Atomic Nerds

Okay, as the discussion that ensued from this post demonstrates, we need to lay some ground rules about comments. We’re still not exactly a big place and things will still go on an individual-by-individual basis, but here are some basic what NOT to do’s if you want to participate in the happy fun discussion playplace that is Atomic Nerds.

1. Do not start out the gate assuming your gracious hosts were hatched from a pod yesterday and are completely unfamiliar with this thing you call “life”. For one, it’s just plain condescending and generally rude, and that will get our hackles up right quick. For two, it’s not true- we are not inclined to speak on a subject unless we know a bitty bit about it. If what we say reveals that we DON’T, then correct us, but jumping to the conclusion that we are gawping ignoramuses because we have come to a conclusion you don’t believe the data warrants isn’t going to make the discussion go any smoother.

2. Don’t tell us how we feel or will respond to your enlightening commentary. See also, rude and condescending. If we’re on a rant you can pretty much safely assume that how we feel about that exact subject is “angry”, but, for a generalized example, if we’re on a tear about irresponsible dog owners, don’t assume the subject of dogs in general reduces us to a quivering irrational mess of emotion.

3. On the subject of “rude”, you may be under the impression that the general worthiness of your content means you don’t NEED to be polite. You are wrong. Courtesy is the grease of civilization, and if you’re unwilling to expend a little energy on some very basic social signals that are shorthand for “Hi, I’m here to have an honest and rational discussion with you.”, then that tells me that the odds on your also being willing to indulge yourself in other respects by being a dishonest PITA are pretty high. Also? Of all the individuals I’ve run across who had this view of life, not once have I run across one whose thoughts really WERE half as brilliant as they seemed to believe, especially given their tendency to throw tantrums when contradicted.

4. As a writer, part of my job is to be readable and understandable, which is why we angst about the look of the site at all. As a commenter, the obligation isn’t quite as stringent, but if you want to have a discussion, being readable and understandable helps *a lot*. I don’t demand Grammar SS standards, but if I can’t follow your sentences or sentence fragments, the likelihood of my having the patience to engage with you plummets. I know some people just plain have a tough time typing, so exactly how much I care about this tends to scale directly with levels of courtesy- there’s typing badly because you’re bad at typing, and there’s typing badly because you don’t care enough about others to put in the small effort make your content readable. Your behavior otherwise gives me a hint as to which is which.

5. If the length of your comments have a tendency to reach or exceed the character limits- which are quite generous on WordPress- you need to get your own blog. This is our house, not your soapbox. While it’s theoretically possible that all of that verbiage is well-written deep thought- and as a serial offender myself in the realm of long comments, my standards are pretty generous- most of the time, it’s got a bad signal to noise ratio. If you’re touching on some larger field, linking to the necessary information (which I may or may not need- see point one) is a lot better than trying to explain the whole thing in the comment. Likewise, if this is a subject near and dear to your heart that you feel only you are the authority on, link to where YOU’VE described it- because if you have this much to write, you could use a place to put it, yes? At your own place- don’t use everyone else’s for free hosting.

6. Follow the Wheaton rule- don’t be a dick- and you’re golden. The Wheaton rule really covers all these rules- they’re just clarifiers for those who may have problems not being a dick, or understanding that being a dick IS a problem. They’re really not likely to decide that it is after reading this, either, but at least now *I* have something to link to in the process of explaining that behavior needs to stop or the discussion will.

A few folks have noticed the new look around here. This being the internet, the change has of course left everyone unhappy. Some folks think the new layout is easier to read, but fugly, some folks get migranes from the new look, pretty much everyone seemed to think the old layout was horrible to read and occasionally kicked puppies. I’m getting tired of messing with .css files when I could be busy drinking, or playing warcraft, or drinking while playing warcraft. That said, choose! Choose the form of your destructor the site layout! Seriously, this whole site-look thing is producing a very cranky Stingray.
[poll id=”1″]
(And if this poll plugin goes pear-shaped, vote in comments.)

Kang and Kodos, rather than there being a clear alpha and a clear beta, have the sort of complex relationship with one another that’s fairly common to dogs (and humans, for that matter) of opposite sex. They tend to be much more concerned with intrasex pecking orders. Consequently, she defers to him some of the time (like guarding, in which she still looks almost totally up to him), bullies him mercilessly at other times, and at still other times he’s reminding her who’s really bigger by dragging her around by the neck for awhile while she yowls and complains.

Particularly, she is pushy about possessions. She will claim treats, toys, chews, beds, and favored nap spots from him just because she can. Kodos simply doesn’t care as much, so 95% of the time he lets her have them.

We brought a new dog bed home today, as we had two beds for three frequently used nap spots. Kang sniffed it extensively and decided she didn’t like it; when Kodos decided it was just fine, she threw a crybaby fit until she could take it back from him. (She only cared about the bed for about another minute.)

Many hours later, she walked into the room to find, imperiously spread out on the new bed she’d pissed and moaned so hard about Kodos taking before, the cat.

She took one long look, politely took the toy she’d left there, and went and lay down across the room to chew on it.

This weekend, blogger Breda had an encounter in a bar with a rude gentleman who, despite not really needing the space due to a lack of crowd, essentially tried to squeeze her out of hers. Retreating slightly (making “leaving” gestures) made him press harder. She made firm eye contact and said “excuse me”, and he yielded.

See anything wrong with that description? That is, in fact, what happened. But because she described the look that made him back off in a common fashion- “I will kill you where you stand” (see also “if looks could kill”, “death glare”, “drop-dead stare”), and made a reference to the situation as having some relation to self defense- as an example of a small and simple way to not think like a victim- there was some controversy with an individual in the comments who saw it as a sign she had gotten too aggressive in her mindset and was thinking of literally killing him for the minor offense of getting in her personal space and refusing to leave until asked.

I didn’t see it that way. I didn’t see that anyone could until I read the comments, because I was nodding along with what she was writing as very close to what I’ve seen described in an entirely different community, one that has nothing whatever to do with lethal force and only ever peripherally touches on self-defense: animal trainers.

Most people know that if you stare hard at a dog, this is “a challenge,” and that if he looks away, this is a submissive gesture. This is true enough as far as it goes, but as with eye contact in humans, it’s a good bit more complicated than that. Eye contact is one subdivision of an entire suite of body language- sustained eye contact combined with stiff, hunched posture is either a challenge or a statement of possession depending on the exact context, whereas sustained eye contact combined with a relaxed posture and a doggy “smile” can simply be a shared look between the dog and someone it likes and trusts. By itself, eye contact just means “I am focused on you”- the rest of the meaning, be it aggressive, playful, defensive, or affectionate, is provided by body language.

Eye contact in animals is also very closely linked to personal space- whether it’s a modern dog trainer telling you to “step into his space” to back off a dog from something you don’t want him to have (or to stop him from pushing into yours) or a natural horsemanship instructor telling you to be aware of your space and the horse’s, personal space isn’t just about not wanting to touch someone else’s body or smell their breath, it’s a sense of awareness that has all sorts of social- and predatory- messages built in from way before humans became distinctly human. It works across social species, especially those with any sort of heirarchy, and especially those that can expect either to prey on other social animals or be preyed upon by them. This combination of eye contact and advancing or retreating into the other creature’s space is so powerful that it forms the core of how a herding dog works- it moves the sheep or cattle by manipulating eye contact and by either actively moving into the animals’ space, or simply indicating with eyes and posture that it will if the animal doesn’t either stay where it is or back away. This is one of a great many examples that can be found on Youtube, but if you watch, the important thing here is that the Border Collie is moving the sheep by manipulating its posture, eye contact, and distance and speed from the space of the sheep- never by actually touching them:

A good trainer exploits this relationship with his or her own eyes, posture, and sensitivity to space; the reason Breda’s post rang so familiar to me was that it read, minus the self-defense specific language, exactly like someone who had learned to back off a dog- whether out of their personal space or away from their sandwich- with a significant look and a mild word, all backed up by intent that can’t help but be communicated in their body language. The important part here is that the intent- common to dealing with an asshole stranger in a bar or a dog trying to snaffle your lunch- is not I will kill you if you don’t stop that, but I mean it and if you test me I’ll follow through. In the case of the hungry dog, “follow through” means taking the dog and physically preventing it from having further access to you and your food. In the case of a stranger in a bar, “follow through” means making whatever degree of scene is necessary to bring social pressure to bear on the offending rude person. Only in the case of an approaching predator- a mugger, say- does “follow through” actually relate to drawing a weapon. The underlying mindset- not violence or aggression, but a willingness to react appropriately to whatever boundary-pushing action is being taken- is common to all three situations.

What else is common to all three situations is the invasion of that significant personal space- it’s an aggressive gesture unless an invitation is issued, which is why we define it as “rude” and incivil. The dog may just want the sandwich and the stranger a bar stool in a location he defines as desirable, but in both cases a deliberate attempt is made to push someone else’s boundaries and get them to yield something desirable against their will. This ancient link between personal space and varying degrees of this kind of behavior is why we use the word “pushy” to describe such a person to begin with- and while pushy individuals may normally never advance beyond taking your time, your seat, or your lunch, “pushy” is also a descriptor applied early on to those who are likely to try for more serious things- like your money, sex, or your life. That is why people who do have a self-defense mindset are usually more aware of when they’re being pushed, and that it’s not appropriate- if you’re allowing yourself to be pushed without a word or look, you’re also confirming to the pusher that you either aren’t aware of them or that you’re reluctant to stop them when they act in this fashion. That’s a go-light to anybody who might have predatory intentions rather than merely pushy ones- and if they’re standing in your space anyway, there’s no room or time left to take action to stop them if they act on it.

The original phrase that sparked controversy was one common in the self-defense community: “Be polite. Be courteous. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” I doubt many people take that literally, but the advice it contains is sound- a statement that covers all variations of dealing with others you may encounter: Be polite. (Don’t provoke needlessly.) Be courteous. (Respect the space and resources of others.) Be prepared to follow through- in the case of a genuine self-defense situation, that’s having a plan to kill the other person. In all situations of lesser threat, it’s not.

The mindset remains the same throughout.

But Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International is available on Amazon now. If you don’t have a copy, you are missing out on one hell of a read. If you don’t like the book, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Go buy.

We’ll be down in the Moderately Sized City today adding more ink to my hide. We’ll play with the layout/look more when we return, assuming technical support doesn’t make good on his “auditor” theme threat.

Over the last thirty years or so, something has happened to psychology: one of their major models, that of the blank slate, has been crumbling. Biological psychologists have gone from a suspect pack of social Darwinists to having, for the most part, proved that they were right all along and your genes and neurochemistry have as much to do with who you are and how you feel as your upbringing, your culture, and your attitude. Just how much they have to do with it is still in doubt- and the answer is probably “a lot more than sociologists would like to admit, and a lot less than genetic determinists and pharmaceutical companies would like to admit”- but they have won their battle for the paradigm that biology plays as much of a role in psychology as environment does.

With the playing field thus opened, the “evo psychs” or evolutionary psychologists have come into their own- advancing many ideas that would previously be seen as severe heresies as psychological consequences of our evolutionary past. While I am very much on board with the general idea of evolutionary psychology- while I am no determinist, I definitely agree that the way our minds work must have been heavily influenced by evolution- I have a very big problem with a certain group of “evo psych” people, whom I have dubbed the Status-Quo Just-Sos.

To back up for a moment, let me explain where the “Just So” term came from. One of the dynamic tensions in evolutionary theory is the push and pull between the influence of selection- and direct adaptation- and other forces of evolutionary change, including genetic drift, sexual selection, sexual antagonism, and more recently, the need to remain generally flexible. Until Motoo Kimura came along and fixed neutral selection- the idea that many if not actually most mutations are neither deleterious nor advantageous, giving a much more powerful role to genetic drift*- the adaptationists basically owned the battlefield, attributing great power to selection and adaptation in species change. The worst excesses of the adaptationist- which primarily take the form of looking at a trait, concocting a plausible scenario for its role as an adaptation, and then treating that as though it were obvious truth rather than an ad-hoc speculation- are generally derisively referred to as “Just-so storytelling”, after Rudyard Kipling’s whimsical children’s stories “explaining” odd features of animals.

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I’ve got the seedlings of a rant kicking around my noodle, but it’s not quite ripe yet. LabRat’s muse was apparently detained by TSA while she was out of town Monday for singing the TSA Gangsta Rap. So for now, please enjoy the bluebird that services our house during the end of the year.

Not so long ago, I whipped off a rant on the latest antics of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. You can revisit the link if you’ve already forgotten about it, but the Cliff’s Notes version is that I frown on confrontational displays “representing” atheists that deliberately piss on the beliefs of the other creeds also on display. I’d much rather not be “represented” at all than have assholes doing their asshole thing in “my” name.

To my complete surprise, given that it was written on about half an hour’s worth of cranky and not much care was put into it, it has apparently winged its way around the Atheist Internet, and has attracted Comment. It fell into the two general camps of “what an Uncle Tom” and “damn straight”, and I flicked an eyebrow and moved on. Now it seems I have come to the attention of an- or the, I really don’t know- atheist blogger at About.com. (Hat tip to commenter nal for bringing this to my attention, as I was out of town when the link went up.) He definitely does not fall into the “damn straight” camp. After goggling at the reaction of the Free Republic forums to FFRF’s deliberate provocation (what do you expect to happen when you throw shit in the general direction of monkeys?), he gets to me. Since he starts off on the only part that seems to have winged its way around the net, for clarity’s sake, I’ll reproduce both. Me:

Do all of us infidels a favor- you know us, the least-trusted minority in America- and sit down, be quiet, and SMILE when someone wishes you a Merry Christmas or Chappy Chanukah or Reverent Ramadan or Krazy Kwanzaa or whatever generic sentiment that assumes you view the winter season as anything other than a yearly astrological event. They are wishing you good will- the smart thing to do is take it, and return it.

Him:

Right, because sitting down and being quiet worked sooooo well in the past — back when there were few atheists standing up and speaking out, atheists were sooooo much more liked and respected…. Oh, wait. That isn’t true at all, is it? Although fewer people are willing to vote for an atheist for president than any other minority asked about (including gays, Muslims, women, etc.), more people today are willing to vote for an atheist for president than at any time in the past — including all those years during which far fewer atheists were standing up, speaking out, and rocking the boat.

At first I thought he must not have read the whole thing, but it turns out that he merely hurled himself to the ground in a last-ditch effort to miss my point. My point was that when people are generally engaged in a display of celebrating an occasion they all associate with peace on earth, love, hope, and all that sort, the proper reaction is not to first demand a place at the table, and then go on to piss on everyone else’s plate. None of the other displays contained any element of “you’re all wrong and stupid”. The Christian display didn’t have anything about “…and the rest of you burn in Hell!” in it. The Jewish display didn’t go “Enjoy your holy human sacrifice, you rubes”. Only the atheist display was there purely to declare all the others wrong.

That’s standing up and being counted, all right- as the only ones there that are there to be assholes about their beliefs. It does make a certain breed feel good to be noticed and counted for this trait, but I ain’t one of ‘em.

If there were some connection between atheist sitting down, keeping quiet, and just smiling while Christians pretend to have some privileged authority to define American culture, don’t you think we’d see the opposite?

Some of them do. When they’re shoving about trying to stick the Ten Commandments on school and courthouse lawns, or demanding that school science curricula be changed to fit their doctrine, I care. When the majority faithful simply aren’t pretending not to be the faithful or the majority, then I really don’t give a shit. Being a minority is not some sort of crime society commits against you; there are various outrages that ARE committed against minorities, but seasonal symbolic displays don’t really hurt anything but somebody’s self-importance.

I can’t think of any — but I can cite plenty of examples of minorities making great strides after doing precisely what all the concern trolls told them not to: standing up, speaking out, rocking the boat…. and doing it all at the “worst” times possible.

Exercise for the reader in Great Moments in Historical Minority Rights: please name the period in which the Civil Rights movement for blacks had the greatest momentum. Was it during the movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, who emphasized non-violence and in doing so exposed his most entrenched opponents as the brutal bigots they were, or was it during the time of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, whose chief revolutionary activity was murdering other black people for not being ideologically correct enough?

I actually feel vaguely ashamed of myself for even having just written that, because the greatest institutionalized injustice atheists have ever had to cope with is being disqualified from the Boy Scouts on a technicality. Comparing our “struggle” to not be tut-tutted about to segregation, Jim Crow laws, and occasional lynchings is like complaining about your papercut next to someone who has lost a limb.

This is my point: what we are “fighting” for isn’t our rights- we have those, and always have- it’s for our image. The Freepers and the kind of religious type who really and deeply disapprove of atheism aren’t likely to ever be swayed from this position by any means short of brainwashing; the people we’re trying to “reach” are the ones that don’t really give atheists or atheism all that much thought. Bringing their attention to the subject by deliberately behaving like self-centered, obnoxious boors- you know, what a lot of people vaguely suspect not believing in a divine authority that dictates firm morality leads to- doesn’t help that cause, it harms it.

So is putting up a sign criticizing religion, but that doesn’t stop Lab Rat from writing a long, invective-filled rant about it. So it’s OK for Lab Rat to hurl insults and complaints about a harmless atheist sign, but it’s not OK for atheists to display a sign criticizing religion? That doesn’t strike me as very credible.

LabRat isn’t claiming to represent anyone but her cranky-ass self; Freedom From Religion is proposing to represent all atheists with a display of invective next to the display of other faiths who are in the midst of celebrating positive human experiences that are nearly universally admired. She also didn’t march up and demand space on anyone else’s server for her message.

How hard DO you have to nurture your butthurt about religion that this distinction is not obvious?

What about the even more special kind of smugness and entitlement carried by people who feel compelled to comment on a phrase or idea without knowing anything about it? That seems to include Lab Rat who apparently never took the trouble to do any sort investigation into what “freedom from religion” means: freedom from the rules and dogmas of other people’s religious beliefs so that we can be free to follow the demands of our own conscience, whether they take a religious form or not. It’s so much easier to just attack the motives and character of people you don’t know and have never met than it is to take the time to learn what they are saying and why.

That’s cute, Skippy, it really is. The fact of the matter is that I used to read that organization’s outreach and articles pretty regularly, had an active membership in the American Atheists, and did all the other infidel-warrior stuff. I’m very much familiar with the “deeper philosophy” there, because I was reading my original sources. You know what happened next? I turned 21 and got the fuck over myself. What happened? I realized I AM free to follow the dictates of my own conscience, and free from the rules and dogma of others, and I ALWAYS WAS. What I was NOT free from was occasional discomfort due to contact with someone else’s beliefs and attitudes, and NOBODY has a right to be free from that. Not a Muslim who doesn’t want my ham sandwich near him, not a Jew that doesn’t want my house blazing bright on a Saturday evening, not a Christian that doesn’t want to see two men holding hands, and not me when I’d really prefer not to have to put up with Christmas crap scattered all over the landscape from Halloween to New Year’s.

When I was on a visit home from college, I was having a meal with my father, and as I was very full of this oh-so-reasoned-and-brave atheism thing at the time, the subject came up- I had a vague and fuzzy idea that he wasn’t a believer, but it never really was discussed, so we’d never talked about it before. In the course of the discussion, it emerged that he’d once attended a meeting with Madlyn Murray O’Hare. Rather star-struck, I asked him what it was like.

“I walked out halfway through.”

“…Really? Why?!”

“I decided that not wanting to associate with god-botherers didn’t mean I had to associate with obnoxious assholes instead.”

Having a rare moment of young adult sense, I did not press him on the point. I’m sure the evolution would have happened over time anyway, but 9/11 put the final shovelfuls of dirt on my days of being a fan of the American atheist activist scene; the contrast between the jihadis and the nice Methodists down the street was just too starkly gross. Instead of making belief in the “supernatural” versus nonbelief my litmus test, I instituted two rules: I will not put up with deliberate ignorance, and I won’t put up with deliberate assholery either. To my not very great surprise, this has sorted people along completely non-denominational lines- I’ve seen way too much ignorant, half-baked overweening bullshit from Christians, atheists, Jews, Muslims, pagans, Buddhists, and any other category I may have missed, and I’ve seen a lot more sense, reason, compassion, and other things to value in all of the same groups as well.

One of the things that believers love to point out, which they persist in mostly because they actually DO have kind of a point, at least with respect to displays of atheist “brotherhood” like this nonsense, is that you can’t form a moral or ideological core around a negative. What atheists (and agnostics and all the other fuzzy a’s) have in common is what they DON’T believe, and what they DO is as varied as religion itself. If I don’t believe that $deity whipped out his creatin’ hand and slung first us and then a universal set of rules that us needs to be happy and productive, then there are several other possibilities. First is that there aren’t, or should not be, any rules- various blendings of anarchism, nihilism, or both. I think the first is completely unworkable and the latter is the single most retarded way to react to life’s complexity that I can think of. (“Someone didn’t gift-wrap this universe up for me special and tell me how to live, so there’s just no point to anything.”) I’ve met enough atheists that fall into both or either category not to be surprised at the stereotype that they’re ALL like that.

What I do believe is that we’re here, we evolved ourselves into the life conundrum of being capable of advanced reasoning abilities but still having all the ape desires and drives we did for the past several million years, and that the problem of intelligence is the problem of figuring out how to live with one another in a way so that we can use that reason more than we use traditional rules like “biggest rock to the head wins”. I don’t believe religion is a mind-virus, the world’s most successful parasite meme of all time; I believe it’s one of many cultural tools we adopted as a species to give some structure of thought to those problems of intelligence and society. Religions come in many varieties because there are many ways to do that, some more successful than others- and sometimes, as with the ethical philosophies of the Greeks and the Japanese, they don’t even have anything to do with a supernatural lawgiver. There’s plenty of nasty ape behavior coded into some versions of some religions, but that’s because it’s as susceptible to modification by its creators and users- us- as any other cultural tool.

I want to live, and talk with, the people that are determined to act like people rather than like apes. I’ve simply found that the supernatural fine print on their tools almost never has anything relevant to do with this choice- as “Austin” has just reiterated for me.

You know what sucks? Juggling schedules to deal with a deposition because our time is cheaper than the asshole lawyers we’re battling, that’s what sucks. Between that and a fair-sized kerfluffle at the paying job, I’m afraid I’ve got to throw more filler at you folks. This one comes courtesy of commenter Eseell:

If you’ve been hanging out in #gunblogger_conspiracy on SlashNet IRC, you’ve probably seen this already since it cracks me up even on the Nth watching. If you haven’t been hanging out there, what’s wrong with you, don’t you like talking to lots of cool people? Remember, get control of the wrist. Real content to resume shortly.