2011 December » unsane

It’s not a resolution!

Dec 312011

It’s that time of the year when lots of people start making resolutions for 2012. For the most part, they’ll fail.

So I’m not making any new years resolutions.

Instead, I’m just promising myself one thing: I’ll write more regularly in 2012.

One of the interesting aspects of rattling through my head this year and sorting out some long term issues has also been a realising that a lot of the things I’d been doing on a day to day basis had been things I hadn’t been taking much personal satisfaction from.

On the other hand, writing is something I get a great deal of personal satisfaction from. I’m not just talking blogging, though certainly that’ll be one area in particular where I’ll be continuing to push myself. However, I do have a couple of projects outside of the blogging genre which I do plan on getting my butt into gear and completing. Who knows? By the end of 2012 you may even want to lay down $5 or $10 in the Kindle store to grab something with my name on it, and I’m not talking about an IT book.

May.

Fingers crossed.

Don’t feed the trolls

Life, Media, Morality 2 Responses »

Dec 302011

Every now and then I see someone (hopefully jokingly!) make reference to some problem they’re having, and how they’re going to contact one of the Australian “current affair” TV programmes.

These aren’t current affairs programmes; they’re bogan hysteria generation systems deliberately designed to make people get indignant about either the wrong or the inconsequential things while the real issues, the ones that take more than 30 seconds to explain, are safely ignored.

They belong in a new genre of television – flatutainment; that’s right, they’re about as entertaining as watching someone fart for 30 minutes. Likely less, since there’s a lot of people out there who happen to find fart jokes amusing. Yet they stink far worse than 30 minutes worth of farts.

Ultimately, these shows are just trolling – they spout bigotry rivalled only by radio shock jocks, and they parrot on about minor transgressions as if they’re world-shattering events, spending their time bullying either people who have committed some petty misdemeanour, or worse, the innocent and the helpless who are unable to respond to defend themselves. Why? Because it’s easier to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war when those dogs are going up against people who can’t defend themselves. This is a blood sport, pure and simple.

They have no interest in tackling real issues, because real issues take more time to explain, and if the sorts of people who watch those shows have to spend more than 90 seconds trying to grasp an issue, they change channels, which means advertising revenue is lost. That’s what it’s all about, in the end: advertising revenue. And since those shows are jam packed with ads (when they’re not themselves being a giant ad for a corporate sponsor), they’re optimised for a fevered, indignant, captive audience. Nothing else matters.

Please, people, don’t feed the trolls.

Making sense of gay rights

Equal Rights, Humour, Life No Responses »

Dec 292011

The extreme right, bigots, bogans, and other suppressors of social advancement often spout the nonsense that gays, lesbians, transexuals, intersexed and bisexual folk are after special rights when we talk about sensitive issues, such as say, the right to marry.

Since this is seemingly a really difficult concept to understand, I’ve decided to flowchart it. After all, flowcharts make complex and difficult decision processes much easier to understand.

Introducing the Flowchart

In case you’re confused, this is how you work out whether the GBLTI community are asking for special or equal rights:

So that there’s absolutely no confusion, I’ll provide two examples for the use of this flowchart.

Example 1: Asking for the right to randomly fondle strangers in public

Now, imagine if you will, a situation where the GBLTI community were actively campaigning for the right to fondle strangers in public. No, they’re not, this is just an example.

In this situation, the flowchart would guide us as follows:

The flowchart works! It clearly tells us that such a campaign would be a request for special rights, because it’s something that heterosexuals aren’t currently allowed to do.

Example 2: Asking for the right to marry the person we love

A current trending issue is that of same-sex marriage. That’s where the GBLTI community is asking for the right to marry the person they love. This flowchart would look like the following:

Wrapping Up

As you can see, even the most complex of conundrums, such as working out whether the GBLTI community are asking for special or equal rights, can be solved with a flowchart.

5,506 days

Equal Rights, Life 1 Response »

Dec 282011

Darren and I consider the start of our relationship proper to be 30 November 1996.

That means as of today, as I type this post, we’ve been together for 5,506 days. Yet somehow, we don’t qualify for marriage.

On the other hand:

Sinead O’Connor announced today that her and her latest husband split after 16 days (in which they only lived together for 7 days);
Kim Kardashian stayed married for 72 days;
Britney Spears stayed married for less 3 days (55 hours, to be exact);
Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra were married for 9 days;
Lisa Marie Presley could only manage to stay married to Nicolas Cage for 107 days;
Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock got the big D after 122 days;
Drew Barrymore and Tom Green hitched their wagons for 163 days, though that was an improvement on her first marriage which lasted just 42 days;
Liz Taylor’s shortest (but by no means only) marriage was 205 days long.

(The majority of those figures were taken from “TIME’s Top 10 Short-Lived Celebrity Marriages“, you can find more in “Wikipedia – Hollywood Marriages“.)

Let’s graph those relationships:

That’s right, our relationship is the Pacman of relationships against those marriages.

And people still want to hold up the notion of marriage being exclusively between men and women as a way of preserving it?

What a joke.

What if companies were treated like people?

Life 1 Response »

Dec 262011

There’s been a lot of fuss and bother about the American supreme court passing laws that give companies rights akin to real people, and a lot of people see that this is a bad thing.

On the other hand, this transformative process, if done right, might be very good.

Now I know lots of people have talked about the disadvantages of this transformation, but imagine some of the advantages, if you will:

Cigarette companies could be sent to gaol for manslaughter;
Banks that charged say, a $40 overdraft fee to “recover costs” could be charged with fraud;
Power companies that cut off electricity to houses where people have life support equipment could be charged with murder;
Finance companies that melt down the global economy could be charged with treason in dozens of countries simultaneously;
Gambling companies could be charged with theft and larceny;
Mining companies that plunder the natural resources might actually have to pay reasonable levels of tax on their obscenely high profits;
Churches could be sued for hate speech, vilification and discrimination;
And the list just goes on and on.

So as long as we do it properly, I’m all for this American notion of making companies like people.

Dear Barnaby: Screw you

Life, Morality 1 Response »

Dec 242011

I’ve been thinking a little more about the pathetic diatribe Barnaby Joyce made in the Canberra Times a few days ago, and the utter hypocrisy therein.

In particular, when calling atheists “the sneaky sect”, he claimed:

Yes, this sect’s followers make their way on to your veranda then hold a righteous court of sneering indignation about the crib in the park. You can hear yourself muttering under your breath, ”I wish you would go drown yourself, you pseudo-intellectual Gucci flea.” They write letters to complain about the incorrectness of carols at the school and picket the Christmas tree. To not insult their religion, you must no longer follow yours.

What a hypocritical, ignorant, condescending, arrogant piece of shit that paragraph was.

At the time I said that atheists had hardly pioneered letter writing campaigns or protests. After all, look at the number of letters schools get every year about “immoral” books, or all those christians protesting abortion clinics, funerals, etc.

But now that I’ve had more time to think about it what really makes me angry is the incredibly hypocritical part:

…make their way on to your veranda then hold a righteous court of sneering indignation about the crib in the park…

Are you kidding me, you sad troll?

Barnaby Joyce: I’m now 38 years of age, I’ve lived in three states of Australia for varying lengths of time, I’ve had multiple houses and phone numbers, some listed, some unlisted.

And here’s the consistent thing between all those addresses and phone numbers:

I get christians door-knocking to try to convert me or sell me salvation;
I get christians letter-dropping pamphlets about Jesus, salvation, and the immorality of homosexuals;
I get christian organisations calling me asking for donations.

I’ve not once, in all my life, had an atheist knock on my door, drop a letter or pamphlet in my mailbox, or call me at night asking me for support.

And you, Barnaby Joyce, have the gall to accuse atheists of this?

Crawl back into your sad and bitter little hole, troll.

Yes, I’m pissed off. Nothing irks me more than overpowering hypocrisy, and Barnaby has it in spades.

Barnaby Joyce, at it again

Life, Morality No Responses »

Dec 232011

A while ago, Barnaby Joyce, the leader of the LNP in the Australian Senate, said, when speaking of his daughters and the issue of same sex marriage:

“We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband and I want that to happen for them.

“I don’t want any legislator to take that right away from me.”

(“Gay marriage should be ridiculed, says Independent Bob Katter“, Mat Sadler, Perth Now, 16 August 2011)

Now, at the time, I said opponents such as Barnaby and Bob were coming across as batshit crazy, using stupid arguments about girls not being able to marry men if same-sex marriage were allowed, and (the horror!) “gay” being used to describe homosexuals rather than light happiness.

As we hit the end of December, Barnaby has come out swinging again, this time against atheists. You see, he doesn’t like us, and says:

“My war is always against that religion called atheist extremism, that sneaky sect. Its advocates’ belief in nothing is more affirmed and uncompromising than just about anyone else’s belief in anything.”

(“The ‘sneaky sect’“, Barnaby Joyce, The Canberra Times, 22 December 2011.)

Whoa, Barnaby, starting by calling atheists a ‘sect’ is an interesting proposition, but you blew yourself out of the water when you said we believe in ‘nothing’.

You see, atheists actually believe in quite a lot. Now, I hate to fight fiction with fiction, but I’ll fall back to a quote from Stargate: The Ark Of Truth:

“We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, through argument and debate, but, most of all, freedom of will.”

You see, atheists aren’t non-believers, they’re generally very staunch believers – in things that can be seen, and proven. Now, I can’t speak for all atheists, but my take on the world is that I want explanations that have a firm basis in fact. It doesn’t mean that I personally have to see and experience it all, but it does mean that reputable scientists for instance, do. That’s why I believe climate change is real. (Barnaby, however, is an unbeliever on that front.)

Now, here’s where Barnaby gets down and dirty with his little rant:

Yes, this sect’s followers make their way on to your veranda then hold a righteous court of sneering indignation about the crib in the park. You can hear yourself muttering under your breath, ”I wish you would go drown yourself, you pseudo-intellectual Gucci flea.”

(“The ‘sneaky sect’“, Barnaby Joyce, The Canberra Times, 22 December 2011.)

An interesting turn of phrase, one has to admit. It kind of reminds me of:

“Put her in the same chaff bag as Julia Gillard and throw them both out to sea.”

(Alan Jones Breakfast Radio Show, 29th June 2011, as quoted on Media Watch.)

Unfortunately, this seems to be a fairly standard response from the extreme right wing. It’s a violent and nasty path to turn own.

Let’s take a catalogue of what I know I believe in, versus what I know Barnaby believes in, just for comparison here.

I believe:

In a world view based on details about the physical world which can be independently verified;
That people whom I’m debating a topic with still have a right to live, regardless of whether I agree with their belief;
That climate change is real, given the vast majority of the world’s scientists concur on it;
That the right for same-sex couples to marry will not impact the rights of heterosexual couples to marry.

On the other hand, Barnaby believes:

That the accumulated writings of dozens or more people from thousands of years ago represent the truth from an omnipotent deity who started the Universe from nothing and while seemingly all powerful and all-good allows terrible things to happen (well, except those bits that are no longer acceptable to believe in, such as slavery, killing people who work on Sunday, etc.)
That someone like him, in a situation being confronted by people who disagree with their world view, would wish those naysayers ill, or even death;
That all the scientists in the world can be part of some vast conspiracy (or a part of a “league of morons”, perhaps?) and be completely arse-up wrong about climate change;
That if same-sex couples can get married, his daughters may not be able to get married.

I’m going to do this not because I’m feeling smugly superior, but because I need to make the point:

Who is actually on the moral highground with their beliefs? Barnaby, or me?

Barnaby then desperately tries to scramble back onto some ground, let alone moral highground, by insisting of atheists:

“They write letters to complain about the incorrectness of carols at the school and picket the Christmas tree. To not insult their religion, you must no longer follow yours.”

(“The ‘sneaky sect’“, Barnaby Joyce, The Canberra Times, 22 December 2011.)

Interestingly in this, Barnaby seems to forget all the letter writing campaigns by christians in Australia over the years about a plethora of topics. Moral outrage accompanied by a pen and a sheet of paper has lead to untold numbers of letters to schools complaining about Catcher in the Rye, Sons and Lovers – even Harry Potter.

He seems to forget those christians who have been picketing abortion clinics for 20+ years, sometimes hurling vitriol at the people coming and going, or those christians who have been picketing funerals for the express purposes of spreading their hate speech further.

People in glass houses, Barnaby? Don’t start talking about letter writing and picketing as if it’s something atheists invented.

Barnaby fails to grasp the simple facts here – while some atheists undoubtedly would like to see religion made illegal, what people choose to believe in within the privacy of their own home or property is entirely their right. And equally, if people choose to congregate in a church to pray to something I equally believe doesn’t exist, then I may feel sorry for them, but I don’t run out screaming the church should be pulled down.

What I do object to though, and what so many other atheists object to, is the forced, public indoctrination of people into religion. Using Barnaby’s example, why should children be forced into singing christmas carols if either they, or their parents, aren’t religious? (If he thinks that’s OK, well let me tell you as a child who was forced to do that, it’s not. It’s not OK to have a religious teacher single you out as the kid who doesn’t want to sing along to a religious song and make you sing it in front of the entire class.)

Atheists are anything but sneaky. We’re open, and we’re often very up front about our belief in real evidence. We don’t use tomes written hundreds or thousands of years ago and undoubtedly modified countless times since to pick and choose our defences for bigoted world views from, and we don’t need said book to teach us a moral path in life. We also choose to live this life now for fulfilment and happiness, since there’s no evidence at all that there’s any form of life after death.

Barnaby insists that atheists should:

“all just remain at work while the rest of us go on holidays, and we can double the pleasure by knowing that, when we return, they can go on theirs. This doubles the time away from each other.”

(Ibid.)

The age old argument, “If you don’t believe in religion you shouldn’t go on federal instituted holidays that fall at religious times!” Cry me a river, Barnaby. After all, the timing hasn’t really got anything to do with the date of birth for … oh, wait, you’ve got something to add about that? Let’s hear it:

“The timing at the end of December has more to do with the celebration of the pagan festival of Saturnalia rather than when Christ was actually born. Those politically incorrect early Christians had the good sense to roll with the customs rather than to rage against them.”

(Ibid.)

Thanks for saving me the words, Barnaby! If you want to talk about traditions, christmas isn’t really christmas but a pagan festival. So why are so-called traditionalists getting hung up if some people would like to more generically call it a “festive season” or a “holiday season” so as to (a) still pay respect to those who see it as important, (b) recognise the social importance of the time of the year, and (c) not violate their own beliefs in doing so?

Sneaky is as sneaky does, and sneaky people write opinion pieces accusing atheists of being a religious sect so they supposedly have equal ground to argue on, or issue press releases stating that a world famous atheist, having recently died, would now be a believer.

The pink dragon

Life No Responses »

Dec 222011

Me: There is a pink dragon in my carport.

You: I don’t see a pink dragon.

Me: It’s invisible.

You: How do you know it’s pink?

Me: Because it can show itself when it wants to.

You: But I walked through your carport, I didn’t bump into anything.

Me: It’s quite manoeuvrable.

You: But I’ve seen your car parked in your carport. How could the car and the pink dragon fit in there together?

Me: Because it’s still a young pink dragon – it’s not that big.

You: But still, dragons are meant to be much bigger than elephants, even as a young dragon it must be large.

Me: Yes, well, it can also push itself slightly out of phase from normal matter.

You: But that would mean it phases out from the ground too and it would just fall through the earth.

Me: Pfft! It can levitate.

You: Can I see the pink dragon?

Me: Only if you believe it exists.

You: OK, I believe it exists, but I still can’t see it.

Me: Then you don’t really believe it exists. Only a true believer in the pink dragon can see the pink dragon.

You: Why can’t I feel its breath? Dragons breathe fire, right?

Me: It’s a spiritual fire. Believers in the dragon feel its breath inside them.

You: What does it feel like?

Me: Like the warming glow of a pink dragon’s breath inside me, of course!

You: Wouldn’t that be too hot?

Me: No. Why would it burn its true believers?

You: Can you at least take a photo of the pink dragon for me?

Me: Of course, here it is:

You: I just see an empty carport.

Me: Really? I see the pink dragon in the carport. You mustn’t yet completely believe in the pink dragon.

You: In order to believe in the pink dragon I need to see evidence of its existence.

Me: In order to see the pink dragon you must believe in the pink dragon without questioning.

———-

The “pink dragon” argument (a variant of Russell’s Teapot) is, to me, the perfect example of why I’m completely comfortable with my atheism – and how arguments for religion invariably sound.

Death was too good for him

Life, Morality No Responses »

Dec 202011

A lot will be said of Kim Jong Il over the next few days, but I think what we need to also think of are the people left behind. And so, here’s what I say to them:

Do not mourn the monster who passed into the night. His ravages now are ended, yet his legacy lives on. Look around you, at the empty chairs and empty beds – the places where your loved ones should be. They’re not there, and it’s because of him. His excesses and his cruelty robbed you of your families, your lovers, and your friends. The sycophantic wailing you’re required to show for fear of your own life should hide a secret cheering: the monster is dead.

The joy of his death is of course overshadowed by the plain, simple fact that life is not going to instantly change. His son will likely be as decadent and crazy as his father was, but we can hope his excesses may be a little less so than his fathers’. We can hope that change does come, and that you can start revealing your true emotions in the light without fear of persecution, either for yourself, or those you care most about.

And remember, when you are forced to talk “dear leader”, to think in the safety of your own mind, “capricious monster”.

A man walks out of a psychologist’s office

Life, Mental health 1 Response »

Dec 192011

So on Friday I effectively had my last session with my psychologist. I’ve worn him out – he’s moving to Brisbane.

Well, that’s only half true. He is moving to Brisbane, but it’s for reasons entirely unrelated to me.

While in theory I could go do more sessions, perhaps finding another therapist, I walked into Friday’s session believing it could be my last, having achieved what I set out to achieve with the process, and so I thought it might be worthwhile noting what I got out of it all:

Self control.

That’s it.

Of course, we can summarise too much, and the real story is more intricate and complex than just “self control”, but at the core of it, that’s what I got. That self control isn’t just some idle little thing, it’s big – it’s about understanding.

Very little of that understanding came in the form of my therapist actually saying “I think you should do X or Y”; indeed, one might say that the biggest time he suggested anything along those lines was to explain how to beat the fight or flight syndrome – to slow down, breathe deeply, and in doing so, physically counteract that adrenaline surge that comes from shallow and angry or panicked breathing.

Self control can be a deceiving term, too. Some might read it (and I’d have previously read it) as keeping a lid on it all. But that’s precisely the behaviour that got me into the messed up and neurotic state I was in; self control isn’t about who-bottles-it-up-the-longest, it’s about having the ability to let things out in a way that is both healthy and safe.

So self control came not from learning new techniques to suppress, but by coming to grips with the validity of emotions I’d long trained myself to hold in. Yet that’s like trying to squeeze a handful of water … it’ll keep leaking through in various ways, and if you squeeze too hard, it’s just going to come spurting out in all different directions.

A significant part of the therapy came in terms of talking long enough about issues that the root cause became apparent. Maybe for others it’s a longer process, but part of my sometimes neurotic behaviour had been an essential recognition of where issues were springing from, but not being able to work past that. Talking openly with someone about it let me get past those blockages.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but for many people there’s a mistaken perception that we should be able to work through any issue in our head on our own. Yet, biologically and chemically, this just isn’t true. The brain is a complex organ – I spent years at Uni studying Artificial Intelligence research, and I maintain a “lay-IT” interest in it, and the ironic thing is that for all the research that’s been done, the brain itself is still at best only barely understood in places, and not understood at all in others.

Yet the brain is an organ. It has electrical impulses, it has chemistry and hormones and all sorts of other things happening within it. Learning is believed to be about the repeated firing of synapses in a particular path, effectively making that path the default path. So unlearning is about coming up with techniques for breaking those paths.

Only idiots think that you can heal malfunctions in vital organs without getting medical attention. When those issues are healed without official medical attention, there’s still a form of medical approach being made. Vitamins aren’t magic tablets; if they work it’s because they chemically interact in a beneficial way.

In the same way that it’s generally accepted that a person with heart problems should see a cardiologist, we should get to the point where we happily accept that people with mental health issues see a specialist in that field. Sometimes that might be a neurologist, sometimes it might be a psychiatrist, sometimes it might be a psychologist, and sometimes it may be a GP.

I refuse to feel any form of stigma about making the decision to see a psychologist. It was the best, most appropriate decision that I could make at the time, and doing so solved a bunch of problems for me – and gave me the tools to continuously chip away at them. Will I be perfect at it and never get depressed again? No – but we’re entitled to be sad from time to time. We have all those different emotions for a reason, and it’s not crazy to acknowledge them. If you want crazy behaviour, it’s expecting that you should be happy and stress free 100% of your life.

With that self control and higher self understanding comes a renewed me. I’m not reborn, that’s a stupid term – but I am reinvigorated.

In a post from some time ago, I said that I admired one friend in particular since he “reminds me of the best parts of myself, but unencumbered by the hangups I had when I was his age” … I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the last couple of days since the final therapy session. Not out of regret, but of renewal – of a willingness to stare down those hangups that I’ve lived with for such a long time, and reassert control. Not to try to throw them out – they’re there for a reason, and pretending I can fully excise them would be an exercise in self delusion. But to acknowledge those hangups and know why they’re there – that’s powerful: to know where your weaknesses lay and have the tools to confront them is infinitely better than pretending they’re not there at all.

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