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Once more around the dance floor?

 Tom Standage puts some perspective on The Culture War (via Boing Boing). A quick sample of the quotes:

1790: "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth;"

1816: "The indecent foreign dance called the Waltz"... "forced on the respectable classes of society by the evil example of their superiors, we feel it a duty to warn every parent against exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion."

1909: "but GOD alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives begun at the 'moving pictures.' "

1926: "Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy?"

1954: "All child drug addicts, and all children drawn into the narcotics traffic as messengers, with whom we have had contact, were inveterate comic-book readers"

1956: "The effect of rock and roll on young people, is to turn them into devil worshippers;"

2005: "The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children"

Coulter's Only Faithful Fan

Read about Ann Coulter's new book.

O Ann, I am your only faithful fan.
Conservatives may buy your books, but they
Don't see your ploy, your pocket-lining plan

To market pseudoscience to your prey
By tugging on their xenophobic fears.
I love the way you gather what they say,

Then sell it, packaged—all they want to hear.
But Ann, my love, the thing that stokes my lust
Is seeing you, so confident, sincere,

Presenting crap, but getting them to trust
Like babies. Through your ballsy lies I can
Adore the noxious dreck that should disgust.

Naively, they respect you as a man;
O Ann, I am your only faithful fan.

(Crossposted from PhaWRONGula)

Blowing up slabs of meat

On 3 Quarks Daily (quoting The New York Times) I see that Finland is entering a metal band in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

I don't know what to think. Does this make Eurovision better, by cutting a slash into its saccharine blancmange? Does it take away the one redeeming feature of Eurovision, its unapologetic bouncy campness? Or does Lordi fit right in, another I-can't-believe-it's-not-plastic fabrication? 

I expect that it will do little to change the image of Eurovision, but it does help to reposition Finland. For some reason, this quote made me smile: "Lordi represents a rebellion by Finns who are saying, 'Hey we are not all the Nokia-wielding people the government would like you to think we are.' "

The Future

Do you fear the rise of the machines?

For decades writers have been predicting the subjugation of humans to robots, or to a super AI. The created slave becomes the master. We lose our freedom, our enjoyment of life. Would I be stretching the bounds of credibility if I suggested that the robot revolution is already proceeding as predicted? I had to ring up a bank today.

Evil upon evil upon evil. First, take a run-of-the-mill pop-love-twee-gush-song from the '80s. Next, create an emotionless cover of that song with extra dollops of soporific. Then shred it through a band-mangled tweeterless wooferless telephone audio system, and then butcher it into four and a half bar chunks between adverts for bank services, canned messages to acknowledge that you're still on a queue, regular reassurances that your call is important, and messages to suggest that you dial 1 to try a customer self-serve abomination to avoid the further embarrassment of this phone queue. Admit it, loser: if you hang around waiting for a real human to talk to, you're a frightened luddite, unfit to enjoy the sparkling future of automated banking services.

Why did I have to subject myself to such debasement at the "hands" of a machine? I could have hung up at any time. I could have wandered away from the phone and left it off the hook in a symbolic gesture of defiance. But, I needed information. They had something I wanted. The machines have inserted themselves between providers and consumers. They've found that perfect leverage point. Drive your wedge between vendor and customer and you can control the world. The rise has begun.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

For destruction Frost is also great

What if, instead of teacher, farmer and botanist, Robert Lee Frost had been a software geek?

I have been one acquainted with the code.
I have debugged, with sources and without.
I have recursed and watched my stack explode.

I have outsourced through times of talent drought.
I have despaired when projects overrun
On schedules pert with hope and gant of doubt.

I have denied the pigment of the sun
And bested night on caffeine pulse and will.
This exponential journey I've begun

(As kiddies swarm, precoc'd with leeter skill,
Uncultured by the baggage that has slowed
My uptake rate) may seem quixotic. Still,

I come with nerdy aptitude bestowed;
I have been one acquainted with the code.

Software Geek Haiku

Last day before freeze;
Feel the fragility of
Unguided design.

This should have been written a couple of days ago. Now that the software in question is frozen there's time to stop and rant at the unbelievably inept interface design that caused last minute defects.

Freethinking

How to know when your religion is a fabrication:

  • When your omnipotent deity, for some reason, relies heavily on fallible human followers to perform physical actions.
  • When the natural events that you attribute to your deity affect believers and unbelievers alike without discernable favour.
  • When you know it must be true because of all those other intelligent people who believe it.
  • When you interpret people's dismissive reaction to it as being proof that you're onto something.
  • When the only way you can understand modern science is to assume all scientists are conspiring against your deity.
  • When the only way you can understand other religions is to assume that a malevolent entity is blinding or influencing their followers.
  • When the only place you need to look to improve your understanding is within your religion's published literature.
  • When you know that scholars who share your religion are inherently more trustworthy than other scholars.
  • When you think that a few provably true statements in its teachings validate the rest.
  • When your unchanging deity, on record as having demanded complete slaughter of an unbelieving tribe (including babies) is your definition of love, mercy, and justice.
  • When the other religions are based on stuff made up by people, but yours is based on divinely inspired teaching delivered through divinely selected prophets.
  • When there are definitely no inconsistencies in it, but it does have difficult issues that are beyond mere human understanding.
  • When you know that its teachings were misapplied in the past with horrible consequences, but believe that your current interpretations and their social implications are correct.
  • When figures claiming to speak for your religion express foolish and intolerant views, but you won't publicly denounce them for fear of either (a) presenting a divided view, or (b) being seen as having less faith or piety.
  • When it teaches you to ascribe all happy experiences to your deity, and all unhappy experiences to other sources.
  • When any good you do is merely an expression of your deity's goodness, but any evil you do is of your own sinful nature.
  • When speaking against it would break your relationship with your parents.
  • When it tries to make you happy about a loved one's death.

If any of the above signs are evident in your religion, seek advice from a freethinker.

Must gouge out eyes now...

I just saw the first episode of the new Dr Who (New Earth). It was pathetic, shallow, filled with plot holes, inconsistencies, and glaringly stupid "science". It didn't let me suspend disbelief with fun science fiction. It kept hammering impossibilities at me without any covering pretense of futuristic technology. There was so much in that episode that fell so far short of the standard set in the previous season that I'm guessing that whole episode will turn out to be a dream, a fantasy going on in Rose's head. If not, then the BBC must've made an executive decision to target the 6-9 year old market.

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