You can't argue with logic like that

After Harold Camping's second try at a date for the apocalypse (21 October) came and went without a fuss, I was a little less depressed to see the Camping followers' mailing list completely fail to rethink their position. Truly it was as though the first nonpocalypse never happened, the response was so similar. People first held out to the very last minute of the date anywhere on the globe, then they scrambled through the scriptures to revise the date and extend it somehow, and then finally some* accepted that it was wrong, but put blame on themselves and praised their god anyway.

It's revolting to see thinking human beings so eager and willing to kiss the hand that beats them.

Though there was one glimmer of hope (names censored below to protect the stupid):

A---, after THREE failed prophesies including very specific dates, anything Harold suffers in the press he richly deserves. You can't wish this away, or crunch more numbers to make this go away. He stuck his neck way out and has allowed his enemies to take him out. You can say "shallow and shoddy" all you want, but the only thing PROVEN to be shallow and shoddy is the timeline and it's "guaranteed" dates.

E--- N---

And the reply? A one-line email from D--- C---:

All part of God's perfect plan E---.

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*"Some", because a good portion of the mailing list seems to have gone private to discuss how the end date might actually be the end of the year.

And here we have a perfect demonstration of how the whole "Jesus is coming back in this generation" thing has been going now for 2000 years.

EU bans children from blowing up Christmas balloons!!! (Or does it? The anatomy of a media beat-up)

A Facebook friend recently posted a link to this article from The Daily Telegraph:

Children to be banned from blowing up balloons, under EU safety rules

Children are to be banned from taking part in traditional Christmas games, from blowing up balloons to blowing on party whistles, because of new EU safety rules that have just entered into force.

My first impression on reading the Facebook preview (headline and lede) was that someone was trying very hard to incite some rage about this story. It's as though someone at the Daily Tele was playing conservative-outrage bingo: "EU" "ban" "Christmas" "children" ... after a few sentences of being bombarded with such words, I can imagine their 64% Conservative readership being so beside themselves with indignation that they simply won't have enough neurons spare on the rest of the article.

If "an official" quoted by The Daily Telegraph is to be believed, the EU Nanny State has decided that although small children have been blowing up balloons for generations, they won't be anymore and they will be safer for it. Whether or not those same children will be permitted, perhaps at Christmas time, to look at pictures of children blowing up balloons is still uncertain.

This is clearly a ridiculous policy, right? The EU is off it's rocker! And that is the impression you will get from much of the article, quoting a sociologist concerned that these bans will hamper children's fun and learning, a committee member noting the absurdity of telling families how to blow up balloons, all reinforcing the headline that balloons are about to be banned.

The story has also spread like wildfire throughout the Interwebs, being repeated, mocked, and derided by everyone who reads it:

• wtf!!! Children to be banned from blowing up balloons
• I wonder when cutlery will be banned? We can all use those plastic spoon-forks like in prison.
• "Outrage of the week"
• "You know what I think is dangerous? Letting pencilnecks like these EU officials anywhere near regulatory power."
• "should children be arrested for blowing up balloons?"

etc.

It all seems legit, and legitimate to ridicule, except in the few paragraphs where the actual EU policy is referred to. For example:

Official guidance notes: "For latex balloons there must be a warning that children under eight years must be supervised and broken balloons should be discarded."

So what is the real story?

Already, even in the article's own content, we have a contradiction. You can't put labels on banned items, can you? If the official guidance notes that children must be supervised with their balloons, then how can they be banned from using balloons? Unless the EU is suggesting that parents supervise a banned activity? Oh I'm sure it's possible, bureaucracy being so absurd and all!

If the particulars of EU balloon labelling policy are your thing, you can download the Toy Safety Directive Explanatory Guidance Document here. The short of it is that children are not about to be banned from playing with balloons - how do you enforce a rule like that anyway? - all that's happened is that balloons will now have labels telling parents that deflated balloons are a choking hazard, and strongly advising them to supervise their kids while playing with them.

There isn't even going to be a temporary ban on balloons (thanks, Facebook Friend, for that creative bit of reinterpretation you came up with in a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that you got fooled). Page 75, Article 9.2.1, not only specifies a two year transitional period to conform, it specifically permits toys conforming only to the old Directive that are already in the market, or even any that entered during the 2 year transition, to continue to be sold.

Balloons will not be banned. But don't take my word for it, take the Daily Telegraph's word for it, when they completely failed to report on any mass shortages of balloons or crying children having their balloons ripped from their hands by over-zealous EU officials back in July this year.

Yeah, that's right. July this year. Despite the Daily Telegraph's claim that the policy "just entered into force", this story is actually 3 months old. The Directive was written in 2009, and the transitional period ended 20 July 2011.

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We all say we know that the media lies and that you shouldn't believe everything that you read in newspapers. Still, it's a bit of a shock to see something as blatant as this, a story devoid of any story-worthy content apart from the bits that were made-up.

The interesting thing about this story is not the minutiae of EU balloon labelling policy, but why the hell it was written at all. So the Daily Tele hates the EU, so it has to meet its outrage-quota for each issue, but surely there are other, more interesting, more legitimately infuriating things going on in the world that they can get their readers worked-up about?

I don't know, perhaps it is as simple as a bit of EU-bashing. The Paul Nuttall MP they quoted is a member of the eurosceptical UK Independence Party. He also had the best and funniest quote, which either means he's a naturally charming and quick-witted fellow, or he wrote the press release. But even then, surely the EU is doing something wrong, somewhere, that's more interesting than this? Wasn't there something happening in the Greek economy?

My gut reaction, whenever I see a beat-up, is to follow the money. But even in this case it doesn't make a lot of sense. What would it cost to print a label on a packet of balloons, maybe 0.001c? This is clearly not about labels and balloons.

The best I can come up with in that line of thinking is that the target is not the labelling policy but the other aspects of the Toy Safety Directive. The bulk of it seems to deal with chemicals in toys and the paints used on them. Unlike the balloon policy (heh), the chemical regulations part of the Directive hasn't come into force yet. The manufacturers still have an additional 2 years to deal with that transition, and it will be a lot more cost and hassle than putting labels on packets of balloons.

Yet while that particular theory confirms all of my ideological narratives, it seems too tenuous a link to make to this article. I can't see anything in it quoting, say, a company that makes toys, or even a corporate-sponsored think-tank. Perhaps it is just EU-basing after all?

Quotes from The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Hamish Hamilton, London, 1965

p. 21: ... to understand is above all to unify. The mind's deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man's unconscious feelings in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. ... If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled. If thought discovered in the shimmering mirrors of phenomena eternal relations capable of summing them up and summing themselves up in a single principle, then would be seen an intellectual joy of which the myth of the blessed would be but a ridiculous imitation. That nostalgia for unity, that appetite for the absolute illustrates the essential impulse of the human drama. But the fact of nostalgia's existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied.

p. 36: If [Kierkegaard] substitutes for his cry of revolt a frantic adherence, at once hie is led to blind himself to the absurd which hitherto enlightened him and to deify the only certainty he henceforth possesses, the irrational.

p. 46: My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evidence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity*, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together.

(*See also, The Master and His Emissary, by that theologian chappy)

p. 45-6: And these two certainties - my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle - I also know that I cannot reconcile them.

p. 58: All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion.

p. 75: At this level the absurd gives them a royal power. It is true that those prices are without a kingdom. But they have this advantage over others: they know that all royalties are illusory. They know, that is their whole nobility, and it is useless to speak in relation to them of hidden misfortune or the ashes of disillusion. Being deprived of hope is not despairing. The flames of earth are surely worth celestial perfumes. Neither I nor anyone can judge them. They are not striving to be better, they are attempting to be consistent.

p. 79: The idea of an art detached from its creator is not only outmoded; it is false. In opposition to the artist, it is pointed out that no philosopher ever created several systems. But that is true insofar, indeed, as no artist ever expressed more than one thing under different aspects.

p. 81: If the world were clear, art would not exist.

p. 88 footnote: Man simply invented God in order not to kill himself. That is the summary of universal history down to this moment.

Harold Camping's flock, notes for later

I've joined the two yahoo groups that Harold Camping's group use. I did so soon after the rapture didn't come to pass. It has been ... interesting. Funny, of course, bewildering at times, but sad as well. Mostly saddening actually.

I joined in the hopes of watching how they react to the failure of their prediction, maybe in the hopes of gaining some special insight into human nature ... or how we humans think ... something along those lines. I think I need a while to kind of digest what I've been reading. I can definitely see patterns, and their behaviour has confirmed an article I read (that of course I can't find right now) about how doomsday groups respond to failed predictions. I'm impressed that it was predictable, it suggests that there's something to be learnt here. Maybe.

The most interesting thing to me so far has been that they have a very powerful culture against arguing and questioning. They even have these coded phrases for it - "scoffers and mockers" is one - that I've seen at least once used as a powerful weapon against those who break these implicit rules.

I also think that Harold Camping himself was not a fraud, in that, I think he definitely believed his own bullshit. They all testify to what a nice and sincere man he is. I think nonbelievers usually assume that these leaders are all about the money (or the chicks), but that isn't the case here, and I wonder if it really is the case generally.

Also, I need to do something about this - http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Alert---Homeopathy-Under-Attack-in-Australia.html?soid=1101927195136&aid=DNEodVsObg0

And I thought you had to be stoned to see this kind of thing

Apparently the suicidal can see the paradox-gates too:

We open the successive doors in Bluebeard’s castle because “they are there,” because each leads to the next by a logic of intensification which is that of the mind’s own awareness of being. To leave one door closed would be not only cowardice but a betrayal—radical, self-mutilating—of the inquisitive, probing, forward-tensed stance of our species. We are hunters after reality, wherever it may lead. The risk, the disasters incurred are flagrant. But so is, or has been until very recently, the axiomatic assumption and a priori of our civilization, which holds that man and truth are companions, that their roads lie forward and are dialectically cognate....We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, onto realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. We shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartók’s music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity.[5]

Ken Ham's in Brisbane!

Oooh, I just found out that Ken Ham will be speaking at some church south of Brisbane tonight. Sadly I'm not going to be able to make it, as I'll probably be getting drunk with my fellow stall-holders to celebrate the end of the Fair Trade market, but I'm sorely tempted...

Ken Ham on Facebook!

Ken Ham has a fan page on Facebook. It's comedy gold. For example, some of the comments under a photo from the dolphin show at Seaworld, where in the caption Ham bitches about the presenter mentioning the age of the dolphin genus line or whatever:

Seth-Julie Byrd: I'm trying to teach my two year old whenever he hears "millions of years ago" he should say, "No, that's a lie." However, I think I've thoroughly confused him. He was watching a cartoon the other day and it said something like "there are millions of fish in the ocean" and he shouted at the TV, "No! That's a lie!"

Richard Folker: If the dolphins really went back 10 million years, they ought to have evolved enough to be keeping humans in cages instead of the other way around.

(Richard's probably being intentionally hilarious, but with Poe's Law, one can never be too sure...)

John Sherman: You take your family on vacation to Sea World for a day of fun ..... only to find yourself trapped in a House of Horror. Your head spins as you read the sign "Dolphins go back 10 million years. Today's show takes us back 2 mil years & the Christmas carols turn out to be Santa is coming to town & Rudolph.