Cerebrate's Contemplations

And Another Thing On Social Justice

And while I'm at it, on the topics of Christianity and social justice, someone want to explain to me exactly how you can reconcile coercive redistribution of income and/or property with "Thou shalt not covet" and "Thou shalt not steal"?

Granted, I'm no theologian, but while I can find plenty of endorsement for the notion of charity and giving of one's own, I appear to have missed the spiritual mandate for playing Robin Hood, either directly or by proxy via the government.  Enlighten me.

Either It Is Or It Isn't

This Slacktivist post (seen via a share on Google Reader) is really damned irritating, not least because it puts me in the awkward position of defending Glen Beck, of all people, which is moderately invidious for a social libertarian, but principally because of the delightful way in which it illustrates the mealy-mouthed two-facedness found so often in the political mind.

Specifically, (read the post first), at the point at which he switches the topic under discussion from "social justice" to "justice" by arguing from the literal meaning of the words, and that therefore all justice is social justice, and therefore, that any attack on social justice is eo ipso an attack on justice:

Justice is, by definition, social. Justice, by definition, is something that exists only between and among individuals and groups of individuals and groups of groups. One might argue that "social justice" is redundant, but one cannot oppose "social justice" without opposing justice itself.

Well, bullshit.

Quick poll: Is there anyone out there who follows politics who isn't aware that "social justice" doesn't refer to "justice" in its classical sense - i.e., the proper resolution of criminal and equity matters - but is rather, and especially in a political context, a code-word/dogwhistle for "distributive justice", i.e. "income redistribution" via social engineering and a mish-mash of other "progressive" ideas, i.e., socialism rebranded to appeal to people who like to think of themselves as just?  Even Wikipedia goes that far (third paragraph).

Now, of course, as those of you who read the original post will now point out, he does dismiss this notion with his argument from literalism:

I'm guessing that Beck would argue that he's not opposing justice per se, only "social justice" -- which he sees as a "code word" for Nazicommunism or something. But this is nonsense. Not just the slander that every Christian from the original disciples on down is a Nazicommunist, but the very idea that it's possible to speak of "justice" as distinct from "social justice."

And this is where I have the problem.  See, you can't have it both ways.  Our friends on the left - including the author, yes - make a big deal out of "dogwhistle politics" and "code words" being used on the right: "state's rights", for example, always means an appeal to "racist, and probably neo-Confederate sentiment", and "pro-life" likewise "keep the womens barefoot and pregnant", and on and on and on.  Now, sure, you can argue that, but if you do argue that, it is the worst and most arrant kind of mealy-mouthed hypocrisy to fall back on literalism when someone calls you out on a Magic Phrase That Does Not Mean What You Claim It Does, Or So They Believe.  Contrariwise, if you want to have a reasonable expectation that you'll be taken at your word and not suspected of double-talking, it would behove you to refrain from making claims that your opponents are lying in plain sight.

In short: you lie vilely.  So do they, probably, but that doesn't make it any better.

Calling Cards for the Internet Age

I've always liked the old notion of calling cards (in the "visiting card" sense, not the telephony-only cash-card sense), over and above their degenerate business-only recension, and since I'm endeavoring to be marginally more sociable these days than I used to, here, I thought it might be about time to rehabilitate the notion for the modern Internet age.

So I recently had a few boxes of these printed up:

Behold, the modern-day calling card, a.k.a., the "Where To Find Me On The Internet/In Social Media" card.  Handy for those of us who are networked all over the place, or - especially if more widely adopted - those of us who never quite manage to catch, write down, and/or subscribe to all the usernames we probably ought to at tweetups, or other 'net-centric social events.

I think I shall call it the @-card.

We Must Not Protect The Children

Read another pro-surveillance article this morning, this time at twittown, regarding the problems of anonymity, social network, and how it enables sexual predators and other Bad People (tm), and that therefore, inevitably, We Must Demand Government Regulation to Save the Children.

(Of course, it goes out of its way to excuse the parents, who you might think should bear some responsibility for keeping an eye out for their children's safety, being in loco parentis on account of being the bloody parents, belike.  But, yeah, I know we've as much chance of selling personal responsibility these days as we have of selling ice on Pluto.)

I might also add that the problem with wrapping children in a universal fluffy cotton blanket of protection, and even more so with wrapping everyone in it via government regulation, is that it produces a bunch of squalling perpetual adolescents like the Millennial Generation who completely lose their grip on reality any time it's even suggested that they might have to live with the consequences of a bad decision they made.  Not that there's much chance of selling that one, either, given the well-established pro-neonatization trend we're stuck with.

But then we get here:

If we weren’t so obsessed with our illusions of privacy, if we weren’t so protective of our boring, meaningless online activities, if we weren’t so paranoid that the moment we link anything to the government, Big Brother is going to force us into an Orwellian world of Doublethink and constant government monitoring and oppression, we could pass those laws. Those laws, and other laws like those, have been proposed – but we, the voters, won’t approve them, because our so-called "privacy" is more important to us than the lives of these children, and the countless others like them.

Well, yeah.  If that's paranoia, color me paranoid.  It's not like there's any connection between your "boring, meaningless online activities" and the rest of your actual life.  It's not like there are people on the right slavering at the thought of crawling into your bedroom for God or into the rest of your activities for the Security State.  It's not like there are people on the left slavering at the thought of pawing through your politically incorrect habits, bad lifestyle, and hatred of nature.  It's not like there are people all over the political spectrum wanting to stick their noses into your heads and call out your ideological deviance.  It's not like we recognize the chilling effect of surveillance on free speech with whistleblower and source protection laws; and, for that matter, it's not like the chilling effect of surveillance on any behavior outside the most straitjacketed conception of the norm has been documented.  It's not like identity cards are one of the first tools totalitarian regimes resort to.  It's not like there are people out there (with stalkers, abusive exes, etc., just to name the most obvious) with very good reasons to hide their identity on-line that anyone with an ounce of decency would respect.  It's not like, say, people haven't lost jobs, lost homes, or otherwise suffered because their private, legal, consensual activities were publicly outed to every goddamned bigoted meddlesome jerk in the vicinity.

It's not, in short, like ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE, EVEN IF A FEW IGNORANT AND/OR MALICIOUS JERKASSES IGNORE THIS.

Even if you could practically do everything you'd need to do to remove the already minuscule - despite what our fear-ridden, sensationalism-saturated, entirely-unable-to-make-rational-probability-calculations society tells us daily - risk, on an individual level, of something like this happening, well, then, why don't you roll the difference between living and just being alive in some flabby, mushy, eunuchoid, Demolition Man-esque parody of a healthy society into your utility calculus, consider if that's what you really want for your children, and then - if you still come down in favor of this sort of thing - stick it where the sun don't shine without a great deal of proctological assistance.

And if that makes me one of those stereotypical "dead-baby libertarians", well then, I can live with that.

Shortest English Pangram

Been going through some old notes, turned this one up:

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. (29 letters)

Anyone got a shorter one?

Empire Avenue

I'm now on it.

So here's the Obligatory Activation Code:

EAVB_XHAMTJXTAU

(Ticker: CEREB, for those who care.)

I Find Your Lack Of Faith Disturbing

So, we recently ordered some laboratory gloves suitable for working with sodium hydroxide (for the saponification process), and which I will doubtless also use for those things I occasionally do involving working with many other lovely chemicals.

Only problem is, of course, that due to quirks of the pricing process, the ones we have are solid black.  And that means I can't wear them for long without having the urge for an "I find your lack of faith... disturbing." moment.

Still, could have been worse.  The other color on offer for the kind we needed was blue, and we all know where that would have ended up.

I Haz Microsoft Tag

...of course, a tag that points to this blog, on this blog, really isn't a whole lot of use to man nor beast, but hey, got to try these things out, right?

Dear Gossips of the Web

Let me draw your attention gently to RFC 2616, Section 14.36:

The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.

What this means, in short, is that we can see where incoming links to our blog posts are coming from.  So, ladies and gentlemen, if y'all are going to play the gossip game and chat about us behind our backs, don't put a direct link to us in the locked LiveJournal post wherein you do it.  Kind of makes it obvious, don't'ch'know?

Instead, put the URL in, but don't make it a hyperlink.  As per what I've quoted above, if the reader has to copy and paste it into the address bar of the browser to go there, then the referrer won't show up in my logs, and I'll never know.

I mean, I personally don't give a damn what you say about me behind my back, but if you're going to do it, at least have the goodness to do it right.

Helpfully,

Me

A Statist By Any Other Name

(Proximately inspired by a post and the inspired controversy concerning what, exactly, is a Nazi.  Ah, history hurts, don't'ch'know?)

You know, it really doesn't matter what you call them.

Fascists. Communists. Socialists. Plain old Dictators or Autocrats. Third-Way-ers. Social Conservatives.  Corporatists.  Liberals. Progressives. Even Moderates.

Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a jackboot by any other name still stomps as hard.  A busybody's a busybody, a thug's a thug, a statist's a statist, a collectivist's a collectivist, a Utopian's a Utopian, a hubris-ridden technocrat's a hubris-ridden technocrat; and, to sum it up, there ain't no label you can hang on a self-designatedly-superior power-tripping asshole to make him any less of one.

Frankly, damn the taxonomy of it.  Sorting out the details of exactly which and why and how these bastards want to own you slice by slice is somewhat interesting academically, but in real terms, doesn't really matter all that much.

Either you do respect the life, liberty and property of your fellow sophonts, or you don't.

Either you do believe you should get to control other people, or you don't.

Either, in short, you are a slaver, thief, and parasite, or you're not.

All else is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The Transcend Has Decided It Likes You

"Let me put it this way.  I'm a post-soph.  I've been enhanced with a couple of millennia worth of bio-nano-info-sopho-technology to the point where there's orders of magnitude difference between me, in cognition, coordination, memory and emotion, and an average baseline.  We write software of greater-than-human-mind complexity.  And so most of us have trouble relating to people who are, from our perspective, temperamental, slow-running, fuzzy-minded, blurry-souled, readily-simulatable near-automata."

"So when I, say, find you interesting, that's a notable event.  When our group consciousness, on the other hand, the weakly godlike superintelligence that is as many orders of magnitude above me, finds you interesting, that's a genuine miracle."

"And that, my dear," he concluded, "is what, when leaked, has attracted the unwanted attention of close to every intelsec outfit, infobroker, forknapper, 'quisitive, newsie, theologian, godbotherer, and freelance weirdseeker in the Associated Worlds."

   - cut from today's random idea pile

Airport International, Brian Moynahan

Now here's a blast from the past.

Judging from the worn state of my copy (published 1983), I must have acquired this around the time I started flying - which is to say, when I was a wee tyke of no more than ten, flying back and forth from the UK to the Middle East as an "unaccompanied minor" on my way to and from boarding school.

So, to a certain extent - and I admit that I read it again just recently mostly for sentimental reasons - my view of this little volume is perhaps colored by memories of those days when flying was An Exciting Adventure, as opposed to modern days, in which flying is That Pain In The Ass, No, Literally, Have You Seen The Seats They're Putting In Those Things These Days, Not To Mention The Security Procedures?

But even that aside, it's a fascinating look at aviation of the time, covering flying from airport to aircraft, the people of aviation, flight from take-off to landing, and everything that might go wrong on the way, with a wealth of detail, all richly referenced.  And a jolly good read, to boot.  Of course, quite a lot has changed in the aviation industry, even just from the passenger perspective - for a start, a lot of the airlines mentioned simply no longer exist; no more Pan Am, for example - there's an awful lot that's still relevant and interesting today.

Still, I'd love to see a Further Updated Edition to compare notes with the current era.

I'm Here (for Second Life)

Another one of my Quick'N'Dirty product range, I'm Here is a really simple application for shop owners, homeowners, landowners, and anyone else in Second Life who'd like to let their visitors advertise their presence.

In short, it's the ugly twitterbird-patterned pyramid (don't worry, if you buy one, you can reshape and retexture it all you want) shown in the picture.  All you do is rez it somewhere on your land - it learns the local parcel name and SLURL automatically - and then when a visitor clicks on it, it posts a tweet to their account (after prompting), of the following form:

"I'm visiting Arkane Systems at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Strata/224/137/51 #imheresl"

If they haven't previously authorized the I'm Here application to post to their Twitter account, it will walk them through approving it using OAuth, but otherwise, it should Just Work.  So, in a nutshell, all you have to do is rez it, and it takes care of letting your visitors advertise your place for you!

(Note: Some users may experience problems if they're behind a firewall which doesn't allow web access to high-numbered ports for the web; unfortunately, this is a limitation of the Second Life servers and we can't fix that right now.

I'm Here, while not itself open source, makes use of Babbage Linden's Twitter OAuth library, which is under GPL.  Please find more details of that here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Twitter_OAuth_Library , including where to obtain the source code for the library.)

Get your I'm here on XstreetSL here, or at the usual store location.  L$100.

The Rules of Life, Richard Templar

I bought this book in Heathrow Airport.

I have no idea why I tend to buy self-help books (or management books, another genre this applies to) in airports, apart from the broadening of standards that tends to apply when facing an eight-hour transatlantic flight, but I do; so it goes.  This one, however, I didn't read on the flight - I think I bought quite a few books that time - so here I am coming to it much later.

Unfortunately, while I have found some good and interesting reads in this genre, I can't say this is one of them.  Its greatest weakness is actually something it says itself, on page xiv: "What you will find is good old-fashioned common sense.  There is nothing here you don't already know."

Which may well be good in some contexts, but I'm afraid does not make for a terribly fascinating book.  Indeed, I think I would almost have to say verging on the platitudinous.

I bought his Rules of Work at the same time, so we'll see how that goes.  In the meantime, though, I think I'll stick with the Amoral Series.

Video Games, Television, and Agency

While I'm blogging this morning, here's a shout-out to a great post over at Mike Hoye's blarg? that deserves some more exposure.  Here's a sample:

More philosophically but also of tier-one importance to me is that video games (especially of the open-world variety) don’t just offer you a choice, but the act of playing them forces you to make choices. There’s no detached voyeurism here and you are not, either in which games you have or in actually playing them, absolved of your own agency in this process.

I’m sure that Mcluhanites or some other school of metamedia junkies have some better word for this, but medical and crime-scene dramas are just about the canonical example of what I’ve been referring to, for lack of a better term, as “agency porn”. Pretty, driven people with morals and ideals and goals on the screen, having these heavy emotional relationships the viewer can turn off with a button, doing ostensibly important work you’ll never do and periodically splattered with entrails that don’t belong to anyone you care about; pornography of a life of decision and consequences, instead of sex.

These things are consumed without the least input or interaction, uncritically. And I am 100% convinced that if you watch enough of these it skews your view of the world. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the startling rise of helicopter parenting, overprotectionism and the general pushback to letting kids have any kind of personal freedom has happened at the same time as these viscerally vivid crime dramas about child abductions and serial killers have moved towards being on TV 24/7.

But it is just a sample, albeit a choice one, of the reasons why I like it and largely agree.  Go read the whole thing.

(Although, also, I personally hold out for books, too.)

Anonyponymous, John Bemelmans Marciano

And now a rather late review of this LibraryThing Early Reviewers book, which we received back in October of last year, but which somehow spent rather too long sitting around on my desk before I got around to reading it.  But then, if you'd ever seen my desk, I'm sure you'd understand how such things could happen.

Anonyponymous is a word coined by the author, referring to those people who are both eponymous, i.e., have had their names turned into words at some point in the past, and anonymous, because we've forgotten that fact.  And this books tells some of those stories.

Well, I wouldn't call it a serious study of this linguistic phenomenon - but then, it's not trying to be - and at least from my perspective, not all of them are as forgotten as all that.  But it is a fun book to have lying around on the coffee table or in the bathroom, especially if you - or guests you expect to have - love words.

Not sure I'd have paid hardback cover price for it, though.

Port I/O under OS/2

(Note: The site where I used to have this archives is being decommissioned, so I thought I'd just post it up here - copy and paste the code to get the long lines. It's been a fair old while since I last used OS/2, but it still has a lot of sentimental value for me.

If you have occasion to use this code, I'd really like to hear about it. Please don't ask me to answer any questions about it, though, as it's been many years since I last did any OS/2 development, and I no longer have my reference books or an OS/2 machine handy to test anything on.)

A frequently asked question on OS/2 programming is if there is any way to access the IO ports from an application. One way of doing this, one of the simplest ways, is outlined below. It works by using the TESTCFG.SYS device driver, which comes with OS/2, to do the actual port I/O for you. Functions are provided to open and close the driver, and to perform IO in bytes, words, and doublewords.

// Include all needed includes for the .DLL definitions

#define INCL_DOS
#include <os2.h>

// TESTCFG driver command constants
#define CFG_CATEGORY  0x80

#define CFG_IN_IO   0x41
#define CFG_OUT_IO   0x42

#define CFG_IO_BYTE   1
#define CFG_IO_WORD   2
#define CFG_IO_DWORD  4

// TESTCFG driver structures
// IO packet structures
typedef struct _IOPKT {
  USHORT   io_address ;
  USHORT   data_width ;
  union {
   UCHAR  ucData ;
   USHORT usData ;
   ULONG  ulData ;
   } d ;
  } IOPKT ;

typedef IOPKT * PIOPKT ;

typedef struct _IODATAPKT {
  union {
   UCHAR  ucData ;
   USHORT usData ;
   ULONG  ulData ;
   } d ;
  } IODATAPKT ;

typedef IODATAPKT * PIODATAPKT ;

// exported functions
// open_ports - prepare the system I/O ports to be read/written

HFILE _Export open_ports (void)
{
 HFILE hfDevice ;
 ULONG action ;

 DosOpen ("TESTCFG$", &hfDevice, &action, 0, 0, FILE_OPEN,OPEN_ACCESS_READWRITE |
   OPEN_SHARE_DENYNONE, NULL) ;
 return hfDevice ;
}

// close_ports - close the I/O port device driver
APIRET _Export close_ports (HFILE hfDevice)
{
 return DosClose (hfDevice) ;
}

// port i/o input functions

APIRET   _Export input_byte (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, PBYTE pb)
{
 APIRET  rc ;
 ULONG  cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT  iopkt ;
 IODATAPKT iodatapkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_BYTE ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = sizeof (iodatapkt) ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_IN_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm,
      &iodatapkt, sizeof (iodatapkt), &cbdata) ;
 *pb = iodatapkt.d.ucData ;
 return rc ;
}

APIRET   _Export input_word (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, PUSHORT pw)
{
 APIRET  rc ;
 ULONG  cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT  iopkt ;
 IODATAPKT iodatapkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_WORD ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = sizeof (iodatapkt) ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_IN_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm,
      &iodatapkt, sizeof (iodatapkt), &cbdata) ;
 *pw = iodatapkt.d.usData ;
 return rc ;
}

APIRET   _Export input_dword (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, PULONG pd)
{
 APIRET  rc ;
 ULONG  cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT  iopkt ;
 IODATAPKT iodatapkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_DWORD ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = sizeof (iodatapkt) ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_IN_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm,
      &iodatapkt, sizeof (iodatapkt), &cbdata) ;
 *pd = iodatapkt.d.ulData ;
 return rc ;
}

// port i/o output functions
APIRET   _Export output_byte (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, BYTE b)
{
 APIRET rc ;
 ULONG cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT iopkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_BYTE ;
 iopkt.d.ucData = b ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = 0 ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_OUT_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm, NULL,
      0, &cbdata) ;
 return rc ;
}

APIRET   _Export output_word (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, USHORT w)
{
 APIRET rc ;
 ULONG cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT iopkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_WORD ;
 iopkt.d.usData = w ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = 0 ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_OUT_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm, NULL,
      0, &cbdata) ;
 return rc ;
}

APIRET   _Export output_dword (HFILE hfDevice, USHORT port, ULONG d)
{
 APIRET rc ;
 ULONG cbparm, cbdata ;
 IOPKT iopkt ;

 iopkt.io_address = port ;
 iopkt.data_width = CFG_IO_DWORD ;
 iopkt.d.ulData = d ;
 cbparm = sizeof (iopkt) ;
 cbdata = 0 ;
 rc = DosDevIOCtl (hfDevice, CFG_CATEGORY, CFG_OUT_IO, &iopkt, sizeof (iopkt), &cbparm, NULL,
      0, &cbdata) ;
 return rc ;
}

GURPS Vorkosigan, Genevieve Cogman

...because GURPS The Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game is just too long to fit into a post title.

Well, I've been waiting for this one for a long time.  I can tell that it's a long time, actually, since way back in the day I used my Pyramid subscription to download the playtest files for this one, and SJG hasn't made those available outside closed mailing lists for a long time.

(Somewhat Irritable Side Note To Steve Jackson Games: And if you had kept doing that, you'd have sold me a lot more books, 'cause I'd routinely download every set of playtest files you made available, and that meant I found that I wanted a whole lot more books than I thought I did just based on the title and pre-release information.  All of which, yes, I subsequently went out and bought.

The number of good books I'm probably missing out on now because the title alone doesn't make me want to take a chance on ordering them is... irritating.

Anyway, back on topic.)

It's a little hard for me to review this strictly as a gaming book, since I haven't run a game for, oh, years.  But I still do buy a fair number of sourcebooks, worldbuilding maven that I am, and so obviously I had to rush out and buy this one.  I'm not sure I've ever booklogged any of them during my time booklogging, but the Vorkosigan universe has always been one of my personal favorites, and so I couldn't resist the opportunity for a little peek behind the scenes.

Splendidly, the book does not disappoint. Granted, there's not that much new information that a really detailed study of the books couldn't give you, save in gaming statistics terms, but then, as hobbits, I like to have "books filled with things they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions".  And as a look into the Vorkosigan universe, it excels.  Combined with the illustrations - which, I note, were iterated past the original series author multiple times until she was satisfied - and the grains of insight into the next, as yet unpublished Vorkosigan novel to be gleaned, I'm absolutely more than happy with it.

Recommended.

The World Is A Mess, And I Just Need To Rule It

Sometimes, when you read some farrago of ignorance like the comments on this article concerning the effects of the Chilean earthquake on the Earth's rotation, or contemplate the apparent 25% of parents who believe vaccinations cause autism (and the 12% who refuse them on this basis) out of a mixture of bad science, meaningless celebrity endorsements, and total inability to compute probabilities, it is hard to stick to one's principles.

Yes, I admit it.  I'm a bad libertarian.  Sometimes I have felt the urge to join the liberals, what sometimes seems to be most of the conservatives, and all the rest of the plurality of slaving bastards out there in declaring that, well, these morons don't deserve their autonomy/agency/free will.  It's time to become all meddlesome.  "Stay between the lines.  Don't think for yourself¹, and if you do, keep your mouth shut, and never, ever put it into practice.  Do what your betters tell you.  Believe what you're told is right by the right people.  Obedience is virtue.  Mindlessness is pretty good, too, if best covered up by an obsession with trivia."

(Of course, in those moments, I am still fundamentally intellectually arrogant enough to cast myself as the Wise Technocrat doing the ordering of the world - hence my choice of the Dr. Horrible quotation as the title of this piece - rather than one of the great mass of people subsuming their selfhood in the Collective Will, as Guided By and Made Manifest In the Great Leader, the Anointed Expert, the Policy Wonk, the Word of God, Our Elected Representatives Who Art In Congress, and/or President Hope'n'Change, and thus being made blessedly free of the burden of independent thought and self-responsibility.

I blame a quaint attachment to self-determination.  Or false consciousness.  No, wait, the Illusion of Self-Awareness!

Or, I suppose, less sarcastically, the fundamental unimpressiveness, at least to me, of everyone who's ever tried to cast themselves for the part.)

It's all a ridiculous fantasy, of course.  I know as well as everyone should all the theoretical reasons why it can't work, from the Calculation Problem through Mistake Magnification and Values Dissonance, and the demonstrable pragmatic reasons why it hasn't worked, from a mere litany of ever-failing programs, economic failures and general misery to the mountains of corpses left behind every time some stalwart Utopian has got hold of enough unchecked power to put his ideas into practice, and for that matter the principled reasons why it shouldn't even be attempted, starting with the beyond-even-my-grasp presumption and hubris that one is so all-fired wise as to rule everyone for their own good, and their own notions of what their good is be damned.

But sometimes... it sure is tempting.

1. Yes, yes, some of these folk do occasionally talk about the virtues of free thought, dissent, "speaking truth to power", etc., etc.  Given the violence of the screaming tantrum that they all throw the moment someone exercises the faculty and wanders off the reservation with it, I am comfortable in asserting that they're all lying.  Even if they're lying to themselves about that.

Presentation HUD

New!  For Second Life, and more specifically for Viewer 2.0 now I can take advantage of the new shared media feature, here's my quick-and-dirty "Presentation HUD".

While wearing this HUD, simply type "/48 <url>", i.e., "/48 http://www.google.com/"and it will automatically rez a web browser in front of you, enabling you to give ad-hoc presentations, look things up, or show videos, pictures, and other web content to your in-world friends.  Here's a quick example showing my blog:

 
And since this is HTML-on-a-prim, you can browse freely, and use the regular back/forward/zoom controls.

If you right-click on the rezzed browser and "Touch" it, you get a menu of options.  By default, only the owner of the browser is able to use the browser controls and interact with the web page (thus, suitable for presentations), but to enable everyone to browse and interact, you can use the "All" option; "OwnerOnly" sets it back.  The "Reset" option forcibly resets the browser to the home page you specified on the /48 line; and, finally, the "Close" option de-rezzes the browser when you're done.

NOTE: Note that it do absolutely no validation on the URL you specify; I didn't want to limit what the Shared Media feature might handle in future, but this does mean if you typo the URL, you'll need to delete the browser and make a new one.

And, obviously, you need script and rez permissions for wherever you are for this to work at all.

Get it on XstreetSL here or from the usual bat-vendor at the usual bat-location!

L$ 50.

The First Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Simple, isn't it?

Congress shall make no law.

You will note, I trust, that it makes no mention of whose or what's freedom of speech might be abridged.  That's a big ol' universal, right there.  It doesn't mention citizens, or residents, or aliens, or humans, or monkeys, or dogs, or big blocks of cheese.  It doesn't mention corporations, non-profits, churches, bands, guilds, mobs, mediacorps, journalists, neighborhood associations, or protesters.  It says not one damn thing concerning what the speech is to be about, whether it's enlightened technocratic discourse, populist ranting, manipulative advertising, or shooting the shit at the watercooler about last night's "American Idol".

It says "Congress shall make no law."

Which makes all of the profoundly tedious bloviations going around the Internet concerning political speech versus regular speech, and corporations versus non-profits, and mediacorps versus regular corporations, and groups of people versus individual people, and so on and so forth until we're all thoroughly nauseated a complete and utter waste of everyone's time, because the Constitution, the fundamental law of the land, is (a) speaker-neutral, (b) content-neutral, and (c) entirely damn clear.

Congress.  Shall.  Make.  No.  Law.

Now, granted, while I like it this way, goodness knows there's a lot of statolatrous buggers out there who don't.  To those on the Right, I say - well, actually, I just say "Arse to the lot of ye!", since once you start ignoring the plain words of the Constitution you've wandered off any conservative reservation either I or the definition of the word would care to acknowledge.

To those on the Left, I'll just say that while I acknowledge y'all are pretty much philosophically down with amending or weaseling around the Constitution to make it better fit your version of How Things Ought To Be, considering the amount of pious yammering y'all have indulged in over the last decade about the Gross Impropriety of Amending the Constitution to Take Rights Away - well, the hypocrisy, are you not soaking in it?

Blaming the Victim

...is not always incorrect.

All that being a victim means is, to cut it down to the core, that something bad happened to you. As always, I must here cite the ObMerriamWebster:

victim (n.):

1 : a living being sacrificed to a deity or in the performance of a religious rite

2 : one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent : one that is injured, destroyed, or sacrificed under any of various conditions : one that is subjected to oppression, hardship, or mistreatment : one that is tricked or duped

What it is not, however, is a grant of virtue, infallibility, or immunity from criticism.

Some people are victimized by others.  Some people fall victim to circumstances.  And some people walk in front of the bus, play on the railroad tracks, sign the contract unread, wave that flag in front of the bull, tease the junkyard dog, guess the numbers instead of doing the calculations, get blind drunk in the bad part of town, use the hairdryer in the bath, insult the muscleboy's mother, or spit into the wind.

Some of these people realize that they screwed up shortly thereafter.  As for the rest of them, we are doing neither them nor society in general a service by refusing to let these morons be called morons.

Sex, Gender and Orientation

I have come to the conclusion - based on the various piles of material I have collected on the three topics named above as background research for worldbuilding and conlanging purposes - that what really drives me nuts about the entire non-heteronormative set is the bloody awful ontology.  I mean, good grief, people, 945 terms...

...in an almost certainly incomplete list...

...with culture-local significance included, and words which are considered only specific to some things by some (not all) people ("Please be aware of the cultural significance of a term before you use it. Also, not all terms can be applied to all three of sex, gender, and orientation - 'intersex,' for example, is considered by some intersex people to be a medical condition, not an identity term. Please be sensitive of that too. :)"), oh, and mixing in cultural aspects of identity with gender, too, unless "working class" and "activist" are genders now...

...which can be combined in arbitrary ways ("There are exactly 945 options here, and a total of 2.9740×10²⁸⁴ or 297 trenovemgintillion possible combinations, more than there are elementary particles in the universe.")...

...which also, per the author of this form, should not be placed into even the loose categories they're in now ("Although I really wanted the words to stand for themselves, without tainting them by splitting them up, with 945 options that's not really plausible. So I have categorized them into groups. Like any other classification system, this is completely arbitrary.")...

...and which have no clear communicable definitions anyway ("I will not attempt to define all these terms, since no English words could do any of them justice. The exact meaning of each one is undefinable, and there probably isn't an exact meaning anyway, since some of these even differ among people. Similarly, I've included a lot of words that could be considered synonyms; the connotations of each term, however, are slightly different, and some people may identify with one and not another.")...

...and, just to top it off, per another article (otherwise quite helpful due to its willingness to define things, something that the author apologizes for), entirely subjective in applicability ("Eventually you must realize that the only thing you can rely on is that if you believe you are something, you are.").

Now, I'm a mad-dog libertarian, and thus both (a) in favor of morphological freedom, and (b) constitutionally disinclined to believe that anyone else's choices in re gender presentation and/or sexuality are any of my god-damned business, unless I'm actually involved in them; and really, I'm enough of a cosmopolitan to grasp that accepting compliments in the spirit in which they were meant and declining politely any offers not to my taste covers virtually everything:

But one thing I do care about, as a tidy-minded chap, is ontology.  And this ontology, folks, not to put too fine a point on it, is an unqualified bloody disaster.  It is as clear as obsidian, as enlightening as an event horizon, and as useful as a mathom.  In linguistic terms, it is as useful for communication as a 20-year veteran of the State Department or a PR flack specializing in spin control.

Now, I'm not asking for the Betan earring code here, although it would be nice.  But for the love of sanity, don't we as a society spend enough on academic departments and professorships in "gender studies" and "queer theory" that we can expect something better than this dog's breakfast by way of terminology?

Where, oh where, is the Linnaeus of gender?

Tax Reform

It is that time of year again at which I must again advocate that most important of tax reforms: the abolition of withholding of income tax, so that everyone, not merely the self-employed, must go through the delightful procedure of computing their total gross income, and then in turn computing from that figure exactly how much of it the IRS – and their local state Department of Revenue – demands, and then finally write the check and mail it off to them.

And having done that, I must also advocate the abolition of sales taxes and other one-slice-at-a-time forms of taxation, and that the collection of those funds be rolled into the income tax, too, or at least into the same annual return.

After all, an informed population is supposedly a Good Thing for democracy, so what objection could anyone have to eliminating the obfuscatory salami tactics that make the average chap distinctly unclear as to how white he’s being bled?

First Lines

So, via Elizabeth Bear’s LJ, the First Lines Meme.  As she says, “The idea here is to post the first lines from various WIPs, because this will magically cause them to become finished works. Um. Through incantation do we command the demon to appear.”

Well, it would be nice.  I’ve never been satisfied enough with the progress of any of my notional works-in-progress to actually, you know, finish one yet.  But I do have three ideas kicking around in my head, albeit untitled, at the moment, so here are some first lines in the hope the magic will work for me:

I.: “Valuematic Vending, how may I direct your call?”

II.: “So, once again,” the customs supervisor said, “you wish to offload 288 million suspended infugee mind-states whose last memories are having their heads cut off by flying hunter robots?”

III.: The Arrival was heralded, as the technology of relativistic starflight makes inevitable, by a new star in the sky, blue-white and baleful; fortunately, this being a modern and rational age on the planet below, no new religions were founded around this celestial oddity, and its appearance merely resulted in a socially acceptable level of rioting and apocalypse-cultism.

…and on we go.

Enabling .CHM Help Files on Network Drives

Security updates to Windows XP and to Windows 2003, as well as the default configuration of Windows Vista, prevent HTML Help (.chm) files from running from network shares. While this is a useful security precaution in general, in practice - for those of us with either utility software running from the intranet or e-books in .chm format - it's also bloody hindering awkward.

This ability can be restored by adding the following registry information (.reg file format) to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001
"EnableFrameNavigationInSafeMode"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
"MaxAllowedZone"=dword:00000001

This requires that the location of the .chm files is recognized by Windows as part of the Intranet Zone, which may need to be configured separately. While it is possible to permit .chm files to run from other security zones by changing the value of MaxAllowedZone, I for one strongly recommend that you NEVER DO THIS. EVER. I MEAN IT.

(And if you do, you acknowledge that I told you not to.)

Foreigner, C. J. Cherryh

I am so very behind on my booklogging.  It’s not quite so bad as it might seem, looking at the dates, since over the end of December and half of January I also had what amounted to a serious reading-speed slump, so I just plain haven’t been getting through them as fast as I might like, but still, the pile’s back up to nine, and that’s more than I really want to see on there.

This also means that it’s taken long enough for me to get around to some bits of my booklogging, like this one, that I’ve forgotten a lot of what I wanted to say about it, but I shall nonetheless try.  As you may recall from my comments on the Chanur series, way way back when I first started booklogging, the reason I like Cherryh so much is her ability to realize alien societies so well, both in making them alien, and in showing that alienness to us, the presumably human reader, in a way that we can come to understand over the course of the book.

The alien culture in this book, the atevi, upon whose planet the human ancestors of our protagonist were inadvertently deposited by an superluminal accident, is indeed excellently realized, and both it and the plot (although somewhat slow to start, it rapidly develops once it gets going) are most rewarding to examine for the thoughtful reader.

Recommended, therefore, for said thoughtful readers!  And worldbuilding/xenoculture mavens in general, too; this is how it’s done, and it’s how it’s done right.  I look forward very much to the next nine books in the series.

Death Is A Preferable Alternative To Communism

Liberty Prime said it first.  Who am I to disagree?

And seeing as I don’t disagree, here’s the T-shirt.

Supreme Court Decision

What does "Citizens United" mean to us in practice? Why, that foreign corporations will be able to influence, persuade, and lobby the public directly, instead of the dirty underhanded foreigner tricks - say, slipping an envelope full of used hundreds under the door of a Senate toilet stall - that they use now. We should applaud. That's the American way.

The Underappreciated Filibuster

Well, I'm seeing a lot of complaints these days about the filibuster, and the difficulties of passing a bill despite a 59-41 majority. Which seems to be a tad ridiculous, in the popular opinion.

(Not just yours, Kenn, although yours are the most recent I've seen - and come with the handy geometric-and-starting-to-look-exponential graph.)

Well, I would like to take a moment to sing the praises of this underappreciated political maneuver. Quite apart from a personal belief that 59% is a crappy basis to get all mandatial over, it is doing very well at performing the Senate's intended function of slowing populist wackiness down to a crawl.

And, hey, as long as both sides of the aisle are dominated by lunatics, thugs and procurers, anything which both defeats the attempts of *either* of them to act substantively, and which *neither* of them are willing to abolish for fear of the other... well, then, that's just the greatest thing since sliced bread.