Archive for May, 2004

This one isn’t so much of a rant as just a commentary. My sister sent me an email with a humorous quote, this was my response:

On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 22:05, Beth wrote:
> “somewhere in Texas, there is a village without it’s idiot…”

You know, there are several different ways in which I measure the level of a person’s enlightenment. One particular measure of that enlightenment is the ability to tell the difference between rational thought and instinctive thought, and the ability to deal with both.

At the bottom of the scale you have people that react instinctively and don’t even realize it. Then you have people that do realize it but think that it’s related to their intelligence and therefore must be right. These people are the ones that will immediately have a gut reaction to things and make up their mind based upon that. Some of these people are actually pretty smart, they just tend to trust in their gut reaction too much. Gut reactions are nice things we’ve built up as humans over time, but they served us well when we were nomadic, warring tribes in the jungle and are primarily based upon fear and paranoia. Once we moved into civilized societies, they were the wrong instictive reactions to have. You have to be smart enough to recognize that your gut reaction isn’t a measure of your intelligence, it’s a measure of your anamilistic instincts. The people that aren’t real smart have these reactions and can’t see any other way that things could or should be. Smart people that think this is somehow related to their intelligence will have these reactions and then spend all their efforts creating rationalizations to justify their gut feeling.

Next up on the ladder, you have people that have instinctive reactions, but over rule them with rational thought. These people know better than to follow their instincts and instead do what makes sense. However, because they are ignoring their instincts, they sometimes have to deal with the fact that their own rational actions sometimes leave them feeling uncomfortable at an instinctive level. It’s unfortunate, but I think this is one of the worst failings of Christianity. Not that I think the teachings of the bible are bad (depends on what teachings you are talking about, some of them are ludicrous but that’s because of time frame specific translation issues and the like, for example Leviticus saying you can sell your daughter into slavery is just ludicrous, but that’s because women in the times of the old and new testament were considered property, nothing more, but if you ignore the more violent portions of the old testament, the new testament does have a message of peace that goes so far as to say “turn the other cheek” which is, of course, an example of ignoring your instinct and going for a higher level of action). The problem, as I see it, is that the bible tries to get you to behave at a higher level than instinctive, but doesn’t directly address what happens to a person when they ignore their instinctive needs and responses.

I think probably nothing bears this out more than the current religious stances on sexuality in general. The bible tries to get us to act at a higher level than our instinctive level when it comes to sex since acting at an instinctive level leads to things like rape. In order to do this, they villify sex, making it dirty, and making it hard for parents to discuss sex in any meaningful way with children. This is unfortunate since part of a healthy marriage (again, an attempt to behave above the instinctive level) necessarily includes a healthy sex life. Yet the fundamentalist christian philosophy is to throw children into marriage without any real education in sexual behaviour and just let them figure it out for themselves. I admit, your sexual exploration is a fun time in your life and I wouldn’t want to take that away, but at a minimum our children should be taught that part of a healthy marriage includes not just being a couple, but making each other happy both emotionally and sexually. Far too many people go into a marriage not realizing that part of being in a relationship involves these things, and the way we villify sex to children raises so many kids with sexual hangups that we have actually taken as much of a step backward as forward with our current dogma. I think people would be suprised if they actually paid attention to what percentage of divorces in this country among young couples are sexually related, and this villification of sex and people with sexual hangups is a big part of this.

At the top of the ladder you have people that have instinctive reactions, over rule them with rational thought, but also know how to make their actions under rational thought *also* satisfy their instinctive needs so that they feel comfortable at both levels. This is where things get difficult. Everyone has different instictive responses and of varying degree. A person first has to identify their instinctive responses. Those responses have some basis in reality. You see something, you hear something, or you are presented with some issue and your first response, without thinking about it, is usually your instinctive response. After you’ve identified the instinctive response, you have to think the issue through to come up with a rational response. Then you have to compare the two, find out what about the issue triggered your instinctive response, and then when trying to decide what to do or what to feel you have to try and find some way to both carry out the rational response while at the same time handling the trigger that caused the instinctive response (assuming the instinctive and rational response are different). This can be difficult and requires understanding your own mind.

George Bush is definitely at the bottom rung of that ladder. What really disappoints me though is that Dennis Miller used to be higher up on the ladder, but after 9/11 he reverted back down to the bottom rung. That event shook him up so bad that he let go of his rational thought and started relying solely on his instincts: fear, paranoia, violence. Sad.

OK, so I’ve got a server at the house that is a live server on the Internet. I use it as a mail, web, ssh, imap, and authoritative DNS server for my domain xsintricity.com. It uses a raid5 array for the filesystem to protect it from hard disk crashes and the like. Well, the basis of a raid5 array is that if any single disk fails, the other disks are able to continue in degraded mode without loosing any data. About 1 1/2 weeks ago, one of the disks started failing. Completely. Normally, this wouldn’t be any big deal, but prior to this, the machine had started exhibiting a different problem as well. Namely, once in a while, one of the disks would get kicked out of the array due to a temporary error condition. I could always add the disk back into the array, have the system reupdate it to current, and things would go on working just fine until the next disk got kicked out. Well, now that a disk it out of the array all the time, that second disk failure makes the machine panic every time the occasional kick happens. Recently, that’s been every morning

So, I’ve got a new hard drive on the way. Should be here tomorrow. Once that’s here, I’ll rebuild the entire filesystem on the new disk, kill off all the questionable disks (I got one disk that’s big enough to hold all the data in the array) and hopefully my problems will be solved. We’ll see…