Making minor deities disappear in a puff of logic since 1972
Fri, 23 Dec 2005
Spammers suck.
Of course, you knew that.
The spamming bastards have been spewing their links and randomly generated comments all over my blog, and it's difficult to keep track of all of the spam they generate in all of my archived entries.
Rus uses Blosxom too, and he sent me his "comments" modifications, but the "comments" plugin is different enough from "writebacks" (which I use), that I didn't want to go through the trouble of merging in the diffs.
So, the shortest path seemed to be to write my own solution. It's pretty unsophisticated at the moment, and trivially easy to crack my scheme (for goodness sakes, my image URL is named what is depicts) but I'm interested in allowing the class struggle between the blogetariat and spamgousie to escalate in a darwinian/dialectic fashion.
When the spammers refine their methods to get past my filters, I'll raise the bar to see just how far off the floor I need to get to escape the pestilence infected waters unleashed by the marauders from Spamalot.
As of this moment, Khan 1, Spammers 0. C'mon, you anklebiting scum, I dare you to raise it to the next level. I have DHTML/DOM, ClientCaps, HTTP, Javascript, and encryption tricks under my sleeve waiting to be unleashed.
(Warning to the innocent bystanders: If you don't enter the Spamblock number, your comment will be transparently dropped)
Be generous, share: Digg This! | Add to Del.icio.us | Have you Reddit?| Stumble It!
Rus -rus at berrett.org- writes: writeback vs. comments blosxom plugin
i picked the comments plugin over the writeback plugin because the comments plugin supports threaded replies. just fyi.
Tue, 13 Dec 2005
Clemency Denied
Ever hear the phrase "Let he without sin cast the first stone"? It's one of the most hypocritical Christian teachings, if the positions of many conservatives is any indicator.
How so? Well let's see. First, there's the right-to-lifers, who claim that their goal is to "restore legal protection to innocent human life". The choice of the mother or the individual are irrelevant, of course.
If you have terminal cancer, and wish to humanely end your life (you know the kind of "humanity" we seem to be able to demonstrate toward our terminally ill pets-- but that we can't demonstrate for our own elderly), too bad... Your life is innocent, and you must not be allowed to die.
So, if you happen to be Tookie Williams, a convicted murderer, regardless of whether you have accepted Jesus as your savior, and regardless of what steps you may have taken towards redemption-- you are no longer "innocent life" and hence, to the right wingers, the death penalty can and should apply. So it really apparently comes down to whether you're simply a bad person (Tookie) or a saintly good person like, say, Terry Schaivo.
But wait a second... Don't Christians believe we are all sinners in the eyes of the Lord? So who is so righteous-- so without sin-- that they could operate the switch? And who is so without sin, whose innocence is so abundant that they couldn't possibly be euthanized?
According to Christian teachings, there's only one person who could have done it, and nobody else.
So according to the Christian faith, the only person who could flick the switch to execute Tookie, is Jesus Christ himself. And the converse would also hold true-- the only person who could not qualify for euthanasia, abortion, or capital punishment-- again, would be Jesus Christ himself (since all life except "His" is, by definition, not "innocent life").
Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for or against capital punishment nor abortion (I wouldn't base any such argument on a faith I do not adhere to). I'm simply pointing out that it's not a particularly ringing endorsement of the faith when many of the followers of said faith adhere to it in such hypocritical and inconsistent ways.
It makes just about as much sense as indiscriminately murdering people by bombing an abortion clinic under the premise that it's being done to prevent the indiscriminate murdering of people.
Be generous, share: Digg This! | Add to Del.icio.us | Have you Reddit?| Stumble It!
Wed, 07 Dec 2005
War on Semantics
I recognize and accept that some organizations, to placate the 25% of the rest of us, may be rolling back the Christian facade placed on top of many of the traditions of the holiday season. Some of these organizations do it as a matter of law-- the separation of church and state. While the government is explicitly prevented from infringing on the practice of religion, implicitly, government is also, in my opinion, required to not advocate any particular practice of religion.
But to call it an all out "war" is unadulterated hyperbole. Next time I hear someone talk about ultra-secularist religious oppression, I think I'm going to stuff them into a crate and send them to Turkey where the equivalent of the mayor of New York would be imprisoned for five months for saying the equivalent of "God Bless America".
But I started this entry by talking about irony, not ignorance of what constitutes a real secular war... The irony I speak of is that the "erosion" of the institutions the Christians are decrying are not actually Christian institutions at all, but largely pagan ones.
Consider decorating a tree, hanging a wreath, or mistletoe or holly. That couldn't be any more druidic. What about the Yule log? What about celebrating a holiday on the Winter Solstice. Hmm. Sounds more Wiccan than Jesus. So when someone "renames" a "Christmas" tree to a "Holiday tree" that's not being Politically Correct, that's being Historically Correct.
I'm not saying Christians should stop using Christmas trees (unless, of course they haven't read Jeremiah 10:2, but that's something they can reconcile amongst themselves). I'm also not saying that the rest of us should condemn trees decorated during the holiday as being Christmas trees.
The point of the holiday season (and it's not exclusive to the Christian faith, I'm sorry to say) is to quit being such tight asses. Jesus taught tolerance and turning the other cheek. He also asked for people to pull the plank out of their own eye before pointing out the sliver in others'. Christians don't have exclusive license on the holiday season, on the holiday spirit, nor many of the holiday traditions we celebrate today.
Seriously, people. Let the holiday season mean whatever it means to everyone. Nobody is diminishing the magnitude nor the breadth of your celebration of Christ's "birth" by calling what you put in your living room a "Holiday Tree". If you want to call it your Christmas tree to the people who come to your home to admire it (and the presents you bought from Walmart), more power to you.
As Shakespeare pointed out, "a rose by any other name..."
Be generous, share: Digg This! | Add to Del.icio.us | Have you Reddit?| Stumble It!
All content and photography under khan.org is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
