Badass Quotes

Just to mix it up a bit, some totally badass quotes, many from very evil people:

One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic - Joseph Stalin

[Upon hearing the suggestion that he should encourage Catholicism to court the Pope during WWII]

The Pope! How many divisions does he have? - Joseph Stalin

Death solves all problems. No man, no problem. - Joseph Stalin

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We don't let our enemies have guns, so why let them have ideas? - Joseph Stalin

[I actually don't agree with this quote (obviously, since agreeing with this would make me a jackass), but find it hilarious nonetheless]

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized. - Adolf Hitler

Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future. - Adolf Hitler

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed. - Adolf Hitler

The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it. - Adolf Hitler

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. - Adolf Hitler

Before all else, be armed. - Niccolo Machiavelli

Men should either be treated generously or be destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries; for heavy ones, they cannot. - Niccolo Machiavelli

Politics have no relation to morals. - Niccolo Machiavelli

I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, for vengeance, for desolation. War is hell. - General Sherman

I think I understand what military fame is: to be killed on the field of battle and have your name misspelled in the newspapers. - General Sherman

War is cruelty. There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over. - General Sherman

You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog. - Harry S. Truman

I fired MacArthur because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President... I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, because that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail. - Harry S. Truman

In Soviet Union it is hard to do comedy. You cannot improvise... if someone heckles you from the audience, you cannot say "your mother wears army boots", because she probably does, and she will hurt you. If you make joke, "take my wife... please", you come home... she's gone. - Yakov Smirnoff

"When I first came here from Russia, I went to Cleveland... In Cleveland, they made me feel at home, so I had to escape again. Now, I make fun of Cleveland because everybody makes fun of Cleveland. In every country they make fun of a particular city. When I was in Russia, for example, we used to make fun of Cleveland. - Yakov Smirnoff

I saw an ad in newspaper, it says "we guarantee your furniture and stand behind it for six months". That's the reason I left Soviet Union! I don't want people behind my furniture! - Yakov Smirnoff

Democracy is different in America. For example, woman can vote but horse cannot. - Borat

Yo, I don't play no games. The only games I play is my dick versus yo' pussy. And my dick always wins. - McCracken, a "friend" of a friend

So this bitch started yelling at me, so I said to myself, "Stay calm, McCracken! Stay calm!" So I pulled out my gun, and I shot him. - McCracken

Twelve Quick Refutations (Plus Extra)

Here are some arguments people often have used against me, and some of my responses to them:

(1) Pascal's Wager: There is x probability that God exists, and 1-x probability that he doesn't but there is infinite reward for believing if he exists and non-infinite reward for non-belief if he doesn't, so therefore you should believe.

Great. Tell you what, send me $10,000 in cash and I'll not only give you infinite money in two month's time, I'll get you into heaven guaranteed. It's too good a deal for a smart guy like you to pass off, and space is limited.

(2) Learn to respect the mystery of life.

Sure, as soon as you respect the mystery of why you have a fever or why your car broke down.

(3) Your ideas threaten our humanity.

Hundreds of years ago, part of our 'humanity' was susceptibility to things like smallpox and bubonic plague, but I don't see very many people whining about their disappearance.

(4) Your ideas are all based on other ideas. Even the concept of 'idea' is an idea. How can you argue for the correctness of your system when you make such fundamental assumptions?

Everything, even logic, needs a starting point, and I make sure this starting point is as basic and solid as it possibly can be. If you're asking for an axiom-less system, feel free to sit helplessly with your thumb up your ass without even bothering to think for fear of the possibility of doubt.

(5) (related to #4, but not quite the same) All people filter reality through beliefs, thus beliefs can alter reality as they wish, thus there exist only beliefs, not reality.

As Yudkowsky says, everyone eats food through their mouths, and these mouths filter the taste of the food, so there is no food, only mouths. If you can filter your reality, why are you arguing with me anyway, instead of willing a frozen block of lavatory waste to flatten me where I stand?

(6) You have to respect my beliefs.

Nope.

(7) By the idea of Black Swans (this opinion is usually given by that curious new breed of idiots who think they understand 'The Black Swan' and like to cite it a lot) you can't predict the future since an improbable event will dominate it, so why even try?

Yes, you're right of course. The best course to dealing with unknowns is to put your fingers in your ears and hum as loudly as you can, I'm sure that will take care of it.

(8) You argue against faith in God, but you have faith in logic.

If you deny logic you lose your right to a logical response (same as denying God removes the possibility of a theistic response). In that vein, go fuck yourself you hypocritical piece of shit.

(9) Corporations threaten ancient and beautiful cultures! You can't support their evil ways!

Exactly, the Wall-Macht is driving into charming little towns in their discount Panzers for the greater glory of Fuhrer Walton. The fact that the locals shop there and work there of their own free will doesn't mean anything, nor does the fact that you're treating their technologically-deprived little 'idyllic' towns and lives as something you can view for your own pleasure rather than, you know, towns filled with people who'd like access to things like medicine and the internet thankyouverymuch.

(10) Don't question a war-time leader.

Sure, because the best way to make sure someone is doing their job properly is to ignore any mistakes you see them make. That's why it was smart for Soviet commanders not to question Stalin's order to not respond to German attacks in 1941.

(11) You shouldn't interfere with [insert process x here - it's usually aging or death] because it is a natural thing.

I hate the idea that natural = good. Go back to your mud huts and your malaria and smallpox and illiteracy you hypocritical twat. The mere fact that you're arguing this means you don't practice what you preach, and that fact makes you not only an asshole, but not worth further arguing with.

(12) Your belief in Free Will is like trying to impose a desirable face on a reality that can't accept it. (The guy who said this also said he believed in determinism because it's more consistent with the guiding ideology behind science - excuse me for asking, but isn't THAT trying to impose a desirable face on reality?)

No it isn't. Heisenberg Uncertainty means the question is meaningless for practical purposes, so neither side is more 'acceptable'. Also, your determinist viewpoint has no place for consciousness, which obviously exists, so you need to fix that gaping hole. Also, free will isn't more 'desirable', it's just the only useful assumption you can make.

And, for good measure, some popular sayings:

(13) You can't have your cake and eat it too.

What the hell do you want me to do with a cake other than eat it? Mount it in a display case so I can "have" it? (note: I thought of this BEFORE yahtzee put it in a Zero Punctuation video)

(14) What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger.

Cool. Mind if I strengthen you by taking all your money and burning down your house?

(15) What goes up must come down.

Except Voyager.

(16) Turn the other cheek.

Such a dumb saying I don't even know where to begin. Unless it's about passive-aggressive behavior, this just about does it for sheer idiocy. Turn the other cheek when hit? No, stab the fucker, then nobody else will hit you.

(17) Slow and steady wins the race.

Fast and steady tends to do better. The fable itself is fine, but the moral ought to be "don't stop until you've crossed the finish line you fucking idiot".

Two Fallacies

After reading a huge chunk of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's hugely famous magnum opus "The Black Swan" (which alternates between brilliant and rage-inducing), I was thinking about his chapter on "silent evidence", the evidence that never makes it into the pages of history and thus causes distortion. An example of "silent evidence" that Taleb gives is Casanova, or rather, those like him who never became famous. Casanova believed that his "etoile" (star) pulled him out of tricky situations, and indeed he did weather numerous setbacks only to come back as strong as ever. However, if we consider a large number of potential Casanovas, who, upon suffering a setback, have a probability of p of bouncing back (again, each setback in reality is different, but we're keeping it simple so it's easy to follow), many will be eliminated when they don't bounce back (probability 1 - p for each setback for each potential Casanova), and, at the end, only those who made it through make it into the pages of history. This demonstrates that a lucky string of one-in-a-million will often appear when there are enough potential Casanovas, even in the absence of an outside guiding influence. It only seems miraculous and probabilistically impossible because we read about the surviving Casanovas, and not the ones who were pulled under.

This came back to me later when Taleb switched to infuriatingly wrong, in a paragraph about how casinos prepare for all the wrong tragedies. His example was that casinos try to guard against probabilistic variability and cheating through diversification and surveillance, but the things that cost them are things like tigers mauling performers. His conclusion is that the majority of risks fall outside the casinos' models. But this falls victim to his own 'silent evidence' fallacy! Variability doesn't harm casinos BECAUSE they guard against it - so the potential threats don't make it into the books. They are silent evidence. So is cheating, since cheaters get caught or scared away, so the potential risk is totally unknown.

Unfortunately, this analysis of the defect could very well fall prey to precisely another fallacy - the so-called 'Elephant Repellant' fallacy. The idea is as such: a guy walking along a road sees a farmer in a field in England spraying a very smelly substance all over the fields. Naturally curious he goes over, and, holding his nose, asks him what he is spraying on the fields. "Elephant repellant" replies the farmer. "But there are no elephants anywhere near here!" protests the guy. "I know," says the farmer, "it really works!" The point of the fable is clear: any preventative measure can only be determined to be ineffective (at least anecdotally... a rigorous scientific test can differentiate between effective and ineffective preventions well - but sometimes, like in the case of terrorism, double-blind rigorous studies are impossible, and in other cases narrative bias gets in the way anyways), since if nothing happens, it is not clear whether the prevention was responsible or if nothing was going to happen anyways.

This might explain the popularity of curative methods over preventative: we like being able to judge effectiveness. Thus we labor for a pill to cure obesity and a cure for cancer, yet preventative methods are underutilized, placing a huge strain on healthcare.

We thus have two fallacies that work in opposite ways: whether you assume the existence of no silent evidence or the existence of silent evidence, you expose yourself to risk of faulty analysis. So what's to be done? Heres a suggestion in anecdotal form:

In 1973, Israeli intelligence was observing major movements from the Egyptian Army. The military intelligence bureau, Aman, was certain that this was just an exercise. The Egyptians had done the same thing the previous year, and there had been no war, just as Aman had predicted, and nothing seemed different. The actual result is of course famous: Egypt pushed into the Sinai and for a few days it seemed as if Israel was going to lose a decisive ground confrontation to its Arab neighbors until it was able to remobilize its armies and push the invading forces back. However, here is an alternative to Aman's decision making method that to me appears far more rational than its modus operandi of trying to read Arab intentions: prepare for everything. In the case that there is a significant (>1% in my view, but I'm not a military analyst) probability of war, mobilize enough forces to repulse any initial offensive. "But you're only recommending this with hindsight!" I hear you say. "You knew there would be an attack! This tells us nothing!" No. That is not my methodology. I recommend a preparation for any movement capable of producing an attack. I think Israel should have put its active forces on alert and prepared to mobilize the reserves even in '72 when the Arabs didn't invade. The point is that sure, you didn't know if your preventative measures stopped an actual attack or if you were using elephant repellant, so to speak. But in this way you know that you were secure against any possible attack. The enemy is inherently unpredictable; ANY factor depending on human beings with free will is inherently unpredictable. "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy". However, given the level of intelligence available to the IDF, the capabilities of the enemy were known, so, prepare for any attack up to the level they are capable of. In this way, enemy intent is removed from the analysis and it is impossible for them to catch you off guard.

I will illustrate my point with another example:

A teacher tells his students that there will be a pop quiz next week, intended to surprise them. The students then go through the following logic: if the teacher puts the quiz on Friday, they will obviously be expecting it since it's the only day left after Thursday passes with no quiz. Thus, the last day the teacher could put the quiz on is Thursday. But if the teacher puts it on Thursday, thanks to this same logic, they'll be expecting it then too. And so on, so that the teacher cannot surprise the students, despite the students not knowing when the quiz will be. And indeed the teacher cannot surprise smart students. Why? Well, lets see what this logic prescribes: if Thursday passes with no quiz, prepare for it for it will be on Friday. If Wednesday passes with no quiz, prepare for it, for the teacher will not ruin the surprise by putting it on Friday so it will come on Thursday, and so on. The general advice: be prepared for the quiz EVERY DAY. You cannot surprise someone who is prepared every day.

And indeed this is my recommendation for users of 'elephant repellant': figure out how capable elephants are of coming into your fields and trampling your crops, and get the repellant accordingly. Do not try to read the minds of any elephants capable of coming in: 'they might not want to' is not good preparation. If there is a credible threat, and the costs of unpreparedness are high enough, as was the case of Israel in '73, you must prepare for it. Otherwise, you expose yourself to a (negative) Black Swan that may be not quite as unlikely as you think it is.

Hi, I'm the New Guy. I'm the same as the Old Guy.

So, I realized that I should have an entirely different email account contributing to this blog, one that is very much NOT LINKED to me as a person, otherwise I could get into trouble. So I'm the new guy. I'm the same as the old guy.

Yeah. That's it. Boring post today, following a month-long hiatus. But cut me some slack, I got a problem set to finish up. Actually two, and for one of them, by 'finish up' I mean 'start and finish in a day'. Plus something about a paper for a class I thought was going to be literally no work.

Blech. I'll think up something interesting to say later. It's actually irritating not to have someone to debate, I'm just talking into thin air right now. I need another contributor, someone stupid who'll disagree with me and that I can tear apart.

The Fable of the Elephant Pack

It's not my style to listen to fables or stories with morals from the people who raised me in general. For example, most sayings are retarded - "slow and steady wins the race"? No it doesn't! I've always found that fast wins races more often than not, as unbelievable as that sounds. The real moral of that story ought to be "hubris and stupidity lose races - so don't fucking stop until you've crossed the finish line you fuck!" Hell, Usain Bolt proved even that moral untrue. However, there is a story with a moral that I always remember and follow the advice of. It's a true story from that idiot savant, my dad.

My father was in the Israeli Army in the late fifties all the way through the early sixties (he even got called up for reserve duty in '67). In the army, a very important drill was the "walk to the next town over carrying a backpack full of shit" drill, and there were two kinds of packs that were used. There was the light pack, and then there was the so-called "elephant pack". The drill sergeants, thick as they were, would often just say "take a pack and go to the next town". And always, there was one idiot or another who would ask the question: "which packs?" The answer was ALWAYS "the elephant packs". The moral of this story is simple and obvious: when presented with ambiguous instructions, shut your trap and pick the one that suits you better. If they tell you that you did the wrong way, you have the ambiguous instructions on your side. They just said "take a pack" - and by golly, I did!

Even stupider is asking when the instructions are unusual, but clear and in your favor. Just follow the instructions, don't ask if they're what your commanding officer/boss/professor really meant to ask. On this note, to the guy who just asked my professor if the homework was really due Thursday rather than tomorrow: you are an idiot (and you know who you are). It said Thursday, just turn the fucking homework in on Thursday! Now I have to pull an all-nighter, thanks to your goody-two-shoes questions. It's as if they said "take a light pack and head north" and you responded "are you SURE you didn't want us to take the elephant packs?", at which point they said "oh, you're right, drop the light packs and shoulder those fucking elephant packs!"

Just STFU and go with the easy, moron!

A Serious Man

Disclaimer: I do not think all the settlers are terrorists, although they all are in violation of international law and are a provocation for the Palestinian terrorists. But many of them are terrorists in their own right, the ones who harass the Palestinians, who build settlements in Arab towns and then introduce a zillion checkpoints, who feel they need a wall zigzagging its way across the West Bank, the religious ones who think that they really have the right to the land because an old book says so. They are terrorists, as much as any Hamas commander is. The only difference is, they have a state and army backing them very openly and directly and Hamas doesn't.

Continuing my last post about MidEast peace (a pipe dream if there ever was one) I'm going to give the Israelis a recipe on how to achieve it. They're never doing to do it, because the settlers are assholes, and they are an amazingly powerful political force in Israel. But I'll suggest anyway so later I can say "See? You shoulda listened to me!"

The key is this: Israel needs to show that it is SERIOUS about both destroying terrorist organizations and about peace. Right now, it's neither, which is the worst idea ever. I am an Israeli nationalist and an unapologetic supporter of democracy, but if the IAF decided to take over the country, it would be fine with me as long as they stop the retarded shit that is Israeli foreign policy right now.

Immediate Solution #1: Least likely to happen, most likely to succeed if it did happen:

Disenfranchisement: Any Israeli citizen must live in Eretz Israel (i.e. within the pre-1967 boundaries or within Jerusalem) in order to have the vote. Discourages settlement AND freezes the retard settlers out of the voting process instantaneously. Justification: settlers are violating international law. Result: Israeli government would by default right itself.

Solution #2:

Last post I described how Israel should get serious with terrorism (come on! if someone stole and then broke your TV, would you PAY them to get it back? well, that's exactly what exchanging prisoners for Israeli BODIES is! the only thing it'll do is create MORE Israeli bodies that you'll have to pay more for, dumbshits!), so consider this solution to already contain the "Soviet plan" for dealing with terrorism. The second part is a settlement construction freeze. Not the scared-ass freeze like now, where the Israeli terrorists (oops, I meant to say "settlers") can build and harass the Palestinian non-terrorist people all they want (face it, settler violence doesn't distinguish between the terrorists and the scared poor people the way the Army does). No, in this freeze, any attempt for new construction is met by the Army coming and blowing up the new building, and then confiscating all the heavy construction equipment and arresting a few terro- oops, my bad, "settlers" just to make a fucking point.

Then, (as long as I'm dreaming, I might as well make it my "best of all worlds" scenario) throw the Israeli "settlers" in jail with the Palestinian terrorists - the real terrorists, mind you, not the people who accidentally left a wrench in their car when they came to the checkpoint - and videotape it. I'd pay a lot of money to see those creeps beat the snot out each other in jail, I really would. It would also be nice if they threw the American evangelists in too, just for kicks, like Pat Robertson who thinks his perfect God of justice killed thousands in Port Au Prince because their ancestors made a pact with the devil (and not even an evil pact, from what I'd read Robertson thought that the devil was a pretty nice guy, offered to free the slaves from their French masters). It'd be just like they all wanted, them fighting each other, only this way they won't bother everyone else who just wants to be fucking left alone.

Actually, that's my real dream: a massive fistfight between Pat Robertson, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter on one side, with Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Nasrullah, Ayatollah Khameini, Mullah Omar, Ahmadinejad, and Omar Al-Bashir on the other, a good bloody fight to the death where no one really wins.

Oh, if only...

From Russia With Love

I've been thinking quite hard for some time now on the question of terrorism and how best to counter it, and now I am convinced that I have the answer, though many people won't like it.

Of course, the only counter in the long term is education and prosperity. If a region becomes rich enough, all of a sudden the people living in it become more interested in life and less interested in blowing themselves up or kidnapping foreigners, and if a region becomes educated enough the (almost always religious) ideologies that push people into such attacks become contested.

However, in order to build education and prosperity, terrorism and counter-progressive insurgencies must be temporarily paralyzed, which means that a short term counter is also needed in order to effectively combat it.

What short term policies work? In my view, it's quite simple: leniency begets further attacks. In the West and in other developed nations cherish our ideas of fundamental human rights and they work extremely well when dealing with 99+% of the world. But when facing terrorism, the only proper response (by a utilitarian value judgment, whereby quick resolution of the crisis, however costly, is preferable to dragging on the conflict indefinitely) is out-right brutality. They are not our friends, and they could be our friends if they so chose. But they chose to be our enemies, and to hurt our friends. In the name of those who wish to abide by the rules of civilization, we must eliminate them.

First thing: however much I admire the IDF, I must criticize them on one thing: their willingness to exchange live terrorists for the bodies of Israeli soldiers. Bodies? Who gives a fuck about bodies? They're DEAD, they're no happier here than they were over there, they can't help us. Let the assholes keep the bodies and we'll keep their asshole buddies locked up. I'll give you a fair trade: bodies for bodies. Israeli policy ought to be extremely hard-line on this issue: every ambush brings a reprisal killing. One dead soldier = 5 dead terrorists in prison. In exchange, Israel ought to also stop building its bullshit and highly destructive settlements throughout the West Bank and leave particularly nasty places such as Hebron. Hell, I'd be all for the IDF to just leave Hebron without warning, let the asshole settlers (who all but worship Baruch Goldstein, this guy who machine-gunned a mosque and killed anywhere from 25 to 50 Arabs and wounded 100 more) deal directly with the Arabs they've terrorized for years.

As for how the US should to respond to a terrorist attack? I'll let the following true story serve as a guide:

In the 1980's Lebanon was occupied by several foreign militaries and an ongoing series of hostages from various nations were being taken. Most countries dealt with the hostage crises the 'normal' way: they talked, cajoled, and offered to free prisoners of radical groups they'd taken in exchange. However, one very different case occurred in 1985...

In 1985 four Soviet diplomats were abducted and one was killed. The abductors demanded that the USSR put pressure on Syria to stop supporting a rival militant group. The Soviets, however, had other plans. They sent Alpha Group, a special forces team, to Lebanon. Using their excellent human intelligence (a la KGB) they identified the families of the kidnappers and took them hostage in return. Normally, a country would then begin negotiating for the hostages' release; not Russia. Russia wanted to make the point clear - one of theirs had been killed, hostile action had been taken against them, and the perpetrators would pay dearly for it. They cut off the fingers of one of the family members of the hostage-takers and mailed it to them - "Dear Hostage Takers, kindly return our people otherwise you'll get more of yours back like this, Sincerely, From Russia, With Love". The three remaining hostages were returned pronto, no Soviets were kidnapped ever again in the Middle East, and no Russians were either until 2004.

This is not something to be gloated over, I'll have to say, despite my urge to the contrary. We should use these tactics as sparingly as we can, since their harshness gives them a low utilitarian value a priori, meaning the results will have to be extra good to make up for it. However, looking at it coldbloodedly (and that's the only way to look at things with consequences as grave as this) who achieved the better result, the West or the Soviet Union? Even from humanitarian terms, the Soviets outdid the United States, since the weaker actions of the US made the terrorists feel fine about kidnapping more people and mistreating them for years. One person with missing fingers is a lot of pain, but not very much when compared with dozens of people held captive, tortured, and killed like the American response has resulted in.

Am I suggesting tearing into every terrorist's household? Maybe, but the main point I want to convey is "whatever works", which incidentally is my motto for life. And whatever the Russians did worked, and what the Israelis are doing isn't.