Happy Halloween!

A Red Angry Squid-Like Creature Monster Holds Up A Wooden Board In Its Tentacles With "Happy Halloween" Written In Orange On it

If you want candy, don’t come to our house tonight — we’re following the recommendations of the Teal Pumpkin Project and are handing out glowsticks, instead. Not only do we not have to worry about child allergies, but we won’t have a house full of tempting candy. It’s also cheap: glow stick bracelets are less then ten cents each, so we’ll give out a bunch.

Otherwise, we’re celebrating by staying home and maybe getting a scary movie on netflix.

P.S. Daylight savings time ends tonight, so don’t forget to set your clocks back.

Need entertaining podcast recommendations

nightvale

I’ve been increasing my daily penance of exercise by a considerable amount, and am now spending an hour or more a day making my brain send electrical impulses to large muscle groups generating somewhat rhythmic motions. This is not fun. I’m only doing it because the technology has not yet arrived to allow me to discard the decrepit husk of flesh supporting me, and place my brain in a vat with a nerve bundle connected directly to the internet. So it goes.

Anyway, what I’ve been doing to make it tolerable is hook my auditory nerve, via a sensory transduction interface made of meat, to a device that feeds my brain podcasts, downloaded off the internet. I know, you peons who have been chained to long commutes in a vehicle are already totally familiar with this medium, but my commute is about one minute long, and involves crossing the street. So until now I haven’t had much opportunity to soak in soundwaves long enough to get past the introductory title, but that’s changed.

Give me ideas! I’ve been listening to Welcome to Night Vale, which is nice, because here in Minnesota we’ve long been habituated to this form of entertainment by Prairie Home Companion, but this is like PHC as written by HP Lovecraft with a heart transplant from a gay socialist.

Need more. Light, weird, entertaining is best — heavy, too distracting stuff might get me run over by the massive farm equipment on our roads. Also, soon enough I’ll be bundled in layers and freezing in icy blizzards while walking, so it’s got to be amusing enough to motivate me to brave the winters.

Thunderf00t keeps proving me wrong

I was so, so, so wrong to invite him to blog here. His latest escapade: a woman wrote a letter to his employer complaining about his assholishness, trying to get him fired*, and so he doxxed her and sent his legions of haters to ruin her business with bad reviews. And of course the scum at 8chan are excited and see blood in the water and are cheering on attempts to drive her to suicide.

These are truly terrible, awful, vile people. I’ll never forgive myself for inviting him to join us at a network that’s the antithesis of everything he stands for.

The people who have been targeted by 8chan and Thunderf00t are struggling to keep their business afloat, and have created a fundanything page to raise money, and so far they haven’t even come close to what the thundering asshole gets for every video he makes. Yeah, people suck.

*This was a bad move for a number of reasons. 1) it was going to have no effect (I speak from experience) and should have no effect, 2) his employers certainly already know that he’s an asshole, and have no problem with it, and 3) it gave him an excuse to be openly vindictive.

So someone finally actually read Walden

Never having been able to make it through the book myself, I have to admire Kathryn Schulz, who read the whole thing, and thinks Henry David Thoreau was a wanker. Like Ayn Rand, it’s a mystery how such an obnoxious thinker became so revered.

Thoreau went to Walden, he tells us, “to learn what are the gross necessaries of life”: whatever is so essential to survival “that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it.” Put differently, he wanted to try what we would today call subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” Tucked into that sentence is a strange distinction; apparently, some of the things we experience while alive count as life while others do not. In “Walden,” Thoreau made it his business to distinguish between them.

As it turns out, very little counted as life for Thoreau. Food, drink, friends, family, community, tradition, most work, most education, most conversation: all this he dismissed as outside the real business of living. Although Thoreau also found no place in life for organized religion, the criteria by which he drew such distinctions were, at base, religious. A dualist all the way down, he divided himself into soul and body, and never could accept the latter. “I love any other piece of nature, almost, better,” he confided to his journal. The physical realities of being human appalled him. “The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking,” he wrote in “Walden.” Only by denying such appetites could he feel that he was tending adequately to his soul.

Schulz does explain why he’s popular. His nature writing, when not soured with his philosophy, is excellent, and he appeals to something in the American psyche.

Although Thoreau is often regarded as a kind of cross between Emerson, John Muir, and William Lloyd Garrison, the man who emerges in “Walden” is far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand: suspicious of government, fanatical about individualism, egotistical, élitist, convinced that other people lead pathetic lives yet categorically opposed to helping them. It is not despite but because of these qualities that Thoreau makes such a convenient national hero.

Ah. He was a primordial Republican.

It was all China’s fault

If you noticed some really annoying slowdowns here on FtB over the last few days, we were being effectively ddos’ed by China. Not because we were a threat, but apparently because a Chinese search engine was being a bit overzealous and repetitive in slurping up links.

This situation has been corrected thanks to the efforts of our clever technical person, Alex. All hail Alex!

Never get into a land war in Asia…

…or argue with dudebros on Twitter. I made that mistake yesterday.

First problem: they were arguing with me about plagiarism. It’s not so bad, they said.

Have you ever noticed that they tend to focus on trivial interpretations of real problems? They all think that they’re like little cut-rate Malcolm Gladwells, the twerps, and that picking some bit of common knowledge and taking a counter-intuitive perspective makes them brilliant. No, it doesn’t. Most often it makes them wrong.

So they’re yammering at me that it isn’t even a crime — it’s not stealing, because the original creator of the idea hasn’t lost anything, so why should anyone complain about it? Except, of course, that the creator has had credit taken from them, and try telling a writer that they lose nothing if someone else copies their work without attribution. But hey, they were on a roll.

Then, predictable as clockwork, the second problem: stereotyping. You know who else plagiarizes a lot? Asians! Their culture encourages copying. Then, the trump card, gloriously played with a triumphant smirk: When I say plagiarism is bad, I’m accusing all Asians of theft.

Yeah. All Asia. All Asian culture thinks plagiarism is just fine.

asia

That’s where I threw up my hands and blocked them all. There is stupid, and there is impenetrable ignorance.

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His underwear carried dark portents

I just liked that line, from this story about Jim Bakker claiming his choice of underwear color was a sign from his god. Wait, Jim Bakker is still alive, and still working as a televangelist? That’s more a portent than his underwear, I fear.

He was claiming that because his underwear was black, the world was going to end in September. It is now October, of course, so it’s obvious that his underwear is a false prophet, and must die.

There seems to be a lot of end-of-the-world nonsense going around. Last month’s eclipse was also supposed to be a portent of apocalypse. It fizzled. Now some guy is claiming the world is going to end tomorrow.

I’m not worried yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow what color underwear I’m wearing, and then maybe it will be time to panic.

Just doing my part

A clinic in Virginia took a pro-active stance against the anti-choicers preaching and sermonizing outside: they tried to drown them out with a recording over a loudspeaker. I don’t actually approve of that tactic — the first consideration ought to be welcoming patients, and compounding cacophony isn’t helpful. Interestingly, though, their choice of a recording was the audiobook of The Happy Atheist, as read by the resonant Aron Ra.

“We are apes and the descendants of apes,” the recording of Meyers’ book “The Happy Atheist” declared. “We’re the descendents of rat-like primates, who were the children of reptiles, who were the spawn of amphibians, who were the terrestrial progeny of fish, who came from worms, who were assembled from single-cell microorganisms, who were the products of chemistry.”

“Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock and he didn’t care about you—he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics,” it continued. “You aren’t here because of grand design, but because of chance, contingency and selection.”

Not only was Aron Ra given no credit, they also…misspelled my name. I guess I should learn to expect that. When I got married, I suggested that I adopt my wife’s name instead, but she squelched that. No one would ever misspell “Gjerness”, would they?

But actually, much as I appreciate the attention and the anger of Christians, don’t blare my words at women just looking for care. It’s not appropriate and is counterproductive.