In case you weren’t watching for this anywhere else, you can now download the full release ISOs for SL 6.0:
and here for 64-bit
If, like me, you installed any of the betas and RCs, by now you should already be updated to the full release.
It’s hard to process all the junk in the media about what’s going on in Libya if you don’t know the history of the country.
What the MSM want you to remember is bombings, and they want you to think Qaddafi is a dictator. None of that matches reality. The current uprising is not a peaceful cry for democracy, either. It’s another CIA operation of regime change.
I find this covers the relevant history nicely. It’s best to see Qaddafi in proper murky Eastern fashion as a leader, a very big tribal elder figure, but lacking the precise control of a dictator. Like an eastern potentate, he had lots of layers between himself and reality on the ground. We should be utterly unsurprised if his take on things is completely different from that of the MSM, and that neither bears much resemblance to reality. I doubt any of us knows the reality, nor even the people on the ground involved.
His leadership was marked by some silly vision of making his nation like a true Arabic empire, but with far too many modern Western features and assumptions. For the most part, his influence is that of a revered theorist, and his theories have missed the point, though the results are not so bad as we’ve been told. Good things did happen, and the broader welfare of the people did rise significantly since Qaddafi rose to his position. The problem is you cannot make several nations of people into one big tribe. It hasn’t worked here and it didn’t work there. Local autonomy is the life and breath of tribal economics, but Qaddafi tried to make his whole country like a single big happy family with highly centralized control. He bluntly broke all the old tribal boundaries in his administrative districts, and that cannot possibly work. Ever. It violates fundamental principles of human nature, not to mention God’s Laws.
The disco bombing was a Mossad operation with planted fake evidence. The airline bombing was a CIA operation designed to prevent some DEA agents presenting evidence of the CIA’s heroine operations in the Middle East, again with planted false evidence. The so-called chemical weapons plant we bombed was basically an aspirin factory; yet again, Mossad planted fake evidence around the facility to produce a false report from our spies on the ground. If you wanted to know these things, it would be easy to read the compelling evidence all over the Net.
The current revolt is easily traced to long-time CIA operations in the Mediterranean. The current rebel leadership went to various training courses run by the CIA. The courses were designed to look like some honest promotion of democracy, but included a healthy dose of activist trouble-making bullshaloney. It takes advantage of the ever-present opposition elements in every country in the world. We can’t rule out the same influence in most of what’s sweeping the Middle East right now, but it always includes a good bit of slop, a high margin of error, so that things cannot be precisely controlled by our black ops people. There are other, competing interests working out there. The CIA plans to keep an eye on everything and steer it as they see fit, but we and they should expect some surprises. However, the business in Libya is almost 100% CIA meddling and arrogant “nation building” which stems from the same violent rejection of human nature which backs every evil regime in history.
Libya’s current troubles are nothing more than exchanging one bad government for another. Qaddafi’s service as our whipping boy has run its course, just as with Saddam in Iraq, Mubarak in Egypt, etc. Time for a new one.
Just a few quick notes here. There is as yet no repository offering Xiphos and Sword for SL. You can easily Yum the Clucene and development package from SL repositories. I decided to grab Sword and Xiphos SRPMs from the Fedora 13 Updates repository.
Sword builds after you satisfy the other dependencies using Yum. SL has them all, except Waf. You’ll need to pull that from FC13 SRPMs, too.
Xiphos is a bit more ticklish. The SPEC file calls for xulrunner-devel-unstable, but that has been obsoleted by the latest xulrunner-devel package. So I simply edited the SPEC file and changed that to match the reality. It built fine from the xulrunner-devel and works as it should.
The real problem with video games is they tend to cripple human intelligence in players.
It’s nothing new to taste the brouhaha over tenuous links between video games and violence. Someone with an ax to grind notes video games are addictive (which is demonstrably true) and goes on to assert some link between this virtual world escapism and anti-social behavior (not proven, perhaps unprovable).
It sounds reasonable, since we know addictive strands in human personality do create significant flaws in how people address their world. Who hasn’t faced the unreasonable, painful and destructive behavior of someone addicted to a chemical substance? The brain is a spooky place at the best of times, but crippling our interaction with reality by cutting ourselves off from the tools of perception, and replacing that with any number of fantasies, guarantees a measure of failure. Bad enough becomes inevitably worse than it has to be.
Yet we know most of humanity enjoys the escapes into fantasy precisely because they know it’s not real. If all we had to deal with were expansions on our awareness of just how badly broken the world really is, we would not call it “entertainment.” At the very most primitive level, entertainment compares the world we experience with the one we would like to see. It helps us to imagine what might be, to explore the possibilities. Those of us with a creativity quotient take the cue to decide what has been done before isn’t necessarily the result of thorough examination, and there may well be a better way on some level. Invariably, such creativity will extract just a few more improvements from reality. We need a slice of humanity to always chase dreams or we have no hope of salvaging anything at all from the past.
Something inside us knows when an element of a particular encounter is false in some way. If all we get from such moments is a vague discomfort, then the only result is more tension, more pressure to escape heedlessly. If we structure our escape by giving place to human weakness along with more noble elements of human nature, and mix these things differently, we learn more about both. A fantasy which is too chaotic is not entertaining. It has to connect tangentially to reality in some way, so that it mimics reality with different rules. What would you do if the context of your world changed? How would your character manifest? You can learn a great deal about yourself and your very real world by indulging in good and artful fantasy. It makes you better able to discern the falseness in the real world.
There are some badly broken people in this world, and withholding from them fantasy won’t improve their condition. Engaging them in fantasy won’t make them measurably worse. Such people are everywhere, and it’s simply not possible to identify them all and keep them away from the entertainment the rest of us need, and should be permitted.
The problem is not with fantasy, per se, but the means of delivery. It’s not so much a problem with mindlessly violent fantasy via video games, but video games themselves. As the experience approaches total immersion in an alternate reality, it is not the barriers of mere judgment which are broken, but the level of improvement those experiences offer. A major element in the social good from entertainment is suspense of the ego, the losing of a measure of the self so that those inner resources are set loose. If you loose too much of yourself, those inner resources get lost, too. Full sensory engagement consumes the subconscious as well, and disorients the recalibration process.
Literature, recitations, music and live drama all have proven beneficial in the process of raising the level of human intelligence. They provoke a level of ego suspension which strikes a fair balance between ugly reality and complete disconnection. The problem with even ordinary video is the very well established effect of hypnosis, in that it suspends too much of the ego, and goes too far by grabbing all the resources of human attention, weakening or even killing the subconscious processes. Just yesterday I experienced this afresh, being caught by a running video display in some business. It was mindless and stupid, and offered only the shallowest of moral elements, but I was nonetheless transfixed by the spectacle. At some point I tore myself away and felt guilty, because I wasted some part of myself to no good purpose. It wasn’t even that entertaining, but it was absorbing by virtue of how much of my ego it consumed. Video games go one step farther, by engaging your direct interaction under conditions when your subconscious is mostly inactive. Not to the point of making you mindless and utterly shaped by the experience, as the nanny-state proponents allege, but bad enough to fail the mission.
I don’t see a tipping point, but more of a sliding scale. Every day we see advances in virtual reality, in the absorption of the ego into an alternative world. I suppose at some point we may see people utterly crippled by the experience. I doubt it will make them any more violent than is already the case with the mass of humanity, but it will certainly make them less intelligent on some level. For example, in the linked article, we note Carole Lieberman plays a silly game by asserting a fantasy as reality, and the gamers respond in kind by asserting a fantasy regarding her books in Amazon reviews. Both are a matter of spewing words. That our society already suffers from a vast layer of fantasy from carefully controlled inputs is not the question; it’s really easy to discount both Lieberman and the gamers. When the business of writing and selling books is more like games, when a visit to Amazon becomes the sort of consuming and absorbing experience as that stupid movie I saw, I think humanity will be a lost cause. I’m pretty sure those predisposed to gaming are approaching that now, but the rest of us will surely face the same absorption at every turn as soon as the psychopaths can arrange it.
But neither gaming nor advertising is a major moral threat in the sense Lieberman alleges. Morals are too complex to be gained or lost that easily. Rather, there is a different kind of moral threat from a world which cannot communicate at all without taking the easy path of making a vapid video to post on YouTube. The greater danger is not in causing us to do bad things, but to do nothing at all. That business of sucking up the whole of our minds renders us inert and passive. Only on a very superficial level will it cause people to use poor judgment in doing things; at the very core the issue is they’ll just go along for the ride because that’s all they know.
It’s not that I didn’t like running Debian Squeeze on my laptop, it’s that there was no reason to ever use the laptop since my desktop was identical. I noticed Scientific Linux (SL) was close to releasing their 6.0 and decided to try the latest release candidate. Unlike CentOS, SL runs a beta test program and it is now quite usable.
You can review the series on RHEL 6 for the Clueless (now in a static archive linked here) for most of the details. I’m sure most of that will also apply when CentOS 6.0 comes out later.
There are several other differences between CentOS and SL. It appears CentOS has a much larger user base, and the mailing list archives indicate a rather different kind of user. SL draws the Fermilab-CERN crowd, naturally, as that’s where it’s produced. The users of CentOS include a much larger group of rowdies, so to speak. I sensed the developers were being hounded by impatient folks, whereas the SL lists are much more calm about these things. On the other hand, CentOS developers keep more of their discussions in private, and don’t take time to post detailed descriptions of their progress toward each release. SL has their very public whiteboard, which is a copy of the project leader’s literal whiteboard kept in his office. There is also a nice listing of problem RPMs and how they went about getting past the build failures. Thus, perhaps it’s simply sane for the CentOS devs to avoid wasting time responding to every passing anxious user, whereas the SL folks don’t seem the face much of that.
You’ll be happy to know the ATrpm repository covers SL, as well. However, you’ll have to edit your YUM repo file once you install the ATrpm repo. Here is what I had to make mine look like:
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/sl6-i386/atrpms/stable
This will get you all those nice tweaked codecs and packages for multimedia playback. Please note, Adobe now has it’s own YUM repo for the Flashplayer plugin. When you go to Adobe’s download page, you’ll get the option to select the YUM package. This allows updating the Flashplayer directly and automatically.
On the issue of fixing the bytecode hinting in the Freetype library, I noticed the SL repo is out of date compared to what is installed from the DVD. I had to get my SRPM directly from the RHEL respository. It still works out fine.
Overall I’m very pleased with how well it works like RHEL, but free and tweaked just a bit to make it easier to use. I heartily recommend Scientific Linux as a good clone of RHEL. The DVD required I select the minimal video driver, but it all worked nicely and I didn’t have to do anything to make suspend and hibernate work. SL has added a few more options for the touchpad to the standard GNOME mouse config dialog. This is typical of the enhancements you’ll find.
Adults are not herd creatures; children are. To the degree you embrace conformity, to that degree you have unfinished business in your process of maturation. A godly, spiritual society of mature humans would be nearly shapeless in its diversity and flexibility. Genuine diversity needs no promotion or recognition.
When the political authorities promote diversity, you will note it is always a substitute for the real thing. It is diversity which divides, because it simply chops up any given population into groups which, if they do not antagonize each other naturally, then it must be provoked. Control is always divide and conquer, but not in the way God divides, where everyone is utterly unique, but a division into strictly defined categories which are manageable by the bureaucratic machinery.
The spiritual path is challenging orthodoxy. Even if it happens the orthodox position is factually correct, no one should be permitted to assert it for its own sake. The proper parental response to adolescent challenges to orthodoxy is to encourage the exploration, to guide them through the difficult period of human development when each of us must find our own unique path to peace with a broken world. Don’t lie to them about everything being all fine and it’s they who are messed up for daring to challenge it. Reality sucks! Let them see it painfully and clearly, and steer them away from the other falsehoods, which includes the assumption things ought to be nice. If they don’t come to a clear realization how bad it is, they won’t have any reason to grow up and try to improve things by shining the light of truth.
It requires a hard-headed realization of how nasty this world is before you can expect a sensible negotiation of balance between what you can and cannot change, and on what level you should challenge the false assumptions of your world. Yes, there are moments of sheer joy mixed with sheer terror, but most of it is downright dreary. The conventional world around you attempts to subvert this natural impulse to find yourself by offering all sorts of lies, trying to steer you into one of several manageable tracks of false individuality. This is the one thing we most need to challenge.
Let me cite a concrete example with the person I know best: myself. I suffer this persistent vision, a dream or premonition if you will, that I will be somehow swept back into government service, perhaps even some sort of military conscription. Given the wasteful expenditure of human life and productivity in our various undeclared and illegitimate wars around the globe, even someone with 50% disability rating and 55 years old could be swept back into the gaping maw of government.
In an ideal world of genuine need, such a process would naturally take into account my talents, such as they are, and deploy me where those talents were most needed. That will not happen. Should such a process be initiated which would attempt to use me again, it would surely be on the basis of the shallowest bureaucratic number crunching. They’ll want me as some kind of security guard. That’s because my last military service was in the Military Police, and I was on the fast track for promotion when I got hurt. Using me for a static security post would free up the more able-bodied as cannon fodder.
On one level, I am certainly competent for such work. On another level, it would be insulting and degrading, just about the last thing on this earth I would want to do, not to mention morally repugnant. And would I do it? Probably.
That’s because I have found my own path, my own level of negotiation between the various forces pushing and pulling me in this evil and broken world. I would submit to this awful thing because it would put me in a very good place to do what really matters most to me, that business of shining the light in the darkness of human misery. An awful lot of other folks out there will be miserable, sucked into something they don’t understand. Despite all the conventionality, each of them will be unique in their own mixture of blindness, bewilderment, certitude, sadness and resignation. A few will at least appear quite happy with things. But I would take each of them as utterly unique, even when they fall into easily recognizable psychological profile types. I would assume each of them has some divinely appointed moment with me, and me with them, and His inscrutable plans will work out as He alone can measure.
No two of us should expect to respond the same in the same situation. In spite of my commitment to pacifism and my hatred for such government service, particularly the ultimately bureaucratic and dehumanizing work of physical security, I already know God has warned me to be ready for such. Granted, if it was TSA, I’d rather be put in jail or even executed, but military style access control — gate or perimeter guard — is more tolerable. Would you call that compromise? For you, it might well be. For me, it’s a matter of context. The context includes my peculiar outlook on the difference between things which I control versus the things I do not control.
The most important thing you’ll ever do is challenge the orthodoxy of everything until you find your own answers. The title of this post is a double entendre. It’s you versus convention; kill or be killed. You can allow it to snuff out your spiritual awareness, or you can engage in the endless battle against it in your own soul.
I love people. They are far more important to me than anything else on this plane of existence. When complete strangers ask me to help with their computers, I’m glad for the chance to do something good for another human. I’m so glad, I do it for free. Granted, I may not have time to do as much as they might want, but I try to offer whatever help I can give within the context of the moment.
You are an elitist computer snob if you could do the same, but can’t imagine feeling that way. You most certainly are an elitist snob if you tell your relatives they can’t afford your computer help.
People buy computers without a clue, knowing only they want one and can imagine things they want to do with one. Often things don’t quite work out, because we all know most people are influenced by cultural delusions and advertising lies. Still, they buy a computer, get some sort of ISP hookup and go surfing. And when their bundled virus protection fails because it was crappy in the first place, or the trial period runs out, or they fall for some of the most basic idiotic social engineering trick, their system begins spewing spam, or hosting porn, or becomes part of bot herd, or maybe all three. Mostly, it simply quits working for them. I know they’ve been misled, and I patiently educate them while I fix their system. That education part is far more important than the fixing part. But they paid money for that computer, and it would be a shame if they couldn’t get back on line.
If you feel everyone should be forced to pass an exam and get a license to use the Net, you are an elitist computer snob.
If you think the Internet is some sacred domain for which the unwashed masses are unworthy, you are an elitist snob. If you sneer at folks who happen to know just a little less than you, it’s people like you who make the world a far sadder place than it has to be. You are a part of the psychopath class who would gladly crush the life out of any living being for the sake of your personal convenience, and it’s a darn good thing most of you spend all your time with computers where you can’t do so much harm. But if things get so crazy your elitist wishes start coming true, I might forget I’m a pacifist, and do whatever I can find to do to protect the world from your kind.
Right now, that’s mostly prayer, along with reaching out to people you’ve treated with contempt. I like computers, too, but people come first.
I’ve been studying this pretty closely for about fifteen years now, and I find the development of the Open Source GUI, particularly on Linux, is really depressing. I no longer suggest Linux to folks because I care too much about the people and their needs, and Linux as a community can’t be bothered.
First, a reminder: I run Debian Squeeze and it’s unlikely I’ll change anytime soon. Barring dramatic improvements between now and the next release, I’ll probably run Squeeze until it’s “old-stable.” I’ve run Red Hat 6.0 and it’s almost as good for my purposes, but lacks a few conveniences. Still, when CentOS 6 comes out (the developers have opted to push out 5.6 first), I will highly recommended it.
I’m exceedingly happy both of them chose to grab GNOME at the end of the 2.x series. After viewing the screenshots and reading about the changes coming in GNOME 3, I feel like it’s KDE 4 again. At one time KDE was my favorite. Now, the developers and hobbyists win and regular users are the enemy. Yes, I’ve seen hobbyists and developers both flame and disparage folks who don’t like the new versions, and it’s the one reason computer users as a whole will never take Linux seriously. There will never be a serious adoption of Linux (or BSD) by the masses because the insiders hate the masses. At least, that’s how the masses feel when they encounter the insiders. It is certainly the feeling I got when I’ve tried to communicate with the developers.
Throughout my the entire time I used KDE and GNOME starting with the initial releases, the one thing I always wanted, and never got, was just once get things fixed without adding a bunch of new breakage. It never happened, with GNOME and KDE, it never will. Sure, they work, but there is always a large amount of breakage and glitches because for every thing they fix, they add three more problems with some new feature. For me, KDE died with the introduction of the 4.x series, and GNOME will die with 3.x. No, they aren’t trash, but they are evil. They demonstrate for all the world to see there is a severe shortage of user love in the Open Source GUI development community.
So for at least the next two years, I’ll have with Debian something fairly useful. RHEL and clones will have their useful interface for the next seven or so.
The next best hope is XFCE. Yes, it’s short on features and convenience, but it’s soon going to be superior to everything else by a long shot. That is, superior when measured by the needs and expectations of the vast majority of people who use computers — the folks willfully ignored by the GNOME and KDE developers. It’s possible something will arise which makes a lot more sense, something actually friendly and useful to the masses, but I’m frankly cynical about it. This won’t keep me from using Linux. If I have to go back to the simple window manager way of things, or even reduce it all the way to the command line, I’ll do it, because Windows disappoints me even more.
Let me get this out there for everyone just once more, on the off chance anybody with influence reads this. There is no such thing as the average computer user. That’s a moving target. But throughout my entire Linux experience, GNOME and KDE have never quite hit that target. Once or twice they’ve come close for a short span of time, then drifted off again. I know because I’ve spent most of those same fifteen or so years helping people. I love people. You know, those odd creature for which computers exist, who sit at their keyboards hoping they can get something useful from their investment in time and money. It’s bad enough with Windows, but at least they do get things done, when viruses and other malware aren’t eating holes in or hijacking their OS.
In biblical terms, they are the lost sheep, simply doing what they understand best, and the shepherds are too busy to notice the whole flock is wandering off and getting eaten alive. That’s because the commercial software vendors are predators who pretend to be shepherds. When I ran across Linux and understood how it resisted the virus and malware games, I thought my shepherd’s heart finally had some hope. Well, the GNOME and KDE games proved beyond all doubt my hope was misplaced. Sure, there’s Mac — bizarre and utterly foreign to most folks, and even more predatory in terms of prices. It will always be a niche product, as will Linux on the desktop. That’s because the folks who pump out the software, while not predators, they simply have no clue about the care and feeding of sheep. They could get a clue, but it’s not nearly so exciting as talking to themselves or joining what amounts to a circle-jerk with all their own kind, and doing all this nifty visionary stuff.
It’s almost as if they have never met a real human. They are wonderful at computers and utterly senseless with humans. That’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s too close to the truth. Linux geeks are wacko, but it’s a sad elitist wacko, not a fun and loving wacko.
Real people, the folks who use computers, would rather not have to install their OS, but they might be willing if it’s enough better than what comes installed from the factory. Most of them would actually embrace the challenge of getting Linux to do all the stuff, particularly with online multimedia, that Windows does, if they didn’t have to face that constant change. I mean big changes. That’s because Open Source in general, and Linux developers in particular, are hostile to the notion of supporting what they have already released. You see, those users would not mind installing once, but they balk at doing it every six months. That’s because there are too many radical changes, too many new things and losses of old things, and this awful snotty attitude they are somehow ungrateful when they complain they don’t want to spend all their lives chasing the next release. These people have work to do, and they don’t want to work on their computers, but do their work on computers. They should be able to get one OS for the life of the computer, with no substantial changes in user experience until they replace that machine.
The one thing in all this which is most often broken, never fixed except in the next release, and always with a bunch of new breakage, it’s the GUI. After briefly flirting with sanity, KDE has gone off into hyperspace. GNOME is right behind. Enjoy your voyage, but don’t you ever let slip from your mouths or keyboards some vain hope you can replace Windows as the dominant OS. Stop lying to yourselves. You don’t care about people. Linux will always be it’s own niche computing environment, always superior in most aspects to Windows, but always completely hostile to user needs. I can’t even get folks to accept Ubuntu any more, because Canonical has gone wacko in it’s own anti-user ways. It’s like a disease; give it time, and the folks in charge start chasing clouds in the sky and babbling about “pure computing” and similar terminology.
I give up. I’ll never go back to Windows, but most of the people I serve in my computer helps ministry can’t be served by Linux any more.
I’ve been watching the news about the Stuxnet worm, as a lot people have. On the one hand, it seemed to have been a really fine design, say some. But others said it was full of flaws, when you really examine it closely. You would expect the AV vendors to support the former, but we can’t ignore some of the trustworthy folks who say it was junk.
Then we get this big splashy exposé from the New York Times, of all places, admitting it was the nasty but crafty work of the US and Israel black ops agencies. That part was no surprise, but since when did the NYT ever actually tell the truth? Obviously, whenever the NYT says something which approaches the truth, the intent was to hide something even worse.
Sure enough, today I spotted this:
What was the point of the New York Times article at all, aside from the obvious entertainment value? Certainly co-author David Sanger has a rep as being one of the primary conduits for and conjurers of war propaganda in making the case for an attack on Iran — similar to the role Michael Gordon played in the lead up to Iraq, largely by presenting unsourced and unverified claims from unnamed officials about threats posed by enemy states.
But while you might think that Sanger has the desire to sell a possible war with Iran to the general public, this story seems to undermine the possibility of such a war, if, as the article claims, the Iranian nuclear program has been set back years as a result of Stuxnet. It seems to put the brakes on a narrative that has been animating nearly all Sanger’s reporting for the past four years, and I’ve found myself puzzled again trying to discern the article’s political intent. Could this article be a signal by someone in the Obama administration that a war is not coming anytime soon? It seems to at least be a possiblity that the Stuxnet story could indeed present an opportunity to cover a retreat from that option with a claim of success that, as some pro-Israeli sources have suggested, is the equivalent of a military attack….
My conclusion is that the authors’ purpose was simply to craft a fantastic and fawning patriotic narrative, overstating joint American and Israeli power in light of less than stellar results, a caricaturized timeline to suggest a much longer and greater degree of sophistication, planning and strategic capacity in the Stuxnet effort than the actual chronology of events reveal, and a possible means of backing away from a war that may be off the table now, by writing up a self-congratulatory victory fable.
Please note the long article offers a chart which shows the worm had no real apparent effect on the production of Low Enriched Uranium. So our black ops folks aren’t as sharp as they would like us to believe?
No. It’s the same thing I’ve said before: The psychopaths who rule this world are in the minority, and they range all up and down the normal human scale of intelligence and talent. Getting large numbers of really talented folks to work for you requires being even smarter than they are, and the only reason real geniuses ever accept a government paycheck is it’s the only way they’ll ever get to explore things no one else will fund. And they’ll hate the politics of government’s deadly bureaucracy all the way through. To get folks who willingly serve them, the psychopaths have to embrace a lot of idiots, or at least folks who are rated poorly enough to fail at getting a real job. Not everyone in government service is utterly brain dead, but my personal experience shows me promotions beyond some minimal level do not happen unless you are really missing some intelligence. Being really bright and really evil is extremely rare, and you won’t serve long in the US government security agencies unless you manage to swallow a lot of evil.
Recognition as an expert may well be a primary justification for rejecting someone’s advice.
While I admit to the iconoclastic urge, such is not the controlling factor. It’s a symptom. That urge is derived from experience. Having confronted so many experts and their damnable effects, I have learned a healthy cynicism about their abilities and motives. The greater problem is who uses those experts as a defensive shield for their tyranny.
Reputation is one thing, but propaganda can create a false reputation. That should be self-evident. That’s because we may know intuitively, if not consciously, those who desire control over others are morally disqualified to wield it. The ambition for great causes always includes the baggage of control, of some unspoken necessity of dragging you, I and everyone else into their plans. At the end of the day, they are always willing to use threat of force to include us.
But it’s always for our own good, you see. The experts tell them so.
This is the business of usurping God’s Throne in Heaven. He simply can’t be allowed to tell you or me something different than what these ambitious folks and their experts are so sure God has told them. It’s the logical flaw of concrete consistency. Yes, that’s a logical flaw, if you are operating in God’s revealed logic. It’s the assumption God can be brought down to our level of human reason, that a thing cannot be both A and not-A at the same time, and then applying that to God.
The God I serve is big enough to tell you one thing and me another, and they be conflicting things. Not because He’s playing head games with us — if any human did that, it would be some dastardly thing. But God is big enough to avoid such limitations. We can’t pretend to evaluate Him on our level. So if I claim to speak for God, I would be the last person to demand the use of human power to enforce my declaration of what God wants for you. He’s big enough to handle your acceptance, or rejection, of what I might say about His wishes. This applies to the whole range of discussion about whether there even is a God, or many, or nothing.
If I am deluded, that’s my business. More to the point, it’s none of your business. Your certainties are not mine, and mine are not yours. The biggest lie of all has consistently been one set of certainties must be followed or we all perish. This is the favorite lie of tyrants, and is the presumption behind trotting out experts for or against anything you can imagine.
It’s the excuse for child welfare laws which see thousands of families each year torn apart, something which pokes a finger in God’s eye. He owns the persons of this world, and it lies entirely in His hands to grant ownership of children to some of the most pitiful parents you can imagine. But they aren’t your children, so if you can’t find a way to persuade them so that your wishes prevail over theirs voluntarily, stay out of it. The burden is upon you to cultivate that leverage via love and sacrificial care, not by calling the local child welfare authorities. Their expertise is founded on a well established hostility to God and the cosmic level of moral order. It’s based upon a presumption of ownership over children which the officials did not bear.
That presumption of ownership extends to you and I. Having a pretense of the will of the people changes nothing. Other people around you don’t own you, and cannot assign ownership to some agent to act on their behalf. They do own themselves, in one sense — you can’t rightly exercise use of their bodies by force for your amusement. But the second greatest lie of experts is conjuring up some fantasy of how your less intrusive actions encroach upon their self ownership. For example, the insane presumption behind hate speech codes, and the imaginary “emotional distress” people suffer when you say certain words or phrases. The only reason some words hurt is because we have created a psychotic culture in the first place. Fix the psychosis and the words don’t matter.
You have the God-given right to be wrong, and so do I. The very notion of expertise itself is evil. A more reliable metric is trust, a trust earned by good results, and a humble willingness to be questioned every step of the way. It’s that rejection of the question which is sin.
