Stoke well the furnace, Iblis!

Jerry Falwell is no more.

Or is that ice I see on the ground?  Because I'm actually making a post in my blog.

I guess if enough of the old crowd asks for my return so be it.

Today I scored a small triumph of sorts - relating the Wiccan Rede to the data we're getting from a study on moral judgment.  "Do what you will if it harm none" is a perfect encapsulation of what Richard Shweder calls "autonomy ethics," one of three moral codes whose importance varies acorss cultures.  The insight today, with my grad student Valeschka,  was that it also encapsulates a positive and a negative ethic.  The positive ethic is do what you will, the negative ethic is to avoid harming other people's rights.   This makes it a complicated ethic to apply, unlike the morality of purity and sanctity (ethics of divinity) or the morality of duty (ethics of community), because it's inherently adversarial - "and each one did what was right in his own eyes."

This related to the findings from the scale she's developed, where the items on what made things morally right correlated with values of hedonism and power, while the items on what made things morally wrong correlated with values of care for others.

Anyway, I also goofed off a lot but I hope to return to form tomorrow and start up a couple of projects.

Don't you love the phenomenon I have hereby dubbed INTERNET ONE-DICKMANSHIP:

When you pull out your inter-dick and type the following speech in more or less these words:

"My magnificent inter-dick is clearly more evolved than that sorry excuse you call e-genitalia.

In fact, you should thank me for the favor I am doing you in telling you this.

You do not? You are angry with me? But I merely speak the truth. It is you who are the weakling.

Oh very well. I see that you are all just losers, whereas I have a life.

Thereby I am forced to bid you adieu.

Adieu, adieu, adieu.

No, for real this time.

Do not attempt to follow me!

Pathetic worms."

Inspired by this shining example. Note the correct way to handle a troll - not with EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE LJDRAMA.

This attitude thrives on the average computer keyboard's marked lack of a "grab by scruff of neck, pull into back alley and administer tire iron justice" button. I heard Microsoft is working on one as part of "trusted computing" though.

Also, the use of "Common." right next to "illiterate mayor."

I hereby dub this next bit Trism's Law because I have seen it so many goddamned times.

TRISM'S LAW: Any sufficiently long message on the Internet, correcting or mocking someone else's grammar or style, will itself contain one or more errors of grammar or style.

Feel free to post your favorite examples as the mood strikes you.

Click here.
Take the quiz.
Post your results.
( See trism's results. )

As the world awaits the next Harry Potter Book, I'm left feeling as uninspired as by the hype about Star Wars Episode III, which also left me cold, and which I haven't even seen yet. I suspect my reading of Half-Blood Prince will be similarly delayed.

Why? I think I have identified the fly in the ointment common to the two: the attempt to portray adolescent angst in both the last HP book and the last but one Star Wars film. Both feature teenage boy heroes flipping their wig, acting uncool, giving in to the dark side, where the dark side is testosterone, or perhaps some midichlorians gone slightly fermented.

The problem here is that this is not what adolescents young or old want to see. Lucas and Rowling both are seeing adolescence from the outside, not the inside; describing tantrums with bad writing and bad acting, breaking the sheen of self-glamorization that the young always spray onto their own histrionics. And by revisiting such juvenile delights, adult readers are expressing their need, not to see a clinical description of teenage behavior, but to be young and full of possibilities again. (Yes, I would class both Harry Potter and Star Wars as juvenilia, though not all fantasy literature deserves the tag.)

What writers have to understand is the 90210 effect: the mainstream Hollywood cheat of casting actors in their 20's and beyond as teenagers, because real teenagers, well, look and act like the teens in Todd Solondz films. Likewise, the teenage reader of fantasy juvenilia wants a main character who is or acts just beyond adolescence, resourceful, good-natured, sometimes naive. And the crucial bit - any drama, angst, morally questionable actions, or self-doubt must be reverently mythologized, externalized, and given significance. Writers like Kasdan and Brackett understood that, and gave us The Empire Strikes Back. Lucas on his own doesn't, and we get the awkward junior high school play that was Attack of the Clones.

I mean - teenagers read this stuff to validate, process, escape and heal their own pain. They don't need any depictions of Harry blowing his stack like a spazz. And the adult reading this loses the illusion, and is forced to wonder "What the hell am I doing sitting in a teacup in Disneyland?"

No, give me the Alex Rider series any day. The perfect junior James Bond, dark but deeply moral - and at least Anthony Horowitz knows, like Ian Fleming did, how to bring a plot home at 200 pages.

I'll wager a great deal of the much-vaunted calmness the British people are showing in the face of the bombing can be attributed to the refusal of their publicly-owned broadcasting company to engage in ominous music, panicmongering graphics, and "Are YOU at risk?" rhetoric. That sort of stuff is left to the tabloids, and nobody believes them anyway.

Meanwhile, in America, it's ORANGE ALERT time and security on public transport systems is increased. This has nothing to do with threats to America, or with any terrorist group with two brain cells to rub together, and everything to do with threats to the career of Homeland Security officials imagining how dumb they would look if the world's dumbest terrorists decided to run the same play from the same book, one day after. Cover Your Ass as usual.

OK, I have been double-tagged by the "5 favorite songs today" meme so here goes:

* The Day The Earth Cried - Gravediggaz
* Super Lyrical - Big Pun and Black Thought
* Raiding the 20th Century (huge mashup megamix) - Strictly Kev (http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/DJ_Food_-_Raiding_the_20th_century.mp3)
* Kashmeer - Led Zeppelin
* New York Groove - Ace Frehley

now six of you post your favorites and six friends in your lj, viz.

kitty_kitty_cat
misia
perigee
amiev
firesign3000
mirumototsubasa

Dear fellow men:

I know it may seem like women get all the attention in this world.

As a man, you are part of the anonymous mulch. As a woman, you are a brightly colored butterfly fluttering through the fields of gray data, the cynosure of all eyes.

But believe me, sometimes women would like to get less attention. Especially from us men.

And you know what is just the worst? When you, the boring man, attempt to get attention on the internets by lamely adopting some aspect of female coloration.

(Note: This is not a slam on real-life transsexuals, who have their own reasons beyond attention whoring. Or to put it another way, any attention whoring they do is merely coincidental.)

The most direct way is just to adopt some sexy female avatar. When I hung out on text chat back in the day, this went on all the time. In fact, it became a running joke that some player who has as their desc a red-haired, green-eyed, intimately pierced, bisexual elf-nymphet was just "too good to be true."

This is a slightly amusing game. It's on the same level as the big-breasted cutouts in gaming stores. It's a direct and cheesy byproduct of the male domination of most fan cultures. I can live with it. I've even done it, for kicks. (I think I stopped doing it after I met, IRL, the other guy I had "lesbian" cyber with. "You're the electric blue fairy with the pink labia?")

But then there is the lamer way. To get the attention due to females who are victims of sexual violence and discrimination, men will use metaphors such as:

"You touched my cards without my permission. I felt violated!"

"I don't like how my favorite game is progressing. I feel like a battered wife!"

(actual examples from forums of a certain game i am involved in)

It's not that men aren't sometimes victims of sexual violence, but that male victims of real violence suffer from the opposite problem - being men, society expects them to put up and shut up.

In the case of game-related "rape," or course, the inner angst of these poor guys is likely to be met, somewhat more appropriately, with scorn and dismissal, or charitably, with a wish that they would emotionally disengage from such relatively minor invasions of their life.

I, personally, would like to say - to try to call on the attention and compassion due to victims of sexual violence, for emotional pains coming from the failure of voluntary hobby activities and those who design and play them to live up to your high standards of expectation, is severely inappropriate.

The odds are that if you know five female gamers, one of them has been raped or sexually abused in some way. With a penis. Not by making rulings that make no sense, or having their deck shuffled roughly in a card game tournament.

Suck on that statistic for a minute, and then thank God that even 5% of gamers are women.

These are insights derived from studying the emotion of disgust for the past 5 years, posted at the request of motel666.

Your one-stop book is William Ian Miller's The Anatomy of Disgust. In psychology, some of the preeminent researchers on the topic are Paul Rozin and Jon Haidt.

What is disgust, and what does it do for us?

* The basic emotion of disgust has a facial expression of wrinkled brows, stuck-out tongue, and turned-down mouth corners. This points to its origin in the animal reaction of distate - expelling something noxious from the mouth. But over evolutionary time, distaste was built upon, turned into an emotional reaction intended to protect the whole body from contagion -- an implicit germ theory. In this regard, only humans show disgust, and show it relatively late in development; if cats had disgust they would not clean themselves in the way they do, for example, and infants are notorious for playing with their own excrement until a certain age when it becomes repulsive to them.

* What creates basic disgust? This is complicated. Appraisal theories of emotion in psychology have a habit of summing up emotional triggers with catchy formulae like "anger = other person responsible for negative outcome." But disgust seems to be triggered by very basic stimuli, which after much thought I can sum up as "things involving the body that we are not used to," though this still seems to fall short. Most disgust falls into the categories: 1) unfamiliar food items (and animal foods are more disgusting than vegetable, perhaps because they involve two bodies!) 2) bodily fluids and products in general (including sex) 3) the dead, diseased or otherwise unnatural body, regardless of whether the death or disease was scientifically contagious or not.

There is also speculation but little real evidence that disgust also applies to extreme examples of moral evil, for example, Naziism or Satanism. It is interesting that these examples also contain their own body-related elements - the abominations of Dr. Mengele, the use of the naked body as an altar. Can moral disgust exist without these things?

* We can see that disgust guards against contagion because it follows the "magical" laws of contagion as laid down by Claude Levi-Strauss in his studies of anthropology. Carol Nemeroff did a series of studies with Paul Rozin showing this; for example, people are still disgusted by a sweater worn by someone who died of cancer, and unwilling to wear it. The playground concept of "cooties" is disgust-contagion in its most primitive extreme, and points to the ways in which ...

* Disgust can be metaphorized as social contempt. The emotion was used, for example, by Nazi propaganda against Jews, comparing them to disease and to disease-bearing animals. As compared to fear or anger, this is a good way to agitate against a social group without having to point to a specific injustice or threat of theirs. Merely being strange - having foods, bodily or sexual customs that are not "ours" - is enough.

* One thing needs to be cleared up before continuing; in the English language "disgust" is often used as a synonym for "anger" (You stole from me and I'm really disgusted). This has been interpreted as evidence for a moral variety of disgust, but my own research shows that when a scenario is not actually physically disgusting, "disgust" terms are more related to endorsement of anger faces showing how a person feels, than disgust faces. In other words, this is a use of the term "disgust" that has little bearing on the actual basic emotion.

* Disgust is irrational. Consider the example, used by Haidt in his studies, of a chocolate shaped like a dog-doo. Even though we know it is chocolate, it is still disgusting, and no amount of rationality will convince us otherwise.

* In spite of being bodily, in spite of being irrational -- or perhaps because of both! -- disgust is a strongly socialized emotion. There are some things that appear to be disgusting across cultures; feces, vomit, disease products, dead bodies. Whether these are innately disgusting or disgusting via strong universal socialization is unclear yet, awaiting that highly unethical "wild boy" experiment. Yet move away from these, and foods, sexual practices, body modification practices, physical contact norms vary widely in their disgustingness from culture to culture. Sharing disgust can be a way to bond socially, as children do when they giggle at gross jokes; overcoming disgust can be an initiatory ritual moving one to adulthood, as in sexual initation or the first beer; overcoming disgust can also be an anti- or sub-social act, proclaiming one's individuality. This apparent paradox arises from disgust's being both an irrational and a human emotion. By accepting disgust you demonstrate your status as a human and member of your culture; by overcoming it, you demonstrate your willingness to transcend culture and childhood.

Hope this has been informative!

OK, I am putting these in one entry. Respond to one, or both challenges!

==================================================

Leave a comment if you want to know what I really think of you and I'll reply and tell you. No lies, all honesty.

Then post this in your journal so I can find out what you think of me.

==================================================

Reply to this post and tell me something you would like to do with me someday.

Then post this in your journal to find out what your readers want to do with you.

Ten bands/artists you couldn't live without:
[1] DJ Shadow
[2] Tupac
[3] Biggie
[4] Sonic Youth
[5] Mission of Burma
[6] God Speed You! Black Emperor
[7] Bach
[8] Beethoven
[9] The Stranglers
[10] Beastie Boys

Nine albums that are important to you:
[1] Sonic Youth - Dirty
[2] Beastie Boys - License to Ill
[3] Minor Threat - Out of Step
[4] Roni Size - New Sounds
[5] Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power
[6] Beatles - White Album (good songs only)
[7] DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist - Brainfreeze
[8] Public Enemy - Nation of Millions
[9] Tupac - All Eyez on Me

Eight movies you'd watch over and over:
[1] Star Wars
[2] Pulp Fiction
[3] The Seven Samurai
[4] Shrek
[5] Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
[6] Memento
[7] Mulholland Drive
[8] LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring

Seven things that annoy you:
[1] Bureaucracy
[2] Stupidity
[3] Unbalanced geekery
[4] Literal-minded, cover-your-ass paranoia caused by lack of common sense
[5] Abuse of power
[6] Prudishness
[7] Incompetence rewarded

Six songs you love: (pure Stream of Consciousness)
[1] "Apache" - Incredible Bongo Band
[2] "Venus" - Television
[3] "Some Velvet Morning" - Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
[4] "Walk on By" - The Stranglers
[5] "Made You Look" - Nas
[6] "Look To Your Orb For the Warning" - Monster Magnet

Five TV shows you never miss(ed):
[1] Scooby Doo
[2] UFO
[3] Three's Company
[4] SCTV
[5] Saturday Night Live

(haven't owned a TV since high school)

Four of your favorite books:
[1] Gene Wolfe: Book of the New Sun
[2] Russell Hoban : Riddley Walker
[3] Don DeLillo: Underworld
[4] Luc Sante: Low Life

Three albums you recently bought:
[1] Pere Ubu: Early singles & b-sides
[2] Kool G Rap and DJ Polo: First two albums complete
[3] Fischerspooner

Two famous people you'd like to fuck (note, this is different from my list of dead sexy but untouchable famous people):
[1] Drew Barrymore
[2] SCULLY (if I am a geek then let me be damned)

How the hell does this stunt promote the dignity and welfare of animals?

Oh, and guess what. The sheep were killed anyway.

I wonder though -- would the prank be seen as cute, or xenophobic, if the sheep had been bound for Israel?

OK, 99% of quizzes are rubbish. This one is good though. Because it sort of got me right.


You're a True Punk. You know that punk isn't all
about studded jackets and mohawks. If you're
political, you're actually informed. Most of
the stuff you love is from before the 80s,
though you know bands like Fugazi kept the
spirit going.


You Know Yer Indie. Let's Sub-Categorize.
brought to you by Quizilla

"Cats to become a rabbit should gather immediately now here. This is the hat and shawl for disguising oneself."

This is CATPRIN.

I'm here to keep up with my old friends from the MOO days, and try to help them out as much as I can.

It's amazing how long ago it was, some of the things we shared.

You're all good people though, so I'm back.

-- Roger