Petter Häggholm’s blog

It is curious how the debate after every Islamist deed of terror, such as the Charlie Hebdo shootings, always results in a flood of Most Muslims aren’t like that!—in a knee-jerk response that reminds me of nothing so much as #NotAllMen. This may strike you as (needlessly) offensive, but before I bring up my caveats, please consider the parallels. (But before you respond angrily, at least do read through to the end.)

1. It is true that most men aren’t rapists. By analogy, and in fact, it is true that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists.

2. It’s true that lots of men are vehemently against sexual assault and harrassment, just as it is true that lots of Muslims are vehemently fighting terrorism.

3. The truth of the Not All Men reply, however, is secondary to its unhelpful deflectionism—yes it’s true, but the point is that although not all men—indeed, not even a majority of men—are like that, still a minority large enough to matter are, and the fact that it’s a minority does not mean that it isn’t an issue with men—much like, say, breast cancer is an issue for women (even though most women don’t get it and some few men do).

   Or maybe…much as how, although lots of terrorism is committed by non-Muslims, and the majority of Muslims are not involved in or sympathetic to terrorism, still it looks as though the issue is disproportionate, and mere deflection won’t do.

4. Finally, many people writing today are complaining how unfair it is that Muslims are expected to stand up and proclaim that they’re opposed to extremism and terrorism. But then, strictly speaking it’s hardly fair that I have to speak up against rapists. Yet, I’m told, my silence may be mistaken for tacit approval (and worse yet, daring to treat it with levity—by telling or laughing at rape jokes, for instance—might make the true villains mistake me for a sympathiser). —I said I’m told—but, too, I agree, and extrapolate.

How dare I (you might ask) make this so general, as though Islam worldwide bore responsibility for what a bunch of lunatics in Paris did? You might have a point, were that and similar local incidents all there were to it, or if the appearance of sympathy were a rarity. But we know that’s not really true. The best example I can think of are the riots after the satiric cartoons in the Danish magazine, Jyllands-Posten. In outrage at some Danes’ audacity in portraying their religion (or their pedophile prophet) in an insulting manner, riots were nigh worldwide. It seems that people died in consequence in Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Turkey, Pakistan, Libya, Nigeria, Iraq, and Egypt. Let’s not pretend that there is no connection.

And there is always a predictable outcry that, although some Islamists may act like this, that has no bearing on Islam, or Muslims. #NotAllMuslims! To this I can only say, poppycock! As Jason Rosenhouse said,

I heard someone on television today lament the fact that when a Muslim does something bad, somehow all Muslims are expected to condemn it. This misses the point. The issue isn’t what anyone is expected to do. It’s what moderate Muslims had better do, loudly and unambiguously and with no “buts” at the end, because right now the crazies are the public face of Islam. No one is concluding that something is wrong with modern Islam because two Muslims did a bad thing. The conclusion is based on the chaos and despotism and illiberal attitudes that seem especially rife in the Muslim world.

More broadly, there is this constant insistence that when somebody does something, and says it is because of their religious faith and beliefs, much of the world credits it only conditionally: If what they did was good, then we’ll believe them. But if they did something bad, they must be mistaken or lying: It must be extremism, maybe a cult, or maybe it’s a response to imperialism, colonialism, racism… All of those are real, important, awful factors, but let’s avoid the No True Theist Fallacy.

But…

With that all said, there are some extra factors to keep in mind. I loathe the term “Islamophobia”, as though a hatred of that vile religion were a bad thing. (Do you think it is pristine and blameless? Go forth and read up. The scripture itself is bad enough, quite apart from all the other stuff.) There is a strong implication, which I reject and resent, that being vehemently critical of Islam implies a hatred of Muslims, and further, that it results in—or perhaps based on—racism, in particular against Arabs (presumably, then, combined with ignorance of the fact that there are many white Muslims, although they’re a minority, and that most Muslims aren’t Arabs, and that the single largest Muslim population is found not in the Middle East, but in Indonesia).

On the other hand, there are factors of racism and irrational hatreds far beyond rational loathing of Islam. I’m not very familiar with Charlie Hebdo, but they certainly held a lofty moral high ground compared to their Islamic murderers—but now, a few French compatriots of the victims are working hard to give up that moral high ground by shooting and throwing grenades at mosques (and blowing up some poor restaurateur’s kebab shop). In the US, after the 9/11 terror attacks, I gather the FBI reported a 1,700% increase in hate crimes against Muslims. (And, to be sure, people whom racists mistook for Muslims. I may dislike the conflation of Islamophobia with racism, but if you assault people on the basis that they have brown skin and wear turbans, you’re a racist.)

There, then, is a very important difference between #NotAllMen and #NotAllMuslims: Men deflect in order to avoid self-examination, feelings of recrimination, or criticism. Muslims and their defenders deflect because, well, I agree with most of Rosenhouse’s article cited above, but there is one point where I’m afraid he is too optimistic:

Now, this is the point where the self-righteous types will accuse you of Islamophobia. They will lecture you about blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few.

But no one is doing that, and they know it. Almost no one thinks that all, or most, or even a majority of Muslims have any sympathy for yesterday’s attacks. The problem, though, is that the attitudes underlying the attack are not those of a small, fringe minority. It is willful blindness to pretend otherwise.

I agree with the assertion that it is not a small, fringe minority, but unfortunately, I fear it is not true that Almost no one thinks that…even a majority of Muslims have any sympathy for terrorist attacks. Deplorably—indeed, almost as deplorably as the murderous attacks themselves—it seems there are always people ready to take their vicarious vengeance on the nearest Muslim (or Muslim look-alike).

Here, #NotAllMen would only be comparable if the nighttime streets of our cities were haunted by roving gangs of actually-militant feminists, waylaying and beating men, and occasionally firebombing places that men like to frequent.

And, more, that attitude is probably very pernicious in subtler ways in its milder forms. I think that many Muslim-majority countries are—I’ll say it openly—barbaric. If the law sentences someone to being flogged for blogging critically of Islam, then the legal system and society that permits it are both horrid. But that doesn’t mean I’m ipso facto sympathetic to indiscriminate bombing, or drone strikes killing civilians at numbers I don’t care to guess at. But unfortunately, a sufficiently uncritical acceptance of the vilification of precisely the places and societies I am trying to vilify in a more nuanced manner, lays the groundwork for popular acceptance of—or at the very least, lack of resistance to—military campaigns that do just that. I reject the concept of Islamophobia, but I accept the sad truth that people in the Middle East (who may or may not be Muslims—I suppose most of them are; I don’t suppose it morally matters) die, every day, because people are uniquely unbothered by the idea of bombing Muslim-majority areas.

Under Bush, it was getting awfully tempting to think of this as Christian (or should that be Christianist?) terrorism on a large (and well-funded) scale.

#NotAllMuslims support terrorism. Most of them don’t. Yet it is disproportionately an Islamic problem, and toxic Islam should be excused no more than toxic masculinity. Let’s acknowledge this; let’s avoid euphemism and cowardly deflection and circumvention. At the same time, though, we should not loose sight of, nor fail to emphasise, that the goal here is to speak up—loudly, freely, offensively—and deplore violence, not return it.

Just got back from a helicopter flight to, over, and landing in the Grand Canyon. I have a bad track record with outings, but this was sublime (though I'm not sure if anyone could tell, as it was sublime in a manner that had me wrapped in my own headspace).

The Grand Canyon itself is, well, famously grand, but focusing so much on it does a great disservice to the surrounding landscape, which defies description. I was about to construct an analogy involving craftsmen and chisels, but to compare it to human art would be to do the country a disservice and to demean it: It was not carved, but magnificently eroded.

I would not have thought that a landscape so arid would be so shaped by waters, but the entire landscape was full of dry water-courses, canyons, and arroyos; there was little water to be seen, but its trace was everywhere. (Maybe this is because it is so arid, and the soil therefore contains much less organic matter to soak and bind up the water, so that when it does rain, it flows unimpeded?) It was interspersed with cliffs and hills and small mountains -- but never a rolling landscape. Rather, craggy ridges and scarps thrust into the air, seeming to defy geology. One hulking ridge was all rusty-red down one side (from, yes, rust), whereas the other crumbled away in a dark umber, nearly black. In places, ridges jutted up at forty-five degree angles, yet were banded with what for all the world looked like the bands of sedimentary layers. Were they sediments, and were those ridges thrust up tectonically? If not, what other process was responsible? In one place a stepped ridge was in at least four different colours, each step running along the ridge distinct -- the first white, the next yellow, then rust, and finally that dark umber.

Nor was it a dead landscape. Arid, yes, and probably that is why it is so geologically dramatic, because it is thus free of not one but two great sources of erosion, rainfall and organic factors; yet though the great part of the ground was bare and dry, still you'd never have been more than a few steps from a cactus, or spiny bush, or other plant (tough, dry, spiny, thick-leaved) that I cannot even categorise. I saw no animal life save flies, a crow, and a few sea-birds on Lake Meade (which barely counts), but there was a ubiquitous buzz of insects. Somehow this appealed to me even more in some ways than a forest (though I do love to walk in a forest), perhaps because it seemed comprehensible. I don't know the few dozen important plant species, nor yet the insects and many lizards and so on, but in this arid and therefore sparser, slower-moving ecosystem, it had an air, it looked as though one might with study figure it out -- not like even a temperate forest, where I wouldn't even care to guess the order of magnitude of the number of important species. This isn't to say that I dislike a forest just because its ecosystem is too far beyond my grasp, but rather that the lure of attainable comprehension was another attraction of the desert.

When I think about the awful shit happening around the world right now—whether on the murderous level of ISIS (which I shall speak no more of qua too fucking depressing) or the sordid pettiness of the coproliths from 4chan behind #GamerGate, I often find myself in a state not so much of moral outrage as weary bafflement, unable to comprehend the kind of mentality behind it. I don’t think of myself as notably nice, and on occasion I can out of sheer irritability be petty and unpleasant (above baseline levels). Yet the thought of launching a campaign of black hat hacking, libel, and fraud to ruin someone’s career, livelihood, and life, merely because their opinions offend me, feels…unthinkable, quite literally: I can verbalise it, but I don’t know that I can actually think it per se. Thomas Nagel wondered what it is like to be a bat: to see the world through senses and perceptions completely different from those of humans. I do, too, but (albeit with less interest and more distaste) I also wonder what it is like to be that kind of active misogynist.

I read once, a long time ago, the claim that in order to truly understand something, you must believe it—that is, at least briefly entertain the notion, even though you will discard it in the next moment.¹ I do not know whether this is true, but it always seemed to me that it has a ring of truth to it.² I can verbally describe how bats perceive textures with sound modulation and motion via Doppler effects and shifting frequencies, how a particularly base and virulent form of religious extremism perverts people to cutting other people’s heads off, or how criticism of their preferred monoculture appears to stir some basement-dwellers into fomenting anger, but I have no sense at all of the qualia involved.

Sometimes I find myself wondering to what degree this is emotional self defence. Perhaps (part of?) the reason I don’t understand is that I don’t permit myself to understand—that I hesitate to gaze into and have that abyss stare back at me. Of course I don’t want to experience the qualia of being these people: after all, I find them vile and do not ever want to be like them. Perhaps that implies (in the logical sense) that I do not permit myself to understand them. It’s certainly pleasing to be able to honestly say that I cannot fathom what manner of mind would stoop to these levels.

That might not be an unalloyed good, though, because it sounds an awful lot like a defensive flavour of othering, of rejecting these people utterly and as morally subhuman³ to avoid having to suffer the quale of comparing myself to them and finding any moral similarities, however tenuous. Perhaps at the personal level, that’s OK, but on a larger scale, it leads to retributive justice systems where the focus is on ensuring that They—Those People who commit iniquities—suffer their Just Desserts: putting a priority on making rule-breakers suffer rather than minimising harm. Consider the difference between the dystopian prison system of the US with, say, Norway.⁴ My gut tells me that if I somehow found myself in the same basement with one of Zoe Quinn’s or Anita Sarkeesian’s erstwhile tormentors, the most satisfying course of action would be to hamper their typing, tweeting, and hacking abilities by breaking both of his⁵ elbows. Yet reason and data both tell me that the only way to solve these problems in the longer term is to despise the attitudes and behaviours, yet empathise and build bridges with the perpetrators.⁶

I can’t do that. I couldn’t, even if the opportunity improbably arose—perhaps because I lack the interpersonal skills, perhaps because I lack the moral courage to attempt to understand these people well enough to talk to them, or perhaps because I’m just too judgemental and unforgiving. If, for example, your moral hackles were raised by my suggesting just now that we should on some level attempt to sympathise with the slime currently harrassing Quinn, Sarkeesian, et al, I want to point out that I’ve already described them in such terms as “sordid pettiness”, “coprolite”, “misogynist”, “vile”, and earlier in this sentence, “slime”. In my defense (on the rational side), I let this be my lodestone for personal views, not for voting in political elections—I wouldn’t want to base policy on classifying those people as slime (that and a bit of racism is how you end up with the world’s largest prison population).

Ultimately, though, we all need to remember: The #GamerGate harrassers aren’t sordid, petty, vile, misogynist, slimy coprolites. Like us, they are human beings—they just happen to be particilarly petty, misogynistic people with petty, sordid, coprolitic, and vile opinions, words, and deeds.

¹ If anyone knows the source of this idea, I should be grateful to hear it.

² Put it this way: At the very least, I feel confident that I understand the proposition.

³ I do not regard anyone as inferior on the basis of ethnicity, biological sex, gender identity, &c., but I do judge opinions harshly.

⁴ Not that I’m an expert on the Norwegian justice system, and I’m sure it has many glaring flaws, but surely the focus on rehabilitation and minimising recidivism is more useful to society than basically torturing criminals and teaching them them to hate.

⁵ Inevitably, alas.

⁶ See this Cracked list, item #3. I find it oddly touching.

Mail encryption

If privacy of your email matters to you, you may want to consider using end-to-end encryption. This is different from using a “secure” email provider: With end-to-end encryption, the sender of the email encrypts it before sending, and the receiver decrypts it after receiving it. It's not decrypted during transit—thus, even your email provider cannot read your email.

Without going into mathematics whose details I’d have to review anyway, suffice to say that PGP is a strong system of email security that, with sensible (default!) settings, cannot be effectively broken with modern technology and modern mathematics.¹ (Strong enough, in fact, that various US security agencies tried to suppress it, and when its creator released it for free to the world, he was taken to court and accused of exporting munitions. The case never really went anywhere.)

PGP uses something called asymmetric encryption. Technical details aside, the nifty and amazing thing about it is it’s what’s known as a public key cryptosystem, meaning that I can give you a bit of password (public) key that you can use to encrypt messages for me, but no one², not even you, can decrypt them…except for me, as I retain a special (private) key with the unique power to decrypt. My public key is here, should you wish to send me secure email.

My preferred solution is a plugin called Enigmail for my mail client of choice, Thunderbird.

PGP with Enigmail in Windows

• Install Thunderbird.
• Download GpG4Win, an OpenPGP encryption system in its Windows version.
• Install Enigmail (the easiest way is, in Thunderbird, go to Tools→Add-ons and search for Enigmail).

There are some other solutions, none of which I have used.

PGP for webmail (like GMail) in Chrome

There's a browser plugin, currently for Chrome only though Firefox is in the works, called Mailvelope that will transparently encrypt/decrypt your webmail. There's a helpful guide. For now, there’s another plugin for Firefox, but it has received mixed reviews.

Linux

If you’re using Linux, this shouldn’t be a problem in the first place. Install your mail client of choice and it surely comes with or has an OpenPGP plugin readily available.

Other

Apparently there's an Outlook plugin. There’s a plugin for OS X Mail.app.

Passwords

As a reminder, keep in mind that your security is never stronger than your password; and your password is never safer than the least secure place it is stored. If your password is weak (password, your name, your date of birth…) there’s no helping you. If your password is pretty strong (|%G7j>uT^|:_Z5-F), then that’s no help at all if you used it on LinkedIn when they were hacked and their password database stolen, so that any malicious hacker can just download a database of email addresses paired with their passwords.

The solution is to use strong passwords, and to only use each password in one place—if you steal my LinkedIn password you can hack my LinkedIn account, but you can’t use that password to access my bank, email, blog, or any other account. The drawback of strong, single-use passwords is that you’ll never, ever remember them. The counter is to use software to remember them for you.

My preferred solution is a family of software called KeePass for Windows, KeePassX for Linux, KeePassDroid for Android (my smartphone), and so on. This has the primary feature of storing all my passwords in a very strongly encrypted file. I store this file in Dropbox, which lets me share it between my devices (work computer, home computer, laptop, phone). I don’t consider Dropbox fully trustworthy, but that’s OK: if anyone breaks into my Dropbox account, all they’ll get is a very strongly encrypted archive that requires either major breakthroughs or billions of years to break into (or a side-channel attack like reading over my shoulder, literally or electronically; but if they can do that my passwords don’t matter anyway). Thanks to this, I can use very strong passwords (like -?YhS\[q@V4#]F'/L|#*1z)_S".35/#T), uniquely per website or other service. Meanwhile, I only have to remember one password: the password for KeePass itself (which I shouldn’t use for anything else).

The KeePass family of software also tend to come with good password generators, which can generate garbled gobbledygook like the above, and/or include constraints if a given website won’t let you use special characters (e.g. you can tell it to generate a random password 10 characters long with letters and digits but nothing else, which includes at least one letter and one digit). You can also use it to store files, which is a nice way to keep track of things like PGP keys.

Some theologians and apologists (notably, I gather, the fairly famous Alvin Plantinga) hold forth a curious epistemic argument purportedly in favour of their theism. The argument in one form (not due to Plantinga) goes like this: Evolution optimises organisms for survival and gene dispersal, not correct beliefs, which would be favoured only if they enhance the above.

That is, because there’s no telling whether unguided evolution would fashion our cognitive faculties to produce mostly true beliefs, atheists who believe the standard evolutionary story must reserve judgment about whether any of their beliefs produced by these faculties are true. This includes the belief in the evolutionary story. Believing in unguided evolution comes built in with its very own reason not to believe it.

Now, the most obvious problem with this argument is of course that evolutionary theory does give us a reason to suppose that we can arrive at true beliefs, because it is difficult to conceive of any process whereby a tendency toward mostly false beliefs would be beneficial for survival or gene dispersal. I'm sure some scenarios can be dreamed up where fortuitous misconceptions would cause an animal to behave in a manner just as good, or even better, as correctness, and certainly we know of (and science corrects for) some tendencies toward, for instance, false positive errors and other biases, but here we must imagine something both subtler and more pervasive, and in particular a mechanism that accepts sensible input from the exterior world and systematically transforms this input into beliefs that are erroneous and yet more advantageous than the simpler mechanism of apprehending reality…

Still, I don't think that's the argument's worst problem. After all, the assumption of some divine entity provides no more guarantee that your senses are accurate than a naturalistic view! On the contrary: Although it's not a logical proof, I think I have outlined a good reason to think that evolution is in fact likely to produce brains capable of apprehending reality, not perfectly but with at least some fidelity. Assume the existence of an all-powerful being, on the other hand, and that all goes out the window. What grounds have you to suppose, if such a being exists, that the beliefs it chooses to have your brain produce are correct? It is completely arbitrary! The apologist might conceivably argue that his God is a God of truth and so forth, but those are just more of the same arbitrary beliefs. On the assumption that an all-powerful being exists, which can manipulate your senses and beliefs as it sees fit, your are at the utter mercy of its intentions; and its intentions are unknowable, because it can make you believe whatever falsehood it wants, and every “evidence” you might have that your vision of this god is the right one is equally susceptible to (infallible) falsification.

Ultimately, both atheists and theists must assume some fidelity of their senses a priori, whether they wish to admit it or not. Although every epistemology needs its axioms, the naturalistic world view introduces no more than necessary, and people like Plantinga and his fellow admirers of the Argument from Arbitrariness (if you will) would do well to avoid casting stones in glass houses, for once you assume the existence of ultimate beings, everything is arbitrary.

The oft-repeated saw is that to improve, what you need is to train with people who are better than you are—to swallow your ego and accept that you’ll get beaten in sparring, you’ll have to tap a lot; because you can only learn from people who are better than you (and therefore have something to teach) and in particular, you’ll never learn to defeat skilled opponents without practicing on skilled opponents. There is of course considerable truth to this, and I’m sure it is possible to get very good indeed in a meatgrinder situation where your every training partner from day one is a brown belt and up.

Personally, though, I feel that there is plenty to gain from training with people who aren’t better. Regarded one way, it’s certainly a lot easier to learn offence, and practice new moves that I’ve yet to master, on less experienced opponents with whom I have a greater margin of error. I’ll never pull off a brand new sweep on someone with whom I struggle to keep up to begin with, but with a brand new beginner, I can perhaps get my position and get a few reps in every round. When rolling with people at approximately my own level of skill, I get to practice a more competitive sort of game, because either may credibly “win” and neither is predisposed to play a super defensive, staving-off-inevitable-disaster game—and here those new moves are put to the test. Against superior opponents, well, I certainly get plenty of opportunity to pratice defence…

This may be a psychological flaw on my part, but I will be honest and say that sometimes, I don’t feel like I gain anything at all from rolling with people who are better than me by too wide a margin. It’s one thing if I’m constantly forced to play at the edge of my capabilities; that’s fertile ground. When someone shuts down my every attempt before I can even get started, though, I don’t think that really teaches me anything because I get no useful feedback: I can’t tell the difference, then, between “that was a mistake” and “that was a good idea but this guy is just good enough to shut it down anyway”. Then it’s not a learning experience, but mere frustration. (I do my best, when rolling with very new beginners, to remind myself not to create that kind of situation.)

I also think that one should not scoff at the benefits of rolling even with very new people, or much smaller people. Yes, if I outweigh someone by 50 lbs and have 4–5 years of experience to their week and a half, I can probably sweep them in pretty much any direction I choose, but I should be able to make more intelligent use of our training time than that. For one thing, it is a good time to relax, roll without using strength or power, and isolate details, control using the feet only, and that sort of thing. For another, I find that helping people, providing hints, and talking them through those first few rolls can itself be a learning exercise for me as much as for the other person, because it forces me to analyse the situation carefully and isolate and highlight the most important essentials, which is hard to do in the rough-and-tumble of a more even match.

And, of course, it’s good to give back. The only reason I am where I am today is because other people (I would be remiss if I didn’t specifically mention Kabir’s name at least once here) helped me in this fashion, by toning their game down a few notches, give me room to try things, and help me out—and I have a long way to go still, during which I hope to receive more of the same. So of course I want to do as much as I can to provide the same encouragement, help, and guidance to others in the same community or, if you will, family. For all that you go one-on-one at the time when you’re facing a particular opponent, building grapplers is a community effort, and as in many things, the journey is to my mind more important than the destination.

Now I’m off to open mat at GBV (slightly late because I felt moved to write this post) where I will roll with people who may be any combination of better than me, worse than me, and roughly at my level, and I leave confident that either way, I’ll have room to learn.

I’m considering trying an IDE for a change, rather than just gvim, because exploring options is good. I gather the top three IDEs that get mentioned in the context of Django are Wing, PyCharm, and Komodo (none of which are free), or Eclipse with PyDev (which is free, but has the even higher cost of being fucking Eclipse: I think using Eclipse is a much higher price to pay than money).

PyCharm, by the IntelliJ people, looks more full-featured than I knew any Python IDEs were. It’s really quite nice, and its code intelligence is impressive. The only obvious drawback is that it’s slow (is it because it’s written in Java? or just because it does so much introspection to provide such good hinting for so dynamic a language as Python?), which might or might not drive me crazy; and that when its code intelligence gets things wrong, it can be irritating. For example, it’s wonderful that it warns me if a variable is nowhere declared, but annoying when I know damn well that it gets injected by a decorator.

Wing IDE feels much lighter and faster. It has an impressively accurate vim input mode. (PyCharm also has vim emulation, need to try it.) It also feels like a more native application. In addition, when I open a Django project, the Django support is…I don’t know if it’s superior, but it’s more explicit: I get a Django menu with manage.py actions like validating models, generating SQL, and so on. Its code completion feels slightly more limited, though—import a symbol from a project-local module and PyCharm clearly knows more about it than Wing does.

Both Wing and PyCharm do Django; highlight a template reference in PyCharm and it will go to the template, for instance.

Komodo…I wonder why discussions on IDEs with support for Django mention Komodo. It looks like a great editor, it may even be a great generic IDE, but Django support? My brief search for making Komodo deal intelligently with Django revealed this amazing screencast which seems to conflate syntax highlighting support for Django for supporting Django with the IDE. No: Syntax highlighting is a feature a GUI text editor can have. For an IDE to support a library should mean more. For example, if I open a Django project, it might at least have the decency to figure out what running it should mean (hint: not running the module I’m currently editing). Since it doesn’t do this right off the bat, nor make it trivially discoverable, I infer that even if there exist better Django integration features, it’s so far off the priority radar that I can not only discount Komodo as an option, but reiterate my surprise that it even gets brought up.

Currently I’m leaning toward PyCharm as the top choice, but feeling vaguely guilty about it.

Ever since I revived that damned RPG project, I cannot help but think about a proper setting, and while I enjoy the venerable old Drakar och Demoner for many of its rules, many of its races and selection of monsters, and most especially its magic system, still the chief campaign setting (Ereb Altor) is an unacceptable patchwork of unrelated adventure settings all tossed onto one big map, and many details are altogether missing, so my campaign setting will be my own. And this is what happens when I start thinking down those lines.

SHUT UP THESE THINGS ARE IMPORTANT FOR AN IMMERSIVE AND CONVINCING SETTING DON'T YOU JUDGE ME

Tell a Christian that you are an atheist because you find the evidence for theism thoroughly unconvincing and the odds are pretty high that you will, at some point, be told that he doesn’t have enough faith to be an atheist, or that you need faith in the non-existence of gods just as much as he needs faith in the existence of his. At first blush, this sounds at once superficially reasonable, obviously false, and profoundly bizarre.

It sounds superficially reasonable, because the objection that my atheism is not founded on an absolute certainty and absolute proof is of course correct. It sounds obviously false because the word “faith” is typically used to describe a positive belief in something for which there is insufficient empirical evidence, and is not a word suited to describe skepticism, whether justified or unjustified. It sounds profoundly bizarre because many Christians use the word to describe a purported virtue of trusting in the existence and benevolence of their god in spite of the lack of such evidence (the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen).

Part of the problem is that the word “faith” is a vague one on which we may both equivocate and have genuine misunderstandings. I use it to describe belief that is not justified by rational evidence, because in any situation where there is evidence we have other words to describe it, but I recognise that anyone who uses the word in conversation with me may mean just that, or equally well something different, such as a religious belief that they perceive to be supported by evidence, as a synonym for “confidence”, or something else altogether.

Then again, a disingenuous approach some debaters will use is to conflate them intentionally, a logical fallacy known as equivocation. You might say that I have “faith” that if I sit down my chair will bear me up, just as you have “faith” that your god exists—but they are clearly not the same kind of faith, since I have ample evidence that my chair will support me, and furthermore this evidence is available to anyone who wants to inspect it: You could (if you truly doubted it) have photos, videos, contemporary eyewitness testimony, or if you were truly dedicated you could come visit me and see for yourself. Moreover, the supportive quality of chairs is not contrary to anything in common experience; it’s not (as Sagan would say) an extraordinary claim. This approach is apparently used to justify the evidence-free kind of faith by implying that it is equivalent to obviously rational forms. It is not. My confidence in chairs is based on facts and observations that could be amply supported against someone skeptical of chairs; unless you can provide facts and observations in favour of your deity, it’s not the same thing at all—and if you can then let’s talk facts and evidence, not “faith”.

More promising is the notion that I need faith to be an atheist—faith not quite supported by evidence, that is—just as the theist needs faith to be a theist. Some theists, indeed, are known to dismissively quip that “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” (by implication of which faith is a bad thing, since more of it leads to us sinful atheists—but that is by the way). However, this also falls down flat on closer inspection.

First of all, we all subscribe to most of the same basic premises or assumptions in dealing with the world, theists and atheists alike. We all operate on the assumption that the external world is real and that our senses provide us with systematic information thereof. Even a hypothetical, reductio-ad-absurdam biblical literalist has no choice: Without the empirical evidence of his eyes and ears, he could read no scripture and hear no sermons. So clearly, in terms of the basic appreciation of what exists, we start from the same position.

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, as Occam’s Razor slices, and I choose to stop there. I accept the truth of premises that cannot be denied without resort to solipsism, but thereafter I demand evidence before I accept anything as true. This post goes into more detail, but in brief, since it is always possible to invent an infinitude of ideas, explanations, and purported entities, my choices are always going to be either refusal to accept any without evidence, attempting to accept all of them, or picking and choosing in an ad hoc fashion.

This all sounds rather abstract, so let’s consider this tweet from @repenTee:

@haggholm as I think about it ur conjectures are based on faith no evidence 2 prove that God doesn't exist somewhere in the universe.

(Pardon his spelling; it’s a tweet.)

The problem with this protestation is that although it is true that I have no direct evidence that no such thing as his God is floating about somewhere in the interstellar void, nor do I have any evidence that there aren’t two gods. Or three. Or ninety-six point four. Or, for that matter, a giant magic space-duck ’round whose mighty bill six supermassive black holes revolve. This shows the insufficiency of “there is no direct evidence against it” as an argument to accept any proposition: It opens the gates to all manner of silly things. I want to remain intellectually consistent, so I must approach all these disparate and sometimes contradictory claims (there is exactly one, are exactly two, three, four gods… cannot all be true) with the same approach. I do, and so accept only the ones whose existence is supported by good evidence. Therefore I am an atheist.

(This is of course what Russell’s Teapot was created to illustrate, along with its more modern successors—the Invisible Pink Unicorn, Sagan’s invisible dragon, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and so on.)

So as Bertrand Russell observed,

…I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

I believe that this sufficiently deals with equivocation, and dismissing the idea that the lack of positive disproof of a proposition (in spite of lack of positive evidence for it) is sufficient grounds to believe in it. We’re left, then, with the notion that the atheist’s confidence that there are no gods is on par with the theists’s faith in his because both positions have evidentiary support. The same @repenTee provided this frank and illustrative example in a blog comment:

…The faith we've entered into is not without evidence. Much as biologists observe cellular structures so we have observed nature and from it conclude that these things have been created by God. As we have observed people, places and things we conclude that something greater than ourselves must exist. Who this God is from that point we may differ but the theist never concludes that God exists apart from evidence....

Unfortunately, the analogy with biologists falls rather flat when we consider that the biologist’s inference from observation is only the first stage of scientific investigation. In the canonical simplification of scientific inquiry, this is observation leading to hypothesis formation. A biologist might for example observe cells in agar, see some interesting things, and conclude that cells reproduce by fission…but it doesn’t end there. If a biologist submitted a paper to a journal with no more substance than “here’s what I saw and here’s what I conclude”, it would be rejected and might not even receive the grace of a note explaining why. Rather, the biologist must use this point as a starting point only and ask questions. If I am right, what does that imply? What else should I be able to see? Can I follow up on that, and do I see what I expect? More importantly, what if I am wrong? What should I expect to see if I am wrong, and can I check up on that?

Indeed, some very great scientific truths have been discovered thanks to ideas that were arrived at in very ad hoc fashion, but turned out to be true. August Kekulé famously arrived at the structure of the benzene molecule from a dream of the Ouroboros, a snake biting its own tail. Einstein developed a lot of ideas from Gedankenexperiments and his sense of scientific aesthetics. The ultimate source of an idea is not so very important, whether empirical observation or irrational impulse—you may observe nature and draw the wrong conclusions; you may hallucinate and by chance have a correct idea. The key is not where the idea comes from, but how we can tell if it’s correct or erroneous.

This is of course the principles of falsifiability and (implicitly) replicability, two of the great cornerstones of the scientific enterprise. We accept no one’s word that something is true just because it seemed reasonable from what they saw. We expect them to explain in quantitative detail what difference their idea makes, so that we can make predictive statements and check whether it’s correct. Note that this goes beyond merely looking for consistency. I can make up all kinds of crazy ideas that are consistent with facts. I can claim that the world is such as it is because the giant magic space-duck willed it to be so, and this is consistent with facts. But it’s not an idea to be taken seriously because I cannot say “If the space-duck exists then we should observe X; if it does not then we should observe Y.” Before I accept the truth of a proposition, the existence of any entity, it must be clearly meaningful to say that it is false—and of course that meaning must turn out to be counterfactual.

So let us return to the quote from above:

…The faith we've entered into is not without evidence. Much as biologists observe cellular structures so we have observed nature and from it conclude that these things have been created by God.

At this stage, what’s been described is hypothesis generation. There’s nothing wrong with generating hypotheses, and no wrong way to do it (only more or less productive ones), but hypotheses must not be mistaken for validated theories, for truth. How do you know that your idea of divine creation is correct? What predictions have you (or any theist) ever made that would detect divine agency—what evidence should be sought to verify that your god created something rather than just natural processes? If you have not looked for it, then it’s not comparable to what a proper biologist does at all; it’s the brainstorming phase, not the publishable work that actually gets a scientist respect and tenure.

This is also the big problem with a deist god. Certainly it violates no evidence, but nor does it leave any evidence or make any predictions. To say that there is a god, but it leaves no traces of itself for us to find, only sounds less crazy than to say the same of a magic space-duck because we are culturally conditioned to take gods more seriously.

The objection to deism is also applicable to certain views of theism—that is, those that fall into the trap of the God of the Gaps. Over the centuries, some defenders of religious faith have insisted that what we cannot scientifically explain must be the work of their god—the orbits of the planets, say, or the origin of life. As Kepler, Newton et al explained orbital mechanics, these defenders of faith had to admit that the planets weren’t pushed along by their god—but “ah”, they’d say, “gravitation itself is surely the power of God”. Along comes Einstein and explains gravitation as geometry, the consequence of deformations in spacetime, and gravitation turns out not to be an intangible force after all. “Ah!”, exclaim the defenders (or their intellectual descendands), “but then spacetime must be due to God.” And so on—with every new discovery, their god is redefined so as not to conflict with facts. But this god can never generate a meaningfully falsifiable prediction, because every falsification is inevitably explained away with a new redefinition.

Indeed, earlier versions of these beggar-gods, deities who would hide in any nook or cranny that science had yet to illuminate, did generate falsifiable hypotheses, such as “the planets could not remain in stable orbits but for the mystical power of God”—which turned out to be false, neatly disproving them.

The only gods that remain to be dealt with are the ones with more meat on their bones—ones who generate falsifiable claims: Gods such that their followers ought to be able to come up and tell me: “These are the verifiable (or falsifiable) differences between two models of the world: One such as it is or would be with my god in it; one such as it is or would be without him.” That is a god that needs to be evaluated on an individual balance, the evidence for and against it weight—especially that against it (as attempted falsification yields better evidence than mere consistency-with-established-facts).

I’d welcome such falsifiable evidence.

Novum cingulitis (“the new belt blues”) is a psychogenic condition generally contracted on obtaining a new belt in a martial art, such as BJJ, where the patient’s abilities are constantly tested against those of their peers. Typical symptoms include tenseness, a sense of guilt and unworthiness, and constant low-grade nervousness, and may include a period of mild depression. Other common symptoms include paranoia (though this is controversial as some argue that everyone is, in fact, out to get the patient).

Novum cingulitis has no cure, but the condition is self-limiting and will resolve on its own, typically ⅓–½ of the way to the next belt (when a new outbreak may occur). Common home remedies include sandbagging (q.v.) and practicing martial arts without hard sparring, where the additional measure of “pulling rank” may also be employed. Modern medical science recommends against these extreme measures, however, and suggests a healthy diet, vigorous exercise, plenty of rest, relying on your teammates, and colloquially, “manning up”.

Though poorly documented in the literature, novum cingulitis is a very common condition. If you yourself practice BJJ and have never suffered from the new belt blues, you probably know someone who has.