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Sadly, No! throws an offhanded dig at Mark Noonan’s descrip­tion of the “Kingdom of God” as a state of exis­tence. While Noonan even­tu­ally does come out in favor of democ­racy, you’ll note that it’s only because you can’t guar­an­tee you’ll get a com­pe­tent and benev­o­lent dic­ta­tor (one who only oppresses The Other) not because the idea of being ruled by fiat — being forcibly infan­tilized for life — is sim­ply repug­nant on it’s face.

The post reminded me of a dis­cus­sion I had a while ago, about Intelligent Design. During the dis­cus­sion, I had men­tioned a story I had read online about the empha­sis of cer­tain sto­ries (whether grounded in sci­ence or not) over oth­ers in edu­ca­tion. I was, regret­tably, unable to prop­erly explain myself the per­son in ques­tion, mainly because I was spend­ing more time attempt­ing to recall the story than explain­ing what it meant. With today’s renewed search I found it, and I’m blog­ging a huge excerpt so I don’t lose it again:

You see, Cap was a sci­en­tist, after all. That said, I felt I just had to ask a few things com­monly held to be true amongst American Christians which seem to be com­pletely at odds with sci­ence. You know the list. The two big ones are “how old is the world?” and “so what about evolution?”

He didn’t answer me philo­soph­i­cally. He answered me polit­i­cally, and it shocked me how right he was in his observation.

In his thick brogue, he gen­tly answers about evo­lu­tion, “Out of curios­ity, then son, do you know what the Soviets taught their chil­dren regard­ing the ori­gins of species of the world?”

“Well, cer­tainly they didn’t teach cre­ation­ism,” I answered. I didn’t know the answer, but I fig­ure Godless com­mies don’t do cre­ation­ism, right? I assumed evolution.

He looks at me and says, “Lamarck. You remem­ber that one from biol­ogy class, don’t you?”

“Lamarck? Isn’t that the the­ory that said giraffes stretched their necks their whole lives try­ing to get at food in the trees and their bod­ies responded by cre­at­ing chil­dren with longer necks?” I was proud of myself for remem­ber­ing the the­ory. It was one that we were taught was prim­i­tive, dis­proven, and taught solely to show us pre­de­ces­sors to mod­ern the­ory. “I mean, the Soviets were sup­posed to be all about sci­ence, why would they teach Lamarck?”

“Well, for one, it doesn’t really mat­ter where school­child­ren think they came from, does it? I mean, fac­tory work­ers and clerks and farm­ers and mechan­ics — does it really mat­ter one way or the other for the vast major­ity of folks if they think they came from fish or from God or whatever?”

“I sup­pose not, but that doesn’t explain why they would know­ingly teach some­thing known to be false science.”

“No. It doesn’t. But that’s because it wasn’t sci­ence they were teach­ing. Think about it. In a Lamarkian world­view, all the cells of the body are striv­ing for a sin­gle goal which will only be real­ized by the next gen­er­a­tion. All the cells of the body work­ing together as a col­lec­tive for a bet­ter future in which they may not even par­tic­i­pate. They taught Lamarck not because it was sci­en­tific or true — they taught Lamarck because it made good lit­tle commies.”

I felt relieved for a moment that I wasn’t in a total­i­tar­ian state that val­ued faith to the state over truth. Unfortunately, Cap kept talking.

“And what type of a soci­ety do you sup­pose school­child­ren taught Darwin would cre­ate, lad? One where the best, the fittest, the strongest, the fastest lux­u­ri­ate in the spoils of their vic­tory at the expense of the ones they van­quished along the way? What is to be said of the losers? They were weak, weren’t they? They didn’t fight hard enough. They were stu­pid. If that’s the world you want, you’ve got to teach the kids right, don’t you?”

Sure, I knew about the pop­u­lar­ity of Social Darwinism amongst the Gilded Age thinkers. It never occurred to me that we never really left that time. More impor­tantly, for the first time it occurred to me that whether or not some­thing is true doesn’t deter­mine if it is taught. There are plenty of true things that we don’t spend time on in the class room. Why so much empha­sis on some true things instead of oth­ers? Because they con­firm our world­view. It’s not a con­spir­acy or any­thing. It’s just that we teach what we value.

So that brings us full cir­cle to the world of Evangelicals. Commies taught their kids Lamarck because they val­ued col­lec­tivism; even after they knew that the the­ory was faulted. Capitalists teach Darwin; even after the sta­tis­ti­cal suc­cess of anti-Darwinian pro­grams like Social Security and the Interstate Highway sys­tem. What type of per­son — what type of a world­view val­ues creationism?

What is to be said of cre­ation­ism and val­ues? I mean, beyond just the “it’s what’s in Bible” stuff. What world­view does it espouse?

Things are as they are and always will be as they are because God made it that way and wills to keep it that way.

I’m here where I am in this place and this posi­tion in life because this is how I was made by God. I was divinely willed to push this broom, so I have to learn to deal with it. Whining is for the faithless.

Humans aren’t pow­er­ful enough to harm the environment.

It doesn’t mat­ter how much this world sucks.

The wealthy and pow­er­ful are where they are because God wants them there. George W is pres­i­dent because God wants him to be so.

Creationism is the value sys­tem of the monar­chists, is it not?

Brad from Baltimore, writ­ing to Joe Bageant in “Yes, I’m an Urban Liberal”

via Chuck0.

Nothing is unbreak­able
No sys­tem is per­fect
There is always another way
Given proper inquiry, the way can be found
The future lies in the pos­si­bil­ity
Where any­thing is possible

This is what we for­got on 9/11.

I am, today, unfo­cused and angry.
Someone is hat­ing me.
I don’t care, they can keep their hatred.
Shields up, ‘n shit.
Vampirism begone!
And take your sloppy think­ing with you.

I want none of it.
I want a full-night’s sleep.

The week before last (before my job started) I spent the whole week on a quest for reli­gious knowl­edge, start­ing from a post syn­di­cated to Indyblogs (the Indymedia site) about Wicca, describ­ing the “debate” between those who choose that reli­gion after see­ing The Craft or Charmed reruns on TBS, and those who actu­ally research the stuff. The most hilar­i­ous was Why Wiccans Suck, which reminded me of some old comic strip­page on s*p [insert secret-identity con­spir­acy the­ory here]. The bent of the pages on that site seems to be that most peo­ple who claim to be witches aren’t really witches, they’re just doing it to piss off Significant Others^TM and/or other Authority Figures^TM, don’t know much about the reli­gion itself, it’s his­tory, tra­di­tions, and most impor­tantly, it’s Rules^TM.

Of course, I’ve heard all this before, from fundamentalist/conservative Christian preach­ers and radio/televangelists, talk­ing about the modernist/liberal groups (Methodists, Unitarians, the Jesus Seminar). My main prob­lem with Christianity is that the whole reli­gion seems to be over­run with fun­da­men­tal­ist wackos like an army of Taliban enforcers, albeit cloaked in suits and part-on-the-left Aryan master(bater) blonde hair. Thus, it’s hil­iar­i­ous to me that some Pagans believe their reli­gion isn’t fun­da­men­tal­ist enough, and is over­run by those who don’t take it seri­ously. To be fair to the WWS site, I don’t think that blend­ing reli­gion and pol­i­tics is ever a good idea, no mat­ter what the reli­gion and/or pol­i­tics is, and it does irri­tate me that peo­ple whom I would oth­er­wise respect say things and use ter­mi­nol­ogy they don’t under­stand or haven’t fully thought through, par­tic­u­larly terms that I hap­pen to have an affin­ity for (like “Freedom” and “Anarchy”).

Nevertheless, “There aren’t enough peo­ple who take it seri­ously” is about as close to a ring­ing endorse­ment of a reli­gion as I’ve ever found.

Then last week, it was on to the new job. I spent the first day help­ing my boss pid­dling around with a bro­ken wire­less setup out on a farm, ulti­mately deter­min­ing that the prob­lem was an embed­ded Linux/wireless thing — some­how the box man­aged to delete it’s firmware. Ugh. When the start of the day came around, I thought it would be a quick, unevent­ful trip to watch the stuff in action, fol­lowed by some faint web design/PHP back at work. Silly rab­bit, it’s a 6-hour (includ­ing the drive) wran­gle with a net­work in the mid­dle of nowhere strung together by a third party, who shall hense­forth be know as the Mad Tin-Foil Hatter. I mean, come on, what’s the point of lock­ing down the AP with a MAC-address list when:

1. It is already using WEP.
2. You’re in the mid­dle of Farm Country, USA, and the clos­est thing to “civ­i­liza­tion” is a small state-college (town) a dozen miles away.
3. The net­work isn’t com­plete (like every other net­work, ever).
4. You aren’t going to doc­u­ment that fact in your notes.

Anyhow, after try­ing to fig­ure out why the Windows lap­top wouldn’t con­nect for about an hour, I got mine (in OS X, because “Broadcom built a soft­ware radio rather than just a wire­less card. FCC reg­u­la­tions stop them releas­ing the source in case peo­ple use it as a soft­ware radio” — which is the dumb­est shit I’ve ever heard), which actu­ally gives use­ful error mes­sages (e.g. “This wire­less access point has an ACL, which you aren’t on”) instead of the utterly use­less crap Windows spews — for the NetworkManager crowd, please do make the wire­less error mes­sages mean­ing­ful. Aaanyways, after adding a sec­ond AP to see if it was sim­ply some screwy com­pat­i­bil­ity prob­lem with the AP, it turns out that the wire­less stuff we had Just Wasn’t Working^TM.

The rest of the week was spent on designing/implementing a PHP web-app for access­ing a whole slew of PDF-format doc­u­men­ta­tion. Previously, if some­one from the com­pany went out to a site they needed to bring the docs for every­thing they needed to work on, often stuff that my employer didn’t sell them or install. If there was some­thing there that wasn’t noti­fied, it required a cell-phone call to the office where some­one would go slough­ing through a huge phys­i­cal 3-ring binder to find the appro­pri­ate doc­u­ment. The end goal is to have it acces­si­ble via a web­site or an XML-RPC inter­face from the PDAs the on-site peo­ple slog around with them.

The main goal was to get it (barely) func­tional so I could worry about the design (and teach myself how to actu­ally do a web-app stuff in the mean­time). The major hur­dle in doing a web app is rec­og­niz­ing that it is not a native app, and can­not ever totally be a native app. A web app (from the server side) is effec­tively an appli­ca­tion which must do every­thing in one pro­ce­dural shot, and then must start over from scratch for the next page. About the only ray of sun­shine is that the lan­guages for web-apps (ASP, PHP, Perl) elim­i­nate much of the bull­shit (read: man­ual mem­ory man­age­ment) for lan­guages typ­i­cally used for native apps (C/C++).

Anyways, this com­ing week I get to rework that thingie to not be a hack, and work on a SQL-to-PDF thing for the ISO-9000 wankers, who are demand­ing that the same doc­u­ment (con­tent) printed years from now must look the same as though it were printed today, regard­less of the fact that there is no “doc­u­ment” per-se, just a bunch of fields in a data­base that get col­lated into an HTML page, which makes print­outs sub­ject to the whims of the browser coders. That insan­ity requires PDFs, and since it’s pos­si­ble for peo­ple to want to print out and/or upload hun­dreds of these “doc­u­ments” at once, gen­er­a­tion on-the-fly (either at INSERT or SELECT time) is imprac­ti­cal, requir­ing a cron job to peri­od­i­cally poll the data­base for new entries and start generating/caching PDFs for them in the background.

You may remem­ber ISO-9000 from the late-night “Bureaucrats Gone Wild” video series.

Lastly, while tak­ing the Debian Quiz (scored a 48%, though Question #24, on the num­ber of times Braden “Cup of Shut the Fuck Up” Robinson ran for DPL is actu­ally scored incor­rectly — he ran five times, and lost four of the five, but they make “4” the right answer), I found hot-babe. Why was I not informed that a pixie-ish naked blonde hot­tie could show up on my desk­top when some­thing is eat­ing it’s young/infinite looping/frying my CPU? Where are all the demands for account­abil­ity? Why is there no inves­ti­ga­tion as to why I was not informed of this purple-bra-clad activ­ity monitor?