The First Church of Free Speech

We’ve picked up another writer. His name is Jason Peppers, and he goes by the handle “Elfdart” on the StarDestroyer.Net BBS. Now he’s further to the left than I am … actually probably a lot further, but I read his stuff and, regardless of whether I agree, I always have to laugh at the sheer vitriol he manages to inject into everything he says. I thought, “This guy should have an editorial column in The Washington Post.” Since he doesn’t, I offered him something far better, if “better” can be defined as “having more of my writing”.

So welcome Jason! Please try to offend as many people as you can!

I’ve gotten over 50 comments on my post about the intelligent design. This is far more than I’ve ever gotten on any post. So what’s with the sudden swell in popularity? I have a few theories. I’ve had a few ping-backs, so that could explain it. People visiting other, more trafficked blogs happen to run across mine, and since I speak about intelligent design in only the most vitriolic sense, people get upset.

The other possibility is that it’s some sort of organized attack by creationists. This type of tactic certainly isn’t unique to them; lots of different groups (including my own community of Mac users) coordinate attacks on people posting things they don’t like. One user sees an article he doesn’t like, posts it to a BBS and suddenly there’s a deluge of comments coming in.

It’s too bad really. I explicitly stated in that post that I’d already gone into detail as to why intelligent design is unscientific, but none of the geniuses posting comments decided to go and read those posts. So here’s the post in question.

In any case, I’m happy about the popularity. There might be a bunch of people accusing me of being intolerant and dogmatic (as good a display of psychological projection as I’ve ever seen), but at least people are visiting my little corner of the web.

So in conclusion, thanks for encouraging me. Now all you IDers can blow me.

Kirk of Reasons Unbeknownst ping-backed my post on intelligent design, so I figured I’d do him the same courtesy in my reply. (Is that considered a courtesy? I don’t know. I’m only blogging to see my own writing.) He also mirrored part of the post in the comments. Anyway, here’s what he had to say.

Great points until you get into economics. The intellectuals with Ph.Ds in econ tend to think Socialism is a great idea. The god fearing masses may be wrong about darwin but their low-tax instincts are a good thing. In other words it could be worse, we could be a nation of atheists that think Marx was on to something. Ideally we’d be pro separation of Church/State and anti-Socialist but that’s a hell of a lot to ask people who don’t want to live without either a big friendly god or a big friendly brother. Though I wonder if big governments see religion as competition (tithings vs. taxes) and subtly discourage religion, though China unsubtly encarcerates Falun Gongers.

Kirk, you’ve got this apparent dichotomy of “It’s either small government or it’s a bunch of fucking commies”. Like lots of things in life, there is a happy medium between social and personal responsibility. Like it or not, we do live with other people who we have an unwritten contract with, and we, as a society, do have obligations to each other. You can have social policy without being a communist government. You’re also making the mistake of equating big social governments and big economic governments. They are not the same, and in fact, one can be big while the other can be small.

The neo-con invasion of the Republican party should have made this clear. Under Saint Ronald and now George W. Bush, the federal government’s social influence in the everyday lives of its citizens increased substantially. One of Reagan’s worst policy initiatives was giving the FCC the power to curb free speech on public airwaves, and Bush is making it clear that he wants the power to poke his nose into Americans’ homes, phone calls and private communications whenever it suits him, without any court review at all. While he was busy peeking under our sheets, Bush and his neo-con buddies have shot through legislation that basically lets corporations run roughshod over the consumer. Because hey, the Invisible Hand will always be there to protect the consumer’s interests, right? Sorry, I don’t think so. When you have little or no government regulation over the free market, you get monopolies like Microsoft and cartels like the RIAA and MPAA. Oh yeah, and the oil and pharmaceutical companies get to ram a government-subsidized screwdriver up the American people’s ass.

The Republican party got into bed with the Christian right, so I hardly think that churches are considered “competition” by our glorious leaders. No, churches are for harvesting voters. The problem is that the Christian right doesn’t realize that. They think the Republican party actually gives a shit about their agenda at some time other than an election year. Once the likes of Pat Robertson realize that the Republicans will never deliver on their promises to end abortion and amend the Constitution to outlaw gay marriage (otherwise what would they use to get the bigoted masses to the polls?), they’ll stay their asses home on election day. And that day can’t come soon enough.

Someone posted a comment to my post about the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 premiere. I thought I’d address these concerns so there is no confusion.

I’ve read through a good chunk of your blog and an old website of yours. I didn’t find anywhere therein a description of your time in the military. I assume, since you state in this posting that “the military is portrayed very believably” that you have first-hand experience?

No, I have never served in the military. But the show exerts a very realistic feel, and people I know in the military seem to approve of its portrayal. For example, the [i]Galactica[/i] has a small-arms locker that’s housed in a vault, something which is standard on US Navy vessels. I can’t think of any other popular sci-fi show which actually has something similar on their vessels. (Star Trek certainly never did.)

Other interesting points:

• The [i]Galactica[/i] has a “ball”, which is used to assist pilots in landing on carriers. Pilots will “call the ball” to indicate that they are on the right approach. (Or at least that’s how I understand it.) This is how it works on a real carrier.
• The crew always preface their communications with their locations or names, so if the deck chief needs to talk to the bridge, he’ll start with “Bridge, Hangar”, wait for a response and then proceed with his message. Also standard protocol in real militaries.
• They still use bullets. (In one episode, the chief carries an M4A1 carbine, which is starting to replace the M16 in the US Armed Forces.) Halle-fucking-lujah! I’ve about had it with the sci-fi wanking over lasers, phasers and the like. There’s nothing inherently inferior about throwing a lead slug at someone as opposed to zapping them with a death ray. Bullets are cheap and can be mass-produced very easily. Ammunition for a laser-based weapon would consist of gas that would need to be stored in compressed containers.

  The big advantage of a laser is that it goes in a straight line. Even at relatively short distances, a bullet will experience gravitational drop, wind resistance and random course deviations resulting from moisture in the air. Professional snipers have to take all of these factors into account when setting up their shots. It’s not as simple as sighting the guy in your crosshairs. A laser would basically eliminate all of that and be quieter. But this advantage isn’t really worth it for small arms or even carbines, since people can be easily trained to compensate for the inaccuracies inherent to bullets. Just ask a soldier.

But Battlestar Galactica isn’t perfect, of course. It has a good track record of realism in the military, but like just about every show on TV, their writers don’t really understand computation. Maybe I’ll rant about that some other time.

I’ve basically duplicated the old site in two places. The link here is the archive location, and there are files for the old site in their original locations, so the Google links will still work. (Believe it or not, that site had some pretty good rankings and referrals in certain searches and other sites, so I don’t want to just cut those off.) The copy of the site for the Google links now has a note on each page (included in the navigation bar) that it is now defunct, and the Home link will lead to the blog.

For those who are curious, Daltonator.net is the domain of Rob Dalton, a good buddy over at StarDestroyer.Net. He maintained my old site, and he was generous enough to set up this blog for me. To thank him, I’ve granted him authorship on this blog if he ever feels like venting. So you might hear from him from time to time.

I’ve also granted authorship to my good friend Andy Walters. Andy and I have been friends since high school, and he’s a practicing Christian. He’s also a liberal, so some might argue that that doesn’t count, since God obviously hates all liberals. (Especially the ones wanting to take care of poor people. I mean, since [i]when[/i] does [i]that[/i] ever appear in the Bible?)

So to all of the hate mailers who whined at me for hating Christians and wanting to lead young Christian girls astray into a life of sinful, debaucherous sex … you were wrong on the first count of the indictment.

Okay, everything is up and running. I’m still getting the hang on this blog interface, but I think I can handle it.

You may ask … “Why didn’t you just keep updating that wonderful site of yours?” Mostly because it was a pain in the ass. I had to type the HTML by hand, format everything correctly, upload to the web server, make sure nothing broke, etc … It got tedious. With [url=http://wordpress.org]WordPress[/url], I can just type in a box, and off it goes! Everything from archiving to searching is totally automated. No wonder blogging is so popular! If you want to rant about current events, all you have to do is type shit in a box and post without having to ever consider what you’re actually saying! Brilliant!

Also, lots of people still e-mail me about the site, and regretfully, I can’t respond to everyone. But I’ve got all my site-related e-mail sorted into the categories “Nice Stuff” and “Hate Mail.” Maybe I’ll post a few of the hate mails for my loyal readers to laugh at. After years of responding to the usual creationist garbage, it just gets to be too much to argue with these people. Not because they’re right … because they’re morons. Seriously, how are you supposed to have an intelligent conversation with someone who honestly believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old? Or that humans were placed here one day and … that was it? You might as well try talking about thermodynamics with someone who honestly believes that Santa Claus travels all around the Earth every Christmas or rabbit physiology with someone who believes in the Easter Bunny.

Long-time visitors will notice that the old site is gone. I’ve replaced it with a blog. That’s right. I’ve decided to add my voice to the cacophony of free speech no one seems to give a shit about called the “blogsphere.” The old site (Damien’s Den of Sin) is archived here.