Every Man a Monk

In the spirit of Tom Clancy (he stayed around for the internet comments, he just doesn't have much impact anymore), I would like to reference the concept of Every Man a Tiger.

Having not read the book, I will nonetheless assume it means something along the lines of "every soldier should be able to be intensely aggressive on command" and then ignore the idea but I just wanted the line for other purposes.

That purpose is to discuss the notion of how wisdom has changed. No, not the "biological explanations invalidate moral ideas" kind of change. The notion of what behavior was actually considered especially wise in the past is now very common.

Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

attributed to Alfonso the Wise, 13th century

Such ideas are absurd if you assume the creator actually knew what it was doing (H.P. Lovecraft would disagree) but his interest in ideas and knowledge was a unusual in a bureaucracy more noted for physical warfare than administration or reflection.

Times have changed and now we live in the information age, ideas are the basis of survival, not just force, and people are trained to take risk into account in ways that even ancients could not (see wikipedia). Most importantly, centuries of cultural evolution have selected a series of analogies and examined the implications of ideas such that we are able to quickly convey the needed attitudes in ways that ancients had to live out for other people to really understand them.

If a parent can use a movie reference to convey the needed idea for the needed attitude (wisdom?), then can we suppose that ordinary people today have the exposure to ideas that made a monk in the past be considered wise? Does the same apply to self control?

Why can't we get other ads like this?

As I cope with stress in life and the aftershocks of humans being chaotic and selfish, I periodically listen to Scientology ads.
"Oh NO! You are drifting into that cult?"

No. I'm not. The combination of visually complex images with outstanding production qualities. The depiction of a comfortable, clean, and orderly world is something I yearn for despite never having been a real inhabitant of such a world. The integration of the uplifting music is incredible and is doubly so because uplifting music is so rare. Even the Scientology jargon is spoken in a calm and caring tone.

Does that bring me closer to Scientology? No. One of the side-effects of having studied political propaganda is that I am aware that the images of calm and order in many movements are a facade and that is especially true in Scientology (according to the accounts of several former members).

More on #GamerGate

It is interesting that the controversy over an all too protected group of incompetents trying to maintain their social position through accusations of bigotry (rule by guilt) in the extremely connected online world of gaming happened a bit before similar concerns have been echoed with Lena Dunham and some unrelated false rape accusations at UVA. As we have learned from #GamerGate, the hatreds and distrust between social tribes has been unleashed.

Perhaps, by being young, internet savvy, and motivated, the gaming community reacted to the simultaneous rise of the guilt class faster than those who were less internet active.

That said, evolution is fast in the Internet and the risks are forming untoward alliances worry me.

I grow sad as the once powerful and sincere movement has become deeply divided and has lost the focus. Perhaps there is good that will come out of a makeshift group of watchdogs begging for money and attention. As unpleasant as class conflict is, the guilt class and the indignation class might battle it out and leave the space where real freedom and survive (like the aristocrats and people in Rome). Perhaps that is excessive optimism, perhaps it will just turn into a bitter bout of rival factions insulting each other and not allowing cross fertilization of ideas.

Either way, there needs to be some actual game reporting going on.




I would like to point out that another gaming commentator whom I respect greatly (Mundane Matt) has his own response.


I am obviously more sympathetic to Mundane Matt. Not because of any animal spirit of "stay in the fight!" but because he points out that the commercial concerns of the people who dedicate a huge amount of time in creating an alternative gaming media are legitimate.

I have to say Matt makes some really credible points. Matt retains perspective and Matt is the one who has touched upon the informational nature of the struggle, not the militancy and aggressiveness of Internet Aristocrat's desires.

At last, having to read the Iliad in college is paying off because now I get to compare Internet Aristocrat to Achilles.

Too Late on #GamerGate

It has become much, much later and it is unclear what the outcome of #GamerGate has been with Internet Aristocrat leaving as have a few other major participants.

It seems that as the major gaming media groups have had to overtly or covertly reform, the seriousness and focus by #GamerGate has fallen off. With the lack of seriousness, some nastier urges have been left unsupervised and driven out some very good people.

Questions of profiting off the traffic gained by being a major source of news on #GamerGate are legitimate insofar as one has concerns that the content is skewed to attract more spurious views. Having seen the fuss over the cancellation of the game Hatred, I am increasingly concerned that the negative reaction to a class of untalented thugs gaining power by using passive-aggressive accusations to puff each other up and protect themselves from the irritation of the gaming public.

While such bad behavior is to some extent inevitable in any protest movement that relies on very diverse but dedicated people who still have bills to pay, it did seem to drive one of the most brilliant commentators on the Zoe Quinn saga away.

If there is a lesson in this, it is that keeping a clear focus on what the enemy is and not getting so angry any enemy of the deservedly scorned.

Am I a bigot?

While perhaps unwise, at least part of why I started this blog was as a mild form of self-reflection. It is now that the need for such reflection becomes more acute. Yesterday, I was accused of wanting to create a master race because I wrote a comment pointing out the different assumptions between US Social Conservatives and the movement for Gay Marriage. It should be obvious that I never mentioned eugenics and even specifically was asked if I believed in interracial marriage (I do).

One part of my mind says the other person was just making an unfounded accusation because they couldn't contest the points made. There is still a large part of me that is reeling from the accusation, that is scanning my own thoughts for violations, that is trying to understand how such an accusation could be substantiated, and dreading interacting with the world.

 Perhaps even more unwise (if I am to work in a field demanding the special trust of the people), I will mention that I have been mildly depressed recently and that the accusation has made me very depressed and agitated. I normally despise the taste of alcohol (not that I dislike those who drink it, my taste buds are very active). I have been quietly trying to drink a bottle of Jagermeister over the course of the past few hours (slowly since I still hate the taste).

In the search for answers, I have looked up many people addressing the criteria for being considered a bigot. While I only list this post, the attitude seems pretty common.

For all practical purposes (and for such concerns, what else matters?) it is not beliefs that make a bigot. It's actions.

If you vote against gay marriage or gay rights, you are a bigot, as surely as anyone who voted against civil rights in the '60s was a bigot. If you preach against gay rights, you are a bigot. If you write against gay rights, you are a bigot. If you give your money or time to any Christian church or ministry that you know actively works to restrict or limit gay rights in any way, you are a bigot. If, in private, you intimate to your dearest friend that you don't think gay people should be allowed to get married, you are a bigot.

Since I view Gay Marriage as a policy question entailing the myriad concerns of policy changes, this is a standard I meet very quickly. Since modern society prizes tolerance and considers bigots to be contemptible and subject to efforts to exclude them from normal civic participation, the stakes are high.

High enough that the fact an accusation was made makes me feel very insecure in this society. How can I, a policy geek who has plenty of examples from history to draw upon and plenty of pessimism about radical changes, meet the standards for participation in society?

I can't.

That raises the question. What is to happen to one who cannot meet the standards of society?

Emigration?
I have only one other citizenship and I don't even speak the language. Plus, what use is a History Major in a country drowning in history?

Grow a thicker skin?
Easier said than done. Especially as penalties for ostracism increasingly involve governmental or quasi-governmental sanction. Periodically, people make proposals to adopt the Canadian model of Human Rights Commissions (most famous for prosecuting Ezra Levant and for having an unclear legal status). Social ostracism is bad enough when a bar tender tells you (the patron) that you are a terrible person from overhearing a conversation.

Protests?
I don't have the emotional energy to fight. I don't have the unquestioning certainty to keep on doing so.

Suicide?
Again, unwise to mention but it is a thought I am considering and the value of the "writing as therapy" partially involves actually addressing it with the discipline of words.

While commonly described as "a permanent solution to a temporary problem", it is far more socially acceptable than bigotry. While I am used to the idea of suicide as desertion from the struggle to make life better. I see far more ambiguity when it comes to public shame to induce a suicide (to avoid the messiness of formal sanctions). Drastic?

So is the accusation.

I have to ask, is the alcohol affecting my judgement and should my consideration of so drastic a recourse be done in an impaired state?

When is one not in an impaired state? Sleep deprivation, grief, stress, hunger, and more all impact us virtually the whole of a normal day. Is a little terror, alcohol, and sleep deprivation such a change?

A key question, does a bigot deserve to live? Since no tears are shed for the likes of Governor Wallace or Mussolini, I will take the answer as no. Should I take the accusation of a person on the internet seriously? Probably no but the effect is still there. By a quirk of life, I do not have the social experience to determine if my actions are abnormally unacceptable or not. The doubt is still there and will likely stay there for the rest of my life (however long it is).

What DnD character am I?

I Am A: Lawful Neutral Human Wizard (4th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-18
Dexterity-11
Constitution-14
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-18
Charisma-12

Alignment:
Lawful Neutral A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs him. Order and organization are paramount to him. He may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or he may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government. Lawful neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you are reliable and honorable without being a zealot. However, lawful neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and diversity in society.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

An effort to understand Liberal views on education

Something I have encountered is that assertion that Liberals believe in an "everybody gets a trophy" culture in education.Also that Liberals are proponents of "student centered classrooms" and supposedly prize a student's ego over the accurate assessment of knowledge.

As I am increasingly skeptical that activists actually understand the policy arguments and that the words used in those arguments accurately convey the substance of the ideas in play, I want to speculate on what those phrases MIGHT mean.

The good news is that military education tends to be a pretty objective environment so drawing comparisons between military educations and then trying to import those issues to civilian life seems reasonable.

This article points out some elements of military education in Arab societies. of special note is:

Education Problems

Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to "sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.
American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes impossible.

Which is of interest given the pressure to find a way to ensure education despite the student's ego and lack of knowledge. If ego is a barrier and negative reactions potentially disastrous, then acting cautiously towards the students egos would seem rational IF IT IS ONLY AS A BARRIER!
Another factor is the heavy reliance on memorization. As a former student in the French educational system, the pressure to memorize a lot of facts became critical to understanding the issues in more reasoning work quickly and easily. As the American students I have seen try to reason without facts, the situation is much of the rest of the world is trying to use facts instead of reasoning. As the intellectual framework for the educational plans fade in memory, the efforts of people to comply are imperfect and people implement policies to achieve the old goal but without the context to assess if the goal is relevant.

I suspect that is true of "critical reasoning" in the US schools. Perhaps in 1930s Arkansas the effort to instill some facts and social obedience did not include the instruction to look things up. Nowdays I find people can google the first page of results but not tell if the claims made are credible.
Assessments of narcissists decades ago noted the lack of any real self-esteem (deep seated feelings of inferiority) and that much of the undesirable behavior was an effort to puff themselves up.
It seems possible that the teaching fad of "self-esteem" was trying to counter that dangerous inclination by improving people's sense of self-worth in those cases. As in the cliche game of telephone, it got mutated into "everybody should be taught this" and "being told you are great is the same thing as actual confidence in your self...right?".

The military tries to achieve a similar goal of getting soldiers to engage in behavior they might ordinarily be too cautious for. The military uses confidence courses and training events to give people the experience of having achieved something tangible in order to build the real self-esteem to avoid negative effects.

The point is that the military uses real sense of accomplishment and trying to build a pattern of trust to overcome the concerns that seem to be reflected by neuroscientists and that civilian teachers may be garbling the process up.

As for the "Student-centered classroom", the military has the concept of "ownership". Since the mission tends to go better when people involved feel some sense of connection to it, the military tries to convince people they "own" whatever their task is. Likewise, the sources of learning are many and generals routinely learn tidbits from junior enlisted. I'm guessing that the idea is to get the students more involved and decision-making in order to get them motivated to learn and that the effort tries to be aware that the students are sources of information too (just that the students are in class for a reason).

That is what I take to be the most plausible goal for "student-centered classrooms". I am guessing that somebodies garbled it yet again and took it to mean the students should direct all aspects, not just that they should be given some discretion to choose what they want to learn as part of a broader set of things to learn about.

Battlefield Earth... The Book of Horrors!

In what is perhaps a nasty bout of masochism, I decided to read Battlefield Earth and contrast it to my re-reading of Ender's Game. While the characterization of Ender's Game suffers somewhat from the notion of intelligence as so clearly heritable and the (thankfully) incorrect notion of intelligent people trying to jockey for position all the time,  it was still a novel that raised several interesting questions about empathy, obligation, and the morality of force.

Since Battlefield Earth (the movie) was so terrible, I have to ask "was the original book so terrible?". I hope to be able to answer that eventually but the first 15 pages make it a chore.

Conclusions on Battlefield Earth

Now comes the unpleasant discussion of the value of the movie itself.

It is unpleasant not simply for the pain of watching the movie twice, but because I have gradually changed my opinion of the movie. It is easy (because of plenty of good reasons) to say the movie is terrible. Certainly, there are terrible elements (like the efforts to mimic the iconic scenes of the past 30 years) but there is more to a movie than the execution.

The story idea has promise and many of the odder plot elements had room for plausible explanations. The effort to characterize the pitiable state of the humans (thus making them look far too stupid to be plausible of taking on and winning against a massive empire) and the Psychlos (which made their "evil" look a lot more like incompetence compounded with stupidity coupled with cretinism.

Many of the things the movies does wrong can be judged more harshly because of the connection to Scientology. Perhaps it is with the perspective the Scientology is in its death throes that I feel far more charitable to the movie. Let us hate the sins of the director, producer, John Travolta, L. Ron Hubbard, and the myriad executives who made the movie even weirder.

Let us also have mercy on Barry Pepper and his fellow actors and on the concept itself. The general outline of the story had promise (Hubbard had some success for a reason) but the execution seems as if Hubbard was someone who never edited his work.

Now excuse me as I regret not having watched the movie drunk. Perhaps it would have needed less charity had I done so.

The Battlefield Earth Review (you've all been dreading) Part 5

The deeply ambiguous pleasure of watching Battlefield Earth continues.

The difference between cliches and platitudes is at best undefined and a blur in many cases. "That is not living." is a line, that, existing in the right setting, could be meaningful. It refers to "life" not merely as the state of existence but of a certain notion of what life should be. Obviously it would be very value-specific but a work of social Science Fiction would surely be written by people who can articulate such values with credible characters and plausible motives...right?

That this movie is written by a guy who claims the world is controlled by 12 psych professionals might indicate that looking deeply into reasoning and motives might not be on the list of priorities.

Our enemies on this planet are less than twelve men. They are members of the Bank of England and other higher financial circles. They own and control newspaper chains, and they are, oddly enough, directors in all the mental health groups in the world which have sprung up. Now these chaps are very interesting fellows: They have fantastically corrupt backgrounds; illegitimate children; government graft; a very unsavory lot. And they apparently, sometime in the rather distant past, had determined on a course of action. Being in control of most of the gold supplies of the planet, they entered upon a program of bringing every government to bankruptcy and under their thumb, so that no government would be able to act politically without their permission.

Anyway, these fellows have gotten nearly every government in the world to owe them considerable quantities of money, through various chicaneries, and they control of course income tax, government finance -- Wilson, for instance, the current premier of England, is totally involved with these fellows, and talks about nothing else, actually. They organized these mental health groups which sprang up simultaneously all over the world, and anything that has mental health in it - in its name - or mental hygiene, or other things of that character, such names as that are all part of the organization which stems from these less than a dozen really men.

The rousing music as the caged humans cheer the fact that a human can speak Psychlo is a reminder that the movie strongly relies on knowledge being power. The trouble is that such an awareness makes far less sense with people who were grunting at each other and were fighting each other over food last we saw them (presumably less than a week ago). Good possibility which would have worked if it wasn't for that meddling character inconsistency.

Also, a bit more literary criticism. Trying to make the enemies look evil by having them backstab each other, display no impulse control, and act counter-productively (don't forget the sexism!) detracts from the whole sense that the aliens are a real threat. Efforts to engage in characterization in one (very unsubtle way) detract from the premise of the movie. In most films, the effect is slight enough that we don't notice it too strongly. Battlefield Earth is fatally undermined by that premise.

In retrospect, the power of the Scientology lies in presenting straw men for the young to defeat while bombarding them with flattery. "See the big, bad Terl? See him kick the dog and make sexist comments. Watch as the hero defeats the villain. Youth is great. Now...Want to take a personality quiz?"

Of note is how the hero becomes more articulate as the movie progresses (as some effort to show the effects of the teaching machine). This is not badly done.

"It's a learning machine. [It'll] teach us how to fly." Not quite hamfisted allegory but you can't make an omelette without ruthlessly crushing dozens of eggs beneath your steel boot and then publicly disemboweling the chickens that laid them as a warning to others. The allegory is still very heavy in the scene where Terl hides the gold in the dead employee's coffin (dead because of his harebrained order).


Getting back to the theme of flattery, the plan to kill the Psychlos by suffocating them with the Earth's atmosphere (being aliens, the stuff they breath reacts to radiation and oxygen is no substitute) by smashing the windows in old human city taken over by the aliens when the bulk of the done's atmosphere is held in by those big glass panes that keep the outside out. The human plan seems to be recreating iconic scenes from the Matrix and riots (stuff that young, mildly arrogant, people like).

Technologically primitive tribesmen being able to fly harriers like Top Gun is accomplished in a week. Not a platitude unless you consider that is what people can accomplish when they put their mind to it (or rather, when you put L. Ron Hubbard's imagination into it).

The ending, with Terl being surrounded by terribly animated gold in Ft. Knox was blunt force trauma at its worst.

The Battlefield Earth Review (you've all been dreading) Part 4

Well, we come to 45:00 where the action (such as it is) begins to mount.

"You wouldn't survive the jump!" is a phrase that could have meaning in both the film and the real world (in reference to the idea that improving oneself by leaps could result in a crash). Allegory runs superficial in this movie.

"Just because you've never seen them fly doesn't mean they can't fly." Words to inspire optimism and an awareness of the thetans in all of us. Also, the power of belief gives us supernatural (or at least minor violations of probability) powers. Somehow, that might be important to a cult that advertises the ability to unleash the special powers people have that are subdued by ordinary life.

'Don't touch anything, there's not telling what they might do to all of us."
Caution, the mark of a prisoner who wants to stay alive. In this case, it is meant to point out the specialness of the hero by how curious he is in the face of possibly inspiring the villain to harm the humans.

48:00 starts with one of the more insultingly subservient characters in the movie. An alien from a race that was exterminated by the psychlos for whatever unprofitable reason. Of note is that they were initially called the 'Chinkos" but that was changed after Hubbard died for obvious reasons. Clinko being such a big change in that it was less directly insulting of the East Asian stereotype of elaborate rituals of respect. It is as if Hubbard picked a stereotype to use as the basis for the race and then left the name unchanged.

The scene (and a few that follow) serve to remind people that "knowledge is power". True insofar as one can use it to achieve better results. Ironically, this part has not been hideously twisted into some deformed version of what is popularly understood by it.

"I don't need your permission. I'm no longer a child."
Presenting both the determination of the presumed love interest, the power of youth that has become free, and the idea of life without the constraints of hierarchy. Flattery is the basis of Scientology. In particular, it declares freedom despite the very practical reasons why people might be constrained. To not be a child implies some ability to recognize the situations in which one should act in a certain way (that is, to have learned constraint through teaching or experience). Adulthood is only one aspect of it.

In perhaps a reversal of the expected order of things, the love interest (whatever her name is) is captured and used as... "leverage" (groan).

Anyhoo, back to the protagonist's effort to crush the spirit of hero. After a brief stint in some library, they go out to some field with cattle and Terl shoots some legs off before being overwhelmed by humans wielding spears. Impressive it ain't. As he is faced with the hero holding his own gun, Terl points out that humans were the only species to hunt for sport (if that kind of knowledge existed, then why the scene with the rats?). Yes, the evil alien lectures the humans on their own barbarity.

It is thus here that I point out the obvious "Yes, we can!" joke.



Again, Terl can get reliable intel out of humans in order to threaten the hero's love interest (whom he can't talk to) but can't tell that humans don't like to eat rats?

 Seriously, angering the humans when they have already submitted and reduced any trust in an agreement between them and your plots? Villainy fail.

Since I can only take so much of this in one sitting. I end at 1:05:00. See you next post.

The Battlefield Earth Review (you've all been dreading) Part 3

"Production equals profits!"

Ugh. That was fetid reminder of where we left off.

Good grief, even the security cameras are at a tilt! What a horrible bit of design. While cliche ridden, the past few minutes (30:00 to 40:00) of footage were surprisingly free of platitudes turned sideways.

Since I can't stand large doses of dreck, I want to at least say that Hubbard was trying to create a situation where the aliens utterly failed to understand human desires by re-interpreting simple acts from a different set of expectations. It was an attempt and once that ceases to be interesting after 8 years old. We are by now used to the concept and the large number of human captives would have provided a better pool of test subjects than allowing prisoners to escape and forage.

Plausibility is not some that Scientologists struggle with.

The villain underestimating the heroes (humans) is also a dull trope since it is soooo 30s. A lot of what passes for planning in the Psychlo side would be credible for a bunch of semi-retarded staff members barely entrusted with any responsibility and not given any training due to it being a deeply underfunded and unsupervised operation. The notion that the security chief was top of his class makes that possible plausibility prevented. Again, not platitudes but painful nonetheless.

A few thoughts on commenters

In reading John R. Schindler's blog (and a few of his books), I notice that his very careful foreign policy thought is laid out in well sourced posts. Posts that attract kooks and vitriolic people who've never bothered to read what he posted.

His post where he discusses the CIA's use of torture, being a particularly emotive topic, attracted a lot of comment and a lot of stupid comments. There were many good comments among the dross which is why I suspect he allows them. Also, being that he holds sensitive information, his responses were sadly limited to a few, not very descriptive words.

So is there value in comments on a sensitive post many people will get wrong?

Yes. For one, it serves as a useful barometer of the sentiments of crazies (and since stupid people rule the world...) and allows the few informed people to add to the discussion despite the difficulty in finding their posts. Just the freedom to post implies an acceptance of outside input which is reassuring and adds to the trust in the reactions between reader and writer.

So grok on, dudes!

The village elders of the world

I am increasingly wondering if the eventual division of fields between theology, government, academia, and diplomacy has just passed the Islamic world by. To have a cleric make a foreign policy declaration strikes me as well outside the role of clergy in most other societies but it would fit with the notion of a small society with little differentiation between specific jobs.

In such small societies, the elders fill all roles of governance. Where in the past priests were doctor, psychologist, social scientist, politicians, and possibly theologians, they have since become more limited in scope as those roles have been split off and professionalized.

Iran seems to have reverted to the old tribal elder system. David P. Goldman claimed Islam was the sacrilization of the old Pagan social order. I am increasingly inclined to believe him.

Work in progress (to be completed)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/have-democrats-failed-the-white-working-class.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthomas-b-edsall&_r=1

A new standard in evil (Disturbing)

No, not the CIA torture report, the ISIS manual on dealing with female slaves.

"Question 13: Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not reached puberty?
"It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse."

"Question 19: Is it permissible to beat a female slave?
"It is permissible to beat the female slave as a [form of] darb ta'deeb [disciplinary beating], [but] it is forbidden to [use] darb al-takseer [literally, breaking beating], [darb] al-tashaffi [beating for the purpose of achieving gratification], or [darb] al-ta'dheeb [torture beating]. Further, it is forbidden to hit the face."
Question 20: What is the ruling regarding a female slave who runs away from her master?
"A male or female slave's running away [from their master] is among the gravest of sins…"

ISIS has between 30,000 and 200,000 psychopaths.Interestingly, the Grand Mufti of the Al Azhar university (most respected institute of Islamic thought) condemned the actions of ISIS on pragmatic grounds that it hurt Islam's reputation.

In that vein, be aware that Ron Paul has called for the abolition of the intelligence community and the removal of US troops stationed abroad.

Games Culture, an analytical revolution

Many years ago, people made the argument that networks and systems of communication and development would revolutionize society. The downside was that such consequences were judged to be unpredictable and thus risky for the rest of society.

In particular, military thinkers were talking about "network centric warfare". One of the major concerns was a series of questions of how development would take place.

Behold and witness how for-profit game nerds are assembling such data!

The Battlefield Earth Review (you've all been dreading) Part 2

The notion that "the Grass is greener on the other side" is a generally accepted platitude for good reason. The process of desiring something where one doesn't see the flaws over the identical thing with flaws visible is so ingrained in reality that the platitude is a simple reminder of that that serves as an arguement.

Since even L. Ron Hubbard recognized that languages change over time, re-inventing the phrase to serve as a description of a person was a simple way to do that. Too simple. The world is supposed to have changed utterly but the fragments that remain seem far too similar to be taken credibly. Not a bad idea, it just was dragged down  by the poor design of the rest of the movie.

"I won't write it unless I see it!" is another one of those common phrases. Interestingly, it seems Terl is playing a retarded empiricist counterpart to the retarded empiricist of the hero. Of course, that turns into Terl (the security chief) risking the life of one of the employees by ordering him to give the weapon to a human who, as predicted by the employee, shoots the employee. Security done by stupid evil aliens who conquered galaxies... Give them a hand folks!

The "I am a psychlo of my word" gag gets old the first time you hear it and gets worse from there. Lets face it, it might have been funny back in 1930 to see a common phrase altered to include aliens. By 2000, it has been done so many times by better producers that the use in Battlefield Earth is not just flat but flattening. Also, the routine violation of the plain meaning of it is used to show both the lawful evil use of weasel words to get out of the plain meaning of phrases of reassurance. OK, people hate lawyers. The problem with the movie is that it is employed in such an overdone way and in so ridiculous situations.

A security chief who tells the bartender serving his drinks that he will reveal some horrible secret that would imperil his son's career? Not smart. Especially dumb from the person who supposedly graduated top of some academy for security personnel.

"Whatever serves the Corporation best." While not a platitude so much as a cliche avowal of loyalty, it is a reminder that the war analogies often used to understand business have been taken to an absurd extent of seriousness. Likewise, the notion of the protagonist (which is really Terl) sleeping with the daughter of some important official and thereby explaining the low status is another dull cliche.

The fight over letting everyone eat at the same time is another way of communicating social ideas in a very cliche way (yes, I am using cliche a lot but it is that kind of movie). "We have enough trouble without killing each other over food!" may be a true phrase for humans trapped in a Detroit zoo converted into pens for human slave laborers. It is a reference to the debates and Cold War hostility over Economic theories and their application.It is also a reference to the Overpopulation debate raging when L.Ron Hubbard was just starting to organize his cult.

Since then, Julian Simon's work has shown that overpopulation fears were absurd. As master of the conventional cliche, Hubbard probably wanted to convey the hopeful spirit that cooperation was good (a key feature in plans for international cooperation to reduce the global population) and that food shortages were a result of human mismanagement (a key criticism by the anti-Malthusians). In trying to play both sides, it might have had meaning when it was written. In 2000, not so much.

"Nobody works for free."
"Man-anaimals do."

More immortal dialogue that takes the observation that costs are inherent in any choice because some other choice is not made and turns it into a question of wages. Economics Fail!

In regards to actual platitudes though, the atrocious scene and the ones that follows is devoid of them (the cliches abound including slaves doing manual labor surrounded by equipment that would render it unnecessary).

The Battlefield Earth Review (you've all been dreading) Part 1

Remember, this is about the many, many, many platitudes and deeply altered memes that people casually accept have a set meaning. Much of the value of fiction is in allowing us to re-examine those assumptions. Some of the danger lies in when those meanings are changed without our awareness but still demanding our acceptance. Think of it as a spider which uses the existing environment to serve as a base for its traps.

I'm watching as the Franchise Pictures name fades from the screen and then a terrible job of lettering announces that "Man is an endangered species".

Gee... Thanks for the Paul Ehrlich paraphrase. It's nice to know that the overblown disaster fantasies of biologists who didn't believe in rapid adaptation of nature had some cultural impact. Just this time the reason is that aliens came in and exterminated most of humanity.

Since main body of Scientology members lives in the same geographic space as the 1960s Population Control movement (especially proximity to Paul Ehrlich's prestige), it seems reasonable to think that the Scientologists simply stole memes for use in hackneyed ways.

We're watching the hero ride in on his white horse (who must be pretty hungry living in the mountains without grass to eat), meet his love interest (presumed), find out his father died (so throws away medicine that is presumably valuable but also portable), and then argue with the chief that they need to move on to areas with more food.

While not exactly a platitude, it is a recurring theme in some of Scientology's media. The young, courageous hero, arguing for the needs of the people against a corrupt or tired older order that doesn't respect them or knows how to do the job. Admittedly, it is a popular trope since the younger crowd is the one that can afford the many forms of media and flattery is a big reason to imbibe it.



Scientology just does it to the weird degree.

 The notion of bad stuff nobody has seen or confirm plays into the image Scientologists have of themselves that they are "Freethinkers (tm)". Eventually, fears must be assessed to see if the concern is still valid. That is a process normally done by the young who lack the specific life context of the old and have their optimism unchecked by experience. Scientology feeds on that optimism/narcissism.

The line "I don't believe in fate!" is a way this is expressed. The determined young hero who rejects the defeatism of the older leaders is a trope that was cliche long before the movie. In the context of the movie, it is a valid claim. In the context of the world the writers and audience inhabit, it calls out to the idealized view of determination.

In yet another reminder of the power of flattery (or at least the effort the movies makes to harness it), the supposed love interest wants to accompany the hero (since you can't really call him the protagonist in a movie starring John Travolta) but is convinced to stay back since she is more able to handle herself in danger than the rest of the tribe so she needs to be there to protect them. A plausible smooth move full of flattery to women who like thinking of themselves as strong in combat (puberty be bleeped).

In a mild tangent, I would like to point out the flashbacks to the cave scene while attacking the "dragon" was actually nicely done. It created a visual of the hero imitating the actions of the one he had disagreed with. SFDebris had a negative view of it but I think Chris got the impression it was to serve as a reminder, not as a point for future contrast.

Back to the platitudes! As Johnny makes his way into an amazingly intact mini-golf course that survived until he managed to damage the dragon more, he encounters two hunters who grunt at him and ready spears as if they were javelins. He then utters the immortal line "I believe in what I see!" which raises and ignores the question of what a person can actually see.

I've still got 1:50 minutes left so I think I'll continue in part 2.

Torture

Sorry for the lack of levity today but... a thread in a forum I frequent had a thread on torture. Since I have an interest (remember the whole preparing to go to Law School thing?) I wanted to see if the understanding of what torture is has changed over time. A few empirical issues might explain the massive disagreement over the ethics of it.

Firstly, even the Allies in WWII used torture.

What took place there was not just sleep deprivation or verbal intimidation but threats of elective surgery and beatings.

Certainly sleep deprivation is harmful, both physically and psychologically, but... was it intended to be covered in a prohibition against torture?

Likewise, was verbal intimidation intended to be covered?

Does that matter as evolving practices change the customary laws?

If that doesn't change, does that indicate some fundamental change in treating torture as "just a bunch of unpleasant stuff" instead of the older understanding as "specialized infliction of pain with instruments"?

The UN Convention on Torture (1985) Doesn't actually define torture clearly.

Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

It is plausible that sleep deprivation is considered more seriously now than in the past? Yes. 
Still, it is a coercive practice that does not meet the legal standard of evidence needed for trial.

Since by now I have given up due to not being able to find any info on the early understanding of sleep deprivation's status at the time of the Geneva conventions, I will simply guess that the initial use of sleep deprivation in US interrogations from 2001-2006 were not at a time when it had become an international idea of torture. Now it is.

Blogging Battlefield Earth

Today (at a more wakeful hour), I will watch battlefield Earth and blog about the role of platitudes in it. For now, I will point out one of Lifton's observations on thought control.
http://www.ex-cult.org/General/lifton-criteria 

 6. LOADING THE LANGUAGE the language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliche (thought-stoppers) repetitiously centered on all-encompassing jargon "the language of non-thought" words are given new meanings -- the outside world does not use the words or phrases in the same way -- it becomes a "group" word or phrase .

As should be pointed out, I am not a scientologist and I have never been one. I do, however, think it a fascinating study in psychology made more accessible by decline. I was recently surprised by a co-worker defending Battlefield Earth on the basis of special effects. Since the effects rely on camera tilts and stilts (no, not the dialogue), I found that a little odd. I am guessing that he might have other reasons for defending the movie.

 That weird Christmas party was what shook a previous discussion loose. Lifton, platitudes, and the downright different meanings Scientology attaches to words all came together with the terrible characterization in Battlefield Earth.

Scientology and Music

As evil and superficial a cult as it is, Scientology's cultivation of young and desperate artists does allow for a different kind of music than would normally be survivable in the marketplace.

Bear this song in mind.

While it plays with the sexual undertones in "reach the top. Please don't stop." it generally lacks any really interesting words. The tune is a continuous loop of a series of barely changed notes. Bland is a word that comes to mind.

That said, I am a person who is very sensitive to sound and patterns. Music I can tolerate and see mild variation in is what a lot of people would overlook because of the lack of clear distinction in the melodies or the similarities of the notes. This explains some of the appeal of the work of Enya.

While her voice is far more controlled and the words more evocative of fantasy, the repetitive melodies and only mild notes is a common theme.

I wonder, does the appeal of the cult include a desire of extremely sensitive people to engage in the active and overtly sensual life of people less prone to over-stimulation? The advertising is often focused on scenes of people engaged in stuff commonly regarded as exciting. The music that comes out is more soothing than exciting and that might owe to the people who actually join despite their wish to be the adventurous, sensual archetype.

Dude!

While it has been a long time and my writing has tended towards question websites and novel writing. I did note this very interesting, disturbing, and disturbing (because it is really... a loss for words). http://heyjackass.com/

 

As a way of communicating the dysfunction of crime, it is rude...but effective.

Thoughts on the New Cultural Golden Age

It is common to say that there is nothing worthwhile on TV or that the Internet is full of dreck. My father is certainly one of those who complains even as he watches Dr. OZ. One of my best friends also has turned away from popular culture in disgust at the sex on TV.

I think this is unwise and that is misses something almost nobody mentions.

We are in the middle of a cultural renaissance as media no longer responds to the largest demographic but increasingly towards smaller and smaller slices with copious criticism to endure good writing. Where once producers focused on the large, dumb, and trashy segments of the population, the Internet allows previously unpublished authors to find an audience. For every 50 Shades of Grey, there is an insightful kindle-only book. Where we once only had a few pages of comics in the Sunday paper, we now have webcomics that respond to many different interests with many different storytelling styles. Some focus on gag-a-day jokes, others on a larger story, some on teaching, and some cater to unusual interests like linguistically inclined fans of Norse Mythology and Post-Apocalyptic character-driven comics.

Webcomics are not the cultural medium enriching our lives. Music is undergoing a radical transformation. TV shows used to have simple and predictable music while complex and seriously moving music was left to the orchestras. Now it is the reverse. Professional orchestras are often known for uninspiring and often done music (unless they perform very well) while anime and computer games strive to create music memorable not only as an accompaniment to the rest of the work but which are amazing as independent works of music. Music has left the "official" bastions of music and is now brought to new heights by commercial interests seeking to please a specific audience other than music critics.

The writing of the Flintstones may not have been great but the cringeworthy aspects of Star Trek TOS were possible in part because of a lack of alternatives and resources for writers. The modern age has plenty of resources for writers outside of the "writer's workshops" or academic courses. TVTropes has many concepts explored and listed. Critics are now more numerous and more resourced as internet critics can respond to new culture from the perspective of the more specific interests of their slice of the audience.More literate science fiction fans can watch SFDebris where once Analog and word of mouth were the limits of what a fan could get in way of screening.

Even as Hollywood plows more and more money into badly written scripts and professional movie critics deliver unreliable reviews, Pixar has re-invented animation and crafted movies that appeal to all ages for their excellent writing and creative characterization. While the Hangover appeals to the cruder sensibilities of people, Battle L.A. was brave enough to drop the almost obligatory romantic sub-plot, and Gravity made it despite the religious undertones. That said, big Hollywood studies are slowly dying but more unconventional movie producers are entering. The Gamers is a movie that did for Dungeons and Dragons what the DND movie was supposed to do but failed. The Futurama and Firefly movies were forays into movie-making by TV shows which crafted excellent movies despite being comparative amateurs in the medium. Hollywood is out of creative energy but there are others who do great things without the budgets that were once requisite.

While computer games are still mocked as a wast of time and useless escapism, professional authors are increasingly taking a hand in writing parts of computer games. Planescape: Torment was one of the first in the writing revolution. (Those familiar with Douglas Adams and the Starship Titanic should remember that Douglas Adams was an eccentric genius and a field should not be judged solely or even substantially by the works of eccentrics). Games like Bioshock became great not for the gameplay (which was still an important aspect) but because the immersive world was created around a philosophical point, not just cool guns.

While the claims of the social importance of 'Culture" (understood as the "fine Arts") remains murky when sculpture is the effort to craft some new combination fo already tediously overused elements of social protest, playing a home game with the aid of construction equipment conveys ideas and a sense of awe that no abstract art in the past decade has matched.

Whatever the state of politics, it is exciting to live in what is a golden age for several forms of culture and tremendously inspiring works are produced daily thanks to the internet allowing for much more rapid cultural evolution.

David Foster Wallace's nothing on this guy

This is an interesting article whis partially about his encountering and interviewing Gary Gaygax but is really a detailed and beautifully written examination od Dungeons and Dragons in a slightly sociological approach. That is not so rare as to deserve comment. Many people have commented on the moral panic of the 1980s where Dungeons and Dragons was connected to Satanism fears. Some even from a Christian perspective.

What few have done is to write with such beautiful footnotes or to weave the background information into part of two narratives at the same time.

An example of the amazing footnotes is this one:

21. Even nominally evil player characters (see §3.0) often cooperate; they do their evil only to the non-player characters, who aren’t in a position to resent them when the game is over. As Skip Williams, who for many years wrote the “Sage Advice” column in Dragon, a D&D magazine, puts it, “evil characters tend not to act like evil people in real life. It’s more of a hat you wear.” ↩

While roleplaying and fantasy  in general has raised some people's suspicions because of the deliberate deviations from reality, the social effect of such a phenomenon is likely to be a bit different than fears that a person will be incapable of relating to the normal world or sucked into witchcraft. Perhaps the most articulate of the critics of Fantasy roleplaying is hosted by none other than Chick Tracts (of the amazingly misinformed religious pamphlets) fame.

The concerns expressed are that the roleplaying accustoms players to concepts of witchcraft and dysfunctional behaviors.

For example, you can have a "lawful evil" character. A handbook states that: "A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard to whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty and order, but not about freedom, dignity or life."⁷ Talk about a mish-mash of moral ambiguity. Our young people are having enough trouble getting their values straight without being immersed in this sort of material!  

One of the ways Dungeons and Dragons has changed society is by popularizing the lawful vs. chaotic aspects of moral behavior. I argue that with fantasy, we are now in a world where social groups playing games combine to create emergent properties that can imagine worlds under slightly different rules allowing us to predict what effect certain changes will have. I predict that society is now prepared for the effects of no FTL communication once humanity has a colonized new space systems just as well as it is for having such communication speed. People fantasizing and gradually writing new works to meet new standards of immersion have addressed concepts in a way a strict adherence to reality cannot.

Thoughts on resiliency

Reading through this article by Theodore Dalrymple, something came to mind.

There are two very different approaches to resiliency that come through. One is that a system has limited spaces for priority treatment and that the more people who exaggerate or boast about their conditions needing care, the harder it is to prioritize the truly needful. The other is that the more reticence people have about addressing a distressing situation or condition, the more less likely they are to seek needed treatment and thus reticence is undesirable.

The latter is the more conventional in this socially liberal society. It has since become common for celebrities to speak out in public about conditions they have and urging other people to speak out about them. This may seem harmless when somebody spends some off-screen time talking about OCD as a means of displaying their "caring" credentials but becomes seriously annoying when such efforts undermine stigmas surrounding a particular behavior.

One of the ways that societies have controlled undesirable behavior is by attaching stigmas to decisions or conditions that are effectively harmful. While it may be possible to argue that those conditions are not actually harmful and thus do not warrant stigma, it should be acknowledged that stigma is a social response to something to restrain certain effects. When people argue that stigma is the main barrier to seeking help  and that it needs to be eliminated, they are arguing not just that the undesirable condition is something that people should seek treatment for but that it is more effective to lower the barriers to committing the condition and to ease seeking treatment than to create a hard barrier at the risk of keeping people in.

An example would be the two approaches to Alcoholism. It was traditional to consider undesirable incapacitation with alcohol a moral failing and that stigma was one thing that would hopefully keep people away from risky behaviors and would pressure those caught up in such behaviors to cease. Sometime in the modern era, some people argued that the stigma was causing people to hide their problems resulting in worse outcomes. Their proposal was to classify excessive inebriation as a disease, reduce the stigma, and to thereby reduce the shame of seeking help.

Here is the problem. That is a gamble. It is not clear that the effect has been to reduce the undesirable effects and the role of shame in society is subjective enough that reducing such stigmas might even increase the behavior as people feel less cost for indulging in things they desire but which society once disapproved of. So far, that is a mainly policy debate that might eventually get some clear tests for the effects of such moral re-engineering.

The danger comes in when it becomes assumed by many that reducing stigma is clearly the better option or that people cannot restrain themselves or handle undesirable situations. Life is full of things we cannot control but, barring some strange neurological conditions, we can generally control our reactions to such things.  Of of the effects of the rise of subjectivity has been that many people are inclined to refuse any comparison of objective reasons to be happy or not in favor of a focus on mood. There is some merit as subjective experiences are often different and depression can be traced to differences in the brain.

Another force is the inclination to see suffering as a source of moral legitimacy. It is not just that suffering might encourage greater insights than a content or safe person would have, it is that victimhood carries with it power. I suspect that part of this is that the political tribes in the US drew different lessons from the Holocaust and many Liberals concluded that great deference must be paid to those who suffer in order to make up for such evil. The result was that, in many mutating minds, suffering became power and virtue. Passive-aggressiveness knows no political boundaries but certain ideologies are more vulnerable to it than others.

As suffering confers power, claiming suffering in the public sphere confers public power and emotional responses. Demonstrating that one is a caring person is a powerful urge in a society that seeks to be caring and among those who base their identities on being though of as caring. Those lacking a skeptical urge reinforce such practices. Similar processes are at work in societies with different values like the cult of power in Nazi Germany where ostensibly powerful and rational organizations were anything but. In a society where displays of compassion are a means of advancement, skepticism becomes a target and reticence is interpreted as weakness. Among those less inclined to corrupt the system, the great fear is that serious conditions needing external care will be ignored in the social pressure to be reticent. That sounds like a legitimate concern and sometimes such cases come up but the number of frauds committed to demonstrate one's superiority through suffering (fake claims of rape to fit in in rape-prevention rallies, etc.) makes me very worried about it.

Resiliency is something the US Army keeps on trying to indoctrinate its soldiers to follow but the assumptions are completely different. The idea of resiliency is goal oriented and is centered around a person becoming more functional and able to bounce-back after a negative situation. Instead of seeking power through displays of suffering and compassion, it seeks to build people who are powerful by responding to specific situations in a way that maximizes the potential goods. Part of that is encouraging reticence where that will allow a more favorable process (not immediately wailing that one's wife is unfaithful after not getting a phone call in the last hour) and encouraging people to seek help with certain conditions that are judged to be more serious than a person can deal with on their own (suicidal thoughts).

These are incompatible approaches and I suspect that those who seek the reduction of stigmas on the gamble that the long-term result will be better are not fully willing to think of caring services as limited in capacity, quality, and resistance to corruption. Those seeking resiliency cannot fully communicate that they seek to make it easier for those who seriously need help by discouraging the minor cases and warning people away from ill behavior. This has become a moral conflict with the fervor of sides that cannot agree on assumptions, terms, or the obviousness of the theories.

Some More Speculative Fluff

Is it possible that one reason some people fear high IQ people is that they dread the effects of a passive aggressive person whose patterns they cannot even perceive? There is a certain comforting directness to a stupid thug being overtly aggressive. A passive-aggressive intelligent person can cause no end of problems for dumb people and those dumb people wouldn't even be able to respond.

The devastating nature of passive-aggressiveness is such that coping mechanisms, even dysfunctional ones, can produce a better result by total exclusion and risking avoiding the benefits of a smart person by forgoing the lower risk but higher cost of an evil smart person. That still makes life hard for smart people but it might be possible to reduce such a fear response.

Great Post Linked

I would like to comment on this excellent blog post.

http://chobituary.blogspot.com/2014/10/amnesia.html

I admit that I am worried by her reference to recovering memories. As psychology moves on, the notion of recovered memories is considered extremely dubious.

Her descriptions of escaping into games because of the pain of her family life is one that I can relate with but also one that I have seen in some of the more insightful commentators within the gaming community. It is possible that these were already smart people whose writing in life was shifted towards games as a result of that escape. It is also possible that it takes pain to write and that these people suffered enough to make them writers who simply had an affinity for games. Another possibility exists that I want to explore.

That the forced shifts in perceiving reality make the ability to perceive and understand the world from different perspectives stronger. As an abusive parent tries to force a child to perceive the world their way, the child with a strong sense of self can see the world as the parent tries to impose and as the child actually does see. Games are an extension of that and the more immersive the fantasy world, the more escape it might bring. Since so much of useful writing comes from offering and weighing perspectives, that stronger ability provides perceptions more valuable to understanding the world and the fantasy worlds by extension.

I can agree on the unreliable nature of the Social Justice effort as many people seem more interested in speaking out than in collecting reliable statistics with reliable methodologies and seeking workable enforcement mechanisms. I applaud her courage for considering the effectiveness of her job as something serious.

So much that passes under the label of Social Justice is fantasy and she has made the point more simply than I would.

Well worth reading.

News from Parchin

http://www.acq.osd.mil/ncbdp/nm/nm_book_5_11/appendix_F.htm
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=1000&lat=35.4883388&lng=51.7622685&hob_opt=1&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=10699&ff=50&zm=11

1 megaton Iranian nuke?

#GamerGate (more observations)

Part of the power of the game reporters and the clique that has coalesced around Zoe Quinn seems to be their initial credibility provides a veneer of coverage that will sway the casual and uninquisitive outsider. While people with more experience of the quality of reporting on gamer media might be resentful of the poor coverage, collusion, and lack of real journalism, an outsider would not have any understanding of these tensions and would, almost be definition, have to defer to those whose business is providing information about the community.

For all that people talk about "free availability of information" and "open-mindedness", in practice, the vast number of competing perspectives needs some way to sort out the ridiculous from the possibly credible and official organs are the most common way. News organizations gain their power from being the ones to receive, filter, and transmit the information their customers might find valuable. When a crisis erupts, the journalists will have extra credibility.

The trouble is, the very core of #GamerGate's concerns are the incestuous and poor quality of reporting that provides inaccurate information and suppresses debate. For outsiders, trying to understand the #GamerGate protestors and their opposition must first be filtered through the more "respectable" sources of information which are the reason for the whole conflict. Likewise, the improbable and dubious nature of many claims by the Zoe Quinn clique require some minimal technical savvy to dispute and most people simply do not have that. The stereotype of the socially dysfunctional and misogynistic game nerd is quite common (thank you 1980s DnD Satanism scare) and has some basis in reality but not to the point as claimed by Quinn. Again, some knowledge of gamer culture and internet systems are needed to even perceive anything dubious about Zoe Quinn.

So what does #GamerGate have?

Public attention from Twitter. Sympathy from social factions tired of "Social Justice", motivation to dig up facts and dispute claims in a calm and convincing manner, and visible respect for gamers. Since advertisers care about not alienating their customer base, the last point will probably prove decisive.

What we also have is a very nice little information way waged through official mediums and unofficial ones (twitter, youtube, etc.), through discussion, censorship, calculated information releases (doxing and leaks), and attempting to shut sites down (DDOS attacks). I believe we have a lot to learn about information warfare from this little war within the gaming community. I admit myself amazed at the rapid pace of the conflict but I suspect that may be due to the small size of the gaming journalists, large number of protesters, massive skill base (research, video production, careful argumentation) on the protester side and comparative lack of skill on the other (hence the resort to more coercive tactics).

More thoughts on #GamerGate

One of the most interesting features of this controversy is that it crosses so many interests that normal political divides don't predict sides.

Julian Assange (a pinko whose too anarchic to be a commie) and Adam Baldwin ( a Conservative actor with the requisite nerves of steel) both were condemnatory of the censorship and bans of #Gamergate protesters.

Protests take place on Twitter, and many of the places normally frequented by gamers have such interlocking groups of editors that censorship is unexpectedly far reaching. While the main lesson is that gaming journalists have serious conflicts of interest and low ethical behavior, another is that editors of key geek resources are also liable to use their power coercively.

Also of interest is that while Social Conservatives have expressed fear that violent video games are "murder trainers" (as in the words of LTCOL Dave Grossman), some have spoken out in favor of the gamers and their protest.




 The geography of the conflict is interesting as well. Not only have the obvious sites like the Steam Greenlight page been a battleground (quickly purged by Zoe Quinn), so have various gamer and geek news sites (which have banded together in their common defense against being proved wrong and fear of their readers). Of interest is that some common Geek resources like Wikipedia, TVTropes, Reddit, and Twitter have been scenes of conflict with banning. Initially, only a handful of common sites like Knowyourmeme granted refuge for discussion and have since been the point of information gathering and dissemination of the protest position.

It wasn't until the first few youtube videos were banned that the movement gamed massive following as gamers who were less than active on the news sites got informed and concerned by censorship.

One of the bits of wisdom passed down has been that when people are allowed to act collectively, they will likely act collectively to the harm of others. The secret mailing list allowed the members of the Zoe Quinn clique to organize the other journalists into their defense but also inspired a collusion that destroyed one of the basis of journalistic independence, the power of multiple perspectives.

This is a PR disaster on more than a natural scale. For this level of fallout, there must have been a professional at work making particularly bad advice which was trusted way too much. Pay attention to 26:14.



There was a PR "professional" at work. 

We have found the limits of competence and honesty of a dysfunctional journalistic and media culture that looks like it will soon be devoured by the public they despise.

#GamerGate (initial thoughts)

This controversy has been a major situation within the geek parts of the internet but also has dramatic significance beyond it as an example of democratic action and news dissemination. Since the situation is highly controversial and complex, it is actually kind of necessary to explain how the situation is before drawing observations from it.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/quinnspiracy

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate

Of these, the video by InternetAristocrat is probably the clearest and most entertaining (if least detailed) of the links.

A few things stand out.

In an age of virtually no barriers to entry in the media, there are still destructive and dishonest cliques of people who can direct coverage based on interests.

In an age and field where wealth is in the hands of many, attention and the emotions that lead to it are money.

Acquiring that attention can result in dishonest dealings between those desiring it and those willing to provide it at the price of the trust of their readers.

The power to sway the general audience relies on several factors of whom, position (as in authority or trust), will to continue, and access to the general public.

The main players in the conflict have been Zoe Quinn et al., The game reporters, the anti-corruption gamers, and the advertisers seeking to make money.

Quinn has motivation and will to continue (she makes money from sympathy) and her followers may believer her or find advantages in supporting her (sexual for her close cooperators, credulity or cheap absolution for others).

The journalists are harmed by attacking their audience but gain a form of social respect by seeking to criticize their social niche to make it more closely fit the ideal of the dominant ideology (Liberalism) which the gamer protesters refer to as Social Justice Warriors. They may be making bad fiscal decisions and destroying their credibility within the community that they rely on for money but they have a higher goal, public respect.

Gamers seem tired of the constant condemnation heaped upon them by the main disseminators of information in their community and of the surprisingly heavy hand of censorship across ostensibly separate websites such as Youtube, 4chan, TVTropes, Reddit, and more. The controversy was initially minor but the censorship has created such distrust that critics were energized and otherwise neutral people found their interest in free discussion threatened.

The advertisers just want to make money and the willingness of them to walk away from offending journalists allows them to save their precious advertising funds from associating themselves with an increasingly brutal conflict. When the advertisers abandon a publication, the publication itself is nearly dead.

Here is my big observation.

Few of the people involved seem to have any serious moral perspective or duty towards a perspective. I suspect Zoe Quinn just sought to gain publicity through her sexual liaisons and the people around her were desperate to engage in that primal urge. At the same time, they had another urge to feel better about themselves compared to other people and did so by parroting the dominant moral critiques of the age even if their personal actions were exactly what they decried in others. They did not think seriously about what hypocrisy they were committing, only their passive-aggressive posturing.

When the controversy broke, many people were willing to ignore the improbable elements of Quinn's account or the censorious nature of the media response in order to advance what they saw as a necessary battle against the evils of sexism, hatred of women,  and a lot of other things. Their urge to act blinded them to the evils they were supporting and the ideology they championed must in part be judged by the ease by which dishonest people can use it to manipulate others to their own ends.

Another bit of Cult Fun

I had commented earlier and only very slightly about the ignorance of cult leaders about the supposed authority they relied upon for their power.

Lyndon LaRouche is one such man. There is a fairly detailed website tracking his activities which has some insightful articles despite the crude design. One of the things that LaRouche claims is that he is a genius (in effect, he has enough sense not to be too explicit about it). I am skeptical. He loves to make claims about historical figures and about ancient philosophical concepts but does so in ways utterly foreign to experts in the relevant fields and without simplifying the concepts so they can be understood and verified.

Something that is a wonderful example of this phenomenon is an article he wrote in one of his publications in the 1980s. It is a (probably) fictionalized accounts of a security situation that is used to highlight the operations of his organization while serving as a reminder of security concerns.

OK, so that seems to be the typical cult paranoia and grandiosity. So what? It wasn't until the last paragraph on page three that I realized something was horribly wrong.

The organization worked on the implicit assumption that Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin had the correct method, and that Sherlock Holmes's reputation had contributed much to spoiling the quality of security and intelligence organizations worldwide. Poe would have agreed. Poe would have made a valuable addition to the news service's evaluations teams, and he would have found the circumstances agreeable.

Well, there's a literary person most people have heard of but few have read and a fictional character that is supposedly superior to Holmes. Whatever the merits of the "Dupin is better than Holmes" case, these are not either or situations. The process of cultural development is both iterative and additive. Dupin came first and grappled with issues that allowed the more complex work of Holmes to enter the public imagination because elements of the work had been achieved beforehand.

Alright, a degree of name-dropping is par for the course that is claiming to be tracking down terrorists. What's next?



No excess of humility here. Just your typical mad scientist plot but with far less accessible language. At least he didn't name-drop Caesar's referring to himself in the third person.

The relevance of Poe becomes even greater as the assertion is made that he was a member of the Cincinnatus Society and that it was an intelligence organization. Gee, that is not something ordinary people would know and certainly not something historians of the American Revolution would agree with. Likewise, claiming the Marquis de Lafayette was a member of the organization might have been a bit much.

Morse lived 1791-1872. The Marquis de Lafayette lived 1757-1834. While it might have been possible for the two to meet and work together, the only practical time for that to have taken place would be between 1811-1834 when they were both adults and able to travel. The trouble is that actually piecing the possible dates together is much harder because that would involve figuring out when they were in the same country, when they could have met, and if they even knew each other. It is easy to claim that their cooperation was a very well kept secret but traveling across the Atlantic ocean incognito while having somebody claim they worked with you at home during the relevant dates is a bit of a stretch.

Also, as a guy with a bit of interest in military and intelligence history, I have never heard such a thing.  Let's get back to the article.

The chairman thought of the thought which had passed through his mind as he had absorbed the briefing. "I can smell something special in this." It wasn't "smell"; he rebuked himself for falling under the influence of popularized argot. It was the cardinalities of the case, even at this early stage. "Intuition", "hunch", "smell": those were qualities to be encouraged in the cop on the beat, the detective. They should not be encouraged expressions of insight among intelligence specialists. A good intelligence officer ought to be trained in Kepler, Leibniz, Monge, Carnot, and the methods of Alexander von Humboldt's proteges at Berlin and Gottigen. A good intelligence officer ought to move in the same direction as Poe, but further and better. Greek classics, music, and physical geometry: everyone, especially the elite of public service, ought to be grounded from childhood in those fundamental disciplines.

 Remember folks, this is a guy writing about himself. He also condemns the use of simple terms which indicate a pattern has been recognized and unworthy of of intelligence specialists. This guy was a hipster before it was uncool. Also, what Astronomy, Calculus, and other mathematics have to do with Intelligence work remains unasserted.

Also funny is the claim that FEMA has something to do with security as opposed to just responding to natural disasters. I thought the FBI and state police forces did that. Oh,well, silly me.

Philby's crowd in the KGB had lined up with Khomeini and Beheshti from the beginning, working closely with British intelligence. The Tudeh Party had systematically moved into every vacuum in the administrative apparatus. The game was obvious. When Khomeini finally died, the Tudeh Party would control the apparatus. "Those idiots at State and the National Security Council" had stuck to playing between their delusions about the "Islamic fundamentalism card" and the Socialist International's Bani-Sadr option. The British must be laughing their asses off at the silly American dupes. Now, it appeared, the payoff for years of stupidity was about to come.

Err...Since when was Philby dealing with Iran? Since when did the KGB take the Islamists seriously as a proxy? Maybe, just maybe, the seizure of power by Khomeini was in response to a political opening that the very human planners in the KGB didn't spot as a problem. Whatever, this clearly isn't meant to be serious work, just ego-stroking. Let's move on.

Was there a connection to the Chicago business? On recent years' past performance, there was always some sort of connection between any two unusual atrocities occurring in the world at the same time.

Repeat after me: "Correlation is not Causation", "Correlation is not Causation", Correlation is not Causation". Better now?

Let us also assume that it is a bad idea to impute information into a case without actually having data. Assuming a person who made a bomb threat is connected to Iran or that they are highly capable before finding the bomb might be a mistake. Who are these jokers anyways? Oh.

That is the way in which the facts oft he Chicago crisis shaped up. This was the sort of problem in which the chairman had the relatively best skills, developed over decades. This was one of the situations for which he was best suited to be in charge. Instead, he was fishing with the problem from outside the command-structure, reading and tugging at the few shadows of reality accessible to him. The challenge of affecting reality through such shadow-play was delightful-as an intellectual exercise. Unhappily, there was concern in the chairman's mind that the price of failure might be a nasty one. The problem was possibly a nasty one, and included, probably, the exceptional sort of case with which those probably in charge were least equipped to deal.

Gotta love a case of good old-fashioned megalomania.

He then goes on to talk about the bomb assuming it must be some nuclear or biological weapon on the assumption they are dealing with some uniquely intelligent and capable person. Again, they haven't found the bomb, just have a note, and are guessing based on just about zilch in a situation where most bomb threats never materialize and where most bombs are small, poorly constructed, conventional devices. Assuming the guy wants to blow up Chicago might not be a warranted inference.

The most interesting thing about quarks is that they do not exist. No physicist has ever conducted an experiment in which the effect of a quark's existence occurred, and there is no basis in actual experimental physics to infer that such critters might exist.

There is another and annoying tangent on Quarks which the editor claims don't exist. Good grief. Not only are particle physics unrelated, they are beyond the reach of the public, not within the professional experience and purview of intelligence personnel, and not something worth complaining about in the article. Also, they got the physics wrong.

The real, deeper issue reflected by the promotion of the quark dogma is the fight, over approximately four centuries to date, between the physics of Johannes Kepler and that of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton.

AAARGH! Just stop!

Cauchy was an agent of Venice and Metternich, sent back into France to the purpose of attempting to destroy science under the .patronage of Orleans, the British-Metternich puppet on the throne of France at the time. Under Cauchy's influence, the leading figures of the Ecole Polytechnique were either hounded out, or their work, including the crucial work of Legendre, suppressed.

More name-dropping without context or reason. I just don't have the patience or will to fight through this drivel anymore.

Two of Cauchy's frauds which have done the most to ruin the mental capacities of mathematical physics students in subsquent times are his hoax of "limits doctrine" and the assumption of arbitrarily fine division of a linearized continuum.

Did this guy fail math forever?

There's a bit more but I'm beginning to understand how cult brain-washing works. Trying to pay attention to this garbage is requiring a lot of mental energy. How does anybody take this moron seriously?