“In his latest tape Ayman Al-Zawahiri warned America to convert to Islam and give up beer.”
Actually, he warned America to give up alcohol. I don’t drink beer because I don’t like the taste, but I do occasionally drink hard cider. So I have decided that Al-whatsits’ demand justifies a glass of hard cider tonight.
Thirty Marines, already tired from a long patrol, were ambushed by approximately 250 Taliban.
Fifty dead Taliban, the rest fleeing in terror, zero dead Marines, no Marines even badly injured. Read the story. Those young men leave me shaking my head in awe. The lamestream media will not report this. If you happen to read this, pass on the word.
Orac has written about the latest proclamation of Matt Nisbet, famous in the science blogosphere for telling everyone else that they have to “frame” their arguments for, and defenses of, science his way or no one will ever listen to them.
Nisbet asserts that calling someone a “denier” just because they deny well-established scientific knowledge, is tantamount to calling them a holocaust denier, thus calling them a Nazi, and this will only cause anger and hostility without advancing the discussion.
Well, first, I guess Nisbet should learn that different groups have different experiences and may not have the same associations to words as he does. For instance, I grew up reading science fiction, starting as soon as I could read (so far as I can remember) and only studied history in school much later. Since the science fiction books I read were accumulated by my parents, they tended to be from the Forties and early Fifties. So they were very focused on the upcoming nuclear war. And that war was referred to as … The Holocaust. This is an appropriate name etymologically, since Holocaust contains the roots “all” and “burn”, which is exactly what a nuclear war would do. Stories set after that upcoming war are called post-holocaust stories. I have over the years developed the association that “holocaust” refers to Germany’s attempted extermination of the Jews, but even today that is not always my first thought when I encounter the term. This is especially true when I encounter the term “post-holocaust”, which is rather rare with respect to the historical holocaust, and much more frequently seen in reference to science fiction.
Does “denier” immediately suggest holocaust denier? Well, as in the case of “holocaust” itself, maybe I just don’t have the same background that Nisbet has. But that is not my first thought; indeed, I have always seen “denier” as describing a particular attitude toward the subject, whatever the subject is. Certainly someone who denies the holocaust is a holocaust denier, but there are also those who deny that AIDS even exists, or deny that it is caused by HIV, and those are also deniers. Those who deny AIDS are the first deniers that I ever heard of. And I suspect the same may be true of many other denizens of the Web.
Since Nisbet was objecting to words like “denier” and “denialist”, Orac proposed an alternate word, namely “pseudoskeptic”. His explanation is:
It captures the essence of what denialists do almost as much as the term “denialist.” Remember, a true skeptic is always open to changing his or her mind if the evidence and science demand it. In contrast, no amount of evidence will ever change the mind of a pseudoskeptic. Also, unlike a skeptic, a pseudoskeptic will defend his position with logical fallacies, bad science, misinformation, and misleading arguments, while representing himself as a “skeptic” of established science.
It seems to me that “pseudoskeptic” is truly different from “denier” and “denialist”, and captures a different facet of behavior. There are some people who go to Orac’s site (and others) and will never say “I deny evolution; evolution didn’t happen; it’s all a lie and a fraud”. Instead, they’ll say “this isn’t sufficiently supported; that isn’t sufficiently supported; I am unconvinced by the other”, and then when they are presented with evidence and citations and arguments, they will continue to fall back on “skepticism” until other commenters realize that there is nothing anyone can say that will induce them to agree. But such people can claim that they are certainly not denying evolution — why no, they are merely treating it skeptically. It’s the same dodge that school boards use: “oh, we’re not denying to children that evolution has occurred; we’re merely teaching the controversy so that they can see that it isn’t proved and can never be proved to our satisfaction”. Oops, I guess that last clause isn’t one they openly admit.
So I think “pseudoskeptic” is a good word that perhaps ought to be used in many cases instead of “denier”, not because Nisbet associates “denier” with “holocaust denier”, but because “pseudoskeptic” accurately describes one approach that some people take not to deny, but to refuse to acknowledge, scientific knowledge.
Just one post and then to work …
I thought Fox’s headline yesterday was stupid (“Seniors Pilfering Nest Eggs as Millions Live in Poverty”), but they’ve actually topped it! Now it reads “Seniors Pilfering Nest Eggs While in Poverty”. This is even better.
The first headline implied that the rapacious hordes of seniors drove the millions into poverty. When I first saw it, for a moment I expected an article about how young people with low paying jobs, trying to move upward, were unable to save for the educations of their own children or their own retirements because of the regressive tax supporting the Ponzi scheme called (laughably) Social Security.
The second headline … well, don’t you think it outright says they are stealing? Suppose it said “Children Pilfer Food While In Poverty”. Wouldn’t you picture the children sneaking into grocery stores and slipping a little food in their pockets? The headline clearly describes unscrupulous seniors living in poverty and pilfering other people’s nest eggs. You might have sympathy for their plight, but you’d also have sympathy for their victims.
Fox, the word you want is “consume” not “pilfer”. Or “empty”, which is shorter, but that doesn’t quite sound right to me. Or perhaps “draw down”, though that’s two words and a bit longer. Or perhaps “invade”. There are lots of words that don’t describe people as thieves.
I try to ignore headlines. I am literal-minded, so I tend to be confused by them. However, these two did not just confuse me. They’re stupid.
“Father Raped Daughters For 30 Years, Bore 9 Children”: really!? I would have thought that if he is a father he is not, um, equipped to bear children, however evil he is (and he is very evil). The story discloses that in fact the daughters bore the children.
Would it have been so hard to title this “Father Raped Daughters For 30 Years, Sired 9 Children”? It’s only one character longer and it’s biologically possible.
“Seniors Pilfering Nest Eggs as Millions Live in Poverty”: who are these dastardly seniors? It’s not clear if the millions are living in poverty because the seniors pilfered their nest eggs, but surely the pilfering didn’t help.
Oh. According to the story, they’re consuming their own nest eggs. They aren’t pilfering anything from anyone.
Would it have been so hard to title this “Seniors Consuming Nest Eggs as Millions Live in Poverty”? It’s the same length and doesn’t brand them as criminals.
With Morrowind, Bethesda Softworks made an interesting decision. They released, free for download, The Elder Scrolls Construction Engine. This engine is certainly akin to the program they used to create the Morrowind game space and the Oblivion game space, if it isn’t the program itself. With it, users could change the game space entirely on their own, without input or permission from Bethesda.
And so users did change the game space. They wrote mods (short for modifications) to change everything that could be changed.
Don’t like the way the whole world levels up with you? Go through and change the base level and player-based level factor for every single NPC (non-player character) and random encounter in the game. A number of people did that. See, for instance, Oscuros Oblivion Overhaul. Changes like this tend to be part of overhauls that rebalance the game by changing the damage from weapons, change the effects of magic, change the characteristics of monsters … Basically they create a different game that still looks like Oblivion.
Don’t like the appearance of the buildings, the roads, the furniture? Make your own textures to replace them. The biggest of these texture replacers that I know of is Qarl’s Texture Pack, more than two gigabytes in size.
Don’t like the bland, boring NPC faces? There are more than a thousand, but that’s okay; someone has gone through and changed every last one of them.
Don’t like the bland, boring terrain? (I didn’t think it was boring until I saw what could be done with it.) There is a team working together on a project called “Unique Landscapes” that is hand-crafting interesting terrain. Instead of kind of hilly terrain with generic trees, they have redwoods or cypress trees, little streams with little bridges over them, ravines, swamps — I haven’t seen anything like all of it, and am looking forward to just wandering through it.
Does the City of Bravil, supposed to be the haunt of criminals, look just as clean and beautiful as all the other cities? No problem; there’s a German group that completely redid it. To give an idea of the new look, the mod is called “Blood and Mud”. Bravil is another place that I am looking forward to visiting.
Even little stuff: the gold coins look like grimy nickels to me. Other people hate the appearance too, so there are little mods that fix the appearance of just the gold coins, such as this.
And on, and on … if you’re like me, you can spend days looking at mods rather than actually, you know, playing the game.
I bought Oblivion when it first came out a couple of years ago, but quickly discovered that I had no computer anywhere that was capable of running it (those crummy video cards, again), so I put it aside and didn’t think about it. However, when I found that my laptop just couldn’t manage the monitors that I wanted to use (I use two when I remote-desktop into the office computer), I got the new desktop with Vista, about which I have complained mightily. It occurred to me after a while that perhaps this new computer would handle Oblivion, so I installed it and indeed it worked.
In a nutshell, the game started with your character in a jail cell. The Emperor and a few guards come through the cell, trying to escape assassins through the secret door therein. Your character tags along, but the guards are slowly killed off and then the Emperor himself is killed after giving you an amulet and charging you to take it to a person named Jauffre. At that point, you can finish the escape and go out into the wide world.
Being a literal-minded person, when I first started the game, I immediately headed for Jauffre and gave him the amulet. He charged me to go find a person named Martin (the heir to the Emperor), which I immediately did. Getting to Martin required going into Oblivion (the game equivalent of Hell, complete with lava everywhere), so I immediately did. I fought my way through Oblivion, then through the besieged town, and brought Martin out safely.
And then I stopped.
Because I had done everything immediately, as soon as I was told to do it, I had gotten no experience along the way. I was still just a first level character, the weakest I could be, and yet I had survived in Oblivion. That didn’t hardly seem right.
Furthermore, several non-player characters (NPCs) had followed me into the besieged town, and they had all gotten killed. That bothered me. I wanted to be able to protect them better.
So, I backed up to an earlier saved game and got a little experience before going to get Martin. Now I was fifth level and should have mopped the floor with the monsters in Oblivion. Except … these were different and much tougher monsters. I did make it through, we all charged into the town, and all the NPCs got killed again because although I was much stronger than the first time, the monsters were much stronger too.
Something is wrong with this picture.
So I went online and quickly discovered that there is an active Oblivion-gaming community. There is even a wiki where all your questions are answered. This helpfully informed me that in Oblivion, the world revolves around you. When you are low-level, so is everyone else. As you level-up, so does everyone else, so the level of challenge in Oblivion, for instance, will always be the same (barely survivable).
No, don’t like that at all. Some areas, like Oblivion, should be barely survivable even for high-level characters, and suicidal for low-level characters; others should be a serious challenge for a low-level character but no sweat for a high-level character. Rewards should be proportional, of course. If you’re beating up on little goblins, whose idea of combat is “scream and leap”, then you should get at most a few gold pieces off them. If you’re taking on a nest of vampires, you should get some serious treasure.
But that’s not how Oblivion works.
Or at least, that’s not how vanilla Oblivion works. At this point I discovered mods.
To be continued …
This is an image from Oblivion. I have no idea what the skeleton is doing there. It does not move and my character can’t seem to interact with it. I’m guessing the local medical students put the skeleton there as a prank. That thing in its right hand is a beer bottle. The bright orange stuff at the top left is the flame of the torch I am using to illuminate it. Note the detail on the wall.
This is why one might want to just wander around. There are just interesting things to find around every corner.
In Repairman Jack: a new identity, I described four candidates for Jack’s new identity: Richard Westphalen (my personal favorite candidate), Lew Ehler, Miles Kenway, and Jim Zaleski. In mentioning the latter three, I was working from memory since the book was out of print and my copy was in Oklahoma. However, the book has since come back into print and I have a copy.
Miles Kenway is out — he’s too old. It’s a pity he died, as I really liked him.
Jim Zaleski is out — he has a brother. I didn’t greatly regret his death, as he was a jerk.
Lew Ehler remains a candidate, as he stated that he had no close relatives and his age appears to be right.
Again, what bothers me is that Jack never even considered any of these guys, especially Richard. Every time he would moan about the difficulties of finding a new identity, I would mutter “Richard! Richard!” between gritted teeth.
This blog uses WordPress. When you first click on “Site admin” in WordPress (it’s only visible if you are an admin), you can see the Dashboard, which includes things like “Incoming Links”. I never look at the Dashboard, really, just immediately click on to what I mean to do. So I happened to look at it today and …
My pitiful little blog was linked by Michelle Malkin??!!
It took me seven months to notice, unfortunately, but I kid you not: I’m buried down in the links on this page. Malkin, like so many others, interpreted The One’s statement about not wanting his daughter “punished with a baby” as meaning that he would want her to have an abortion. That may be the correct interpretation; I was more generous in my assessment of him at the time, being unaware of his deep friendship with murderous terrorists, so I thought he would want her to know how to use contraception effectively.
I think, however, that it is unreasonable to say that pregnancy cannot be viewed as a punishment. Yeah, yeah, beautiful act of bringing life into the world and all … but if you didn’t choose to get pregnant and don’t want to be pregnant, the prospect of nine months of throwing up, rubbing your aching back, undergoing frequent and very personal examinations by doctors, labor at the end, and other indignities that I don’t even know about — most certainly is punitive. Try to imagine if this were inflicted on a burglar instead of nine months in prison — the ACLU would be up in arms.
Malkin calls this the “pregnancy-as-inconvenience-on-par-with STDs” attitude; my view would be that an unwanted pregnancy is a lot worse of an inconvenience than most STDs; most STDs can be cured in a lot less than nine months.