Category: Side Notes

Unconsciously Accepting Our Programming

One phenomenon that continues to fascinate me is the habit of individuals to take on outside programming seemingly without conscious thought.

For example, if you ask people whether Nazis should be punched, you will likely receive one of two responses: yes or no. This become interesting when you press either side to explain their reasoning.

Those who are against punching Nazis will explain that they oppose using violence in response to mere speech. However, if you press them by submitting scenarios where speech an lead to deadly consequences and ask them where the line is drawn, they usually won’t be able to provide much in the way of a response.

Those who are in favor of punching Nazis will explain that Nazis are dangerous individuals and therefore must be dealt with before they obtain power. However, if you press them by asking them why they only want to punch such deadly people instead of outright kill them, they usually won’t be able to provide much in the way of a response.

Both sides are usually regurgitating programming they’ve received from others. One side is regurgitating the ideal of free speech whereas the other side is regurgitating the ideal of using force preemptively to prevent a more dangerous situation from arising.

All of us unconsciously accept programming to some extent. But we are capable of rational thought and therefore capable of overcoming programming (or deciding whether the programming is actually beneficial and keeping it). However, employing rational thought to overcome programming seems to be uncommon and some people even actively push against doing so. It’s almost like people enjoy the fact that they’ve unconsciously accepted programming.

The Government of Maine Must Be Abolished

The government of Maine must be abolished. I know what you’re thinking, I’m an anarchist so I say this about every governmental body. However, the government of Maine is deserving of special scrutiny because it committed a sin so egregious that no justification for its continued existence matters any longer. That sin was the failure to use the Oxford comma:

Drivers with Oakhurst Dairy filed the lawsuit in 2014 seeking more than $10 million. Court documents filed Thursday show that they settled for $5 million.

A federal appeals court decided to keep the drivers’ lawsuit alive last year. The suit concerned an exemption from Maine’s overtime law that says it doesn’t apply to “canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of” foods.

The disagreement stemmed from the fact there’s no Oxford, or serial, comma in the “packing for shipment or distribution” part. The drivers said the words referred to the activity of packing and shipping, but they don’t do any packing.

As I’m prone to say, you either use the Oxford comma or you’re wrong.

Explaining the Plebeians Love of the Games

The Super Bowl is being hosted in my neck of the woods this year. It’s not bad enough that the entire city looks like it’s hosting an open-ended military presence but it also has to keep up this appearance all week. The plebeians, even though most of them can’t afford to attend the actual game, don’t seem to mind though. In fact many of them belief it’s an honor to host such a great event.

What honor do these individuals experience as they watch the Super Bowl taking place a few miles from their home on televisions that their fellow plebeians in, say, Houston, Texas don’t get to experience as they watch the same game on their televisions?

The honor of knowing that if a sizable nuclear bomb were dropped on the US Bank Stadium, they and their house would be consumed in the exact same blast!

What greater honor could any of us experience?

I’m Putting Myself on The Blockchain™

I am formally announced that I’m putting myself on The Blockchain™. Please throw money at me:

The stock market loves blockchains. Last month, the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranded itself as Long Blockchain and saw its stock price triple. On Tuesday, restaurant company Chanticleer Holdings saw its stock soar by 50 percent after the company announced that it would be moving its reward programs to the blockchain. The company owns several burger brands and operates a number of Hooters restaurants. It also holds a minority stake in Hooters of America, the parent company of Hooters.

Another Day, Another Officer Involved Shooting

Yesterday an individual somehow managed to get a weapon into a police interview room and apparently drew the weapon against himself, which lead to an officer involved shooting:

A man was injured after a police shooting inside Minneapolis City Hall Monday afternoon.

Police chief Medaria Arradondo said Minneapolis police personnel were interviewing the man, and then left him alone in a room.

“And he began injuring himself with an edged weapon. After attempting to subdue the adult male subject, officers discharged their weapons,” Arradondo said.

The man was rushed to Hennepin County Medical Center. His condition is not known.

One has to wonder how the individual got the weapon into the interview room but I digress.

The more I see the term “officer involved shooting” the more I realize how euphemistic it is. The first reports of this incident simply mentioned an officer involved shooting, which didn’t tell me if an officer was shot, if an officer shot somebody, or if all parties involved were shot. If you read a headline that says, “An officer involved shooting occurred at the Minneapolis City Hall,” you might be lead to believe that somebody shot a police officer.

Why can’t people use the far less ambiguous description, “An officer shot somebody,” or, “An officer was shot?” Why do so many people fell the need to tiptoe around what actually happened?

An Interesting Psychological Phenomenon

Whenever there’s a story about an instance of abuse where the victim failed to fight back I see at least one comment asking why the victim didn’t fight back.

It’s an interesting question. I’ve often asked the same thing about inmates on death row. There is a population of individuals who have nothing to lose. If they follow the rules and act submissive, they’re going to die anyways. Why don’t they fight back? Certainly the minute chance of escape is better than the guarantee of death, right? Yet we seldom read stories about inmates on death row making a last ditch effort to escape before they’re executed.

It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. I wish I had a better understanding of it.

The Evolution of Languages

If you’re familiar with any Romance language, then you’re familiar with the concept of gendered nouns. Each noun is assigned a gender; which can be masculine, feminine, or neuter (although some languages have dropped the neuter gender); which changes how its accompanying adjectives are declined and what pronouns are used to refer to it. Things can get interesting when a noun that refers to a person doesn’t reflect the gender of the person.

For example, the Latin word for farmer is agricola. Agricola, despite being in the first declension group of nouns (which are mostly feminine), is a masculine noun. Because of its grammatical gender it would be grammatically correct to use masculine adjectives and pronouns to refer to any farmer even if they’re female. Some Latin nouns could be either masculine or feminine depending on the gender of the person they described, which is a concept many of its successors have expanded on. French, for example, has masculine and feminine versions of many nouns that describe people. However, what does one do when they are referring to somebody whose gender isn’t known? This question has been a hot topic in French circles in recent years:

Paris (AFP) – Moves to make French more female-friendly have sparked impassioned debate in France, with an appalled Academie Francaise warning of a “mortal danger” to the language of Moliere.

At the centre of the debate is the growing use of formulations such as “lecteur.rice.s” for the word “readers” to embrace both genders.

[…]

But the school textbook referring to farmers as “agriculteur.rice.s” and shop owners as “commercant.e.s” — complete with a new punctuation mark called the “middle dot” at the level of a hyphen — sparked particular rage among French language purists.

I find it amusing that people who speak a bastardized version of Latin are worried about purity but I digress.

Language is one of my favorite topics to study. Since languages evolve spontaneously they becoming friction points. Different groups of individuals have different views on how languages should evolve. French is subject to these arguments more frequently than most other languages because there is an organization, the Academie Francaise, that attempts to control the evolution of the language. Whenever popular culture decides French should evolve in some manner the members of the Academie Francaise are there to bitch about how that evolution is unacceptable.

One side effect of the spontaneous nature of language evolution is that one can often get a feel for the concerns of many of a language’s speakers by looking at the most recent evolutions. Gender, for example, has become a larger concern in the United States and Europe. This has reflected in the predominant languages of those regions by the introduction of new words and, in the case of languages with gendered nouns, new grammatical rules.

Ultimately these changes will contribute to the languages changing so much that today’s speakers won’t be capable of comprehending speakers of the future. What is even more fascinating in my opinion though is that these changes will contribute to today’s languages splitting off into multiple other languages. In a way our concerns and disagreements can become so polarizing that we literally cease to speak the same language.

The Sordid State of Conspiracy Theories

Remember when conspiracy theories involved shadowy organizations pulling the strings behind the scenes in order to advance plots so complex that they made James Bond villains look like simpletons by comparison?

Now we get mundane plots like George Soros paying some leftist militant to attack Rand Paul in order to send a message. I blame the degraded literacy rates. Nobody appears capable of crafting complex plots like those found in many novels. Instead people today seem to only be capable of concocting straight forward storytelling of the likes found in most Marvel movies.