The Journal of the Grey Wraith

Whisky

2010-03-08T02:53:07Z

I'll pass this one along from Whisky Galore, for any scotch drinkers out there.

http://www.whiskygalore.co.nz/webstore/product.php?productid=16254&cat=0&page=1

Litre bottles of Glenfarclas 12yo for $80 at the moment. I know you can probably get litre bottles of Glenfiddich at that price pretty routinely, but I can vouch that this is a much better, much fuller malt.

Choice and Responsibility

2010-02-15T00:51:41Z

What is responsibility ultimately? It is taking the right actions, yes? And all actions that can be judged must ultimately be choices, since one cannot be judged on actions that one does not choose to make: those of instinctual reaction for instance.

//If one's unconcious actions are dangerous, being unpredictable or violent then they should be controlled, as a dangerous dog would be. But not judged personally. However this is a seperate issue to my point at the moment.

So, assuming we agree that responsibility is a series of choices (if you don't, your own interpretation would be interesting to know), then I can pose this: What happens to responsibility when choice is removed? Now apply that to law.

Imagine a government desides "let us create a law that will make pedestrians safer on the road". Not too far removed from some of the laws we've seen bandied around lately.

So a law is dictated that pedestrians can only cross the road on a controlled crossing, when the signal is green. Anyone that tries to cross anywhere else, or while the signal is red gets fined $50 or something. That way, no pedestrians will be hurt on the road. Standered logic of lawmakers, yes? But here comes the science: By legislating against something, you have removed choice, and as choice is dimished responsibility goes with it. Here's why: Pedestrians can only cross on controlled crossings now, so as a driver there's no need to watch out for them any more when you're not at a crossing. The drivers responsibility has diminished, because the pedestrians choice has diminished. When one errant pedestrian to cross the street 'illegally' and they are that much more likely to be hit, and the driver can legitimately say "I am not at fault, he was breaking the law" And suddenly watching out for pedestrians on the road is no longer part of responsible driving because pedestrian saftey is now controlled by laws, not choices.

Think about this, and if you grasp it and agree in concept, apply it to laws that presently exist. Or social rules, or any method of control at all. See the patterns immerging? Control increases, responsibility decreases.

--

Ok, now lets get freaky with this. Appply this idea to core laws, even to the very concept of the rule of law.

Go with a core law, like though shalt not steal: A man who steals and isn't caught may say "I challanged the law and won, the law has failed". But in the absence of that law, what moral defence does that man have? Assuming the man is aware of his actions, he understands that by stealing he harms the community. What can he say but "I have chosen this harmful action, I have cheated my community, 'I' have failed". That realisation would be, I think, worth a lot more than expensive 'rehabilitative' jail time. It would also reach 100% of theives, rather than the 11% that are caught presently.

Ah, but before you rage out completely, I know what you're saying: What about the remorseless? What about the many people who don't care about their community? Indeed, what of the many people who even 'enjoy' the prospect of stealing from, or harming someone else in whatever way. It would be even easier for them to exploit people if there was no such law to control them, and it would be. That of course is the huge problem that renders this merely an idea, rather than a viable means of running a city. No, developing this idea into a working ideology would mean accepting hard truths; namely that those individuals previously discussed who knowingly and persistently harm a community, are by that nature not part of the community, but imposters, and should logically be removed when identified. But... no, too many unreliable outcomes at this time. Give humanity a few more hundred years to grow up, then maybe.

Amsterdam: Hash, hoes, and heresy? Also doctrine, again. (long, gets interesting I promise)

2010-02-13T03:12:21Z

Normally I would let international media haplessly portray this story as they will, but curiously this one seems to be on some kind of front page blacklist. One has to search quite spesifically even to find it on the BBC. But, it is important, so I relay it for the sake of awareness.

-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7842344.stm

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/21/geert-wilders-freedom-on-trial/

http://www.newsrealblog.com/2010/02/03/geert-wilders-witness-list-cut-down-to-three-in-medieval-amsterdam-trial/

It's also covered by Pat Condell's most recent essay (http://www.patcondell.net/index.html).

-

So there's the links, and here's the short version and my take on it:

There's this guy Geert Wilders in denmark who's got this nationalistic liberal party in government; and he made that short movie 'Fitna' which had the islamic world furiously growing beards and yelling death in the streets, as they are so prone to doing. The movie itself isn't much more than a reel of islamic scare stories and information. Of course none of it is remotely untrue, but to say it's presented in a slightly unballanced way would be an something of an understatement. But, no more so than the endless 'documentaries' floating around out there. You know the ones: Moon landing was a hoax, the ever popular 9/11 conspiracy, Jewish aliens controling the government from Mars, whatever.

Though in fairness, 'Fitna' stands above most of these because it doesn't actually contain any bullshit. Just unfairly presented truth.

Anyhow, this guy is now on trail for it, the charge being "inciting hatred and discrimination toward islam"; and thats where this gets interesting. When was the last time anyone saw someone getting pulled up on a charge of attacking a religion in a civilised country? Attacking the gays, or the Asians or whatever, understandable. But getting charged for attacking a religion, in Denmark? That's new.

So, what the hell. List the places you could end up in court for making an internet film attacking a religion: Some of the boonie states of America if you went for christianity, India if you went for hinduism, and any country on earth where the muslim population has reached critical mass if you go after islam. But not, you'd hope, in Denmark. But, there it is; so why?
Two possibilities as I see it, only one eventuality. Option one: Critical mass. The endless deluge of death threats that represents the modus operandi of islamic opposition to any given concern has actually gotten to the ruling framework of the country. Wonderfully terrifying, and quite the case in other countries recently assimilated like Indonesia and Nigeria. But not in this case.

No, this particular dude is on trial because he has a political party, and that party is hammering the previously dominant ruling ones in the vote stakes, and they are shit a brick scared of going down to it. That's where things get interesting and screwy. There's all sorts of weird happenings starting to occur around the trail. Witness being messed with, and just now, the trail date being set to co-inside with the elections.... and with that old chestnut, things get both interesting, screwy, and compellingly familiar.

Now, I'll let people speculate amongst themselves about whats going on there, or what happened when that sort of governmental desperation previously went on in Europe, that isn't really my concern. Nor is whether the muslims take over Europe or not. I find myself with an ever dwindling empathy for humanity as a whole. If the Europeans are stupid enough to let it happen, then they deserve to lose their sovereignty. What I'm interested in is doctrine, and at it's heart that's what this trial is about. Throughout some of the more intelectual spots of Europe, concentrations of minds have been breaking free of the D-day doctrine*, and this has naturally resulted in shifts in the democratic government in those countries. Like a cornered animal, the encumbant doctrine will get scared and fight back, with increasing desperation. This is, in part, a manifestation of this phenomena. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, but either way I expect to see it escalate.

*D-day doctrine: Very simply, a strain of man made doctrine, developed in world war 2, designed to engender in the allied population an absolute hatred and fear of the Nazi's and everything associated with them. The doctrine was magnificently designed, English intelligence really were masters of psychology, even back then. But, after it's purpose was served it didn't go away. Imagine... cane toads in Australia, same thing ultimately. The Nazi's are long dead now, but the we must still fear, and we must hate; the doctrine demands it. So we desperately find fear and hate within our own society, and we suffer. Essentially, I think it's the reason that irrational hate, fear and persecution persist so effectively even now that the religious doctrine that used to sustain them has gone.

If people genuniely want to know, I'll try and write that story. But remember it's just a story, because otherwise it's cutural blasphemy.

Produce

2010-01-30T02:31:00Z

Bringing my own food plan this year, that cost a bit. How much? A 25c per litre fuel voucher's worth, that's how much. Atleast I'll save on petrol driving up there. But, I will eat well.

Also aquired beer. Wigram brewery; tis a manly place, and produces fine manly beers. I hope I bought enough.

I'm also well equipped for the France vs the (old) world wine competition, and the beers of great interest tasting. I hope to see others equally well represented.

//Query: Can anyone tell me if there will still be power access in the Mong this year? If so I'll bring a small fridge.

'Improved' spiced wine recipie: As requested by JD

2010-01-13T02:50:52Z

As far as I remember, the ingredients are all mostly the same. What differs is the method.

Ingredients:

SPICES (Volumes depend on how much you like whatever. You can also omit or add most things without it tasting a whole lot different)
Chopped fresh ginger. (needs more than you think usually)
Whole cinnimon quills.
Cloves. (Not to many of these or they'll overpower everything else)
Pepper corns.
Fresh grated nutmeg.
Lemon and orange peel.

HONEY
Light clover for an easy drinking sweetness, darker varieties for a heavier flavoured mix.

WINE
For a light wine: Sweet reisling (Hardys is a cheap sweet one) and fruity merlot. Two parts white, one part red.

For a heavier wine: Drier reisling, or chardonay if you like oak; and a tannic red like cab sav. Two parts red, one part white.

Method:
The big difference in my method is how the spices are infused. It gives a better, cleaner infusion without cooking off the alcohol in the wine by heating it.

First, get your large pan (big enough to hold all the liquid) and put in all the spices accept the fresh ginger (you don't need a spice bag). Turn the heat on high and stir them around in the pan while they heat up. Keep them all moving or the peel might stick.
When the spices are all thoroughly heated up (they should start smelling really strongly of themselves when they are ready), but before the peel has shriveled up too much. Now throw in the fresh ginger and pour in all the honey you are going to use.

Note on ammounts of honey: Use as much as you like, but I tend to use quite a bit less than the official recipie. About half to two thirds as much. That produces the sweetness level of my last few spiced wine batches, if you can remember them. Particularly don't use too much if you're going with the light variant (two of white one of red) or it'll taste sickly.

Boil it hard for a few minutes, stirring continuiously. After about five minutes, tip in a little white wine to dilute the mixture and continue to heat and stir for another five minutes or so; longer will equal spicier. Now take it off the heat and add all the wine. Mix it all up until the honey is fully dissolved, then strain it into another receptacle, seperating all the spice bits.

It shouldn't have any sediment because of the whole spices (the nutmeg is probably still in there somewhere but I've never encountered it); and as such, whatever it tastes like now is pretty close to what it'll taste like later. It will still taste more mellow once it's been in the bottle for a while though.

And that's it. Get ready for the smooth, clean, and sediment free taste of the spiced wine mark 2.

//I'm now developing the mark 3 formula.... I'll update on that experiment when I have some results.

Foamy the squirrel tells it like it is.

2009-12-03T04:08:36Z

Only true pragmatists can listen and not be offended.

//Allthough I think he's a little unfair on the French.

Apartment warming BBQ (sort of) 5'th of December 4.00pm LFOD

2009-11-25T00:33:31Z

Sort of in that because of the rather small avaliable space, it isn't actually going to occur inside the appartment itself... more sort of across the park, at the LFOD; which is fine because the LFOD is good and rocks like early 70's metal.
Be there.

//There will be a small cocktail thing at the actual appartment before that, sadly by invite only, since I just cannot fit everybody in without stacking them on their heads and permanently traumatising the cat. We'll bring the ingredients for said cocktails over to the LFOD proper when things begin, so you won't miss out.

///Oh, and margaritas.

sundered_dark @ 2009-10-06T10:26:00

2009-10-05T21:29:58Z

Stephen Fry and a Kakapo:

Quite possibly the most hilarious thing I've seen this year. It's little wonder these endearing but clearly brainless birds are so rare.

This Week in Beer

2009-08-07T06:58:36Z

I think it's high time I had a weekly beer review.

I'll start at the end.

ARMAGEDDON India Pale Ale: Brewed by Epic Brewing Company of Auckland.

6.66% by volume (Science!)

$10.00 for a 500ml bottle.

So, this is allegedly the most heavily hopped beer in New Zealand. This sounds extreme, but it doesn't mean it's going to be some horrid undrinkable experiment. NZ craft beer on average is far less hopped than in other countries, so in this case the level of hoppage is probably more indicative of what an American craft IPA would taste like. At $10 it's expensive too, but what the hell; I'm willing to take a ball now and then to try something special like this.

Right> into the glass it goes. It's a slightly cloudy light copper colour, with a relatively fragile head that's receeding quickly (meaning no bottle conditioning, probably not filtered though). The smell is the lovely sharp floral/herbal kind that you'll get off any craft IPA* My world of beer certianly hasn't exploded in a hop fueled mushroom cloud yet, but then again I havn't tasted it yet.
Ahhh, there it goes. No, not really, but there is certianly no doubt that this has several metric butloads of hops in it. Infact I believe this may even qualify as a taste explosion, and as such earns one of my masterly crafted analogies: The taste is initially and fleetingly sweet, like the flash of light as the Terminator 2 playground scene 'esque bomb goes off. Then, like the heat radiating from the blast, there is a mellow radiant taste as the malt imparts it's flavours. Then, all too quickly, the all consuming shockwave of hops catches up and my pallet is overwhelemed with the incredibly intense flavours of the bittering hops, leaving my taste buds charred skeletons of there former selves.

After restoring said skeletonised tastebuds with a woodsmoke marinated muscle, I try and have a few more cracks at this. The floral sweetness at the start and the malty smoothness in the middle are both really good flavours, but I only have a split second to taste them before getting hit by the all consuming bittering hops; which without the ability to slow down time, makes this a difficult beer to describe. What I can say, is that this beer is at least 90% finish; and that finish goes on and on; I can still taste it several minutes after taking a sip.

So, certianly a beer of curiosity rather than everyday drinking. I wouldn't want to tackle this without time to spare. Normally, I can nock off a 500ml bottle in a few minutes no problem. Not this one however; this is going to take me a while. I'm allready feeling slightly strange from the sheer intensity of the bitterness.
As for food matching, something bloody strong. These marinated muscles are a pretty good match on their own, but some sharp cheese would go well too. But I think main course foods would just be utterly overpowered by this beer though. Trying to drink this and taste your meal at the same time would be a real challange.

So does this live up to it's name? It certianly represents the bar for me in terms of hop concentration in a beer. But it hasn't left me as absolutely staggered as the lable suggests it will; but then again I'm a reasonably seasoned beer drinker. For an export gold drinker, things might be different... now there's a worthwile experiment.

Ok, scores. What categories does beer have I wonder?

Refreshment: 3                 Low, but I really don't think this is meant to be a refreshing beer.

Aroma:               8                 The aroma is lovely, and stronger than other craft IPA's.

Intensity:          10                As stated, this is currently the bar for intensity. Strong, strong stuff.

Ballance:          4                  Probably unfairly impossible to achieve in this beer, but none the less, the bitterness totally takes over this beer.

Price                 7                  High, but not unfairly high. Hops are expensive.

*Tui is not a craft IPA. Tui is to real IPA, what a fine wine is to a toilet full of spoiled meat. (Guess the game reference and I might give you a bottle, maybe, unless I suspect you used google).

Release the cyber-hounds

2009-07-31T02:28:41Z

The Boston Dynamics BIGDOG Robot.: Coming a millitant mosque near you.

Take note of how well it rebalances automatically, this is epically advanced stuff. Look for it on the field in less than ten years I'd reckon.

sundered_dark @ 2009-07-23T20:54:00

2009-07-23T08:57:42Z

Sam Raimi directing Warcraft...

Pray out the gay

2009-06-25T23:32:00Z

As everybody knows, exorcisims can cure all kinds of ailments. But now, gayness!

The last few seconds of the clip are the best. He calls him a sex demon.

But seriously, these demented, doctrine infected creatures in the video. They have big families. Really big families. Be aware.

// I wish religious fanatics would call me a sex demon.

Swine Flu

2009-06-17T00:43:18Z

I think it's pretty safe to say that they've officially lost control of swine flu over here now. We're on the skinny end of that logarithmic curve of infection now and there's no getting off it without evacuating the city. Of course this particular virus doesn't do shit to you (at the moment). But still, it's an interesting study in just how difficult these things are to contain, and how screwed we'd be if this was harmful.

Ironically, it seems this one really broke out when some infected subjects ignored their quarantine orders and went to church. I allways knew doctrine spread like a virus, but it's rather poetic to see both happen at the same time.

So, health officials here may learn from this, but to little avail I fear. The painfully evident reality is that the primitive/stupid element within most populations in the world will ruin any efforts to contain something like this. Japan, Iceland, some of the Scandinavian countries, they could pull it off maybe... and by hells, wouldn't the world be a better place afterwards. They could call it the renaissance virus.

Jet

2009-06-15T23:03:36Z

Jet and Jane on closeup (Skip to chapter 3)

I didn't realise this was going to be on, but it was last night.

Learn

2009-06-09T22:49:58Z

Sound. But not as you know it.

Whatever artistic merit mysticism may hold, it will allways be eclipsed by the beauty of understanding.

Warmup

2009-05-27T11:09:31Z

Lindisfarne shopping tomorrow, maybe possibly followed by tasting of many wines at the casino's diamond bar (NZ pinot nior awards tasting is on). We should form a Lindisfarne committee and do a little warmup for the weekend.

This will be evening'ish. Post interest and otherwise watch this space.

//Oh, yeah it's cheap. $2 wines.

When computer games become movies

2009-05-24T23:23:01Z

Meet the spy

And meet the sniper, my own class. Woah, check out the geek pun bitches.

These (and the rest of them, just do a search if you want them) are from Team Fortress 2. Play that shit.

sundered_dark @ 2009-05-23T13:39:00

2009-05-23T01:41:13Z

David Attenborough, on planetary overcrowding.

Ice

2009-05-11T09:20:54Z

That first breath of freezing air at last; it feels suddenly like I've been holding my breath all summer. Not cold, for cold is an uncomfortable and wholly miserable experience. Freezing air is different; my Norse gene's recognise it immediately and turn my body into a furnace, turning cold into an entirely external sensation (assuming I've eaten enough to fuel the process).

Warm air is a useless, passive gas; but freezing air is not. As mist gives form to light, freezing air gives form to space. Move your hand through the air normally and nothing happens, you feel a slight breeze maybe But move a warm hand through freezing air and you'll feel true contrast between what is your hand and what is the space around it; it's texture and resistance as you cut through it, and if you listen to the sensation you'll know exactly where that hand is, and exactly how it's moving. Move your whole body through that air and you'll feel the same.

And when the ground freezes, all of the distracting background smells that rise out of it are nullified. What's left are the relevant smells being emitted by active things. Running water, animals, people, vehicles; I can pick out cigarette smoke over kilometers.

It's an experience.

Hope

2009-05-06T01:23:52Z

So, the hope bit... you know I can't even think of what it was today. I'm all written out, nothing I can come up with seems particularly compelling. Another time maybe.

Doctrine and hope

2009-05-04T23:53:00Z

So, dealing with doctrine recently. Here's a few key bits of information for anyone who wants to better understand how it works.

My functional definition of doctrine: Information that propagates within a system. Information rather than knowledge, because the information of which a doctrine comprises necessitates no connection to reason. The information can be anything at all, and it doensn't have to be wrong. Passing on a belief that the world is round without having made any attempt to find out whether that is the case is just as much doctrine as passing on a belief that the world is flat.

Religious doctrine is the simplest and most wide spread, so I'll stick to that for my explinations (though you can get medical doctrine, 'scientific' doctrine, and all sorts).

-

Doctrine succeeds because of three primary forces. Both forces, ironically, are rather Darwinian in their action.

1. Transmition (Humans, like many animals, instinctually imprint their understanding of reality and how to behave in it from their parents. It takes comparitvely massive contradictory forces to change a persons fundamental understanding of reality once they are grown up.)

2. Replication.

3. Control (Fear/Reward mechanism.)

-

I'll start at the top, with Transmition.
It's all the same, all over the world. Three words "Get" "Them" "Young" What you teach them has no bearing what so ever. The sky is green and it's the devil making it blue? Fine. Have my babies or you'll go to hell? Cool. Stone this woman in the street because god said you should? groovy.

IT DOES NOT MATTER what you tell them. That is the most tragic, deadly, and effective aspect of doctrine, and one you should remember. Get them young, and you've got them. Every single religion in the world makes mileage out of this function to some degree. From simply parents passing on to their children what they believe, to bible schools, all the way up to the Islamic school system, where children sit at desks for years on end and rock back and fourth as they recite the koran until every single word of it is burnt into their mind forever.

This accounts for 99% of doctrine transmition. Missionaries, conquest, etc, are not really relevant forces in todays world (though they were in the past). Exactly the same rules apply to these mechanisms though. 'Saving' people through conversion scores heaven points with many Christian denominations, and flying planes into the buildings of percieved enemies of one's faith scores them with others. 72 virgins man, booyaa!

//Replication next, but I have work to do in the mean time.

Allrighty then, Replication: When looking into this one has to start analysing the purpose behind the rules that make up the system. It's then that things get very interesting, and very complicatied. It's taken me years of observation to start understanding the real complexity behind religious systems. Once a doctrine begins to replicate unchecked within a population it mutates and evolves by natural selection, almost exactly like an infectious organism. How many times has the bibal mutated into a new testament in order to thrive? I find the parallals between H.I.V and religious doctrine are quite uncanny, but you can explore that thought on your own time, but I will use the analogy, as it is a good way of conceptualising a lot of these ideas.

Anyway, there are certian constants that can be explained easily enough. The systems of replication within a doctrine are usually pretty simple, and simmilar between types. First and formost: Reproduction is good; but only if it's organised. Because disorganised reproduction might result in individuals being overlooked and not bound to the faith, resulting in the destabilisation of the doctrine within that population. Thus: Thou, shalt not commit adultery etc etc.
The huge evidence for the mechanism is the massive global persecution of homosexuality; almost uniformly damned by every religion across the globe. They'll justify that by saying it's ungodly, or immoral or it'll degrade society or whatever, but at it's heart the issue is simply that homosexuality is not just incompatable with, but also a threat to the core mechanism of replication. So we watch doctrine mutate to fight this new antigen, as a few vague verses in the bibal now being trumpeted as irrefutable proof of god's dislike of gays.

Now, take a breath while I deliver the smackdown on Catholicism.

-The official Catholic stance is to forbid the use of condoms, which they know full well is directly leading to people dieing from aids.

-The other big official Catholic stance is to forbid abortion, because every life is sacred.

Oops?

At the heart of this monumental contradiction is one important fact: Life is worthless; Reproduction is everything. That's how natural selection works, and as we've observed, doctrine is very much a product of natural selection.

Now you're thinking, and reasoning, and terrifying patterns are beginning to immerge. I'll leave you with that while I get to grips with this next bit. Control.

Control.

At heart, just as simplistic and brutal as the rest of it really. If you want someone to do something, what do you do? You give them a reason why they want to do the thing, either positive, or negative, or better yet, both. 'Get me that stool and I'll give you an apple, and if you don't get me that stool I'll kick you in the ear'. And the stool is yours! Amazing! Atleast it would have been to a caveman. But then they took it a bit further, and then a lot further. What if you wanted to compel someone to go to war and kill some people you don't like for you? Then it gets tricky. Firstly, because they are allready facing the posibilty of death by doing it, there isn't much you can threaten them with if they don't do it, and secondly, they will be out of your reach even if you did want to punish them. For that kind of compulsion you need something that is both worse than death, and that also follows the person wherever they go.

Enter heaven and hell. Hell is worse than death, and it'll allways get you in the end, so it's better to obey and die.
This is what I like to call: 'Convenient.'

And respectively, heaven is better than anything possible on earth, and the person that made you do all that stuff doesn't even have to give it to you, it just happens magically if you obey (once you die). So if you die it's irrelevant anyway, so who gives a shit. Infact, might as well blow myself up right now like this guy with the dodgy beard is telling me to, fast track the whole proccess, and get those virgins right now.
Now, this I call: 'Suspiciously fucking convenient'.

These almost mindlessly simply controls work absurdly well given how blatantly dodgy they seem when you actually think about it rationally. The only explination I can come up with is that these disturbingly large groups of our fair species really are that stupid. But I'll move along.

-

Who?

That concludes the mechanisms of doctrine for the present, but not the issue at large. There's a question that should be becoming more and more pressing by now: 'Who's in charge of the doctrine'? The short answer is: 'Nobody, mostly'. Now here's the long awnser:

To explain why there's nobody in charge of doctrine I'll use my forbidin pork analogy. Pork is forbidden among some religions because it's 'unclean'. Not poisonous, or harmful to eat, but just sort of supernaturally cursed. This is, obviously, quite painfully retarded; but, crucially, it didn't used to be. These religions in question sprang up in rather warm regions of the globe, where eating pork that was past its use-by could easily kill you. People observed this fact, and they would have been pretty inteligent and scienfically minded people too. But this was way before the understanding of germs, so they didn't understand why it was hurting people, but they could see that it was, and so they had to stop people eating it. Trying to explain to an entire village that you shouldn't eat the pork because "there was something wrong with it sometimes, but not all the time, and you didn't know what it was", would have been a little hard to get those to those thatched roof idiots that these proto-scientists were dealing with, so how else do you manage it? Doctrine. You tell a story about how it's cursed by the gods, and that's why its bad. Everyone can understand that, and everyone will obey that, because the doctrine of gods and curses was probably established long before that. Parents tell the story to their children, children tell the story to their children, it becomes a way of life, nobody eats the pork.

So in the instance of the pork, it was some smart guys trying to help thir people that were, for a few generations, 'in charge' of the doctrine. But those first guys would have died, and generations would have passed and now nobody was touching pork, there was no new scientific observation of it's effects on people. So even when they had the understanding to make the connection that it was only pork that got left out for a while that was dangerous, they didn't have to oppertunity to learn that. They could not deviate from the doctrine.
Thousands of generations later, in present day, they still beleive the pork is cursed. Even now that other knowledge that they possess can more than prove that there's nothing wrong with pork, the doctrine has mutated and merged with the core doctrine of their religion. So they still can't eat pork, even though they know it's fine, because now eating pork would be an offence to their god.

So nobodys in charge. Doctrine is simply that effective at surviving it essentially becomes in charge of itself, and it can do it in a single generation. Not to assume a doctrine is inteligent though; it isn't. Only so much as a virus is intelligent. There are plenty of examples of intelligent people making use of doctrine though.
-

Intelligence
Doctrine, as I state above, is a system devoid from any intelligence. The flock are controled by the priest, the priest is controled by the more important priest, the whole institution is supposed to be controled by a single figure or group, but they in turn are supposed to be controlled by the bible which is (alledgedly) static, so the system could cycle on forever. But that isn't how it works. There are some people, probably people quite a lot like me, that see doctrine from a more latteral perspective than the rest of the flock. But where I see... well never mind what I see, but some people see oppertunity.

Using doctrine for personal gain seems to me about the most catastrophically irrisponsible thing someone can possibly do. For example, if one looks at the history (or watches South Park, alternatively), it becomes cringingly clear that the Mormonism was essentially started when one man extorted a buck or two from some nieve people by messing with doctrine. That is the kind of footprint created by use of doctrine. Or if you want a more current example, Scientology: Absurd, unfathomably ridiculous, yet growing. Never mind the dodgy cults that almost uniformly end up functioning as nothing more than the means for men to get at vulnerable young girls.

You'd be better off playing with nuclear bombs. They only kill millions of people once, not again and again in a self propagating cycle that spans the length of history.

-

Lastly, I promise. There is some hope; allbeit less than when I started writing all this. I'll have to write that down later though, I'm out of time for now.

Contrast

2009-05-03T00:22:54Z

BBC guy investigates the Westboro babtist church doing their thing.

Really I need more groups like this. They do more to undermine doctrine than any ammount of sound reason is ever going to.

Sadly there's none of them down here, but we could easily breed some. All you need is one Pastor and a bunch of indoctrinated underage girls and you've got yourself a thriving religious comunity anywhere in the world.

sundered_dark @ 2009-04-16T01:16:00

2009-04-15T13:18:11Z

http://members.shaw.ca/boong-ga/01.jpg

The more you study this image, the weirder it gets.... and it gets really, really weird.

Yes, it is real, but reality is different in Japan.

Auckland

2009-04-08T02:07:38Z

So, the Auckland super-city thing is going ahead. The concept worked really well in Brisbane so it sounds like a plan to me. But the real bit of news here is that the government decided to toss the special Maori only seats on the council and just have all normal ones.

Unsuprisingly, toys are being thrown out of the playpen by the Maori party over this, and Mr Sharples had this to say:  Getting rid of the Maori only seats is "institutionalized racisim!"   Now, like all such great statements, the more you read this one, the funnier it gets. Try it.

For those of you still catching up with the irony here, I'll extrapolate: He's complaining that getting rid of Maori only seats is institutionalized racisim... but infact having racially appointed seats on a public council is possibly the very definition of institutionalized racisim.

Now, is there even a discussion here?  Can there possibly be? I mean how dumb are we supposed to be in this country that a statement as retarded as this could provoke debate. That's getting to an 'arguing with religious people about religion' level of futile stupidity, surely. But there is going to be a debate isn't there, there always is, because the sad truth is we are that dumb in this country.

Why is New Zealand so dumb about this stuff, and why can't we just grow up and be sensible?  Now there's something worthly of discussion.

sundered_dark @ 2009-03-31T10:27:00

2009-03-30T21:28:04Z

Attack of the penis-copter.

It comes...