flog

My brother showed me today on his BlackBerry a forwarded email he had received about an Iraqi women being reprimanded for speaking up in a grocery checkout line that she hoped American troops would stop bombing her relatives soon.

The response, by an old man, in support of the innocent babe-in-the-woods serviceman standing behind the "burqa-clad" woman who was the intended recipient of her barbs is that America's military defends her freedom of speech and is bringing that great gift to other countries in the world and that if she was more outspoken in her home country, then our military may not have "needed" to go there in the first place.

There are numerous problems with the email, which snopes does a handy job pointing out, but what really struck me were two things. First, the re-iteration of the myth that by executing wars of imperialist domination throughout the world, the American military is protecting my freedom when the fact is that our forces are currently spread so thin in Bush's quest to find and fight "al Qaeda" that we are ill-prepared to defend against another domestic attack. Second, the structure of the argument makes absolutely no sense when you break it apart and wash away all the bullshit, ra-ra-ra rhetoric.

1. America is great because the military defends our freedoms (including speech) and kills brown people in the name of spreading these freedoms to other countries in the world.
2. Malcontents are only free to voice their concerns because of the military's actions around the world.
3. If you exercise this freedom to express ideas that the Wal-Mart set disagrees with, you are obliged to leave.

Number three clearly shows that those advancing the argument don't really believe in the freedoms mentioned in number 1, or are too stupid to appreciate the deep implications of liberty. It's sort of the opposite of a circular argument, because the conclusion repudiates the premise rather than assuming it. What is that called?

We're testing this voice authentication system at the telephone center. The testers want to save "everything" that goes between the IVR server and the voice authentication server, so I'm stuffing XML SOAP responses into a SQL Server 2005 database table. Today, one of the eggheads wants to see just the score and confidence values from the SOAP response for each test phone call.

Now, the root element in the SOAP response had a namespace defined. At first, I wasn't prefixing the element names with the namespace. I suspected this was a problem, but always got an error message about "redefining namespace" if I tried to declare the namespace inside the value() method. It turns out, if the source XML in your table has a namespace in it you must:

• Declare a namespace inside the value() method call


• The namespace must have a diferent name than what is already in the xml

When I joined together those two little details, I achieved XQuery nirvana.

select
CallId, UserId,
case authtype when 1 then 'enrollment' when 2 then 'verification' end as AuthType,
ResponseTime, SequenceNumber, ResultCode,
SOAPResponse.value('declare namespace tmp="http://craplite.shitaphonics.com"; (/tmp:FilePointerVerifyWithoutNewSettingsResult/tmp:Score)[1]', 'decimal(22,20)') AS Score,
SOAPResponse.value('declare namespace tmp="http://craplite.shitaphonics.com"; (/tmp:FilePointerVerifyWithoutNewSettingsResult/tmp:Confidence)[1]', 'decimal(22,20)') AS Confidence
FROM AuthResponses_Test
WHERE SOAPResponse.exist('declare namespace tmp="http://craplite.shitaphonics.com"; /tmp:FilePointerVerifyWithoutNewSettingsResult/tmp:Score')=1

order by callid, DiaphonicsUserId, ResponseTime, SequenceNumber

This quote was a little too long for the book list.

"The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning--but not the end--of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning--but by no means the end--of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition--which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything."

--Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, pp12-13

It's a popular rejoinder from the god crowd, when they finally tire of hand-waving and rationalizing away the facts about uniquely faith-based atrocities in the past, that Communist/atheist movements have done no better. Hitchens responds firstly, that throughout the flowering of the fascist period early in the 20th Century that the Church was all too happy to endorse fascism and order its follows to go along with the fascist crusade against Jews and Communists. This fact does something to diminish the charge laid at the atheists' feet.

Secondly, Hitchens argues that the authoritarian, statist, Communist governments in Russia, China, and Cuba were not really seeking to eradicate religious structures so much as replace them with Communist forms - the charismatic leader standing in for diety. This is an intriguing idea, and true as far as it goes, but it still seems a bit of a cop out.

At best, believers and atheists have to agree to a draw on the topic of atrocities committed in the name of advancing irreal ideologies. This is still something of a victory against the believer since it renders moot the claim that religion elevates human behavior.

Ned: Phil? Phil. Phil. Phil Conners. Phil Conners, I thought that was you.
Phil: How ya doing? Thanks for watching.
Ned: Now don't you tell me you don't remember me because I sure as heck-fire remember you.
Phil: Not a chance.
Ned: Ned! Ryerson! Neddle-nose Ned. Ned the Head. Case Western High!
Ned Ryerson.
  I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show.
Bing! Ned Ryerson.
  Got the shingles real bad senior year almost didn't graduate.
Bing! Again. Ned Ryerson.
  I dated your sister, Mary Pat, until you told me not to any more. Well?
Phil: Ned Ryerson?
Ned: Bing!
Phil: Bing.

For some reason my gmail "Clip" had an ad for this piece of crap movie with the tag line 'Expelled - Why Big Science seeks to refute Intelligent Design'.

I'm fairly confident "Big Science" (should such a thing exist) seeks to refute intelligent design for the following (non-exclusive) list of reasons:

• It requires "special pleading" since the Intelligent Designer (which must necessarily be a complex entity) does not have a designer.


• It employs demonstrably false definitions of information.


• It fails Occam's razor by postulating a designer to explain phenomena which we can see evolving by natural selection or uses a designer to fill gaps in our current knowledge as a pseudo-explanation.
  

Further reading at the Talk.Origins FAQ Website.