2010 July

I had to share this one:

Ooh and this one too

-- Download About my new story, The Pee Martini as PDF --

Today I posted yet another true story The Pee Martini, under my ‘Silly and Pointless’ category, about a time that I accidentally drank a whole bunch of pee. This was back in 1999, and I was a little crazier than I am now in terms of the drugs and alcohol I would do. In this story I seem to be portrayed as a bit of an angry alcoholic, swearing at my friends and calling them bastards because I couldn’t find my vodka, but I’m really not like that normally… or if I am, it’s mostly in good fun and only with friends. Coincidentally a buddy the other day was saying something like “It’s taboo for guys to show affection for each other, so we gotta tell our friends they’re douche-bags instead.” It’s all in good fun, one of my stories that really doesn’t have much of a point beyond being a funny story.

-- Download 20 Logical Fallacies as PDF --

I just found this page listing 20 logical fallacies examples at http://www.theskepticsguide.org/resources/logicalfallacies.aspx and thought I should share. It basically lists off all the different specific ways, that human beings–myself included–are morons. Reading through this list I can see numerous examples of flawed logic in just about any argument I’ve been in, and more frighteningly in a large number of arguments used by legislators. This kind of human fallacy is one of the main reasons I’m an anarchist; because these psychological processes can distort our large-scale social perspectives as easily as they can on the small scale, but when we have these fallacies, the damage that can be done by a large organized group with laws and police is far greater than the damage that can be done by a few individuals.

I wanted to point out a few examples of the fallacies on this list and how they have been used against me and some of my political positions. (I’m not going to list any religious arguments because that would be too easy.) (I’m also going to conveniently neglect to point out the times where I can’t help but revert to these fallacies.)

The most common one for me as an anarchist is the Straw Man, or “Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.” This one happens to me whenever I say that I don’t support police, criminal justice or putting people in jail. Most people will immediately start arguing about how horrible some folks are and how much suffering certain kinds of crime can cause. Their ultimate goal seems to be to convince me that crime is bad, as though I just announced that we should all start killing and raping each other because it’s fun. I think deep down they know what I really mean: police, prisons and criminal justice are counter-productive to our commonly held goal of crime prevention. However, they have no facts, figures or examples that support the idea that police are preventing crime (this isn’t their fault of course, because this is such a commonly held belief that no one bothers to collect facts and figures), so they have no choice but to go to logical fallacies to make their arguments.

Another interesting one is the Slippery Slope, or believing that to hold a position, you must hold the extreme of that position. Now, I have another very unpopular opinion that’s very important to me that I might not have blogged about yet, and that is my belief that it is morally wrong to create children until we  have solved the world hunger issue, the overpopulation issue, and when there are no more orphans on the streets. In the past, people have argued that my opinion would cause the destruction of humanity because everyone would forever believe that making babies is wrong, regardless of the situation.

My personal favorite, Tu quoque, “an attempt to justify wrong action because someone else also does it.” This is the core psychological motivation for police and military. Whenever I argue that these things destroy people’s lives and cause misery to everyone, including innocent bystanders, one of the most common arguments I get is “Well, yeah, but those other people did horrible things too.”

Last night I updated my first WordPress plugin, Kalin’s PDF Creation Station on this site, and somehow it all worked wonderfully. Now the links you see to download my posts as PDF files are coming from my own plugin instead of the AS-PDF plugin I was using earlier.

I was able to figure out how to get a simple regular expression to find and remove the image caption code, so if you go to spirit animals sketch, for example, and click the PDF link, you’ll see that the image actually shows up without all the extra code garbage you would see when I was using AS-PDF. You’ll also notice that the PDF link does not show up on certain pages like table-of-contents pages or this post. In the old plugin it was all or nothing and I couldn’t turn it off for individual pages. AS-PDF also wasted server resources by creating a PDF every time the link was clicked. With my plugin, each file is created once, then cached.

That’s for the single-post feature of this plugin. What this plugin is primarily for is to create large PDF documents with many pages and posts. That functionality is ready to go, but I still need to go through and create a PDF file that contains all my True Stories, one that contains all my ‘Stories of New Beginnings’ stories, one for the Against A Rock bonus materials and possibly one for all my blog entries. Once that’s all done, I just need to wait a week or two and make sure nothing gets hacked or blows up, then I’ll post this baby to the WordPress plugin repository and see what the community thinks of my little project.