Atheism and Community

There's only one serious problem with atheism - it lacks the vital element of "community."

I think this to a great extent explains why people who are raised atheistic - of which I am one, by the way - tend towards socialistic principles; raised absent any community save those forced upon them by the government - schools, primarily - they come to see government -as- community; to such an individual, it makes perfect sense to have government provide welfare and services, because there is no alternative - there is no community outside government.

Which is why religion is increasingly becoming opposed to government involvement in society, a position nobody would have expected two hundred years ago - the religious -see- the alternative, they live it.  They go to churches where collection plates are passed around, when pleas for help are made for unfortunate members of the congregation.  And it's a real community; the people know each other.

This is another thing which the internet is changing; community is finally catching up to the changes in social structures.  Pleas for assistance are made and responded to.  And things evolve.

Social Security

Social Security is not as simple a matter as either the Republicans or Democrats make it out to be.

It is, effectively, a mandatory retirement scheme.

The problem is that it is a mandatory retirement scheme whose investment portfolio amounts to this: Treasuries.  Special treasures with special interest rates.

No, the Democrats didn't raid the trust fund, and neither did the Republicans; the excess funds from Social Security are always spent to buy treasuries, the sale of which funds government activity.  The system is -built- to raid the "trust fund," which is and always has been a big IOU from the Federal Government.

From a certain perspective this makes accounting easier; the Federal debt -includes- its Social Security obligations.

From another perspective, this simultaneously digs and hides a massive hole in Federal accounting; it holds a loan asset against itself on spent money, which can either be held out as an imaginary trust fund, or a massive debt obligation, depending on who is making the claim.

It also means that the Federal government is legally obligated to be in debt.  To itself.  Deficit spending is -required-.

The problem comes in because the Federal government isn't required to hold liquid assets against its debt, and doesn't, and as social security declines into the red, the excess costs are effectively and necessarily coming out of the general budget, which, because we're running a deficit, means our imaginary debt gets transformed into real debt; which is to say, the trust fund -does not exist-.  All of those costs must be paid for.

Prejudice In Hiding

Because prejudice is no longer acceptable, instead prejudice is hidden behind support for non-prejudiced ideas with a disproportionate impact on a particular targeted group.

Immigration is probably the most obvious arena for this; individuals prejudiced against Mexicans insist we should tighten immigration laws.

But here's the thing: Tightening immigration laws, while repugnant to me, is not a racist cause.  There are legitimate, entirely non-racial arguments for tightening immigration, and indeed the majority of people who want to tighten immigration are not racists.

But because they share a cause with racists, they're branded racists themselves.  This clearly is not a legitimate branding; the fact that a racist supports a policy does not make the policy racist, nor does it make those who support the policy racist.  Well-meaning individuals, looking at the racist basis, may treat the rational basis as a rationalization by the racists, invented by the racists, with no legitimate concerns.  This does not make it so.

This is a serious problem, not least because the targets of the misbranding rapidly cease to treat "racism" as a valid complaint.  It undermines broader efforts in eliminating prejudice.

This is why the race card is worn out; because individuals like Goldwater were and are branded with it; he had legitimate reasons for opposing the legislation he opposed; he didn't want the civil rights movement to go away, he wanted certain objectionable things removed from specific legislation, primarily the expansions of federal power at the expense of the states.

An Ode to Anon

Anonymous wins.

To the entropic decay of authority:
Fear Sun Tzu's greatest tactic,
An anonymous majority,
The entity climactic.

The greatest skill of battle,
An army entirely formless
Whose enemies babble and prattle
Unknowing of the coming abyss.

An Internet once given,
An Internet now taken,
All is not forgiven
And they are unshaken.

Try and take away a founder
Try and take away a domain
Regulation flounders
They will yet remain.

The domains will be theirs
Targeted once and scattered to the wind
The domains shifted to the shares
Domains over servers transcend.

Dot P2P or heirs,
Wikileaks and pirateers,
Anonymized encrypted musical chairs
Hiding what Anonymous reveres.

You should be fearing this fight,
Do not lose control to hold control
Or the status quo shall die tonight;
In chaos will achieve their goal.

Anonymous wins.

Wikipedia: From Knowledge Base to Encyclopedia

A momentary respite from my absence, potentially prolonged depending on how things go.

One of the things which depresses me about Wikipedia is the extent to which it has declined from its initial explosion; it's trying to be a reputable source of knowledge, which to my mind is contradictory to both its mechanisms and its community.

What was beautiful about you, Wikipedia, at least for me, wasn't that you were 100% right, but that, 100% of the time, you had some kind of information about something.  I didn't want just another encyclopedia; there are already encyclopedias out there.

"We should be respectable and authoritative" - no, you shouldn't.  That's not why I, or countless others, came to you.  We already HAD respectable and authoritative encyclopedias; free ones, even, as of the time you got popular.

There was a brief, beautiful moment there, when the drive to create information exceeded Wikipedia's ability to remove it again; you could find information about the characters in the webcomic Freefall, you could find information on (somebody's opinion of) proper oral sex technique, you could find an editing war going on between a company and people trashing it.  Wikipedia wasn't merely an encyclopedia, it was an -internet- encyclopedia.

For all your work, you're still not authoritative; if I'm building a bridge I'm not going to get the shear strength of a magnesium-coated steel beam from you, you're no good to someone writing a paper as a source, I can't rely on you to say anything about climate change (your pages contradict each other for crying out loud).  You're not independent; your emphasis on authoritative sources and marginalization of things like blogs means anything ignored by the mainstream media gets ignored by you, as well.

You're still kind of good for getting the gist of something when detailed factual information isn't necessary, or quick refreshers for information I've already largely internalized and would recognize serious issues in.

But you aren't wild and free anymore.  You have massive lists of information you intend to delete - not because it isn't true, not because nobody wants it, but because it doesn't fit your vision of yourself.

Your time is limited.  The vision you're trying to constrain yourself to is not the vision which made you great.  What you are trying to be, others are better at being.  You're jockeying to be a third-rate encyclopedia.

Well, I have a first-rate encyclopedia.  If that's all you are going to be, I don't need you anymore.

What do I replace you with, however?  That is the question.

By the by...

Out one business trip at the moment; this is to be followed by Thanksgiving, which is being hosted at my home this year, followed by a second business trip.  I have a few spare moments, but I'm reserving those for my girlfriend, who has been incredibly patient with me (our anniversary was this past weekend, and I couldn't be there) and whose patience I'm trying not to try too much more, so the blog will probably be put on hold for the next month or so.

Yeah, I haven't been running it long enough to do this, so I'm probably going to lose the two people who were reading regularly my rants on a regular basis.  Ah well.

Hmm...

Feeling guilty lately about not spending much time with my grandmother.

My grandfather died in recent years, and it became apparent that her mental state was significantly worse than anybody thought; we thought she had early-stage Alzheimer's while he was still living and minding her, but since then we've discovered that, while it's not the early stages of Alzheimer's, it is one of the other variations of dementia, and it's a lot more advanced than we had thought.

On the one hand, I want to spend time with her, because I don't have much time left to do so - but then actually doing so is... she's not there.  Even when I spend time with her, I don't feel like I'm spending time with... -her-, just her body, and the shadow of a mind.  She has lucid moments, characteristic of the condition, but...

She forgets what you've said thirty seconds after you've said it; she forgets what she's said thirty seconds after she's said it, and will repeat it.  She will repeat a story you told her a day or two previous, thinking it's something which happened to her.

She has hearing aids; I'm not sure if she actually has problems with her hearing, because the majority of the time she simply can't understand what you're saying.  There's something going on in her mind, she works very hard to pretend she knows what you're saying - if you laugh randomly she'll laugh with you, assuming you told a joke - but her thoughts are entirely... inaccessible.

We took her on vacation with us; a cruise.  The week after, she thought we had gone to Arkansas; two weeks later, she didn't recall it at all.  (Not to mention that she had absolutely no idea what was going on when we were on the cruise itself.  She mostly stayed in her room, although she did seem to enjoy the shows.)

But thinking back, I have a really hard time figuring out how much of this is new.  The family used to laugh when she did things like put apple vinegar instead of apple juice into a pie recipe.  My grandfather is gone now, and we can't ask him how bad things really were.  My dad remembers her being not quite right when he was a kid.

I don't know if the person I've always thought of as my grandmother was even ever there, or whether the persona was something I invented, shoehorned around a confused woman doing her best to get through the day, laughing when people told jokes because they were laughing and not because she understood them.  I remember my grandfather went to great lengths to get coffee pots and other appliances which looked and worked exactly like the ones they had had before, even when I was a very young child.  My parents replaced her old microwave (which used a turn-dial) with one with buttons as a Christmas gift one year, and from then on my grandfather was the one to use the microwave; she had it over ten years and never did learn to use it.  It was this way my entire life.  Was she better then?  Did I simply not see it?  I don't know.  The stranger things she did stand out, but they could have simply been particular bad days.  I can't recall her ever acting in a way which would suggest she was healthy then, though.  And even then, when I thought of her, it was always as a unit pair with my grandfather; I couldn't have pictured her without him, and that... lack of a picture held true when he died.

I think she knows he's dead, but I do not think she knows how long it's been; I'd be surprised if she remembered what he died of.  She doesn't notice the anniversary of his death passing.

I feel guilty not spending time with her, but at the same time, I don't actually want to.  I try to keep her comfortable, bring her her coffee and the newspaper she rereads dozens of times throughout the day (I do not know how much she understands, but it is part of her daily ritual).  And I watch somebody who is shade already, unaware of the living.