Malaugmented reality

Disturbing.

Unfortunately, you don’t need fancy computers and high tech 5-senses interfaces to get this effect, where your reality is distorted by filters in your head. This is the human condition. We do it all the time.

Here’s an example: a comic book used to manipulate the wetware in kids’ brains to make them think gay people are wicked.

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We grow up with these little modules planted in our skulls by well-meaning families and friends who also have them in their heads, and it isn’t a little box mounted on our necks that we can conveniently rip out to perceive “reality”. There ain’t no such thing possible — it’s implicit in the modeling of the world we see around us, because we don’t accurately “see” the world, we build it. Everyone is walking around in a virtual reality all the time, and what matters is how well it reflects an underlying substrate of matter and energy, how well it allows us to interact with our fellow avatars, and how much damage and how much benefit we provide to each other. This is true not just for them, fellow liberal/progressive secular humanists, but for us.

The people who made that anti-gay comic are using a version of virtual reality that creates enemies all around them, and justifies wrecking their lives. It’s also kind of crude and generates a blocky, black & white universe that doesn’t have much nuance or fine detail.

How’s yours doing?

Cutting edge information on atheism!

I really regret having to miss this conference going on in San Antonio this weekend: The Gods of Atheism.

Wait, what?

It’s put on by the Fullness of Truth Catholic evangelization ministries.

Yeah, they’d be the experts in the “Gods of Atheism”, I guess.

The conference features some atheist superstars:

  • Fr. Mitchell Pacwa, S.J. Who? He’s some guy with a lot of training in theology.

  • Dr. Marcellino D’Ambrosio. Who? He used to play bass in some rock bands in his youth, and now has a Ph.D. in historical theology.

  • Sr. Miriam James Heidland. Who? She used to play volleyball. Now she’s a nun.

  • Adam Blai. Who? An auxiliary member of the International Association of Exorcists. Enough said.

Perhaps you want to see the schedule?

I really could use information on Avoiding Demonic Attacks and Staying Spiritually Safe, and I’m curious to find out what the Most Dangerous Atheism of All might be. And, well, it would be nice to find out who the Gods of Atheism are, ’cause I’ve been failing in my duties to them, apparently.

It’s really too bad I have to miss out on so much information about atheism, but even if I were able, I couldn’t go. It’s sold out.

So many students…

Another portent of doom: the students are arriving. I’m also at the Lake Itasca Biological Station for our annual Bridge To Biology program, in which a fraction of our incoming new students are taken out into the woods for a weekend of brainwashing indoctrination fun and education and cohort building activities. We have so many new biology students that they can stretch all the way across the mighty Mississippi.

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We also have some returning students acting as peer mentors/wranglers.

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Obviously very dangerous. Don’t cross them.

The biggest crime in America: unregulated capitalism

Our priorities are all screwed up. The wrong people are in jail.

In dollar terms, what group of Americans steals the most from their fellow citizens each year?

The answer might surprise you: It’s employers, many of whom are committing what’s known as wage theft. It’s not just about underpaying workers. They’re not paying workers what they’re legally owed for the labor they put in.

It takes different forms: not paying workers the federal, state, or local minimum wage; not paying them overtime; or just monkeying around with job titles to avoid regulations.

No one knows exactly how big a problem wage theft is, but in 2012 federal and state agencies recovered $933 million for victims of wage theft. By comparison, all the property taken in all the robberies of all types in 2012, solved or unsolved, amounted to a little under $341 million.

One of the nice things about stealing that much money is that you can buy off people to cover your criminality. Also, we have these ideological fanatics — Libertarians and Republicans and Conservatives — who will leap to the defense of the Invisible Hand’s right to pick pockets.

Friday Cephalopod: This Pokemon Go stuff is getting out of hand

I mean, really. This team of ‘scientists’ hijacked a valuable research submersible, strapped their gadget to it, and sent it cruising to a depth of 900 meters in the Pacific Ocean just to catch this goofy-looking purple thing.

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Listen to these people…buncha giggly teenagers.

I’m a bit annoyed that they went to all this trouble to find it, and then they apparently were all out of pokeballs.

It’s actually a movie prophesying our future under Trump

We’re getting yet another dumb-as-dirt Christian movie: Torchbearer. It’s made by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s brand new campaign advisor, and it ‘stars’ Phil Robertson, the Talibanesque asshole who is best known for selling duck calls and appearing in a reality TV show. How bad is it? You may not want to watch the trailer.

Firstly, it visually and emotionally assaults the viewer by lingering on gruesome images of violence and death, using reenactments and animation as well as the most graphic historical footage from Auschwitz and more recent images of victims of ISIS and Boko Haram being beaten, shot and burned to death. I would call the movie’s infliction of trauma gratuitous, but it seems a very purposeful act meant to provoke and inflame and generate a rage to war.

This is what this country has come to. And it’s so stupid: Robertson is an ignorant nobody, they’ve just concatenated a collection of horrible, unrelated images, and claimed that only being as fanatical about your fanatical Christianity as this fanatic will save you from those other fanatics. Meanwhile, they obliviously show prolonged scenes of Catholic and Lutheran Nazis committing atrocities under the rule of the Catholic Hitler, while blaming their actions on atheists.

I disapprove

Statues of a naked Donald Trump have appeared in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City. I don’t understand why.

They are intended to demean and belittle the guy, I understand that. But does anyone think they’ll be effective? At all? Does anyone think they’re even the slightest bit accurate? Caricature should have a substantive point of some sort — political cartoons, for instance, will exaggerate features to make the subject instantly recognizable, but then the idea is that the caricature is doing something, saying something to illustrate an idea. These statues are just standing there inert, looking unpleasant. It’s content-free mockery.

I have to switch it around. If a statue of a naked Hillary Clinton were erected somewhere, would anyone find it to be a cogent argument?

I’ve personally been the subject of a lot of this sort of thing: I’m regularly sent photoshops, or scrawled, poorly done cartoons, that simply illustrate me as short, fat, and ugly. I don’t see the purpose; if the creators think it stings, I actually do know exactly what I look like, and mainly what I see is that they had to work to make me look uglier, and that what’s most ugly are the minds of the people who think these kinds of garbage portrayals are persuasive or in any way potent.

Wonderful news about our criminal justice system

NO MORE PRIVATE PRISONS.

The Department of Justice will stop contracting with private prisons, the department announced Thursday morning. The decision comes a week after the DOJ inspector general released a damning report on the safety, security, and oversight of private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.

Now if we could just end the drug “war” and demilitarize the police…

The ugly id of billionaires

You called me a mean name. You banned me. You don’t like me. You don’t love me.

It’s striking how often the bitter complaints of unwarrantedly rich fucks like Peter Thiel are little more than the plaintive whines of a neglected toddler…a toddler with gobs of money and lawyers who want to appease him with vindictiveness.

Peter Thiel, I don’t love you, I don’t like you, and my vocabulary is too feeble to come up with the mean name you deserve. You’re a petty, nasty, poisonous little man, lacking in the strength and confidence to cope with dissent in any way other than by flailing about with lawsuits. May your every drink, no matter how costly, taste of gall, and your fine meals be flavored with wormwood; may your silk sheets have the texture of slime. I hope you live a long life of fruitless floundering for love, and some distant day die alone, attended only by a calculating battery of lawyers.