Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

For my Islamic Law class this past semester, I wrote a short essay about Muslim linguistic philosophy in light of modern linguistics. For some reason, I don’t have the final draft, but I do have the first draft. I don’t really want to go through and edit it, so I will post a PDF of the paper and the sources. Read it.  Or don’t.  It’s probably pretty boring.

This weekend I attended the Deftones concert with everybody’s favorite reverend. The show was originally booked for In the Venue, which is really strange considering that they must have sold more than one thousand tickets. What’s even stranger is where they moved it after they realized that a thousand people wouldn’t fit in a venue that probably holds no more than two hundred: The Salt Palace convention center. It wasn’t the worst place for a concert, but it seemed a little odd. Oddness aside, it felt wonderful to hear Deftones close their encore with the song “7 Words” in the same venue hosting the National Sheriff’s Association convention. Anybody familiar with Deftones knows why that is funny.

I don’t want to say the opening bands were bad performers, since it’s very hard to open for a big act (see The Like at the Muse concert last September). Fall of Troy has potential, but they clearly weren’t showing it. Direngrey, some Japanese death metal band, I suppose, had a decent sound, but couldn’t keep the attention of the crowd. Dan and I had our own little after party walking around Salt Lake and eating at Denny’s. We must have had the munchies following the contact high we surely received.

In a Past Life…

You Were: A Friendly Jester. Where You Lived: Central Africa. How You Died: Buried alive.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am bringing back a feature that has long been sitting dormant in the vast expanse of the Internets: the Friday Fatwa. I don’t know if I can say how long it’s going to be back, but it should show its ugly face every now and again. Where to start…

First, there was recently a bear attack in Utah county in which a young boy died. The local news and opinion pages since then (Monday or Tuesday I think) has been saturated with the story and commentary about the incident. It’s really starting to grind on my nerves. Here are a few letters to the editors I found particularly annoying:

[From the Deseret News]

I know that all of our hearts go out to the family of the young boy who was recently killed by a bear in American Fork Canyon. It was a tragedy. However, I don’t understand why warnings were not posted when a bear sighting took place earlier that day.

If you were at a beach and there had been shark sightings, a warning sign would have been put up. Surely there could have been some way to alert campers

Kim Grant
Kaysville

What kind of sign is necessary? You’re in the bloody wild. Of course there are going to be bears. Welcome to Utah.

[From the Trib]

I read, with sadness, the article about Samuel Ives being killed by a bear. I am sure that everyone has condolences for the family.

However, the fault does not lie solely with the bear. The family was camped two miles above the campground, some distance away from the developed areas. The Forest Service cannot possibly follow everyone who goes into the mountains to see where they are camping and what they are doing. If people choose to reject safe camping procedures by staying in undeveloped camping areas, they also must accept any consequences.

Luke Osborn, the bear hunter, yelled, “Yahoo,” when he killed the bear. There is no reason for joy in that. A bad decision cost two lives. This was not the bear’s fault, not the Forest Service’s fault and not young Samuel’s. If people would learn to follow safe practices and respect the natural wildlife in the mountains, these unfortunate events would not happen.

Janice Klein
Park City

Frankly, I agree with him, but his letter elicited this response from TribTalk user ‘Brigham Nephi Taft Benson’:

God gave humans dominion over animals. That means we can do whatever we want to them. Animals have feelings? That’s a good one. Only a tree hugging hippie would think that, not a manly man like myself. Killing animals is fun! I love watching their soul leave their body and knowing that I was the one who caused that. Gives me quite a rush, kinda like you hippies get when you smoke your doobies or whatever you call them.

Sweet Jesus…that’s all I can say.

What I am waiting to see now is a letter similar to the kinds of letters the ill-informed listeners to conservative talk shows send in when talking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Allow me to simulate a possible entry:

We, the American people, need to stop protecting bears. Good, honest, American people don’t go into bear caves and slaughter bear cubs, but the bears rip through tents and take innocent American children. We need to stop supporting the terrorist bears.

Alma Benson Young
American Fork

In other news, I frequent a gym that includes a large family pool full of children. Why is it that these kids can’t be bothered to towel off before they go into the locker room or the bathroom stalls, leaving the floor covered in a large pool of water? What’s worse is that the management has removed some of the floor mats, leaving dirty pools of water where I stand to change.

There is also a local Mexican restaurant I am fond of that serves its food cafeteria style. When I went there last night, the woman in front of me had a conversation with one of the line workers that went something like this:

Woman: What is the thing in the bowls I keep seeing? It looks like a taco salad.

Worker: It’s a salad.

Woman: Okay, I think I want that. What do I get in it? I want meat. What kind of meat do I get on it? Do I get cheese on it?

Read the bloody menu before you order.

I visited a high-school graduation ceremony in Washington state this past weekend. It was a whirlwind trip, with very little time for any R & R. As a result, this week I am more lethargic than usual. I am sure the increase in Salt Lake temperatures the last week haven’t been helpful either. Anyway, being at a graduation made me want to post this:

A more substantial post will come soon.

I find it terribly ironic when fan clubs devoted to Sam Harris pop up on Facebook. A group of followers of an atheist thinker to gather and rally against theism with evangelical zeal seems remarkably odd to me. One of the discussions in the Facebook group I linked to I found particularly interesting. The thread is entitled, “Harris vs. Dawkins.” The first paragraph of the first post reads:

While Dawkins has impressive credentials (with his seat at Oxford), his most recent book The God Delusion falls down hard when making coherant [sic] arguments against the faithful. While I respect the mans effort in organizing the non-religious (especially atheists) politically, his most recent work is just not as intellectually robust as Harris’s The End of Faith.

When I read this paragraph, I don’t see a reasoned discussion about the arguments made by Sam Harris as opposed to Richard Dawkins. What I see is a discussion about the comparative writing and reasoning ability of the two men. This is the way critics write (I am writing as a critic now). This is also the way competing religious polemicists write. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if their dream came true.

There is an old saying: the masses are asses. If you have a group of, say, one hundred people off the streets, I would wager that five to ten are capable of leading intellectually. The other ninety would only be capable of following. The followers become the most zealous. This is the way religions progress within fifty years of their founding, and is the way secular movements are prone to develop. Honestly, religion may be baloney (I personally believe it has plenty to offer), but it is baloney with a future. It can be seen in the way opponents of religion need their own organizations to counter it. Perhaps dogmatism aids in perpetuating the species.

In other news, I was thinking about game theory applied to player-versus-player combat in MMOs while driving between Huntsville and Salt Lake. There is a great debate among the player-bases of these games about survivability and damage dealing. For example, the mage (an offensive spell caster) class in World of Warcraft has, hands down, the lowest survivability in the game, and should be able to trade survivability for the ability to introduce other players to a world of pain. In reality, the mage class is gimped. Other classes can put out comparable or more damage but have far greater survivability and utility. Players who roll mage like to cry about this, really, it isn’t that big of a problem.

There is a concept called first-mover advantage. In PVP, this can be interpreted that in world play (as opposed to controlled battleground play), your chances of victory (here defined as reducing your opponent’s HP to zero while keeping yours greater than zero), all things being equal, are greatly increased if you engage an enemy player. If he engages you, your chance of survival, all things being equal, is greatly decreased. If a mage keeps this in mind, meaning he makes the first move, his survivability is no greater than that of a healing, damage-dealing shadow priest.

Of course, not everything is necessarily equal. The PVP system in WoW is, at least in part, gear based. A well geared player can own another’s face, even if he is taken by surprise. Ganking, or engaging a player while he is engaged in PVE doesn’t really count. The player being ganked stands no chance.

As for a quick update on my summer reading: I am reading through the Lord of the Rings series again. I am about half-way through the second book right now. I am also reading two biographies. On about General William Tecumseh Sherman, and the other about abolitionist John Brown. I am working on my Arabic so I can take the CASA exam for a fellowship in Syria in 2008, and would like to find time to work on some Hebrew. Time time time.

…where my blog title came from?

Here.

I dug through some of the comments in response to my letter to the editor. I didn’t want to register to respond there, so I figured I would bring up a few points here:

· Point: In the same [1852] speech I referenced, Young stated that the master should treat the slave with kindness. I shouldn’t have been so one-sided. My Response: Brigham Young saying to treat the slave with kindness is an insignificant point. He still openly supported the institution of slavery. Slavery is wrong, regardless of whether you treat your slaves kindly.

· Point: You can’t judge a 19th century man with a 21st century standard. Imagine judging Abraham Lincoln for using the N-word when it was used all the time in his day. My response: That’s not an apt comparison at all. I agree that it is wrong to judge a man by a standard that didn’t exist in his day. That’s not what I am doing. I am judging a man by his claim to prophecy and by the standard of his immediate predecessor Joseph Smith, a man who ultimately ended up supporting Abolitionism and conferred high priesthood offices upon blacks.

· Point: Blacks weren’t ready for the priesthood. We need to work by the Lord’s timetable. My response: No. This is a point I tried to make in my letter. This excuse doesn’t cut it anymore. Blacks were apparently ready under Joseph Smith, so clearly the Lord’s timetable made room for them under Smith’s leadership. As a Mormon and a Christian, I demand a real answer.

Thank you. Come again.

Do you ever have one of those days when you’re like, “I am going to write a letter to the editor”? I had one of those days on Wednesday. In retrospect, I will probably piss some people off who are close to me. That’s the way it goes. I figured it would go unnoticed, but it turns out it is the number two most visited article on the Tribune website as of writing this. I figure I would at least milk my new-found popularity and share with you.

Note: there is some harsh language at the bottom.  Turn away now if you are easily offended.

I stumbled across these headlines people submitted to the Salt Lake Deseret Morning Tribune News back in January. Some are interesting, some are funny, some are melodramatic and nauseating. Here are a few gems.

· Trib eliminates annoying sticky note on newspaper

OMFG! This would be long overdue.

· Bush, Cheney resign; Pelosi takes oath

That would be just as unbearable to me.

· TSA stays stupid airport security rules

Not gonna happen. It’d be welcome, though.

· Democracy restored in USA: World watches

*nausea* Seriously though, this touches on something that annoys the hell out of me. Something about being out of touch with reality and not understanding what democracy entails. I’ll write about that some other time.

· Scientists find red meat & lard have health benefits

Anybody want to take a stab at who submitted this?

· Hinckley decries Utah theocracy; says “Get real”

Eh, Utah is hardly a theocracy. Try living in a real theocracy.

· Nothing left to chance: Utah Lottery funds education

Ironic headline. I like it. I also wouldn’t complain if Utah got a lottery.

· Legislature repeals everything, adjourns, order ensues

That’d be sweet.

· Utah’s new Fourth District elects Democrat

If the new district is Summit County, it will.

· al-Sadr: Democracy is better than Sharia

If you actually look at what Sharia is, you’ll see that it can’t even remotely be compared to democracy. They fulfill completely different ends.

· Olympics return in 2014

Euthanasia now!

· Utah joins civilized world

Heh…

Now, usually I try to keep the language PG on the blog, but I absolutely had to post this:

With All Due Respect, I Choose Not To Go Fuck Myself

Sir. Sir. Sir! Now that you have, I dare say, made your opinion on this matter more than abundantly clear, might I finally be afforded the…

Lameen on Farfur the Mouse.