Eternal meaning

More Douglas Adams:

It's very clear in the end - is it an A or a B? - ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

Which recalls the old complaint that without an authority-figure deity to mandate the dividing lines, we burn away the original ties that bound the meaning of mathematics to the world and instead leave it stranded on a solipsistic island of the human imagination. Because clearly, meaning has nothing to do with the human imagination; if the world doesn't conform 1:1 with what's in my head then everything is meaningless for all time.

Of course, the definition of life has always been a matter of opinion. It's just that with religion, people tend to deliberately suppress that things have ever been different — after all, it's an eternal truth, so how could it ever have changed? We've always been at war with Eurasia, etc.

[Technorati Orwellian atheist bastardry deliberate forgetting]

After education

Really catching up here, this news is only a week old. From The Register: Conservapedia too pinko? Try Metapedia.

Metapedia — literally after education, presumably it's where you would go when you're done learning — is an alternative wiki devoted to the pro-European cultural Kampf.

(Honestly, Pro-European? These people must be Americans to whom 'European' means 'white'.)

Oh look, it's our old friend cultural Marxism, complete with hallucinated conspiracies by The Frankfurter School. I told you the bastards had adopted "political correctness" as a convenient cover for creeping racism.

Well, at least now you can research white-supremacy pricks in one convenient place. I'd look into it more, but I have to find a way to block that bloody logo in the upper corner first. It's going to give me nightmares.

This probably needs to be refuted, since people will believe anything as long as it's blamed on communists:

Anti-racism is the Marxist ideology of opposition to “racism.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term “racist” was coined by Leon Davidovich Bronstein (Leon Trotsky). Anti-racism is a major focus of Cultural Marxism.

Of course, if they'd bothered to look up racialism they would have found an instance from 1907, long before Trotsky's 1930 book.

[Technorati European meaning white Frankfurter school Metapedia blame the commies creeping racism creepy logo cultural Marxism free speach hallucination political correctness retardpedia war on memory white scumbags]

While I'm being political

For something like the Danish cartoon controversy to have its flames fanned like it did, it had to be convenient news for a lot of people: first, for the ones who compiled the dossier, misters Akkari and Laban, I suspect they could very well have been believing their own bullshit, not merely wanting to get on the map.

The numerous other people involved, though: what did they get out of it? I couldn't quite figure it out, until I saw this post by Angry As'ad, a Lebanese professor at Berkeley:

This is absurd. In Arabic newspapers, some Western companies took out ads to declare that they are not Danish. This while Arab governments are doing business with Israeli companies. Personally, I boycott Israel and Israeli products, but will not boycott Denmark or Danish companies.

Here we see a professed standard (enmity towards Israel) not being translated into action, presumably because Israel has enough industrial power that a boycott would be seriously impractical. Railing against a perceived enemy that they're not particularly dependent on thus provides not only a handy outlet of frustration, but also a cover for this hypocrisy. How convenient.

On the other side, we have a class of people who believe that Islam is a scourge, but keep on buying colossal amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia. How to resolve this uncomfortable hypocrisy? Why, you bray loudly on your blog. Feels good, doesn't it.

Of course, being too obvious about blanket-hating an entire faith would be distasteful and in fact might get you arrested. But support Denmark, that's a pleasantly vague message that does most of its work through connotations. Sound familiar? It's all part of the war on specifics.

Support Denmark. Not support Jyllands-Posten, mind. That's a bit difficult to spell, what with all those wacky Danish letters in it, for the unwashed who already have trouble spelling free speech. Instead, J-P is represented by the entirety of Denmark, even though all the Danish government did was fail to take the extraordinary action of censoring newspapers. But c'mon, it's not like Denmark is all that big a country? How could they possibly need more than one newspaper, am I right? AM I RIGHT? Yeeeah.

This substituting the whole of Denmark for a Danish newspaper might be seen as a simple reaction to the fact that the boycotts were of Danish products generally. But given the average blogtard's propensity for tribalism and all these people who have trouble seeing that Europe even has individual countries in it... no, I don't think so.

With freedom of speech thus reduced to an excuse for a hot-air football match, people happily donned jerseys labelled "Denmark" and "outraged Muslims". By the time news emerged that Jyllands-Posten had previously refused charicatures of Jesus for fear they would offend, everyone were too busy thumping their chests to notice. Perhaps they had forgotten the name of the paper. Perhaps they had forgotten that there ever was a paper to begin with. The original circumstances merrily shed, it became the meme of The Danish Cartoon Controversy. Nevar forget!

Then the coarse lumping-together seriously backfired — or it would have, if people generally didn't have the attention span of gnats. In the case of Erik Haaest, the arts council that awarded him the money genuinely is part of the Danish government, making the whole-for-the-part actually somewhat justified.

Well, I certainly feel safer knowing that free speach is "defended" by a gang of tribalistic attention-deficit cases, their defence contingent on the opposition being someone they already hate. Don't you?

[Technorati Danish cartoons GSAVE NEVAR FORGET TWAT angryarab atheist bastardry blogtards cartoon controversy chest-thumping free speach global struggle memory hole metonomy never forget post-mortem equine flagellation soundbite culture vitriol war on memory war on specifics]

WTC as an anti-religion slogan is ill-advised

The "official Richard Dawkins MySpace presence" is running a campaign (at the bottom of the page) to change people's icons into this thing.

This is a foolish move for a site claiming to be a "clear-thinking oasis." Now, normally I'd be all in favor of hammering the important point home that belief in immortality can make people do horrible things. But just slapping the towers of the World Trade Center on a flyer like this mostly exposes how little you know about their history.

Manhattan architect Laurie Kerr's The Mosque to Commerce, published in Slate on the 28th of December 2001, lays out the history of how the WTC's architect Minoru Yamasaki was heavily influenced not only by modernism and Japanese design but also by Islamic architecture:

Yamasaki's courtyard mimicked Mecca's assemblage of holy sites—the Qa'ba (a cube) containing the sacred stone, what some believe is the burial site of Hagar and Ishmael, and the holy spring—by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca's.

The fact of the matter is, the towers probably symbolized minarets.

So. With "no religion," Yamasaki would probably never have imagined the WTC the way it turned out in the first place. Employing the WTC for a slogan against religion like this requires an act of forgetting, of sweeping inconvenient details under the rug. But apparently we desperately need slogans these days. Because it's the information age, or something like that.

(Mosque architecture? In turn inspired by Byzantine.)

It must be really easy to keep believing

"Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it" seems as though it ought to be more rhetorically effective than it is.

Maybe people don't like to be reminded of just how much it is they forget, especially things they once believed in.

Or maybe it's to do with the sheer simplicity of it.

(The quote is from Philip K. Dick, apparently. I had forgotten.)

Eternal war, part CXXXVII

Interesting. Americans are apparently beginning to internalize the notion that

Now since when has the objective of war been to never kill or torture civilians? Not in World War II, where we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intent then was to crush the will of the other side, and to make so horrible for them to keep fighting us that they would surrender.

It is refreshing when they just out and admit that they're in favor of employing terrorist tactics. Or maybe this is just due to "terrorist" having been used as a synonym for "enemy" for so long that it completely passes them by.

Implied, of course, is the notion that since our side did it, it must be okay. Forgotten is the simple fact that most wars before 1933 did not involve civilians very much. Forgotten is the fact that WWII's civilian slaughters were so horrible that a Geneva convention was drawn up to prevent it from happening again.

Note also the circumspect language — goals of war are not usually defined negatively, nor are they usually consistent throughout the course of it: war has its own logic, and tends to sweep people along once it starts to churn. As we can see.