Sporus's New Writeups

land mine (idea)

2009-12-14T02:38:49Z

A fundamental point about anti-personnelle land mines which does not get made is that they are economic weapons: Their primary function is to destroy the rural economy of a country or region by making farming difficult or impossible - this makes them of enormous geo-political importance. They are small and very, very cheap and can be broadcast over huge areas from planes. A variation is the Israeli use of "dud" bomb-lets from cluster bombs to destroy the rural economy of the Lebanon when they last invaded; forty percent of the bomb-lets from the cluster munitions were "dud" - a quote from the BBC: an incompetent weapons designer indeed!

This is the reason we are served up with the bare faced lie that it is impossible to limit their lifespan, say to 6 months. There are a hundred ways to do this.

(Incidentally, the "They only blow peoples' feet off because that way you remove 3 people from the battlefield" - the victim and the stretcher bearers - is…

The Media and Science (idea)

2009-11-04T05:30:51Z

Breath of Fresh Truth

Let's not say what we are allowed to say, let's tell the truth. The big thing about the media is it's a propaganda apparatus, just much better at it than authoritarian countries like North Korea or whatever.

It is fundamentally important to power, which - being powerful - controls the propaganda apparatus, to be able to say: "This isn't merely our opinion, this is science." This has all sorts of consequences and corollaries. These include:

We have to be kept ignorant about science, otherwise we'd just laugh in their faces - note the removal of real science from television in recent years, and c.f. their dislike, centuries ago, of translating the bible into English (then they said: You've got to agree with us, it's the word of God.)

They mostly want to tell us how we should think, act, and feel. So they have to legitimise the fascist pseudo-

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Why Microsoft is evil (idea)

2009-11-03T07:39:58Z

An Obscure Feature of Microsoft

Dismay Among the Martian Race

For the first time in many years I smoked a cigarette the other day. Without exaggeration its only flavour was of mild burning paper.

We have got so used to this sort of thing that we do not realise how deeply odd it is. Why for example is supermarket bread tasteless or unpleasant? Why do country music radio stations grade the songs from 0, for rubbish, to 5, for very good, and then play the 3's - they all do this as a matter of conscious policy in the US? Would not the famous Martian, freshly arrived among us, react with confusion?

The Dismal Regiment of Windows

Windows is COMMERCIAL in big letters. Meaning it treats us, like all thing supposedly commercial, as infantilized farm animals. But what do infants like - why gaudy bangles, 'eye candy'.

But Windows is perhaps the dreariest looking thing ever to get on a cathode ray screen.…

The Industrial Killing of the Old (idea)

2009-11-01T09:45:33Z

My elderly mother was given "neuroleptics" she died slowly and horribly, with profound akathisia and even high stepping, such as in arsenical poisoning.

I found this difficult to work out, feeling that, although the drug corporations would profit from her destruction, the other powerful interest groups would not. One particular powerful interest group cannot simply do exactly as it pleases, but must square it with the other powerful groups - the bulk of them must profit. But how could her death possibly benefit anyone but the drug corporations?

It seems clear to me now that Noam Chomsky has the answer: I listened to this speech the other day http://www.archive.org/details/dn1996-0509 and it seems to explain how wider power benefits from my mother's death.

If you look at the world he says, the nastier, poorer type of country simply kills a proportion of the economically inactive. Whereas in the United States, where one cannot get away with simply killing…

Sigmund Freud (idea)

2009-07-20T11:33:34Z

Freud, an evil Genius.

His was a strange do - Freud - his illiterate, fascistic, and obviously evil ramblings changed the world. So were they just fools, in the old days, that they fell for him, and as evil as him, or was it something important? Was it necessary to change the world and Freud just happened along?

Freud and Jung were on a sea voyage together and in an orgy of thought arrived at most of their "ideas". A key one was that the more upsetting to a patient was something the more likely it was true. Truth is degrading.

All Psychological Explanations Are Degrading

All psychological explanations are degrading has remained a central feature of psychology to this day. Sporus - listening for this for decades - has only ever heard one non-degrading psychological explanation: a motor cycling psychologist said people motor cycled because they like speed.

What is it that Healers Worry

…

chemical potential (thing)

2009-04-25T12:50:27Z

Chemical Potential

Chemical potential, μ, was defined by Josiah Willard Gibbs as:

If to any homogeneous mass in a state of hydrostatic stress we suppose an infinitesimal quantity of any substance to be added, the mass remaining homogeneous and its entropy and volume remaining unchanged, the increase of the energy of the mass divided by the quantity of the substance added is the potential for that substance in the mass considered.

A feel for this potential:

Being a potential μ is of the same character as a pressure or a voltage or even a temperature. It sort of "pushes" on things.

If a pressure is allowed to alter the volume of a system by a tiny amount then the internal energy, U, (the total energy of the system) changes by the small amount of work that has been added to the system. Equally if temperature is allowed to push the thing through an…