Prosthetic Conscience

iw8 ridiculousness

OHAI. This has been sitting in my Commonplace Book since mid-Februrary waiting for me to publish it. Now I have enough of a morning routine that I may be able to do a few computer things before work again once in a while, so this is getting spit out.

So, I got an invitation to a group on Facebook called iw8. The invitation comes from an elementary school friend and high school acquaintance who has joined some kind of cult of evangelical WASPs who for some reason believe they are Jewish. The group itself seems to be dedicated to teaching youth to wait until marriage to have sex.

This is so insane that I lack the vocabulary to describe it. I’m not going to go into the details of why abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work. Instead, I want to talk about the basic social context of chastity-before-marriage.

In a society where the median age at first marriage is 14-16, like in most peasant agricultural societies, abstinence until marriage is no problem, almost a no-brainer. It’s a cultural norm that hardly even needs to be enforced in order to be effective.

In a society where the median age at first marriage is more like 18-22, like in post-WWII America, abstinence before marriage is still ideologically tenable, but is starting to bump up against biological realities, so that you can expect to see widespread hypocrisy and double standards emerging. In the US, this mostly took the form of most of the boys having premarital sex with a few “bad girls” and then going on to marry the “good girls.” Exactly how well this worked is depicted in the film Splendor in the Grass.

But when the mean age at first marriage is well over 25, and pushing towards 30, it is full-on, reality-denying, flat-earth, batshit, bugfuck insane to expect people to wait for marriage before they have sex. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to construe a literal meaning from iw8’s message. Do they mean that you should wait until you’re 26 to have sex? Or that you should marry at 18? The first is simply ridiculous to expect of anyone who’s not axsexual and does not have a calling to a celibate religious order. The second is incompatible with a society in which both men and women look to an extended period of higher education as the basis of economic opportunity. Teenagers are not stupid, and they have a lower tolerance for hypocrisy than adults. If you give them an abstinence-only message, they will correctly deduce that you are either an idiot or a hypocrite, and will tune out everything you have to say.

Sex education is essential to preventing unwanted pregnancy, and the transmission of STDs. And sex education has to be premised on the fact that teens are going to have sex. We must teach young people the facts, with a focus on safety, responsibility, and communication. The two goals have to be preventing young people’s first sexual experiences from having damaging consequences, and building a strong foundation for their later, mature sexual relationships. An abstinence-only approach doesn’t help achieve either of those goals.

[ Posted: 07:00] | [ Category: politics] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

bbcode-mode.el: a simple emacs mode for editing bbcode

A couple of years ago, I looked for a bbcode mode for Emacs, and, not finding one, wrote a very simple derived-mode for it. For some reason, syntax highlighting only worked intermittently, which I didn’t have time to put too much effort into trying to fix, and so I didn’t actually release the code for public consumption. Recently, though, I saw on Planet Emacsen an explanation for why it wasn’t working; I’ve tried to find that post to link to it and credit the author, but unfortunately, I can’t.

Anyway, having fixed the font-locking issue, I’ve released bbcode-mode.el at bitbucket. In the process of releasing it, I searched for other bbcode modes to make sure I wasn’t taking a name that was in use. It turns out that in the meantime while I wasn’t releasing my bbcode mode, Xah Lee released another, xbbcode-mode. The two modes are rather different in design, so depending on your tastes, you might reasonably prefer either one or the other.

A side note: I wish bitbucket supported org-mode README files like github does.

[ Posted: 06:43] | [ Category: computing] | Permalink | Comments: 2 ]

Fedora 12 upgrade

So, I upgraded from Fedora 10 to Fedora 12 over Thanksgiving weekend. I had skipped the Fedora 11 upgrade because of a bug in either preupgrade or the F11 install images used by preupgrade. By the time I got a round tuit to try upgrading to F11 again, F12 was a week from being out, so I just waited, then used the F12 preupgrade. It went very quickly, and fairly smoothly. These are the problems the upgrade caused me, sorted into fixed and not-yet-fixed.

Problems fixed:

• Had to reinstall lots of python libraries (had been built for 2.5, needed in 2.6) in order to get my websites to work. This was expected, though more packages were affected than I had expected.
• I had quite a few problems merging my old dovecot and postfix config files with the new ones, which resulted in the household not getting any mail for a few days. This was mostly my fault, though.
• Any sound played through pulseaudio was accompanied by a horrifying hissing noise except when the volume was at a single specific value. This turned out to be a problem with my sound device’s ALSA driver and the “glitch-free” playback in pulseaudio. This is despite the fact that I have snd_via82xx, which is supposed to work. Changing pulseaudio’s settings to add ‘tsched=0’ to anything that might load a hardware module solved it, but not until after a reboot. Probably an old pulseaudio process was hanging around from one or another user and keeping the old settings active.
• Gnome menus have old legacy things in them that they’re not supposed to. I have to fix this with every dist-upgrade.

Not fixed yet

• Old VMWare doesn’t work with the new kernel. On the laptop, which runs Ubuntu, I’d already run into this and upgraded VMWare to solve it. I’ll have to do this here in the next week or so.
• Some of my policy settings (like letting sound continue playing when you switch users) have been lost, and since there is no longer any admin GUI for PolicyKit, there’s no obvious way to fix this. I find this annoying, because my audio is played by mpd, the whole point of which is to play music when run as someone other than the active logged-in user. Adding some group memberships may fix it… have to see after restarting some services.

Conclusions

Fedora 12 seems nicely put together, and the upgrade was, though not the smoothest, smoother than many others I’ve gone through in the past.

[ Posted: 10:00] | [ Category: computing] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Linkspam for the week of November 9–15

Manliness: The Baby and the Bathwater | The Art of Manliness

As probably the only person who enjoys both “The Art of Manliness” and “I Blame The Patriarchy”, I’d like to point out that this article sums up why that’s possible.

Source: 2009-11-10 Tue, Manliness: The Baby and the Bathwater | The Art of Manliness

Why You Should Never Talk to the Police : Law is Cool

Source: 2009-11-10 Tue, Why You Should Never Talk to the Police : Law is Cool

[ Posted: 07:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Links for this week

[ Posted: 18:10] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Lunchtime Linkspam

DeMint, Maddow and Honduras: Don’t Dare Call It Treason

…

Maddow prefaced her remarks with a long homily on how badly the U.S. government hated military coups, because they ran counter to everything the U.S. government stands for, were so abhorrent to American values that the U.S. government cut off all ties to such repugnant pariah regimes, and blah blah woof woof.

This is amazingly stupid…

Source: 2009-10-06 Tue, DeMint, Maddow and Honduras: Don’t Dare Call It Treason

FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records | Threat Level | Wired.com

the feds mounted a serious investigation of Swartz for helping put public documents onto the public web.

The crime of making public documents public…

Source: 2009-10-06 Tue, FBI Investigated Coder for Liberating Paywalled Court Records | Threat Level | Wired.com

The First Counter-revolutionary

This is really a brilliant article, in that it does a very clear job of explaining Hobbes’s conception of liberty, and how that conception of liberty is still held by modern libertarians (and many modern liberals) and opposed by modern radicals. It really gets to two issues that had been previously puzzling me:

1. Why some libertarians appear to prefer monarchy to democracy (see Democracy: The God That Failed for the canonical example)
2. Why I can’t get along with agorists.

Agorists are basically a split of the anarcho-capitalist tendency who maintain most of that tendency’s theory, but have a leftist cultural identification (that is, they identify or attempt to identify with the working class) rather than the rightist (owning-class) identification of mainstream anarcho-capitalists, and a robust critique of actually-existing corporatist capitalism. I’d like to see them as allies. But they always rub me the wrong way, I think this is pretty much the reason: agorists have a Hobbesian conception of liberty that is at odds with my own radical-democratic ideals.

Source: 2009-10-07 Wed, The First Counter-revolutionary

Some Libertarian Socialist Fragments « Bowers of Paradise (Life After Authority)

A good explanation of what’s wrong with the homesteading theory of property.

Source: 2009-10-07 Wed, Some Libertarian Socialist Fragments « Bowers of Paradise (Life After Authority)

Ra’s Al Ghulah - Libya

Huh, how about that?

Source: 2009-10-09 Fri, Ra’s Al Ghulah - Libya

Cameron could well be the last ever UK prime minister | Jackie Ashley | Comment is free | The Guardian

Source: 2009-10-09 Fri, Cameron could well be the last ever UK prime minister | Jackie Ashley | Comment is free | The Guardian

Charlie’s Diary: Politics

Re: Scotland leaving the UK

Source: 2009-10-10 Sat, Charlie’s Diary: Politics

LENIN’S TOMB: The pitfalls of tolerance

A discussion of “tolerance” as it exists as a tool of colonialism or of dominance.

Source: 2009-10-13 Tue, LENIN’S TOMB: The pitfalls of tolerance

The Alexandrian - Misc Creations

Dissociated mechanics

Source: 2009-10-13 Tue, The Alexandrian - Misc Creations

A Little Help From Your Friends: How Common Security Clubs Can Mend Our Social Fabric | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Source: 2009-10-14 Wed, A Little Help From Your Friends: How Common Security Clubs Can Mend Our Social Fabric | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Meet the New Healthcare Boss

How liberal tinkering with the payment system doesn’t solve the basic factors that make health care unaffordable.

Source: 2009-10-15 Thu, Meet the New Healthcare Boss

Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil

An oldie, but a goodie.

Source: 2009-10-19 Mon, Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Tragedy of the Commons, R.I.P.

Over many decades Ostrom has documented how various communities manage common resources – grazing lands, forests, irrigation waters, fisheries— equitably and sustainably over the long term. The Nobel Committee’s recognition of her work effectively debunks popular theories about the Tragedy of the Commons, which hold that private property is the only effective method to prevent finite resources from being ruined or depleted.

Source: 2009-10-19 Mon, Worldchanging: Bright Green: Tragedy of the Commons, R.I.P.

Schneier on Security: The Commercial Speech Arms Race

Source: 2009-10-19 Mon, Schneier on Security: The Commercial Speech Arms Race

The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don’t Work) | Cracked.com

Via Free Range Kids.

Source: 2009-10-23 Fri, The 5 Most Popular Safety Laws (That Don’t Work) | Cracked.com

Worldchanging: Bright Green: Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?

I basically agree with the argument here, except for the negativity about the transition movement. The problem is that a bright green future is ideal, but the chance that we will fail to bring one about is significant. I don’t begrudge anyone trying to achieve a “soft landing” on the (hopefully false!) assumption that a crash is the only alternative.

Source: 2009-10-27 Tue, Worldchanging: Bright Green: Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?

[ Posted: 12:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

A Fist Full of Links

The quagmire of masculinity

“But there is, of course, a way out. It’s called feminism. It offers men a way to understand the nature of this toxic conception of who we are.

Feminism is a gift to men, if we are smart enough to accept it.”

Source: 2009-09-25 Fri, The quagmire of masculinity

Language Log » Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day

“Going forward” is my particular bête noire. As commentator Nathan Myers says ‘it is meant as a sort of prayer, suggesting ‘please let everyone here forget all that has gone before’. I find this particularly true of political use of the phrase, and not surprisingly, it is a particular favorite of the Obama administration.

Source: 2009-09-28 Mon, Language Log » Moving low-hanging fruit forward at the end of the day

Why I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore - Where is Ploum ?

The actual problem with Wikipedia is how desperate its editors are for (academic) credibility — to the extent that they are willing to destroy any unique value it might once have had in pursuit of (academic) credibility. But the sad thing is that they will never convince their critics, and in the mean time are alienating their would-be supporters.

Source: 2009-09-28 Mon, Why I don’t contribute to Wikipedia anymore - Where is Ploum ?

LENIN’S TOMB: G20 Protests

One of the better comments I’ve seen about the repression of the G20 protesters points out that when the ‘Teabaggers’ inspired by Glenn Beck turned out to protest over healthcare reform, they could bring a gun and cite the second amendment, without being harrassed. G20 protesters get beaten up and exposed to top notch military technology if they just cite the first amendment.

Source: 2009-09-28 Mon, LENIN’S TOMB: G20 Protests

Senate Dems against public option come from states with near-monopoly insurance markets

Source: 2009-09-30 Wed, ISS - Senate Dems against public option come from states with near-monopoly insurance markets

Groklaw - On Mono, Miguel, Stallman and Fusion with Microsoft

The best article currently available on the subject. Lays out full evidence for Miguel de Icaza’s perspective and why it is incompatible with the Free Software movement.

Source: 2009-09-30 Wed, Groklaw - On Mono, Miguel, Stallman and Fusion with Microsoft

Memes strike back: Gerbils, gay blood elves, and Glenn Beck - Ars Technica

How many legal documents have you seen that throw circumspection to the four winds and tell a WIPO arbiter that “only an abject imbecile could believe that the domain name would have any connection to the Complainant.” And that’s before the “HOMOSEXUAL BLOOD ELF” even makes an appearance.

This is quite possibly the best legal brief ever.

In other news, Rick Santorum is be “dipping his toes” in the 2012 Iowa “waters”. Ew.

Source: 2009-09-30 Wed, Memes strike back: Gerbils, gay blood elves, and Glenn Beck - Ars Technica

Commentator who called for coup against Obama worked in Johnson, Carter administrations

This is basically blawg drama, and thus, SERIOUS BUSINESS, but it’s interesting in what it says about the right-wing mind (such as it is). Hasn’t been reported in the MSM, but possibly only because it’s blawg drama.

Source: 2009-09-30 Wed, ISS - Commentator who called for coup against Obama worked in Johnson, Carter administrations

Bluetile - a modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve

I like the idea of a project that tries to bridge the gap between traditional window managers and modern tiling window managers.

Source: 2009-10-01 Thu, Bluetile - a modern tiling window manager with a gentle learning curve

LENIN’S TOMB: Victory for neoliberalism in Ireland

Source: 2009-10-04 Sun, LENIN’S TOMB: Victory for neoliberalism in Ireland

Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws - NYTimes.com

Many big slaughterhouses will sell only to grinders who agree not to test their shipments for E. coli, according to officials at two large grinding companies.

Spew.

Source: 2009-10-05 Mon, Woman’s Shattered Life Shows Ground Beef Inspection Flaws - NYTimes.com

‘I’m not sure “bimbo” is the best translation’

The Conservapedia crew are busy rewriting retranslating the Bible to cleanse it of liberal bias. (Via.) Their talk page for the Gospel According to Mark is a record of stupidity and blundering that some day they are going to wish had never been there. They’ve had particular trouble updating the name of the Third Person of the Trinity (‘ghost is misconstrued as spectre or phantasm, rather than spirit (interestingly, they’re the same word in German, geist, from which I imagine we get the wording’, is one scholarly contribution) and after considering ‘Holy Force’ and ‘Divine Force’ have settled (for now) on ‘Divine Guide’. Which just makes the Third Person sound like some wandering swami.

Source: 2009-10-05 Mon, The Early Days of a Better Nation

[ Posted: 07:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Linkspam of the Ages

[ Posted: 07:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Everyone Loves Link Spam

[ Posted: 06:30] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Getting html articles in Gnus to obey browse-url-browser-function

I use Gnus for email, and frequently get emails with an html part. In some cases, I even want to receive emails with an html part, as with RSS feeds that have been translated to Gnus groups via rss2email, in which I sometimes want to see images inline so I don’t have to click through to the original article. Like most people viewing html emails in Gnus, I let emacs-w3m handle the translation of html to text. The problem with this is that then hitting return on a link will use w3m to follow the link, not the browser you have specified in browse-url-browser-function.

This little code snippet fixes that. I’m not sure it’s ideal in all ways. But it works for me currently.

(eval-after-load “w3m”
  ‘(progn
     (defun jfm/open-url-dwim (&optional url)
       (interactive)
       (if (equal browse-url-browser-function ‘w3m-browse-url)
           (w3m-browse-url url)
         (if (equal (face-at-point) ‘w3m-anchor-face)
             (w3m-view-url-with-external-browser url)
           (browse-url url))))
     (define-key gnus-article-mode-map (kbd “<return>”) ‘jfm/open-url-dwim)))

[ Posted: 07:30] | [ Category: computing] | Permalink | Comments: 2 ]

Random system beep sounds for Fancy beeper

Akkana Peck writes about her approach to using Fancy Beeper to provide random system beeps on a system with no built-in system beep. I’m thrilled to see that people are actually using Fancy Beeper in the wild and are building their own solutions around it.

[ Posted: 06:30] | [ Category: computing] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

stockphoto on bitbucket

So, development of stockphoto, my Django-based photo gallery application has been languishing for a long time. Like, three years long. Like since Django 0.96 long. Mostly, that was kind of okay, because it is a tiny application, and it was working perfectly within its limited domain, until the release of Django 1.0. I had been wanting to fix it up before the Django 1.0 release, but never got a round tuit.

After my daughter was born, I needed to use it to show baby pictures to our family, so I had the motivation to at least fix stockphoto up to work with a current Django release. This is done; it mainly involved fixing up the model code, switching to forms from oldforms, fixing up the URLs, and fixing zipfile import to work with the new upload API. I have put the fixed code on bitbucket. If you pull from tip at that repository, or download a snapshot of tip from the downloads page, you will have a stockphoto package that works on Django 1.0.

This isn’t quite a release though; it needs a few cleanups before I can push out an 0.3 release:

1. Update documentation
2. Since there were some small model changes, I need to provide a way of migrating from 0.2.1. I am leaning towards South for providing this.
3. Remove dead code

There won’t be any new features in stockphoto 0.3 except for non-browseable galleries (which is already in bitbucket, since I wanted it for my daughter’s site). I’m tentatively planning a 0.4 release that will have the features originally intended (since so many years ago) for 0.3, plus some suggested to me in email.

If you’re interested in using stockphoto, please follow it on bitbucket, and send me any patches you find useful.

[ Posted: 12:15] | [ Category: computing/django] | Permalink | Comments: 1 ]

Why I haven’t been blogging

I haven’t blogged in a long time, mainly because I haven’t been in front of a computer very much for a while. I also haven’t wanted to write any political or technological posts before I wrote about the reason I haven’t been in front of a computer, my daughter Jubilee Fern McBrayer-Donath.

I announced her birth to friends and family by email, and set up a Django-based website for them to see her photos (password required; friends and family who got left off the email announcement, email me to get it). But other than that, I really didn’t get in front of a keyboard between her birth (April 9, 2009), and when I went back to work two months later (thanks to FMLA).

But anyway, she’s beautiful and strong, and I’m at a keyboard a bit more now, so the web-mediated part of my life is getting back on track, and a few articles should start to trickle out.

[ Posted: 12:10] | [ Category: personal] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

identica-mode.el update

I’ve written a little update of Gabriel Saldana’s identica-mode.el, which wasn’t working on identi.ca as it currently stands, or at least not with a current Emacs. The updated version is posted on EmacsWiki. Expecting some updates from Matt in Chicago to fix @links, and planning to add support for !groups and #tags, maybe some more faces.

[ Posted: 11:22] | [ Category: computing] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Anarchy We Can Believe In

[ Posted: 13:07] | [ Category: politics] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Links for Jan 25 2009

[ Posted: 20:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Links for [2009-01-20 Tue]

[ Posted: 18:00] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Links for 2009-01-10 Sat

[ Posted: 11:55] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Response to Brad Warthen’s 2009/01/09 The State Editorial

As of yesterday (2009/01/09), IDF officers have admitted that there was no gunfire or mortar fire from the UN school that was shelled by an IDF tank. This has been reported in the UK Guardian, and in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. This means that the sole source for that claim – the IDF – has admitted that it was a fabrication. Of course, the UN has denied since the beginning that there were any Hamas militants shooting from the school. It is unfortunate that you chose to privilege a CYA claim from the Israeli military over information from the agency actually present at the school.

This is not an isolated incident, but part of a disturbing pattern. The IDF has also shelled UN relief convoys, forcing the UN to end humanitarian aid to Gaza civilians. What’s more, the UN gave GPS coordinates of all UN facilities in Gaza to the IDF, presumably so that they would know not to target those coordinates. They also made it known that civilian refugees were taking shelter in the school, which makes it clear that the shelling was an intentional act of state terrorism.

It is highly disturbing that The State‘s official editorial position is in favor of state-sponsored terrorism.

[ Posted: 11:51] | [ Category: politics] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]

Links for Tue 2009-01-06

[ Posted: 22:01] | [ Category: web] | Permalink | Comments: 0 ]