Shameless food orgy post

I only ever come back to Poland when I need to 1) shop, 2) have a food orgy 3) both.

So, in the interest of my family having the best possible food orgy ever this Xmas, both parenting units and me went out shopping.

Sauerkraut for pierogi is scheduled to be purchased directly from a farmer on Monday, as per usual, but cakes!

(AND OMD I FORGOT ABOUT MUSHROOMS NOOOOO)

Anyway. My mum is a cheesecake person(1), so we spent hours choosing the right sort of quark. The discussion was mostly about whether it should have sugar or not.

My dad is obsessed with the idea of making his own tiramisu, somehow. I don’t know why. I don’t think he knows either. It’s like, my dad is “AND SUDDENLY THIS BRILLIANT IDEA OCCURRED :D :D :D” sort of person.

So he was sniffing around mascarpone for hours, and finally bought 1 kilogram (“WHAT IF THERE ISN’T ENOUGH??? *SADFACE*”). Uh-huh. There will be a lot of tiramisu.

(I’m also hoping there will be brussels sprouts with raisins at some point. NOM NOM NOM BRUSSELS SPROUTS :D)

Personally, I think I will be making gingerbread (OMD NEED HONEY NAO OMD OMD OMD), muffins, moar muffins, something with marzipan, a chocolate cake of some sort and apple cupcakes.

Um.

I don’t really like sweet stuff. I just want to baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaake!

(Also: must ask what the trophy girlfriends wants)

OMD JUST REMEMBERED MY BROTHER’S PAL’S GOT HIS OWN APIARY MUST HAVE THE  HONEY NOW.

On a more atheism-related note: no one in the family is actually Xian or anything. We’re in this for the food. Duh.

Oh wait. Maybe in the morning.

(1) NOM NOM NOM.

Oh noez! I’m going to Poland AGAIN (also: spellcheck tells me I should write “Cabal” instead of “Catal”)

But only for holidays!

But, alas, no internet for some time!

Also, I’ve got three long long drafts, and no will power to finish any of them, which is sad.

(On the plus side, I also have an article about variation in neolithic teeth from Catal Hoyuk(1), an article about ziggurat cake(2), and a book about ancient Israeli women’s clothing(3))

I have to think of a way to bake a ziggurat cake before I get home. That would be epic(4).

Also, another book(5) has a chapter on fake Egyptian hieroglyphs. In that they were not really writing, but pretty patterns used for decorative purposes. Sort of like Chinese writing in Japan some 3000 years later.

Awesome!

Well, gotta go. Ciao <3

(1) Sorry, to lazy for diacritics. This is how weak the will power is today.

(2) It’s not actually about ziggurat cake, but about archaeology, but I have to pretend that it’s about ziggurat cake as long as possible, because archaeology is boooooooooooooring.

(3) Yes, really.

(4) In the ZIGGURAT, DUDE way. I actually can bake. Cook, even.

I’m brilliant.

(5) I can’t forget about it, because it seems that it accounts for about half of the weight of my suitcase =_=

I never thought I’d say that, but, wow, US needs moar libertarians, apparently

Because the yes, sir/no, sir mentality is perhaps starting to get slightly unhealthy? For all involved?

So, by now everybody must have heard about what happened to Peter Watts, a Canadian s-f author who was beaten up by USian border patrol when he was going back to Canada. Whatever you might think about the incident (and it would be sort of, perhaps, crazy to believe it was Peter Watts who provoked them, and even so, would that constitute a valid excuse for such a ridiculous abuse of power? Nuh-huh) the dumbest thing is this:

When an enforcement professional pulls you over, it is known as a “stop.” The proper behavior at a stop … is to stop and await further instructions. This is for your safety … AND theirs. Getting out and demanding a reason is construed as a “lack of compliance” (see above).

Somehow, all I got while reading this paragraph was a group of Daleks screeching “OBEY! YOU WILL OBEY!” at the hapless imprisoned Doctor.

Also, WOW, does someone have a hard-on for a creepy authoritarian state in which people in uniforms can do whatever they feel like BECAUSE WE LIVE IN A PERMANENT STATE OF WAR DON’T YOU SEE oh wait-

Folks, this is the real world. Cops, borders guards, security officers get attacked routinely. They have the right to defend themselves. And defending yourself as a security professional means taking pre-emptive action.

Yeaaaaah, sure. So, they get attacked routinely (which might as well be bullshit, I’ve no idea), which means they can bully and attack other, possibly innocent  people preemptively? Ohoho, somehow, this doesn’t make any sense?

I mean, on Earth, and as long as you apply Earth logic, and so on?

So, what should Peter Watts do?

My advice: go before the judge, be contrite and respectful, apologize in the most sincere and forceful language available to you and GET ON WITH YOUR LIFE. Fighting this battle on principle is a losing proposition. You’ll face defeat and prove nothing. Accept the way things are, admit you made a mistake and learn from it. And give the security guys a break next time. The Sixties ended on September 11th, pal. Get used to it.

Koff koff, suuuuuuure! He should apologise to the armed men who assaulted him for 1.  not being sufficiently obedient and 2. provoking them, because, let’s face it, he was just asking for it.

The whore.

In the comments, the maverick author of the charming piece of pathetic authoritarian drivel divulges also that:

In a previous draft of this post, I was going to mention Israel and the check-points (so of course I thought of you and Danny). Failure to comply at an IDF check-point no doubt leads to immediate use of overwhelming force (and for good reason)

Uh-huh. Israel/Palestine war. US/Canadian border. COMPLETELY THE SAME THING oh wait-

So, where are the libertarians nao? Somewhere else, bitching about taxes?

Typical.

(But then, what do I know. I’m just a typical Euro commie)

(And thanks Cthulhu for the Schengen Agreement)

What can go wrong, will go wrong. What can’t go wrong, will go wrong, too.

I’ve got a fascinating article about fieldwork and the blunders linguists-cum-anthropologists sometimes do.

I wanted to add a quantifier like “when they haven’t done enough research before setting out on an Oceania trip”, but then I realized that, no, actually, there are things you can’t really know beforehand, because sometimes you will just make mistakes, OK?

Boldly went where no linguist had gone before

Gunter Senft researched the language (and culture, inevitably) of the Trobriand Islanders in Papua New Guinea.  The most reliable book about Trobriand Island at the time Senft was about to set out there was still Malinowski’s stuff from 1920 and 1930.

Which is why when he arrived the stuff he knew was:

1. Stuff from Malinowski’s publications.

2. The interrogative pronouns avela (who), avaka (what), ambeya (where) and the general deictic beya (this, that, there, here) he was taught by a Catholic priest from the local mission(1).

Mistakes were made

That said, some of the mistakes Senft made were rather silly and avoidable(2). This is because they were clearly caused by projecting Senft’s language on the language he was trying to learn/investigate. For instance, he showed a spider web and asked someone what it was, to which the answer was kapali la bwala. Because he already knew that kapali meant spider, he assumed that the la bwala part was another noun, which he then interpreted as “net”.

Later, it turned out that la was a possessive, and bwala meant in fact “home”, so that the whole expression should be interpreted as “spider’s house”, not web.

Other times, though, Senft really couldn’t have known.

For instance, when he heard a word bweyowa, after consulting the native speakers briefly he decided it was the deictic “here”. However, a look at a map at a map hanging at the Catholic mission(3) suggested that Bweyowa is rather a variant of Boyowa, and is actually the name of the island on which he lived.

Oops!

When Senft pointed at a piece of carving (for which the islands seem to be famous) and asked for a name for it, he was told it was uligova. It took him some time to find out that the word was actually for what the carving depicted, namely “a crocodile“, which was the reason while the language speakers had continued to snigger at his wacky antics for some time.

At first children were afraid of him whenever he went(4), so an event when a kid didn’t cry was a cause for further investigation. When a mum with a non-crying kid approached, Senft decided he could ask for the kid’s name. Upon hearing his voice, the kid did finally start crying, and the mum said gwadi e-kokola, which  Senft painstakingly noted down as the kid’s name.

What the phrase means, however, is “the child is afraid of you”.

Resistance was sort of futile

The more serious mistakes were however the ones that directly threatened to make Senft a pesona non-grata on the island: the lack of proper manners, his social misbehaviours.

For instance, he kept asking people about the names of people who were already deceased, and noticed that some of them would not want to speak to him again shortly thereafter. It turned out that it was a huge faux pas to ask about one’s dead relatives on the island.

Senft also made a blunder when he asked about a word that was part of the women’s language, and which men were forbidden to utter. He also shouldn’t have mentioned profanities that were part of children’s songs outside of the context of the songs.

One of the most hilarious mistakes, in my opinion, was the one Senft made with regard to greetings. He would go out to bath every morning, carrying his towel and soap stuff, so that he was sure everybody knew where he was going. This is why he was quite puzzled that the people he would pass on his way would ask him where he was going anyway, and that they were quite discomfited when a detailed answer was not forthcoming.

Finally, one of Senft’s neighbours explained to him that he should always answer the questions as exactly as possible, because they were as a matter of fact greetings. The details were required for two reasons:

1. the practical one: there were many accidents involving coconuts on the island,

2. the sort-of-practical one: the islanders believe that the world is filled with the malevolent spirits of dead people, known as kosi, who are fond of scaring people so that they become disoriented and get lost in the jungle.

So, by asking him for his exact route everybody was showing that they care a great deal about his well-being, and Senft, by being dismissive of those questions, acted like a complete jerk.

And this isn’t something that only happens to foreign researchers. Prof Kobayashi who specialises in NE Japanese dialects, once accidentally asked about a name of a plant in a village in which the exact same words actually meant “fart”. His informant was a nice old lady; one can only imagine how outraged she was at the young (then) post-doc behaving so rudely(5)!

(from Gunter Senft, “Ain’t misbevahing? Trobriand pragmatics and the field researcher’s opportunity to put his (or her) foot in it”, Oceanic Linguistics 34/1)

(I suppose I could send the pdf if I’m asked really nicely)

(1) Catholic missions are like cockroaches. Or locusts. D:

(2) OTOH, it’s easy for me to say.

(3) At least they aren’t completely useless.

(4) As a person who had Japanese kids crying at her formidalby alien sight, I can sympathise ^^;;;;

(5) This is a story I heard from prof Kobayashi himself. There’s even an article about the word, somewhere.

Sendai-ese

I was going through the notes I took yesterday.

I Figur – Inschrift – (Adorant – the only figure that’s inscribed – name of the god abgebrochen)

Fail!

(And I usually write stuff like left-right-up-down-NSWE-middle-outside with Japanese logograms anyway)

Double fail!

How to be a morally and intellectually bankrupt homophobe

This is very easy.

A recipe, of you please:

1 homo sapiens

1 holy book

0.5 brain

What you do is:

First, you read a holy book, one that says “because of some issues regarding gender roles in our society, anal sex in which a man is penetrated by the other party (parties) is wrong”, and then conclude that “therefore, gay sex is wrong”, which you swiftly re-parse into “gay people are sinners”. You then proceed to empirically verify this hypothesis, and find it false. Gay people are not only not evil, as you expected them to be, but they are remarkably not altogether dissimilar to yourself(1). They have families, relationships, and sometimes even buy their books in the same online bookstore as you do. You may even realize that they like the same films you do. They might even drink the same brand of coffee as you do, provided you’re an insufferable coffee snob(2).

Impossible!

You then proceed, by a strange stroke of luck that mostly can be explained by somebody’s internalised homophobia, to become friends with some of the gay people who are morally inferior to you by default because of the fact of them engaging in  sexual intercourse that may involve a position explicitly forbidden in a very old book you once read(3). They are fun, and you like to hang round with them. They also suffer from internalised homophobia, so they have nothing against hanging round with a morally and intellectually bankrupt hypocritical bigot.

Anyway, will it lead you to revising your initial hypothesis? Not in the slightest bit.

You continue being the same bigot you were to start with, now with the added cognitive dissonance, and bonus self-recriminations of “why am I not disgusted by gay people, oh noez!”, and “am I being permissive???”.

This is how religion oppresses religious people, guys. They may realise there’s nothing wrong, empirically, with being gay, and yet! Old book says it’s wrong, therefore it is.

(via Dispatches from Culture Wars)

ETA: typos.

(1) Apart from, on the average, being less bigoted than you.

(2) I am!

(3) That is, if you read it at all.

Referral fun

1. To the intrepid Googler who searched for “zajebiscie English”:

Please specify your query. Otherwise I might not be able to halp you.

2. To the intrepid Googler who looked for “how to deconvert fundie”:

I’m afraid there is no one fool-proof method to do so. If they are bright, try using Dawkins (or Dawkins’ arguments). If they’re absolutely, completely thick, you can still use Dawkins’ books to beat them to death with.

It will be rather ineffectual re: deconversion, but nonetheless very satisfying.

3. To the curious Googler who looked for “what’s bad about cognitive science major”:

Absolutely nothing, I assure you. Cognitive science is a very interesting and useful field of study. Good luck!

4. To the brave Googler(s) who searched for “sendaianonymous”:

Hi thar!

Praised be La Beebs for not allowing comments! Or at least hiding them so cunningly I’ve yet to stumble upon any.

For once, there’s a valid reason not  imprison a priest who abused children(1).

Namely, the humanitarian one: “because he’s too sick”.

Naturally, this is not how modern media communicate “too sick”. Modern media communicate “too sick” by saying “too fat”, so that the proper outrage of the general public can be achieved.

Therefore, voila, BBC’s:

Sex abuse church elder McConaghy ‘too fat for jail’

Facepalm! Thank Cthulhu for the blessed absence of reader comments.

At least he was found guilty, and the victim is more or less satisfied.

(First person to write a fatphobic comment will land in the spam folder)

(Without further warning)

(Better yet, I might preemptively spam the word “fatty”)

(1) Other than: the Catholic church shipped him to Bangladesh where he will be able to abuse more children. Or: the Catholic church special commission granted him anonymity.

Objective truth!

(I’m sick and miserable. So sick I haven’t had any coffee for two days now.

Hm.

Time to rectify my gross negligence?

Brb)

Back!

Anyway, This post started this morning with my astute observation that:

Username “objectivetruth” always belongs to a fundie or creationist(1)

Then Nachasz came and rightly pointed out that “objectivetruth” could also be a randroid.

Thus, armed with this solid heuristic apparatus, I set out to troll on my road of internet discovery.

1. WordPress users will be pleased to hear that there is no user called “objectivetruth” here.

2. Because they’re on Blogspot.

3. Only, moved out. And, guys, it’s hilaaaaaarious!

First this:

What is truth? Truth is something I believe AND it is actually true. Lots of people today talk about personal truth (subjective truth). Unless what they believe is actually true then it’s not truth. Truth is not SUBJECTIVE.

This means, and pay attention, because it’s a huuuuuuge leap right there, this means: “what I believe is true, because I say so. When other people say so, it’s not true. Because I say so”.

This is, of course, a statement of astounding profundity and far-reaching epistemological consequences.

But there is, as usual, moaaaar! This page has a curious definition of the truth:

We already know the answer: Truth is when things are the way we think they are. When our thinking matches up accurately to what we’re thinking about – when our beliefs are correct – we say they are true.

Welllllll. I’m no philosopher, but then, we don’t need a philosopher here to say that the logic here, is, perhaps, a bit, slightly, minutely circular.

Also: when things are the way we think they are, and our thinking that things are the way we think they are reinforces our thinking that they are the way we think they are, what we have is not “truth” but “confirmation bias“.

We all know what a lie is. We also know that truth is just the opposite. The Bible uses the word “truth” in this way all the time. Paul said, “I am telling the truth in Christ, I am not lying” (Romans 9:1). John writes, “No lie is of the truth” 1 John 2:21. Sometimes the contrast is between truth and error (e.g., 1 John 4:6), which is basically the same thing.

Yeah. “Error” is totally the same thing as “lie”. So, like, this is why, when we have a lying criminal in court, and a witness who is simply mistaken, they will both be treated exactly the same way by the law. Also, a student who had errors in her maths homework will be treated the same way as the one who cheated his off  his friend’s homework. Totally.

This is because “error” and “lie” are, like, totally the same thing.

(Authorial intent! Look it up! Think about it!)

Several lines down, a brief affair with sanity:

Facts of the world are truth-makers.

Yeah. Only I’m not convinced he really knows what “fact” means. Look it up(3)!

Anyway, to the serious business entries! From the delicious post about idolatry and, well, something:

Here is the big idea of todays workshop; when I put anything in my life before God it means I am also putting that thing in front of my spouse. God hates when we do this and there are severe consequences that will occur if we do not change our behavior. If God is not in the right position of my life, my master then it is impossible for our marriages to be in the right order as well.

Huh? What? Why?

So, is Christian marriage some sort of threeway-with-god kind of thing? Kinky. Or is it? And wouldn’t it mean that you’re worshipping you spouse and god? Or, whatwhereblargh.

I have to say, spatial relationships in a healthy Christian family are very confusing.

Do you know that everyone worships something in this world? No matter if you are an atheist, agnostic, buddhist, hindu, pagan or Christian you are going to worship something.

So, as an atheist, what would it be that I worship? The absence of gods? How do you do that? Do I need an altar that says “to the absence of gods”, and do I have to pray to gods every day, gleefully proclaiming “thank you, guys, for not being there”?

That would be hilarious, actually.

Only, I don’t have time, and also, no need for ritualised behaviour, most of the time.

God has created all mankind with a need to worship Him.

This is because Christianity is like Gor.

Also: what about free will?

The rest of the post was pretty much nauseating, apart from this gem:

It was early an early Saturday morning and my lovely wife gave me a kiss good bye eyes I was rolling out of bed and she tells me she needs to take my car because her car is really low on gas. I say no problem just make sure you are back by noon because I need to go to Church and work oh and babe if you can actually be back a little earlier that would be great because I want to get my oil changed. Maybe you could be back at 11. So I start getting ready and it is nearing 11. I am thinking to myself she better be back she knows I need to get my oil changed and want to get it washed. 11 passes and it is now nearing noon and I am really starting to get upset. I am getting angry. It is about 5 minutes to 12 and her she comes rolling up and I am thinking how selfish was she to be out that long. Why would she not be considerate of what I needed to do. As the door opens I bite her head off and yell at her. Where have you been! You know I wanted to get my car washed you know I wanted to get my oil change and you just did whatever you wanted. My lovely wife turns to me and says babe I got your car washed and I got the oil changed for you. I am now looking for a rock to hide under for what a jerk I am. Do you realize I was committing murder in my heart?

What a jerk!

The list of idols is a thing to behold, though. Did you know it’s a sin to have your kids go to sports practice on Sunday? Because then you may not be able to get to church on time, and god will hate you?

Heee.

Then, there’s the post about god’s wrath:

We just don’t do it often enough, if at all. We even hear people apologize or act like this is some character flaw of God.

Huh. Why is that OK for god to be a Bitch Queen of Bitchville, more or less, but the godly Christian has to be all meek and docile, like a trained puppy?

And we have to understand it is not a reactionary type of anger but it is a holy and righteous anger. We as humans have a hard time understanding this perfect anger or wrath. Because we are flawed and sinful.

Yes. Yes. Precisely. This is because we’re sinful, not because we think, like, you know,  logically.

Then we see God wipe out the entire world except for 8 people in the flood of Noah.
• Then in the days of Abraham we see that he completely destroys Sodom and Gomorra.
• We see He destroys all the army’s of Egypt along with Pharaoh in the Red Sea.
• We see that he destroyed the Amalekites and killed all men, women and children because of their 430 years of rebellion against God and the sacrificing of babies to Molech their false God. Do you know what the Amalekites would do when they sacrificed their babies they would heat up a statue of their god until it was read hot and place the babies on it and let them burn up. God gave them lots of time to repent and brought His wrath upon them when the nation of Israel wiped them all out.

All those actions are, of course, very laudable!

Sooo, god’s wrath against the Amalekites is godly and perfect, because god did it. It also has nothing to do with the ill-defined “reactionary anger”(4), which is the anger you feel when somebody does something to you. Nope. The Amalekites did nothing to god. They were just unpleasant! And they burnt babies. And god had too much time on their hands.

In short: they had it coming, stupid bitches, and genocide is all right.

Praise the lord!

Also, the ObjectiveTruth’s righteous wrath directed at commas is righteous and godly. This has nothing to do with what commas did to him, and the story about commas running over his puppy is totally fabricated. By satan.

Totally!

This and moar and the charming Objective Truth website.

ETA: Link to Nachasz doesn’t take you to FF now *facepalm*.

(1) Note: those two labels are by no means mutually exclusive(2).

(2) Also: this is all thanks to PZ who linked to this hilarious piece of verbal diarrhoea which belongs in the Creative Writing 101, part One: How not to write, but, oh well.  Anyway, look at the comments!

(3) Please note that the What is truth article has a tiny tiny tiny footnote saying “taken from this (address) website. It is however unclear to me whether he means by it the entire thing, or something else, or I don’t even know anymore.

(4) Trufax: I snorted every time I saw “reactionary anger”. *Snorts*

And I’m too lazy to copy the link, today.

I like when people say that someone’s views are mediaeval!

NSFW (profanity)

Finally, a message I can approve of, with a shiny cute adorable video: