Umm, no.

Hah hah hah, silly Dropbox.

You want me to run a proprietary, closed-source daemon on my Linux box? Are you high?

No. Fucking. Way. Go to hell and do not come back.

Double Facepalm

When the fail is so strong, one Facepalm ain’t enough

Via religulous stupidity, of course.

Conspiratorial leaps of illogic

After many years of working with computers and hanging around computer people, and especially with troubleshooting and debugging, I’ve developed a physical sense of tight logic and good causal and evidentiary connections. I now find it physically jarring and just wrong when there’s a break in the chain of logic. Which is why I find conspiracy theory stuff painful to read, watch, or listen to.

I’ve been working with a musician lately who is a big fan of Jordan Maxwell, is a 9/11 truther, and who is quite convinced that the world is controlled by the Bavarian Illuminati Freemasons (fnord!). So he sent me a Jordan Maxwell video and I watched it. Or tried to. Maxwell does a lot of research, but it is kind of scattershot and riddled with holes, allowing him to jump to completely unfounded conclusions almost every minute or two. About a third of the way in, the leaps of painfully wrong illogic were too annoying, and I couldn’t continue.

Example: Maxwell is going on about the Masons. Fine, I know a bit about the Masons since I dated an Eastern Star member for a few years, and got to know her family who were all involved in that. So Maxwell is presenting the different orders and such, pretty interesting stuff, including things I didn’t know like the differences between the various rites. And he mentions the Third Degree Master Masons, and the term “the third degree”. Then he asserts that the term “the third degree” refers to interrogation because “the police force is a Masonic institution”. What the fuck??!

No, sorry. “The third degree” commonly refers to a tough, coercive, merciless interrogation because the initiation rite to make it into the third degree of the Masons is rumored to be really difficult, traumatic, and allegedly sadistic. So cops, and others, whether they are masons or not, have used that term to indicate a harsh interrogation. Maxwell casually asserts that all the various police forces in this country (there’s one for every county and almost every municipality in the whole nation!) are a great masonic conspiracy, just because they occasionally use a term that comes from Masonry. That was a leap large enough to startle me.

There’s plenty of others. His analysis of visual symbolism is just as interesting as his take on language, but similarly weak in logic and bizarre in its conclusions. He’s kind of like a paranoid Joseph Campbell. He infers from the common use of symbols like the eye in the pyramid, the cross and the crown, etc, that the world is under the control of an occult conspiracy. I learned first hand and at a very young age that the use of symbols doesn’t indicate any kind of conspiracy, or even that the people using the symbols have any idea what they mean.

When I was young, and played in heavy metal bands, we tended to use in our visual communications lots of upside down crosses, pentagrams, blood-spatterings, blackletter lettering, umlauts, etc. And hysterical parents and legislators and newsmedia breathlessly concluded that we were all satan worshippers, or Nazis, or druids, or all of the above. Horseshit. We were white suburban middle-class kids, trying to look tough. We used those symbols because they looked cool. And the Occam’s Razor explanation of the use of, say, the use of Masonic, Egyptian, and/or Rosicrucian symbolism by the rich and ruling classes is the same: it looks cool, it looks "official", it looks regal. It’s much more likely to be done for the same reason that so many banks and government buildings in the USA done in the neoclassical style: aspirations of, and intimations of, legitimacy– not conspiracy. I could be wrong– I haven’t proven anything– but Maxwell doesn’t either. That’s my point. It’s very different to offer a likely and mundane explanation with qualifications, than to present a completely stunning and complex one as fact without any kind of logic to back it up. Why do so many people miss that distinction?

I think we need to teach logic and critical thinking in schools. More people need to understand that simply putting two facts next to each other, but not connecting them in any kind of causal way– like showing the gin and vermouth to each other in a very, very dry martini– is not enough to draw any conclusion. Likewise to train people to become physicaly uncomfortable with “facts” that aren’t backed up by any kind of evidence. Things like that stand out as obviously to me as a function call that is misspelled, or a wire that isn’t plugged in: “Oh, hey, there’s the problem!”. More people need to be physically startled when such leaps are made. I think we’d have better politics, better software, and things will run more smoothly.

Let them eat stimulus checks

Instead of the good old Keynesianism we need– long-term government investment in projects to make the nation energy independent, a masive overhaul of the nation’s public transportation system and electricial grid, dramatic public works and incentives to remake the country from suburban sprawl to small towns and cities surrounded by productive farmland, incubating green businesses, and other things that need to be done anyway and which private industry can’t or won’t do–, each of us gets a couple hundred bucks in the mail and are told to… GO SHOPPING!

“Sure, I know you’re malnourished and need hearty, filling, nutritious food, over the long term, in order to return to healthful self-sufficiency… so here’s a little candy bar right now with lots of sugar. Be sure to eat it right away.”

Pathetic. Insulting. Completely backwards. So out of touch as to be condescending without even trying to be. Marie Antoinette calls out from the balcony in Crawford, Texas, “let them eat stimulus checks”.

Shill Out

Whenever I stumble upon an opportunity to do so, I shill for a friend's business, NearlyFreeSpeech.net. In addition to being my web hoster– and a damn good one–, I believe in their philosophy, and I've become even more convinced of the vital need for the service they provide whenever I see crap like the telecom industry's attacks on net neutrality. The Internet is not a broadcast television, and must never be allowed to become one.

For the last 4 years, I've included NearlyFreeSpeech.net's tagline as my email .sig; since I know how hard it is to compete with huge MegaCorporations and their massive ad budgets, I figure a little guerrilla marketing goes a long way.

I sometimes felt guilty about being such a shameless shill. But then I read this:

They had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. You do the math. No wait, I'll do it for you: that's 880 posts a day (if minimum was met). However he said the better ones could do around 8 or 10 an hour.

So I guess a lot of guerilla marketing goes an even longer way. The idea of some mega-corp renting out a boiler room of paid shills pretending to be actual members of some community or other… eek. I've seen those ads that said "GET PAID TO SURF THE INTERNET", and went, heh, yeah, that's funny, who's gonna fall for that. Well, maybe it's not so funny.

Invasion of the credibility snatchers.