nihil architecture blogs

Some people reading this Blog might find my grammatical capabilities dubious, those will probably give up. In fact, I was told from childhood on I should make my sentences shorter in essays, and I could divide native speakers over the fact if my grammar in a given language was correct or not. I’ve lately taken an appreciation to realize that these are ultimately related, take this extreme example of a sentence I once posted in a thread about anti-piracy vs. anti-copyright.

So please, Micra, cut the holier-than-thou self-righteous attitude of that some how it’s a de facto moral absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here with tonnes more of rational arguments than your morally stagnated dogmatic view on the matter try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Some people would say that that is grammatically very bad, and all of those would not be able to point out why it’s so bad. A thing I always had, they said it was bad grammar, but they either admitted they couldn’t say why, or say they didn’t feel like it. Point is that it’s very much grammatically correct, allow me to show it by cutting it down and down:

First we remove some adjectives:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here with tonnes more of [...] arguments than your [...] view on the matter try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Then we remove some embedded clauses:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] moral absolutism that downloading is bad and your surprise that people here [...] try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Finally the bare skeleton of the sentence:

[...] Cut the [...] attitude of that [...] it’s a [...] moral absolutism that downloading is bad. [A]nd [cut] your surprise that people here [...] try to ‘justify’ its taking place. [...]

Now, this is very obviously grammatically correct, and inserting extra adjectives and adpositional clauses surely shall not change this. So, what was wrong with it? It was just a very long sentence inside a very long sentence, maybe that’s hard to read, I can imagine that a lot of people would find a sentence to be grammatically incorrect even though they can’t point out why, simply because they can’t read it. One could call it a mark of supreme bad style in literature to write such sentences.

I can’t say I care, I don’t think about how I’ll word things or ‘prose’ when I debate, I write down what I have to say. Of course this is all defeating to the goal to convince an opponent if he-or-she can’t even read what I’ve to say.

I also don’t believe in ‘good style’, most rules of style were invented at whim by some person at some time any-way, like split-infinitives, that’s just nonsense. But I’ve also come to appreciate this very simple fact reasoning; I write those sentences without thinking or trying, most people find them hard to read, I don’t find them hard to read at all, so does this say a lot about my capability with grammar, or theirs? I’m not stupid in learning languages or seeing patterns, far from it, so, the often told rule of ‘making shorter sentences’, couldn’t it all just be a warped way to say ‘Keep account to the grammatical deficiencies of your audience?’, people that often make long sentences and are perceived as ‘chaotic’ by their audiences have a popular reputation to be quite intelligent nonetheless, what if people just perceive it as chaotic due to their own inability to perceive the more complicated patterns? I’ve made compelling the notion that my sentence was correct, even though a lot of natives would at first sight say that it obviously was not.

I’d find it a not-too unreasonable notion that children who’re told by their teachers to curb the length of their sentences are in fact being told implicitly ‘You’re smarter than I, therefore I find your sentences hard to read.’

But then again, who with half a mind’d deny the universal præsence of dubiousness in linguistic præscriptivism?

Some time back, I had a conversation with a district attorney about the idea of the legal system, not so much a debate, she felt of course that people that commit crimes should be put into jail, let’s not get too nihilistic and hold that axiom as dogma for sake of argument. I was more openly quæstioning the issue of how many innocent people are put into jail as a sacrifice for that ideal. After all—all there is to this is a lower bound of how many innocent faced legal discipline, ignoring for the time being the possibility that—of course—a guilty man can also later be ruled innocent.

Now, I personally believe one can ask and force people to compromise to help others, I think one can kill one man to save to others. And until some one has given me a tangible definition of the difference between ‘compromising another man for one’s own benefit’ and ‘refusing to put effort into helping another man’ I shall assume them to be merely politically differently coloured terms for the same concept. The difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter of you like. Both come down to you gaining advantage and willingly letting another man losing some-thing for that goal.

So, I agree that—assuming the legal system helps to stop crimes—to a certain degree it’s reasonable to force innocent people to be compromised to help more innocent people. In fact, I of course don’t believe in the moral nature of legal systems and see it purely as asking a certain group, here criminals, to give up their gains for another larger group, here productive citizens. Seeing how the definition and popular opinion about what constitutes a ‘criminal’ changes dramatically over time, I have no reason at the moment to believe it’s any more than simply a system people have evolved to justify their system and actions and not having to face the fact that they as a majority sacrifice a minority for themselves by mentally labelling them ‘criminals’ and believe that some how they ’should’ be punished.

Her reasonable response in some-what similar colours to my open thoughts were. ‘Yes, but it’s a price we pay for it.’, the ‘we’, here is an interesting one. Who exactly pays for it? not I, I’m not innocently in jail, I assume her to not be either while we talked on Jabber. So it’s a price  ’we’ ask other people to pay for us as I illustrated above. But it’s not as unfair as it sounds, as it’s still a democratic system and people have by majority vote chosen for it under the understanding that by sheer bad luck they too could be incarcerated innocently and have accepted that risk for the benefit of their secured safety. Though—it only takes 51% of the adult population that does not yet reside in jail—innocent or not—to decide this for the entire population. So theoretically, the minority can decide this for the majority, though that doesn’t seem to be the case and legal systems are overwhelmingly supported.

But there’s a catch to it, the population seems to support legal systems under misinformation, people make this choice effectively on the knowledge of only the lower bound I spoke of before, not many people seem to be actively conscious of the fact that it could, and most likely is, a lot higher than all the cases that were discovered of people being put to justice for a crime they didn’t commit. More so, the legal system itself seems to spread propaganda about lady justice being blind and judges being impartial, supposedly that people are innocent until proven guilty and other romanticized ideas about the functioning of the legal system that are blatantly not true. Judges as human are they are are far from impartial, one may be innocent until proven guilty on paper but de facto one has to face interrogations, one is ‘held for quæstioning’, one has already been compromised in one’s freedoms and desires before being formally convicted and most legal systems offer no compromise if a conviction is not obtained. Furthermore, of course a lot of judges have already made up their mind in advance. Maybe people know this on the street, but do they realize it? Are they really as conscious of this as of the fact that they have five fingers? Or do they just know this as a given to answer on tests but make their choices of life as if that fact isn’t there?

I don’t think people realize it at all, and many don’t even know it, people indeed seem to live their lives as if it’s true, the romanticized version of the legal system of impartial and blind judges that can separate fact from lies and speculation—it isn’t. Judges are essentially often amateurs about the things they have to rule over, often they have their experts with them but just as often they overrule their advice. The fact that in all cases, taking it to a higher court changes the decision of the judge, at least in magnitude and quite a lot of times changes the guilty to the innocent and the inverse seems to give it quite clear. Lady justice is not blind at all, she has very acute vision. If ‘justice’ takes into account that also the magnitude of the penalty is that which one ‘deserves’, then I don’t think a single man has ever been put to ‘justice’. Yet the populace that supports this system overwhelmingly seems to live in the feeling that it does function as an apparatus of justice rather than order. And perhaps not as orderly as many people also think. The fact remains that despite the legal system being there, crimes still happen. An interesting fact is also that on a world map, countries which have a very strict legal system tend to have a higher crime rate. Of course, either could cause the other and it’s well-conceivable that the populace demands higher punishments if crime rate increases, though it would seem intuïtive that as a larger percentage of the populace is composed of criminals, they would seek for less. An often cited example of course is that the Netherlands has very low cannabis consumption rates, despite the fact that it’s infamously legal in this country.

Another thing to account for is that even if people realized the true figures of the innocent being compromised in the name of the greater good, and even if they were quite high, people still maintain the ‘it’s not going to happen to me’, attitude. People tend to have this feeling that if they know, or even realize that bad thing x has a certain chance of occurring to random people. They still have the feeling it’s going to occur sooner to their neighbour than to the, and even sooner to a random person they never heard of. Humans are indeed inærently optimistic, and probably this weighs in their decision to maintain a legal system.

So, seeing that the people have been misled, and have misled themselves to make their decision to have a legal system? What would happen if there weren’t one? How moral is a random human being? What if there were just rules to keep, but one wouldn’t receive punishment for breaking them? Do humans beings not steal because they feel it to be ‘wrong’, or do they not because they don’t want to go to jail?

A thing to take into account is that ‘You will not beat a man to death because he stole a thing from you but call the police instead’ is another rule and law in this society. So, if one abolishes the state’s role in punishing people, the people will jump into that vacuum and take it on their own to punish criminals. Now some people might see this as an advantage and many people indeed have more often called for people being allowed to enforce the law on their own and have looked with dismay to people being punished more severely than a person that robbed their shop, because they beat that person practically to death for it.

And those rules are another example of order, say that a person has raped my daughter and I proceed to kill that person in rage. Many people would feel that I should not be put into prison and I can imagine it, the catch is here, ‘say that a person has raped my daughter.’. What I have done there is administered a death penalty for a crime as judge, jury, executioner, prosecutor, and legislative power against a man that ‘had a fool for a client’. I find it quite plausible that—certainly in my emotional rage—I got the wrong man. Maybe my daughter wasn’t even raped but just put up a story for some candy. So, imagine if we remove those rules? Then a lot of innocent people are going to get killed, and if we say you get acquitted afterwards only if you turned out right; still a lot of innocent people are going to get killed because people often think they are right when they are not in a fit of rage, and they have to go to jail themselves too afterwards. So this rule that you can’t take justice into your own hand serves as a rule of order.

Back to the example of the shop, we have a man caught in the act there, maybe a bit more trustworthy than a daughter coming to you crying that she’s been raped by a teacher and you jumping to your gun in rage. Say you can use more force than necessary to defend yourself on people you caught in the act, you of course have to prove afterwards that that person was really robbing your shop, that’s a lot harder to do of a dead man lying on the floor. So say you fail to prove that, and they did prove that you shoot him. You go to jail yourself, alternatively you can say that they have to prove that that person didn’t rob your shop. Well, then you’ve created a really handy way for killers to escape conviction as they can always claim those things, making it very hard for you to prove they lied. So then you end up with a system that lets the guilty go. The rule again serves for order, to let the legal system operate practically and efficiently.

Ultimately, the perception a lot of people have that these things should be allowed again seem to work on a romanticized idea of the legal system and the human ability to spot criminals you see in CSI and Law and Order. Take the film ‘Dirty Harry‘, it of course triggered a mass response from the people that police offers should have more freedom. But what happened in that film is fiction, and not reality. Understandably, many people find it strange that evidence that is illegally obtained cannot be used, after all, evidence is evidence no matter how it was obtained? Well, if you allow it and just discipline the officer that did so, they have a motivation to obtain that evidence, there being very good reasons that some of those methods are illegal. Say your hunches are wrong? you never see that in fiction do you? An officer trying to obtain evidence illegally but simply being wrong and having violated the privacy of an innocent man, or worse, tortured him. There’s a reason you can only go so far to obtain evidence. It doesn’t seem to happen in films like Dirty Harry, but police officers that are overly emotional about their cause and try to bring criminals to justice because they hate them tend to not think that clear and if they are set to get an innocent man into jail they better not have the luxury of obtaining their evidence in all the ways they like. Unusual in that this rule is there to protect the innocent at the expense of letting some guilty people walk away.

The thing I ask myself in this is what the optimum is, for me, clearly punishments should be lighter, not heavier, I see no single plausible reason why crime should increase if punishments are lighter, and they are and should be seen as a lesser evil and a vessel of order and not justice. Prævention should also have more emphasis over punishment, you don’t take innocents with that and better stop a crime than punishing some-one to prævent it a later time.

Ultimately, a tool I see to stop crime is to combat poverty, why resort to breaking the law if you have a comfortable life? It doesn’t apply to all people, I know and realize though. Another thing is to simply migrate the effect of crimes on the victim. How often have you been the patient of a crime you could ask yourself? Killed surely not, maybe a friend was killed? Not in my case or in most cases at least. Most people I knew that died died due to conditions, old age or bad driving, either of themselves or others. Not many people are truly that taken by crime, it might even be less than are innocently put away. A better solution for me would to provide for better funding and accommodations in cases of theft. As in the case of driving, many people that support higher punishments seem to also favour higher maximum driving speeds, while traffic is still a far higher cause of death than murder. It seems indeed that people are not that much interested in stopping death rates after all with their legal systems but simply getting people behind bars or punished in some way that conduct behaviour they do not approve of. No one hates a speeder, unless perhaps he crashed into your mother and killed her. But a thief or murderer, that’s another story.

On a rather dubious site, I was entering ‘debate’ with some-one who was apparently a linguist, not only that, but also a linguist who not only claimed that a spelling standard regulated by an official body was ‘descriptive linguistics’, but also a spelling standard which differentiated two words which were phonetically equal as much as phonemically and simply spelt differently per etymology, which is also a regular process of a lot of similar couples in the language we spoke of, and also a spelling standard which is most notoriously wrongly applied even by adults in spoken of language, even after many months she still claims it’s descriptive linguistics with absurd arguments, also, she doesn’t like me. I’m talking about the ‘dt-rule’ in Dutch by the way. If you are a linguist, please tell her she sucks (cataclysm__child at hotm4il dot common extention) with my compliments. In fact, you don’t have to be a linguist, any-one who know the definition of ‘descriptive linguistics’ can just mail her and argue why she’s wrong, I’m against the argument of authority.

However that is completely irrelevant to the article actually and I’ll leave in the middle if I just wrote it as an excuse to rant on Nele, which actually is a pretty beautiful name I would name my daughter like that. The point is I had a debate with her which started about creationism and then ventured into scientific rigour. She continually accused me of not ‘understanding’ philosophy as I attacked Captain Moustache on flaws in reasoning like you’d never seen it. What also happened was that she said some things about the imperfection of maths such as ‘Mathematics has unproven theorems’.. yeah. That was the first thing she said. So I simply assumed she applied some terms wrongly, that’s a contradictio in terminis I fear, you can only call a statement a theorem after it’s proven, that’s the definition of a theorem. So I pointed that out and asked what she meant to get back not only some-thing which indicated that she just read a dubious article about it and didn’t understand shit what she was talking about. But also some clear errors she made which I pointed out. That’s the vital difference, I pointed out her errors, I could point them out and then I claimed she didn’t know or understand the process behind mathematical reasoning at all and suggested she stop talking about it as she made a complete fool of herself. How-ever after asking a lot of times ‘Yes, what am I misunderstanding about philosophy then, where do I err?’ she couldn’t give me any concrete examples, she just kept claiming I didn’t understand it regardless of that she couldn’t extract an error in reasoning or some factual data I stated wrongly about the subject.

Which sadly happens rather often. That people insist you are ‘wrong’ without them being able to show the point where you are wrong, which is just annoying. The same thing happens a lot of times in art. ‘You don’t understand art.’ How could you ‘understand’ art in the first place? You could agree with people who think they understand it, that’s as close as you can get. It’s a sum of opinions, studying art and having discourse about it. Same with continental philosphy like Nietzsche, I mean, come on, it’s formally just popular literature he wrote. He wrote it for laymen to read, people with no education in any scientific field ought to be able to understand it assuming ‘common knowledge’ as prærequisits and therefrom it is popular literature by definition. How people think of themselves as ‘intelectual’ by reading that or Nietzch is called a ‘thinker’ is beyond me.

This article sucks, next time a good old holocaust post, now go tell Nele why she’s wrong with my compliments, don’t just tell her she sucks, give arguments. Nahh, just forgot about it, I’ve given all the arguments I can, repeating an argument doesn’t make it more valid, no argumentanda ad nauseam please.

All right, I am fully conscious of the fact that from the perspective of my mother what happened was that she got a præsent for me, I asked a question about why she thought I liked it and she got back when she had just finished her sentence out of no-where. “FUCK YOU, DIE BITCH, YOUR KIND BURNT BRUNO AND KILLED TURING, FUCK OFF, GET OUT OF MY ROOM AND TAKE YOUR WHOLE DISGUSTING SPECIES WITH YOU.”

What happened was that she came home with ‘I’ve bought some-thing for you you’ll like?’, ‘Hmm, what?’, ‘Black cushions.’(*), ‘Hmm, why would I need those, I already have cushions?’, ‘Well, you like black.’ (**) At (*) I already thought ‘30 seconds and I’ll explode, probably. At (**) I did, I tend to ask questions before exploding no matter how obvious a situation is before getting angry, realizing that I cannot know what I overlook as the last human on earth.

Point being, this is probably the seventh time I told my mother I do not like ‘black’, repeating things isn’t that annoying. I’m more annoyed by the reason she thinks I do. In her world, I apparently wear  ‘a lot of black clothes’, which I may do 60% of the time, I also wear a lot of white and grey clothes. I’m more interested into why for instance she has to this day failed to notice I always wear plain clothes or simple design, or that I always wear discrete cloths in that I always have long trousers and longsleeve shirts / hooded sweaters even in the summer, or that my clothes are also several sizes too large (belts for the win), for some reason, of all those things, the black colour is the only thing which has captured her attention, which isn’t even omnipræsent like all the others I mentioned.

Naturally this is to accumulate to her collection of stereotype images of her own son. A chap with long hair and a psychotic depression in early adulthood who then according to her own vision of the world shall then dress in ‘black’. The same happened at the university when I was asked what kind of music I listened to with me replying ‘ambient’ to get back ‘Ahh, Slipknot or some-thing?’ to just say back ‘Almost, except completely different, kind of like you and some-one with a brain.’, if he already knew for himself what kind of music I listened to, why ask? I personally can’t stand those teenagers who idolize ‘black’, listen to ‘metal’ and are blatantly savage and having the time of their lives on concerts whilst jumping around with their friends who at the same time often claim to be ‘depressed’ and ‘hateful’ or some-thing like that. From my own world, they are closer to my mother than to me in the sense of that they are also guilty of stereotype imaging.

What people also forget to realize is the nature of the in-group bias. Members from an external group appear as more alike than members from your own group, I shall pertain no fake modesty to that I’ve throughout my life have been let completely unaffected or at least that little that it becomes irrelevant by this human behaviour. I remember that on an electronic music board, some-one got annoyed by that people can’t understand the difference between trance and techno and claim it is all the same, an annoyance I share, they are nothing alike. However the right of that person to be angry by that was voided when a day or so later he said that R&B and Hiphop were all the same… small slip maybe? No, because as I pointed out his hypocrisy, he kept claiming that they really are the same while trance and techno aren’t and it are just marketing terms in the former case lest a genuine distinction in the latter… human behaviour, textbook example.

The true hypocrisy lies in that in some forms, this behaviour is all but universal, and in others even illegal. To say that ‘all foreigners’ are just the same is pretty much evil here, and if it comes from a government official that person would ultimately have to resign. Some-thing I have attended my mother to earlier on such an occurrence, especially when she got angry when some-one thought that Moroccans have a higher crime rate in this country, that would also mean that people of Indian descent have a higher crime rate like my mother. Saying that Moroccans have a higher crime rate is  as much a fallacy in debate by the way, as ‘Moroccans’ are just as much a group which we can divide into ‘Moroccans that work at a bakery’ and ‘Moroccans that work as a lawyer’ and those again and again. The only argument you can put forth comes to the individual ‘You have done a crime.’ is an argument. A simple reductio ad absurdum to show you cannot use ‘groups’ in this sort of argument is:

Be x a random human. Now construct a ‘group’ A consisting of x and y where y is a serial killer. We now have a correlation of group A in crime rates (which is absurdly high) as x is in group A. x is more dangerous. We now have established that every human is more dangerous than average… contradiction by the definition of average. Q.E.D.

Which so perfectly shows the problem with stereotypical imagery. How to construct group A. The point is that we may construct A in every way we like. But people are naturally inclined to group certain things together and others not, for no real reason. My mother is inclined to group people who wear black together versus those who don’t. Thence came her stereotype imagery.

Theorem: Biology is a pseudoscience
Proof: Biology does not offer proofs or if it does does as stupidly as this little ‘proof’ here.

One of the most dire things wrong with this ‘proof’ is that it lacks a definition of ‘pseudoscience’. In order to define pseuoscience, let me first give an informal definition of the scientific method as used in this article:

Any form of deduction which is:

1. Objective, any scientist at any time and any place and from any culture most come to the exact same results from the same set of data.
2. Not contradictory to classical logic, the propositions derived in science may not be proven false in logic, however they do not necessarily have to be proven true, as in experimental results.
3. Investigative, scientific deduction is to investigate what is true, not trying to prove certain things true.

With the occasional slips, biology remains largely innocent of malperformance on point 1 and 2. However on point 3 they fail graciously. Let’s examine some of their slips:

Species

Biology postulates the existence of the concept of ’species’, which is commonly explained as ‘Two individual forms of life who can produce fertile offspring together if and only if in the same species.’ this isn’t even a definition of the concept of species and what is an ‘individual form of life’ isn’t even defined. Is an ant-hill one invidual or not, that is the question? But we need no more to quite simply show the concept of species cannot exist. Using the argument of clines.

A cline in biology is simply a group of related organismes diverge continually over a large area. Its inhabitants can most likely produce fertile offspring with its neighbours, and the whole street. But not much further than that, and this applies for every inhabitant of the cline. Assume members x,y,z in a random cline X. It occurs that x can produce fertile offspring with y, and y with z, but x not with z. x is then of the same species as y and y likewise with z, since in biology. An individual can only belong to one species. We may conclude that x is of the same species with z. But x cannot procreate with z we first established, so it’s also not of the same species. A contradiction to with what we started. Q.E.D. the concept of ’species’ cannot exist. And of course, given with that biology has shown continuous evolution of species and common ancestors, we may also conclude that the Mushrooms I have on my Pizza are in fact of the same species as I. Cannibalism is tr00 kids.

Diseases

Biology seems to postulate the existence of ‘diseases’, what are they? I’ve yet to read a good definition thereof, some common once we encounter. ‘Every-thing that is substantially different from normal’. Assuming we can take averages in some-thing as complex as ‘life’. How much is ’substantially’ then? Are extremely intelligent people born with a disease? Extremely pretty people? Furthermore. It’s probably extremely rare for all people to be in the room you read this in right now, it’s a disease to be in your room…

So let’s sharpen that definition to ‘Every-thing that is substantially different from normal which causes a disadvantage to the organism’. Like being on a deserted Island, that’s disease now.. and still being exceptionally intelligent. Or being homosexual in Iran, or wait was a disease.. or wait, it’s not.. or is it? Yeah… we haven’t even been able to define what we mean with ‘disadvantage’ by the way.

On that homosexuality issue, DSM used to consider a disease.. not any more, and now people get offended if you call it a disease… what the hell, first get a good working definition of disease, then prove them wrong and get angry at them. It’s like getting angry at some-one for not liking the Mona Lisa… also, calling people with Autism, Depression or whatelse mentally ill is still politically correct to do it seems. Psychiatry seems to fail at point 1 here, not objective, clearly they are influenced by culture.

Life itself..?

The entire fundament of biology, the existence of the elusive concept of ‘Life’, the very start. And they still can’t show there exists such a thing in the first place. Namely, they can’t define it. Every definition they try ends up with unwanted stuff like mules not being life, or fire being life. Give up, admit it, there is no distinction between lifeless and dead matter. It’s such a naïve distinction you cannot make into a scientific one. Seriously, biologists are amateurs, never have they made a valid logical step and a complete idiot like myself can use valid informal logic to prove them wrong. Oh boy.

[further reading]