"Just a little cut."

In The Golden Compass a human being's soul exists external to the body in the form of a daemon. The villians of the first book perform experiments on children in which they cut the daemon away from the child; removing the bond between the child and its soul. The rationale for this experimentation is that cutting away the daemon renders the child immune to Dust, the quazi-physical particle version of original sin.

The heroes of the book are disgusted by the practice of cutting away a child's daemon (called "intercission"). To cut away the daemon is an abomination; it goes against the natural state and renders the child a shell of their former self. The villians in the book argue that protecting a child from dust, original sin, is worth the "little cut" of intercission.

So we have two parties in this situation. One party argues that modification of a being can be justified if the benefits outweigh the offsets. The other party argues that modification of a being is an abomination regardless of what this modification provides.

My sibling has a three legged kitten named Weeble. Weeble was hit by a car when younger and so his right front leg sustained terrible nerve damage and was itself broken and useless; the leg would drag on the ground as Weeble romped around. So one day Weeble had a surgery in which his right front leg, testicles, and claws were removed.

Relate that to the idea of intercission.

In what way is modification of a being through surgery justified? While viewing the film version of Golden Compass the audience was anxious and frightened during the scene in which the main character and her daemon are to have intercission performed on them. Yet surely these same people would see no problem modifying the reproductive organs of their pets via surgery. What of removing the claws of cats? What of circumcision? What of removing useless and detrimental appendages such as Weeble's leg? By what means do we define "useless" and "detrimental"? Is is detrimental for a cat to have its reproductive organs and claws; for a child to have its soul?

Certainly any action can have justifications fabricated for it. But by what means are these justifications assessed? Can we truly take offense at the idea of a child having her soul cut away in a book if in real life we remove the claws and reproductive organs of our pets; treating them like property rather than living beings?

I think not.

In Golden Compass the organization who performed intercissions justified their actions by claiming that they knew what was best for the children, that being immune to Dust was worth the hollow daemon-less existence. In what way are we not adopting that same ideology when we neuter our pets, when we remove our cat's claws, when we modify and change and conform living beings to our idiotic idealized notions of how they ought to be?

Are we truly so wise that we know all ends, that we truly understand what is best? Or do we merely rationalize the actions we perform to make our pets less whole, less natural, less free, and more convenient?

How often do we say "Oh, it's just a little cut"?

Too often.

1.2 million PS3s sold...

Sony Corp. said Monday that PlayStation 3 game machine sales totaled 1.2 million in North America during the key holiday season.

I received a PS3 and the PS3 version of Rock Band for Christmas. On the day after Christmas I returned the PS3 and the PS3 version of Rock Band to the stores from whence they came and collected the money.

So, 1.2 million units may have been sold. But you have to then ask how many were returned shortly thereafter by persons disgusted by the idea of owning one of the damn things.

So please, Sony. Subtract one from those sales numbers. And then kindly crawl into a hole and die along with your proprietary Blu-Ray bullshit and your damned marketing campaign.

Do you want it? No.
Do you need it? No.
Let me hear it!
Fuck you, Sony.

Strings and Rods

Let's say I decided to make for myself a marionette. I suppose I would carve some wood into the approximate shape of human limbs and attach them with joints to a wooden torso with a wooden head on top of it all. I'd then attach some lengths of string to the extremities of the puppet and maybe I'd tie the other ends of those strings to my fingers, so that when I moved my hand in certain ways, the strings would be pulled and the puppet would be made to move.

Now obviously it'd be a very simple man who watched my puppet moving around and did not deduce that it was only doing so because of my own motions, but what would you say about the person who doesn't wonder at how I myself am made to move? I think it's reasonable, within the confines of this metaphor, to suppose that on my extremities are lengths of string which extend invisibly to the hand of a puppeteer who created me much in the way that I created my puppet.

The problem with that is there's no reason to assume that the chain ends there. Why not another set of strings which are pulled by yet another puppeteer, and after that more string and more puppeteers all the way into infinity?

Maybe the answer to that is when I make my puppet, that's the entire length of the chain. There's me, and there's my puppet, and if I want there to be a puppeteer above me, I have to make him, too. Only instead of using string I attach rods to my limbs, so that he'll stay above me and when I move my body, it'll push my puppeteer's hand into motion as well.

Sometimes I wish there were a puppeteer. It'd make some things a bit simpler and probably more satisfying. But we can't even seem to agree on what kind of puppeteer to make for ourselves, and even that is a little disappointing. When I look at my own wrists and ankles, I don't see string or rods, even if I wish I did. I don't see anything at all, and can be troubling.

How Many Kids can you [Chat]?

Post your responces in the talkback. I can fight 12.

12

This is why I love Ron Paul

MOVIE

Ron Paul makes a hell of a lot of sense, no one else does.
best line - Terrorism is an existential threat

Lady Enide resurfaces with horror story from the doctor's office

Hello people. I'm reposting here what I posted earlier today on my other non-blogger blog, with some slight edits for names, etc. This is the most... um... thrilling? adventuresome? horrific? thing that happened to me during holiday break. Chances are you'll enjoy the break from J's rants (no matter how much you tend to agree with him), if nothing else.


Well, I just finished experiencing the worst morning in the history of... Lady Enide's visits to the doctor, anyway. If it hadn't been for the strange absence of anxious-mortified self-consciousness that usually accompanies such episodes, it would have easily been the worst morning of my life. God is good; I could not have felt more at ease in my misery.

Eye doctor: simple checkup, right? Least invasive and disturbing of all routine medical procedures, right? Even after waking up with a somewhat woozy stomach, the intrepid Lady Enide was unshaken in her faith that nothing truly awful could possibly happen. She ate a solid breakfast (even avoiding coffee) so as to deter further queasiness, drove herself to the office, filled out the insurance info without much ado, read the bottom line of the chart easily with both eyes (though the number 2 at the end confused her brain somewhat, as she wasn't expecting numerals and was trying to make it out as a letter...), and obediently chose to have her eyes dialated with the eye drops instead of being charged $35 for the use of the laser-photograph-gizmo-machine. The drops went in, they weren't bad, and as she waited for the nurse to return for more tests, she thought how proud her mother would be of her.

Near the end of the nurse's tests, she began to feel cold--and somewhat more woozy. "These are simple, non-scary tests. Why am I freaking out? I have no reason to be!" She returned to the examination room and sat in the chair to wait for the doctor, and began feeling colder... after a minute, she lay down on the floor to catch her breath, and when the doctor walked in, she felt well enough to sit up and start finishing the examination. The doctor was a little wigged out but said plenty of people had fainted before, so L.E. should let her know if she started feeling poorly again. The test was almost through when this proved to be the case...

At first I thought I'd just sat up too quickly the first time. But laying down again didn't really help--I was *very* cold now, and quite light-headed, and my abdomen was hurting more. They gave me a sugar tablet but it didn't help. Finally I asked the nurse assigned to look after me to show me to the bathroom, and I literally did not get there a moment too soon.

Now, if you don't like reading anything disgusting, even in a roundabout way, you should skip this paragraph. I'll spare you the more gruesome details; but, readers, I felt like a wet rag being wrung at the middle so that all the extra fluid would run off at the ends. I think I *have* felt more sick in my life, but not so completely helpless in trying to control my body. What made me worry somewhat at first was that the fluid in the sink was a very dark pink--or possibly diluted red. Oh, great, methinks. I've got internal bleeding from some unknown cause and am going to end up a case the like of which you'd view on House. This thought wasn't nearly as disturbing as it might've been, though, seeing as I was fairly well preoccupied with just trying to get the stuff out of me. As it turned out--or as I realized shortly thereafter--that pink stuff couldn't be anything but the excess dialating fluid which had run into my nose and down my throat. The well-meaning doc has given me a fairly good dose in the right eye to make sure it worked, cause I'd kept blinking. I, thinking it was like any other nose spray or the like, had swallowed the better part of it--it didn't even taste bad.

I suppose I can't blame my stomach for not wanting its muscles paralyzed, too.

I must've been in the bathroom for half an hour; they called my mom for me, then my dad when they couldn't reach her, so he came up with my brother to take me home--even though I was feeling well enough to drive myself when it was all through, I certainly wasn't at the time they contacted him. By that point the doc had given up on me and gone out for lunch... so now I have to go back this afternoon sometime, if they can fit me in, and finish the checkup. Or at least show them my insurance card and give them the co-pay, which they never asked for. If I was really cheap, maybe I could make a practice out of inducing these episodes and just keep switching doctors...

My cat has to go the vet later today, too. I think we're going to spend the rest of the day recovering together. You know what? They need a Calvin & Hobbes where both of them are under the weather and suffering together... I thought Watterson had a strip for every life experience, but I guess he missed that one.

Cursor*10

Flash game. Very awesome.

That's my high-score. It might be possible to beat it, but it also might not be. Try it.