How the Catholic Church Ironically Screwed Itself

I can't claim that all of the ideas here are my own, but I will deliberately not name the source most influential to this writing.

In the Catholic Church, women aren't allowed to become priests, and men who do so must take a vow of celibacy.  Now ask yourself, what would the general profile be of a person who fits those stringent requirements?  What kind of male would be most willing to forgo the biological purpose of his existence to dedicate himself like that?

For a long time, homosexuals have been heavily persecuted and socially ostracized, most often by the religious whose holy books proclaimed them to be affronts to God.  Now if you were an individual (male) whose sexual orientation was grounds for ostracism or other forms of punishment including execution, how might you integrate yourself into society to live as happily as possible?  What if there were a socially acceptable profession that deliberately forbade consorting with women?

The end result of these social dynamics was that with tremendous irony, many who chose to enter the priesthood were those whom the Abrahamic religions abhorred.  The persecuted ended up persecuting themselves.  In one most recent example, Cardinal Keith O'Brien admitted to (homo)sexual misconduct despite being one of the most vitriolic opponents to same sex relationships (See link below).

As we all know, sexual urges are VERY hard to simply ignore; they need to find one outlet or another. And so, the Catholic Church has been mired in sexual scandals, from the infamous priest pedophilia to the rumored hiring of male prostitutes in the Vatican.  One current theory is that Benedict XVI didn't resign due to his health but rather due to some sort of blackmail from male prostitutes hired by Catholic Priests.  I make no attempt here to excuse pedophilia, I'm just speculating on one of it's causes.

The Vatican has botched the handling of its priest's transgressions, leading to a public relations debacle.  In terms of their views towards homosexuality and women they remain obstinately in the past, alienating more and more of the younger generations.  They thus ever recede in relevance from the public sphere.

And so, the Catholic Church is being destroyed by those whom they decided to persecute.  You'd think they would have learned something about that from their own past overcoming Roman persecution to eventually dominate a huge swath of the globe.




Link (courtesy of Reddit): http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/03/03/cardinal-keith-obrien-admits-inappropriate-sexual-conduct-following-allegations/

Biased News

There's always been a lot of shouting on both sides of the political spectrum about biased news reporting on both sides of the media.  These arguments are actually pretty different from how they present themselves.  If that made sense.

Look at the things around you right now.  Maybe you're in your room, maybe you're outside.  But look around.  Do it.  Right now.  Observe everything around you.  Now take a small part of your environment, and in your mind, try to turn it into a news headline.  American Idol Still a Bad Show, Seat Currently Uncomfortable Says Ass.

Done?

Whatever headline you made, hold it in your head.  Now look at everything else you didn't make into a headline.  You picked something out of that other stuff and made it news.  News-worthiness is not an objective attribute of something.  You made a personal value judgement about deciding what to make into news  Everything else around you was exactly as newsworthy, but you chose something.

All news is an inherent personal value judgement.  While it may seem obvious that a headline should say 18-Car Accident on Freeway, there is no objective reason why it couldn't also be (regarding the exact same thing) Teens, Bored in Traffic, Decide to Play 'I Spy'.  Newsworthiness is a choice.

Accusing someone of biased news reporting assumes the existence of unbiased news reporting. However, as I've discussed before, all news is a value judgement.  There is no such thing as unbiased news.  When people accuse others of reporting the news biased or unfairly, all they're really saying is 'your frame of reference is very different than mine, and I don't like it.'

The take-away point of this?  I have no idea.  I just thought it was something kinda interesting to think about.

Django Brings History Alive (To John Gillen, with love)

Django was a spectacular and well-told story, but it's brilliance extends beyond it's face-value.

Slavery existed in this country 150 years ago.  That's within my generation's great and great-great grandparent's lifetimes.  We as a country tend to have an inflated picture of ourselves, and since slavery is such a recent happening, it has been taboo in cinema.  Sure, there have been some works about slavery, but no one did a war movie until the gritty realism of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.  The same holds for slavery: there have been no hollywood blockbusters on the scale of Django Unchained that display slavery for what it truly is, unfiltered.

History textbooks do little to evoke the emotions of school kids.  We students of history read statistics all the time about mass casualties, but no one breaks down in tears seeing that.  We see old drawings of people wearing klan outfits, but that does not come close to evoking the fear and awe I felt watching the scene in which the klan crested a hill, wearing the masks out of the Strangers (http://www.impawards.com/2008/posters/strangers_ver4.jpg), on horseback waving flaming torches.  I felt the same fear I felt when I watched the strangers, both because of their similar masks but also because of both villains had the same malevolent intent.  That one brief scene brought the klan alive for me.  For the first time, I felt something of what it means to fear them.

Sure, we read about slavery in our textbooks, but nobody feels the revulsion or the disgust like they do when they actually see the people get whipped or see them hunted and torn apart by dogs.  Nobody feels the hatred and contempt of slave-owners until they see how they treated their fellow man.

Now, why is this important?  It is important because we as a nation have to face our demons.  A people that ignores portions of their past learn nothing from it, and are doomed to be poorly prepared for the future.  A similar story is of the Japanese, who to this day ignore the vast suffering they created in the WWI and WWII era's when they systematically raped and pillaged virtually all of east Asia.  This is why till the day he died my grandfather held a grudge against the japanese.  Ask anyone of korean, chinese, or vietnamese descent, and I'll bet you they have at least one family member who still hates the Japanese.

Django takes our past as it was and shoves it in your face.  You can't ignore what slavery and the south actually were having seen this movie, it's wound up too closely to the plot.  This is important because it shows all those southern pride, confederate flag-waving motherfuckers what they're proud of.  Being proud of who you are as a person and where you come from is fine, everyone has a hometown, but is a problem when these people glorify a history full of brutality and oppression.  It is a problem when they yell about the 'south rising again', it is a problem when they're still racist.  Know who you're channeling.

We have racial problems in this country, and who knows if they'll ever be completely solved.  But we cannot face them as a prepared people if we are too embarrassed about our history to learn from it.  And if you can still be immersed in our history of slavery as Django Unchained does and you can still yell about your southern pride, then from the bottom of my heart GO FUCK YOURSELF

Also, Tarantino's directing was on point, but his acting could use some work.

EDIT: by the way, it's 'to john gillen with love' because he suggested I write something about movies.  Well, here you go.

Prayer and Altruism

Every time there’s some sort of tragedy, I see a jillion facebook statuses and tweets offering their thoughts and prayers to the victims of whatever happened.  For this article I’m going to altogether ignore how ridiculous the concept of prayer is, as that could almost be an article all on it’s own (so if you think about it long and hard enough, god’s going to change his master plan just for you? yeah, okay lol).

Prayer is purported to be an altruistic act.  It supposedly helps the bereaved in some way simply from the goodwill of the person praying.  The problem with all of this is that any altruistic act announced to the public is not altruism at all.  

Altruistic acts are those that are done simply for the benefit of the recipient, and for no other reason.  People who announce their beneficent acts to everyone are not motivated by their desire to help someone, they are motivated by the rise in social status they get when someone clicks that facebook ‘like’ button.  They are not motivated by altruism and compassion, they are motivated by narcissism and their own greed.

This concept of praying in public being narcissistic is in the bible itself:

-”Be careful to not do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them.  If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” Matthew 6:1

-”So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets. as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.” Matthew 6:2

There’s a lot in Matthew about not praying in public, and yet I see so much of it on social media sites.  A little while ago after the Newtown shooting I posted a passage from Matthew as a status on facebook to remind people what the bible actually says.  It’s a really sad day when I, an atheist, have to quote the bible to tell people what their holy book actually says.  I think that’s pretty revealing in of itself.

So if you want to be truly altruistic in your actions and prayer, dont be public about it.  Don’t go posting photos of you volunteering at a soup kitchen.  It’s great that you did it, but doing it for the wrong reasons removes the veneer of nobility from your actions to reveal the true core of vanity and narcissism.

Sociology and Psychology on Wall Street

Any market is an inherently social institution.  A market by definition exists when two people trade something.  As such, one cannot fully understand an institution like Wall Street without understanding the sociological and psychological foundations underlying it.

The ways in which financial analysts price assets like bonds are subject to social trends.  They are now priced by the state-pricing model.  Before that it was the capital-asset pricing model.  Before that it was, i dunno, maybe a guy reading pig entrails or something.  The point is that there is no reliable objective way to predict the future market value of an asset.  "Experts" instead rely upon whatever theoretical foundation is currently the flavor of the week churned out by academia.  Once you view financial market participants as a human society, a more accurate picture of how the market works emerges.

In the short run, market prices are explicitly what the society values an asset at.  In the short run this has nothing to do with any fundamental value behind an asset, but rather what the society collectively values it at.  All of those graphs tracking an asset's price over time are literally graphs tracking the equilibrium price at which the society values that security.  As such, all of these prices are subject to human societal and cognitive biases.  Socially, things like crowd psychology run rampant.  Consider the recent string of IPO's by social tech companies.  Ignoring the fact that the companies had little to no actual revenue streams, the trading society's conscience collective was ignited by the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the promise of riches from those companies.  And how have they fared since their IPOs?  At the time of this writing, Facebook (FB) has dropped from $45 to $21, Groupon (GRPN) dropped from $31 to $4, and Zynga (ZNGA) dropped from $10 to $2.  I think LinkedIn (LNKD) is a bubble waiting to pop with a price to earnings ratio of over 900! This societal stampede towards easy riches can be seen in any market bubble.

Wall Street itself is set up in a manner that encourages a herd-like mentality of traders.  People like professional analysts, Warren Buffet, Jim Cramer, etc. are all presumed to have knowledge that the layperson does not.  As a result, the vast majority of market participants herd towards any stock they recommend, while they stampede away from any they don't.  Similarly, beginning level traders are often expected to conform to the views and beliefs of their superiors.  How else would they hope for promotion?

It's also interesting to see how the social market bubble also applies to other areas of finance like Venture Capital.  I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, so I've done a lot of internet research on business opportunities.  Every "Hot Start-Up" list for the past 5 years lists App company after App company, Social this and Social that.  Venture Capitalists giving these entrepreneurs their funding are just as subject to societal movements as Wall Street Traders are.  Which one of them wouldn't want to be the next Peter Thiel (an early investor in Facebook)?

Psychological effects are also important to note.  Since they are in every human, they are bound to effect social markets on a large scale.  There is a whole industry dedicated to predicting future stock prices based on past performance called technical analysis which relies heavily on analyzing stock charts.  They talk a lot about moving averages and support levels.  I think those are great examples of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic.  Other things, like our tendency towards risk aversion, and hindsight bias also play important roles in how people trade.

Another interesting aspect of all of this is how regardless of irrationality, how we socially define reality essentially is reality on Wall Street.  For example, it ultimately doesn't matter that technical analysis is ultimately a pseudoscience quackery.  If enough people believed in it, the markets would behave exactly as the chartists predict because in this case the chartists are the market.  I don't remember who said it or the exact phrasing, but a phrase I like goes something like this.  Irregardless of reality, a thing is real if it is real in it's effects.  God doesn't exist, but he has still influenced a couple thousand years of human history.

Now the question is, how do we make money from this?  There are 4 ways to make money on Wall Street.  1- Cheat.  Make a Ponzi Scheme, trade on insider knowledge, etc.  2- Get REALLY REALLY lucky (unlikely).  3- Invest in a passively managed index fund.  This is a great strategy advocated by those of the efficient market hypothesis which you can read up on your own if you want to.  It is, however, kind of boring.  4- Value investing.  Buying stocks that have a high book to market ratio.  This is usually pretty hard to stomach however, as it means betting against the prevailing wisdom/social forces on Wall Street.  This is what Warren Buffet advocates.

Oh I almost forgot a fifth way.  Make money selling your own bullshit advice (*cough* Motley Fool *cough* Jim Cramer *cough*).  On that note, you should really look into buying some Tesla Motors Stock.

(Disclaimer: I am long Tesla. But you should really, really buy some too.)

The American Dream as Social Control

"Hope is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness." - The Architect, The Matrix Reloaded

The American Dream- the belief that enough hard work will earn you a place in the upper echelons of society- is rooted in the Enlightenment ideals of the 1800's.  Our society was one birthed in the denial of a formal class system, and it was this idea that spawned another, that surely with enough work, anyone could ascend to any height of economic or social prosperity.  I have no idea if the Founding Fathers intended for this to happen, but this newly created American Dream became a method of exerting social control over the disadvantaged classes while simultaneously building America into an economic powerhouse.

It is the American dream that drives the huge influxes of immigrants from their homelands into the US.  Immigrants like Albert Einstein and Andrew Carnegie who aded value to our society and built it into something great.  It is the American dream that busses the lower classes to menial daily jobs, where they trade their lives for a daily wage in hopes of a better future.  It is the industry of the lower classes, fueled by the American dream, that elevated the US to economic heights previously undreamt of.  The problem with this whole thing, is how unfair it is in it's effects.

I'll start with an example.  I've had several days when my stock portfolio has jumped a healthy percentage, netting me (lets say for example purposes) $1k.  Thats a third of the money I made last summer working three jobs I made in one afternoon.  A glaring problem with the American dream is that hard work does not translate into wealth.  That work has to be focused in a certain way.  It is only the hard work of the capitalist, the entrepreneur that may result in wealth, not the sweat of the day-laborer.  This may seem obvious to you or I, but rest assured the vast majority of people out there don't understand this key point.

The few society members that understand this point rise to the upper echelons of society and pass down their wealth from generation to generation.  Those that don't remain in their destitution and squalor.

The effect of the American Dream on our society is to pacify the lower classes.  Have you no money?  Then surely you have not worked hard enough, for America rewards the hard workers.  In fact, you are a lazy parasite on our society if your hard work has not made you rich, and you need assistance from the government to survive.

Because of the American dream, the lower classes can only think to blame themselves for their poor living conditions, not the upper classes that constantly use their institutional advantages to maintain their power over the plebeians.  And so, they are pacified.  They plot no revolutions or coups- they turn to religion in hopes of claiming their justly deserved but nonexistent rewards in the afterlife.  If I haven't previously covered how religion is a system of social pacification, I may do so in the future.  For now, suffice to say that it functions in a manner very similar to that of the American Dream.

Announcement

For the month of April, if not longer, i'll be deactivating my Facebook account. For any of you still interested in getting updates from this blog, you'll either have to check the page periodically of your own accord, or check my twitter page which I will only be using for blog updates (@NOTdavidu). I'd have deactivated my twitter too, but then any blog updates would have been totally devoid of an audience.

P.S. this is not an april fool's joke.

P.P.S. Really? 2 votes in the poll? jerks.