The Damnable Scrumpers.

The Intelligence Squared debate on Catholicism has made it onto YouTube (viewable here). I'd read about it, and the devastating turn from moderate negativity or indifference about the Roman version of the Christ mythos, to an overwhelming, humiliating vote against the church's "positive" influence.

The ongoing evils, such as the lies they tell Africans about condoms spreading AIDS, are doctrinal, and will never end. The sin of Onan, wasting "seed" in a prophylactic is considered a greater loss than the millions of deaths the spread of AIDS has caused. It's the same thinking that causes objections to life-saving treatments we could get from stem cell research. By the logic that drives these objections, a woman should hold a funeral every 28 days for a child that will never be, and the act of masturbating should be followed by a trial for mass murder. Those who call themselves "holy" in the RC tradition value spermatozoa and embryos more than living people.

I'll confess to feeling no small amount of glee when religion receives a nut-punch. It feeds on and encourages ignorance, and devalues this life by promising a much better one once you're putrifying in the dirt. It has a long established tradition of thuggishly subduing any knowledge and learning which contradicts, and highlights the contradictions in, holy texts. It is also a wilful partner in intolerance and sectarianism, both feeding, and feeding on base and malign instincts. Claiming to be the source of human morality, yet fuelling some of the most immoral, inhuman acts in history.

I've never believed in God, but only when I first stumbled upon a Creationist debate online, 8 or 9 years ago, did I give it any real thought. It wasn't something I felt any need to discuss, or even consider; but the inherent preposterousness of the argument from Creation genuinely shocked me. Every science contradicts the Young Earth view, geology, palaeontology, archaeology, biology, astronomy, astro-physics, genetics, carbon dating the list goes on. Each one devastates the notion of a young Earth.

Biblical literalists lump all sciences in with Evolution; anything which contradicts the notion of a young Earth created in 6 days, because the monkey idea gives them an unpopular hook they can use to try to drag down the entire scientific edifice. Darwin's dangerous idea did not involve the Big Bang, the red-shift, accretion discs, geological strata or any of the other things that offer indisputable proof of the ancient nature of the Universe and this world.

Darwin's notion was so simple it's a wonder it took so long for it to be recognised, and it is so easy to grasp that it is an act of pure willful ignorance to deny its reality. Mutations and variations in the genetic lottery which we can observe constantly within single families in a single generation; and the propagation of advantageous and neutral mutations and the decline of detrimental ones through natural selection. Both parts of the evolutionary process are observable, logical and undeniable.

Darwin's work has been subjected to hostile public reaction, hostile press coverage, hostile peer review and hostile court proceedings and stood unwithered by the most excoriating invective the forces of ignorance could fling at it. It has withstood every test thrown at it for 150 years, under the sort of scrutiny which leaves biblical "truth" lying in tatters.

Under fierce debate it always emerges that objections to Darwin are not actually based on scriptural adherence. The real difficulty with evolution boils down to vanity. Given the choice of being made in the image of God, or being a bald monkey, you can see that evolution knocks the glamour off the human condition a little. Personally, given a choice of being a clever monkey who can make his life what he chooses, or a guilt-ridden wretch who must constantly atone for the sins of a man and woman who ate a fucking apple, I'll choose the banana. Having the same face as God seems like a shitty trade-off for condemning humanity to an eternity of guilt because thousands of years ago a couple of naturists went scrumping.

Like the infantile objections to the fact of our simian ancestors, when reality and rationality has torn away all of religion's nebulous obfuscations, vacuous vagaries and smug sophistry, the final, last-gasp appeals routinely fall on what would be taken away if God weren't there. Hope for the underprivileged and downtrodden, the comfort of a guiding spirit and the hope of an eternal, post-mortem reward for a life of self denial. The infantilism of these appeals reveals itself by virtue of the fact it's impossible to make them without sounding exactly like someone explaining why you shouldn't tell a child there's no Santa Claus.

Removing the invisible, magic spaceman from the equation will make people less inclined to settle for a crappy lot in life, to take responsibility for their own fate and actions, and commit to making this, the only life we will ever have, worth living.

BUT

Funny word, "but". Not as funny as "butt". Heh, "butt".

It's a handy word to insert just before you completely contradict a view you just espoused. Sandwich it between a popular notion and an unpopular one and you can delude yourself you're softening the blow.

Two cases in point, one famous; one not as famous.

"I'm not a racist, but..."
"I believe in freedom of speech, but..."

It's common knowledge what the first one means. It means "I'm a racist". Maybe not a burning-cross-in-the-garden string-'em-from-a-tree racist, maybe not even the sort who sends everyone in his phonebook "harmless" racist jokes. Just someone who quietly simmers with impotent envy when a they see a nice looking blonde girl with a big black guy, or when they see an asian in a much nicer car than they themselves can afford. The quintessence of the casual racist. It's not a way of life, just something to do in an idle moment when they think nobody's looking. Like panty sniffing.

The second is more insidious. We can all think of things we're "not supposed to say", and without much of a stretch we can probably all think of things we'd rather never hear. The principle seems easy to erode on a case by case basis, because freedom of speech sounds like one of those nice principles you can bend or ignore when it doesn't suit you. "I believe in freedom of speech, but holocaust deniers shouldn't be allowed to air their views" has a strong veneer of properness to it that "I'm not a racist, coons and jews are fine, I just fucking hate pakis!" isn't ever going to be able to match.

It must be understood that "I believe in freedom of speech, but..." is every inch a confession of the exact opposite as the claims of casual racists to be nothing of the kind. It shows a woeful ignorance of the principal of free speech, that that which is spoken openly can be challenged openly. More importantly, those who believe you can pick and choose free-speech are directly to blame for the rise of the open racism which is now common.

Linguistic interventionists have been compromising freedom of speech gradually and consistently for a couple of decades, at least. In doing so they provide weapons to anyone who needs uncomfortable truths in which to swaddle insidious lies.

Criticizing factual crime statistics that show certain ethnic groups are more likely to commit crimes. Calling anyone who objected the the brazen political irresponsibility of unchecked immigration a racist. Branding anyone who objects to the undemocratic, cronyistic upper-echelons of the European Union a "little Englander". Every time legitimate discourse is branded as bigotry people become fearful of speaking their minds.

Only those who are already castigated and ostracised can say these things, because they have nothing left to lose. When Nick Griffin is armed with truths that everybody knows, but mainstream politicians dare not speak, he has the perfect sheep's clothing in which to gain mainstream appeal and credibility.

Those who are most shrill in their protests at the rising success of the BNP are the ones who are to blame, and their attempts to stop Nick Griffin's pathetic bigotry and squirming distaste at being confronted with his past from being exposed to public view this week, shows that they have learned nothing.

In the short term, his appearance on Question Time should sober the opinions of a few on the wisdom of sending their protest votes his way. In the longer term, unless people are given back true freedom of speech, including the freedom to offend openly and therefore be challenged openly; unless those in the mainstream are brave enough to speak uncomfortable truths without resorting to ugly Daily Mail bombast; and conversely, unless the shrill Guardianista class learn the ultimate danger in suppressing mature debate with cheap political opportunism, this is a problem that will only get worse.

4 minutes for Fox News to say "Fascist", a record?

I had a looksie at Professor Richard Dawkins being interviewed on the O'Reilly Factor, and to be fair to Bill, he was actually letting Richard occasionally speak this time, whereas on his last appearance he may as well have been tied to the chair with his mouth duct-taped shut. Maybe not being in the studio helped. Anyway, Richard had the wild idea that sticking "God did it" in science lessons anytime science hasn't found the answer yet, was maybe not a great idea. Here's the vid...



I thought I'd send Bill an email, he likes that kind of thing.

Hey Bill,

I watched your interview with Professor Richard Dawkins and am hugely disappointed that it took so little time for you to have to resort of the grubby tactic of a shouted accusation that he is a fascist. This for his simple proposition that science classes should only teach evidence based science. Such a reactionary and simplistic verbal assault is a pitiful level of discourse. Ad-hominem attack is no substitute for a reasonable cut & thrust of debate. Frankly, it's debate at the level of the village idiot, and the ugly outburst showed how swiftly you had run out of intellect, and sabotaged any of the prior points you had to make.

regards,
C.A. Hughes.

Although Bill has a lot of obnoxious views, if you look you can generally see there is a chain of thought that led to them. I wonder what he doesn't get about the idea that if you shove God in a gap in scientific knowledge, then there is no reason to explore that gap scientifically. The entire problem with the notion of "Creation Science" is that it is an anti-science; science seeks to answer questions by investigation, creation "science" tells you not to look, because the answer is ALWAYS "God did it", and that is ALWAYS supposed to be enough.

If it was enough, we'd still believe the Sun orbited the Earth, people wouldn't understand why the first anti-biotics didn't work anymore and go back to dying from simple infections, the mentally ill would still be treated with exorcisms. The list goes on. Whatever you believe, "God did it" is simply replacing one mystery with another, it precludes investigation rather than advancing it, it will never be a good enough answer in the quest to understand the world, the universe, or the workings of our own bodies.

Scunthorpe.

Scunthorpe dwellers have a hard time saying where they live in some places on the internet, automated anti-swearbots are constantly scouring the webtubes looking for textual sexual naughties, and the name "Scunthorpe" contains the naughtiest of naughties.

Automated censorship is becoming an increasing problem, as evidenced by this iTunes listing Peter Serafinowicz posted on Twitpic this morning, for the nursery rhyme "Cock a Doodle Doo". Or, as infants are all familiar with obscene genital slang and must be protected from the correct name for a male chicken "C**k a Doodle Doo". (I note they don't mind the "Dick" in Hickory Dickory Dock)



It's kind of funny, but also, kind of not. Censorship needs measured judgement and oversight. Automating it, and letting it loose on the world at large with a quite obvious lack of "common" sense in the equation really just winds up pissing on a lot of people's strawberries for no good reason. It's not just words with 2 meanings either; I've encountered forums and games where you can't type the word "happened", because it contains the letter sequence "pene", which is spanish for penis.

If this isn't stupid enough, the egregious, racist, homophobic, invective fuelled and profane filth bucket, where socially inadequate teens can give vent to their ugliest instincts, XBox Live, has given rise to a "much too late to the party" effort on the part of Microsoft to police the in-game-chat of their system. Their response to the abuse has been directly proportional to the rank horrors of adolescent bile, which means it's been equally ridiculous.

Last month they proudly spoke of their hard-working censorship team. Desperate to be seen to doing something after years of neglect, which have led to a Lord of the Flies style ecosystem, they not only censor actual swear words, racial and religious epithets, references to sexual activity and gender orientation (somewhat famously blocking the account of my old alt.digitiser pal Richard "Gay"wood purely because of his name), these days they actually ban phrases which contain no swear words, but which have been given second, sexual meanings. They ban made up words used to substitute for swear words, like BSG's fuck-tastic "Frak!" (presumably the game called "Frak" won't ever be appearing on XBLA either)

If it was just things like "blowjob", a well-known portmanteau word, of which neither of the constituent words is obscene you could understand, but just how many people do they think know what a "Cleveland Steamer" is? Anyone who knows would probably be too busy laughing to care, and those who don't would be none the wiser. They are actually proud that they trawl the internet all day looking for phrases which "could" have a sexual meaning. Proud of their dictionary of thousands of things that people aren't allowed to say.

I've been on the internet for over a decade, and right back at the very start I discovered that there was next to nothing you could type into a search engine without getting a porno result for it (pre-Google, the internet assumed you ALWAYS wanted porn). When my lawnmower broke down and I was looking for a new one, a prodigious number of the results presented to me were for photos and websites dedicated to women attending to their pubic coiffure. This was just the tip of the iceberg (which is probably an innuendo to somebody too).

At an estimate I would measure the language offers a lexicon where anything up to 85% of the words could be used in a smutty double entendre (made up statistic). Anything shaft like can be invoked in a penile metaphor; anything featuring a cavity or slot can be a vaginal counterpart; anything hairy, fuzzy, downy, grassy, thatched, wiry or curly can be a surrogate for pubic hair; and anything involving a liquid can double for semen, ideally alliteratively, "man milk", "baby batter" "Lady lube" etc.

Essentially, this special Forbidden Dictionary of anything that might construed in a sexual context will probably soon preclude any communication whatsoever, except platonic comments about amorphous objects with no long protrusions or cavities. I believe this is actually all policed manually, for now, but it still a fucking stupid policy. Policing the spawning of new double entendres is as useful an activity as trying to strike matches on mashed potato.

With so much of the internet now being social media, user generated rather than delivered by content providers, policing the vast volume of amateur sourced material driving the web economy would be impossible to achieve manually, so we may all fall increasingly prey to this automated censorship. Maybe it will clean up some potty mouths, or maybe it'll just make people more creative. People are very, very creative.

As it stands, Facebook and Twitter, don't censor updates. People with friends ranging from 13 (like they can enforce that age-limit) to geriatrics, all have equal access to any filth you feel like updating with via their FB newsfeed Equally you can say pretty much anything you like in tweets. That's now.

Twitter recently decided to prevent the #quantickstesticles hashtag from trending, presumably because it featured the word "testicles" which is a non-profane anatomical term. I suspect this manually censored, rather than automatically, as it had been trending strongly for a while before it, and the tweets using it vanished from the search string. Whether Twitter did this at someone's request, or whether they did it pre-emptively is not clear.

On Facebook I've seen elderly relatives complaining strongly about about friends swearing on their young relatives walls, internet worlds and real worlds are colliding. The pressure to censor at source is likely to grow as networks spread across generational divides.

Maybe the internet was unfettered for too long? There's no real way to say how old someone is online, so protecting young ears and eyes from the foul language it's been awash with for so long seems like a beneficial endeavour on the surface of things. Fact is though, I knew more swear words, sexual euphamisms and lewd innuendos than my parents did by the time I was 8 years old. Kids swear, and they like it. They are voracious for things their parents wouldn't approve of and don't understand, and they have so much energy and imagination that censorship will never keep up, let alone outrun them.

Incidentally, I had chicken for dinner, but would refute claims I was gobbling cock. I'm a hypocrite!

lbd

Well, I've started a new book, unfortunately my hate of the second draft process is making the attempt to get a first draft close to final draft quality is making for slow progress. Trying to address tone and choose flowing prose while keeping unnecessary exposition and inelegant descriptive shit to a minimum while still getting across the feel I want for the story, it's so slow.

The screen of my Powerbook is utterly phuqqed, so I'm working exclusively on my shiny Samsung NC10, with the main advantages being that I don't need to keep an eye on the battery life, and the LED screen is bright enough to use easily outside, which is a big bonus over the PB, which was almost impossible to see outdoors on any but the dullest day (when you don't really want to be outdoors)

I also now have a "Delete" key. What the hell were Apple thinking not having a delete key on what became the writers' machine of choice? I'm quickly breaking the habit of having to take care where I put the cursor because of "Backspace only" restrictions. My main problem is being back in Windows. XP is a mature and well rounded environment now, but there are still the nags of working with Windows after the freedom and speed of a Mac. All the little things it keeps doing, like an idiot who is so desperate to be helpful that they just keep getting in your way and making life harder. It's like trying to work with somebody standing in front of you, waiting for you to ask them to help, when you don't need any damned help.

I've bypassed most of this by stuffing it with high quality, non-Microsoft made freeware. After years of using Word, I've found Open Office to be very accessible, and fairly similar in terms of keyboard shortcuts and such.

I had to use IE at first, until I'd got Firefox installed. I can't believe Explorer still doesn't have tabbed browsing? maybe I missed something, but I found no way to do it, and it's not something you should hide. Who the phuqq still wants to open every damned link in a new window? That's the only reason I can figure that some sites still thrust this target="_blank" shit on you, this very blog hoster among them. The only other reason for forcing people to open a new window is if you're desperate they shouldn't navigate away from your site. If your site is any good, they'll come back, quit the new window shit you annoying bastards. Tabbed browsing has been around for bloody years now, I don't want 2 dozen windows shat all over my screen.

Anyway. My friend Kellie, aka "tiny_little_me" back from the dj days left a 4 page suicide note about a month ago, and hasn't been seen since. Her car has been found, but no trace of her has. She was really smart and funny, and had a great heart. The world seems to lose so many of the sort of people it could use more of. Hateful shitwads seem to live almost forever. I don't get worked up about these things though. The last year or more has left me kind of numb to a lot of things.

Tomorrow will be Day 4 of the new book, hopefully I'll pick up some speed as my mind gets back in the habit of writing. I'm not even managing a thousand words a day, which is really the minimum I expect of myself, but my mind feels clumsy right now, so if I were working at that pace I'd just have 3,000 words I mostly hate, rather than the beginnings of something small that feels right all the way through. Oh, one other thing, I can feel the Ctrl+S twitch coming back. I never feel safe in Windows, I've lost too much work to it's flakiness before. Ctrl+S is my safety net.

The internet is shit at being an archive.

I have no special intent behind this post, I've trod that ground before. Here's something that was very popular when I first got started internets.

They were simpler times.

This walking on water shit is easy.

Volcano base is go!

Tristan da Cunha sits 2,816 kilometers from the coast of South Africa, and 2,430 kilometers from its closest neighbor, the island of St. Helena, where the Emperor Napoleon lived out his final days in exile. The main island of Tristan da Cunha does have a small permanent population: roughly 270 people living mostly in the capital city of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.

Now that's the sort of place you could get up to nefarious shit. Build Death Rays, or a Tsunami machine, make a clone army from the DNA of Joe Pasquale, play the stereo really loud. Mortgage rates are 2% now, there's never been a better time to buy.

I need to draft a want-ad for some henchmen.

Hoff is the new Shat.

It occurred to me today that David Hasselhoff is the new William Shatner.

They both starred in once highly popular, high budget shows, that are now considered the pinnacle of cheesiness. They have both had comical music careers, The Shat with his laconic chatty style, utterly unburdened by bothersome musicality; The Hoff with his Cheese-Rock, so beloved of Germans, Austrians and other Arian nations.

They both suffered from career lag and credibility dive in middle age, and they both have made new careers of taking the piss out of their old careers. Fake self-deprecation that leaves vast egos undented, and self-reinvention as caricatures of themselves seems to be a successful formula.

If Baywatch was Hoff's T.J. Hooker, now all he needs is his own Boston Legal.