As Soren Kierkegaard once noted (somewhere in his journals), "People hardly ever make use of the freedom which they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as compensation." I find this to be true for many, if not most, of the people on the Internet. They demand the freedom to express themselves in any way, yet they rarely put any thought into what they say -- only emotions. "This sucks!" "You suck!" "omgwtflol!!" And so on. If their thoughts are being deleted, they're quite eager to call it censorship. In a sense, I suppose, they're right, as they are quite clearly being restricted from expressing themselves. They should, however, not two things:

1) Freedom of speech is not absolute. Freedom is not absolute. There'll always be some restrictions to what you can do or say.
2) Censorship is not absolute. It only works here and now. You cannot ban something everywhere. You cannot ban it forever. You can only make sure that people don't read a book, an essay, or a comment here and now. But this is really what counts for anyone using censorship as a weapon or a tool. What the future might bring, does not concern them.

Right now, as I write this, there's a censored book on the desk in front of me. Not one of those that have once been banned somewhere (although there's lots of these in my bookshelf), but one that's actually been censored (It's a strange feeling, looking at it, knowing that it actually happened). It's a collection of papers from a meeting of the Soviet Estonian Academy of Sciences held in late 1948. The subject discussed there was the conference held in Moscow earlier that year where Genetics was declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience" (see the Wikipedia article on Lysenkoism for some background information). Several pages have (rather sloppily) been cut out from the book; the title of the censored paper and the name of its author have been blanked out with black ink. The unknown censor has done his (or her) job well -- you cannot make out neither the name nor the title. But the Machine as a whole hasn't done (couldn't have done) as thorough a job as one of its parts. I was still able to find out who the author of that paper was -- it was actually a speech by the President of the Academy of Sciences (he was arrested a few years later). I could even read the text of the speech if I wanted to: it was published in a national newspaper the next day. But I haven't read it. It's not a part of this book anymore.

Is anyone else here using the experimental interface thingy (aka University of Michigan Testing)?

It's interesting to note that using that thing has forced me to quite drastically change my browsing habits. Now, I normally read Slashdot at a threshold of -1, with a +3 bonus added to all the negative moderations and a +1 karma bonus. The first thing I changed when switching to the experimental interface was losing the karma bonus. I don't find users with an Excellent karma to be intrinsically more intelligent than others. I only ever used this because then I didn't have to open every comment in a new tab. Unfortunately, this would clutter the comment pages with loads of boring comments from boring people who think that just because they have this +1 bonus everything they say is pure gold. But now I can skip all this crap and only read it if it sounds remotely interesting.

The other thing I did was adding a +1 bonus to friends/fans. I did this because in journals, I want to see all the comments at once. It's a good solution, but not a perfect one, as the scores next to comments are different from what I'm used to seeing. But it's something I'll have to get used to.

I still haven't practically touched the focal comment control buttons. Does anyone know what these could be good for?

One morning, when Daniil woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into Franz Kafka..

Everyone knows by now that Internet debates are entirely futile. They usually result in exactly nothing and only serve to waste the time of those participating in them. There is no positive result. There can't be one, as the "rules" or the structure of an Internet debate simply don't allow it: all the debates pretty much boil down to two people yelling "NO, you're wrong!" at each other. No new information is ever added; the topics have already been debated to death, and the arguments used are such that everyone pretty much knows them by heart. Nothing new.

The only thing an Internet debate can ever lead to is what I call the Godwin Point -- the point where the people participating in the discussion realize that it has drawn out way too long. This usually happens when they run out of arguments.

Some people think Internet debates are about winning. That you can lose a debate by using a Nazi comparison. Of course they're wrong. The truth is, there are no winners. No losers, either. It doesn't really matter whether you use a Nazi comparison or not; it doesn't matter whether you are the one that posts the last comment to the thread or not, you'll still end up thinking you won the argument. But you didn't, and neither did you learn anything new. You only wasted some time.

I just wanted to say that I realized today that I am, in fact, a three-legged duck. That's it.

Err, hi.

I wasn't going to post anything here anymore, but someone asked about this, so I thought I'd better let you all know why I'm leaving -- for this is what I'm about to do. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave this account mostly "as is", though, for I have grown so attached to it -- to this mask -- that I just can't force myself to delete it... Which is kind of funny. It's as if it was a part of me, when in fact, it isn't. It's just a mask. A lie -- it has been all along. But I can't go on living like this any longer, so I've decided to end this game.

What I'm about to tell you -- and what I've been insinuating at in the previous paragraph -- will come as a shock to most of you. It might be less of a shock to a few, those few who had figured it out a long time ago (I know that at least one person has, and I suspect that a few others have as well). Who figured out that I am, in fact, a girl, and am just pretending to be a boy online...

I've never liked what I am. I've wanted to be a boy as long as I can remember. In this society, the boys were the ones that played all the interesting games. The ones that are allowed to have interesting lives, while girls are just supposed to...look pretty. I don't think I've ever looked pretty (some people might, of course, beg to differ). I cut my hair short. I wear pants. I hang out -- used to hang out -- on Slashdot...

Why here? I discovered this place by accident and subsequently learned how easy it is to be someone else here. Noone will ever actually see the real you, especially if you live in a country everyone confuses with Elbonia (heh). You're an abstraction of yourself, without a voice, a body, a face... Because you can easily lie about these, too. The photo I submitted to the photo contest was my brother's...And you never knew...

All the polls and "memes"... I've had lots of fun answering these the way I would if I were a 22-year old guy. Ironically, these were the moments when I always found out that while I can pretend to be someone else, I still can't change what I am...

Yes, it's been fun, but it wasn't until recently that I realized how unethical it actually was. Lying to you. At first it didn't bug me that much, but I've become more and more aware of this, and now I just can't take it any longer (some troll, huh?). Can't continue like this. Can't keep "living" in this lie -- and neither can I stay here after what I've done. So I bid you all farewell. Please don't be mad at me...

You really shouldn't be reading this. Please don't read this JE.

It is said that Emperor Nero once gave birth to a little green froggie. He kept the frog in his palace, ordered a special room to be built for it to live in, fed it salad leaves and flies. The flies had all been caught live by a slave of Nero's. The frog would never eat dead flies.

And then one day a flying saucer came to take the frog away. Nero wouldn't let them do it at first, for he had grown attached to the little froggie. So they burned the place down. The city of Rome. Nero was so shocked, he could only watch it burn down and sing sad songs.

I'm sure you knew all this already. They must've taught you this back in school. What they didn't tell you, however, was that Nero also gave birth to a tapeworm. Now this was by far the most miraculous thing to have happened, like, ever. The pyramids are nothing compared to this!

The tapeworm, too, had an alien father. Of course this is all metaphorically speaking, as these aliens didn't have these different sexes the way we do. They did have sex, though, but mostly with animals. There was, however, this one alien pervert who had sex with Emperor Nero. As a result of this union, Nero gave birth...to a tapeworm.

It was not just a tapeworm, it was a RED tapeworm. And it was the biggest tapeworm ever to be born -- Nero had to walk around the block three times before it was all out. By that time, the red tapeworm had eaten two slaves and one senator. And this is where this story will come to an abrupt end, because that poor senator was me.

You ask me why I shiver?

Out of the black void of the bloated net I received a hideous JPEG attachment, a single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from this godless email I received. If I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a thing.

Read it and tremble, mortal!

[Note: found this on Metafilter]

The Image Culture

Christine Rosen

hen Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana in late August, images of the immense devastation were immediately available to anyone with a television set or an Internet connection. Although images of both natural and man-made disasters have long been displayed in newspapers and on television, the number and variety of images in the aftermath of Katrina reveals the sophistication, speed, and power of images in contemporary American culture. Satellite photographs from space offered us miniature before and after images of downtown New Orleans and the damaged coast of Biloxi; video footage from an array of news outlets tracked rescue operations and recorded the thoughts of survivors; wire photos captured the grief of victims; amateur pictures, taken with camera-enabled cell phones or digital cameras and posted to personal blogs, tracked the disaster's toll on countless individuals. The world was offered, in a negligible space of time, both God's-eye and man's-eye views of a devastated region. Within days, as pictures of the squalor at the Louisiana Superdome and photographs of dead bodies abandoned in downtown streets emerged, we confronted our inability to cope with the immediate chaos, destruction, and desperation the storm had caused. These images brutally drove home the realization of just how unprepared the U.S. was to cope with such a disaster.

But how did this saturation of images influence our understanding of what happened in New Orleans and elsewhere? How did the speed with which the images were disseminated alter the humanitarian and political response to the disaster? And how, in time, will these images influence our cultural memory of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina?

Such questions could be asked of any contemporary disaster--and often have been, especially in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., which forever etched in public memory the image of the burning Twin Towers. But the average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards. "In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too," novelist Don DeLillo observed. Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type. On flickr.com, a photo-sharing website, you can type in a word such as "love" and find amateur digital photos of couples in steamy embrace or parents hugging their children. Type in "terror" and among the results is a photograph of the World Trade Center towers burning. "Remember when this was a shocking image?" asks the person who posted the picture.

The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking--a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history. Until the development of mass reproduction, images carried more power and evoked more fear. The second of the Ten Commandments listed in Exodus 20 warns against idolizing, or even making, graven images: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth." During the English Reformation, Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell led the effort to destroy religious images and icons in the country's churches and monasteries, and was successful enough that few survive to this day. The 2001 decision by the Taliban government in Afghanistan to destroy images throughout the country--including the two towering stone Buddhas carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan--is only the most recent example of this impulse. Political leaders have long feared images and taken extreme measures to control and manipulate them. The anonymous minions of manipulators who sanitized photographs at the behest of Stalin (a man who seemingly never met an enemy he didn't murder and then airbrush from history) are perhaps the best known example. Control of images has long been a preoccupation of the powerful. [...]

Every Playboy centerfold from 1988 to 1997.

"When I look at people that I would like to feel have been a mentor or an inspiring kind of archetype of what I'd love to see my career eventually be mentioned as a footnote for in the same paragraph, it would be, like, Bowie." - Trent Reznor

Here's Lenin's brilliant prediction of the existence of subatomic particles even smaller than the electron*, as it's given in "Materialism and Empiriocriticism" (Chapter 5.2):

"From Engels' point of view, the only immutability is the reflection by the human mind (when there is a human mind) of an external world existing and developing independently of the mind. No other "immutability," no other "essence," no other "absolute substance," in the sense in which these concepts were depicted by the empty professorial philosophy, exist for Marx and Engels. The "essence" of things, or "substance," is also relative; it expresses only the degree of profundity of man's knowledge of objects; and while yesterday the profundity of this knowledge did not go beyond the atom, and today does not go beyond the electron and ether, dialectical materialism insists on the temporary, relative, approximate character of all these milestones in the knowledge of nature gained by the progressing science of man. The electron is as inexhaustible as the atom, nature is infinite, but it infinitely exists."

* Some background, from an earlier chapter in that same book: "For instance, Lavoisier's principle, or the principle of the conservation of mass, has been undermined by the electron theory of matter. According to this theory atoms are composed of very minute particles called electrons, which are charged with positive or negative electricity and "are immersed in a medium which we call the ether." The experiments of physicists provide data for calculating the velocity of the electrons and their mass (or the relation of their mass to their electrical charge). The velocity proves to be comparable with the velocity of light (300,000 kilometres per second), attaining, for instance, one-third of the latter. Under such circumstances the twofold mass of the electron has to be taken into account, corresponding to the necessity of over coming the inertia, firstly, of the electron itself and, secondly, of the ether. The former mass will be the real or mechanical mass of the electron, the latter the "electrodynamic mass which represents the inertia of the ether." And it turns out that the former mass is equal to zero. The entire mass of the electrons, or, at least, of the negative electrons, proves to be totally and exclusively electrodynamic in its origin. Mass disappears. The foundations of mechanics are undermined. Newton's principle, the equality of action and reaction, is undermined, and so on."

This JE was inspired by a Slashdot article.

Every time someone makes a bold, yet dubious scientific claim (that they've debunked the Quantum Theory, invented a new and extremely powerful power source, proven that time doesn't exist, and/or so on), someone will invariably invoke what I would call the Einstein Defense: Einstein was a lowly patent clerk, yet he managed to revolutionize science; surely this guy can be right as well?

Well, no. Not really. First of all, Einstein's existence does not prove this guy right by way of analogy. Secondly, it's a bad analogy anyway. Your common crackpot scientist bases his (or her? I don't know, I've yet to see a female crackpot scientist...) "discoveries" on misconceptions of scientific theories -- or indeed on misconceptions of what a scientific theory is. This is usually because they don't have any education in physics -- unlike Einstein, who had a "real" degree in Physics (ok, so he was oficially a Physics and Maths teacher by training, but back then, this was what training to be a Physicist was all about. You couldn't just study Physics). As to him being "just a patent clerk", then I'm under the impression that it was not unusual for a patent clerk to publish papers in science journals. In fact, it was considered a matter of honour.

So, in this respect, Einstein wasn't someone completely unusual, a man "out of the woods". He was a talented physicist, for sure, but the common image of him as someone with no formal education is just a myth. A myth that has inspired quite a lot of pseudoscience. Please stop propagating it.

Of course I haven't really studied his life that thoroughly, so I may have gotten something wrong here. Feel free to correct me. Or something.

Brain scans find the penis at last

AT LAST we know where the penis is represented in the male brain.

The genitalia's location on the "homunculus", the brain's map of body parts, has been in dispute since the 1920s. Now Christian Kell at the University of Frankfurt in Germany has put eight men into an MRI scanner to help settle the question. Using a soft brush, Kell stroked parts of each volunteer's body while recording brain activity.

Each man's penis was represented in the same place - flanked by the areas for the toes and abdomen - Kell told the Organisation of Human Brain Mapping annual meeting in Toronto. "The only depressing thing," he says, "is that the representation is very small."

*Edit* Leo: I'm banned yet again (for an AC comment I made two days ago...heh). but yeah, if this law got passed in its current form, then these sites would become liable for all the comments posted. I don't think they wanted such a "solution". And they're also making it sound like they never intended to have any laws passed against inciteful comments...

---

In an attempt to improve this place (is this a meme?), I thought it appropriate to write a JE on local politics. Namely, a strange media (and political) campaign that has started about a week ago. It had, however, been in the making for much longer. And what they're campaigning against is internet flames.

When the first Estonian news portals were built in the wake of the dotbomb boom, some of them also incorporated the possibility of anonymously commenting the news. Back then, this was hailed as the "collective mind" of the internet people, able to produce insightful commentary on any topic. Fast forward to today, and what you have is "toilet walls" -- the discussions are a mess of unmoderated flames, trolls, all sorts of idiots. But I guess this was quite predictable, yeah?

Now, these forums quietly existed for years, but lately, they've been getting quite a lot of media attention, mostly in connection to a court case where some guy was found guilty of inciting social and racial hatred (he had posted racist and antisemitic comments on different boards). I guess this is where it started -- some people were suddenly talking about how "something has to be done". The last drop -- but also the perfect excuse -- seem to have been some comments posted about the tragic accident where rally driver Markko Märtin's co-driver Michael Park died. This is when a few national newspapers openly started campaigning against all the hate-spewing. They soon coined a neologism, "leim" (pronounced as "lame"), derived from "flame", as the thing they were fighting against. Supposedly this word stands for a comment, blog entry, email, etc. with insulting or inciting contents.

Now, this is where it all gets a bit strange (of course this sort of course of events is quite normal in Estonia...). Instead of actually actively fighting against these "flames" -- like, say, by deleting the offending comments -- they chose to start this media campaign. A new law has also been proposed, making it easier for law enforcement organs to identify anonymous commentators.

Now, what I find absurd about this campaign is precisely the fact that instead of considering other possibilities (all forms of moderation), these people want to change the laws to punish the wrongdoers. I mean, I don't condone posting comments like "burn the Jews", it's just that I don't think having the police hunt them down is the answer.