The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

sam harris and reza aslan debate on book tv for about an hour and a half.

i still think harris is a fuckface; my critique has more nuance, but ultimately it boils down to he acts like a fuckface, even if his charicature of liberal christianity and islam is generally accurate. the issue is not the reasons - metaphysical, rational, irrational, etc - why party a fights with party b, but that both parties do so nonviolently, and preferably with respect to (the real or imagined, depending on your stance) inalienable rights.

it doesn't genuinely matter whether my neighbors is a christian, a buddhist or a marxist (to pick three random faiths) so much as they are a good neighbor. even the crazy people in jesus camp are, by and large, good neighbors - in that even virulently religious assholes generally don't go beyond social sanctioning in attacking their neighbors, with some exceptions of course; and i can't really argue for or against social sanctioning. of course, my preference is that people mind their own business - perhaps to the detriment of the mythical beast invoked by various people as "community" - but that's why i live in a place of relative anonymity. there are, of course, reasonable boundaries to social sanctioning that even the most facile advocate of the morphous quality known as "tolerance" will acknowledge - should people tolerate [insert unnacceptable quality or type of person here] living next door?

this question is obvious in the terms of antisocial behavior - loud music, assaults, etc etc and so forth - but less obvious in terms of potential infraction. imagine your worst idea of a neighbor - pedophile, nazi, whatever - but imagine them keeping to themselves and never really disturbing NOR hiding their status. how much does their potential danger actually influence your feelings?

point being, toleration has its limits. some of my immediate neighbors, for example, may resent my personal feelings or beliefs on various subjects - political, religious or social - but provided i don't actually publicize these beliefs, everything is probably cool. and even if i do, well...i've had a few short exchanges with various people in the neighborhood on various issues - i'm the sort of guy that, for some reason, drunk people start talking to about their problems in life.

ultimately, it helps that i can snap most of them in half, of course, and i often find it hard to quantify how not being afraid of physical violence actually influences my political and religious beliefs, or even if this question is answerable. that my younger self kept to principles in the face of actual violence doesn't necessarily mean anything outside of being a stubborn pain in the ass.

and even more ultimately, i do think political belief is generated - in part, if not the dominant part - by one's worst fears combined with one's understanding of oneself. (to charicature, at their hearts liberals are greedy robber barons, conservatives are barely controlled libertines, libertarians are petty tyrants, and so forth) and we see this quite obviously in the words of people like sam harris or especially in documentaries like jesus camp (and variously, in the fiction of the left behind series and other wish fulfillment forms of entertainment).

coming back to drunkenness and honesty and social sanction, when the RNC convention was in the city i had met up with a bunch of people in downtown brooklyn for a friend's birthday at a lovely tiki bar called the zombie hut after spending the day in the city visiting various protest sites, dodging cops and meeting up with some friends whose band had played earlier. in the process of building up to a horrific hangover the next day i had entertained our little group with loudly and tactlessly outlining my plan to fill the WTC crater with the protestors and the republicans and the more dickfaced cops and paving it over. (i may have invoked images of three piece suits and puppets for peace intertwined like a time capsule, to be dug up by later generations and interpreted as a complicated religious ritual by robot anthropologists.) the only other party in the place was a group of six people, three men and three women, who clearly did not take kindly to my projections of invoking a city of peace through the mass murder of ideologues, idealists and opportunists; one particular gentleman kept making eye contact with me, on the cusp of wanting desperately to tell me to shut up or perhaps even throwing a beer glass at my head.

having had enough to drink to be both irritable and mischevous, played a mean trick on this poor guy by doing an old psyche-out routine from ye olden football days. presuming you practice enough, if you look at someone - you can stare at their forehead if eye contact wigs you out, though that's far safer in giving a speech than in something where watching facial tics can tell you to get the hell out of the way - and are suitable for bluffing of this kind, you can visualize a series of violent actions (in football it was, for example, a pancake) and the changes in your physical and emotional non-verbal cues are transmitted with disturbing effectiveness. (i.e. like how you know the drunk in the bar is about to get up and start some shit with you, except a bit more self-directed) the target of my anti-affection backed down, and i continued on my pox on both houses comedy routine to much delight and merriment.

so i guess the real moral of the story is that social sanction requires overt violence to enforce at some point, be it the might of the state or just a bludgeon. and even further, freedom from social sanction requires the willingness to inflict enough damage in return to make intervention unadvised until numbers are lopsided enough to ensure victory, and that ultimately might will always make right - it is merely might distilled through the justifications and glosses of culture, politics and law.

i am lucky - in that particular episode, and many others throughout the years - that for the most part people, including myself, are reluctant to engage others with violence. we all are, to be sure, though luck no doubt runs out. another example of my multipolar instability started back around halloween last year; one friday myself and two other gentlemen pulled a drunk old man off the tracks (he just sat down with his back to the tracks like there was a bench there) while sixty or seventy people sat around in their halloween finery and watched. i left the station for fear of screaming my head off at some faultless young woman who asked the general crowd "wow, did you see that?"

i walked home in an utter rage in the pouring rain, completely shocked (for the thousandth time, being reborn naively after every obvious life lesson like the perpetual virgins of islam...) and nearly got into a random fight with a drunk - and again faultless, if stupid - young man outside of the same very bar i mentioned above. life is funny like that. six women surrounded him after i asked him three times to move out of my way before throwing my bag down and grabbing for his jacket; it was only a few blocks later that i had realized just how fucking stupid what nearly happened

but i spent the next two weeks intervening in various subway disputes and disturbances without much forethought - the drunk guy who started yelling at an old woman that "no one wants your wrinkled old pussy"; the two guys who were asking a far too young girl (she was all of 15 perhaps? a strain of gallant paternalism will never leave me, i fear...) if she wanted to come home with them to suck their dicks; the drunk guy who started yelling at me while i was otherwise engaged with a fine book and minding my own business, etc.

time and again i threw dice because i was utterly obsessed and enraged by that young woman saying "wow, did you see that?" no matter how many times i've understood this lesson, from grammar school to high school to now, both as victim and victimizer - people will not intervene if they can avoid it, even if intervention is the only correct course of action, even if their intervention with the ubiquitous cell phone would stop a potentially fatal beating.

to quote myself from a paper last year on liberalizing nyc concealed carry laws:

[dhex]

and in my in-box, most oddly:

[Nana Komatsu]

[dhex]

yeah, it's a non-verbal form of intimidation. you see it a lot with dudes on the subway who are having a bad day and want to spread the misery around, or looking specifically to fuck with somebody, since there's no good answer. (i.e. "nothing" gets a standard "what, you think i'm nothing? fuck you!" and also inspires some trade insults in return, leading to the sort of encounter party a was looking for in the first place)
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[dhex]

speaking of aggression, the continuing saga of my journey remixes:

mooseknuckle (rough edit)

warning: kind of loud and obnoxious in a lot of parts, and on the long side.
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[dark steve]

unrelated: http://youtube.com/watch?v=R3iiaGD0koU
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[dhex]

why is the 50 foot woman dressed like athena?

this was an interesting piece in, of all places, american conservative. they generally try to avoid interesting pieces 80% of the time.

along those lines, what the living fuck happened to counterpunch?
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[dhex]

oscar shrugged
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[dhex]

continuing the shits and giggles train:

a freudian analysis of atheism.
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[Dracko]

[dhex]

one day we'll teach you to love again, dude.

it's obviously a parody, though.
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[Dracko]

I'm all about the love.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dark steve]

[dhex]

hmmm...good point.

unrelated: i feel these guys on this one
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[dhex]

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/009176.html

[Dracko]

[dhex]

i can't imagine la would help much; everyone desires everything, but not everyone realizes that everything is impossible.

The subtitle says it all: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.

My reading of such books follows a formula. Pick up said charge that voluntary individual behavior is leading to a crisis. Sort author's mush into a rational choice model with either social externalities or imperfections within the self. Evaluate said model using evidence, in particular whether the other implied predictions are plausible.

it's a shame some of his commentors are utter fuckwits.
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[Dracko]

I really don't put any faith into these sorts of books. They're loosely scientific and assume far too much about people's strengths and intelligence, or rather, lack of.

Besides, "loose", at this stage, seems like a pretty moot, tantamount irrelevant, concept. I'm no longer a bitter high school geek.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

it depends on what kinds of axe one wants to grind in many cases; obviously the author of the book he's gently ripping on is concerned that young women are doing things incorrectly.depending on what an author uses to support such a case - and depending on your biases - will determine how people respond to it. unless you're reading a targeted work of sociology or anthropology, most of the time you're going to have to rely on some generalizations of varying statistical support.

also, people can make generalized systemic arguments and still be compelling (foucault comes to mind, as does virginia postrel, just to pick two disparate examples) depending on one's taste for melodrama and the argument being put forward. similar defenses are employed by the more staid supporters of much of what falls under the rubric of "cultural theory" or "critical studies" since very little of it relies on anything other than syllogisms. (ironically, much of that field comes from an institutional culture that sometimes overtly devalues attempts to measure anything mathematically or statistically, which is handy if one's work is going to be unsupportable by those commonly accepted means.)

but the methodology is similar; build a case for something the author thinks important or alarming, find supporting examples, and see if it sticks.

edit: i should add that this doesn't dissuade me from reading and enjoying many people who don't necessarily make the most airtight arguments. i have different standards for academic work than reading books (pop sociology/pop political theory or whatever you'd like to group them as) and ultimately, i get interesting ideas from all over the place. i don't have a lot of love for people who write obtusely because they think people should have to work to understand them, but i also view that as a kind of demonstration of worth in certain categories. i.e. the people who do "get theory" as it were have a greater amount of cultural worth than those who don't.

this has actually popped up in my wife's phd program; there's a subset of people who concentrate on theory and formed their own little clique to distinguish themselves from the people who were more interested in writers and writing. being known as someone who "gets theory" was a definite social marker for their group. of course, to my bias it meant they were better at creating personal attacks in the guise of syllogisms but, being what i am, of course i would say that.

you see a similar phenomenon with people who like "difficult music" - those who genuinely do like, say, francisco lopez (i pick on him because i think he's fucking boring as hell, just fyi) generally won't be dicks about it, as opposed to saying "well, you're just not [smart enough/old enough/advanced enough] to appreciate his genius." no doubt you see a similar thing with certain kinds of games (lonely games?) it's a way of demonstrating a separation from the masses, i.e. a status-seeking game. generally speaking, if you cannot outline a concept in a single paragraph so that nearly anyone can understand it, you may not really understand that concept. (you may also suck at explaining things, which is fine for technicians but not good for teachers.)

a rhetorical counter to this, of course, is not to adopt some kind of proto-phillistine attitude or the kind of needlessly wounded martyrdom bullshitting one finds from conservative commentators on the academy like david horowitz, but to agree with every single charge for disagreement put forward. most of these exchanges, like arguing about politics (rather than discussing politics - the difference is pretty obvious to anyone who has experienced both), rely on an emotional reaction. without the reaction there's no way to continue the back and forth, which ultimately relies on either anger or embarassment (i.e. proving one is not what is one is being called)

case in point:
my wife had a class with a south african poet in a race theory class. ultimately, she was a nice person, but not meant to be a professor. (too quick to cry and/or get emotional over simple disagreements; actual arguments were largely impossible) at one point they read a law review journal where the author capitalized "Black" in all of his footnotes but used a lowercase "w" for "white."

my wife was a copyeditor and a journalist for many years; as such, this sticks out like a sore thumb - it's either one or the other, you know? consistency is god.

of course, in bringing this up to the class she did not anticipate the lack of agreement on what this means to different parties. to her it is a typographical error; to the professor it was a symbol of something much larger. unfortunately, my wife was not prepared for what was to follow - the professor lost her shit for half an hour and called out "that kind of attitude" that causes racism, sexism, and so forth. my wife was arguing about an essentially typographical point; the professor was arguing an emotional/political point. neither seemed to understand the other was not speaking about the same things.

the correct tactic, in my eyes, is to embarass the professor at that point and call their professional demeanor into question; regardless of someone's political stance, if they're engaged enough to turn out that kind of emotional lecturing, they most certainly want to believe they're speaking from a position of moral authority. calling that authority into question interrupts their narrative and engages them in defending what was, just moments before, self-evident.

but again, i am a fucking jerk, and quite protective of my wife, who was very upset.

that the professor then spent two hours apologizing on the train ride back from fordham (how weird they would end up in the same car on that day) is evidence more of her need to leave the teaching profession than anything else. (and my wife's need to toughen up, since personal attacks are the order of the day in the academy. she has since gotten better at not immediately reacting when someone calls her names.)

but by immediately agreeing - the WMD of rhetorical dick moves in this kind of field, where overly emotional people engage in martyrdom sophism - with all of the charges, you make them seem utterly stupid. why, yes, professor, it is my insistence that typography be consistent that is truly causing racial and social strife and economic instability; obviously, the lower-casing and upper-casing of letters is the modern equivalent of having one's name written in the book of life - a hermetic operation that brings the platonic in line with the sub-atomic. that's clearly not a silly thing to say at all.

one of the nice things about going to a business school is that arguing is expected and professors aren't treated with the kind of deference and, yes, fear that they seem to have in many other schools. especially in liberal arts programs, where having a reputation of being "conservative" or "reactionary" can kill a grad student's career before it starts, and that actual intellectual freedom only begins after getting tenure. it's far more equal footing between students and professors, and and far less a priesthood issue. i don't think i could really deal with having to kiss ass with nasty, overemotional people, which may explain my lack of success in so many areas of my life.

can you tell i'm procrastinating?
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[Dracko]

That's fair. I've just had my fill of those sorts of books, save for the Kinsey Reports. Sexual promiscuity, though on occasion linked to excess, depression et al., isn't that big an issue and there's not that big a reason to assume women are any less responsible and smart about it than men. We haven't reached a state of degeneracy, in any case.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

the one area i would disagree with is when you're dealing with teenage pregnancies. those things are a genuine loss-loss for nearly all parties involved, at least on the immediate level. (not including extenuating circumstances like sexual assault, peer pressure, a social environment where having children is a status-seeking occupation, etc)

of course, a future human can do all sorts of things not easily foreseen by us now, and calling every single teenage birth a loss is definitely shortsighted. but such things are a case of the reality of biology taking its rightful head at place of the causal chain.
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[Dracko]

That's only coherent. I had young adults in mind, really.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

got this in an email from someone i know:.

[Scratchmonkey]

[dhex]

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[Scratchmonkey]

[dhex]

thanks for this one!


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[Shapermc]

[dhex]

this made me laugh a lot, even if the author's schtick is weaksauce.

if only because i have run into quite a few "big L" libertarians who are basically retarded. (capital letter anythings tend to be, at least in my experience)
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[dhex]

recipe: i'm making guinness chili tonight. it's mas delicioso con venganza!

or something like that.

anyway a pound of ground beef (lean), a 28 oz can of diced tomatoes (or dice your own, i think about 3.5 cups will do it) a bottle of guinness, and i like to throw veggies in there too. (yeah, i know not a traditional recipe, but whatever, my wife has acid reflux and can't eat garlic or onions or anything too spicy, and thus i must make do) usually i put some corn and some peas in there, or maybe even broccoli stalks.

anyhoo, brown the meat. while you're doing that mix together a slew of spices; a lot of rosemary and some basil, a tiny bit of oregano, some garlic salt, a decent amount of chili powder, a smaller amount of black pepper, some cumin and some curry. (i like a dry low heat so i go heavier on the cumin and curry than the chili powder) and a bay leaf.

i like black beans myself, but they wait until the end anyway.

mix it up, and toss it in after you drain the beef and it's brownish. stir it around and finish cooking the beef (i like mine well done) and then add the tomatoes and the corn and peas or whatever (frozen works fine) and after stirring that around a bit add about six to eight ounces of beer. wait until the mixture starts to boil up real good and then bring the heat down to medium low and cover that shit for an hour, stirring occasionally.

after that hour is up you put in your beans and boil it again, then cook it uncovered for 20 minutes, stirring more or less constantly. i like to serve it over brown or jasmine rice; the wife likes some aged irish or canadian cheddar on top. it goes good with a cold beer or six if you're into that sort of thing.

personally, i could also serve it over steamed snow peas or even broccoli rabe and be quite happy. my ideal chili is green beans, corn and peas, and a fuckload of spicyness, but again, can't do that if i expect liz to be able to eat it. you could probably eat it with crackers, but that's not my game.
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[dhex]

a grylliade poster pointed us in the direction of a private ebay-like market for personal debts.

huh.
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[Dracko]

That's very interesting. The sort of economic development that makes the Web so fascinating a forum.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

holy shit this guy is my new hero.


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[Dracko]

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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

the always excellent tim cavanaugh
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[dhex]

virgins make the best valentines?

who needs mind-altering drugs when you have the national review?

i may loathe the bass car and the teenage dad retard spawns who drive them, but banning spinners is a bit much, even in the communist capital of the united states.
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[Mister Toups]

If you outlaw spinnaz only outlaws will have spinnaz.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dhex]

seriously. though i can't find any other mention of this piece, even through the sponsoring OH NEVER FUCKING MIND

http://public.leginfo.state.ny.us/distsen.cgi

STATUS:
S1640 SABINI
Vehicle and Traffic Law
TITLE....Prohibits the use or sale of hubcaps which contain parts designed to continue moving when the motor vehicle to which they are attached is not moving

01/24/07 REFERRED TO TRANSPORTATION

what in the living fuck?
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[simplicio]

I suggest we refer to these heinous criminals as "spoutlawz."

[dhex]

the dude from toothpaste for dinner was kompressor! holy shit.
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[Dracko]

That's awesome!

He also writes Married to the Sea alongside his wife. And made this.

You might also like A Softer World and Leisure Town, dhex.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[dhex]

that's great! (i like some of the leisure town stuff quite a bit)


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[Mister Toups]

[Dracko]

Yo, dhex, have you read Joshua Ellis' essays on his concepts of taste tribes and the grim meathook future (Lecture)?
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Nana Komatsu]

Also, have you read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danieliewski? I don't actually think you'd like it, but the sheer length of the footnotes and their usage in your Fallout article reminded me a lot of the style of that book.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[dhex]

dracko - i have read taste tribes, but not the other. i'll give it a looksee.

nana - i got it for xmas, and at least at the time it was a little too cute for my tastes.
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[Nana Komatsu]

If you skip most of the site plots and footnotes, the main book does some very interesting things. Mostly the chase scene in chapter 10(?) I thought worked really well.
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resetbutton.net: videogames for unattractive people

[Scratchmonkey]

I thought it was a decent trick; the problem is that writing a book around a trick can get old. And it did! (I still finished the book though, which says something for it.)

I think I like Married to the Sea the most out of the Drew/Natalie media empire. It's more hit or miss except when it hits, it hits you right in your nuts.

Leisure Town, Jerkcity and Achewood are the greatest webcomics ever made.

These reasonably strong opinions have been spouted off by me.

[dhex]

Small-scale revolts have erupted across the United Kingdom for months, as different localities adopt the technology. Some towns failed to mention the new feature, which is concealed under coin-sized plugs under the rims of their garbage cans.

In the coastal city of Bournemouth, 72-year-old Cyril Baker ripped the chip off his new bin the day he discovered it, then went on national television to show how he did it. Thousands of his neighbors followed his example. "It was a very emotional issue. The whole town was in an uproar," he said.
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[Dracko]

As you can see, we're a nation with our priorities straight.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"