SkyNet

Remember the Terminator franchise? Of course you do. The evil computer that takes over the world, SkyNet, is supposed to come out of the military trying to create artificial intelligence. But I think that's crap (and not just because I don't believe in artificial intelligence).

See, there's already a technology that has taken over the world. It's called television.

Future is TV-shaped, says Intel

[Intel] said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.

"TV is out of the box and off the wall," Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, told BBC News.

"TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want."

Mr Rattner said: "We are talking about more than one TV-capable device for every man and woman on the planet.

Oh God, it's happened already! Run! Flee for your lives! All is lost! John Conner can't possibly stop it!

In all seriousness, I used to work as a cable installer, and the number of televisions people think they need is mind-boggling. Plus, what they'll forgo in order to have the money to pay for television. I've been to houses where the only furniture was a TV in the corner and a mattress on the floor. I've been to houses where the water was shut off, but not the cable. I've been called in to places where there was no electricity, and the first call these people made was to the cable company to find out why the cable wasn't working (funnily enough, cable requires electricity to function, because TVs require electricity to function).

But it's more than that now. TV is going to be everywhere. You won't be able to escape it.

You know what? I'm going to develop a device to carry around, totally illegal of course, which will interfere with TVs in my radius. Not only that, but it'll cut off cellphones too. Maybe computers as well. Within a hundred yards of me, silence, static, no connection. And if that makes me a terrorist (it doesn't, for the record, because terrorists have to be inspiring terror in order to achieve some aim, and while losing your precious TV may inspire terror in you, my aim is to interfere with TV, not to inspire terror so you'll do something else), then I don't want to be right.

Because I am right. I'm defeating SkyNet. In my own small way, I'm saving mankind. You ungrateful people don't realize what I'm doing to save the world, but one day you'll see... wait, this is beginning to sound a bit megalomaniacal. Forget it. I'm being selfish.

The Terminator franchise is a bit megalomaniacal, come to think of it.

Rebel/Conspirator

Let's just get the preliminaries out of the way: generalizations are bad. I say this not because I'm planning on making any generalizations and I don't want people to think I think that it's good. I say this not because I'm trying to prove a point about the self-reflexive nature of that statement. I'm saying this because that's basically what all of what I'm about to say boils down to, and if you just feel like stopping here, you'll have received the basic gist, which is, for those of you who came in late: generalizations are bad.

Now, let's work from the general to the specific. First off, while all generalizations are bad, generalizations about groups of people are particularly bad. So, for instance, to say that all Column A are Epithet B would be inexcusable. I could give specific examples, but why bother, as I'm sure you can think of some yourselves.

Having said that classes of people shouldn't be generalized, it is further ridiculous to believe that there is an exemplar individual within a class of people at whom one can point and say, "That individual possesses all of the traits of the class." That's just another form of generalization, I think you'll agree. From that, we can say that no two people can be held up as a smaller subset of any group of people which possesses all the traits of that larger group, and if that's the case, then one can say that the only subset of a set which can be held up as a generalization is the entire set. Thus, no individual or smaller group may be held as an exemplar of any group containing more people than that individual or group (in fact, philosophically I think there's a case to be made that you can't even hold up an entire group as an exemplar of itself, but that's not the point here).

What I'm saying, in plainer terms, is that just because individuals in a group possess traits, it doesn't follow that all individuals in that group possess those same traits. Or, to put in another way, just because someone in a group does bad things doesn't mean that the entire group should be held up as bad.

Sometimes there are cases where an entire group does bad things, and thus can be said to be bad. But until you can verify the individual badness of each group member, you can't assume, based on a sampling of the group, that all members of the group are bad.

Usually, though, that's what people do. They point to a group, say that members of that group are doing bad things, and it reflects poorly on that group. But consider: it doesn't work the other way around. For instance, there were some Nazis (and I use this because it's the obvious choice, plus I'm using the term "Nazi" to mean members of the Nazi Party in Germany between 1932 and 1945, not "fascist") who tried to kill Hitler. Does that reflect well on Nazism? Should we say, "Obviously, Nazis are misunderstood."

So why is it that when a member (or members) of a large group does something bad, something which isn't part of a philosophy espoused by that large group (killing Hitler certainly wasn't a party platform for the Nazis), we automatically assume that all members of that group agree and also that there must be some hidden agenda of that group which this bad thing is bearing out?

Think about it. If you view individuals acting against a group's stated purpose as rebels when they do something you like, why should it be any different if they do something you don't like? Not all environmentalists are terrorists, not all pro-life people are doctor-murderers, not all conservatives are evil, and not all liberals are Communists. In point of fact, you have to judge things by themselves, not representatives of them. It's fine to not like a group's stated aims, but if a member of that group does something outside the stated aims of that group, whether you like it or not, it doesn't reflect on the rest of the group at all.

What News

So, you're looking at the newspaper, and you see the headline "No New Agreement in Middle East."

Yeah, that's news. Does anyone genuinely believe that the Middle East will ever find peace? I don't. I'm not really being cynical either; I don't believe in Middle East peace.

I think people don't want it. Not really. They want peace in the way that we all want peace, and they want peace in the way that we all want to have our own way, but practically-speaking, I don't think anyone there, or possibly elsewhere, wants peace in a way which doesn't involve wiping the other side out.

Basically, at this point, I'm to the point of saying, you know what, screw all of them. There are reasons we obviously can't do that, but for myself, I don't hold out hope of anything more than things not getting worse. If things stay as bad as they are now and don't get worse, that seems like a success to me. Of course, I'm pretty sure things will get worse; Israel will continue to act unilaterally, the Arab world will continue to prop up a Palestinian resistance to that, the US will continue to prop up Israel, and the Palestinians will continue to commit pointless acts of violence because they're living in a hell-hole from which there is no escape. And if that's the status quo, things can't help but get worse without any change.

It's beyond anything more than stubborn idiocy at this point. No one is willing to back away. Let the other guy win, fight another day, that kind of thing. No one is willing to let it go. And I am not exempting anyone, West, East, Arab, Jew, Christian... anyone who is remotely involved in the area won't let anything go.

So the newspapers will undoubtedly keep reporting the same old news about how things aren't peaceful, but until I see "Peace Comes to Middle East" I won't bother to read the articles. And when I see that headline, I'll know that the crazy fundamentalists were right and I'm in for the End-Times, and I'll have too many other things to worry about.