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

I’ve been thinking.

Say Hillary Clinton is our next president. That would mean that my entire life up to this point will have been spent under either a Bush or a Clinton (minus the first two, which were the Reagan years still). Let’s assume she gets elected and serves two full terms. See what follows:

Bush 1: 4 years.

Clinton 1: 8 years.

Bush 2: 8 years.

Clinton 2: 8 years.

4+8(3) = 28 frakking years under either a Bush or a Clinton. I’ll be 30.

A couple things on my mind today. Has anybody (in Utah) heard the referendum 1 (school vouchers) ads on the radio? I find them really irritating. It makes me wonder if there are options aside from “Yes” and “No” on the ballot. The logic the ads are employing is pretty ridiculous. For example, from the “Yes” side: “More money for public schools.” How? Seriously, how? Giving money that could be used for public schooling to people to use in private schooling equals more money for public schools?

From the “No” side: “…Teachers at private schools don’t need a teaching certificate or even a college degree.” How is that even relevant to the discussion? It’s not, it’s just a swipe against private schools and a misconception of what a teaching certificate is, a credential required only for teaching in government schools in Utah. The college degree thing is trumped up. Most private school teachers have degrees. The ones that don’t probably won’t be found teaching math, science, or English either.

The other thing is Julie Beck’s LDS General Conference talk. I know, I’m late to the game here, but I don’t pay attention to General Conference, so I have to catch all of the uproar second hand. I recall some complaints over at FMH about it. As I read it, yeah, I found a few examples of what I would consider an antiquated attitude of what women should do, like:

Mothers who know are nurturers. This is their special assignment and role under the plan of happiness.5 To nurture means to cultivate, care for, and make grow. Therefore, mothers who know create a climate for spiritual and temporal growth in their homes. Another word for nurturing is homemaking. Homemaking includes cooking, washing clothes and dishes, and keeping an orderly home. Home is where women have the most power and influence; therefore, Latter-day Saint women should be the best homemakers in the world. Working beside children in homemaking tasks creates opportunities to teach and model qualities children should emulate. Nurturing mothers are knowledgeable, but all the education women attain will avail them nothing if they do not have the skill to make a home that creates a climate for spiritual growth. Growth happens best in a “house of order,” and women should pattern their homes after the Lord’s house (see D&C 109). Nurturing requires organization, patience, love, and work. Helping growth occur through nurturing is truly a powerful and influential role bestowed on women.

Really though, aside from this and the children thing she said, it wasn’t that inflammatory of a talk. Kind of I’m tired of talking now. I think I need to go to class anyway. Why couldn’t Helen Keller drive? Sorry, sorry, I had to say that.

I found out about this from The Onion before I saw it in the real news.

If you’re not familiar with Conservapedia yet, I highly recommend you make yourself acquainted with it, you know, to save yourself from the liberal propaganda peddled by Wikipedia. In all seriousness, though, the Wiki site created by the son of Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly really is fun to read, if only to be amused by a presentation of brilliant idiocy. What caught my eye today was the article on Noam Chomsky (a more balanced approach here. Now, I may be falling in with a crowd of linguists that find themselves at odds with the Chomskyan tradition, but I think this characterization of Chomsky’s work is pure bullshot.

Generative Grammar

Noam Chomsky advocates the view that the human brain has innate ability to generate gramatical [sic] sentences, thus all utterances which is deemed sensical [sic] to the speaker is necessarily grammatical, and the only role the liguist [sic] should play is to decipher its grammatical structure. This view has been criticized by many linguists as nihilistic in that it rejects the notion of ungrammatical sentences. Noam Chomsky also pointed to instances of infants utter grammatical sentence fragments they have not been taught before as evidence for Generative Grammar.

Okay. What? First of all, how is Generative Grammar nihilistic? Second, this misses the point of generative theory entirely.

Universal Grammar

Noam Chomsky also proposed the theory that a kind of universal grammar, a grammar that underlies all human languages, is hard-wired in the human brain. Thus all human languages are fundamentally the same, with only superficial differences. This theory of universal grammar has been criticized by linguist Geoffrey Sampson as being not falsifiable, arguing that the grammatical generalizations made are simply observations about existing languages and not predictions about what is possible in a language. To this day, the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.

For decades, Noam Chomsky and his followers have been trying to make sense of sentences such as:

Who will be easy for us to get his mother to talk to?

which are deemed to be ungrammatical by a lot of linguists; by using techniques such as linking theory, anti-c-command requirement, A-positions, Bijection Principle, weakest crossover configurations, bound variable anaphora, asymmetric linking, licensing conditions, index of apronoun [sic], null operator analysis, variable binding, configurational [sic] conditions, inappropriate and appropriate antecedents, etc.

I am not even sure how to parse this, especially that, “the search for such universal grammar has been fruitless.” So I am not even going to try. What I will say is how funny it is that apparently, according to our moral superiors at Conservapedia, the theories contained within Chomsky’s generative approach have disproved his theory of Universal Grammar. I guess there are wackos (on both sides) that will take non-political details of people they don’t like and find a way to politicize them.

There are valid criticisms of Chomsky. I am not completely convinced of Universal Grammar or the Competence-Performance model, for example. There is experimental evidence that could refute the latter (which is based on an “ideal” speaker-hearer community, i.e. two people) in that uniformity impedes language acquisition. Additionally, when linguists hear an utterance, they are only measuring performance. Competence is, for all intents and purposes, off limits to measurement.

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.

Good news everyone, I have something new to be annoyed by.

First of all my faithful reader(s) should note that I am either a feminist or at least sympathetic to feminism, however something happened today that almost made me want to go home and brood while listening to one of the Reverend’s misogyny mixes. For the first time in my life, I came upon an idiosyncratic spelling of women. It was spelled womyn.

This is one of many alternative spellings employed by some more radical feminists, others include femal < female and humyn < human, etc., and I find it really irritating. The intention of these spellings is supposedly to fight back the subordination of women through language containing words like “-man/-men,” i.e., classifying women as a subset of men. That’s not what these words do. It’s a complete, unadulterated accident that woman bears any similarity to man and female bears any similarity to male, and so forth. Woman comes from O.E. wimman < wifman, which was a compound of wif ‘woman’ and man ‘person’ (the word for man was originally wer). Female comes from Latin femella ‘woman’ and male comes from Latin masculis ‘man.’ Human from Latin hominis ‘human.’ Oh dear, what’s a gyrl to do against facts like these…

A couple more points: let’s pretend that the above words were coined with the intention to subordinate women. In that case, changing the spelling wouldn’t do anything, since we would still pronounce the words the same way — the root remains the same. This is just a ridiculous attempt at pop-Whorfianism, trying to remove grammatical gender in order to liberate women. If you don’t know how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis works, don’t cite it. Oh, and did you know that Farsi (spoken in Iran) lacks grammatical gender? Women there are the most liberated on the planet.

Anyway, my summer is looking pretty decent, though it’s getting kind of busy all of the sudden. I am trying to get some Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac work in on the weekends, and I started reading The Lord of the Rings again. P.S. Only a few people will understand why this is funny (ZOMG mage nerf!)

Yes. This is what I’ve been doing at work.

EDIT: If you’re unsure where this comes from, check the last paragraph of my previous entry.

I finally got to watch the Frontline documentary The Mormons (I was too busy to watch it when it first aired two weeks ago). I was reasonably impressed with it. It seemed to attempt a fair portrayal, covering the history and culture and interviewing the rank and file and the dissidents. My one complaint was that it didn’t cover early Mormonism’s connections to Freemasonry. Surely that would have been relevant, either in the section on Joseph Smith, Mormon beginnings, or the temple ceremonies. Perhaps it would have taken too much time.

I discussed the documentary with a friend of mine. He asked how I felt about Mormonism, having been raised a Latter-day Saint, growing up in the culture, and being inactive (a term frequently applied to those who do not attend LDS meetings). What can be said is that I have had little exposure to Mormonism as it exists outside of Utah, the sole exceptions being visits to family in Seattle and Minneapolis and the summer I spent with a small group of Jordanian Mormons. Thus, what I can say about my feelings toward LDS culture is limited. I believe the culture is different here since Mormons comprise the majority religious group. This is probably the reason many Utahans identify themselves as being either Mormon or non-Mormon, an aspect of Utah may lead to my ultimate demise. Concerning Utah Mormon culture specifically, it’s can be a little irritating at times, but it’s not as bad as people think. It would be the same with any religious majority (even a non-religious majority).

As per Mormon doctrine and history, it’s a mixed bag for me. Do I believe Joseph Smith was a prophet? No, at least not in the commonly understood meaning of the term. Do I believe Joseph Smith was a fraud? Again, no. I think he was a sincere religious founder. Charlatan? All religious founders (including businessmen, scholars, anyone who has to use persuasions regularly) has to have a little bit of that in him, but I don’t believe Smith was trying to mislead people. Do I believe the Book of Mormon documents the pre-Columbian Americas? No, in fact Joseph Smith listed himself as the ‘Author and Proprietor’ of the first edition. Do I like some of the things Smith did? Yes. I’ll leave it at that.

Do I like Brigham Young? Not particularly. I think he was a dictator, a racist, and a philanderer. While Joseph Smith appointed a black man, Elijah Abel, to hold the priesthood office of Seventy, Young insisted that black men could not hold the priesthood, saying the only reason the ‘Negro race’ survived the flood was so Satan could maintain his presence on earth. He also called slavery a divine institution. I do, however, like the fact that he basically told American to f*** itself when he moved the early Saints west. That is certainly admirable.

Do I believe the Church is the only way to God? No. Do I believe it is one of many ways to God? Yes, the same way I believe Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, etc. are ways to God or whatever supreme entity is there. I believe the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a positive influence in the lives of millions of its members. That is something I will never deny. For me, however, it isn’t what it claims to be. I have to take a different path. So the final question is whether I consider myself ‘Mormon.’ The answer is yes, the same way a Jew can be a Jew while practicing Buddhism. I was raised Mormon, I come from pioneer stock on my mother’s side, my family is Mormon, and it will always be part of me and something I will never deny. Am I a Latter-day Saint? No, at least I can’t call myself one.

In other news, to break the awkward silence that may be permeating the area around your computer right now, I am sick of how the people leading us in this war the US is engaged in can’t pronounce the name of the country we are occupying. It isn’t iRaq, it’s Iraq. Get it right, n00bs. I heard an NPR interview the other day with a guy talking about how difficult it is to find insurgents from helicopters, because iRaq is nothing but palm trees, palm tree farms and sand. Jeez, people. Get with it.

Nation Sickened By Sight Of Happy Young Couple

WASHINGTON, DC—Three states have already passed “Get A Room” ordinances to combat the Oak Park, IL couple’s playful nudging and incessant hand-holding.

GRRR.

“The cacophony of groans, boos and applause echoing inside the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall was as divided as the men and their politics reverberating on stage,” read the opening line of the Salt Lake Tribune’s article covering the recent debate between Sean Hannity and Salt Lake mayor Rocky “America’s mayor” Anderson. Now, I use the word “debate” loosely, since this was a debate in the same way professional wrestling is a sport, in that it wasn’t a debate at all, really. After all, the Trib sent its theater critic to cover the event. A friend of mine (who shouldn’t have attended to debate in the first place) told me she never felt so embarrassed to be from Salt Lake City, and how she assumed everybody there had been raised in a barn. I don’t know if it was really that bad, I don’t really think the debate was as good for the public discourse as some made it out to be. If you attended the event, you were not helping anything, but you were aiding and abetting a fight.

On wholly unrelated note, this has been bothering me for some time: graffiti on bathroom walls, pee on the seats, and purposeful clogging of public toilets. I see this a lot in the restrooms at the University of Utah. This amazes me. Did high-school freshman start attending the university? I would assume that we had outgrown the stage in our lives when we found stuffing a toilet with the fecal mass of five human bowel movements and an entire roll of toilet paper humorous, an act many of us probably never found amusing in the first place. Let’s restore civility to the campus. While we’re at it, let’s bring back tweed, hats, canes, umbrellas, and smoking pipes. That’s my ideal campus.