The Loneliness of Truth

So, I recently made a comment over on Pmomma's blog, and I made reference for something I've been meaning to write about for some time.

Atheism is a lonely proposition. Really. Through repeated observation and conversation, I've come to believe that theists believe in a God for the same reasons little children have imaginary friends: it gives them a sense of comfort, someone they can connect with.

I mean, how often have you heard some bornagain evnagelical asshole talking about how they were an alcoholic/drug-addict before they "came to Christ"? Or somebody talking about how they thought their life was pointless and were seriously considering committing suicide, but changed their minds when one of their friends/relatives/coworkers mentioned a book to them with some hippy as the protagonist, who ultimately wound up nailed to a wooden cross?

The truth is, the people who act like this are, in addition to suffering from psychological and neurological issues, probably very lonely. Really, what's the point of living when life is just the mundane existence it is, occasionally and punctuated by brief moments of elation, enlightenment, inspiration, and contentment tempered by grief, pain, hunger, hatred, anger, and lust?

When you make that final step, the one where you place logic, rationality and empiricism above human emotion and animal desires as a method for dictating your actions, you come to the stark realization that there really is no default reason to live. Granted, passing your genes on is always a good starting point, but then you're no better than your dog. Who, I might mention, doesn't even have the luxury of a functioning reproductive system if you are a responsible owner.

It is an interesting paradox: you want to find the will to live. Why is that? At first, it seems like seeking an explanation for this leads to infinite recursion: you want to find a reason to live because you want to find a reason to live because you want to find a reason to live because...

However in my case, I realized that self-termination would have negative impacts other than the permanent cessation of my conscience: my family would be devastated, my friends would have a reduced opinion of me, and the world would miss out on the innovations I have to give it (you guys have absolutely no idea what a treat you're in for!).

I have my reasons for continuing my existence: I want to be better than those who I respect intellectually, and I want them to know it; I want to fall in love completely, with someone in whose company I can truly allow myself to be weak; I want to have children, passing on both my genes and my intellect, both of which stand apart from others' contributions in their respective categories; I want to make the world a radically better place, and in so doing achieve immortality; I want to make things, because when it comes down to it engineering, artifice, and insight are my truest passion.

In the end, it comes down once again to the distinction between Humans and animals: as a man I am compelled, via rational analysis of my current situation and application of known trends, to contemplate the future and project onto it my desires; this is where hopes and dreams come from. Contrast this with an animal, who has no long-term wants-- and thus, neither hopes nor dreams nor machinations of the creative mind; only desires, applicable exclusively to the now.

Politics

So, every day the retard race for President of the United States of America is pushing its way into my life. From my atheist friends who are, as a rule, mostly liberal, to my well-intentioned conservative Catholic mother, I can't seem to get away from this shit. The fact that people don't understand why I don't worship (Obama|McCain) as the be-all and end-all of potential candidates only exacerbates my frustration.

I have decided to compile a list for you, my faithful non-extant readers, of my political positions. Because nobody seems like they hold all of these beliefs (the Libertarian party comes closest, but is still a bit off), I have decided to start the Lumberjack/Ninja party. With a majority vote of 1, I hereby nominate myself as the 2008 presidential candidate for the L/NP.

My platform is as follows:

Abortion: The right to decide who makes use of your bodily resources is inalienable. Since developing embryos are making use of your nutrients and immune system at your consent, you have the right to revoke that consent. Thus, abortions are to remain legal, safe, and available without the threat of violence and/or death looming over the heads of those poor women who seek them. However, I would be open to an amendment to pro-choice law that outlaws abortions after a certain point; waiting until a fetus is fairly well developed to abort it is, in my mind, akin to inviting your asshole brother-in-law into your house, and not having wit to kick him out before he pisses you off forces you to shoot him. Term limits on abortion are the only tricky part of the whole issue; early-stage abortions should, in my and the entire Lumberjack/Ninja community's mind, remain legal.

Gay Marriage: Why is this still an issue? A pair of consenting adults is a pair of consenting adults. I'd much prefer to see a child raised in a loving household with two parents, whether they be a homosexual couple or not, than by a single mom parent.

Gun Rights: It's right there in the Constitution, folks. You have the right to keep and bear arms. That means guns. All guns. I'd be open to the idea of an Assault (read: Automatic) weapons registry, but not an outright ban. While certain cities may have issues with gun-related violence, I posit that this a result of inner-city culture and not that of a piece of machinery designed to accelerate a chunk of metal at high velocities. If individual cities wish to ban the sale of certain classes of firearms, that is their prerogative... for now. However, it is useful to keep in mind that when you don't know who's packing, you are generally more reluctant to try and shoot somebody.

Men's Rights: You heard me. Men tend to get dicked in a lot of things, and only certain of those areas are amenable to legislative correction. As president, I would end Judicial and legislative discrimination against men, in areas such (but not limited to) the following: Child support/custody, incarceration rates, the draft, and Social Security. I'd also try to adjust the media bias of the "lovable but clueless" dad that permeates pretty much every family sitcom you could imagine. Additionally, I'd address men's health issues, because there is a prominent disparity in the amount of attention, money, and time spent addressing men as opposed to women in healthcare.

Health Care: I'd support legislation to provide for a state-controlled health insurance plan. Everybody would be automatically approved, and your rate would depend on your ability to pay and your expected burden to the insurance fund, with more weight given to the latter criterion. State-provided health care would come with the stipulation that you do what your doctor says you should do, or you don't get treatment. We're here to get you fixed, not to pray for some witchdoctor to cure your gout.

Energy: This is a big one. I'd support research into and implementation of alternative energy sources. These include, but are not limited to: (Thermo)Nuclear reactors, wind, solar, and geothermal. This is America goddamit, we have everything we need right under our feet (or over our heads, as the case may be). My plan would involve two major phases: Shifting our dependence off of foreign oil, and then shifting our dependence off of oil altogether.

The Environment: My energy policy would help to reduce our carbon output, potentially achieving a carbon-neutral society by the time all is said and done. In addition to that, and in accordance with my capitalistic philosophy, I would add a tax on "Environmental Services"- basically, you must pay to have all that shit you dump into the air/water/ground recycled by the environment, which has a finite capacity for chemical recycling. The environment is a resource; resources cost money. Thus, using the environment should cost money. This would provide incentive to streamline processes, making them both more energy efficient and more environmentally friendly.

Education: Back in the day, the United States was the world leader in science and engineering; we kicked ass. Unfortunately, due to the current sociopolitical climate and the pervasive idea that "Math is Harddd!!", we are viewed as a big dumb puppy by the rest of the world, with naught but our inertia maintaining us as the current world leader. We need to re-focus on what's really important: Science. Arts and Social studies obviously need to be taught, along with history. But here's the deal: the Humanities does not change nearly as quickly, nor require nearly the input for a desirable output, as do the real Sciences (in order of Awesomness, that is: Physics, Chemistry and Biololgy). History simply doesn't change. You are not reading this on a computer because some Liberal Arts major studied underwater basket-weaving; it's because people wanted to know how the universe works, and once they had that knowledge they took and used it to bend the universe to their will and make it do what they wanted. I would encourage the Arts, but not as part of a core primary-education curriculum. Any teacher that even mentions teaching Creationism Intelligent Design would be fired on sight.

Civil Liberties:: Unfortunately, we as a people have recently given up a significant number of our rights in order to feel safe from tewwowism. I do not feel comfortable with the fact that my laptop may be seized indefinitely at the border, my email read, or my telephone tapped without a warrant; neither should you. I will fix these things if it's the last thing I do.

Foreign Policy: We need to quit being the world's police department; while it is neither practical nor desirable to sever ties completely with the outside world, I believe that we as a country need to remove ourselves from the unpleasant situations we manage to find ourselves in and attempt to maintain a cordial relationship with everybody else. If we do feel compelled to write some remote wrong, then we move in like Ninjas (I have lots of experience in this area), kicking ass and taking names. We will replace governments if we see fit, but we will set them up to be truly independent. Free people make friendly countries. If countries like Iran still want to be douchebags and decide to push the envelope too far, we will turn them into a glass parking lot, simple as that.

The Joke War on Drugs: It's not working. At all. Here's an idea: consumption of any drug becomes a non-punishable offense; distribution of non habit-forming substances becomes a controlled industry, just like tobacco and alcohol. Distribution of "hard" drugs remains an offense. This way, your friendly neighborhood pot-smoking hippy doesn't get in trouble for doing something that's arguably less harmful than consuming alcohol, and he can make a little money on the side. Conversely, the asshole who tries to sell your children Methamphetamine will be tossed in jail for the rest of his life. Everybody is happy, and if they aren't, it's because they want the government to make their decisions for them, so they need a dose of unhappiness to make them understand the real world anyways.

PHP

So, for the past few days at work I've been self-tasked (anything to avoid doing more QA work) with researching and testing possible upgrade avenues for our internal bulletin board- a simple phpbb instance.

While the version we have installed is very stable, it lacks one critical feature that myself and the important folks inside the Sys Admin group consider very helpful: LDAP-based authentication.

Fortunately, the newest version of phpbb includes LDAP authentication built-in, so once one has an instance running, one merely has to literally click a button and type in the distinguished name and LDAP server information, and one is ready to go.

I duplicated the message board database to my computer with little trouble; mysqldump is one of those simple, disproportionately useful utilities that you would have written yourself had you not known it already exists. Anyways, step one went very well.

Step two: PHP configure/build/install. Wow. Does it need to be that hard? I mean really, I shouldn't have to rebuild PHP every time I want to add new functionality. Running this:

./configure --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --enable-xml \
--with-mysql=/usr/local/lib/mysql
make
sudo make install


and adding a new --enable-foo or --with-bar=baz every time I want to add a new module is simply ridiculous. Does this have something to do with PHP's lack of any concept of namespaces? I mean, really, do we need to throw all 3000+ possible functions in the global namespace? This isn't C, guys. Things would be somewhat alleviated if there were any sort of uniform naming convention that the PHP standard library followed. Unfortunately, no such convention exists and if it does, it is religiously not implemented. WTF?

Anyways, I finally got phpbb3 up and running. It is a testament to the phpbb team that they are capable of writing what I have, in my very limited experience, deemed to be a very well designed piece of software in such a bizarre language.

I guess I should mention that I'm a python guy. Before that, I was a C guy. I've looked into Ruby, which seems like a cool language but provides no functionality I feel I need that python doesn't provide (and it's syntax is very foreign, but I guess that's not really a criticism. If I had my druthers...). I learned Perl before Python, and never really appreciated it. I find that the general rule with Perl is that it's great for one-off one-liners; anything including more than one carriage-return would probably better be served by a more readable language, like assembly.

It seems to me that PHPs most praised feature is also its greatest weakness: anybody can write a web application in PHP. Perhaps I'm an elitist (difficult to prove, I have very little formal CS/SE education), but I've found that people should cut their teeth on well-structured language-- a category in which I include python, C and (grudgingly) Java-- so that they learn good form before being thrown into a syntactic free-for-all with languages like PHP or Perl.

I do have some good things to say about PHP: it's very readable, when not written by a 14-year-old geek setting up his first message board; the community is abundant (though that can also be a problem), and it runs on anything, which for a dynamic-content language is huge; Python has its own web frameworks (I'm finding appreciation for Django), but it is simply not as widely utilized as PHP. That whole language-itself-as-a-templating-system is pretty cool.

Anyways, I guess it just comes down to personal preference. I just can't seem to get into PHP, no matter how hard I try; it stirs up something inside me, something that can only be calmed by using a language that was actually designed. Wow, that sounds really flamebait-y. Sorry. If I wanted to cause trouble, I'd tell you why Emacs sucks and Vim über-alles ist!

Good Luck, man

So, I went to a party tonight. Turns out it was actually a going away party for a friend of the host's; a young Iraqi man who received a full ride scholarship to study engineering here and just graduated, so he has to go back.

I really was just amazed at this guy. Besides having amazing english, he was just a Nice Dude (tm). While he regrets having to leave (he that out of the few places in the states he's visited, Montana is the best), he wants to join the US Army Corps of Engineers as a civillian because he really believes in what they are doing over there. Apparently, it's not all IEDs and cowardly suicide bombers; some real progress is being made, and people's lives are being improved.

He's not the only person I've heard that from; however, he is the only Iraqi from who I've heard such sentiments. Then again, he's the only Iraqi I believe I've ever spoken to.

Anyways, I'd like to compliment him on his vision, drive, and devotion to a cause he believes in. It's also impossible to state what a nice guy he was, and the impression I got of him as a man in the few hours I met him is indescribable. I really hope he does well, and failing that, I hope he doesn't get blown up.

Dana, you are one hell of a dude, and I strongly respect what you are doing, and what you stand for as a man. May fortune favor you, and may the fruits of your labors not go unrewarded.