Religion Awards Coup

In the last few days I’ve been trying to raise awareness in the Atheosphere, to the fact that the Bloggers Choice Awards are in progress and more specifically, that we do not have any Atheist or irreligious presence. Indeed, last year, all the top positions of the “Best Religion Blog” category where taken over by Christians and this year seems to be turning out very much the same.

Thus I took it upon myself to attempt and remedy that.

Initially I nominated some of my favorite Atheism blogs but even though I tried to notify the people running them in order to place some banner or inform their readers, I was largely ignored. I even tried emailing Pharyngula, who apparently loves crashing polls, to let his readers know. But there was no response…

Nevertheless, I then had a better idea: This year, not only should we attempt to get an Atheist Blog to the top of the Best Religion Blog category, but we should do it in the most extravagant way possible. To this end, I nominated The Antichristian Phenomenon as I don’t think there’s a better way to be more “in your face” than this

The ACP is, of course, not the only blog I’ve nominated and ever since I’ve started writing about this, many others have joined me and nominated their own choices. This does not hurt as at all since you are allowed to vote as many times as you wish.

Below you will find a list of all the relevant blogs that are currently nominated along with possibly other links of interest. If you don’t want to visit all of these one by one, just head over to my profile and you’ll see them listed in an easy-to-vote format.

• The Antichristian Phenomenon - Best Religion Blog
• Debunking Christianity - Best Religion Blog
• Daylight Atheism - Best Religion Blog
• About Atheism/Agnositicm - Best Religion Blog
• Atheist Revolution - Best Religion Blog | Best Political Blog
• Friendly Atheist - Best Religion Blog
• Greta Christina - Best Blog of All Time | Best Religion Blog | Best Political Blog
• Phranyngula - Best Celebrity Blogger | Best Blog About Stuff | Best Religion Blog | Hottest Daddy Blogger
• Bonus Nomination: Ray Comfort Food - Most Obnoxious Blogger (No, no linkback to that) ¹

Currently the ACP is the one leading in the Religion category and it’s my personal choice for the top, just because of the LULZ that will ensue. However I do not mind if some of the more heavyweight ones surpass it. I’ve voted all of them up in any case. Unfortunately we still have too few votes. To achieve the top we need at least 250 votes and we have only managed to gather 20 by now.

If you like this idea and want to help further than that, then there is another way: Spread the word.
Currently I’m pretty much the only one pushing for this and I just don’t see any excitement. I am aware of the “Herding Cats” problem plaguing the “Atheist movement” but seriously, this is ridiculous. We can’t even waste 5 minutes doing a symbolic action?

Anyway, the best way to spread the word would be, of course, blogging Currently only the Psychodiva has made a small mention of this but I’m certain that if people larger than me talk about it, it will trigger the necessary reaction.

Another way would be to mention it in your own groups. I’v already posted this in The ACP Forum and the newly fledged Atheist Nexus. If you’re at any other place with Atheist presence, consider making a post similar to these and if you have more rights, sending a simple PM to all members to let them know.

Lastly, if you are a nominee, consider placing the Brag code widgets in your sidebars to let your visitors know to lend you a leg up.

Let the Religion Awards Coup begin!

Definition of Agnosticism

So my recent verbal spar with the Socratic Gadfly moves on. It seems that due to the linkbacks I made to Austin Cline and Adrian Hayter, they were apparently curious enough to see what the post was about and ended up defending my position on Gadfly’s blog (appreciated).
This in turn triggered him to contact me via email and also write about it on his second blog.

During our email conversations, Gadfly did have a more amiable attitude (albeit a bit condescending occasionaly) and we managed to have some progress in finding out exactly what the gist of our disagreement is. In turns out that it is a simple definition issue on the word “Agnosticism” and I will attempt in this post to explain.

Now, I guess the secod post of his was written while tempers were still high and this is why the language is still a bit strong.  Since I have been unbanninated already, I think there’s no point in feeding the flames any more so I’ll keep a more respectful tone.

Gadfly maintains that Agnosticism cannot be logicaly combined with theism. Indeed, by looking at some of the analogies he made on email:

“Agnostic theism” is like “Democratic Republicanism” and “theistic agnosticism” is like “Republican Democratism.” (Allow the neologism for the noun parallel.)

It is obvious that for him an agnostic theist is an oxymoron.

As I mentioned in the previous post. The etymological meaning of the word is “Without Knowledge”. Agnosticism however does not define what you do not have any knowledge about but it is commonly understood that it is about deities. One could very well argue that he is agnostic about abiogenesis or the creation of the universe and that would be a perfectly acceptable phrase.

As pertaining to theism however, agnosticism can easily take one of two common definitions.

• One can be agnostic about the existence of god(s). This classifies them as Agnostic Atheists. The defining quote would be “I don’t know if gods exist“
• One can be agnostic about the nature of god(s). This classifies them as Agnostic Theists and the defining quote would be “I don’t know what or which gods exist“.

The difference is small but significant. On both of these definitions, one could even apply various scales of knowledge. Thus an agnostic atheists can verge closer to atheism with “I don’t know if gods exist but there is no reason to believe that they do” and an agnostic theist can approach a religion “I believe the Christian god exists but I don’t know his exact nature (and thus follow no denomination)” - an Agnostic Christian (The group I think most liberal Christians really belong to).

Due to the open nature of the word “Agnostic”, many people default it to either of the two cases described above. In my personal experience, I’ve had far more people who thought of “Agnostic Theist” when hearing “Agnostic” - which is, incidentally, why I started calling myself simply Atheist in the end. This is also why in the article that triggered this approximately half the agnostics go either way.

And this is where I believe Gadfly is wrong. He defaults to “Agnostic Atheist” but he then takes it a step further and asserts that his take on it is the correct one (and gets annoyed that others use it differently).
This is what I have been trying to explain via email but we seem to have reached the “Agree to dissagree” point.

The thing is, at the end of the day, what matters is that we know what we are talking about. It does not matter a bit if we call someone as “Agnostic Atheist”, “Agnostic”, “Fideist” or even “Purple Banana” as long as we are understanding the same thing. It is a fact that just “Agnostic” can mean different things to different people. And by definition, these people are correct.

All we can do when uncertain is simply ask: “Theistic or Atheistic?”. It’s certainly no reason to get upset about.

PMOG: An unforeseen boon to the atheosphere.

Fellow Atheist, did you recently notice a sudden flux of visitors from blog posts that are not seemingly linking to you? Is so, this is because I’ve been playing around with a new online game and I’ve chosen some of your articles, that I consider interesting, to insert into the playfield, so to speak.

But even if you were not one of those few bloggers who’s posts I’ve chosen for my initial experiment, please bear with me and read the rest of this post. It might be interesting to you.

What I’ve discovered is a very new and fresh on-line game which does something novel. Instead of making players actively participate in the game, like all othe browser games, and as a result require a level of attention that not everyone can afford; it turns the concept on its head and makes the whole internet the playing field. This name of it is PMOG and I think it might have the capacity, if used right, to help the blogosphere and especially the atheosphere, become both more contextual and fun.

I will not go into the details of what PMOG is or how it’s played but I want to explain why it has such a potential.

if you set aside than silly mine pranks and random fooling around with friends, the game’s true power appears in the form of missions. Basically what missions are (at least currently) is a collection of links to various pages in a serial format, along with a short description provided by the player who built the mission. This seemingly simple concept, allows something that is sorely missing.

You see, we currently have so much content produced every day that it is night impossible to find the truly interesting posts.The atheist blogroll is closing to a 1000 active blogs and it will only keep growing from there. I’m currently subscribed to almost all the blogs in the blogroll through an aggregator and I have to wade through a lot of uninteresting and repetitive posts every day just to find one or two that say something worth reading (for me).

Yes, I’ve prioritized a few blogs where almost everything written is interesting but I truly feel that there are underdogs out there who’s thoughts remain untapped while the big hitters like Pharyngula draw all the attention. Sure, places like Challenge Religion and the Carnival of the Godless help to cut through the mud, but their posts always seem disconnected from each other.

My idea then, is to use the mission capability of PMOG in order to create ad hoc “carnivals” that follow a theme and can also provide a customised commentary from the organiser in the form of pointers or clarifications.

This will have two effects that I can initially see:

• We have cohesive groups of posts that do not depend on a computer algorithm or people belonging to the same group. Thus I may have a mission about ethics and link to people who are members of the atheosphere (generally Atheist blogroll or Planet Atheism) along with ones who are not but have something relevant to say and most of us would miss.
• Given enough of us participating on this and allying with each other, we can push our missions to the top of the pile. This provides us with access to eyes we could not reach before.
  Already, one mission on morality that I’ve created which hit 4/5 stars rating, generated 50 hits to my article which is almost as much as a CotG. If you consider that this game is still very very new and attracts people outside atheism as well, there is true potential to increase readership on the articles that are worth it.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg as well. Using items like portals for example, we can utilize our distributed power to create a network of relevant links. Imagine for example someone visiting the Expelled official website and the first thing that pops up is a 5-stars Expelled Exposed portal that the owners of Expelled cannot remove. As the popularity of the game increases, this can only grow more powerful for us, which is an even better reason to join in early.

Currently most missions are the random favorite sites each player has which just as fun (AKA not) as surfing on del.icio.us and makes the overall quality very low. I believe that if we can start improving this quality through the blogosphere, with better descriptions and interesting (underground or not) articles, we can easily take over.

Finally consider that the game can only become more interactive as time goes on. It will not be too long until we can create missions with riddles, votes and whatnot.

In any case, this was my little idea for the day. You can see the two initial missions that I’ve created as a proof of concept. For them, I used the items I marked as shared and starred in my google reader (It pays to do that sometimes).

• Morality without God: Includes articles from No Double Standards, Black Sun journal, Daylight Atheism, Atheist Ethicist and Philaletheia
• Challenge your Mind: With posts from Black Sun Journal, Easy to be Entreated, Geoff Arnold, Debunking Christianity, The Uncredible Hallq, Life Before Death and What’s the harm.

Hopefully, I’ve managed to convince at least a few of you to try this out just in case it’s worth it. In case you do, please add me as an ally so that I am aware of you and we can run & rate each other’s missions.

One last thing. Currently the game is under a lot of load from a recent sudden popularity hit so you might run into the occasional slowness or outright failure. Also, I failed to mention it until now but it requires Firefox and a special extension in order to play it.

Wordpress.com > Blogger

Can someone please explain to my why people are still creating blogs on blogger when they can use Wordpress.com?

I mean, seriously, not only is the feature superiority of the later platform staggering but, after having to use blogger for the last few days now (mostly as a commenter), I can honestly attest, that it’s a pain it the buttocks!

Let me just list…

The things I’ve grown to hate in blogger

The list, looking back at it, is quite large. I’m surprised how someone who is funded by the bottomless pockets of the likes of Google can just be so bad at innovating and usage.

No trackback features

The only way you can see who is linking to you through blogger is to wait until google crawls through the site in question and discovers the link and then creates a “backlink”. If that site happens to be pretty obscure, then good luck.

Also blogger will not send a trackback or pingback to your own blog. I don’t know how many times I’ve been linked from blogger sites and I only discovered it when I checked my incoming links in my dashboard.

On the other side, wp.com not only handles trackbacks appropriately, placing them in the comment field at the time they were written with a small excerpt of the are around the link, but it also does not need you to manually specify trackback urls in your configuration. It will just send a pingback to any link you have automatically.

Comment handling

This is my biggest annoyance to tell you the truth.

• You are always redirected to another template in order to comment. Why they cannot just place the comment field below the entry, I do not know, but it’s horribly annoying. That damn template is so thin that I always have to scroll down 10 times to find what I want to reply to
• The captcha sux donkey balls. Not only are the letters ridiculously hard to read sometimes but apparently It will randomly deny the authentication.
• If your authentication is denied, then you have to decipher the next letters. Also, you cannot preview without correct captcha inserted.
• At random times, my OpenID will not be accepted (even though it’s always the same). When that happens, I have to re-enter the damn captcha always.
• No quoting mechanism or tags. I mean, seriously, how fucking difficult is it to allow the blockquote tag which has been defined in HTML for ages now? As a result, everyone just uses their own damn quoting style which is annoying as you have to figure out how each commented decided to quote today.
  Granted, people use their own quoting style in Wordpress comment fields as well but I can then blame it on their own ignorance/incapability to read and I’m hoping that an eventual upgrade will allow TinyMCE editing.
• I’ll grant that blogger provides a preview feature which is useful but the rest of the comment annoyances just bury it.
• After you submit a comment, your permalink is some crappy blogger code which you cannot use to link to (if you want). In order to link to your comment (or use it in some other way), you need to go back to the original post and click on the date of your comment below your name.

Templates

80% of all blogger templates suck. They suck so hard it’s difficult to explain their suckiness.

• Fixed Width at 640 pixels or whatever which leads me to have 50% of my monitor empty with a tiny column of text in the middle.
• No avatar support. On the other hand, Wordpress.com just added support for avatar collections and gravatars. This just make it more easy to tell the commenters apart.

They only thing saving the template issue of blogger is that they can be hacked, while you can’t do that in Wordpress.com unless you pay. However,  most people who like to hack are more likely to host their own Wordpress sites. Also, the widgets of Wordpress provide a much easier way to add banners and other random stuff to your sidebar instead of editing raw html.

Admin

Wordpress.com provides you with a dashboard with many useful features like statistics, overview of your comments in all of wordpress.com, tag management etc. Blogger has, frankly, jack shit.

Community

The only community issue that blogger has is the top navbar which allows you to jump to another random blog. Not very useful

Wordpress.com has the exellent possibly related posts feature, the classic navbar, tag surfer and tag subscription. If you want to find related stuff in the blogosphere, it is much easier. Also, by supporting trackbacks correctly, you actually see who is linking back at you immediately and it can actually act as a comment (as is the point of trackbacks).

They’ve already included a way to track your self-hosted wordpress blog through wordpress.com so I’m eagerly waiting for the plugins that will allow me to become a member of the wordpress.com community as well.

Btw, the profile setup of blogger leaves a lot to be desired for.

Features

Not only does wordpress.com seriously out-gun blogger in turns of features, it also has the extra benefit or being free software. That means that the quality of the service not only increases but that speed accelerating with the more people that join. What this means is that the rate that new cool features are being introduced increases exponentially.

On the other hand, blogger finally managed to allow scheduled posts just this month. A feature that has been standard for ages everywhere else.

Also, the fact that Wordpress.com is open sourced means that, if for some reason, you wish to leave, you not only have the option of hosting it yourself (since the administration is identical) but you can bet that you can easily find alternatives as well that may fit your needs better.

Finally, I mentioned that wordpress.com is based on free software. This makes it superior ethically as well. While if you pay for features in blogger, you just hand more money to the ultra rich google, by supporting wordpress.com, you are paying the developers who in turn can use their time to provide a software that anyone can use.

So what are you waiting? Just give it a go and see if it works. It’s as painless as it gets.

You’re not certain how to do it? Let me give a hand:

How to migrate your blogger site to wordpress.com

Feel free to link to this section

1. Create a new wordpress.com account and blog
2. Go to Manage -> Import
3. Import from blogger
4. Admire how much better it looks.

If you have an already established user base, in order to avoid losing the users who read you through feed or bookmarked you you can do the following:

Feed

1. Create a feedburner account and a feed for your blog (just follow the instructions)
2. Redirect your blogger feed to the feedburner feed. This can be done though your Blogger Dashboard -> Settings -> Feed. In all honesty, If you have not done this already you’re missing out.
3. Once all your users have moved to the new feed, perform the migration to wordpress.com and then edit your feedburner feed so as to draw the wordpress.com one instead of blogger.
4. Done and none’s the wiser

Ninja Site redirection

This is just a way I thought off the top of my head. Unfortunately you might have to crack open your wallet for it to work. If anyone has a better idea, lemme know.

1. Pay blogger to allow you to use your own domain name.
2. Wait until everyone has updated their bookmarks.
3. Migrate to wordpress.com
4. Pay wordpress to allow you to use your own domain name.
5. Redirect the domain name from blogger to wordpress.com
6. Done and none’s the wiser

Alternatively, just make a final post and inform people to visit and bookmark the new site, you cheap bastard.

New bloggers

Why are you even using blogger anyway? If you’re reading this you should have deleted you blogger already and preparing a trackback from your new wordpress.com or baywords blog to tell me how right I was.

As new users, you have nothing to lose and, hopefully I’ve convinced you, a lot to gain.

Now, Git! Save me from having to use the crappy blogger comments again.

Yet more hypocricy from Objectivists

Once below I found myself bothering with things that I should have known better not to.

Trying not to get into a detailed history of this:

• Evanescent wrote an article
• Alonzo Fyfe (AKA the Atheist Ethicist) tackled it which prompted Evanescent to come to the thread and whine. After failing to discuss (or read Alonzo’s follow up article) he wrote a new post as a reply asking Alonzo to discuss there. I was explicitly not invited.
• Evanescent and his band of Randians were eviscerated by the Barefoot Bum in Evanescent’s blog as well as commenters on Alonzo Fyfe’s post.
• At some point, Evanescent made the following statement (in regards to Barefoot Bum): “If he wants to win this argument, he only has to name another ultimate value other than life”. This prompted me to attempt to give single reply. If it was banned, fair enough, I expected as much.

However, it wasn’t blocked but allowed through and actually replied to. This, to my feeble and “irrational” mind seemed as an invitation to explain my position.

How much of a fool was I to expect even a shred of integrity from Randians. After my subsequent replies were left in moderation limbo for a day, they were eventually deleted (I cannot see them anymore as pending).

Since I expected this from the beggining, I decided to save my replies just in case so that perhaps I can continue the discussion with anyone interested, and also to display, once again, the hypocricy of Randianism.

Following are my replies as it would have been after this comment.

1. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   3 May, 2008 at 6:45 pm

   Why would one avoid pain?

   Why is pain undesirable?

   Because it makes life unpleasant.

   And it is better to have as pleasant a life as possible.

   I gave you an ultimate goal. This means that there is nothing following it and the purpose of this goal ends when it is realized. It is not, as you state, to make my life better. It just is.
   I can explain why I consider this an ultimate goal, but this will not reveal life as an ultimate goal.

   >Because it make life enjoyable to live. Pleasure is the physical/emotional reward for achieving one’s goals. But to what are these goals directed?

   …The avoidance of pain
   You see that this is a circular argument? My goal is not to have no pain, not to live. Life is my means, a tool that I use in order to have no pain.
   I have no choice on using life or not. My choices only affect my life in the future and for that, I have the goal of avoiding pain.

2. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 6:41 am “Desire Utilitarianism has a very good explanation of what rights are, does Objectivism have anything along similar lines?”

   Actually, DU has a very poor description of rights and Objectivism certainly does not have anything along similar lines. DU is capable of only pointing at a *general* phenomena and ascribing to it the term “rights”–which is not only incorrect but also circular. The argument is circular because it merely uses different forms of the same argument to support the idea that rights exists.

   For example, rights exists because generally people have many and strong reasons to encourage aversions to action X. Without all the unnecessary jargonistics, this is the same thing as saying rights exist because people want rights to exist. Well, but why do people want this to be the case? How did most people get those many and strong reasons? How did those reasons originate? What is their basis and is it univeral or cultural or subjective? And what about the few people who do not have those many and strong reasons? What about those who don’t simply care about this either way?

   DU is perhaps the silliest thing I have encountered that purports to be a philosophy; at its root, it is deeply confused about whether or not it is a philosophy based on determinism or free will. It insists on the objectivity of ethics but has no epistemological foundation or theory of concepts that demonstrates this objectivity; indeed, it appears that DU is epistemologically relativistic at best and subjectivistic at worst.

   WRT Objectivism, it is simply not proper and not feasible to try to convince you of the Objectivist theory of rights on an internet forum. Rarely do people engage in online debates to be persuaded wholly about an opposing view; mostly, it is to bum-troll around looking to get into someone’s hair like a stubborn piece of gum or win debating brownie points on cyberspace.

   Primarily, personal and self-motivated study is the way to changing your views and exploring something new. So, if you’re truly interested in learning about the Objectivist theory of rights (and Objectivism in general)–and not simply engaging in fruitless online debates–then read the relevant books.

3. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 6:51 am “name another ultimate value other than life”

   “Absence of pain. Physical and emotional.”

   Absence of all pain would in fact destroy all meaning in valuation. It would be detrimental to our lives–we would not know what has survival value in relation to us and what is a threat. Pain serves many different, important, and often life-sustaining functions. Pain can be an indicator of the nature of our actions–whether they are good or bad for us.

   In an other sense, imagine your loved one is brutally mutilated by a thug right before your eyes. And then you don’t feel pain; perhaps, you don’t feel joy, but you neither feel pain–just indifference. Then, in what meaningful sense do we talk about valuation and emotional responses to values? How do know what is of value to us and what is not? Given our human nature, we experience our valuations through our emotions (emotional pain or emotional pleasure). With the absence of pain, one of the most important indicators of a healthy life will disappear.

   So, no. Absence of pain cannot be an ultimate value. It is in fact important in the service of a truly ultimate value, which is life.

4. Mark C. Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 8:53 am Why would one avoid pain?

   Why is pain undesirable?

   Because it makes life unpleasant.

   And it is better to have as pleasant a life as possible.

   Why?

   Because it make life enjoyable to live. Pleasure is the physical/emotional reward for achieving one’s goals. But to what are these goals directed?

   I’ll give you clue: L__E

   There are two different types of responses to a “why” question: one about the conscious intentions of an agent, and one about mechanisms.

   Objectivism defines “value” as something along these lines: some thing or condition that an agent acts to gain and/or keep. Now, let’s analyze this definition with respect to both types of answers to “why” questions.

   Under the intentional answer, eating for pleasure, eating to rid oneself of hunger, and eating to give oneself energy for doing known or suspected future tasks are values. Picking up sand on the bottom of my shoe when I walk on the beach is not a value (nor is the sand).

   Under the mechanistic answer, anything I gain and/or keep, as well as anything I could gain and/or keep by doing whatever action I’m doing at any point in time, are values. Under this answer, that sand I mentioned is a value. Yet this is absurd and trivializes the notion of value, making it next to useless.

   From this analysis, it can be seen that the Objectivist definition of value must reasonably answer the intentional “why” question, not the one I have labeled as “mechanistic”. So, why is pain undesirable? The answer could be “because it just is undesirable” or “because I don’t want to feel bad”. But with the intentional reading of the “why” question, the answer can not be, or at least almost never is, “because it is detrimental to my life”. An intentional answer can not be reduced beyond the issue of consciously known desire, as far as I am aware.

   Your answer was pretty good up until you answered the question “but to what are these goals directed?”. It is there that the equivocation on “value” pops up, where you switch to the non-intentional reading of the “why” question.

   So life can not be an ultimate value if it is not first a value, and no one, as far as I am aware, consciously holds just being alive, even if unable to do anything, as a value. Clearly, then, it is not the case that every person’s own status as being alive is of paramount value to them. A person’s own life is, at the very least, an instrumental value–it is valuable because it allows one to pursue other values. So one’s own life is a value by the Objectivist definition, but it is only, in general, a means to achieve other ends. Staying alive, then, is almost always, if not always, instrumental. But we can not say that it is an ultimate value. We can, however, say that it (the status of being alive) is a necessary prerequisite for valuing anything. This does not make it an ultimate value under the intentional notion of “value”.

5. Mark C. Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 8:55 am I didn’t separate the quotation from the rest of my post there. The quotation should be from the first line through the one ending in “L__E”.
6. Ergo Says:
   4 May, 2008 at 11:29 am “Staying alive, then, is almost always, if not always, instrumental.”

   This is not only false, it is impossible. Metaphysically, life is a given. Metaphysically, life is always self-directed, self-generating action (in plants and animals, including humans). To be an instrumental value, one must be able to act in such a way as to acquire, gain, and keep the value in order to achieve higher, more important values. But this is impossible because life is already given–it is already acquired, it already exists. Your actions prove that you are alive. Hence, it is impossible to acquire the value of life for instrumental purposes.

   Life as an ultimate value recognizes a very specific set of requirements: that one must act to acquire, gain, and keep all values that serve the purpose of our life qua human being. Since life qua man is the goal, Objectivism provides the unifying framework for all of man’s actions by defining life as “self-generated action” and man’s life as “goal-directed action.” (Man’s life is “goal-directed” in the conscious sense of the term, because we volitional beings could even choose to commit suicide. Animals exhibit goal-directed action as well, albeit to a limited degree, with the goal being survival.)

   Metaphysically, man has one goal, one end–-to live as proper to his nature. Ethically, man has to choose his ultimate goal. Objectivism recommends that man choose his own rational happiness as the moral goal of his life. This recommendation is premised upon a long chain of metaphysical and epistemological analyses.

   Objectivism regards happiness as not only possible but also the *proper* state of man’s existence on this earth. To that ethical end–which is justified on a metaphysical end, Objectivism builds a framework of moral rights that safeguard the conditions possible (the means) for the achievement of that end and ennumerates a series of values and virtues that are necessary means to achieving that end.

   In both cases, the end is the individual–the man; metaphysically, his life; ethically, his happiness.

7. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   4 May, 2008 at 11:48 am

   Absence of all pain would in fact destroy all meaning in valuation. It would be detrimental to our lives–we would not know what has survival value in relation to us and what is a threat. Pain serves many different, important, and often life-sustaining functions. Pain can be an indicator of the nature of our actions–whether they are good or bad for us.

   This is not what I mean when I say “absence of pain”. The goal is not to reach a status where I’m incapable of feeling pain but rather to achieve a situation where I feel no pain at the current moment. Pain might very well return at a point in time but that only means that my ultimate goal reappears and I have to strive to achieve it once more.
   The absence of pain is, pretty much, a goal that you achieve and lose many times during your life and always strive to achieve again, right until the point your life ends.

   Once again, I am not going into the specifics of “Why” I consider this goal the ultimate. Only, as Evanescent requested, providing an ultimate goal other than life.

8. db0 Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
   4 May, 2008 at 11:54 am

   To be an instrumental value, one must be able to act in such a way as to acquire, gain, and keep the value in order to achieve higher, more important values

   How do you assert this? There is no such need as far as I can see. A value is instrumental because it is used as an instrument for another value. There is no necessity that it be “acquired” or “act in order to keep it” (although you do need to act in order to retain life).
   Any such characteristics that you assign to “instrumental values” are of your devising and you need to provide empirical evidence to support them.

Of course after such a blatant display of silencing their opponents, I would be very wary of ever commenting on a place where they moderate. I know that Barefoot Bums trackback was deleted as well so I can only further guess that any opinion they could not refute has been conveniently moderated away. It is no wonder why other commenters are staying as far away from their comments as possible.

It also furtheronly reinforces my suspicions that if ever an Objectivist was placed on a position of political power, what followed would be a suspencion of freedom of such magniture that only Scientologists would be able to surpass it.

Liars

Unfortunately it seems that creationists are not the only ones limited to lying. There are many others who even though they claim an intellectual base (in biology no-less) but are just as shallow and quick to turn to comment deleting and banning in order to silence and the ones that refute them.

Thus, witness the my recent exchange with one such liar with whom I tried to engage in a conversation after I read a recent post from the Black Sun journal. Initially I left a simple comment and didn’t expect to respond any more. However after taking a second look and seeing that I’ve been labeled as an Objectivist (of all things)I decided to leave a second one.

I expected it to be deleted in short order which is why I kept my browser window open to it. And this is exactly what happened. Not only that, but the blog author decided to tell blatant lies in order to save whatever credence she had left with her audience. Unfrotunately, for some reason my browser window reloaded and I lost my comment (although you can see when I tagged it here) which means I cannot easily copy-paste it here.

Within my reply, in short, I tried to actually discuss the matter with her. I explained that she was doing the all too common fallacy of appealing to emotion. I explained how having the goverment take an active hand in the curriculum does not lead to totalitarianism, as exemplified by the situation in Europe where not only is the education level superior to the USA but homeschooling is also illegal. I asked her to put aside for a moment the communism/fascism idea and actually try to discuss the issue at hand.

What did I get for my trouble? I am being labeled as Black Sun’s alias, an Objectivist and a Troll.

Now, you would assume that anyone with even 2 minutes to space would very easily discover the validity of the first two claims by visiting my blogger profile, clicking on the “My Website” link and then coming to the Division by Zer0. Then it would be obvious that I am independent from BSJ and also find out my thoughts on objectivism (Hint: They’re not positive). It would also be easy to surmise that I am also not a Troll, unless Troll for this particular hypocrite includes anyone who disagrees with her…

But no. Even that simple task was too much to ask for this Homeschooler. It was just so much easier to delete my comment, put her comments on moderation (so that we don’t spoil her party) and put invalid labels on me and everyone else who dissagreed with her. Just read Black Sun’s latest post for more amusement.

If this is the kind of discussion she is having, I’m feeling sorry for her kid(s). I really am. Here is a child who will grow up learning that you should never challenge your authority figures or else you risk losing your rights to speech. And Gawd help the kid if he so much as dares to say that Communism/Socialism has some nice ideas. Seeing how she reacted to people proposing goverment intervention in order to save children from being kept ignorant, I’m half-expecting her to explode and start urgent brainwashing procedures (Yeah right, as if she’s not doing so now…)

It’s impressive though. Even Objectivists were not so rude so as to delete comments without a fair warning and an attempt to discussion.

Unfortunately people like this seem to be perfectly happy to live in their little bubble world where all they hear is praises from their friends. Putting their head in the sand is apparently a very appropriate method of dealing with issues and they’re displaying the classic “Live and let die” mind frame that has, and still is, creating so many problems in the world. It is a pity but like a hedgehog, when reality rears its ugly head, they will prefer to curl up in a ball rather than face it.

I have no specific problem with that when it affects only themselves but unfortunately not only do they brainwash their children to act in such a manner but they are also spreading their lies to the blogosphere without havign to deal with any feedback. Against such action, like Alonzo Fyfe says, our only course of action is Words and Private Actions. You have seen my own actions already and these are to spread the word and label them as appropriate.

I urge any and all of you (yes, all five) to expose such people for what they are by linking to them with keywords that describe them. I selected “Liar” in this caseand Black Sun selected the quite appropriate “Hypocrite”. They may be able to delete comments but  unfortunately for them, they cannot delete linkbacks on the web. Hopefully anyone who is looking at whom is linking to them is bound to discover the antilogue…

If you dissagree with my action on the other hand, I’d love to hear your opinion on this.

The Beginning of the end or the end of a beginning?

Apparently back in my homecountry, Greece, people have been finally waking up to the blogging phenomenon and as with anything new, the knee-jerk reaction is starting.

What is happening is that the anonymous blog Press-gr which has been publishing various inside stories for a while has finally drawn enough ire (and lawsuits) that the Greek goverment has mobilized to reveal who the anonymous bloggers behind it are. Apparently, they managed to track down an “author” of the blog by revealing ip addresses from his ISP. Nevermind that this is ridiculous as, without knowing from which IP addresses the authors used to connect to press-gr (which they can only get from Google) they might as well be catching any regular reader (Although without knowing the specifics of the investigation, I guess I could be wrong but I don’t see how unless they set up illegal packet sniffers).

In any case, I was reading Press-gr in the beggining, when the information seemed genuine, but when it started posting any BS that came to their hands, even things posted by anonymous commenters or obvious political propaganda, I decided to call it quits. It was just getting too unreliable (as well as being suspicious due to the amount of adverising) as far as accurate information ios concerned, not to mention annoying as the commentspam was ridiculous - A clear example that freedom of speech does not equal freedom to spam.

So what happened now is that various famous personalities of Greece are claiming that they were blackmailed from the authors of Press-gr and were threatened with defamation. Now, ignoring the fact that groundless defamation from an anonymous blog who’s quality is arguable by most sceptics, is not going to do much damage, the blackmailed people have gone public and are asking for goverment intervention. I’m actually wondering if those fighting back against an anonymous posting have ever heard of the Streisand effect

The most scary thing of all, of course, is that the goverment is now considering putting limits on free speech. This is exactly what the big media companies (and Televangelist/Telemarketers) want. Specifically, they are going to request people that blog about “informative issues” remain eponymous. If they still wish to remain anonymous then it will be much easier for the goverment to violate their rights and find out who they are.

Seeing how backwards the Greek goverment has been until now as regards to digital rights, then it’s fairly certain that things will move towards the worse case scenario. I just hope that more people will start using wikileaks which the Greek goverment cannot touch and also has a much higher standard

Generally speaking, after being sent a cease and desist myself for supposedly defaming my previous employer (although no details were given other than the scary lawyer email), I’m seeing a larger interest in the blogosphere from all the people that are set to have their skeletons drawn out of the closet.

Truly, there is nothing more that these slimy worms fear than the unedited light of truth. Blogs and the internet are the only thing they cannot control and all their secrets are finally slipping through their fingers. Don’t let them take it away from you people.

• Discuss
• Fight Back
• Anonymize yourselves
• Cooperate

Sometimes I’m really glad I escaped Greece…

Το ιστολόγιο του Panhas

Ένας συνεργάτης για λίγο καιρό όταν που δούλευα στον Φωκά, ο Παντελής, μετά απο μια μικρή μου παρότρυνση άνοιξε δικό του ιστολόγιο. Εκεί απ’οτι φαίνεται θα γράφει τις δικιές του οδηγίες και βοηθήματα με ότι έχει να κάνει με MS Windows.

Αρχικά ο Παντελής έστελνε τα κείμενα του μέσω email σε διάφορους (φαντάζομαι) γνωστούς του, συμπεριλαμβανομένου και του εαυτού μου. Δυστυχώς αυτός ο τρόπος είναι αρκετά περιοριστικός καθότι

1. Δεν μπορείς να κάνεις πραγματική συζήτηση με όλα τα άτομα στην λίστα χωρις να αρχίσεις να ενοχλείς αυτούς που δεν ενδιαφέρονται
2. Το αρχικό email μπορεί να μην είναι ενδιαφέρον σε όλου που το παίρνουν αλλά δεν έχεις τρόπο να το καταλάβεις αυτό χωρίς να στο πούνε.
3. Μετά την αρχική αποστολή του μηνύματος, το έχεις χάσει. Κανείς άλλος δεν μπορεί να το βρεί έυκολα και δεν είναι αρχειοθετημένο πουθενά στο διαδίκτυο.
4. Έχεις πολύ περιορισμένο formatting. Δεν γίνεται να βάλεις συνδέσμους μέσα στο κείμενο. Δεν μπορείς να έχεις rich text, κλπ.
5. Δεν μπορείς να κάνεις διορθώσεις. Εαν συνηδειτοποιήσεις ότι αυτό που έγραψες είναι λάθος, πρέπει να στείλεις ένα email ακόμα με διορθώσεις.
6. Εαν επιθυμείς να ακολουθείς τα γραπτά του, μπορείς απλά να χρησιμοποιήσεις κάποιο feed reader που κάνει την ίδια δουλειά με ένα email, απλά…καλύτερα.

Γι’αυτό τον λόγο χαίρομαι λοιπόν που έκανε αυτή την κίνηση και προτείνω ανεπιφύλακτα μια τουλάχιστον επίσκεψη σε όποιον δουλέβει σε οποιοδήποτε επίπεδο υποστήριξης σε περιβάλλον Windows. Ο Παντελής είναι πραγματικός γνώστης της πλατφόρμας της MS και αυτά που λέει έρχονται απο σημαντική εμπειρία. Όχι μόνο αυτό αλλα γράφει μόνος του τα κείμενα του σε δυο γλώσσες (Ελληνικά & Αγγλικά) για να διευκολύνει και αυτούς που δεν κατέχουν καλά τα αγγλικά αλλα και αυτούς που προτιμούν να διαβάζουν τα τεχνικά άρθρα στην γλωσσα του IT.

Objectivist kick

Well, that’s it then. It seems that the objectivist apologist cannot stand my inferior intellectual mediocricy anymore and decided to bar me from posting any longer.  This is the last comment I made to his thread, which has since been deleted.

Yes Lord. We are unworthy…

I agree there is no point in continuing this as your arguments consist of either ignoring what I say, or first labeling me as something (in this case a moral subjectivist) and then bring the encyclopedic definition to personally attack me.

In this case, I am not a moral subjectivist as the encyclopedia defines it. I do not believe all moral theories are good. I do know that different kind of societies find different kind of moral theories correct. Thus morality is subjective.

I appreciate that you are trying to save me from embarrassing myself but seeing as your a shameless intellectual elitist who cannot accept being wrong (witness you ignoring everything you cannot refute), I have no fear of being embarrassed.

Oh, well. It seems that that’s that for the argumentative powers of the objectivist. Ergo seems to be acting no better than a theist to me. If you cannot argue against it, ignore it…

Quote

OMG, this must be like the best quote I’ve seen in a while

…If you prefer mental masturbation, then go back to Philosophy 101 and stroke your intellectual penis with the other pseudointellectuals until you squirt happy little fantasies all over each other. But don’t waste our time with your blathering bullshit.

Just. LOL!

Seriously, there guys have become one of my favorite stops on the net. Their snarkiness is quite refreshing:)

The mutating genre meme music variant

I really wanted to take part in the The Pharyngula mutating genre meme but unfortunately I am not viable for the environment he has created (not enough data from the first two genres). Thus I decided to create a competing meme on music & computers, since I am a bit more knowledgeable in it and my known blogs are a bit more in that subject.

So, here are the rules:

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Shamed

Oh man, I thought I had a nice looking site, but after seeing what some other people can do so easily, I am seriously shamed

In any case, [tag]Arnoc[/tag] certainly deserves congragulations on the excellent layout and look of it.  He’s also a professional web designer so if you’re looking for someone to make your site look good, look no further

Ελληνικό Blogspot

Ρε παιδιά, υπάρχει καμία εξηγηση γιατί σχεδόν όλοκληρη η ελληνική blogo-σφαίρα πάει και ανοίξει ιστολόγια στο blogspot όταν υπάρχει το Wordpress.com το οποίο είναι απλά ανώτερο σε λειτουργία ;

Καταλαβαίνω οτι είναι κυρίως το word-of-mouth (δηλαδή οι περισσότεροι Έλληνες μαθαίνουν για τα ιστολόγια από άτομα που είναι γραμμένα στο blogspot) αλλά η υπεροχή του wordpress θα έπρεπε να μετράει για κάτι έτσι δεν είναι;

Αν εξαιρέσει κανείς το γεγονός οτι στο wordpress.com δεν σου επιτρέπουν να βγάλεις χρήματα, κατι που έχει δημιουργήσει μια μικρή αντίδραση, πιστεύω οτι η υπεροχή βρίσκεται χαλαρά στην πλευρά του wordpress.com. Ιδιαίτερα εαν προσθέσεις το γεγονός οτι τα ιστολόγια που βρίσκονται στο blogspot παίρνουν πολύ μικρότερη προταιρεότητα στα αποτελέσματα του google λόγο των splogs που βρίσκονται εκεί μέσα (Ο οποίος ήταν και ο λόγος που στο wordpress.com κατάργησαν τα “χρηματιζόμενα” ιστολόγια)

Προσωπικά πιστεύω οτι εαν είναι να πληρώσεις χρήματα για το ιστολόγιο σου, είναι προτιμότερο να πας σε μια εταιρία hosting, και να πάρεις μια δική σου σελίδα, στην οποία θα έχεις πολύ μεγάλύτερη ευελιξία έτσι και αλλιώς. Με τις τιμές που υπάρχουν τώρα (7 ευρώ τον μήνα για 300+Gb), είναι απλά η καλύτερη επιλογή.

Καθάρματα Φαρμακοτρίφτες

Να γίνουν εξαίρεση οι αλμπάνηδες ρε παιδιά, όχι ο κανόνας…

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Βοηθώντας το Blog.me

Οργανώνεται συλλογή υπογραφών για την βοήθεια υπεράσπισης του Αντώνη Τσιπρόπουλου. Το πιο ενδιαφέρον είναι οτι το τελικό σύνολο των θα παρουσιαστεί στο δικαστήριο σαν πειστήριο οτι οι “εμπειρογνώμονες” των ιστολογίων και του internet διαφωνουν με την κλήτευση.

Μέχρι τώρα που το γράφω αυτό έχουν υπογράψει μόνο 16 άτομα.

Αίντε!

Losing Souvlako-Faith

Έ ρε Γιώργο, ντάξ, σωστά όλα αυτά που λές αλλα θα διαφωνήσω σε 2 σημεία.

Το μαγαζί θα το καθαρίζεις κάθε στιγμή που ο πιο περίεργος πελάτης μπορεί να θεωρήσει ότι είναι βρώμικο

Δηλαδή κάτσε, εαν κατάλαβα καλά εννοείς οτι όταν ο κάθε υποχόνδριος χαλαστεί που έχει λίγη βρωμιά ανάμεσα στις χαραμάδες απο τα πλακάκια, θα πρέπει το προσωπικό να καθαρίζει; Δεν νομίζω οτι ένα κατάστημα θα πρέπει να τρέχει για τα κόμπλεξ του καθ’ενός.

Δεύτερον, δεν πιστέυω είναι σωστό να χάνεις την πίστη σου στους υπαλλήλους. Εαν θέλει φοβέρα για να δουλέψει, ίσως θα πρέπει να αλλαχθεί. O άλλος καημένος, ο οποίος είναι σωστός στην δουλειά του και πρέπει να δουλέβει με αφεντικά μπαμπούλες, τι φταίει;

Έχω δουλέψει με αφεντικά-μαλάκες οι οποίοι νόμιζαν οτι επειδή με πλήρωναν (και μάλιστα άσχημα) τους έδινε το δικαίωμα να μου φέρονται όπως γουστάρουν. Ε όταν κατάλαβα την κατάσταση και είδα οτι δεν διορθώνεται τότε άρχισα να ακολουθώ το ρητό “κάνω ότι δουλέβω, κάνουν ότι με πληρώνουν” μέχρι να μαλώσουμε και να φύγω απο εκεί. Αντιθέτως, σε αυτούς οι οποίοι μου φέρθηκαν σωστά, έκανα και το μεταφορικό έξτρα μίλι.

Αυτό που θέλω να πω είναι ότι σκοπός δεν είναι να γίνεις εσύ μπαμπούλας αλλά να μετατρέψεις τους υπαλλήλους σου σε σωστούς επαγγελματίες και εν αποτυχία αυτού, να βρείς άλλους υπαλλήλους. Μόνο τότε το κατάστημα θα δουλεύει αυτόνομα γιατί μην ξεχνάς οτι ο ρόλος του μπαμπούλα λειτουργεί μόνο όσο είναι αυτός εκεί.

Εαν τους φοβερίζεις για να δουλέψουν, να περιμένεις ότι όσο λείπεις τα “ποντίκια” θα χορεύουν.

Crappy First

Πήγαινε στο google και γράψε “Stop Crap” και δες το πρώτο link

C’est Moi!

Χα! Είμαι πρώτος σε ένα Google search εκτώς του ονόματος μου!

Που είναι οι σπονσορες να βγάλω και κάνα φράγκο; ε; Αντε σε τιμή ευκαιρίας.

Αυτό το screenshot σε περίπτωση που αλλάξει ποτε

Χωρίς την πλάκα, μιας και το ανέφερα. Διάβασε και το link. Είναι αρκετά ενδιαφέρον και εαν συμφωνείς, βοήθα.

Blog εξελληνιστί

Δεν ξέρω γιατι το θυμήθηκα τώρα αυτό αλλα είναι κάτι που με ενοχλεί καθώς βλέπω την ελληνική blogοσφαιρα. Δεν υπάρχει συνοχή στην μετάφραση του blog και δημιουργούνται διάφορες ηλίθιες λέξεις.
Η πιο εκνευριστική απο αυτές είναι η “βλογ”. Είναι τελείος χαζή και δεν σημαίνει τίποτα. Είναι απλά το Blog με ελληνικούς χαρακτήρες. Το Βλόγκ είναι αμέσως επόμενο στην λίστα των ακύρων, αλλα είναι και σχετικά αστείο μιας και μου θυμίζει το Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy (στην ελληνική μετάφραση).
Τέλος είναι το Μπλόγκ, το οποίο είναι μεν πιστό στην αγγλική προφορά αλλα πάλι δεν σημαίνει τίποτα. Απλά το γράφεις όπως το ακούς. Καλύτερα να έγραφες Blog εξ’αρχης κατα την άποψη μου.

Το γιατί με ενοχλεί αυτό είναι για τον ίδιο λόγο που θα με ενοχλούσε, πχ, εαν το Bit, το λέγανε βιτ ή το γράφανε Μπίτ. Απλά δεν μου κάθεται καλά.
Εαν θυμάμαι καλά, ο ΟΤΕ είχε κάνει μια καλή μετάφραση για το Bit που όντως ήταν πιστό στην λέξη και ακουγόταν σωστά στα ελληνικά: Δυφίο (ή Δίφιο) (Δυαδικό Ψηφίο) όπως και το Bit βγαίνει απο το Binary Digit. Αυτό μου φαίνεται σαν μια πολύ καλή πρόταση για τον εξελλήνισμό του Blog

Το Blog σημαίνει Web Log