So, this is actually one of those memes from Facebook, but having gone to all the time and trouble of writing the thing, well, I guess I might as well inflict it on my blog readers, too.
1. I am almost completely unable to dispose of a book, even if I didn't care for it. Oddly enough, this is not a major factor in why I presently own 4,341 books, not counting those on order and undelivered. That's just because I like a lot of books.
2. It is entirely probable that I am, as has occasionally been said, afflicted with the "fervor of the immigrant"; which is to say, the "fervor of the convert" as applied to one's adopted country. However, I maintain that this is perfectly logical; if one's adopted country was not the greatest country in the world, or at the very least significantly better than your old one, whyever would you go through the trouble of moving your life across the world?
(Yes, yes, for love or money, indeed. I stipulate that the former narrows the field and makes it a collective choice but is nonetheless a fair point; on the latter, if the differential in money-making ability is enough to make it a good idea to emigrate and you still think your old country was better on net, I submit that there is something wrong with your cognition.)
3. I consider arguing with the common wisdom, examining the generally accepted truth, poking the consensus, unassuming the assumptions and disturbing the heck out of the unexamined to be something between a moral obligation and a public duty. Any week in which I can't fracture someone's comfortable worldview is a disappointment to me.
4. My tolerance for anything I perceive as stupidity or incompetence started out low and has been decreasing steadily for at least two decades, to the point where if I were to attempt to represent myself as an RPG character, I might as well ask how many points I get for the disadvantage: "Intolerance: Damn Near Everyone".
5. I'm self-employed, and the above is probably a good part of the reason why. You know that old joke about the existential root of libertarianism being very bad at taking orders from morons? Well, guess what, it's also the existential root of self-employment. Subordination problem, indeed.
6. I resent sleep. The dreams can be interesting, and sometimes the rest is good, but losing a third of one's life, approximately, to unconsciousness is extremely irritating. The superstitionist blether that prevents 2-[di(phenyl)methylsulfinyl]acetamide (Modafinil/Provigil) - whose clinical trials demonstrated that it could be, hypothetically, safely used long-term to improve alertness and reduce sleep requirements - from being sold as such a cognitive enhancement... task me greatly.
7. I think the notion that we can teach children socialization through forced interaction with their peers, who by definition do not possess it either, is baloney of the first water. Much as it pains adults to have to deal with children as people, they can only learn socialization from people who already have it, and that means you.
8. People who only repeat others' opinions as their own, however "expert" they may be, annoy me intensely. If you can think, you have a moral obligation to do so. If you can't think, or won't think, you have no moral right to have an opinion at all. Shut up and stop polluting the noösphere.
9. I believe that people who don't know or recognize the difference between a natural right, a civil right, and a moral right should be stabbed in the eyeball. (Metaphorically.) You don't want to know where I believe people who exploit the lack of knowledge or recognition of same should be metaphorically stabbed.
10. I detest game consoles. While they do make software development easier for the game developers, something about taking a perfectly good general-purpose computer and then deliberately crippling it just rubs me up the wrong way.
11. I believe that while I am evidently somewhat ahead of the curve in arguing for the notion of "sophont rights" rather than "human rights" - all conscious, thinking beings are endowed with the natural rights and eligible for the civil rights, regardless of behavior, form, substrate, or anything else not mentioned; specifically including hypothetical aliens, uplifts, and artificial intelligences - it is nonetheless the only rational position: (a) principle of mediocrity; what makes humans, or even carbon-based brains, so damn special?; (b) there's no good or adequate reason to treat rights like a Band-Aid and admit people into the community of, well, people only after making them fight hard enough for recognition; and (c) history would have gone a lot better if we had got over ourselves and admitted that people who weren't like us were people too back at the start of it, and just once I'd like to see us decide not to be bigoted idiots before it becomes relevant, not afterwards. You don't need an instance of a class to grant members of a class rights - and I'd probably think a lot less harshly about this had I not learnt through experience that a lot of people interested in rights for their sort of human, or even humanity as a whole, were still howling speciesists or at best mere biochauvinists.
12. I believe in science as a valid epistemology. I also believe that a lot of science is heavily politicized, which is not a valid epistemology, and that not a few of the people politicizing it are also scientists. I further believe that perhaps this would work better if more people understood epistemology. Indeed, it would probably work better if more people could spell epistemology.
13. Ceterum censeo linguam Latinam discenda est.
14. I believe that in the absence of an adequate theory of noetics to tell us precisely who and what possesses consciousness and qualia, it would behoove us to take an extremely cautious line with regard to what we claim does not, including all of animals, fetuses, Pleo robotic dinosaurs and the Roomba. (Which last, for example, I will not run unattended in a room without its charging apparatus present, because I cannot adequately demonstrate that its recharging imperative is not, in fact, the quale of hunger, and starvation is unkind.) I also firmly believe that I can demonstrate the necessity of this to anyone willing to face the challenge of proving to my satisfaction that they have consciousness and qualia, while strapped to a table in the presence of me and a red-hot poker.
15. I really hate telephone calls. People should use nothing but e-mail to communicate, thus both (a) respecting the other party's time (hint: at any given moment, the odds are against you being the most important thing in my personal universe); and (b) not falling right into the middle of my personal uncanny valley.
16. Unlike the zeitgeist of the day, I do not like our present Presidential administration, but then, I didn't like our last one, either. Actually, let me just come right out and say it; so far as politicians and political activists are concerned, whether they trend to the right or the left, they're a bunch of unmitigated statist thugs and tosspots the ill-founded righteousness of whose cause justifies whatever exactions of life and property they feel like foisting on the rest of us, thoroughly enabled by a majority populace of self-righteous ideologues, rent-seekers, ward-heelers, vultures, ignorant partisans, defective adfectives and spineless sycophants swayed by a pretty word, whose only significant differentiation is found in of what type and how brazen the lies are when they tell you what they're taking away from you "for your own good"; and none of whom, it would appear, despite their grandiose claims in the area of "returning to original American values" would recognize life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness if given a complete set of historical documentation and/or a bloody dictionary. Yes, I am a trifle bitter -- despite that our status quo is still better than virtually everywhere else's.
17. While my strict libertarian ethics tell me that there is no moral justification for (and, indeed, a top-level ethical injunction against) hanging commie slaver bastards from lampposts just because their ontology is infuriatingly vile, acknowledging this still gives me a sour stomach.
18. My memory is, er, um... something. I hate that. I will be first in line to have Google Mnemosyne installed into my head.
19. It is my opinion that Brazilians have the most impenetrable accents of any region in the civilized world. Southern Europeans, close behind.
20. Instinct notwithstanding, I believe that dogs both possess and exercise a genuine capacity for loyalty, affection, and friendship.
21. I am a stickler for visual continuity (in virtual and physical reality, although let's face it, it's harder to screw up in physical reality). A good example of visual continuity FAIL would be the Swiss investors who have fenced an entire sim behind my office off with 120m high default-plywood walls. YOU FAIL ARCHITECTURE FOREVER.
22. I believe that if you seek peace, you should prepare for war. Some smartasses will respond, "No, if you want war, prepare for war," but they fail to realize that there's no actual contradiction, there. Whether you want peace or war, you've got to prepare for war. The lessons of history teach us that if you prepare for peace, you definitely won't get it, although lots of people will come by to offer you many fine variants on the theme of plunder, slavery, genocide, and totalitarianism. Basically, if you seek peace, be a well-armed citizen in a well-armed state, know what I mean?
23. If I run across a grape varietal that I've never tried before when browsing for new wine, it must be mine. (This is really a subset of my reaction to most things I've never tried before.)
24. I can build worlds much better than I can construct plots. Don't even ask about the actual writing.
25. I do what I must, because I can. Or really, I probably do it the other way around.
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