Praealtus

Luxury problems

2005-02-24T12:37:00.000-03:00

I wish I lived in a world where all that mattered was the colour of my iPod

2005-02-18T13:54:00.000-03:00

The Monkey Puzzled beside the volcano you can't see

2005-02-18T13:51:00.000-03:00

My attention span is getting longer, but what was that splash anyway?

2005-02-18T13:50:00.000-03:00

I obviously have a thing about insect sex, although that also tends to be a time when they sit still long enough to get a good photo. I don't know if these are bees, flies or wasps, nor which one is the male. They're over an inch long and I'm told they eat spiders.

2005-02-16T19:38:00.000-03:00

A spider for goths (can anyone identify this creature? It's body is about 8mm across, it was found in a Chilean orchard in an arid area.)

Update: I found a book in Santiago that declares this to be an "opilionid spider". It moves slowly and defends itself with a nasty stink. I didn´t notice any particular smell from this thing. Some similar beasts show up on the internet, but they´re not the same as this one.

The term "opilionid" also seems to be used as the latin name for the daddy long legs, but this is obviously not one of those.

2005-01-31T13:23:00.000-03:00

There were two, behind the couch. She said she'd never seen such creatures before. She said they weren't poisonous. I did not ask her to reconcile these two statements.

Courtesy is our goal (a mean little tale)

2005-01-29T13:05:00.000-03:00

Yesterday, in BestSave, while waiting to pay for my bag of chips and four chocolate bars, I stood in line behind one other shopper who appeared to have finished with her shopping and was about to leave the cashier to me. She had packed up all of her purchases in the requisite plastic bag and was standing at the end of the checkout, chatting vaguely with the fat-looking woman at the till. Then she came back to the till and at this point pulled out her purse and credit card - something she could have done, even should have done, before starting to pack her goods. Then, of course, the cashier had to swipe the card, wait for it to be accepted, print the receipt to be signed by the shopper and complete the sale before she got to my four chocolate bars and bag of chips.

I needed to be getting back to work. I tried not to show my impatience, although I must have let a little slip because the cashier tried, rather challengingly and with a subtle threat of hostility, to engage me in some inane conversation -

“You didn’t have to swim here then?” She asked. I looked at her for the first time - an overweight, poorly-nourished, gray-looking white woman, head pulled back on her shoulders, in the usual synthetic-fiber nondescript cashier’s tunic.

“Uh, no?” I replied, wondering what she could possibly mean before realizing she was referring to the weather and then uneasily aware that this was a first foray into conversation with someone I didn’t know, on a subject I cared little about, perhaps designed to put me at my ease after being kept waiting, but more likely to raise my tension as I grabbed desperately for matching banalities to throw back.

“Oh, it’s not raining now.” She added, looking out of the window, and illuminating the meaning of her previous comment. “I hear it’s raining in Montrose.”

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know.” I say, perhaps a little meanly, but in an effort to bring the subject to a close, pay for my food and get out of there. None of what she said was said with a smile, and she was wearing one of those horrible little badges which says something like “Courtesy is our goal”. If this is supposed to be a reminder to her, it won’t work, being pinned to her chest where she can’t read it. The only other target might be myself, the customer, or her coworkers, in which case, it seems to be some sort of challenge or merely intended to broadcast her “goal”. Perhaps we are supposed to assume she has achieved it and be automatically courteous back. She took the hint, and my 5 dollars.

It’s not that I dislike small talk, I just see little point in yammering inanely when there’s so clearly nothing to be said. It costs nothing to be polite, they say. Well OK, but part of good manners is knowing when to allow someone their silence and not to force them into a smile and a word that takes more effort than they can easily provide.

The best cashiers are those who will smile and banter with you if you are smiling and talking, and who will just ignore you and do their job if you just want to get through the line. They also won’t spend any longer than necessary chatting with a customer if there are others in line. This kind of cashier seems to be more common in Max's than BestSave. More fool me for shopping in BestSave.

2005-01-29T11:02:00.000-03:00

Sometimes I miss pub grub.

100 pointless facts about me

2005-01-28T18:20:00.000-03:00

Here's an interesting exercise: can you come up with 100 pointless facts about yourself? I'll have to try it myself sometime, but #99 of the case in point is one of the most wonderfully bizarre things I have heard anyone say about themselves: "I cannot stand to have my little toes touched". I also love the fact that it's item number 99.

Presentation

2005-01-27T18:35:00.000-03:00

How much of the value of a work of art is in its presentation?

2005-01-27T14:35:00.000-03:00

Ugly bugly eata da pretty flower.

Regret

2005-01-27T14:31:00.000-03:00

Many years ago, I made a promise to myself never, when all is said and done, regret anything. Even bad decisions can be treated as beneficial, er, learning experiences¹. But the older I get, the harder it gets to keep this state of mind.

Embarrassment is much harder to deal with. I remember doing things as a child and later realising they were inappropriate, or offensive to someone else. Even now, in my forties, I can think of things from age ten or less that make me cringe.

¹: It doesn't matter how hard you try, you can't avoid cliches.

2005-01-27T14:15:00.000-03:00

Twice, he walked down to the beach

2005-01-27T14:10:00.000-03:00

The red light under the table

2005-01-27T14:03:00.000-03:00

The pig contemplates redemption

2005-01-23T22:05:00.000-03:00

Where they can't get my goat

Cervantes vs Einstein

2005-01-23T21:39:00.000-03:00

This gentleman feels Don Quixote a more important work than all of Einstein's theories. Well, I guess that's arguable, but I take issue with his claim "I can drive spaceship Earth without knowing the workings of the atom. But I cannot do without [Don Quijote]". This is a common attitude amongst artists and rather cheaply provides them with an excuse not to show an interest (while perhaps covering an inadequacy that they are well aware of). I submit that if you don't know how the world works, you're condemned to being a passenger. That said, it was a nice article and may well provoke me out of my own apathy to finally read the book in question (I already know about Einstein's theories).

2005-01-21T11:45:00.000-03:00

Black Faced Ibis or Bandurria

Information and reality

2005-01-21T11:18:00.000-03:00

Anton Zeilinger in The Edge's annual question forum believes that "quantum physics teaches us to abandon the distinction between information and reality". I believe that he is making a very common mistake with this interpretation -- he is confusing the representation of reality, in whatever terms are open to the observer, with the reality being observed. In fact, I see this mistake so often, I wonder if philosophy has already identified it as a true fallacy. "The subjective fallacy"? Zeilinger even cautions himself against subjectivism.

A physical theory is really just the same as any other model of reality: it attempts to predict certain behaviours in a physical system given its boundary conditions and the rules it follows. It is only able to do so within its own context. It is not the reality that it is being used to model, it is merely the closest one can arrive within the informational system used to represent it. The degree of precision of the predictions has no impact on the "reality" of the informational system nor on the informational content of the reality. They just happen to match up, is all.

One might just as well claim that your dreams last night were real because they appeared to follow physical laws, or that reality is a dream because you can imagine it.

2005-01-13T14:13:00.000-03:00

Black lizard lost

The Smell of the Crowd

2005-01-13T14:11:00.000-03:00

Babbled conversations of fatuous, facile opinion, designed to establish the thoughtless group's consensus, distilling common ignorance into a kind of glue, cloying, sticky and difficult to clean off, but serving the purpose of holding together the ugly crowd.

2005-01-13T14:04:00.000-03:00

Guanoscape

Good & Evil

2005-01-13T14:00:00.000-03:00

Evil seeks to destroy itself, along with all else. Good seeks to preserve itself, along with all else, including evil.

2005-01-13T13:57:00.000-03:00

Beetles, making more beetles

2005-01-06T18:08:00.000-03:00

Sprites, celebrating

Water

2005-01-06T18:06:00.000-03:00

Sometimes, a glass of tap water tastes better than any other drink I can bring to mind. Sometimes, water seems to have an almost alien unreality -- insubstantially transparent, but sharply reflective, drily sliding off the sides of the glass as I tip it one way then the other, but quintessentially wet.

In the middle of a hot night, I get up and half see, half feel my way to the kitchen in the dark, draw a glass of water and gulp it down to replace the sweat now soaking into the sheets. It's half gone before I can taste it, and that taste is just my dry mouth finding itself again.

The swimming pool, choppy with the waves of children, glints bluely at the sky, calling me for a swim, but I don't want to right now.

The ocean, spread out beyond my apartment window and across town, a light, foamy edge, turning to colorless brightness in the afternoon sun and disappearing into a dusty haze before it meets the horizon (which will be exposed, like it or not, when the sun goes down).

Tears, just waiting for the right moment (and sometimes the wrong one).

2004-12-28T16:09:00.000-03:00

I will grow anywhere, on anything

Affirmation

2004-12-09T17:19:00.000-03:00

Why? What's it for? What's the point? What's it worth? These are the questions science is not good at answering, the more so against need, greed and an ever climbing spiral of utility and exploitation. Pure art doesn't need to justify itself. Art is, self-assuredly, for its own sake, until it grows foolish, then we can smile, or frown, shrug and walk away.

Science, since it seeks whys, must present its own reason also. It turns the tool of reason on itself, and draws spinarettes, spirals and towers of ideas from thin air, or, at least, thin grey matter. It uses reality to build reflections of reality, that it cannot prove even exists, perhaps being no more than mathematics expressed.

Science is the universe looking at itself.

That is the awful wonder, that the universe can even be such a mirror of itself, build these reflections, theories and models of what it finds, repeating them, testing them, refining them, occasionally rebuilding them, ever comparing and refining the representation, ever approaching the inescapable, purest truth, but never, ever quite reaching it, because then it would be the universe itself, a perfect copy of itself, being everything there ever is, and we cannot make two of something from just one. (Can we?)

Why not participate in such a dance, paint a small corner of the grandest canvas, sing a single note of the song of the universe? Sing, and realise you are one of the notes, you are part of the picture you are painting, you are a single brushstroke, exactly in place, exactly in time, you cannot be anything else, in the dance that never began and will never end.

To know this, is to understand, to understand you must explore, to explore you must shed your preconceptions, see the world anew, test each idea for prejudice, your own, or others, until you find yourself, looking out through your own eyes, down upon yourself. The self cannot be escaped, but it can be accepted, harnessed, controlled and ridden, understood for its limits of understanding, defined by the terms it defines for itself, choosing its own expression and expressing its own choice, declaring "today, I shall stand here", because where else is there to stand?

2004-11-25T21:36:00.000-03:00

I shall walk to the hill on the horizon and then decide what to do next.

Cognitive dissonance

2004-11-25T21:33:00.000-03:00

If an idea is shown to be false then the degree of difficulty of accepting that fact should depend on the number of inferences that are built on the original idea, including the number of other ideas that are related to it (if not dependent on it). That is, the world model tends towards a state of maximum stability. If a new idea is revolutionary from the point of view of the mind that hears it, then it has an upsetting effect on that mind dependent on the degree to which its own internal consistency is challenged by the new idea. The deeper the challenged ideas, the less likely the new idea will be accepted because the more damage it will do to the inferences, assumptions and model components which have already been established and reconciled with perceived reality.

Hence cognitive dissonance.

Hence also the emotional disturbance of one who suffers cognitive dissonance - the mind model must seek to reconcile itself with the perceived reality, or it loses predictive power. The emotional pressure to do this will depend on the relative weight the mind model applies to the need to resolve the ambiguity.

If there is conflict between the predictions of the model and the perceived reality, then the model must either
1) reject the new input, either outright (denial) or by arguing for its falsity.
2) re-invent itself (change beliefs to accept the new idea at the cost of others previously accepted)
3) show the new idea to be inapplicable to the model structure which it appears to contradict. (e.g. the contradictions between science and religion - the two are mutually contradictory because they apply different and often antagonistic logical structures.)

The more that (1) is attempted without success (either because the denied idea is repeated encountered or because the argument for falsity fails), then the greater the internal model structure that is challenged by the new idea. If (1) is acheived successfully, then the stronger the internal consistency of the model as a consequence.

The difficulty of (2) is proportional to the extent of the mind model that is destabilised by the new idea and may require rejecting entire chunks of the extant model.

(3) allows the incorporation of mutually separate (not logically linked) ideas into the mind model. (is this possible at all? Or just another way of permitting denial?)

2004-11-25T21:27:00.000-03:00

Foxy, don't you think?

They're taking the mountain away.

2004-11-25T21:26:00.000-03:00

They're taking the mountain away
Scraping it and blasting it and grinding it down
fifteen thousand tonnes a day
every day, every week, every month,
for a year now.
It'll take another nine, maybe more
And they'll have taken the mountain away
Leaving only a few pounds of gold
And a pile of dust
Poisoned with cyanide.

2004-11-25T21:03:00.000-03:00

The view this thistle has is much better than the one from your office.

Free Will

2004-11-25T21:01:00.000-03:00

Free will, in the purest sense, can only be identified by elimination. That is, once all other factors have been accounted for, does the individual make a choice derived solely from the self? But if the self is itself a consequence of external factors, arising as a result of the state of the universe, then does not "free will", by this definition, evaporate?

The only kind of free will that can matter to the individual is that in which one appears to make a free choice. Aware that this choice may be influenced, perhaps in a deterministic way, by factors of which he is unaware, such a person nevertheless assumes a free choice and thus responsibility for the consequences.

For without free will, there is no responsibility. Thus the extent to which a choice is known to be free determines the aegis of any moral principles taken to apply. Indeed, those principles demarcate, in part, the areas of ignorance, known, unknown or chosen, of influencing factors, providing approximate rules of thumb too easily turned into hard, fast, deterministic laws.

2004-11-25T20:56:00.000-03:00

I am old and tired and will be gone soon, but you will have this beautiful thing to remember me by.

Bullies & Blue Ribbons

2004-11-25T20:49:00.000-03:00

This week in the UK they're wearing blue ribbons around their wrists to indicate having been a victim of bullying. Apparently it is surprising how many such ribbons are to be seen. I'm tempted to wear one myself, but I don't think people around here would understand and I don't feel like explaining.

2004-11-23T11:37:00.000-03:00

Tin Angel

Feminideology

2004-11-17T01:16:00.000-03:00

I had an discussion with a feminist today. Well, when I say discussion, it was much more of an argument. It started when I asked if she had ever experienced discrimination within a certain usually male dominated context with which we were both familiar and in which I had never seen it. She suggested that it was often so subtle that most people wouldn't even notice.

OK, fine, make of that what you will, and we talked around the issue some more, but the conversation came to an end when I tried to find some common ground by describing a situation in which the reverse dynamic was true (children's courts, which are heavily dominated by women). The response was curious, a completely willful deafness beginning with the declaration "this is so not about you" and finishing, when I began talking again, with an expression which betrayed a completely closed mind, not listening to what I was saying at all but sustaining an artifically pleasant smile. I stopped, and said "you're not buying this at all, are you?". "No", she said, so I immediately wrapped up and left. It was astonishingly rude, thoroughly unjustfied, and, well, abusive.

What am I to make of this? Another fanatic who believes that her ideology, based on a conviction she is being prejudiced against, gives her the right to practice her own variety of discrimination. Ugh.

2004-11-17T00:58:00.000-03:00

Tadpoles are carnivores

Malapropisms

2004-11-16T18:49:00.000-03:00

A couple of wonderful malapropisms found in blogs:

"Time is an allusion" (lunchtime analogously so?)

and

"Sleep depravity"

Marvellous.

2004-11-16T18:35:00.000-03:00

Sometimes I see things others don't and I look harder but they're still there.

Everything is uncertain

2004-11-16T18:21:00.000-03:00

When a scientist says "everything is uncertain", what he is actually saying is that every statement about our surroundings must be open to test. If a test finds a statement wanting, then the statement must be withdrawn, amended or qualified. This attitude must apply to all statements, no matter how convinced we are. No scientist can afford to think otherwise, it is the basis of his world view.

Of course, this scientist is only making explicit what it is to be sane.

2004-11-16T18:16:00.000-03:00

Mountains are molehills seen from the right perspective

Praealtus, he say:

2004-11-16T18:12:00.000-03:00

Do not confuse force for strength.

2004-11-14T01:50:00.000-03:00

If the sun were my yo-yo.

To delete or not to delete?

2004-11-14T01:49:00.000-03:00

Having owned a digital camera for some months now and enjoyed the freedom to take as many pictures as I please and keep only those that I consider worthwhile, I find myself surprisingly loathe to delete any at all. It is as if these images, no matter how poorly executed, are the last evidence of a chance moment and to delete them irretrievably consigns that moment to oblivion. To delete them would be to superstitiously delete my past.

2004-11-14T01:41:00.000-03:00

Bird flight at sunset

John Peel

2004-11-13T10:51:00.000-03:00

They buried John Peel today. One of the very, very few truly worthwhile heroes of our age, he entertained, educated, and generally expanded the horizons of millions of young people over the years.

I listened to his programme in wonder under the covers as a young teenager, he was the inevitable companion to the first couple of hours of a university all-nighter, my brother sent me tapes of his programme when I first moved abroad, I listened to him delighted, via shortwave on an Andean mountaintop, and sought sanity in his family discussions when my own fell apart.

I grew up just down the road from where he lived, I worked down the road from where he had in Texas, he died just down the road from where I live now.

John, I'm sorry you're gone.

2004-11-10T23:22:00.000-03:00

Play with me in the light a while.

Truth cascade

2004-11-10T23:21:00.000-03:00

Has anyone examined the effect of a single, false, but accepted assertion within a consistent logical system?

What does Godel have to say about this? If any sufficiently complex system contains hypotheses which are untestable within that system, then it is impossible to prove the consistency of the system. The system can then contain false hypotheses which are accepted as true and whose effect on the application of the system is unpredictable. They may force the rejection of true hypotheses in an effort to resolve the contradictions they produce. The effect could then snowball and entirely new system be generated which is based on the hypothesis which was false within the original system, but becomes true within the new one. Such a cascade might be stopped when the system it tries to generate becomes obviously (undeniably) incompatible with observable reality. If this does not happen, then you get a paradigm shift instead...?

2004-11-10T23:18:00.000-03:00

A gap in the clouds offers an opportunity to see farther, but it rarely lasts for long.

Tourist towns

2004-11-10T23:17:00.000-03:00

There's nothing like a tourist town to show you just how deeply superficial people can be.

2004-11-10T23:13:00.000-03:00

Simple ritual

Good and evil.

2004-11-10T23:12:00.000-03:00

Evil seeks to destroy itself, along with all else.

Good seeks to preserve itself, along with all else,

including evil.

2004-11-10T23:10:00.000-03:00

Walk with me a while and tell me of your new world while I protect myself from mine old.

I refuse to write anything about the American presidential election

2004-11-10T23:08:00.000-03:00

bugger.

2004-11-09T17:27:00.000-03:00

What happens when you're not watching.

'No court bias against fathers'

2004-11-09T17:16:00.000-03:00

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss. With a name like that, you just know that she has a face like a horse and an intellect to be expected from the result of generations of blue-blooded inbreeding.

On the BBC web site, she insists that there is
'No court bias against fathers' and goes on to explain that most kids end up with the mother in the event of a separation because, well, they end up with the mother in the event of a separation and the courts like to go with the status quo. Of course, the fact that this pretty much defines a bias doesn't seem to penetrate her upper class skull.

But then again, perhaps she's not entirely objective when it comes to men anyway: check this out.

Oh, and if you've ever wondered how to guarantee that the children end up with the mother, whether the stereotypically and inevitably useless father wants them to or not, consider that the courts will generally rubber stamp a restraining order at the slightest hint from the mother that the father might so much as look threateningly in her direction. Of course, no mother would even consider such a vicious, underhanded stunt, now would she?

2004-11-09T14:38:00.000-03:00

Better than the real thing

Cosmetic Neurology?

2004-11-09T13:25:00.000-03:00

I read something like this where the potential for cosmetic medicine for the mind is discussed and I wonder if anyone ever read "Brave New World" or "1984" or any of thousands of doom-mongering science fiction novels.

Cosmetic surgery for the body has already produced a veritable freakshow of consequences for those pathologically unhappy with their appearance (do I really need to give examples?) and many others just existentially dissatisfied and being lifted onto the surgery bandwagon by general societal pressure. One wonders what the result will be of the loosing on the world of an ability to do something similar with our minds. I guess I have a few neuroses I might feel better off without (or would I?), but perhaps a real attention getter: an IQ of 200 combined with a permanent acid high. Whooo!

Then there was Jim Carrey's recent effort "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" where he has memories of a failed romance erased with unforeseen consequences and painful human complications.

Well, progress is what it is, so I guess we'd better get ready.

2004-11-09T12:36:00.000-03:00

Desert flower

Male:Female Mortality Ratio

2004-11-07T19:47:00.000-03:00

Here's one the feminists won't like (or will ignore): Sexual selection and the Male:Female Mortality Ratio. It seems that "Being male is now the single largest demographic risk factor for early mortality in developed countries".

Cheaters Are Looked At Longer and Remembered Better Than Cooperators

2004-11-07T19:41:00.000-03:00

Here's where the positive side of human nature scores a point, although the route seems a little negative at first.

In "Cheaters Are Looked At Longer and Remembered Better Than Cooperators in Social Exchange Situations": "... cheaters were rated more important to remember than cooperators and more so when a greater amount of resources was involved. [...] cheaters were looked at longer and people had better memory for their faces and were more likely to remember their social contract status."

The point of this variant of psychology (i.e. evolutionary psychology) is that human behaviour evolved in response to environmental pressures just as did human physiology. That is, natural selection applies to behaviour too.

This means that observed human behaviour can be examined from the point of view of adaptation to environment, thus identified behaviours can tell us something about the environment in which we developed.

From this article, I get that it is more efficient to monitor cheaters than cooperators, thus implying that cooperation is more prevalent than cheating and score one for the bright side of the human animal.

It also occurs to me that it provides some explanation for a pet peeve of mine: that murderers and other bad guys get more press coverage than their victims. We want to know more about the perpetrators than their victims in order to protect ourselves. Society, then, more about protecting ourselves from danger than it is building and preserving alliances, implying that the latter come more or less automatically.

Subjective/Objective

2004-11-07T15:18:00.000-03:00

As an addendum to my last entry, I should add that I am not a mysterian. That is, I do not believe that there is any need to resort to supernatural explanation for anything. Well, except, possibly, existence itself, but that's a whole other topic.

But I do believe that there is a fundamental divide between the subjective and the objective.

You cannot experience what I experience without actually being me and then you would be me and we'd have to start all over again. My subjective experience is a closed book to you. All I can do is try to explain with my limited communications skills what it is that I experience. By and large, you'll get a reasonable idea, such is the degree of commonality between human animals, but it can never be complete.

Likewise, I attempt an objective view. I gather what experience I can and assemble a picture of the world which I hope will allow me to predict what might happen next given what I see and what I do to interact with it. But again, this can never be complete (or I will have regenerated the universe anew in my head) so I can never be totally objective.

Thus total objectivity is everything there is, the whole enchilada, er, God. Subjectivity is me, is you, is the two of us together, limited, fallible and profoundly ignorant.

Gosh, you can tell it's Sunday, can't you?

Language and subjectivity

2004-11-07T14:29:00.000-03:00

Wittgenstein wrote "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". It strikes me that this is a somewhat arid attitude toward one's life.

Many philosophers like to talk in terms of qualia, the atoms of experience that make up a world view, irreducible and inherently subjective. A favourite is "red", or the experience of pain. We use language to communicate these ideas to one another secure in the knowledge that if I say "my shirt is red" you will get information on the appearance of my shirt without the need to actually see it. If I say "the milk tastes sour" you'll know not to drink it and may grimace yourself in memories of your own of the flavour of milk left in the fridge for too long.

But we all know that the word "red" is only a label, a convenient arrangement of letters and spoken sound standing for an experience that I cannot transmit to you at all, I can only trust that your experience and labeling of the world is common to mine (we'd be able to find out if it wasn't pretty quickly, after all). My actual experience of red (and sour milk) is something much more complex and inexpressible than can be communicated by a word, or by any other means. Perhaps your experience is identical to mine. I have no way to know, although I admit that it's probably fairly likely.

Language ties your world to mine, lets us communicate and interact on a common basis, allows us to present personal versions of the world in a form that can be absorbed and interpreted by others, assessed for commonality with their world view and accepted or rejected as they see fit.

But it doesn't define the limits of my world and it won't until there are no experiences or thoughts or states of mind that extend beyond the capability of language to fully describe. And the moment that happens, writers, poets, composers, artists even scientists will all be without a job.

A question for the feminists

2004-11-04T17:43:00.000-03:00

To all the feminists out there: does your ideology include a willingness to surrender those rights which favour you as a woman in return for equal rights in those areas in which you believe men to be favoured?

2004-11-04T15:05:00.000-03:00

My door into summer while inside I shall fear no evil although my moon is a harsh mistress and I am a stranger in a strange land.

2004-11-04T14:43:00.000-03:00

One day I shall be chalk on a blackboard indicating secrets yet to be discovered.

2004-11-04T14:20:00.000-03:00

I give thanks that I am still alive though death be close at every step.

Amnesty International and domestic violence

2004-11-04T12:14:00.000-03:00

I've always thought that Amnesty International was an international organisation dedicated to monitoring human rights violations, not a biased advocacy group.

It seems that they've started a new campaign against domestic violence. While this is a laudable thing in itself, it turns out that the campaign in the UK is part of a larger campaign to end violence against women. Again, I suppose this is laudable, but I'm already wondering why they're not coming out against violence in general. I mean, we all know there are child victims and it is possible for men to be victims of violence, isn't?

I should be less skeptical. "Violence in general" is too large a remit for even AI.

But anyway, in the UK the focus appears to be domestic violence against women. It's not put that way, it's just called "domestic violence", the "against women" is implicit since there is absolutely no mention on the campaign's website of domestic violence against men, nor children.

In fact, at first blush, it looks like the focus is even tighter than that. It seems that the victims they want us to know about are supermodels. Check out the posters.

Oh boy.

So I looked around a bit on their web site and discovered a facts and figures page where I
discover that "Every minute police in the UK receive a domestic assistance call - yet only 35% of domestic violence incidents are reported to the police. (Stanko 2000 & Home Office 2002)" and that
"On average, a woman is assaulted 35 times before her first call to the police. (Jaffe 1982)". Now just a moment's thought and you'll realise that these can't both be true. Well, unless the typical victim is beaten 35 times before she goes to the cops and then about 65 more times and reports every single one. (Let us note too that we are asked to compare figures collected 20 years apart).

Then "1 woman in 9 is severely beaten by her male partner each year. (Stanko et al, 1998)". Now this is in the UK, the beatings are annual, and they are "severe". Well, I've lived in the UK , and I didn't see vast crowds of women with black eyes, or wearing plaster casts, nor queues at the hospital, neither did I ever meet a woman who seemed to be subject to such a regime of debasement.

No, in fact it turns out that "Stanko's survey is flawed and the results meaningless. She conducted her survey in a deprived area of London, outside a doctors surgery at a time most men were at work." Convenient, eh?

There's more, but I grow tired of it. Just in case there's any doubt remaining about the bias and bogus foundation of this campaign, check out these figures which demonstrate the rates of domestic violence in the UK to be not far off equal between men and women.

Oh dear, it does rather look like Amnesty International has been hijacked by some, uh, radical feminist agenda, doesn't it? I do hope this doesn't last, I've respected them highly until this.

2004-11-02T21:27:00.000-03:00

Baile Chino, Chungunga, 2004

Value structures

2004-11-02T21:16:00.000-03:00

In evolutionary terms, no living thing is any more "valuable" than any other. Evolution is merely all about who survives and who dies. Whatever value structure you lay on top of this is of your own choosing. It may derive from evolution, perhaps, in ascribing "value" to survivability, but it is by no means proven that any one species has any greater survivability than any other at any given time.

Intelligence clearly has been a survival trait in recent millenia, but that doesn't mean it will continue to be so and, in fact, there is already some evidence that it is not. Since intelligence is about the only thing that really differentiates us from other creatures, this suggests that your value structure elevates intelligence. But you are intelligence valuing intelligence. Therefore, I believe what you are really saying is that "I am more valuable than a baboon". Sure, I'll buy that, but the baboon won't.

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate

2004-11-02T19:09:00.000-03:00

Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate is one of the very best web sites out there. Read it, or be the poorer.

Enlightenment

2004-11-02T18:29:00.000-03:00

Do the enlightened need the idea of enlightenment in order to be enlightened?