  The real truth is far worse: the dirty unkempt horde, the lowest common denominator, is real, devoid of anything worthy of respect, stampeding around inside the boundaries it creates for itself, a headless creation driven equally by the allure of comfortable complacency and the fear of change and the unknown.  And among that horde is a dirty elitist, not by choice but of necessity, judging every appendage of that brutal mob and finding it lacking.  He tries to think that they're all good inside, because in that way he might be saved.  Different upbringing, different background, different perceptions, different maps – but deep down he knows that for some things there is no excuse.  Sometimes, he posts on the internet.