Tag: troll

Kiltit tytöt

Posted by – April 29, 2010

Lehdessä kirjoitettiin että poikia ei enää pääse “tarpeeksi” ammattikoulujen tietyille linjoille koska koulussa paremmin pärjäävät tytöt ovat keksineet kiinnostua ko. opiskelupaikoista. Oletus ilmeisesti on, että tytöistä ei näiden alojen tekijöitä kuitenkaan tule (vaan kaiketi päätyvät kotiäideiksi tai tekemään jotain muuta). Aika sikaa! Facebook-ryhmien perusteella tyrmistys ja vahingonilo oli melkoinen: patriarkaatin puntit tutisevat kun paljastuu että miesten ainaisella etuoikeutettuudella ei enää pötkitä pitkälle vaan tytöt menevät ohi. Ja tämä on muka ongelma!

Olen ilman muuta asiassa kilttien tyttöjen puolella. Parhaat valittakoon maalarilinjoille ja muualle. Sanon tämän kilttinä, valtaväestöön kuuluvana, suomenkielisenä poikana. 18-vuotiaana kiltit pojat komennetaan vankeusrangaistuksen uhalla pakkotyöhön, muut jatkavat normaalisti. Tämän jälkeen saa yrittää yliopistoon, jossa ruotsinkielisillä on omat kiintiönsä. Yliopiston jälkeen voi hakea vaikka kaupungille töihin (toivottavasti se ruotsi tuli kuitenkin opeteltua jossain välissä!) siinä toivossa ettei ole tehtävään yhtä pätevä johonkin etniseen vähemmistöön kuuluvan henkilön kanssa, sillä tällaisessa tapauksessa sovelletaan positiivista syrjintää. Muistakaa että negatiiviseen syrjintään ei tule koskaan syyllistyä! Meillä Suomessa on paljon ongelmia syrjinnän kanssa, mutta onneksi sitä kannattaa vain merkityksetön vähemmistö.

Amnesty and Greenpeace suck

Posted by – March 14, 2010

Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Finnish Red Cross and UNICEF are probably the most popular charities among people I know. I happen to think the first two choices are no good, at least in their Finnish incarnations.

AI and GP suffer from the same fundamental problem: while their broadly stated objectives are commendable, they are run by people who divert the organisations’ money and (more importantly) mind share towards pet issues that are peripheral or even irrelevant to the really important goals.

Amnesty international

AI was originally formed around the idea of international solidarity towards people who are persecuted for their opinions or beliefs. The idea of a common front in support of all oppressed political oppositions, religions, investigative journalists and conscientious objectors regardless of ideology was and is a powerful idea and, in my opinion, extremely worthy of support. Those groups are as badly in need of help and attention today as they have ever been.

Two things are especially important to effectively fight persecution by mobilising public opinion:

  1. Having no ideological bias, so that when you report an abuse, people will believe that your statement is not politically motivated
  2. Focusing single-mindedly on this core objective, so that people don’t dismiss you as “just another” activist organisation

I think Amnesty has essentially abandoned both of those critical assets. Between 1986 and 2000 it issued more press releases regarding the United States than any other region, with Israel in second place. Finnish Amnesty’s recent campaigns have dealt with eg. domestic violence and Finnish sex crime legislation (it’s too easy on the rapists, they say). It’s one thing to expand Amnesty’s scope from freedom of opinion, speech, association and religion to “human rights” in general, but quite another to get involved in the details of criminal law in one of the safest and most rights-respecting countries in the world. Amnesty has become yet another organisation for people who are vaguely leftist, want to feel good about themselves and don’t like America.

Greenpeace

Greenpeace doesn’t care about nature so much as “naturalness”. Science, engineering, artificiality and human progress are its enemies. While the last two are debatable (I happen to be for them), science and engineering are precisely the ways humans can be of benefit to nature.

Correspondingly among its most famous campaigns have been opposition to

  • DDT (a minor environmental problem, extremely important in fighting malaria [edit: turns out that Greenpeace doesn’t mind DDT when used to fight malaria])
  • nuclear power (a safe, practical and abundant energy source)
  • genetic engineering (I can only attribute this to latent Gaianism)

I hasten to say that they have had many excellent campaigns as well, and have done more to raise awareness about environmental problems than any other organisation. Still, I wish they were overtaken by a more scientifically minded and realistic organisation – in any case, they’re far too flaky and unpredictable to get my money at the moment.

Communication density mismatch

Posted by – March 6, 2010

Richard Feynman on attending an ethics conference:

“I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell
it means.”

So I stopped — at random — and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could
translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes
people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written
in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I
finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.”

Denialism

Posted by – November 17, 2009

Let W be my confidence that global warming of several degrees celsius is really occurring or about to occur

Let D be my best estimate of consequences, given the warming

Let H be my confidence that given the warming, it is mostly due to human activity

Let P(C) be my confidence that this human activity can be nullified or sufficiently mitigated at a global cost of C (given everything previous)

Then

W*H*P(C) < 0.5 for values of C that are realistic As C increases, C becomes greater than D before W*H*P(C) becomes greater than 0.9 (and D could even be negative!)

List day

Posted by – July 24, 2009

My current list of the most overrated things. They are in rough order of overratedness (which doesn’t mean either worth or ratedness).

  1. Elvis
  2. Aristotle
  3. The Stone Roses
  4. The Rolling Stones
  5. Kierkegaard
  6. Death in Venice (the movie)
  7. Hegel
  8. David Bowie
  9. The Sixties
  10. Ronald Reagan
  11. Peter Cook
  12. Cognac
  13. Beethoven

This week’s list of words I would support proper use of:

  • exponential
  • ballistic
  • correlated
  • random
  • logical

That is all.

edit: actually that’s not quite all. Overrated thing number zero is sex.

another edit: oh yeah, and overrated thing number something is Michael Jackson *ducks*

Hypotheses

Posted by – July 6, 2009

I recently rather surprised myself by realising how easy it is to come up with beliefs that are basically hunches but that I’m fairly confident about. To wit:

  • Interest in pro sports correlates with religiosity
  • Preferences in programming languages predict intelligence
  • Physical strength in males correlates with self-confidence
  • The previous correlation is stronger than the correlation between attractiveness and self-confidence in women

Actually, now that I start listing them they seem so obvious that they’re hardly worth mentioning. Maybe my true calling is making up correlations for social scientists to verify.

Noticing this stuff is also an insidious kind of self-suggestion. Lots of people seem to hate Java (the programming language) because they hope they’ll become more intelligent that way (I may be in this group). Same for despising pro sports. In those two cases there probably isn’t much causation, just correlation – but I am making an effort to become stronger on the hopes that the relationship between strength and confidence is partly causal. Not working yet, but at least I can now confidently deadlift my bodyweight.

Your thought for the day: is ejaculation ever really premature?

täällä on Herra ja tuolla on Herra ja hiiala

Posted by – March 31, 2009

Kuten monet lukijat varmaan jo tietävät, uskonrauhan rikkominen on aina ollut lähellä sydäntäni. Eräs viimeaikainen syyttämispäätös palautti tämän mieleeni, ja toisinnan tässä sen kunniaksi kappaleen Internet-kansanperinnettä. Vaikka kyseessä on lainaus, korostan todella tarkoittavani tässä sanottuja asioita ja seisovani niiden takana. Tarkoitukseni niiden lainaamisessa on pilkata Jumalaa (arab. Allah).

Jumala on mullikuhnuri, ektoplasma, bassi-bazuukki ja huimapää!

Jumala on putkisierainlepakko ja sianihrassa käristettävä herkkukurkku.

Jumala on sadistinen pedofiili, jonka erityisalaa on pakottaminen homoseksuaaliseen suhteeseen. Jumala on myös narkomaani, taparikollinen ja psykopaatti.

Täten pilkkaan Jumalaa.

Pilkatkaa avoimesti ja julkisesti Jumalaa. Tämä on kehoitus!

Vakavasti ottaen: ei, ei ole erityisen fiksua tai hyödyllistä loukata muiden (uskonnollisia tai muutoin) tunteita huvin vuoksi. Mutta niin kauan kuin reaktio on tämä, vittuilun on jatkuttava.

Let me wrestle with your conscience

Posted by – January 23, 2009

There appears to be a concerted campaign to screw with my remaining regard for the words “human rights”. Something called the Finnish League for Human Rights is interested in studying whether a Christian revivalist movement (Laestadianism) is violating its own human rights by having women in the movement give birth to as many as ten children. Well, ok, right to contraception appears to be a human right and God knows this country is an epicentre for the repression of women’s sexual rights. And as the article says, many human rights violations are ignored due to religious context. However! The same Human Rights League declared a month ago that religiously mandated circumcisions must not only be protected from legal consequences but paid for by the state.

I’d like to write more about this but I seem to have misplaced my keyboard.

On idiot philosophers, OLD SKOOL

Posted by – December 13, 2007

A friend of mine recently remarked on how overrated he considers Aristotle to be. The impudent fool! I’m the Aristotle-overrated-considerer around these here parts. He’d obviously heard me talking about it, forgotten where he’d heard it and said it back to me. Anyway, I felt the need to re-establish my Aristotle-hatin’ credentials, and now I want to do the same here.

Now, all the ancient Greek philosophers seem rather backwards now, but that’s to be expected – they were pretty much working with nothing. The ones who didn’t write on the natural sciences are half-interesting today, the ones who did aren’t. But not only was Aristotle “groping in the dark” – he was actually pretty thick much of the time, and is now given an absurd amount of credit for founding something like all of science.

What was Aristotle’s method? The only scientific method that was known at the time, ie. making stuff up. Incidentally, this technique was not original to him. A bunch of people made their way into history by saying things like “the world is made of earth and fire” (or water and earth, or fire and air, or all of these, or nothing, or cheese). Occasionally some of them even randomly said something that was half-true, like Democritus who guessed that the world is made out of small bits. Some bits have spikes so they taste bitter, some are round so they taste oily. This is pretty much the best they came up with.

Aristotle is given extra credit for “systematising” science. This means that not only did he write a shitload of books, but a lot of them didn’t get destroyed, he wrote about a different thing each time and numbered things a lot. Therefore he is considered to have covered “everything”. How did he cover everything? By waking up in the morning, wondering about something, making up an explanation and writing it down without making any attempt to verify it in any way. Thus we have such revelations as “things fall towards the ground because such is their nature” (you might want to try explaining some things yourself this way, it’s actually not that difficult), “basilisks can kill by sight because venomous vapours issue from their eyes, as happens with women on their period” (this genius of biology was even able to write about animals that don’t exist) and “the world is made of fire, earth, water, air and aether” (a shoutout to his homies).

“But”, I hear someone object, “there was no way to make scientific experiments back then! You’re just cheaply making fun of Aristotle, whose work in philosophy in general is still extremely valuable!” Look, you disgusting little weed, just because something isn’t about science doesn’t mean it isn’t made up (see what I’m doing here? It’s dialogue, which proves that I’m rigorously testing my arguments). But here’s a scientific experiment Aristotle could have made: walk into a cave. You see, Aristotle explained vision with sight-rays that issue from the eyes. You don’t need much to hit on the connection between light and seeing: just shutter the windows, or walk into a cave, or anything. It’s like Aristotle just closed his eyes and said, “Bingo! Eye-beams!” Founder of science, my ass.

Here come the riddle, here come the clue

Posted by – December 11, 2007

Irma Stenbäck wrote in yesterday’s HS about the fact that out of 768 people who have been awarded a Nobel prize for something or other, only 34 have been women. What could have caused this shocking state of affairs? According to Stenbäck “one reason” is that the people who choose who to give awards to are mostly men, and of course men will always choose men. Disappointingly, she can’t seem to think of any other reasons. In particular, she does not bother to explore whether women might have been underrepresented in science and in society in general over the previous 100+ years the prizes have been awarded. If you can’t think of any other reasons than gender-favouritism on the part of the academy members, I recommend a career in journalism. Or possibly women’s studies.