Good Reason

It's okay to be wrong. It's not okay to stay wrong.

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Uchtdorf tells ’em what they want to hear

27 October 2010 / / 4 Comments

That was quick.

Mormons may not know until the hereafter what causes same-sex attraction, but “God loves all his children” and expects everyone to do the same, an LDS Church leader said Sunday.

While the message — delivered to more than 200,000 Utah Mormons — may not seem significant, the messenger was.

As second counselor in the governing First Presidency, Dieter F. Uchtdorf is one of the highest-ranking leaders in the hierarchy of the nearly 14 million member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to address the thorny topic of whether same-sex attraction is inborn.

Ain’t that sweet?

But what qualifications does Uchtdorf have to address whether SSA is inborn? None — he’s just a mystic. No, he was sent to ‘Save the Sale’. Church doctrine changes when it looks like it’s going to affect the bottom line. Hating on homos made good business sense in the past (and thus good doctrine), but it’s been playing increasingly poorly as of late. Answer: Downplay Packer, so Uchtdorf gets to be the good guy.

“Many questions in life, however, including some related to same-gender attractions, must await a future answer, even in the next life,” Uchtdorf said. “Until then, the truth is, God loves all his children, and because he loves us, we can trust him and keep his commandments.”

Have you ever noticed how that ‘wait until the next life’ thing gets played a lot?

Some audience members welcomed Uchtdorf’s approach, which seemed more consistent with the church’s position.

“It seemed fairly close to the line we’ve been getting lately — the idea that the practice is sinful, but homosexual tendencies are acceptable within the church as long as people don’t act on them,” said Jennie Pulsipher, a Mormon who watched the regional conference via satellite at her east-side Salt Lake City stake center. “He also emphasized that [gays] should be treated lovingly as children of God.”

Hear that, gay people? Mormons will treat you like humans, as long as you never have sex for the rest of your fucking life. Sounds like a deal to me.

Joust marathon

23 October 2010 / / Comments Off on Joust marathon

John McAllister is challenging a 25-year-old Joust world record. It’s going on now, as I write this. I’m following the live video feed sporadically.

I found out about John’s attempt yesterday morning, had a look, and I thought, “Wow, he’s really good.” At that point, he’d been going for 22 hours.

Then I worked all day, came back to check out the game in the evening, and he was still going. Now I’ve had a night’s sleep, and he’s still going. He’ll need to go for about 60 hours total to beat the 107 million points. When he takes a break, he just walks away from the controls and burns off a few of the hundreds of extra guys that he’s built up.

Joust is a fast game at the higher levels, and the gameplay is more or less constant. It requires an almost cyborgian level of endurance, but there he is, working with precision at a frenetic pace. He always knows exactly where to be, whether facing the ‘unbeatable?’ pterodactyls, or taking on the blue knights at the top of the screen, predicting their unpredictable fluttery arcs.

So all right, yes, it is the same thing over and over again. And yes, it goes for a long time. Even so, I find the marathon to be strangely compelling viewing. Kind of like when I was a kid in Cheney, probably hanging out at Zip’s, watching someone who was really good. Video games are time machines.

UPDATE: He’s done it. All hail Sir John. His record will live in the annals of history. Ages hence, bards will sing of his jousting exploits, and maidens will swoon.

Or it’ll be YouTubed, which is close to immortality.

Not what I expected

19 October 2010 / / 2 Comments

Complete this sentence:

If a business is manufacturing products that pose real risks of serious disease, we believe it is all the more important that it…

Stop manufacturing the product?

Get taxed into oblivion?

Be legally disbanded?

None of the above, according to British American Tobacco’s website. Their answer:

…we believe it is all the more important that it does so responsibly.

If you make products that kill people when used as intended, how do you do that ‘responsibly’? That’s quite a different definition of ‘responsibility’ than the one I’m accustomed to.

AltMed Flowchart

19 October 2010 / / 1 Comment

Just had to link to the wonderful AltMed Flowchart.

This will help you to select your preferred healing modality, restoring balance and draining away unwanted funds.

Emoticon test

14 October 2010 / / 3 Comments

Here’s a survey about emoticons that you can take. I recognised some, but others I had to guess.

I like to see what other linguists are doing, and it’s fun to guess what the work is intended for. I’d say this work is part of sentiment analysis: working out automatically how a writer is feeling about what they’re writing. Or tweeting.

So help a fellow linguist out and take the test. It’s quick, and sort of fun.

What’s it going to take?

7 October 2010 / / 6 Comments

Boyd K. Packer takes another opportunity to deride gay relationships as ‘Satanic’, ‘wrong’, ‘wicked’, ‘impure’, ‘unnatural’, ‘not worthy’, ‘immoral’, ‘basically wrong’, and ‘evil’.

In part:

We teach a standard of moral conduct that will protect us from Satan’s many substitutes and counterfeits for marriage. We must understand that any persuasion to enter into any relationship that is not in harmony with the principles of the Gospel must be wrong. In the Book of Mormon we learn that “wickedness never was happiness.” Some suppose that they were “pre-set” and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn tendencies toward the impure and the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember, He is our Father.

O what an objectionable old man. Too bad he isn’t just someone’s embarrassing elderly uncle. There are millions of LDS faithful who believe him reflexively, and will help him to legislate for his private prejudices.

This isn’t a one-off, by the way. Boyd Packer was saying this stuff back in the 90s.

There are three areas where members of the Church, influenced by social and political unrest, are being caught up and led away. I chose these three because they have made major invasions into the membership of the Church. In each, the temptation is for us to turn about and face the wrong way, and it is hard to resist, for doing it seems so reasonable and right.

The dangers I speak of come from the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement (both of which are relatively new), and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.

I knew he was saying these things back then, and I disagreed with it. But I didn’t see it for what it was. I thought it was an inspired leader giving his own misguided opinion. I figured that in a few years, this kind of rhetoric would work its way out of the system, and give way to a more enlightened mindset. A more liberal, tolerant mindset. A mindset more like the one held by… wonderful enlightened me! (More than once, I threw out a shoulder patting myself on the back during those times.)

What I didn’t realise was that I was a very slim minority in a very conservative church. I felt like I was holding down the liberal fort, but the rest of the church was continually working on goals I didn’t like. The leaders were actively working to undermine values I prized. They were fighting against the validity of gay relationships in Hawaii. They’d fought against equal rights for men and women. Before that, they’d fought against equality for people of African descent (but I was rather younger then). Each time, I and the other liberal Mormons I knew were bothered by it, to be sure. But then we all hit the spiritual snooze button and refused to wake up. I stayed in a church that despised members like me. I didn’t leave. And this haunts me now.

Why wasn’t overt institutional prejudice enough for me to quit? What would it have taken for me to realise that this church was committed at its core to inequality? Well, I believed in the church, had a testimony, and I thought these policy stances, though objectionable, were temporary, and would change in course of time. I think it might be the same dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships. You keep getting hurt, but you make excuses, tell yourself it’s not that bad. And you stay for the next round.

If you’re a committed Mormon, and you have no trouble with prejudice, then you’ll do fine in the church. Keep it up. I’m not writing this for you.

But if you’re a Mormon who’s feeling a bit alienated and unsure about this latest Packerism, consider that this is just another piece of evidence for the LDS Church’s all-too-human origins. Its policies and practices reflect the thoughts and prejudices of its leadership and its membership at the time. And even if you don’t share these prejudices, remember that as long as you’re a member, they do what they do in your name. You are donating your time, money, and numbers to an organisation that is actively working to undermine your values.

If you decide to stay in, like I did all those years, I understand. But I can also tell you that it’s good to wake up and live a life that’s more free of internal conflict. The LDS Church has their issues that they’re dealing with. You don’t need them to drag you down. Your values are better.

Get off Emma Thompson’s lawn!

4 October 2010 / / 3 Comments

So I notice this article about actor Emma Thompson:

Emma Thompson says youngsters’ poor language drive her ‘insane’

And I think: Uh-oh. We may have found the precise moment at which Emma Thompson turned ‘old’. Because there’s no better marker of advanced age than when you start complaining about the language use of younger people.

“We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power. I went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing their ‘likes’ and ‘innits?’ and ‘it ain’ts’, which drives me insane. I told them, just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid,” the Telegraph quoted her as telling Radio Times.

Sounds like another prescriptivist rant.

But then, because she’s a smart person, she says something smart.

“There is the necessity to have two languages – one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity. Or you’re going to sound like a knob,” she added.

Ah, now that puts things in a different light. We can command different styles of talking, and we can switch depending on who we’re talking to. And I myself worry when a young person either doesn’t know how to use a higher register or doesn’t know when to switch into one. So that’s quite on.

But Emma Thompson is still being an old fart because
1) she’s annoyed, so everyone else has to change?
2) complaining about language is something old farts do.

Atheists know more about religion

28 September 2010 / / 4 Comments

Try your hand at the latest Pew Forum poll. This was designed to test religious knowledge, and most Americans flunked.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

So Mormons did almost as well as atheists? That makes sense. I knew a bit about religion as a Mormon. Then when I learned a little bit more, I became an atheist.

Oh, and in fairness, I did score 15 out of 15 on the poll, but the last question was a 50/50 lucky guess.

The Medium Challenge

27 September 2010 / / 19 Comments

Many thanks to everyone who has responded to the news of my mother’s death. I’ve appreciated everyone’s comments, and I was especially intrigued by this one from a long-time commenter.

I would love you to meet my good friend, I’ve spoken of her before, the clairvoyant one.

I would like you to test her objectively, with your atheistic views intact. Ask her to get in touch with your mother.

I should add (for the religious minded amongst your readers) she is a pure Catholic – purest of pure hearts. And I should also add I am almost an expert on the biblical views on visionaries, prophets, and the like. So no-one can argue badly against her without my intervention!

She is likely to get some wisdom and advice from your mother – you can test it for yourself.

I’m challenging you to a duel of sorts, on belief.

Now, I don’t think spirits exist, since no one’s yet presented evidence for them. And the idea of having a medium contact dead relatives is silly. If my Mom’s going to go to the trouble of crossing boundaries of time, space, and matter to give me a message, then I think she’d come to me, and not someone who has to fish around for information, saying “I’m getting the colour red; what does that mean to you?”

I don’t like what psychics and mediums do. I think they’re either fooling themselves into thinking they can communicate with spirits, or they’re vultures, preying on the grief and desperation of the bereaved. Their techniques are well-known — cold reading is something that you can learn to do. You throw out a lot of suggestions, wait for the subject to feed you information, take credit for the hits, and hope they forget all the misses.

In short, I’m with this guy.

It’s the whole problem of rigour. Going to a medium wouldn’t be a good test for me, since I’m as capable of fooling myself as anyone else. (And maudlin emotionalism, too. After Dad died, I cried watching Blades of Glory, for Pete’s sake. On a plane! It doesn’t take much when you’re in a state.)

With all that in mind, I think the Medium Challenge is a great idea. Even though I don’t believe in spirits and psychic phenomena, I could be wrong, and if we don’t do the experiment, we won’t learn anything new. So I’d like to run the experiment. But it’s going to be a controlled experiment. I want to get not one, but three clairvoyants, psychics, mediums, what have you. As a control, I’ll also need three non-mediums — people who don’t believe in psychic power or readings — doing their best at their own readings.

To make sure I’m not feeding the mediums information, some tight controls will have to be in place. I will be obscured from view by a screen, so the readers won’t be able to read my actions. (It should be all the same to the spirits.) I will only respond to direct questions, and I will only say “yes” and “no”. Other than that, I’ll be very helpful, truthful, and accommodating. The test will be whether the mediums are able to get hits with any greater frequency than the non-mediums, or random chance.

I’d like to video this and turn it into a programme — YouTube at the least, possibly more. Full recordings of all the sessions will be made available via the Internet. And — this is important to me — I’ll be publishing the results no matter what they are, even if they run counter to my current belief. (Or those of the psychics.)

The test needs to be blind, so I won’t know who the mediums or non-mediums are. For this reason, Maureen has kindly agreed to assist in lining up the readings for various nights in November or thereabouts. So if you would like to volunteer as a medium or a non-medium (you-know-who, your friend has priority), please contact her at mediumchallenge@gmail.com.

I still need to work out the particulars of the experiment, so watch this space for the full list of rules and conditions here in comments.

Ketchup and tomato sauce: Australians fret over lexical shift

19 September 2010 / / 23 Comments

Is there a difference between ‘tomato sauce’ and ‘ketchup’?

When I first arrived in Australia 70 years ago, all you could get was tomato sauce. Ketchup wasn’t available. Never mind, I thought, it’s the same stuff, that’s just what they call it here.

Then I noticed that my local supermarket began to carry both ketchup and tomato sauce. Obeying some primal American instinct, I always buy ketchup. But I feel rather silly, since there’s no difference. Or is there? Tomato sauce: thinner, less spicy? Ketchup: more vinegar?

For some people, it matters.

The term “tomato sauce” could be lost to future Aussies with Heinz, for the first time, advertising ketchup on TV.

In a move Dick Smith labelled “disrespectful” to the Australian culture, Heinz has unveiled a new national ad for Tomato Ketchup, which they say is thicker and has spices and more tomatoes than tomato sauce. “They don’t give a stuff about Australian culture or our way of life,” Mr Smith said.

Who knew the Australian way of life was less spicy, with fewer tomatoes?

Channel 9 star Scott Camm said the term tomato sauce would be lost to future generations.

“What, are we gonna start walking down the sidewalk?” he said.

“They’re infiltrating us – it’s not our way of life.”

It isn’t really about sauce. It’s about language attitudes. Australians like the way they talk, and they don’t like the thought of losing expressions like ‘footpath’, ‘giving a stuff’, or saying ‘zed’ for ‘zee’. Mind you, this is a pretty strange place to draw the line. Other far more iconic expressions have dwindled with nary a peep. (When was the last time you called someone a ‘cobber‘, honestly?) But maybe this item is extra sensitive because it’s being framed as a foreign corporation dictating language change by fiat.

So even if there’s no difference in the actual sauce, there’s a difference in the words. ‘Tomato sauce’ is fair dinkum Aussie, while ‘ketchup’ is an American intrusion to be resisted. Will this become a selling point? We’ll just have to see which way the chips fall.

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UPDATE: The ad.

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