A Radical Leftist Perspective.

I'm in a spiteful mood, and so pointing out the manifest flaws in others is just what I need to balm my wearied soul. So then, to Conservapedia, where wonders are ours to be had.

It was Ben Goldacre that reminded me of the fun to be had with Conservapedia, in posting this link. Please, please read it in full, because it's the funniest thing you'll read all year.

It's either incredibly brave of them to post the dialogue in full, or Andy Schafly genuinely doesn't understand just how badly he's been taken apart here. He also clearly doesn't understand what citation is, and has confused cited data for arrogance. In his second letter he again asks for data that is publicly available to be made available to him. If I ever get rich, the first thing I do after getting a big TV is to pay a guy to follow Andy Schafly around with a swanee whistle.

Shall we go with a little bit of pseudoscience first? This is a good one. I like this. It's a wonderful example of the fingers-in-the-ears "La la la, I'm not listening" approach so vital to 'creation science'. Make shit up, don't give a reason.

A little further leftfield, have some dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs, right? Everyone including Adam and Eve, it would seem, as dinosaurs lived in harmony with man and other animals in the garden of Eden. And of course, talk of dinosaurs leads to talk of that other children's favourite, dragons. Despite being cited (oh, the irony) in support of the 'dinosaurs done lived wit humanz and shared their sandwiches' hypothesis', they're referred to as mythical here. Funny that. So dragons were dinosaurs, and so were unicorns. Settled? Good. Moving on.


The only thing that would make dinosaurs more awesome than being dragons and unicorns

How about my old friend Jack Thompson? The Conservapedia article on him is rather brief, despite his being a very vocal proponent of conservative values. Wikipedia is a little more detailed. Amazing that a positive spin on Jack should be significantly shorter than a thorough take on his behaviour.

Of fuck it. I'll just through a few more insane links at you and we can be done here. This one is lovely. I've noticed that so much gun crime here. It's everywhere! And of course, I wholly buy into the idea that a deactivated gun cannot be reactivated. After all, it's pretty fucking hard to make or buy a firing pin.

Here's a page that ponders what to do about witchcraft. Here's a lovely essay. And here's the death of irony.

Gah. Enough. I can't wade through this shit any longer. So, in the spirit of cooperation that should apparently be outside of my egocentric leftist ways, what's your favourite page? Links below, if you please.

Prevenge.

Well, that's it. We're fucked.

"Would You Like To See My Nightgaunts?"

From a park in Russia, by all accounts:



Not as good as this though:



Our dark lord form beyond all time and space spends a lot more time lurking in the bushes than previously thought.

Meet Bob.

In one of the most fantastic pieces of shrill idiocy yet displayed in politics (it's an election year, no-one's short of examples), Senator Gayle Slossberg wants GTA IV legislated against because it contains a rape scene.

Problem is, it doesn't. She made it up. And everyone knows it. Doesn't stop her though. She says the only reason she can't confirm it's existence is that she's not good enough at the game to reach it.

This is a classic case of what I like to refer to as 'Bob The Magic Goblin' syndrome. If you are going to say something is true because it cannot be disproved, check first that your argument doesn't dissolve into undignified slop when it's subject is replaced by the words 'Bob The Magic Goblin'. Just becauase no-one has any evidence of it's existence doesn't mean it's not there of course. We're likely to come across new fundamental particles in the next few years. But if you have no evidence whatsoever, making bold claims, be it on the street or in the US senate is a bad idea.

Bob The Magic Goblin. Effective against 99% of known media scares, new age cures and deities.

Rant.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying here, but a courier's job is not particularly taxing on the brain. You pick something up in one place, put it down in another, traversing the intervening distance as you please.

Except that it seems not to be. The last three things I've had delivered have turned up damaged. The one we at the Little House That Could are waiting for at the moment has had a hefty surcharge applied to it to ensure it's delivered in the evening, when it's vaguely possible to be in to collect it.

So they tried to deliver during the day. Imagine my surprise.



The contents of the Amtrak vending machine, yesterday.

So I'll say it here. Amtrak (for 'tis they) are cretinous weasels. Typing 'Amtrak + Useless' into Google brings up a lot of results. One that was in the top ten seemed to assert that their drivers involved themselves in exceptionally complicated acts of congress with farmyard animals. I am in no position (you'll be relieved to hear) to confirm or deny this, though I am strongly inclined to agree.



After a hard day breaking and losing people's stuff, Amtrak employees like nothing more than to relax with a delicious glass of lead-based paint. You can taste the lead!

The bottom line is, if someone cannot tell day from night, I certainly do not fucking want them to be driving.

Wha-huh?

Now this exists, and the world is just peculiar enough to tolerate.

Quality Journalism.

Oh, the Daily Mail. How I love you so. Here, the Daily Mail show how our very ever so very very brave (GOD BLESS THE QUEEN) boys in the RAF have destroyed and Afghan drugs nest. Where they were turning cannabis into heroin. Take a look - the quote's just below that picture of a Harrier in flight (designed to pop an erection in middle-aged little Englanders).

If this is true, then the RAF have just destroyed the fucking Philosophers Stone. Even as an abuser of nothing stronger than cheap Mexican lager, I really do find the right-wing "Argh! Drugs!" approach to be a good source of cheap giggles.

Makes Sense.

My output at work has been less than impressive:

'Rithmatic.

From the daily show, on the topic of evangelical Christians voting for Obama:

Jon Stewart: “There’s talk that 40% of evangelicals will go with the Democrat [on Election Day]. When did the evangelicals lose their values?”

Ralph Reed: “I don’t think that’s supported by the polling data. I think if you look at most of the general-election polls, McCain’s getting about 60 to 65 percent of the evangelical vote.”

Engage Hyperrant.

Right. This is should really be three posts, but I'm tired, and frankly you don't deserve it. Item one on the agenda: Barack Obama. Well done, sir. Hilary not giving up at this point: pretty damn funny. She'll still be trying to secure nominations next February.

Item number two: I just rewatched Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, AKA Kenneth Branagh's grotesque egotistical wankfest. It is a preposterous shambles of a movie. As a director, Branagh seemingly considers melodrama to be 'a deft touch', and so wanders past it, down the road marked 'mawkish oblivion'. The result is a soap opera with zombies. Usually I would be in favour of such a thing. This must be an off day.

Item number the third: apparently, atheists have no sense of decency. That goes without saying, really. The thing I really want to know is, what is this ceremony, and how much would it cost to have one performed on my sofa? I have my own matches, and it's despoiler is genuinely far more unholy than a couple of amorous goths.

The Reality Sickens.

Because you asked for it:







If everyone would please be careful what they say in future, this need never happen again.

A Moment.

John Gray is apparently one of the most well-regarded philosophers currently published. Still, I find it hard to read this without stumbling across a few of the old classic right-wing arguments.

• Science as a uniform discipline? Check.


• An absence of doubt as integral to the scientific method? Check.


• Evolution as 'ideology'? Check.


• A deliberate misunderstanding of theory and theorem? Check.


• A 'belief' in evolution as tangential to fascism? Check.

Of course, they're all nonsense, but he continues through the usual well-worn anti-intellectual paths for a while (Morality without religion? Impossible!), and of course, his arguments are inherently Judeo-Christian. Why give to conscience anything else? But that's not the problem here.

This man earns his living as a philosopher. He is both published (regularly, in book form as well as article) and a teacher at LSE. That he should present such appallingly weak arguments should be a cause for concern. An example:

"Promoting Darwinism as an intellectual orthodoxy - a creed rather than a provisional hypothesis - these writers renew the old quarrel between science and religion. Though controversy has been intense, it can hardly be described as having made any large intellectual advance on the debate that raged in Victorian times."

I have never wanted more for the written equivalent of a slide whistle. Let's pretend for a moment that the remark is not vapid nonsense (that is to say, the discovery and understanding of DNA, to name but one small step made in the last hundred years, should be thought of as a trivial thing). What 'intellectual advances' are we supposed to have made? The fact that the majority of scientific discoveries, and here I do mean quantifiably, and of all time, have been made in the last fifty years seems to have escaped this man. That they were meant to be set as some vast scheme to disprove religion is a nonsense, and they were never put forth, initially at least, as part of that debate. That they continue to weaken the hold superstition has over the human race is a blessing, but the idea that that is what they have been working towards is precious little but a right-wing fallacy. In Gray's case, though he has always been demonstrably right-wing, you have to wonder what he imagines scientific endeavour to be. Is the quest for knowledge deliberate counterpoint to his musings? From this evidence, he would certainly seem to think so.

The term 'provisional hypothesis' is something I always appreciate when it comes up in a rant of this nature. To call evolution a 'hypothesis' is to misunderstand the nature of scientific inquiry. As previously stated, Mr. Gray is a philosopher, and so I have to hope that he understands what qualifies as a hypothesis. A hypothesis is either untested, or in the process of being tested. Evolution is a theory. The most tested theory in history, in point of fact. Genuinely remarkable amounts of work go into it each and every day. Have a problem with gravity? Call it a hypothesis - after all, God could be holding you down. But know this - gravity, the theory of gravity - hasn't had one-thousandth of the practical work conducted on it that evolution has. That certainly doesn't make it a hypothesis, much less one one-thousandth of a hypothesis.

Here's another memorable quote:

“Just who has imposed on the suffering human race poison gas, barbed wire, high explosives, experiments in eugenics, the formula for Zyklon B, heavy artillery, pseudo-scientific justifications for mass murder, cluster bombs, attack submarines, napalm, intercontinental ballistic missiles, military space platforms, and nuclear weapons? If memory serves, not the Vatican.”

Not Gray's own words, but ones he feels suit his arguments quite well. Again, the need for a slide whistle is profound. Poison gas and barbed wire? No - not work of the Vatican. Work of organised athiests? If you want to believe that, then quite frankly you can fuck off right now. Two things that were amongst the many horrors to come out of the trenches of WW1. An atheist invention? No. How does that even merit an argument? It's genuinely pathetic.

High explosives? Again, I'm pretty sure that wasn't the vatican. The first modern high explosive, TNT, or dynamite, was invented by Alfred Nobel, renowned scientist and philanthropist. It was designed to make mining operations safer. What a cunt.

Zyclon B was created under the auspices of Nazi Germany, led by known Catholic, Adolf Hitler. Of course, Hitler held whatever religion served him best at the time, but you could play this game all day. Most of these things were the works of single men or women, working for a company or government, with precious little idea or control of how their inventions would be used.

Let's play another game. Who covered up organised paedophilia amongst priests in the US and the UK? Who endorsed the Nazi government of Germany? Who organised witch hunts from the 14th through 16th centuries? Who denies resources to help prevent the spread of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa? Whose agents have beaten women in Irish communities? Who has systematically persecuted people whose only crime is to have known more than those persecuting them?

Going beyond the Catholic Church, of course Northern Ireland, where I was born, has seen an grotesque amount of bloodshed in the name of religion. It can't have escaped many people's notice that there has been a certain amount of trouble with non-Christian religions of late (not that it would bother Mr. Gray - after all, his discourse is not against religious persecution, but is explicitly pro-Christianity). Then you have the Crusades, anti-Jewish pogroms across Europe from the middle ages to the middle of twentieth century, persecution of Muslims in Palestine and across the world, honour killings (which are socio-religious, but require religion as justification). Stop me if this gets old.

Isn't the blame game fun? Seems to me as though we could play for hours.

The idea that this short list of things that are not ostensibly Christian constitutes an argument for Christianity is hilarious. These things are no more Athiest (we're getting a capital letter too, spellcheck be damned) than they are Christian. It's a standard of modern politics - the argument that's there to be read and accepted, never questioned - but it should never be one of philosophy.

These are the piss-poor arguments of a man who's already made up his mind - dangerous territory for any philosopher, particularly one chasing tenure. It's going to take quite a lot more to convince me.

Try harder.

Not Bioshock.

Peoples of the internet, hello. I've been drinking for nine hours. This makes me incredulous. I was wrong about the last Doctor Who. There were not bees, but there may have been wasps.

With that in mind: "I chose the impossible! I chose - The Libwawy!"

Sonic Death Monkey.

By now, you know that cyborg monkeys have dropped us to 2nd place in the food chain.

I'd wanted to write something about this in my usual witty and erudite style. Unfortunately, someone else got there first.

Words Fail Me.

The 28th of May, 2008, and apparently this still qualifies as news.

UPDATE: Sadly, CNN have changed the headline. Originally it was 'Aide accuses Bush of using 'spin' in run up to Iraq war'.

Well Fahkin' Street.

Possibly the best use of 'street speak' to date, discussing the finer points of Nokia 3G compatibility:

Human Tetris.

This cheered me immensely today, though if you can sit to the very end of it you are a better person than me.



When I can squeeze out the words in a sensible order, I'll write something about Indiana jones. Short preview: so angry.

Indiana Jones Rant

So, on Thursday night I watched new Indiana Jones film. This is going to be an angry, spoiler heavy review. If you wish for the experience to be preserved, I suggest you look away now. Those of you in the mood for bile, come back after the poster.



A little context is required for my first concern. One of the trailers was for Kung Fu Panda, a film that is being marketed solely on the fact that it has no discernable merits whatsoever. I was still on a trail of thought that started with 'Surely no-one wants to watch goddamn comedy animal movies any more' and was heading to a way of using a predilection for the things as the basis of a humane euthanasia program, when Indy started.

With comedy CGI animals.

Not so good. I'll get the CGI problem out of the way first of all. There is fucking tons of it, it's very badly done, for the most part, and is incredibly intrusive. I wouldn't have minded so much if the pre-release hype hadn't explained, over and over again, that there was going to be a huge focus on practical effects. This was a lie. A big blatant one. It's a big problem, because it really prevents Crystal Skull
from feeling like an Indy film.

There seems to be a strain of protest online blaming George Lucas for this. Which is preposterous. There are so many people out there claiming to see his grubby, ILM-coated fingerprints all over certain scenes they seem to be forgetting that they have no way of discerning this, and also that Spielberg is not exactly averse to using it himself. The idea that you can single out the bits you don't like, shrug and say 'Well, it's that George Lucas, innit?' strikes me as beyond preposterous.

The next problem is that, just like Temple of Doom, the film suffers for a lack of Nazis. Few things can be described as worse off from the absence of fascism, but right here is the exception that proves the rule. I'd have been happier with a weird jungle-dwelling cabal of aging Nazis (with head-in-a-jar Robo-Hitler) than the muddled communists that serve as the bad guys. Two main flaws. The first is that the America presented is one suffering under the peculiar scrutinies of McCarthy and his ilk, and there's no doubt left as to this being A Very Bad Thing. But then, if the communists have infiltrated the army, then it's kind of justified. It's meant to be pulp adventure - it simply doesn't support such a muddled message.

If the Russians were cackling Red Menace-style caricatures, then it would fit. But they're not, so problem number two rears it's ugly head. They don't have any character whatsoever. Nazis can be boo-hiss bad guys, and it's fine. Modern audiences won't accept that from the (lest we forget, non-combatant) Russians. So they're not inflated stereotypes (which I genuinely believe a film like this needs, or at least something approaching it), but they're not human either. As a result, they're simply fodder (in a couple of occasions this is literally true).

At this point, I feel that I should balance this out. The cast are all pretty good. Harrison Ford still clearly is Indiana Jones, there's no problem there. Shia LeBoeuf is even pretty decent. This surprised me, as I'd only seen him in Constantine and Transformers which didn't give me a whole lot of hope for him. The rest of the cast all fit their purpose in small and underdeveloped roles. They're not great, but they never really get the chance to be. One big character problem for me was Ray Winstone's comedy lag. He's supposed to be ex-secret service and ex-MI6, but he's shit. He's utterly incompetent. I get that he's meant to be a comic foil, but really, if that's the case then it wouldn't have been too much of an ask not to set him up as someone incapable of walking two steps without falling over. That would work. Don't make him superhuman twice over.

Cate Blanchett suffers too. Her character is fine, and she acts well (occasionally wandering accent aside), but really she's a sidekick in want of a moustache-twirling villain to stand behind. There's just not enough there to hang a movie off. She never really feels like a palpable threat. There's also a horrendously underdeveloped character point about her being psychic, but this just drifts in and out of the story as required.

The aliens (told you not to read on) that form the centre of the plot may as well not be there. There are a great many interesting things that could have been done with them. For some reason, 13 alien skeletons, when placed in an aztec centrifuge, become one live alien. One live alien that doesn't really do anything, it just serves to have fire shoot out of the bad guys eyes. Essentially, what's described as an advanced race that provided the entirety of human knowledge before a certain point in history (something that might warrant a certain level of explanation) acts only within the bounds of the film to ensure that the bad guy gets a suitably Indiana Jones-style death.

As always in an Indiana Jones flick, the bad guy must perish because they overreach. There's always been a sense that you shouldn't peek behind the curtain, that it'll always be the downfall of whoever and yaddah yaddah. More than anything here, I was disapointed. It would not take much to develop the aliens here. They are supposed to have crossed the stars and what have you to bring knowledge to the human race. Why do they then kill someone off for wanting to know some poorly-defined something?

This last (I promise) point is probably one that is only a problem to me. These aliens are meant to have provided knowledge of architecture, irrigation and so on to the films pre-mayan culture, and been worshiped for it. In mythology, those gods that provide knowledge to mankind are known as culture heroes, and occur throughout many strands of mythology (Prometheus, Hermes, the Japanese god of agriculture whose name I'm not going to look up just to appear smart on the internet). Typically these figures will be trickster gods, and will have taken this knowledge from other gods for mankind's benefit. Now, the fact that they missed this is something that only I care about, but hey - instant backstory. Better than having this ancient interstellar civilisation serve only as bad guy incinerators.

Basically, when all's said and done, the problem here is that they trampled on my inner child, and I can't really handle that. I wouldn't say that people should avoid it - there are a couple of moments where the old magic is there - but I can't see how anyone could come away from this less than disappointed.

A warning.

If I hear one more person get some fairly basic scientific facts crucially, mind-fuckingly wrong today, I may herniate through sheer rage.

If it happens on the news again, you may hear a rather wet pop. This is an indicator that you should duck and cover.

Setting Myself Up For A Fall.

This is extraordinarily good news. Not only does it relocate an important character in the Marvel pantheon back to a time when America had some sort of idea about when combat was morally justifiable (though a newfound love of it does seem to have come with a dramatic increase in the speed with which it will be engaged), but it's also perfect for the character.

Not to mention the fact that a period piece Superhero flick is something that a lot of people who are me have been clamouring for. Basically, a fleshed-out version of the flashback scenes in The Ultimates would be good enough for me.

Of course, there's no word on director or casting yet. Personally, I think Ridley Scott should be making this. Though there's every chance he doesn't.