Politics

Israel is wrong

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I’ve been following the discussion on QT3 on Israel’s recent campaign of airstrikes against Gaza, and one poster really struck home the essential point in just one line:

To The Israelites In Attendance,

I do not know how you people can live with yourselves, knowing what was done to your grandfathers, and doing everything but the last step to someone else’s.

Ouch to say the least. In many ways, it’s an exaggeration of course and there’s plenty to nitpick at if you’re intent on finding differences between Israel and Nazi Germany, but there are enough similarities that Israel needs to sit up and really think about what it’s doing. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself, but does it really need to blockade the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza strip and prevent food and medicines from reaching them? Yes, Hamas uses it as a base from which to launch periodic rocket strikes into Israel, but does that justify Israel launching airstrikes that kill hundreds and injure thousands, including civilians, especially when those rockets kill only a handful of Israelis every year?

I’m concerned and exasperated by Israel’s actions, which I think are detrimental to the nation’s own interests, because I’m generally sympathetic with the Israelis’ plight. It’s a nation that I’ve come to admire and one that I like to think of as one of the good guys. But part of being one of the good guys is that you don’t sink to the level of the people you’re fighting against. It means winning the moral high ground and staying there even if it means making sacrifices.

Israel needs to understand that bombing a people into submission will never achieve peace unless they’re willing to commit genocide against the Palestinians. Israel isn’t there yet, but that’s the road that its actions are taking it down unless it musters the political will to make real sacrifices to reach a lasting compromise with the Palestinians. Given the particular history of the Jewish people, it is especially shameful that they’re anywhere near that road at all.

Films & Television

Ip Man

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My wife and I went to watch this film at the 1 Borneo Mall on Christmas Day, mostly because her father is staying with us at Kota Kinabalu at the moment and he was bored. I’m not going to go into detail about the story, so if you haven’t heard about it yet, check out its page on Wikipedia.

What really struck me about the film was how safe the producers played. Just about every single event in the film is predictable in the worst possible way: courteous and cultured martial arts master who, of course, is also a Chinese patriot, kicking the asses of arrogant and barbaric Japanese invaders, heroic sacrifices, etc. etc. Haven’t we seen all this before? Apart from the boring similarities with Jet Li’s Fearless, released just two years ago, the film isn’t that accurate a portrayal of the master’s life, if his biography on Wikipedia is anything to go by.

Continue reading Ip Man →

Games

Ships of Eve Online

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This familiar side-by-side comparison of the different ship types in Eve Online was updated not too long ago to include the Titans, the largest ships available in the game. You can download a full size 4.65 mb version of the image here. Seeing it really rams home the breathtaking scale that this game works on.

I don’t have time for an MMO because playing one would mean having to skip all other games, but I did, the game I’d play would be Eve. It’s easily the most unique and ambitious of all the MMOs and really the only one that hands the power to shape the universe into the hands of the players.

I note that the game has had plenty of problems lately, what with the uncovering of a conspiracy that might have enabled some of the more powerful corporations in the game to exploit a glitch to create some 3 trillion ISK of goods in the economy and the current financial problems in Iceland, where Eve is based. The latest rumour is that CCP might move out of Iceland to make things easier for itself since most of its revenues come from outside the country anyway.

I might not play Eve, but I always enjoy reading the news and war reports coming out of the game and there’s no other MMO that I’d wish more to have a long and healthy life.

Fun

Frosty the Snowman

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It’s Christmas, so I thought I should come up with a suitably Grinchy post for the season. Since everyone already knows that Jesus wasn’t actually born any time even near this time of year, I thought I’d point out a little known fact about another icon of Christmas. The opening lyrics of this particular Christmas song should be familiar enough to everyone:

Frosty the Snowman
Was a jolly happy soul
With a corncob pipe and a button nose
And his eyes made out of coal.

Frosty the Snowman
May the children laugh and play
And were they surprised when before their eyes
He came to life that day.

There must have been some magic
In that old silk hat they found
For when they placed it on his head
He began to dance around.

The interesting fact about this song, first released by Gene Autry in the 1950s, is that the original idea wasn’t for it to be about Christmas at all. In the 1970s, one of the song’s writers, Walter Rollins, confessed in an interview in Life magazine, that it was supposed to be about the consequences of a nuclear winter, with the snowman being brought to life amidst the radioactive fallout and the dreams of children of a world without war. Sounds sinister doesn’t it? Unfortunately the producers ultimately decided that a more childish version of the song would have more commercial value.

A pity because the original version of the song would be just the perfect thing to have on while I play Fallout 3 on Christmas day.

Religion

Pope: Saving humanity from gays is like saving the rainforest

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I apologize for these anti-religious posts on Christmas Eve, but this is really too good to pass up. Blame the Pope for choosing the festive season to make an announcement like this. From the report by Reuters:

Pope Benedict said on Monday that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behavior was just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

“(The Church) should also protect man from the destruction of himself. A sort of ecology of man is needed,” the pontiff said in a holiday address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.

“The tropical forests do deserve our protection. But man, as a creature, does not deserve any less.”

That’s an awesome display of insensitivity and being out of touch with the general population right there.

Religion, Science

Religiosity linked to brain damage (again)

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The role of the brain in determining religiosity gets put into the spotlight again by a new study by the University of Missouri. As reported by ScienceDaily, this is one of the first studies that use individuals with traumatic brain injury to investigate the connection between religion and the human brain. The data gathered from this particular study lends support to a neupsychological model that links specific forms of spiritual experiences with decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain.

The type of religious feeling that is relevant here is selflessness and the transcendence of feeling a strong connection with others and the universe. The researchers found that people who had suffered brain damage in that area of the brain reported higher levels of these types of spiritual experiences. The researchers also suggest that it is possible to induce such feelings by reducing activity in that part of the brain through conscious meditation or prayer.

As my post title indicates, however, this is far from the first time that religious inclination has been linked to brain damage. This BBC article from 2003 for example, suggests that people who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy are prone to suffer from hallucinations that they may interpret as being religious in nature. Even more interestingly, that article references an experiment that involved studying the brain activity of a Buddhist who was meditating and found that the parietal lobes of the brain were almost completely shut down during that time, the same part of the brain that was involved in this new study. According to the BBC article, this area of the brain is responsible for giving us our sense of time and place, which might help explain why shutting it down would make humans feel that they’re not an individual but are instead a part of the wider universe.

I don’t really have the time to examine this in-depth today but this new study does raise an interesting perspective for me personally. In the BBC article, Richard Dawkins, probably the most famous living atheist today, was found to be more or less immune to the effects of a magnetic field directed around the temporal lobes of his brain, while others who had undergone the experience reporting feeling some sort of “presence”. This led the article to suggest that different people may have a variable “talent” for religion. In the same way, would this mean that humans whose parietal brain regions are naturally more active or well developed innately feel more individualistic and self-centered?

Games, Politics

Sarah Palin wins the U.S. Presidency

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Or she does in my game of The Political Machine 2008 Express anyway. I recently discovered that Stardock had made available a stripped down version of TPM 2008 as a free download when I was moving all of my Stardock-published games from the no longer supported Stardock Central to the shiny new Impulse platform. I’ve never played any version of The Political Machine before, but I’ve heard plenty about them, so I went ahead to download and play this demo version. This version only allows you to play the 2008 campaign lasting 21 weeks long with a choice of only four candidates: John McCain or Sarah Palin for the Republicans or Barack Obama or Joe Biden for the Democrats.

As a contrarian, I picked Palin for my candidate. I’d expected to lose horribly even at beginner difficulty, but surprisingly managed to eke out a win by two electoral votes while losing the popular votes. I immediately restarted at normal difficulty and with a much better understanding of the game now, managed to win a landslide victory against Obama. I next tried playing as Obama, expecting an even easier victory, and promptly got whupped by McCain. I call shenanigans (especially since Brad Wardell of Stardock is fairly well known among gaming circles as a Republican supporter).

As a strategy game, I wasn’t really impressed enough with the demo to be interested in buying the full game. It’s novel for a while, but I’d much rather be playing a more traditional strategy game that’s about killing and conquering your enemies, rather than trying to be more persuasive than them. What’s really interesting about this is how useful it is an educational and visualization tool for understanding the U.S. presidential elections. You’ll understand how winning the election is all about maximizing your electoral votes. It’s far better to have a solid majority in a state worth a whole lot of votes than be moderately popular in a smattering of smaller ones.  Just like real life, winnning means concentrating all your time and money in key states even if it means you’ll be hated in others.

Check the demo out by downloading Impulse for free if you’re interested.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living