Geek Drivel

This is from yesterday’s Dilbert Blog entry:

A Muslim, a Christian, and a crazy guy walk into a room. The one thing you can know for sure is that at least two out of three of them organize their lives around things that aren’t real. And that’s the best case scenario. Atheists would say all three have some explaining to do. And atheists are the minority, which is the very definition of abnormal.

Hm… is computer software “real”?

From the beginning of the Boing Boing article:

Writing on the loony fundamentalist site “Way of Life,” David Cloud presents the startling intelligence that science fiction is rife with humanism, atheism, and is written by polyamorous nudists like Robert A Heinlein [...]

<sarcasm>How horrible!</sarcasm>

The title of the post is “Beware of Science Fiction,” and I have to agree with the sentiment. After all, it’s terrifying to imagine a world where everyone actually thinks for themselves, and doesn’t automatically and mindlessly accept the dictates of their (often self-appointed) leaders.

At least, it’s terrifying to those leaders, and reveals just how insecure and fearful they really are.

Sorry, Taliban guys. Even if you’d succeeded, Samson already topped you, and with nothing more than the jawbone.

I’ve never been able to understand people who reject scientific evidence outright, in favor of whatever their chosen authorities dictate. (I recently saw a quote that sums it up: “[T]he problem with all the “science deniers” is they think the argument is about power and “we” think it is about what reality is.”) The book mentioned here (available as free PDF files on the site) promises a deep delving into the psychology of such people, with scientific evidence backing up every premise.

I haven’t read it yet, but quite frankly, I think such people have a mental illness and need treatment — and if they refuse treatment, or if one can’t be developed, need to at least be barred from any position of authority. Especially in government!

(This will probably be denounced as religious persecution, since the vast majority of religious fundamentalists have this authoritarian mental illness. But consider… we, as a society, don’t allow pedophiles to work in child care, so why do we allow authoritarians to run for public office? The two cases are a lot more closely related than they first appear.)

If this had happened a few years ago, I might have thought it meant something.

[...] The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

You can invoke the God card to get away with a lot in this country — but the IRS card always trumps it.

Darn, and I was really looking forward to moving this blog to www.geek.god…

I’ve always been a big proponent of the theory of evolution. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s the only answer that doesn’t rely on supernatural forces to explain life. But in all the debates about it, it seems that those opposing it focus on two things: irrational religious convictions, and that it relies on random mutations which, when they’re not immediately fatal, are often irrelevant.

A new discovery could eliminate at least one of those arguments. A one-sentence summary of this one-page synopsis: these scientists have discovered that cells carry on a process of continual minute changes to correct externally-imposed imbalances — a kind of “evolutionary feedback control mechanism.” I don’t quite see how change information from the rest of the body is transmitted to the sperm and ova cells (required if the changes are to affect the next generation), but that’s a problem for future research.

In a conversation a while back, I needed a word to express the opposite of authoritarian. I couldn’t find one in my memory, which struck me as odd, so I later looked it up. It seems that there is no English word that describes the opposite of authoritarian; the closest thing I found, after perusing several thesauruses, was that authoritarian was considered a synonym of anti-democratic. Presumably “democratic” would be the closest thing there is to an antonym then.

The upcoming election, and the associated media feeding frenzy, brought this back to my mind. You couldn’t walk past a television in the past couple weeks without hearing talk about Sarah Palin, and how she and McCain would essentially be George W. Bush the Third, because they’re all very authoritarian.

A couple days ago, Scott Adams had a post about his recent survey of economists, which included these paragraphs:

[...] The big question this survey raises is why so many economists are Democrats in the first place. Democrats tell me that highly educated and rational folks, such as economists, gravitate toward the best argument. Case closed. Republicans tell me that liberals, mostly Democrats, drift toward academic jobs where they can best suck on the public teet. It’s easier to be a tenured professor than it is to run a company, so the thing that economists have in common is laziness as opposed to intelligence. And perhaps, think the Republicans, the so-called Independents in this survey are mostly liberals too, essentially Democrats who aren’t joiners. And besides, if economics was a real science, most economists would be rich. [...]

It’s true that academia has long been known to be heavily populated with liberals. Why is that? It occurred to me that it could have a lot to do with the whole conservative authoritarian theme. Authoritarian governments don’t like people to think for themselves, because that leads to people questioning their authority. Hm… sounds an awful lot like most organized religions, especially the fundamentalist type, yes? “We have the One and Only Truth, and you must obey! Never question what we say, because it comes directly from God!” Thus the well-known and long-standing links between fundamentalist groups and the conservatives, perhaps.

When you think about it, the names “Democrat” and “Republican” mean absolutely nothing — this is both a democracy and a republic, after all. The parties could, with equal validity, call themselves Piscis Austrinus and Corona Borealis. So I always read the party references as liberals and conservatives. Or, using the link between conservative and authoritarian, we could define them as those who believe in authoritarianism and those who believe in democracy. Except, of course, that the party that claims to believe in democracy is still trying to grab political power so it can tell everyone else what to do, which means that they’re acting pretty authoritarian too. At least the conservatives are honest about their authoritarianism.

So what political party should an intelligent person favor? Damned if I know. I don’t like either party, nor any of the lesser-known parties, and I don’t care for any of the Presidential candidates I’ve seen to date. The best we voters can do is elect the lesser evil, it seems… that appears to be Obama, from what I’ve seen. But of course, I encourage people to think for themselves.

GoddessJ and I have been watching, with a mixture of horror and incredulity, a web dustup between an outspoken atheist and a large religious group recently. Read the link if you want the gory details, but the upshot of it is that the more zealous people on the religious side are threatening to do physical harm against those who don’t agree with them.

It’s no wonder that violent and intolerant religions took over the world for several centuries. Irrational people have a definite advantage in a physical confrontation. Fortunately, the Internet puts potential combatants out of immediate physical reach of one another, and tempers irrationality by forcing people to think a little before doing something physically violent — they have to make plans to get to the object of their ire, and that gives them time for emotions to cool, and for them to consider what following through on it would cost them.

If for nothing else, that makes the Internet a wonderful thing.