Sunday, December 7, 2014

Study Notes: Nov 30-Dec 6, 2014: "Zombies, Vampires, Democrats, and Republicans"

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week: 

Other notes: 

Also check out: 

Homework for next week: 

 "Correlation of the Week"
  • "This article [right here] puts forward the theory that more vampire movies come out when Democrats are elected to the US Presidency, and more zombie movies come out when the Republicans are in office." 
  • "One argument put forward is that the movies depict what we fear at the time." 
  • "It is clear that zombie films peak in Republican years, but it is less clear whether vampire films have similar peaks under Democrats."
  • "Indeed, the average percentage of movies that are zombie-themed produced during a Democratic presidency is 0.372%, whilst under Republicans it is 0.571%-- this is a large difference." 
  • "There is a 5.7% chance [according to the " single-tailed Student's t-test"] that there is no significant difference between the zombie results under Democrats and Republicans. This is very close to the 5% level most statisticians accept for significance, and as such is a very intriguing result."
  • "There is an almost significant difference between the percentage of zombie movies made under Democrats and Republicans. To predict the next election, it could well be worth looking at how many zombie movies are planned for the inauguration year and the 3 years after it. As most movies are planned more than a year ahead of time, this could be an interesting election predictor." 

 "An Introduction to a Non-Violent Reading of The Book of Mormon"
  • "Within Mormon culture it has become common to justify war and conflict by an appeal to the Book of Mormon... Despite historical and scriptural evidence that early Christian communities refused to engage in warfare and violence, the Book of  Mormon has seemingly allowed members to ignore the New Testament and Christian traditions of non-violence, and move these traditions to the margins." 
  • "Rene Girard, the French historian, literary critic, and philosopher, has argued that 'the gospel simply shows us too options, which is exactly what ideologies never provide. Either we imitate Christ, or we run the risk of self-destruction.'"
  • "The Book of Mormon, in part, addresses the question: how should we respond to our enemies?... We can either imitate Christ in loving our enemies and seeking at-one-ment with them, or we can resort to violence. In other words, will we sacrifice fellow humans for our own benefit, or are we willing to sacrifice self for others? Will we follow the sacrificial economy of Satan, or will we imitate Christ in his voluntary self-giving for others?... The consequences of choosing violence are shown in Nephite self-destruction. Mormon and Girard both conclude, that 'it is by the wicked that the wicked are punished,' and that we must 'lay down our weapons of war.' Or as Girard states it, 'Jesus doesn't need to finish off all the bad guys. They finish each other off.'" 
  • "This message is highly relevant to those of us located at the heart of the American Empire. If this truly is a blessed land, even a promised land, and if God truly wants us to be a city on the hill as some claim, then all the more urgent the message of the Book of Mormon."
  • "Liberation, in the Book of Mormon, is in the hands of the most powerful, just as atonement is in the hands of the almighty Son of God. And just as the almighty Son must give up that power and, in a very real sense, empty himself of his divinity, the liberation of the poor is in the hands of the prideful and wealthy."
  • "The Book of Mormon deals largely with a rivalry between brothers which escalates into a national/tribal conflict with little respite and which ends with the destruction of the Nephite people. I contend that, when looked at broadly or on a macro level, The Book of Mormon shows how the inability of the Nephite and Lamanite civilizations to give up their founding narratives and myths about each other led to self-destruction. It demonstrates how violence only reinforced these narratives and stories while failing to address the underlying causes of conflict. In almost all cases Nephite and Lamanite violence led to more violence. The Book of Mormon is a critique of this violence, a plea to be wiser. It is [a] call to lay down our weapons or war and instead imitate Christ in seeking at-one-ment or peace, which Paul described as a breaking down of barriers between groups, even histories or narratives."
  • John Howard Yoder: "The barrier is the historical fact of separate stories... It is not a barrier of guilt, but of culture and communication. It is not a barrier between each person and God but between one group and another... It is not the case that inner or personal peace comes first, with the hope that once the inward condition is set right then the restored person will do some social good. In this text it is the other way around. Two estranged histories are made into one. Two hostile communities are reconciled." 
  • "Nephite civilization was founded upon a violent act: the slaying of Laban. This foundational act helped define and form Nephite ideology and traditions about enemies. It held that violence can be redemptive and bring about righteous ends. It held that it is better to kill your enemies than to lose your culture and civilization. This was memorialized into Nephite thought with the use of Laban's sword as an emblem of their nation power." 
  • The sword was also used as an archetype for producing more swords and was carried into future wars. 
  • "To a large degree, the foundational act of killing Laban trapped Nephite culture into a narrative that was repeated again and again in future wars and conflicts resulting in the destruction of an entire people." 
  • The Nephites also had a narrative of the Lamanites as the Enemy, with whom there could be no negotiation. "In effect, any threat to Nephite society could easily be recast into the framework provided by the slaying of Laban, which justified violence against those labeled enemies."
  • The Lamanites had a similarly hostile narrative directed about the Nephites. "Lamanite hatred of the Nephites was ingrained in their national identity. According to their narrative, Nephites were liars, deceivers, and thieves who had wronged their ancestors multiple times," including by stealing the birthright and the tokens of the birthright. 
  • It was rarely the Lamanites that were responsible for most of the conflict, but the Nephites themselves. "Nearly all of the major wars can be traced back to a prior act of violence and/or Nephite infiltration and manipulation of Lamanites' hatred toward Nephites, which in turn beget more violence... In modern political terms, we would call this blowback." 
  • Even a so-called justified war against the Lamanites never solves the problem permanently. "Violence only reinforces these narratives and stories about the wickedness of one's enemies, while failing to address the underlying causes of conflict. In almost all cases, Nephite and Lamanite violence only begets violence... As Richard Bushman argued, fighting wars maintains the fundamental values of the society that are rooted in mythic accounts of national beginnings and essential to national identity." 
  • "The only thing that leads to lasting peace in The Book of Mormon is missionary work or dialogue involving a conversion to Christ, laying down weapons of war, giving up of hatred, and a change of narrative. While violence reinforced hatred and narratives, missionary work or dialogue challenged both Nephite and Lamanite narratives about the other, breaking down barriers of distrust and allowing at-one-ment and peace to occur... This includes voluntarily handing over land to the Nephites that the Lamanites had stolen, and which the Nephites had been unable to retake from the Lamanites through violence." 
  • "The decisive event in demonstrating how lasting peace can be found is in 4 Nephi. Both narrators, Nephi and Mormon, point to Jesus as the revelation of God's nature and his desires for humanity. In 3 Nephi 9, Jesus denounces all sacrificial violence, including war, and references Lamanite conversion to a belief in Christ and abandonment of war as the quintessential act... Peace is in turn established for 200 years through following Jesus' teachings and rejecting tribal narratives (-ites) and ideology about the other. Violence breaks out again following divisions based upon class, religion, and a return to national and tribal identities."

"The Constitution: The God That Failed..."
  • This article is, among other things, a document riddled with invisible markers declaring [Citation needed]. Nevertheless, it is very interesting. Some of what was said, I have known already. Other things, I wish to verify in the future. But it is all very interesting. 
  • "Such a referendum [for Scottish independence] would never be tolerated in the land of the free and home of the brave under current Constitutional constraints since the question of individual sovereignty at the individual and state level was solved by Lincoln's clarification on Constitutional totalitarianism in 1865 and further cemented in the years to follow." 
  • "Limited government is impossible and the rulers do as they please."
  • "Constitution Day is not a day of celebration but a day of mourning for what could have been."
  • Lysander Spooner: "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain-- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." 
  • "This essay suggests... [that] the Constitution is an enabling document for big government. Much like the Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain is a fraud."
  • "The document was drafted in the summer of 1787 behind closed doors in tremendous secrecy because if word leaked out of the actual contents and intent, the revolution that had just concluded would have been set ablaze again. They were in a race against time and did everything in their power to ensure that the adoption took place as quickly as possible to avoid reflection and contemplation in the public square that would kill the proposal once the consequences of its agenda became apparent. They were insisting that the states ratify first and then propose amendments later. It was a political coup d'etat. It was nothing less than an oligarchical coup to ensure that the moneyed interests, bankers and aristocrats could cement their positions and mimic the United Kingdom from which they had been recently divorced." 
  • "The original charter of the drafters was to pen improvements in the existing Articles of Confederation. Instead, they chose to hijack the process and create a document which enslaved the nation... Their intent and commitment was to create a National government with the ability to make war on its constituent parts if these states failed to submit themselves to the central government." 
  • "Penned in 1776 and ratified in 1781, the spirit and context of the Articles live on in the Swiss canton system and are everywhere evident in the marketplace where confederationist sentiments are practiced daily. The confederation's design divines its mechanism from what an unfettered market does every day: voluntary cooperation, spontaneous information signals and the parts always being smarter than the sum." 
  • Webster's 1928 dictionary: "[Confederation:] The act of confederation; a league; a compact for mutual support; alliance, particularly of princes, nations or states."
  • "I would advise the readership to use the 1828 Webster's dictionary to accompany any primary source research you may undertake to understand American (& British) letters in the eighteenth century." I would concur. It is also useful for studying the Book of Mormon. 
  • It is a good point made that, as much as we talk of reading the Federalist Papers, it would be just as good of an idea to read the Anti-Federalist Papers. 
  • Brutus: "It is a truth confirmed by the unerring experience of ages, that every man, and every body of men, invested with power, are ever disposed to increase it, and to acquire a superiority over every thing that stands in their way." 
  • "It appears even the much admired Washington was having none of the talk of independence and wanted a firm hand on the yoke of the states to make them obey their masters on high. Washington's behavior in the Whiskey Rebellion cast away any doubts of the imperious behavior of the central government a mere four year [sic] after the adoption of the Constitution."
  • "The Federalists were desperately opposed to the adoption of the Bill of Rights being insisted upon by Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and other skeptics of central governance."
  • Brutus: "So clear a point is this [the imbalance of powers], that I cannot help suspecting that persons who attempt to persuade people that such reservations were less necessary under this Constitution than under those of the States, are willfully endeavoring to deceive, and to lead you into an absolute state of vassalage." 
  • Alexander Hamilton: "All communities divide themselves into the few and into the many. The first are the rich and the well-born; the other the mass of the people... turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the Government... Nothing but a permanent body can check the imprudence of democracy."
  • Only Rhode Island put ratification to a popular vote, and it failed by an 11-1 margin. 

"A Muslim RuPaul at the Dawn of Islam"
  • "Mukhannathun-- and singular mukhannath-- has been translated as 'gay,' 'queer,' even 'third gender,' and none of these are wrong, per se."
  • "A hadith, simply put, is an account of something the Prophet Muhammad (P) did, said, or approved/disapproved of. It can be anywhere from a single sentence or several pages... Or, and the plural of hadith is hadith." 
  • "While these hadith were initially circulated by word-of-mouth (as was the Muslim holy book, the Qu'ran), over time, they were collected and written down. Scholars would spend decades traveling across the Muslim world, listening to as many hadith as they could, before finally writing them down. There are literally dozens of these collections. Each one contains thousands of hadith. These collections aren't monolithic, either. Some are considered more reliable than others (same goes for individual hadith). Also, some sects of Islam will only follow certain collections. But, together, these collections make up the backbone of Muslim law. Just about all opinions by scholars rely on hadith in one form or another." 
  • "While hadith are tightly focused, they cover a broad range of subjects. In these collections you see accounts of the Final Days, milestones in Islamic history, even snippets of the day to day like [sic] of Muslims at the time. You also see mukhannathun." 
  • "The word mukhannathun is tricky. It translates, roughly, to 'men with the qualities of women.' Conversely, you can refer to the 'quality' itself, and say someone has takan (think 'swag'). And, to answer your question, its FAAB is mutarijjalun: women with the qualities of men. It's commonly translated as 'tomboy.'"
  • "Hadith are the backbone of Muslim law. Even a single word can drastically change opinions and attitudes." 
  • "There are entire universities that do nothing but debate and interpret hadith. At this point, your interpretation will only say more about your own biases than those of the Prophet (P)." True dat, and not just for Islam.
  • Secondary histories "provide accounts of the mukhannathun, living in Medina and working as street musicians. Unlike the hyper-focus of the hadith, these accounts have more details on the mukhannathun themselves. From them, a picture emerges of a vibrant community with a diverse range of orientations and gender identities. And at the top of it all was Tuwais." 
  • "He [Tuwais] comes off as a mixture of David Bowie and RuPaul. He was a freed slave of Arwa, mother of Uthman, the Third Caliph... Sometime in his career, he took a nickname, something only female singers did, changing his name to Tuwais, or 'little peacock.' As a singer, Tuwais become renowned in Medina and throughout the Gulf. He created a genre of music called, I kid you not, 'Perfect Singing,' distinguished by its unique combination of rhythm, melody, and verse." 
  • "And then there was the way he dealt with his detractors. Usually, it was through a mixture of comebacks and humor, entertaining his detractors' peers while cutting them down. it's similar to how comedians deal with hecklers today... At one point the local governor placed a bounty on his head. Tuwais simply expressed his disappointment at how low it was. And no one bothered to carry it out." 
  • "Aban bin Uthman bin Affan, the first biographer of the Prophet (P), and a hadith narrator... was tolerant of the mukhannathun, as long as they were practicing Muslims (which, by all accounts, they were)."
  • "So who were they? Effeminate men? Trans women? Drag queens/crossdressers? They certainly didn't have a shared sexuality. Al-Dalal was said to be completely attracted to men. Tuwais, on the other hand, married and had children." 
  • "There's no one way to be a 'male' or a 'female' so there's no one way to deviate from that path. Even broad terms like 'gender identity' miss the ways in which our own identity is shaped by the culture around us. This is why we have umbrella terms like trans*, and why those terms cover people who don't 'identify' a certain wait. It does no good to try and analyze them with our cultural biases. Plus, I'd like to think they'd scoff at being put in a box." 
  • "The end came under the ruler Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik. Some say he was jealous of their attention. Others say the final straw came when al-Dalal seduced both a bride and groom on their wedding night (incidentally, he'd set the couple up). Regardless, al-Malik called all the mukhannathun to his palace, and ordered their genitals removed."
  • "Their response was a hail of jokes. They dubbed their fate 'the Great Circumcision,' held a mock debate about whether it made them 'real' women, and laughed about how they weren't using it anyways. They even gained the sympathy of al-Malik. He eventually called back al-Dalal to personally apologize, and even made him a singer in the royal court. But the mukhannathun never recovered. And, what's more, they were seemingly stripped from music. There are no future accounts of mukhannathun as musicians. Their contributions are, for the most part, lost."
  • "When Muslim armies invaded a land, gender variant cultures were allowed to continue. Some of these cultures exist today, with waria in Indoneisa and the hijra in India and Pakistan. Many of them work as street musicians."
  • "And then there's Iran. Since the 1980s Iranian clerics declared it permissible for 'diagnoses transsexuals' to receive gender reassignment. Today, Iran has more gender reassignment surgeries than any country but Thailand. The state will pay half the cost, and create a new birth certificate. There are even clerics to defend it." Here is a link to a video. 
  • "The mukhannathun are an inspiration for queer Muslims, and queer non-Muslims alike. They've certainly inspired me One of my first forays into transition involved getting henna to my elbows. Other Muslims offered compliments, oblivious. Somewhere, Tuwais is smiling."
  • "Muslims (like the author), hold a great amount of respect for the Prophet Muhammad (P). Because of this, whenever we say his proper name or proper title, many of us include the phrase 'peace be upon him.' This is shortened to (PBUH) or (P) in written form. My exception to this rule is when I am quoting a source that doesn't have it." 

"Why I Am Not an Anarchist" 
  • "In a nutshell, I worry that an anarcho-capitalist society would be considerably more violent, considerably more dangerous, and considerably less friendly to individual liberty than most anarcho-capitalists suppose."
  • Alright. This was more of a post about an essay, so... There isn't that much. Bluh. 

"(the) Gambia, (the) Lebanon, etc."
  • "A referring expression-- that is to say (typically) a noun phrase that is uttered/written in order to represent some entity in a (real or imaginary) world-- is definite if it is used in a particular context to refer to something that is uniquely identifiable." 
  • "In German, I'm told, it's much more natural to call someone the equivalent of the Donald than it is in English." 
  • "Any river gets a the." 
  • "In Africanist linguistic circles, at least in the US... the name of the country doesn't have a the, as the the gives it a kind of 'colonial' feel." 
  • "The the here [in 'The Lebanon'] apparently comes from the name of the mountain that the country is named after: Mount Lebanon or the Lebanon." 
  • "The Argentine... [is] a really old-fashioned name for Argentina." 

"How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later"
  • "I consider myself a spokesperson for Disneyland because I live just a few miles from it-- and, as if that were not enough, I once had the honour of being interviewed there by Paris TV." 
  • "Norman and I, being preoccupied with tossing little children about, said some extraordinarily stupid things that day. Today, however, I will have to accept full blame for what I tell you, since none of you are wearing Mickey Mouse hats and trying to climb up on me under the impression that I am part of the rigging of a pirate ship." 
  • "Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful." 
  • "It reminds me of a headline that appeared in a California newspaper just before I flew here. SCIENTISTS SAY THAT MICE CANNOT BE MADE TO LOOK LIKE HUMAN BEINGS. It was a federally funded research program, I suppose. Just think: Someone in this world is an authority on the topic of whether mice can or cannot put on two-tone shoes, derby hats, pinstriped shirts, and Dacron pants, and pass as humans." 
  • "The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'... I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?"
  • "Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me to wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown of communication... and there is the real illness [ellipsis original]."
  • "It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories which asked the question 'What is reality?', to someday get an answer."
  • "One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, 'Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.' That's all I could come up with. That was back in 1972 [PKD is talking in 1978]. Since then I haven't been able to define reality any more lucidly." 
  • "Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups-- and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught."
  •  "What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. And-- cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Baretta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him."
  • "Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind." 
  • "I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe-- and I am dead serious when I say this-- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things... This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar with us. And that hurts." 
  • "Objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters the most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." 
  • "The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real... I offer this merely to show that as soon as you being to ask what is ultimately real, you right away begin to talk nonsense." 
  • "David Hume, the greatest skeptic of them all, once remarked that after a gathering of skeptics met to proclaim the veracity of skepticism as a philosophy, all of the members of the gathering nonetheless left by the door rather than the window. I see Hume's point. It was all just talk." 
  • "The bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans-- as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides... Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves." 
  • "What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real? We would not be aware of this transformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place." 
  • "That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but-- Is it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth... and only later on realize it." 
  • "Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there. The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen." 
  • "Speaking for myself, I do not know how much of my writing is true, or which parts (if any) are true. This is a potentially lethal situation. We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur..." 
  • "It is an eerie experience to write something into a novel, believing it is pure fiction, and to learn later on-- perhaps years later-- that it is true."
  • "My theory is this: In some certain important sense, time is not real. Or perhaps it is real, but not as we experience it or imagine it to be. I had the acute, overwhelming certitude (and still have) that despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it,specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts." 
  • "These [the Greek philosophers] were not childish thinkers, nor primitives. They debated serious issues and studied one another's views with deft insight... The summation of much pre-Socratic theology and philosophy can be stated as follows: The kosmos is not as it appears to be, and what it probably is, at its deepest level, is exactly that which the human being is at his deepest level-- call it mind or soul, it is something unitary which lives and thinks, and only appears to be plural and material." 
  • "The Logos was both that which thought, and the thing which it thought: thinker and thought together. The universe, then, is thinker and thought, and since we are part of it, we as humans are, in the final analysis, thoughts of and thinkers of those thoughts. 
  • "I have an abiding intuition that somehow the world of the Bible is a literally real but veiled landscape, never changing, hidden from our sight, but available to us by revelation. That is all I can come up with-- a mixture of mystical experience, reasoning, and faith." 
  • "The authentic human being is one of us who instinctively knows what he should not do, and, in addition, he will balk at doing it. He will refuse to do it, even if this brings down dread consequences to him and to those whom he loves. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance... I see their authenticity in an odd way: not in their willingness to perform great heroic deeds but in their quiet refusals. In essence, they cannot be compelled to be what they are not." 
  • "A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children. They do not ask me; I turn to them." 
  • "Time is speeding up. And to what end? Maybe we were told that two thousand years ago. Or maybe it wasn't really that long ago; maybe it is a delusion that so much time has passed. Maybe it was a week ago, or even earlier today. Perhaps time is not only speeding up; perhaps, in addition, it is going to end. And if it does, the rides at Disneyland are never going to be the same again. Because when time ends, the birds and hippos and lions and deer at Disneyland will no longer be simulations, and, for the first time, a real bird will sing." 

"Graphene Could Lead to Better Bullet-Proof Vests..."
  • "Just an atom thick, these carbon sheets [graphene] are not only the world's thinnest material, but they are also the strongest." 
  • "After conducting miniature ballistic tests, graphene was found to perform twice as well as the material traditionally used in bulletproof vests."
  • "Graphene consists of a sheet of single carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb structure. Alongside being incredibly strong, graphene also conducts heat and electricity remarkably well, resists rust and has excellent optical and mechanical properties. Graphene also achieves this impressive range of characteristics while being incredibly lightweight." 
  • "Testing it out is not as simply as firing bullets through it and seeing what happens, because atom-thick material would be obliterated by such an impact, so... researchers used lasers to superheat hold filaments, which behaved like gunpowder and fired tiny silica spheres, or 'microbullets,' at sheets of graphene ranging from 10 to 100 nanometers in thickness." 
  • "By comparing the kinetic energy of the spheres before and after they penetrated the sheets, they found that graphene dissipates this energy by warping into a cone shape at the site of impact, and then cracking outward. While these cracks represent a weakness, the material still performed twice as well as Kevlar... Furthermore, it absorbed between 8 and 10 times the impacts that steel is able to withstand."
  • "Scientists might be able to overcome the cracking problem by combining it with other materials to generate a composite." 
  • "[Graphene] is permeable to protons. This raises the possibility that it could be used to improve fuel-cell technology, or even to harvest hydrogen from the atmosphere." 

"Ravens Have Social Abilities Previously Only Seen in Humans"
  • Ravens "are able to work out the social dynamics of other raven groups, something which only humans had shown the ability to do." 
  • "Ravens within a community squabble over their ranking in the group, as higher ranked ravens have better access to food and other resources. Males always outrank females and confrontations mostly occur between members of the same sex." 
  • "These confrontations are initiated by high-ranking ravens, who square up to low-ranking birds and emit a specific call to assert their dominance. Normally, the lower-ranking, or submissive, raven typically makes a specific call to recognize the high-ranking raven's social superiority... But sometimes, the lower-ranking bird does not respond in a submissive way to a dominance call-- this is known as a dominance reversal call. These situations often result in confrontations, and can result in changes in the social structure of raven communities."
  • "When presented with a dominance reversal recording taken from their own group, ravens displayed behavior associated with stress, because they expected a disturbance in the social order. This stress is typically expressed by the raven either running around or pecking at its own feathers."
  • "Ravens showed even higher levels of stress when they were played a dominance reversal call from members of the same sex. This makes sense, because ranking disputes only occur between members of the same sex. A confrontation between two females, for example, would not have a big effect on the social status of a male raven-- but would affect any females who were listening." 
  • "Female ravens in general were more stressed than males when they were played dominance reversal recordings. This may be females are always lower ranked than males, so changes in community structure pose more risks to females at the bottom, which have reduced access to food in the first place." 
  • "Ravens seemed to notice dominance reversals in a foreign group of ravens, although they exhibited less stress than when they heard such calls from their own social community." 
  • Jorg Massen: "This shows that ravens are able to create a mental representation of relationship dynamics from groups they have never interacted with before, just like us when we watch television. This ability has not even been observed in monkeys yet." 
  • "These findings give a clue that raven intelligence may have evolved with the development of social communities." 

"Anarchism, not Anomism"
  • "Anarchy is from the Greek anarkhos, which means 'without a ruler.' An = without, arkhos = ruler. What is a ruler? A ruler is one who dominates and coerces others until submission and subjugation." At least if we're going with a definition that doesn't consider self-rule, but... It gets the point across, I suppose. Voluntary governments are alright, but governments that operate without the consent of their members? No. And that's all of them, last time I checked. 
  • "There is a word for lawlessness, however, and it's not anarchy. I present: anomy. Anomy is from the Greek anomos, which means 'without law.' An = without, nomos = law."

 "In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization"
  • I know I said it up above, but I really like what Scott Alexander has to say about Stuff. 
  • "Andrew Cord criticizes me for my bold and controversial suggestion that maybe people should try to tell slightly fewer blatant lies." 
  • "It always makes me happy when my ideological opponents come out and say eloquently and openly what I've always secretly suspected them of believing." 
  • "The respectful way to rebut Andrew's argument would be to spread malicious lies about Andrew to a couple of media outlets, fan the flames, and wait for them to destroy his reputation... I am not going to do that, but if I did it's unclear to me how Andrew could object. I mean, he thinks that sexism is detrimental to society, so spreading lies and destroying people is justified in order to stop it. I think that discourse based on mud-slinging and falsehoods is detrimental to society. Therefore... [second ellipsis original]"
  • "But really, all this talk of lying and spreading rumors about people is-- what was Andrew's terminology-- 'pussyfooting around with debate-team nonsense'. You know who got things done? The IRA. They didn't agree with the British occupation of Northern Ireland and they weren't afraid to let people know in that very special way only a nail-bomb shoved through your window at night can." 
  • Andrew Cord: "When Scott calls rhetorical tactics he dislikes 'bullets' and denigrates them it actually hilariously plays right into this point... to be 'pro-bullet' or 'anti-bullet' is ridiculous. Bullets, as you say, are neutral. I am in favor of my side using bullets as best they can to destroy the enemy's ability to use bullets. In a war, a real war, a war for survival, you use all the weapons in your arsenal because you assume the enemy will use all the weapons in theirs. Because you understand that it IS a war." 
  • "For the love of God, if you like bullets so much, stop using them as a metaphor for 'spreading false statistics' and go buy a gun."
  • "Every case in which both sides agree to lay down their weapons and be nice to each other has corresponded to spectacular gains by both sides and a new era of human flourishing." 
  • "Reciprocal communitarianism is probably how altruism evolved. Some mammal started running TIT-FOR-TAT, the program where you cooperate with anyone whom you expect to cooperate with you. Gradually you form a successful community of cooperators. The defectors either join your community and agree to play by your rules or get outcompeted." 
  • "Divine grace is more complicated. I was tempted to call it 'spontaneous order' until I remembered the rationalist proverb that if you don't understand something, you need to call it by a term that reminds you that you don't understand it or else you'll think you've explained it when you've just named it... Every time a Republican and a Democrat break bread together with good will, it is a miracle. It is an equilibrium as beneficial as civilization or liberalism, which developed in the total absence of any central enforcing authority... If you read the Iliad or any sort other account of ancient warfare, there is practically nothing but honor among foes, and it wasn't generated by some sort of Homeric version of the Geneva Convention, it just sort of happened. During World War I, the English and Germans spontaneously got out of their trenches and celebrated Christmas together with each other, and on the sidelines Andrew was shouting 'No! Stop celebrating Christmas! Quick, shoot them before they shoot you!' but they didn't listen." 
  • "All I will say in way of explaining these miraculous equilibria is that they seem to have something to do with inheriting a cultural norm and not screwing it up. Punishing the occasional defector seems to be a big part of not screwing it up." 
  • "I think that most of our useful social norms exist through a combination of divine grace and reciprocal communitarianism. To some degree they arise spontaneously and are preserved by the honor system. To another degree, they are stronger or weaker in different groups, and the groups that enforce them are so much more pleasant than the groups that don't that people are willing to go along." 
  • "The norm against malicious lies follows this pattern. Politicians lie, but not too much." 
  • "I seek out people who signal that they want to discuss things honestly and rationally. Then I try to discuss things honestly and rationally with these people. I try to concentrate as much of my social interaction there as possible. So far this project is going pretty well. My friends are nice, my romantic relationships are low-drama, my debates are productive and I am learning so, so much." 
  • Andrew thinks I am trying to fight all the evils of the world, and doing so in a stupid way. But sometimes I just want to cultivate my garden." 
  • "There might be foot-long giant centipedes in the Amazon, but I am a lot more worried about boll weevils in my walled garden." 
  • "It is not necessary to call out every lie by a creationist, because the sort of person who is still listening to creationists is not the sort of person who is likely to be moved by call-outs. There is a role for organized action against creationists, like preventing them from getting their opinions taught in schools, but the marginal blog post 'debunking' a creationist something something is a waste of time. Everybody who wants to discuss things rationally has already formed a walled garden and locked the creationists outside of it." 
  • "People who want to discuss things rationally and charitably have not locked Charles Clymer out of their walled garden. He is not a heathen, he is a heretic. He is not a foreigner, he is a traitor. He comes in talking all liberalism and statistics, and then he betrays the signals he has just sent. He is not just some guy who defects in the Prisoner's Dilemma. He is the guy who defects while wearing the 'I COOPERATE IN PRISONERS DILEMMAS' t-shirt. What really, really bothered me wasn't Clymer at all: it was that rationalists were taking him seriously. Smart people, kind people! I even said so in my article. Boll weevils in our beautiful walled garden!" 
  • "You have no idea how difficult it is to successfully renegotiate the terms of a timeless Platonic contract that doesn't literally exist. No! I am Exception Nazi! NO EXCEPTION FOR YOU! Civilization didn't conquer the world by forbidding you to murder your enemies unless they are actually unrighteous in which case go ahead and kill them all. Liberals didn't give their lives in the battle against tyranny to end discrimination against all religions except Jansenism because seriously fuck Jansenism. Here we have built our Schelling fence and here we are defending it to the bitter end." 
  • "You cannot simply assume Adam Smith and derive Andrea Dworkin. Not being an asshole to women and not writing laws declaring them officially inferior are both good starts, but it [is] not enough if there's still cultural baggage and entrenched gender norms." 
  • "It could have been worse. I didn't like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who's not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have." 
  • Walled gardens can grow. It's not inherently selfish to focus on cultivating your walled garden. "Why yes, it does sound like I'm making the unshakeable assumption that liberalism always wins, doesn't it? That people who voluntarily relinquish certain forms of barbarism will be able to gradually expand their territory against the hordes outside, instead of immediately being conquered by their less scrupulous neighbors?"
  • "'Evil people are doing evil things, so we are justified in using any weapons we want to stop them, no matter how nasty' suffers from a certain flaw. Everyone believes their enemies are evil people doing evil things. If you're a Nazi, you are just defending yourself, in a very proportionate manner, against the Vast Jewish Conspiracy To Destroy All Germans." 
  • Mencius Moldbug: "Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn't that interesting?... If you want to be on the winning team, you want to start on the left side of the field..."
  • "A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel [according to Robert Frost]. And yet when liberals enter quarrels [on a historical scale], they always win. Isn't that interesting?"
  • "The early Christian Church had the slogan 'resist not evil' (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. By Andrew's reckoning, this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns. And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected." 
  • Mahatma Gandhi: "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind." 
  • "You need a certain pre-existing level of civilization for liberalism to be a good idea, and a certain pre-existing level of liberalism for supercharged liberalism where you don't spread malicious lies and harass other people to be a good idea. You need to have pre-existing community norms in place before trying to summon mysterious beneficial equilibria." 
  • "Perhaps I am being too harsh on Andrew, to contrast him with Aung San Suu Kyi and her ilk. After all, all Aung San Suu Kyi had to do was to fight the Burmese junta, a cabal of incredibly brutal military dictators who killed several thousand people, tortured anyone who protested against them, and sent eight hundred thousand people they just didn't like to forced labor camps. Andrew has to deal with people who aren't as feminist as he is. Clearly this requires much stronger measures." 
  • "Liberalism does not conquer by fire and sword. Liberalism conquers by communities of people who agree to play by the rules, slowly growing until eventually an equilibrium is disturbed. Its battle cry is not 'Death to the unbelievers!' but 'If you're nice, you can join our cuddle pile!" 
  • "Elua is the god of flowers and free love and he is terrifying. If you oppose him, there will not be enough left of you to bury, and it will not matter because there will not be enough left of your city to bury you in."
  • "[Jacqueline] Carey portrays liberalism as Elua, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God who is fundamentally good. Moldbug portrays liberalism as Cthulhu, a terrifying unspeakable Elder God who is fundamentally evil. But Andrew? He doesn't even seem to realize liberalism is a terrifying unspeakable Elder God at all. It's like, what? Andrew is the poor shmuck who is sitting there saying 'Ha ha, a god who doesn't even control any hell-monsters or command his worshippers [sic] to become killing machines. What a weakling! This is going to be so easy!' And you want to scream: 'THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY THIS CAN POSSIBLY END AND IT INVOLVES YOU BEING EATEN BY YOUR OWN LEGIONS OF DEMONAICALLY [sic] CONTROLLED ANTS.'"

 "The surprising decline in violence"
  • Modern atrocities of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries have "led to a common understanding of our situation, namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril."
  • "The original title of this session was, 'Everything You Know is Wrong,' and I'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence." 
  • "The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century." 
  • "The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest. And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance.... If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million." 
  • The rate of homicide in Medieval England was approximately 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year. 
  • One of the problems, so to speak, is that "we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were. There's a cognitive illusion." 
  • "Our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards." 
  • "Thomas Schelling gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs. And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand. Now, each one of them is thinking, 'I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me. Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me.' And so on. Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first." 
  • "One way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence. You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded. The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores, which leads to cycles of bloody vendetta. Life becomes an episode of 'The Sopranos.'"
  • "Eisner-- the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide-- argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states. So that's a bit of support for the leviathan theory. Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on."
  • "In many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne."
  • "In the book 'Nonzero' by the journalist Robert Wright... [it is pointed] out that in certain circumstances, cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction... Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in... The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, 'Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van.'"
  • "The logic of the golden rule-- the more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to."
  • "Anything, I think, that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person." 

Miscellany
  • Murray Rothbard, Society Without a State: "I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of any individual." 
  • Hilda Ellis Davidson, Roles of the Northern Goddess: "On the other hand, a goddess of death who represents the horrors of slaughter and decay is well known elsewhere; the figure of Kali in India is an outstanding example. Like Snorri's Hel, she is terrifying to [sic?] in appearance, black or dark in colour, usually naked, adorned with severed arms or the corpses of children, her lips smeared with blood. She haunts the battlefield or cremation ground and squats on corpses. Yet for all this she is 'the recipient of ardent devotion from countless devotees who approach her as their mother." This quote has become highly influential on a book that I am planning. I am going to need to get Davidson's book at some point. 
  • Robert Frost: "I could define poetry this way: it is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation."
  • Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom From Fear: "It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it." 
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