Summer Reading meme

I’ve been tagged with the holiday reading meme. So here’s what I’ve been reading these holidays.

Reading list
Image by jakebouma via Flickr

I’ve been tagged by Anderson Warm-Fork with the “watcha readin’ this summer” meme (btw my alias is Db0, not DBZ. I’m not a Dragonball Z fan 😛 ). So why not bore you a bit today?

This summer, along with most of the Spring, I’ve been going through the substansial volumes of An Anarchist FAQ. Yes, it has taken me a while to read it all but it’s generally condensed stuff that takes a while, not to mention that the whole thing clocks easily at around 1000 A4 pages.Fortunately, my trusty e-reader has helped me go through it without lumbering boxes of  printed A4 around.

So how good is the AFAQ? Very very good. Aside from clarifying a lot of common misconceptions about the movement, it is also an invaluable resource on common criticisms from more authoritative sources, such as economists or Marxist-Leninists. Section C which counters capitalist economics is particularly informative and a great resource against the annoyingly frequent right-“libertarians”. It’s for such reasons that I’ve created a handy firefox keyword that quickly searches through the AFAQ for a topic I’m discussing and need somewhere to link to.

Even though I’m still not through with it, I’m nevertheless, finally, quite close. Once I’m done, my next target will probably be Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid for which I’ve heard the best things about. This will probably fall outside of the scope of this meme but hey, who cares.

And in closing, let me tag some people to let us know of some interesting stuff to read:

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Make your avatar a "Hoodie"

The Greek Govt is trying to criminalize attempts to protect one’s identity during social upheavals. This is a call for solidarity.

Last year during the Greek Riots, there was a government suggestion to somehow punish people who cover their faces during protests, in effect making it unlawful to protect your anonymity. Back then along with another person, I took a symbolic solidarity action by taking a picture of myself as a hoodie but as time passed and the riots abated, the issue was forgotten.

However it seems that the Government has not forgotten their plans and has now proceeded to decree that anyone caught “vandalizing”, acting violently or simply disrupting the public peace while wearing a hoodie or otherwise covering their face characteristics will be further charged with 2-10 years of punishment. You read that right, if you go out to protest and you are deemed to be disruptive to the public peace (who will judge that? The cops of course) while covering your face (or not, Greek cops have no problem accusing you anyway, and what is easier to accuse than “covering the face characteristics”) then you can go to jail for 2 years at least.

Wonderful.

As a reaction to this announcement, Plagal, who initiated the action the last time, brought up this symbolic move of picturing yourself in a hoodie once more and urges everyone to do something similar. The reaction this time has been much more positive and many more people have done the same (there’s a list in the link above) which could possibly be due to the fact that another blogger proposed the same thing independently, only she went one step further and proposed the great idea to switch all our avatars to Hoodies in solidarity.

So here we go:

Hoodie Solidarity

I’ve already updated my twitter and facebook avatars and I urge you to do the same in all the places where you commonly hang out. And of course if you’re a blogger upload one in your blog and explain why you did it.

If you live in Greece I furthermore wholeheartedly suggest you start strolling around the city as a Hoodie, just so that you can show your disdain for this new government clampdown of freedom of expression and the right to anonymity.

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Monstrous fun in Reddit /Atheism/

A meme breaks out in the Atheist subreddit of Reddit around giant symbols of religion. The titles are simply hilarious.

The reddit religious monstrocity memeThe titles of the posts speak for themselves really

And last but not least

Ah, reddit memes. How fun they can be!

Update: Honorary mention: His Noodly Appendage Is The Only Just God Hovering Over Gaza

Alright, alright! I'll list the six things already.

I’ve been tagged again and again to provide six random factoids about me. I finally gave in.

wtf bug
Image Unrelated by Sidereal via Flickr

I was planning to sit this one out but after being tagged not once, but twice I decided to submit to the will of the public and provide y’all with six random facts about me.

The rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you (Already done)
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random arbitrary things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them. (Can’t be bollocksed.)
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

Six factlets about a life divided by zer0

  • I have had 2 online aliases before I settled on Db0. The first one was “The Mistake”. It didn’t last long. The second one was “Historian” which was taken from my surname of “Thoukydidis”. Most of my online activity from 1997 until 2002 was with this one and thus almost all my online acquaitances still call me that (Some outright denied the new one). I got the latest one from my attempts at Pascal programming.
  • I have had a LOT of offline nicknames. Each person seemed to want to call me something different. By order of sequence (if I remember correctly) I was called:
    • “The Neck” (At school, mostly by bullies).
    • Thouky which became Thouk which became Thou. “Th” as in Theta (Mostly by school friends)
    • Highlander (When I bought my first trenchcoat – Mostly “college” people)
    • Marshal (When I started playing Doomtown – What an awesome game – while still actively wearing the trenchcoat – Mostly by gaming buddies)
    • Historian (Mostly by online people I meat IRL)
    • d’Artagnan (When I grew my current goatee while having long hair – mostly by social contacts who experienced my charming personality 🙂 )
    • Bob (Mostly by English people who fail at pronouncing my real name)
    • K.T. (Yes, I’m aware that it’s almost pronounced “Katie” alright? Mostly by colleagues)
  • The first time I kissed a girl was when I was 17. The second time was when I was 22. I was an ubergeek when that was still uncool 🙂
  • As an ubergeek, I was an avid gamer in my youth. I started with adventures but ended up playing everything except sports and simulations. I stopped playing almost at the same time I started blogging.
  • I prefer to listen to music all the time. I go to sleep with music and wake up with music. If I could I would implant an music playing chip into my brain so that I wouldn’t have to stop it at any point.
  • I didn’t start blogging before 2005 because I considered it lame and attention-whoring. Judging by this blog, I was probably correct.

Tagging

I can’t be bollocksed but if you like the idea, consider this sentence your invitation.

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Meme Tagged: My first day as an Atheist

Here’a first, I’ve just been tagged by the Atheist Blogger with a new meme. I haven’t done any of these in the past (other than taking it upon myself that is). So let’s see…

Can You Remember The Day That You Officially Became An Atheist?

Well, Officially is a weird word that doesn’t apply very well since there’s no organised Atheist Religion. Nevertheless, I can’t really say that I remember the day I became an atheist. I know that I considered myself an Atheist for a while mostly because I could not consider myself a good Christian but I never expressed it. Truth be told, I wasn’t really an atheist but rather an agnostic at that point.

What I do distinctly remember is being in a church for a reason or other (I think because of Easter) with my aunt and for some reason I ended up telling a priest that I was an Atheist, which of course promted him to tell me that I’m just angry at God that I lost my mother. Highly presumtious of him I’d say.

Yes my memory is incedibly crappy.

In actuallity, I became a full-fledged Atheist in my current (and only correct) form only in recent years but it was a gradual process.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

Again not really. I was really an agnostic while calling myself an atheist in my teens so I guess you could say that.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

I remember occasionally, when in a difficult or sad situation, asking inside my head for help but I never explicitly prayed. Perhaps I was defending my self mentally or perhaps it was a leftover from school&church brainwashing.

I’ve since conditioned myself to stop doing this ridiculous mental trick and just get on with the problem at hand.

I never actually truly prayed, as in, “get down on my knees” kind of thing. I was seeing my classmates devoutly bending down their head and closing their eyes in the school’s morning mandatory prayer and I remember I tried it once (simply saying the Πατερ Ημόν prayer internally) but I thought it was all too silly.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

Nah, although people were inclined to believe that because of my mother’s death, that wasn’t the case. I never really felt enough about them to feel anger. I am currently opposed to organised religion and their actions occasionally get me angry but this does not drive my irreligion.

Here is a good one: Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

By the time I consider myself to have become a proper Atheist I had managed to achieve scepticism as well. By the time I first called myself an Atheist when I should have been saying agnostic or even agnostic Christian I still believed in various woo-woo like Energies, Auras, Magic etc

But fortunately not Ghosts. I think Holywood ruined it for me 🙂

Do you want to be wrong?

I would not like to be wrong (I mean, who does?) as it would mean that I was living my life wrongly, based on false beliefs and knowledge. Having said that, If I did turn out to be wrong, I wouldn’t mind, unless the Christian God is, indeed such a bastard as the Old Testament makes him out to be, in which case I would summarily be going to hell anyway.

I would like to be wrong about other stuff however. I would very much love to be wrong about Global Warming, Aliens, Ghosts, Auras and the like. If those things existed, the world would be so much more interesting.

Unfortunately just because I’d like those to exist, I can’t bring myself to willful delusion.

So, that’s that. Time to spread the mind virus.

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