Bad Advice: Celebrities and the Appeal to Authority

We are conditioned to take advice from those we like and respect...sometimes regardless of whether the person we like and respect knows what the hell he or she is talking about. This is ingrained in us as an evolutionary adaptation, but like so many holdovers, it can often do more harm than good. Its active application is known as the Argument from Authority logical fallacy and it can be a very big problem, particularly when celebrities are the ones being emulated, as many celebs live in their own little world of wealth, prestige, and superiority. Fueled by sycophantic fans, fame, and sometimes illicit substances, many are pretty damned far off the beach as far as reality is concerned. Quite frankly, of all the people to not be listening to, some celebrities are only a short notch above pee-stained crazy homeless people...if they're even above that at all, Charlie Sheen.

Following people based on their appeal rather than their qualifications is clearly "a bug, not a feature" in our mental apparatus, but it continues to work. Even the dumbest of us knows that Michael Jordan is only saying he loves Coke because he's getting paid to - that he might even hate the shit out of Coke in reality - but it doesn't matter. Michael Jordan grins and drinks Coke, and it still pokes at the influence of enough of us to be effective, and sometimes this can have very bad results. Celebrities may spread a bad message incidentally, but others are aware of their status as influential people and may use it to deliberately spread their own ignorance among their fans and the media. Jenny McCarthy is perhaps the most prominent example, but just take it as a general rule - listen to an expert, not the guy who played in a TV show you like, and most definitely not Oprah or any of her verminous sycophants (Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, etc.).

But some people in authority - celebrities or not - have some extremely valuable insights and information, even in spite of their bad ideas. In these cases, what are we to do? Should we discredit them entirely based on their possibly lesser failings, or should we do the opposite and ignore them or try and justify them? In truth, this only seems to be an issue due to the weird idea that if you're in for a penny, you're in for a pound - that you either follow someone completely or reject them on the whole. Why this idea exists I don't know, but I find it a bit frightening...the mere idea that another human being must be either essentially perfect or essentially flawed in order to influence your opinion of them is merely frank idolatry, but in any case the solution seems simple to me - simply call them to task for their successes as well as their failures. Pick and choose the ideas you want, and extol the good while criticizing the bad. Bill Maher is an excellent example to practice with. I appreciate Bill for the good things he does, but I am always quick to remember - and point out - the serious flaws in his logic that come about (inevitably) as a result of good ol' compartmentalization, mainly concerning vaccinations and scientific medicine in general. Doing this causes no conflict of interest. Drop your damned adoration and see people for what they are - imperfect - and only good will ever come of it.

See the links below this awesome image I made for more information.

Ten Most Wanted: Celebrities Who Promote Harmful Pseudoscience

The 6 Most Misguided Causes Ever Promoted by Celebrities

Jenny McCarthy Body Count

My List of Online Gaming Douchebags

Let’s start at the beginning, with the obvious:

The internet is a forum in which people can interact with each other under a thick shield of anonymity. An unfortunate result of this is that freaks, morons, and douchebags, many of whom probably wouldn’t even be able to function in normal society, use the internet to take out their pitiful frustrations on those of us who are a bit higher on the evolutionary ladder. Even worse, the scant information we glean upon meeting someone makes it almost impossible for us to make an accurate judgment about who we should be avoiding. A Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG) is possibly the closest thing to real life social interactions that the internet has to offer so far. In order to advance, players must work together by teaming up for battle, doing business, auctioning crafts and valuables, organizing guilds and raids, asking questions, making requests, and many other functions, most of which are far more intimate than one would ever undertake with a group of strangers in real life. Since all of the players are still fully protected by the anonymity of the internet however, the undesirables are still given free reign to spread their obnoxious corruption. The more elaborate and realistic an MMORPG is, the more critical and intimate your relationships with other online individuals become, and it’s now possible for bad apples to cause you a great deal of inconvenience, even extending beyond the boundaries of the game world. The requirement of a subscription fee and heightened game difficulty often do well to weed out the worst of them, but there are always certain categories of people who will cause some detriment to your gaming whenever you’re unfortunate enough to run into them. Excluding the few bizarre extremes I randomly encounter (Neo-Nazi poseurs, ultra-zealous evangelicals, etc.) as well as the obligatory spammers, scammers, and Asian farmers, I have compiled the following list of the specific types of individuals who have most frequently and consistently fucked up my gaming experience:

Smokers

Typical to the mindset of an addict is that they see no problem with making an entire group wait for them or attempt to fight without their help while they go indulge in their chemical dependence. The instances of “brb smoke” have become so common that attempting to avoid it would probably exclude an inconveniently large amount of players, and so I have decided to grind my teeth and stay silent…for the time being. It's almost laughable to expect them to be empathetic enough to realize it, but once you’re in a group with 6 or 8 other people, anything you do to waste time or screw around will affect everybody. That's what a group is for - sharing victory and sharing defeat. Going afk for a smoke is no different from leaving a poker game and forcing the other players to sit on their thumbs until you get back.

Experience has indicated to me that many of the smokers I run into in online games are actually eurotrash, while most of those who are addicted to other substances seem to be closer to home. The next category is for them:

Stoners

Actually less annoying than the smokers in regards to wasted time, as a stoner's high takes longer to toke up (too long for an afk), and lasts longer as well. The stoner is a weak link by virtue of the way they perform while high. A group member who runs into walls (or worse, into a group of enemies), wastes mana casting spells out of combat just to see the pretty colors, and considers everything they're doing hilarious is most likely a toked-up loser. Fortunately, they’re somewhat easier to spot. Since a stoner's life revolves around chemical abuse, they seldom possess the means or motivation to think of anything else, and often name their characters in a relevant way. Beware of such names as SlImShAdY69 or POTT!!!LEEF!!! or any character with an afro.

Kids


I’m not going to address the issue of whether playing an online game is detrimental to a child’s development...but I have to think it can’t be any worse than watching Spongebob Squarepants or any of the other mind-sapping shit that passes for children’s programming nowadays. No, my concerns are purely selfish in that I only care how a child’s presence in game affects me. There are kids whose interest in the game stimulates a savant-like advancement in computer literacy, at least one of whom I’ve actually met, but these are extremely rare exceptions; Most 12-year-olds act like 12-year-olds. It’s usually glaringly obvious in pretty much everything they do, and I don’t pay fourteen bucks a month to babysit their stupid asses.

A relevant caveat: A somewhat random but reliable way to recognize a kid is that they seem to gain some sort of excitement by making their character jump up and down over and over and over again for no reason, as if their spacebar has contracted some sort of epilepsy. They often like to do it right in front of your face as well. If it happens to you, take the hint and head the other way.

Parents

Yes that's right, there’s now a large number of parents (I use the term only in the physical sense) who spend their evenings playing online games instead of tending to their offspring. I count these people among the most infuriating for several reasons. First of all, they have no qualms about going afk and taking as long as they have to in order to tend to their child's needs. This makes them difficult to yell at, as others consider it a legitimate reason and will not usually back you up, but that’s exactly my point: If you think you're mature enough to be squirting out kids, stop playing computer games and go be a parent. Go wipe little Timmy’s ass, read him a story, or if you live in Texas, teach him how to use a shotgun and hate queers for Jesus. These types are overwhelmingly easy to spot because they let you know their parental status at every opportunity. Whereas most normal players will just state "afk" and go do their necessary business, the parent will always give you an explicit description of what they will be doing, e.g. "brb, my 17-month-old wants some grapes" (an actual sentence stated by a groupmate). The reason they inform us so explicitly is, of course, because they want to show off the fact that they've managed to crap out another stinky doucheling. It’s always been beyond me why this is something to brag about - every other life form on the planet can do the exact same thing, most of them more efficiently, in fact. Besides, I believe it's an act of irresponsibility to deposit yet another consumer into our 7 billion-primate infestation. To me, bragging that you have a kid is like bragging that you purposely imported killer bees into your neighborhood.

MMORPGs that require more discipline and dedication, such as Everquest 2 or Rift, have fewer parents, but there are always some around. If you watch talk shows, mark my words – in ten years or less, you’ll soon see a new breed of whining, sympathy-grubbing victim crying on Oprah’s shoulder: The kid whose daddy never had time for him because he was busy running 40-man raids in Molten Core. Then the media will seize onto it and have a field day, and Jack Thompson will get an erection. And nobody wants that.

When confronted about the distress and wasted time they’re causing others, parents will almost always say a variation of the following sentence: "Well unlike you, I actually have a life outside this game."

Do you really? Well go tend to your real life – and your kid – on your own time, not on mine. If you want to have children, go do it. If you want to play video games instead of tending to your spawn, that's your business too. But if you expect me to bend over backwards to cater to your shitty playing as a result of your shitty parenting, then you need to get the fuck out of my way.

Braggarts

There will always be players who consider their character development secondary to making sure others know about it. I have no doubt that some players wouldn’t even be players at all if there weren't people to brag to about their achievements. It would be much more tolerable if these people actually lived up to their own hype, but very often they don’t. More than once I've seen a player get killed because he stopped fighting so that he could type to the group about how awesome his character is. Let’s be clear: I don’t care how many max level characters you have, how much money you farmed today, what dungeons you’ve run, how much DPS you’re doing, or anything else. Shut up and kill stuff, or I might let that ogre eat your head just to shut you up.

Despots

A phenomenon observed in various facets of society is the way some people’s personalities change when they’re granted power over others. A person might be polite and reasonable and likable enough, but once they’re given a bit of authority, they degenerate into bossy jerkoffs who can make everyone under them miserable. The same phenomenon apparently applies even when the authority is almost meaningless, such as when a guild member is promoted to officer or leader. I’ve even run into “leaders” of common, humdrum pickup groups who thought they had more valid opinions simply because they were the first ones to bother sticking half a dozen random people together. I’m a cooperative and generous player who will usually do whatever is asked by someone of higher rank in a guild, but I’m not accustomed to following an order that I personally oppose or see no reason for. Even in the real world and in the face of real authority I have mounted significant opposition when being told what to do, so a high school kid in his mom’s basement gulping Go-gurt isn’t going to intimidate me very much with his nonsense in-game title. Some leader types also seem to suffer under the age-old delusion that in order to get anything done, you have to be a prick about it. Those under them demonstrate an equal degree of ignorance by accepting this, but I certainly do not.

Though I never seek authority over others, sometimes I’ve been promoted regardless and I’ve been happy to hear that I apparently make a fine leader. Perhaps that’s the sort of person who should be promoted – the ones who aren’t lusting after such privileges.

Beggars

Beggars are players who spend their time standing around spamming requests for handouts such as money or power leveling (a process in which a high level character does all the hard work while the lowbie stands around with his thumb up his ass and leeches off the cash and exp). I’ve even had people be so brazen as to approach me and actually open a trade window, only to stand there expectantly and see what I’ll do. It’s quite like having a homeless man jump out in front of you on the sidewalk and thrust his change cup in your face. The irony is that the time these people spend standing around spamming for handouts could be spent killing monsters or doing quests or something else that would benefit them a lot more. It seems silly only to those of us who actually want to play, however. They do not, and so I don’t believe this realization would change their behavior. The one good thing about beggars is that they’re almost always very low level. No matter how much they mooch, they eventually have to put forth some effort to advance, and being unwilling to do this, as well as having sabotaged their relationships with other players by annoying many of the people they’ve come across, they’re ultimately doomed.

I never turn down a freebie or two, but I see no attraction in having everything handed to me on a silver platter. Working for advancement is where almost all of a game’s fun and satisfaction comes from, so this mindset leaves me scratching my head. Even making a sexy female character, taking her clothes off and making her dance for money would be some sort of effort (Even I have shelled out some change to such causes. DON'T YOU JUDGE ME!). In any case, each player should earn their dues just like everything else…or just buy their dues from Asian farmers. That’s fine with me too. Just stop spamming me.

Chatters

Some players are less players at all. Whether they were once interested in playing at all I don't know, but they eventually end up treating the game like some sort of glorified chatroom...or perhaps Second Life with swords. Don't misunderstand - getting to know people and chatting is a wonderful aspect of these games, and one I appreciate very much. But it's certainly possible to do this while getting things done. I personally have no interest in paying a subscription fee to tell dirty jokes all day while my character stands in the middle of town like just another piece of graphical eye candy, but there are sometimes entire guilds of these people. Sometimes they’re not much of a nuisance on their own, perhaps when picked up in a group, as they generally do know how to play well enough to get by and they're more apt to shut up and get with the program while in with a bunch of strangers. That's not to say that I've had to say "less talking and more fighting please" sparingly. It’s important to be with a group of people who share your level of dedication. If you need help doing something and your request in guild or group chat is quickly ignored or buried under a slew of Chuck Norris jokes, you need to find another group of players to hang around with.

And, last but not least, here’s the final category among my list of internet gaming retards:

14 year old Canadians

Need I say more?

Your Grammar Sucks

The following are some words and phrases that I'm tired of seeing misspelled or misused. This list is far from complete, but it does target a few agitators of my GI tract, so I consider it a good start.

Perhaps the most agitating part of poor English, especially on the internet, is not just that people frequently screw it up, it's that they don't freaking care. Try to correct them and you will, at best, be met with eye rolling and ridicule. "Look at this guy, trying to correct spelling on the internet! Haw haw haw!" Well, what difference does it make where you commit your errors? Shouldn't you be in the habit of writing and speaking correctly regardless of the medium? Call me a skeptic (and I am), but I find it difficult to believe that these same people are completely capable of proper English only in specific contexts.

In any case, I'm tired of trying to psychoanalyze the motivations of people who are dumber than I am. Enough preamble. Let’s get down to business:

LOSER/LOOSER - If you read your horoscope or get high in your mom's basement, you are a "loser," not a "looser." The meaning of the latter is, of course, "more loose," and it’s an adjective.

ADVISE - VERB

ADVICE - NOUN

If you wish to respond to this blog, please advise me. Do not advice me. That would make you retarded.

ITS/IT’S - I count this violation among the most common. I’m now even seeing it in professionally produced media such as newspapers, instruction manuals, books, and other places it has no excuse for being. The word "it's" is a contraction. In case that word has too many syllables, I will explain that it's a shortening of the two words "it is," just as "don't" is an elision of "do not" and "they're" is short for "they are." I do not understand how this difference, explained to me around third grade, still manages to escape so many people. To some of us who know it properly, a sentence such as: "The crab, it's claws held high above it's head…" reads as: “The crab, it is claws held high above it is head…" Yeah, that’s right…pretty fucking annoying, isn’t it? When reading aloud, I always read the contraction in its full form on purpose so that all of its misapplications can be heard by others. I assure you, it annoys everyone else as well once it’s brought to their attention.

S/’S - Another excruciatingly common error. The apostrophe before the letter S indicates possession: "Those are Jerry's apples." Plurals and other words are indicated without an apostrophe. It's annoying to see a possessive lacking an apostrophe, but for some reason it's far worse for my nerves to see it added erroneously, e.g. "She look’s at the apple's in the basket's." AAARRRRGHHH! It's like shards of glass in my brain!

TOO/TWO/TO

Let’s just list these:

Too - only to be used in the context of "too much" and "also"

Two - The number that comes after ONE and before THREE

To - Used in every other context

SHOULD OF (Includes WOULD OF/COULD OF) - Where the fuck did this thing come from? If I ever find out, I'll fucking kick it to death Joe Pesci style. What is meant here, of course, is "should have," or its contraction "should've." Stop using this. Seriously.

WREAK HAVOC - Note the spelling. See it? See the spelling? Look at it again. Burn it into your brain cells, because it's easier to find a heterosexual Republican than it is to find a correct spelling of this phrase. I once followed an FAQ that was just full of this expression, always misspelled as "wreck havoc." I eventually had to stop reading it, and as such, I never finished the game. A small price to pay for my sanity.

ALRIGHT - Not even a word. Don’t use it.

TROPHIES - In the case of some words ending in Y, an -IES is substituted for the plural. It's not spelled “trophys” (and it’s certainly not “trophy’s).

THEN/THAN - If you were pronouncing the latter correctly, this error probably wouldn’t be a problem. So fix it.

MOST -EST - Who’s heard that song by System of a Down that deals with “the most loneliest day of my life?” Granted, you don’t need a hideous mistake like this to make System of a Down sound like drugged-out brainless freaks, but isn’t this bit of grammatical shitting-of-the-bed just a little too obvious? Didn’t someone at least tell them how stupid they sound? It’s not like they need that exact phrasing in order to make the song work…

Okay, back to relevance. The suffix “-est” denotes the superlative of the word it modifies. Not all words are allowed to use this. For example, I would say that System of a Down is the “most retarded” band I’ve ever heard, not the “retardedest.” Most words allow either alternative (i.e. “shallowest” and “most shallow”), but common sense should make it obvious that the use of both at the same time is grammatical redundancy. Certainly, the person who uses the phrase “most retardedest” has no right to use it in any context except when referring to him or herself.

Speaking of redundancy…

BUT/THOUGH – Both of these words mean the same thing, and just because they are properly used in different parts of a sentence does not mean it is appropriate to use both in the same sentence. You can't, because they both mean the same freaking thing. An example that immediately comes to mind is a line from the movie Independence Day: “No, he wasn’t his father…but I was kind of hoping he wanted the job though.” Great writing. Why not preface the sentence with HOWEVER for a triple redundancy rating, you hack?

LITERALLY - The meaning of this word seems lost on some, as it is often used as an emphatic. But it can only be so used when the situation calls for it in a literal context. I was in a class one day when a student arrived late. Wishing to expound on how hard she had tried to be on time, she began, “I literally flew downstairs-“

“Literally?” I interrupted.

“Well…no, not literally,” she admitted.

I am not a very well liked person.

There is a recurring skit on Mad TV in which two characters, after announcing impossible conditions, declare that they mean them “literally!” One only gets this skit if one understands the meaning of the word.

Y’ALL - I’m seeing this more and more, particularly in online gaming. The word “you” is most properly pluralized as “all of you.” I’ve even heard it used redundantly, in sentences such as “I’m gonna get medieval on all y’all.” Something this heinous is usually only perpetrated by “urban” speakers or southerners, both of whom routinely commit near genocidal crimes against the English language. I've even seen it misspelled! Yes, it's not uncommon to see this awful abortion of a word spelled "YA'LL." Icing on the shit cake.

K-9 – When referring to the drooling, leg-humping quadruped, the word is CANINE. This homophonic error is primarily used by police departments in referencing their police dog units, which is further evidence of how much education you can get away with not having in order to be a cop. Well sorry, but I will not have Latin be reduced to the level of 1337SPEAK.

ET CETERA - Latin, loosely translating to “and so on.” More and more I’m hearing this phrase mispronounced as “excedra,” as if it had some sort of relation to Excedrin “the headache medicine.” As a person who took four years of Latin, this drives me absolutely batshit.

HEY/HAY - The former is an exclamation, the latter is what horses eat.

LESS/FEWER - This can be a tricky one for some, so pay attention. Both words mean the same thing - the opposite of MORE - but you use them in different circumstances. The basic rule is that you use LESS with mass nouns and FEWER with count nouns. An easy way to tell the difference is to note whether the item being counted ends in the plural S. If it does, then "fewer" is used. In this way, you should be able to tell that it's correct to need "less fish" and "fewer fishes," but never "less fishes" and "fewer fish."

 

Correct

FUCKING FAIL

This naturally leads us to a problem with the opposing descriptors:

MUCH/MANY - In this case, the S plural utilizes MANY and mass nouns use MUCH. E.g. "too many bullets" verses "too much firepower." It's easy to see that "too many firepower" is wrong, but "too much bullets" is apparently still alive and well.

RECOGNIZE/SENTENCE/INTERESTING - A short note to remind people that there is a G in the first word, a T in the second, and a second E in the third. There are silent letters in some words, but these letters are there for a reason. Make sure you include them in your speech or, in addition to sounding drunk or stupid, you may begin spelling them as you say them, i.e. “reckonize,” “sennence,” and “intersting.” There are many such omissions (just yesterday I heard a kid ask for a "cheeseb'ger," possibly to go with his "carmul" candy), but if I focused on all of them, we'd be here all day.

Now I present a brief journal done by a marginally talented but dimwitted young artist. This is not the worst I've seen on the internet by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't want to overwhelm your senses. Please read it and see how many errors you can detect. I'm particularly bemused by her insistence on using spaces in between her punctuation.

"Ok I would like to say that , too the people waiting on ADULT commissions : I do not live by myself , sooo it takes longer to finish my adult stuff then it does my normal cute stuff , so it's not that I am not wanting to hurry and finished your commission , it's just I am hardly ever alone to do them!! ^ - ^;; but I am trying to get them done fast at night ,alright? at night thats when I am totaly alone to work .

Normal commissions: I actully don't have any normal picture commissions at the moment, those I get a few done sooner then the adult ones. so if your interested note me.

umm thats about all thats really all I have to say , and Trades yes !! Trades I am working on very much soo !! I should have a few done before the week is out . I'm gonna make Pin up's cause ..... umm I want too"

How many did you find? I came up with 47. Yes, there are 47 grammatical and spelling errors in these few lines of text. As long as there are people who write this way, then I will always have a slightly higher level of stress and rage than I already do. If someone one day finds me dead at my keyboard from a cerebral hemorrhage or gastric sepsis, please be aware that it was probably shitty internet grammar that did me in.

Twilight and the Undead

By now I'm quite aware that everybody has written a blog on why Twilight sucks.

Well, here's another one. So deal with it.

Let me begin by saying that the vampire used to be a perfectly respectable monster. There are many different versions of vampires throughout various cultures and histories, but all share the characteristics of being undead freaks that feed on the blood of the living. Created to be evil, unholy creatures that torment humanity, they faithfully sowed terror and death among the human populace for hundreds of years.

Now, all of that has changed.

The vampire's transformation into more of a subtle trickster, and even his penchant for seduction, actually occurred much earlier, but I think the final nail in the coffin (so to speak) was Anne Rice. Her longest running series features a vampire named Lestat, and I fully admit that I have not been able to finish one of the books in this series. For any true fan of vampires - or just anyone who can’t tolerate horrible writing - it’s almost impossible to do so. However, I did complete another one of her books, The Mummy, and I doubt it’s outrageously different enough to be acceptable.

Rice herself is worthy of her own condemnation, so I will not fully address her defects here. If you want to see an excellent analysis, go here:

Anne Rice's entry at Encyclopedia Dramatica

Thanks in part to her handiwork, somehow people forgot that a monster is just that - a monster! They're supposed to be the stuff of nightmares, not wet dreams! But with the movie adaptations of Rice’s vampires being played by Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Antonio Banderas, the violation was complete. To say that the vampire’s dignified image had been raped would be an understatement, but with his testicles so cleanly removed, surely it would at least be impossible to destroy his reputation any worse, right?

Right?

Wrong.

Enter Twilight, a series of books that can charitably be described as horrible fat girl fanfiction. Stephenie Meyer’s Lestat is named Edward, and the extent to which he misrepresents the original vampire is almost inconceivable. There are plenty of critics of Twilight, but there is a factor that I don’t think has ever been addressed.

People seem to be forgetting (or are changing the rules to avoid) the fact that vampires are undead. That means that they are in fact dead people who are animated by some other force. Do you see where I’m going with this yet? No?

That’s right, kiddies!

Specifically, since vampires are intelligent, sex with them is known as intellective necrophilia. Thank you, Book of Erotic Fantasy.

Now, I’m really not passing judgment. If you want to bang a corpse, that’s your business. But don’t try and pretend you’re not doing exactly that. I guess you could say that intellective necrophilia is slightly less verboten if the undead are intelligent and capable of desire and consent. Regardless, I think fewer people would be so gung-ho for Twilight if they were reminded that their lust for Edward is necrophilic in nature.

But as with Anne Rice, Stephenie Meyer has decided that destroying one monster’s reputation is not enough. The next beast to feel the sting of her literary axe – the werewolf.

*Sigh* Seriously, it's almost like she has a grudge against monsters and is actively trying to destroy them. Maybe she blames them for her pretentiously misspelled name for some reason. I dunno.

And on it goes. While expressing my contempt for the new Twilight movie, a buddy on my list presented me with some horrible news:

"i have to give you a heads up though, and this is no joke: zombies are next on the list. go to your local bookstore and you'll see that i'm speaking the truth."

If they're trying to bastardize zombies, then the poor creatures must be undergoing changes even more dramatic than the vampire to be considered bangable. They are, after all, mindless, shambling, rotting corpses, and to make love to one (even a pretty one) would be straight-up necrophilia - essentially just masturbation with rotting meat and bones - no matter how dramatic a makeover you give them. I doubt this will stop people from trying though. Twilight has become a cash cow that just screams for imitators. Hey, just write crappy Mary Sue stories and throw in a monster or two and you’re in business!

Well, on behalf of all the people who appreciate monsters for what they truly are, I will address the mob of fat, emo, hormone-crazed dimwits who enjoy Twilight, including the legendary hambeast hack herself, and say:

STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY MONSTERS!

Everything you ever wanted to know about SATAN.

I have always had an interest in the darker, more horrific aspects of fantasy…and I am not alone. Humanity’s lust for the demonic, terrible, and just plain evil reveals a sort of morbid fascination, the same thing that has us rubbernecking at the scene of an accident, subconsciously (or perhaps not so subconsciously) hoping to see a splatter of blood or a disembodied head lying on the pavement. Our obsession is reflected in our fantasies, in which our imaginations seem to know no bounds. Most modern incarnations are harmless, such as scary movies or horror novels, but there were once many forms of fabricated evil that were very consequential, some of which survive today. Undoubtedly the longest surviving and best known of these is Satan.

Invented to be the personification of everything bad (or rather sinful, and yes, there is a definite difference), Satan has become one of the most iconic characters of our time, but perceptions of him still differ widely. Satanists see him as the ultimate representation of our primal urges, with power equivalent. Fundamentalist Christians still believe that he is all too real, with an entire supernatural organization designed to insinuate blasphemy and temptation into God's poor, huddled flock through such mediums as evolutionary biology, Harry Potter, and buttsex. (Though to be fair, these last two may indeed be related.)

THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

So where did the concept of Satan originally come from? Clearly not the Hebrew bible, or Tanakh. Supposed mentions of a supernatural adversary to God, which are excruciatingly vague and meager to begin with, are really only mistranslations and misinterpretations. Even in the book of Job, in which Satan argues with God about Job’s loyalty, the word representing him is ha’satan, which means “the adversary,” coining only that this entity was against god in an argument. We cannot even call the ha’satan's violations of Job in the story works of evil on his part, as he only does what god has sanctioned. Indeed, partway through the torment, god steps in and tells him to wreck Job’s ass even worse!

The “serpent” in the Garden of Eden wasn’t meant to be Satan either (most significantly because the whole Original Sin scenario was totally “borrowed” from Sumerian myth). The common perception today is that they are one in the same, but this is due to later Biblical scholars desperately trying to square all of the rag-tag, contorted, and contradictory bible texts into some semblance of continuity (an attempt at which they ultimately failed). So the Serpent, the Dragon, the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Anti-Christ – all of these have different origins and meanings, many of them having nothing at all to do with what modern society – and even modern religion – calls the Devil.

So does an ultimate evil exist according to the Jewish canon? The answer is a definitive no. Indeed, virtually every act of genocide, viciousness and torment is perpetrated by God. Even evil spirits who assault people are sent directly at his behest, so the lack of an ultimate evil is understandable. After all, with a friend like the Hebrew God, who needs enemies?

God's gonna fuck you up, son.

It makes sense in another way as well - Judaism was supposed to be about having only one god, so the writers of the Old Testament were careful to never present any challengers to his power. Zoroastrianism, a religion even older, posed a rivalry between two entities, one good and one evil, named Ahura Mazda and Anghra Mainyu, respectively. The dynamic of these two gods was very similar to what we now consider to be the relationship between God and Satan, for despite their monotheistic declarations, in time the Abrahamic religions began increasingly to adopt this concept, with Satan as their Anghra Mainyu.

Satan's most prolific depictions by far are presented in the New Testament, probably because the kinder, gentler Jesus wasn’t inspiring as much terror as before, and the ever necessary threat of punishment found a new incarnation. His most significant appearance is in the Gospel of Matthew (4:1-11), in which he tempts Jesus in the wilderness:

"Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; (Wow, that must've been one freakin' tall mountain!) and he said to him, 'All these will I give you, if you will fall down and worship me.'

"Then Jesus said to him, 'Begone, Satan! for it is written, "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve."' Then the Devil left him, and behold, angels came and administered to him."

That sounded like a damned good deal to me, Satan. Where do I sign? But behold, Jesus was a pantywaste, and he refused. And I'm not sure exactly how these angels "ministered" to him afterward, but I doubt they were as fun as the ministrations you could get from Satan's crew.

In any case, this is the very first incarnation in which Satan is seen as a concrete being, and one capable of the power to reward and punish and serve as a possible replacement for God in our worship. With this distinction, Satan's formal rivalry with God over human souls had begun. Along with his increased importance came a jump in power, and Satan was eventually seen as, if not an equivalent to God, then at least as significant to God's flock (that's us). 

For all his supposed evil, Satan's body count compared to God's is pretty fucking weak.

Satan's heyday was most certainly during the Inquisition and the Middle Ages, when he was granted all of his powers and lackeys. When the Christian churches were at the height of their power and fighting for supremacy, suddenly not even the bloodthirsty OT god was terrible enough. They needed something even worse, something that would either punish sinners outright or simply tempt people enough to piss off God so that he would. Embracing the good god versus the evil god concept at last, the frothing Inquisitors and their followers proposed all kinds of evil supernatural creatures to populate Hell’s legions. Many demons even had names, and were patrons over men's sins just as named angels patronized men's virtues! Hell was truly let loose, and it exploded across Europe, conjuring more demons than you could ever get rid of, even if you can totally beat Doom on Nightmare mode. 

Think you're bad, son? Try Dark Ages mode!

Another reason for emphasizing the terribleness of Hell was to make heaven look better by comparison. Christianity has never been able to present a very sexy paradise, so the idea became making life and damnation both so goddamned awful that even Heaven would seem...well, like Heaven.

Zzzzzz...

As the Dark Ages wore on, yet more demonic fables and legends were added to religious folklore. The demon Lilith, for example, whose origins were actually Sumerian (again), was postulated to have begun life as Adam's first wife. She left the Garden o’ Eden because she refused to assume the missionary position during sex, which further shows not only that god obsesses about what you do in your bedroom, but that Adam was a fucking chump. He was "cursed" twice by women, first by a one who wanted to ride him to ecstasy, then by her replacement, who granted him all the knowledge of creation. We men should be so lucky as to meet either one of them.

Below is a contemporary depiction of a female demon. If this is what Lillith looks like, then here's further proof that Adam was either gay or stupid. She could ride me any day.

Horns can double as handlebars.

SATAN GETS A MAKEOVER

In the 4^th Century AD, after Christianity was finally given free reign to shove its shit in everybody’s face, conversions began en masse. Their main tactic in converting the old Pagan nature worshipers was assimilation, which explains, among other things, why Christmas and Easter are set on the Solstices. When the ancient fertility cults proved difficult to assimilate, early Christians resorted to demonizing the old gods. Since a great many fertility gods were depicted as having horns (a sign of virility as well as a connection with nature), it followed that Satan should have them too. Many other characteristics followed.

This was actually a good thing for Satan’s image because before he was the vehicle for demonization, nobody could say exactly what he was even supposed to look like. Originally appearing as a mindless, slavering monster, Satan became more anthropomorphic over time (and developed his scheming pointy beard) once his role as sly tempter became popular. Losing most of his furriness, his skin became either black or chili pepper red, evidently as a result of Hell’s toasty climate. The trident, another ancient symbol of domination, was placed in the new Devil’s hand.

SO WHERE IS SATAN NOW?

With the dying out of the Inquisition and (most) religious domination, Satan became far less of a threat. For most of us, Satan represents that dark allure, the temptation of being naughty, often personified by the playful little devil on our proverbial shoulders, and is a danger only to squares who refuse to live life to its fullest. He’s often portrayed sympathetically, as a symbol of those who refuse to submit to tyranny or other overburdening authority. 

Southpark's depiction of Satan is about as sympathetic as the infamous show allows.

Taking this perspective to the next level, the officially recognized religion of Satanism was organized by Anton LaVey in 1966…and yes, that specific date was on purpose. The central tenets of the religion itself are really nothing new. LaVey himself admitted that it was “just Ayn Rand’s philosophy, with ceremony and ritual added.” Accordingly, modern Satanists, as I can attest to from personal experience, are merely secular humanists with a flair for theatrics. Most of their efforts are engineered to be wanton blasphemy, but seeing as how this is against a God that they do not believe exists (even Satan doesn’t formally exist to them except as a metaphor), it’s clear that their primary goal has always been to shock and tease Christians. Unfortunately, they are so obviously harmless, so few, and so prone to lashing out at one another that not even fundamentalist Christians pay them much heed anymore.

Anton LaVey preparing to devour a small child.

That’s not to say that Satanic scares have fallen by the wayside. Satanic ritual abuse (SRA), a complete fallacy conjured up as a result of the MPD mania of the eighties, lasted for many years, ruined lives, and we are still feeling its effects today. There is much more to this matter, far too much for me to address here, but I would be pleased to recommend additional reading if requested.

I hope this blog has been informative and entertaining. If not, complain to this guy. He can tell you where to go.

The Lamentable Case of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"It's devilish, Mr. Holmes; devilish!" cried Mortimer Tregennis. "It is not of this world. Something has come into that room which has dashed the light of reason from their minds. What human contrivance could do that?"

"I fear," said Holmes, "that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back on such a theory as this."

- Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Devil's Foot

As written by the celebrated author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and his friend and colleague Doctor Watson were men of science. Holmes was exquisitely educated on a vast array of subjects, from Neolithic artifacts to chemistry all the way down to the make and composition of cigar ash and bicycle tires. He possessed a great library of rare and informative books, a variety of clever disguises, and a keen imagination. Using these tools, he fueled a deductive mental power that made the public cheer and Scotland Yard scratch their heads in bewilderment. No puzzle was unsolvable by the great Sherlock Holmes, and having read every one of his stories and having grown up watching the excellent series by Grenada Television, Holmes was always one of my own favorite fictional characters. He made me glad to be smart in a world that nurtures ignorance and disdains critical thinking.

From time to time in his mysteries, Holmes was encountered with strange and frightening phenomena that others in their hysteria and ignorance were quick to credit to the supernatural. But Holmes, always the cold, analytical realist, pursued the cases with real world expectations and indeed always concluded them with perfectly earthly explanations. Even the dreaded Hound of the Baskervilles, a demonic, spectral dog that stalked the moors at night, turned out to be nothing so fanciful in the end.

When it came to ego, Holmes had this to say:

"I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers."

Excellently put, and one of my most favorite quotes…but this truth only applies if someone’s deductions are clear, i.e. if they are accurately gauging their own abilities. As we shall see, if we lack such discretion our egos can run away with us, and it is generally agreed that this is at least a contributing factor in what happened to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Needless to say, after his Holmes stories in particular, Doyle enjoyed tremendous success. He had truly achieved worldwide acclaim and was even knighted by the Queen. But the time was the 1920s, and the spiritualist movement was in full swing. Seances, auras, ghostly photography, ectoplasm and other such hoo-ha were all the rage, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle evidently promptly forgot about such things as gullibility, half-truths, exaggerations, false expertise, selective reporting, and good ol’ needing to believe…at least as they applied to himself. In other words, he dove into the bullshit pit head first and never came up for air again.

Indeed, Conan Doyle became one of spiritualism’s leading torchbearers, even as his friend Harry Houdini was making the rounds debunking the same nonsense. We are thus faced with a very confusing dichotomy between the writing and the man. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes was not his only rational work. He also wrote such novels as The Lost World which, while based on a fundamentally flawed concept, proceeded in the footsteps of reality and scientific inquiry.

So what the hell happened to him? I do not know for certain. I have never fully understood this grotesque transformation. The compartmentalization of the human mind is lamentably common, but a seemingly complete reversal of the rational mind of this magnitude is extremely rare and is utterly inscrutable to me. In Conan Doyle’s case it is sometimes speculated that the traumatic death of his son in World War I drove him to emotional desperation that destroyed his reason, but it is more generally agreed that he simply fell victim to his own fame. People figured that if Holmes was so brilliant, the man who created him must have been at least as much so. How could the “father” of the great Sherlock Homes, one of the most powerful minds in literature, possibly be wrong? Thus, Conan Doyle wrote his articles and spouted his nonsense fundamentally unopposed.

Perhaps his best known blunder involved a series of photographs that are now referred to as the “Cottingley Fairies.” On a lark, two little girls in Cottingley took a few trick photographs using paper cutouts and some simple developing techniques to create what superficially appear to be photographs of the girls interacting with fairies and gnomes. Frances and Elsie and their family placed no importance on the photographs until a friend of Conan Doyle’s wrote him a letter suggesting that the pictures were in fact real.

Conan Doyle immediately attacked the photographs with what I can comfortably call idiotic glee. He was reinforced in his error by a man named Edward Gardner, who was a believer in theosophy (a very long word that just means “retarded crap”). In turn, Gardner fed off of Conan Doyle’s fame, and together the two began building their massive castle of stupid.

Here are two of the pictures:

In the age of Photoshop and other illusory art forms in particular, these are perhaps too obviously phony to us, let alone to any expert in photography, even during the period in question, but the errors committed by Conan Doyle and Gardner in their “investigation” of the photographs are legion, far more than I have room for here, and they led the great author inexorably to the conclusion that these pictures were “utterly beyond any possibility of faking!” To cite one consistent example, Conan Doyle gobbled up special pleadings left and right. When it was observed in the first photograph that Elsie is not even looking at the fairy but a tad sideways, he became convinced that this is because looking directly at fey folk disconcerts them and will cause them to vanish. Thus, Elsie had learned to look askew at them! Excuses for why the second photo in particular must be depicting a moving fairy that is strangely clear and not blurry – something that would be common even in more modern cameras – are even more blatant and ludicrous. There was no attempt at proving any of it, only the barest and most shameless rationalizing that Conan Doyle could pull from his ass, and the list goes on.

And on and on...so long that it eventually resulted in a published volume. Conan Doyle released The Coming of the Fairies in 1922. Spiritualists crowed and non-retarded people facepalmed...but never in front of the man himself. I believe that if Sherlock Holmes had seen his creator chasing fairies he would have hung his head in shame. For where were Conan Doyle's own powers of reason and deduction? Where was his education? Can we really pin all the blame on ego? If so, how might things have been different had someone simply tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Hey Art, all this fairy crap of yours...well, it's making you look pretty freaking dumb. Maybe you’d better give it a rest.”

Of course, Conan Doyle is not the only person who is guilty of this sort of queer rational inconsistency, nor even the only author - An excellent modern example is Michael Crichton. Though his novels overflow with scientific modus, the man himself needed a good kick in the brain. From Wikipedia:

At Harvard he (Crichton) developed the belief that all diseases, including heart attacks, are direct effects of a patient's state of mind. He later wrote: "We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us." Eventually he came to believe in auras, spoon bending, and clairvoyance.

If these are the sorts of things one learns at Harvard, then I'm inclined to think the school does not deserve its stellar reputation. I wonder what state of mind of his own Crichton took to be the cause of the throat cancer that rotted out his neck and eventually killed him.

He was also an outspoken critic of global warming, though I wonder how much he knew about warmth at all judging by his roughly 47 failed marriages. Ah, but I ad hom. Well, good riddance to him in any case.

I suppose what's important about these men is that their writings are what will live on, and if the authors themselves turned out to be fruit loops, at least their stories are purveyors of rationality and science.

But there are still people who believe that the Cottingley Fairies are entirely real thanks to the inventor of Sherlock Holmes.

Freedom of Speech Goes Both Ways

Not long ago I engaged in a disagreement with a random person online who was of the opinion that a British cockney accent is the same as a New Zealand accent.

Yeah this one is starting out weird, but bear with me.

Anyway, it is not. To anyone who has an ear for language, the differences are distinct and notable. Certainly, any New Zealander or Brit will tell you so. But this person evidently did not have a good ear (or brain, since his claim didn't make any lingustic or geographical sense), and couldn't discern the difference. When I told him he was wrong, he uttered the following sentence:

"Oh, I guess we're not allowed to have our own opinions anymore!"

I've heard this before, and it has always left me confused. When arguing, I've expressed that my opponent's statements are incorrect, ill-informed, or sometimes outright stupid, but at no point have I ever suggested that they not be allowed to state them, let alone have them! (Incidentally, if I want them to shut up, I sure shoot myself in the foot by pursuing an argument with them.) There is no parallel here whatsoever, and yet I've heard similar things everywhere, from matters of frivolous opinion to statements that are definitely and demonstrably false. If there's anything worse than a stupid argument, it's an irrelevant one. However, I think I have an idea of what its origins are.

I think it's a massive, distorted overflow from the political correctness movement. Specifically, we've been told that the best (if not the only) thing to do in an argument is to agree to disagree (and I fucking hate that phrase, by the way). Certainly, this is sometimes the most logical solution...or a solution to use in order to avoid pointless or unnecessary conflict, but these people have apparently taken it to mean that we should never express criticism of anybody's statements ever, even when they can be proven false! In turn, this jives with the notion that all opinions are created equal, and it's the same reason why politicians, TV shows, and news programs consult homeopaths and psychics alongside doctors and detectives as a means of "balance."

In addition to being close to impossible as well as completely unproductive, the whole idea carries with it a fundamental hypocrisy. Look carefully at my example. Who is really trying to squelch whom? By suggesting that I'm not allowed to express my opinion that someone is wrong, they are in fact censoring me! People educated in sociology or political science know very well that the Conservative/Liberal divide is in fact not a left or right division at all - it's a circle. Become so liberal that you begin suppressing free speech in the interest of not offending anyone, and you've crossed the midpoint and become exactly the same as any radical conservative who censors people he doesn't like to hear. Many liberals would balk at this, but it's absolutely true. Perhaps they really do dream of a day when a person can say that Richard Simmons is Indian or that pineapples can grow on the surface on the moon and be met with smiles and the phrase, "well, you're entitled to your opinion." I don't know about you, but living in a society like that sounds just as horrible to me as living in any Fascist state.

I would be remiss if I did not also state the obvious - that all opinions are not created equal, and how coincidental it is that the people trying to get others to shut up often have positions that are very weak in the logic and evidence department. Gee whiz, I wonder why that is?

Here's the bottom line: You have a right to have your own thoughts and opinions as well as the right to state them, and I have the right to express that they are moronic. Free speech does not mean "free speech as long as you agree or as long as you're nice about it." The moment you open your mouth in a public forum, everyone in earshot has free reign to chew up your brain droppings and spit them out along with everybody else. That's how it is, that's how it should be, and any outside attempt to protect your fragile sensibilities will inevitably infringe on the rights of others. If you want your ideas to go unchallenged, then you can always go find a place where everyone else agrees with you and express yourself there. But the free market of ideas is dog-eat-dog, and free speech goes both ways. Deal with it.