The Blog That Goes Ping

From the Boston Globe:

January 3, 2007

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. –In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson said Tuesday God has told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in “mass killing” late in 2007.

“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network. “The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

Meanwhile, back in Deuteronomy….

18:20 But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.

18:21 And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken?

18:22 When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

Psychopaths in the Software Industry

The aforementioned Zed’s Rant inspired thoughts on evil in business — ponerization, the process by which an organization falls into the control of psychopathic individuals (a topic that’s been written about at some length — good links in the article).

This is pretty interesting and important stuff.  The big problem though with studying and publicizing the phenomenon of the small minority of people who seem downright evil, is that labeling certain people as evil and pointing to them as the cause of problems is a favorite tactic of the pschopaths themselves.  It’s tough to start playing that game and hope to win when it’s their home court.

I just took the Kiersey Temperament Sorter test and discovered that I seem to have flipped very decidedly from one quadrant to another — NT to NF. I’m wondering if that’s supposed to happen?

I was thinking it might just reflect a shift in values that’s taken place in the past few years, but maybe a shift in values is part of a shift in temperament.

Of course, I’ve spent my whole adult life moving myself into the perfect job for an INTP — computer programmer. I don’t know what INFPs are supposed to do. Kiersey calls them “Healers.” He says Albert Schweitzer, George Orwell, and Lady Diana are amongst them.

My general impression is that the ideal INFP career path would be healing injured baby animals.

I was looking something up and was on the wikipedia page for the Virginia Tech shooter dude, Cho. At the time (now long since lost in hundreds of edits) there was a note on an apparent “contradiction” — some of his teachers said he was a troubled kid who needed help and they were worried about him, and at least one other just hated him, said he was just plain mean, not troubled.

I thought, “that’s not a contradiction, is it? Becoming mean yourself is one common way of reacting to being tormented. Hating yourself and hating others, loathing yourself and loathing others, they’re two sides of the same coin. I know I’m ‘meanest’ when I’m feeling wretched myself, and vice versa.”

That led me to think about how I’ve been lately. On and off I’ve been hit by some really wicked depressed moods in the last couple weeks. It’ll be there one day and gone the next and there twice as bad the next day. I’ve been able to control it with cognitive therapy work, and that’s helped, but…

I’ve been pretty angry at people lately. Mostly people I will never meet, like Bush and his gang. (I haven’t been angry at the Cho dude, not because he hasn’t earned it or anything, but because it just sounds from the story like he was way out there in some very strange bad place of his own already, you know? I mean, what’s the point of getting angry at someone that horribly, horribly messed up? It’s like being angry at a shark.)

I’ve been angry at people on Reddit whose posts I’m disgusted with. I’ve been angry at someone on a BBS for saying he thinks Africa is a lost cause and we’d be better off nuking the continent and starting over. I’ve been angry at Fox News, I’ve been angry at a technical pundit I usually like for writing a particularly spiteful column, I’ve just been overall filled with outrage, disgust, and loathing. At people who richly deserve it of course!

But I realize now that this isn’t a coincidence. The depression and the righteous anger and outrage, they’re two faces of the same beast.

It’s the tyranny of evaluation. It’s a trap. By identifying bad guys and railing against them, I’m playing the “bad guy game.” Fighting fire with fire doesn’t actually work. It makes a bigger fire.

All the people that I admire most, who got the most done to make the world a better place, like Gandhi and MLKJr, did so by transcending the need to judge people as bad. They did their work of making the world a better place by means other than identifying the bad guy and fuming about how bad they were. They were able to say “I do not accept this. This is not right” without saying, to anyone, “I do not accept you. You are bad.”

So clearly abandoning the “bad guy game” is not abandoning a commitment to making the world a better place. It is probably the only effective way to really make the world a better place.

Changing the world aside, I think I’d be a lot better off cutting the world, and myself, a little more slack than I have been lately.

Let’s see how that works out.

I tested the OCR capabilities of the new HP scanner I got on clearance at Staples by scanning a favorite part of the book On Becoming An Artist by Ellen Langer:

Our world has been fashioned largely by people. People create the products we use, make the laws we follow, write the books we study in high school. Despite all of our efforts to perfect ourselves, the truth is that people have limited knowledge, mixed motivations, biases, and any number of other limitations. Many of us know this conceptually, even if we don’t think very often about how it affects our approach to the world. And so we experience our world, more often than not, as if it exists independent of human involvement. We take the things we use, the rules we follow, and the information we rely on as if they are true in some absolute sense, regardless of context or perspective. We have become oblivious to the part others play and have played in deciding much of what we take for granted. This is unfortunate, for by doing so, we give up new choices and lose the opportunity to take more control of our lives.

By creating an external world, then treating it as if it is independent of ourselves, we rob ourselves of our individuality and the opportunity to meet our needs. We can regain control, but only when we put people and context back into the equation. Compare a sign that warns you to “keep off the grass” with one that reads, “Ellen says keep off the grass.” The first demands obedience withour hesitation, whereas the second invites us to ask, “Who is Ellen and why does she want me to keep off the grass? Who does she think she is?” Too often, we follow rules as if they have an inherent logic that is reasonable across all contexts. We are taught to think inside the box. Then we are taught to think outside the box. What I want us to ask is, Who put the box there?

As far as I’m concerned, that summarizes about 90% of what is important in what is called “Postmodernism,” and it does it without anything written opaquely in French. Ellen Langer is a writer who writes in a seemingly unsophisticated style and ends up saying extremely important, deep things, which you’re liable to miss if you’re not careful. Highly recommended.

Oh, the scanner recognized everything perfectly except that it mistook a lowercase ‘L’ next to a period for an uppercase ‘L’. Nice.