The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Chaos:

KeithS @ 173: I don't think he fooled himself at all. I think he's into fooling other people in order to make piles of money, and he didn't give a wet slap about making sure the experience was safe.

I think that's where he started - but the tweets sound like he believed it, and not in the way he wanted to fake. He was immersed in the experience as much as his marks were, and words have power.

Whether or not that actually contributed to his disastrous set up of the situation is a different question, of course.

Alex @274: He didn't call up a demon; he called up reality, which is harder to deal with.

To me, the difference is basically meaningless in this context.

It seems to me like he called up a demon he could not put down. Whether or not it was outside his head in any way isn't that important - he was, just as his victims were, enveloped in the mindset-maintaining elements he was using to sell his ideas. Plus he had the feedback of all these people who believed him, and (if he has had as little training as seems likely) his own success really was largely to do with positive thinking of the "I reckon I can fool a lot of people with this" variety.

I think that, on some level, he may have fooled himself. He evoked the Warrior strongly, and that's what he got. The nonsense about not needing sacrifice is, as pointed out by others, non-sense on every level for a Warrior; so when he was in the Warrior mindset, he started to send out tweets which acknowledged the dangers, and the likely results - his conscious mind may not have known what he was doing, but on some level he seems to have had an idea of how it was likely to turn out.

Of course, in the Warrior mindset, he didn't care.

He was trying a half-assed ritual cobbled together from bits and pieces of mythology and mysticism he didn't understand, and the results killed people.

I hope that all goes well for you, Teresa - boring sounds very much like good news in such a situation!

Many good vibes to you.

Here's my normalcy: it took me a minute to realise why all the news was about the War on Terror this morning. Today, I go for dinner with friends, followed by gaming with them and further friends.

This is good; I must however congratulate the several of you who have considerably more awesom planned for the day!

#24 - I'm playing Spore, and while I don't think it lives up to all the promise it has, it is still a very fine game indeed. So far, that is: I have yet to play at the end phases of the game, but evolving my critters from a water-based cell to a land-based creature to a tribe of stone-aged, four-eyed lizards has been great fun. Tomorrow I'm going to try and play through what happens to the Aredii now that they are a Civilization.

So I don't think that you need to worry; it IS good, very good, but I doubt it will bury you in a dark room creating creatures. But maybe the really addictive bit is yet to come...

#26 As to the Sporn, yeah, in the Tribe phase, one rival tribe was such - and one of the main food animals my tribe hunted were, unfortunately, the nearby nest of Penismen. Oh well.

I played this a little while back, and it's kind of cool. Oddly satisfying when it works, and I watch the world population slowly sink...

A friend also found this comic which seems to admirably summarise the health care policy of Madagascar.

Though occasionally the game killer's Indonesia instead.

Well, it's not like US military hardware never has foolish and inappropriate sentiments written on it...
For example, this tank during the Iraq invasion. The messages may be offensive, but they're no reason to do anything - no more than the French had reason to be worried because of a silly slogan on a tank.

I wasn't concerning myself with good and evil, here. Just existence.

However - if we all only exist as thoughts in god's mind (as Jim suggested), then I don't think you can hold that bad things happening to us makes god evil, any more than bad things happening to an author's characters make that author evil.

Of course, that's no help at all to the characters in question. Still, they wouldn't exist at all if the author wasn't writing a story about them, so it could even be good for them.

And once again, I am arguing for an agnostic point of view. I don't think we can possibly understand the motivations or actions of an omnipotent/omniscient being, so it is very difficult to judge one.

Marilee, there are a lot of people (not just Christians) who say that there's only one god. To say there is no god, though, that's a bold statement. How do you know there's no god? How can you possibly know for sure?

It seems as meaningless to me to claim certainty of god's absence as it does to claim certainty of his presence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

David Goldfarb: I understand the problem, I think. I just don't think we can be certain that there isn't a good reason for the apparent contradiction, which is only apparent to an entity wiser/more informed than ourselves. We can not, by definition, understand the choices an omniscient being is faced with.

I think your argument is a compelling reason not to believe in god, but not proof he/she/it doesn't exist.

Marilee@112: As far as I can see, Jim's statement agrees with you in that there are no gods (plural); if everything exists in the mind of god, then there can only be one (singular) god.

However, I don't see how it's possible to say in this set-up whether it's true or not, since all our observations are within the hypothetical god's mind, and thus unreliable when it comes to measuring it's existence. To me, an untestable statement is nonsense, but that applies to "there is no god" just as much as any other such statement.

David Goldfarb@113: How can we be sure of that? We aren't Omniscient, and can't tell what a being that is might feel it needs to do. God might move in mysterious ways simply because our minds are too small to follow his reasoning.

Of course, that idea leads us to live in a Mythos universe ruled by a god that is, from our perspective, mad: we can never predict it's actions. But again, I don't see how we can rule out the possibility that this is the best possible world, since we can't see or understand the needed alternatives...

The question is nonsense. In that spirit, I direct attention here for a Discordian attempt at a solution.

... thinking about the question a bit more, I reckon God can both make the stone and lift it. But to do so would require reworking the universe so that it no longer works by the current standards of logic, so that the question isn't nonsense.

That might well be something It doesn't want to do, but if It is truly omnipotent, changing the rules of logic should be within It's remit.

I've heard it said often enough that he didn't vote for the war, as a reason to trust him. Often enough, that the fact that he couldn't have was a surprise to me when I first saw it. Not living in the US, I paid less attention to the politicians than I assume Americans do, so maybe that is well understood by the public in the US.

But if that particular smear doesn't work against Obama, well, good. That's one less bad thing to come from this.

P J Evans #135
True, but he still didn't vote for the Telecoms imunity. Isn't one of Obama's plus points that he didn't vote for the war? I can see McCain using this as an answer to that fact.

I see this one as spinable by McCain, given a bit of help from the media. And getting that help never seems to be a problem for him.

Regarding Obama's vote on FISA, I have recently thought of another bad thing about it. McCain didn't vote for this one - so, should it prove highly unpopular with the public, the Republicans can start talking about how their candidate didn't vote for it, but the Democrat did.

Awesome, huh?

Jon #20: Perhaps that article should have had a disclaimer on Digg, too.

“Warning: The Content in this Article May be Accurate.â€

I've seen the argument that the death penalty should be used in cases where one is 'really positive' before, and I've come to the conclusion that I don't think that things can ever be that certain. Scott Taylor eloquently gave several reasons why, and others have also provided good illustrations.

The only way I'd consider it is if the people responsible for someone being sentenced to death were willing to bet their lives on it - that, if the executed 'criminal' were ever found innocent of the crime they died for, the prosecuting attorney, the judge, and maybe the jury that convicted him would all be put to death.

This is of course a ridiculous suggestion, in that it would never make the original death right; but it does I think serve to illustrate the problem with being sure enough to have someone killed for a crime - should you not be sure enough to bet your own life (literally) before you claim that degree of certainty?

Would you ever be that certain?

It occurs to me that this is actually a great opportunity to study the deterrent value of the death penalty; all we need to do is watch for the murder spike.

If the death penalty really is a greater deterrent than LWOP, then there should be people in New Jersey who were deterred from capital crimes before, but are not now that there is no death penalty. They must surely be saying "Finally! My fear of death kept my no-good neighbour alive this long, but now I can kill! Kill! And be sure that the worst that can happen to me is prison."

Thus, if there isn't a sudden rise in what would have been capital crimes (as all these held-back killers take their 'opportunity'), I submit that LWOP is at least equally deterring.

If we assume a population that is generally heterosexual, it makes me wonder who the men are cheating with.

... unmarried women, maybe?

If I can go back to the world policeman thing, I have an observation. The US is often talked about as being the world policeman, and that's well and good. Almost everyone agrees that policemen are needed. However, US policy on being the policeman often seems (at least from the outside) to be that the US government both sets the rules for the rest of the world and polices them.

Societies that do that on a smaller scale are called police states, and this is held to be a bad thing. A policeman needs to be working for someone greater, preferably someone elected by the people being policed.

The police should not be working for their own interests, but the interests of the policed populace. They should not set policy, but enforce clearly stated laws. If the US is to be a world policeman, US government needs to start listening to the rest of the world, and letting others set the rules they enforce.

Thanks for pointing me at the funny. Alas, the site no longer seems to be accepting new accounts, so I'm unable to help them improve the accuracy of their little encyclopedia...

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