Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in littlebbob's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012
11:10 am	Thank you! Thank you, International Workers, on this, Your Day! I appreciate all the hard work you do to give me a basically pretty cushy life. While it's kind of a downer to stand on your crippled backs to grab hold of my pretty much awesome life, I think you'll agree that the alternative is worse and nobody sane would go for it. So, thanks! Also, if you're reading this, you're also standing on the backs of those same workers. You might be a little higher up or a little lower down than me, but you're pretty far up the pyramid. How do I know? Well, unless your superpower is reading blogs with your mind, you're reading this via some electronic device. The device was, if not actually manufactured by absurdly cheap and more or less oppressed overseas labor, was priced to compete with same. This low price makes the device, or access to it, absurdly cheap in terms of how much labor you must perform (even at US minimum wage) to gain that access. Yes, even you people on food stamps, using an ancient computer your brother in law gave you. You benefit, you thereby partake of oppression, and you would be mad to do otherwise. So, rejoice with me in your exalted position in the great heap of humanity, and join me in thanking the vast majority below us, lifting us upwards into our awesome lives. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 16th, 2012
9:03 am	So - what do you make of this? http://photothunk.blogspot.com (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
4:04 pm	Art One axis upon which one can divide art is this: Is the first one the only one? The first guy to paint a Campbell's Soup Can might have had something to say. The second guy was just a derivative twit. but It's still perfectly possible to paint, I dunno, a pretty girl with a earring and have it be a worthwhile piece. What's up with that? Was Andy Warhol doing art at all, and more generally are these inherently one-off deals art at all? Maybe they're... I dunno, commentary, or criticism. Is the one-offness itself just a matter of taste in the first place, so the point is moot? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
12:38 pm	fighting *-ism If you consider yourself to be fighting *-isms, such as racism, sexism, and so on AND if your activities in this struggles can be accurately summarized as 'I ****** online' (for example: I organize boycotts online, I educate people about racism online, I run a discussion forum for issues surrounding sexism online) THEN a) Fuck You b) you are in all probability a worthless sack of shit and to the extent that you are having any effect, you are making the problem worse (Comment on this)
Monday, November 14th, 2011
9:53 am	NPR fails me again This morning I heard a short item on Libya, discussing how under Quaddhafi (pick your preferred spelling) everything was subsidized, and how the new government was going to have to deal with this and oh my it certainly was going to be a tough time ahead weaning the populace off the subsidized lifestyle. Planted in all this is the axiom that profits from an extremely lucrative national resource, in this case oil, should NOT be shared with the people of the nation. We get a couple obvious corollaries quite quickly: These resources should be placed in the hands of Efficient Private Enterprise which will, somehow, make things, somehow, better. Somehow. Maybe the wealth will "trickle down" or some bullshit. A further easy corollary which is certainly a bit of a stretch, but also certainly on the minds of many oldish whitish richish men, is that the Efficient Private Enterprises involved should mostly be US and European. If NPR won't state the obvious:      It's THEIR FUCKING OIL, so it's THEIR FUCKING MONEY, so they should GET SOME OF IT, then who will? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
10:06 am	God, Religion, and All That Another in the endless series of Things That Piss Me Off. It's fairly trendy these days to dismiss religion as the trivial foolishness of another time. Implicit in this is the idea that we, as rational creatures, have pretty much figured it out, or will figure it all out, and there's no need to posit a mystical unknowable force to create the universe and us, Science Tells Us that it all just happened as a consequence of natural laws. Generally people who trot this stuff out don't understand much science, it turns out. Let's take a look at a few things. Physics: The collection of laws that appear to govern our universe give us a number of features which are very handy, like Time, and Subatomic Particles stable enough to hang about for enough Time for interesting things to happen, just to name a couple. These are apparently arbitrary features of the complex rules that, as far as our Science People can work out, govern the universe. Lucky thing, eh? Chemistry: Holy shit, it turns out that the physics gives us a BIZARRELY complicated collection of STUFF. The particles can make molecules, with crazy "electron shells" that seem to obey a capriciously complicated set of rules and advisories that allow compounds to form in a wonderful array of ways. Water is a miraculously weird substance. The rules allow this to dissolve in that, but not in this, these things precipitate out, that ionizes in the other thing, holy crap. It's INSANE. Biology: The chemistry, while freakishly well suited to supporting life doesn't make it easy for life to arise. All available evidence suggests that it happened one (1) time in a rather enormous universe, at least in the particularly curious form that seems to be specifically design to evolve and change and increase in complexity enough to produce: Intelligent Life: The rise of intelligence appears to be another colossal accident. Intelligence sufficient to wonder about where it came from and why doesn't have any obvious evolutionary value, for one thing. Also, a human being is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery. A human CELL is an incredibly complicated piece of machinery which works damn near by magic. So, if one insists that Science is The Way, and that one will believe only in what can perceive and verify (if not literally, at least it has been perceived and verified by some person, and could in theory be perceived and verified by oneself) one is stuck with a wildly improbable universe, with layer of wild unlikeliness built on layer of unlikeliness all the way down. The ultimate question of 'why' is answerable only with 'incredible luck, beside which winning all the lotteries of the world at once is a certainty'. It's tempting to sneak out of this trap by positing the existence of, say, an infinitude of universes; only in those unlikely ones in which intelligent life arose is there intelligence to wonder at the improbability of it all. This is a cheat, since you're positing the existence in some sense of an infinitude of un-perceivable stuff, which is exactly what the Theist is doing. You might as well just posit a God and be done with it. There are ways to do so that satisfy Occam, which is pretty much all you have to go in here anyways. The point here is not that atheism is wrong. The point is that it's not the obvious and simple choice. Sticking strictly with the idea that existence and perceptibility are the same leads one into a rather tight corner -- it's not untenable, it's just tight. If someone dismisses theism lightly, they just don't know enough. There is a reason many scientists are religious. The point here is also, by the way, not that Christianity or Islam or Buddhism or whatever is right, great, or even very good. (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
10:33 am	Using our tool! Read the post before this one for context. Let us suppose, hypothetically, that I want to argue strongly that the Rachel/Sherwood post about Gay YA Fiction is a pack of lies written by authors seeking to place industry homophobia for the fact that they can't get their shitty book published. Let us designate with A the set of authors who "write a bunch of lies about industry professional(s) to explain why they cannot get their rotten book published, rather than face up to the fact that the work is crap" A = "authors who write a bunch of accusatory lies rather than face to to the fact that their book is crap" Hypothesis: People who write blog posts are A. Check: Do people outside of A write blog posts? Yes they do. people who have NEVER written a book make blog posts, BUSTED Let's try a few more hypotheses. Hypothesis: People who write blog posts accusing someone of homophobia are A. Check: Do non-authors write accusatory blog posts? Yep. BUSTED AGAIN. Hypothesis: People who write blog posts accusing an industry professional of rejecting their book for reasons of personality or prejudice are A. Check: Do non-authors write such posts? NO! Non-authors have no books to reject. Our hypothesis rules out non-authors, and only includes authors whose book has been rejected. Our hypothesis is almost the same as the definition of A, in fact, except for the "liar with a rotten book" aspect. So, a counter example is going to look a LOT like a member of A, except either not a liar, or with a good book, or both. Check: Do authors with excellent books which have nontheless been rejected write blog posts accusing industry professionals etc etc.? Well, at this point we wander into the land of "I don't know and don't care enough" but perhaps you, my esteemed reader, might make your own judgements about how closely accusatory blog posts correlate with liar with a rotten book. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
10:00 am	Check it Original posting here: http://tempest.fluidartist.com/my-thoughts-on-the-latest-yesgayya-developments/ Which contains this paragraph: Additionally, Stampfel-Volpe’s post is filled with the kind of red flags I see every day as an anti-prejudice activist. The tone is too defensive and unconvincing. Plus, what exactly do you expect the agency to say? “Yes, we did that”? No. Hell no. Let us set aside the amusing fact that a failer is talking about how someone else's "tone" is very informative. Let us also set aside the issue of whether Tempest is right or wrong, and instead examine the structure of the argument being given here, because it's interesting. What we see here is, roughly, the claim that someone's blog post "looks like" other statements made by.. well.. some sort of bad people, or by people who have done a bad thing, let us say. There are features of the Stampfel-Volpe post that make Tempest think they are guilty of something. These features are described as "red flags" but the only two specific features mentioned are a tone of defensiveness and a tone of unconvincingness. I don't even know what to say about the "unconvincing" part. I can get behind the "tone is defensive" as a pretty well defined feature that Tempest feels is a red flag, alerting her to the guilt of the parties writing it, ok. Let's dig in to THIS a little. A "defensive tone" is an indicator of "guilt." Tempest is reasoning from the specific to the general here: I have seen guilty people do X, you are doing X, therefore you are guilty. This isn't deductive logic, it's inductive reasoning and as far as it goes it's perfectly legitimate. Inductive reasoning is a gigantic part of our human thought processes, and it's a powerful tool. However, it's necessary to be careful with it, and this is a perfect example of why. A logical leap like this is great for hypothesis forming: I have seen guilty people do X. Hypothesis: X correlates with guilt, perhaps strongly. Stronger Hypotheses: X is an indicates guilt. That is, people who do  X are guilty. Here's the part that's tricky, and it's the part everyone leaves out. Now you CHECK YOUR HYPOTHESIS. You can look for a deductive argument that produces your hypothesis, or you can try to bolster it in other ways. An easy check at this point, though, and this is basic reasoning, is to look for a counter-example. Do non-guilty people do X? If so, this will rule out the Stronger Hypothesis, and tend to argue against the Hypothesis. Do lots of non-guilty people do X? Does everyone do X? Who, exactly, does X? This is the process of finding evidence which supports or damages your hypothesis. In this case we can check: Do non guilty people do X? That is, do non-guilty people use a defensive tone? Well, when they are accused of something they did not do they are non-guilty, and they do tend in my experience to become defensive. Do lots of people do this? Does everyone do this? Hmm, probably. Arguably "uses a defensive tone when accused of something bad" indicates "is not Buddha" but little else. Compare: Aristotle is a man. I have observed that some men die. Hypothesis: Artistotle is mortal. (Man-ness implies Mortal-ness) CHECK: Are there men that do not die? No. ARGUMENT: CONFIRMED. Aristotle is mortal. I have observed that some men die. Hypothesis: Aristotle is a man. (Mortal-ness implies Man-ness) CHECK: Do other things die? Women die. Dogs die. Plants die. Every living thing dies. Argument: BUSTED. In this case the hypothesis, that Aristotle is a man, is actually correct, but the argument is completely broken. The only difference between these two is the direction of the implication in the hypothesis. Some people cannot tell the difference between these two blocks of text. Tempest might be able to see it when laid out in this neat fashion, but does not distinguish between the two structures in her own thinking. This is not an indictment of Tempest, really, most people stumble in these ways much of the time -- but that doesn't make it RIGHT, it makes it COMMON. There's also a statistical argument you can make, which is really just about the same thing in disguise, and relies on how strongly X  correlates with guilt. In this case, "defensive tone" correlates not at all with guilt, so we can make no Bayesian argument that a defensive blog posting is an indication of guilt. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
8:42 pm	More on the same boring topic Is it just me, or is there an undercurrent in: http://deepad.dreamwidth.org/67143.html of "Can we stop talking about this dumb gay/queer thing and get back to talking about people of color and how disprivileged THEY are?' I'm gonna jump to the conclusion that deepad is of color, but not of queer, as it were. I do adore seeing these Social Justice idiots claw at one another, though. Orwell continues to speak the purest of truth. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 18th, 2011
6:02 pm	A comparison - What to the The War On Terror, The War On Drugs, and The War On Privilege (as prosecuted by the failfans and others) have in common? Well, probably lots of things. The one that strikes me though is that none of them have a defined Victory Condition. Nobody ever talks about how we shall know we have defeated Terror, or Drugs, or Prejudice. Occasionally someone trots out some rhetoric like "WHEN NO AMERICAN NEED FEAR TERROR!!!" or "WHEN ALL ANTHOLOGIES HAVE WOMEN AND POC FAIRLY REPRESENTED!!!!!" These are not well defined victory conditions. When the people prosecuting a conflict decline to define what the victory conditions might look like, you may rely on this: Victory is not what is sought, what is sought is conflict unending. Solving the problem in any meaningful way is something that they may individually wish for, but as a group or organization, they do not want to solve the problem, are incapable of solving the problem, and most certainly will not solve the problem. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 16th, 2011
11:03 am	A Prediction: The authors mentioned in the previous post will either: 1) respond to the issue one more time with, roughly, "We will no longer be discussing the specific here because that simply derails from the Important Discussion about teh gay in teh YA" or, less likely, 2) fall completely silent on the subject (Comment on this)
10:24 am	GAY YA FAIL!!!!!1!!! So we had this post here: http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/956650.html which was published on Publishers Weekly's Genreville Blog, which created a sort of tiny storm. The shortened version is, roughly: An agent refused to represent a YA novel we wrote unless we gay-washed it. The post also includes strong dose of: We're not naming names or anything like that because what's IMPORTANT is that we have the DISCUSSION. Hang on to that last part. Also, go read the thing if you're remotely interested in this stuff, it's not very long and I hate people who say "Shorter so-and-so: bunch of lies" so you should definitely fact-check me. Then we get this interesting followup: http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-joanna-stampfel-volpe.html which says (again, fact-check me if you give a damn) roughly: That's not true, we made some editorial recommendations which did not include deleting gay characters but did include some other stuff, and ultimately declined to rep the work. Ok, so now we have a certain amount of response of the for "I think they are both telling the truth as they see it" which is unlikely, since there are directly contradictory statements involved. We also have a certain amount of "well it's just a he-said-she-said thing so we can't really know who's lying". Let's look at this last! What's agreed upon is that the agent made some editorial recommendations, the authors declined to take them, and the agents declined to rep the novel. At least, I am willing to stipulate these as facts. We also have stated by both sides that the novel includes five (5) POVs. The question really is, what were the suggested edits? Agent says: delete some POVs (including the gay one) but not the gay character(s) and delete most of the sex for market reasons. Authors say: delete the gay character(s) entirely. These are similar, but not the same. Let us also take it as given for the purposes of discussion that this wasn't a mere case of miscommunication. I think it is reasonable to accept that the agent asked for AT LEAST what the agent claims to have asked for, on the grounds that these edits make sense, and on the grounds that they are reasonably a subset of the authors claim. So it's really about whether or not the agent asked for more than they say they asked for, to wit, complete removal of the gayness. Credibility The authors wrote an essay which is entirely consistent with the oldest story ever told on the Intertubes: they rejected my awesome novel by telling me it sucks but I JUST KNOW that it was because of TEH GAY. Note that "entirely consistent" is not the same as "is definitely a case of". Then they tacked on the "we're not naming names because what's IMPORTANT here is that we have the DISCUSSION" which is entirely consistent with "we made up some of these facts, so let's not go looking at the facts too closely" (that would be the second oldest story ever told on the intertubes) Perhaps the authors are telling the truth on all points here, were asked to gaywash, and just want the conversation to happen. The agents wrote a response saying "you are lying". Perhaps the agents are lying instead, and merely want to continue to conceal their homophobia. If so, however, why would they reply with such a confrontational response? Why not say "for marketing reasons we felt that the novel would do better without the gay characters, and we're as sad about the state of publishing as anyone but we need to eat in these tough economic times as well" which they could have lifted straight out of any number of comment threads on the subject? Are the authors lying here? Who knows, but we know that authors DO write whiny, and untrue, crap in this vein. Are the agents lying? Who knows, but we know that there was at least a better lie easily available which they could have used if lying was their game. I think the agents are telling the truth, and that the authors processed their disappointment at rejection by telling themselves a better version of what really happened, and then deciding to tell the world this improved version (eliding the names, of course, because they're not WHINING they're trying to MAKE THE WORLD BETTER and also so they're less likely to be busted). Unfortunately for them, they seem to have been blabbing behind the scenes, turning this from a parable into a libel. Ooops. (Comment on this)
Monday, September 12th, 2011
9:21 am	9/11 Roughly half of the internet was, I assume, maudlin myth-building with a light seasoning of actual sympathy and concern for those who died and their loved ones who did not. The other half was, I assume, hipsters who were too cool to be maudlin, bitching about the lameness of it all. I hate all you fuckers. I also hate what my government has done with the narrative, and I decline to comment further. ETA: Ooo, I see at least one person, nominally a "writer", decided to use 9/11 to plug a story. Stay classy, Tempest! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
9:38 am	Burningman Art I'm pretty open-minded about art. I figure if I react to it, it's art, which is a pretty broad definition. I might not like it, but I'll admit it as art. Another item of context here: I think art should "say something" which is really just that it makes me react in a non-superficial way. If I react "that was a very pretty flower" or "my goodness that's a lot of glue" then it might be art, but it's not saying anything to me. If it makes me think of other flowers, if it makes me feel the way I feel when I stumble across a pretty flower, then the art is "saying something". Sometimes art says really simple and straightforward stuff like: The Holocaust Was Bad and sometimes it "says" something that can't be said in words. The art at Burningman doesn't see to say anything, at least not to me. All I get is "wow, that's large" and "that person has way too fucking much time on his hands" and "all this shit looks the same, don't these idiots have ideas, even little ones?" and "oh look, neon. Wow, what a great idea, light your shitty latticework of welded together bullshit up with neon all over it so it looks all trippy, I bet nobody's ever thought of THAT before" Most of the art at BM looks like it was put together by people who are far more interested in the process of building the thing than in anything else. They took some classes at The Crucible, sketched out some shitty thing "it makes me think of dolphins!" and spent the year building it with whatever new techniques they learned in the classes they took most recently, "inspired" by whatever art they saw last year at BM. It feels very insular and self-referential. Which all adds up to: Shitty. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
9:29 am	Burningman Community One of the remarks one runs in to when asking 'what's so great about BM?' is something, usually gushy, about the "community" and how it's this awesome coming-together and so filled with love, or whatever. When you stick a bunch of people together, you get a community. In prisons, on reality TV shows, and by golly, in the desert. The creation of a community is not awesome, or slightly unusual, it's completely INEVITABLE. When the people you have stuck together are all clones of one another (affluent white people in this case -- here's a fun game, search for Burningman on flickr and try to find a black person. Just go ahead. I dare you.) they're probably going to get along pretty well. Take 50,000 well-to-do white people on vacation with all the Ecstacy they can eat, and you're gonna have a pretty groovy community, pretty much no matter what else is going on. It's got nothing to do with Burningman and everything to do with homo sapiens. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
11:50 am	Biological Basis for Gender Roles There is a community, possibly small, that does their best to shout down any research which purports to show any biological basis for anything gender-related. The shouting-down of course is done without bothering to inspect the research at all. What I find fascinating about this is that it is pretty much universally agreed that essentially every species of life which uses sexual reproduction has biologically defined elements to the gender behaviors -- the girls do X and Y, the boys do A and B. People are, mysteriously, completely exempt from this. Gender is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT no more and no less, and any effort to point out that this is, well, ludicrous is COMPLETELY WRONG AND STUPID AND THE SCIENTIST SHOULD DIE IN A FIRE. The reasoning appears to be roughly: 1) gender roles are oppression 2) a biological basis for a gender role would justify that role ... 3) ... and hence the oppression What's interesting is that every single step here is wrong. Certainly humans, as intelligent, tool-using, social animals can transcend biologically defined gender roles, and certainly there are many cases where we should transcend these biological definitions. Suppressing science is always a bad idea. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
5:17 pm	I am so sick of the god damned SEALs Fuck these guys, man. Yeah, it's terrible for their families and whatnot when they get killed, I get that. But you know what? These guys are professional soldiers, they live by the sword, with all the consequences of same. In addition, it's probably a bit harsh to say that they make their living obeying illegal orders, but on the other hand, they do. Weep for the poor asshole who got blown up driving a truck full of cans of soup, the poor asshole who joined the army because he couldn't get a goddamned job because Corporate America was too busy using TARP money to buy Treasuries with to create any goddamned jobs. Don't weep for the professional soldiers who SIGNED UP FOR THIS, for whatever reasons, good or bad, or if you must weep for them, weep for that other guy FIRST and HARDER. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
9:16 am	Remember when? Remember when the "liberal media" would pillory a GOP candidate for spelling "potatos" wrong? Well, not even WRONG, just not the way that the reporters thought it should be spelled. Remember when the GOP would subsequently jettison that candidate? Nowadays a candidate can muddle up Russia and the Soviet-Union with, apparently, no consequences. Where the hell is my liberal media? Where did the Republican Party go? Most importantly, WHO THE HELL ARE THESE GUYS? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
9:52 am	Universal Rebuttal Post This post will serve to rebut anything you say, and is also a handy template for much of what passes for reasoned discourse thee days: You are wrong, it is more complicated than that. These events which are occurring now are the inevitable result of what came before. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
9:50 am	Two Axioms Two axioms of the failers, and more generally of the more rapid anti-racist types are: White people cannot understand in any meaningful way the lives, difficulties, or really any facet of the existence of a person of color. The works "Heart of Darkness" by Conrad and "Lost in Translation" by Coppola are basically racist works. The basic relevant theme in the two works cited in point 2 is that the white protagonists can't understand the lives, difficulties, or really any facet of the existence of the people in the culture in which they are, during the course of the narrative, immersed. What was that? In the back.. uh huh. Yes! Yes indeed, the people in those cultures ARE people of color. (6 Comments |Comment on this)