Likely

You know how much I love stupid things. In this case, I just love criminal offenses which are vague enough that about anyone could be charged with them.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8667761.stm

I'm not pro-terrorism. I don't like people who kill other people for any reason, really. So I'm not really saying that the people in question are guilty or innocent or anything else. I'm just agog at the crime with which one of them was charged.

Ilyas Iqbal was jailed for 18 months for possessing a document likely to be useful to a terrorist.

Okay. I possess a document which might be useful to a terrorist. Not even "might." It's likely to be useful to a terrorist. It's called the phone book. I understand that it contains contact information for people who sell various items a terrorist might find very useful indeed. I know I'm not in England, but I'd venture a guess that, even if you can't find gun dealers in the phone book in Ol' Blighty (and I don't know, maybe you can) you can find various other contact information of interest, if not likely to be useful.

In the age of terrorism, we've gotten so scared of things that we accuse people of having documents "likely to be useful." Not even, "documents which were proven to be used in the commission of a terrorist act." That's problematic too, but we're not even going to be that hardcore. Terrorist paraphernalia this ain't. This is like the DEA arresting me because I own plant food, which I might use to grow cannabis. Of course, they could also arrest me for owning plant food because it contains fertilizer, which would likely be useful to make a bomb.

Yes sir, we're sure scared of terrorism. I bet terrorists find that useful. It's likely, anyway.

Outage

Headline: WordPress network bug throws millions of blogs offline

Now normally, you have to wait to the end of the article for the fine print. Normally, you spend the entire article wondering, "Hmmm, I wonder if I should panic the way they say I should?" You'll read an article with the headline: "Silent Killer May Stalk Your Home!" and have to get to the bottom of the page, or at least past the page break, to read that what the article is really about is carbon monoxide and you only have to worry if you're operating a coal coking furnace in your basement.

But the BBC is a haven of journalism, and they give you the straight dope right up front.

"Network problems knocked more than 10 million WordPress blogs offline in a two hour outage on 18 February [emphasis mine]."

Oh dear God! Not... two whole hours! Two hours where I couldn't find out what kind of stew you had for dinner. Two hours where I might not be kept up to date as to your score in some video game. Oh the horror!

Our obsession as a society, indeed as a world culture, with immediacy and trivia has gotten ridiculous, don't you think? If it had been two days, that would be something to remark on. If it had been a vital service, that too would be unacceptable if it were down for two hours. And I suppose it's possible that one or two of the blogs we didn't get to see for two hours (I never noticed myself, but then I'm me) was of vital importance. But they're blogs. Two hours is nothing. Get a damn life, people. I agree that it's a deal, but a big enough deal to make the news? Nope. Sorry. No sale.

Bad Things

You know a question you never hear asked? Why do bad things happen to bad people?

Work with me here. Everyone always asks why bad things happen to good people (if they're interested in justice) or why good things happen to bad people (if they're jealous or vindictive... I mean, if they're interested in justice too, I guess). These are, despite the fact that most people don't think before they ask them, excellent questions.

They don't mean much if you think the universe is essentially random, or if you think that the universe is ruled by a cruel and capricious deity or deities (the Aztecs come trippingly to mind; it must not have been a question they asked their priests very often: "Why does Huitzilopochtli, cruel god who demands blood sacrifices, allow bad things to happen to good people?" Answer: he's a jerk). But if you, like many people who believe in a deity these days, believe in a God of infinite love and compassion, it's a fair question to ask why He or She or It or They don't evidence that compassion much.

The answer given defines faith, I suppose. If you say, "Well, God works in mysterious ways," that means something different from saying, "God doesn't cause bad things to happen, but we wouldn't have free will if He stepped in and kept bad things from happening." There are countless other ways to answer the question of bad things happening to good people, just as there are countless ways to explain good things happening to the bad.

But no one ever asks why bad things happen to bad people (or the corollary, why good things happen to good people, although that's slightly less illustrative).

Logically, it's just as good a question. If God(s) is(are) of infinite love, He/She/It/They should be opposed to bad things happening to anyone. Think about it; if you love someone (even non-infinitely) you should be opposed to bad things happening to them, regardless of their character. You might understand that there are consequences to bad actions, but you shouldn't wish those consequences on those you love, even if they deserve them. Now that doesn't mean you want them to escape consequences, just that you don't wish for bad things to happen to them. That seems to me to be a function of love.

So the answers that are given to the question, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?" should be just as valid for the question, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to bad people?" In fact, the question really could simply read, "Why does God allow bad things to happen to people?"

And again, those answers are illustrative. "To punish the wicked!" is definitely a different religion from, "God works in mysterious ways," which is different from, "Free will."

But the issue is that people ask certain questions and not the equally-valid opposites. And I think that the reason for that is that people want bad things to happen to bad people, and they want God to do it. You can disagree personally, but you have to admit that there are probably a lot of people out there who feel that way. We all think we're good, so only good things should happen to us, and people who oppose us are bad, and thus should get only bad things. Mercy isn't a quality which is possessed by many people, and when it comes down to it, most societies are set up to punish rather than be merciful.

Is God? If you happen to believe in a deity who is all-loving, all-compassionate, all-merciful, shouldn't it be as difficult for that deity to punish the wicked as to reward the virtuous?

I think asking the question, despite it being something of a knee-jerk reaction rather than a thought-out response to tragedy, illustrates more, perhaps, than the answer does.

Gone to the Country

Chirac gives away 'violent' dog

Former French President Jacques Chirac has announced that he has given away his beloved dog [Sumo] after it attacked him for a third time.

...

The dog is now said to be enjoying life on a farm in the French countryside.

"Honey... I'm sorry, but... Sumo had to... go away for a while."

"No, no, he's visiting all his doggy friends on a farm in the French countryside. You know, he's happier there. Because he can run and play in the grass. You know he was never happy living in the city, and now he can make friends with all the farm animals and other dogs. Who knows, maybe he'll meet a nice lady dog and they'll get married."

"Um... no, I don't think it would be good to visit him. At least not now. Maybe later. Because... well, he might see you and think you were sad and then he'd be sad. You don't want him to be sad, do you honey?"

"I tell you what. We'll get a new dog."

"No, don't cry. Sumo's happy now. He's... on a farm in the French countryside. Really. We'll go right now and get a new dog and let Sumo be happy on his farm."

Seriously, my parents never did this to me, but "said to be enjoying life on a farm" is a universal euphemism for "dead." Next we'll be told that Sumo is "suffering from exhaustion" and has to visit a rehab clinic, "just to get his energy back." Then maybe he'll meet with Hugo Chavez and hold up today's newspaper to prove that he's still alive.

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.