Presidium Podium

It’s not that I’m feeling like an incendiary post, I’m just constantly moved to wonder…

Why is it that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (”Mormons”) is so frequently characterised as a “cult”?

Of course, the question has a self-evident answer to a degree, rooted in the historical persecution of Mormons for their allegedly unconventional and deviant beliefs. Interdenominational / interfaith religious conflict is a thing only as old as theology itself. It’s also rather tiresome and boring from a secularist’s point of view.

I also recognise that “cult” can just be another pejorative epithet uninsured by any sort of critical thought. Why, I should know, it’s often bandied about by fellow atheists to describe the totality of theology and theological history.

But I don’t feel like the answer begins and ends there. As near as I can tell as an non-ingratiated outsider unschooled in scripture and professing only a very narrow, cursory familiarity with theological doctrine, the incongruities among various other Christian denominations — and indeed, individual professors of any faith — are at least as vast and cavernous.

And commensurately, I see some dismissive derision going on; in Protestant-dominated Middle America, making fun of Catholics seems particularly the fashion. Or maybe I’m just more acutely perceptive of that having grown up in the confines of a Catholic university and proximate to Catholic intellectual tradition through the scholarly work of my mother, and some other avenues.

But the kind of vitriole, the churning bile, the raging contempt that I see toward Mormonism from so many interlocutory angles? I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in the broad daylight of “respectable” society in view of God, although the dark, moldy catacombs of religious extremism and theo-political fanaticism in certain other parts of the world offer enough parallels. Also, I don’t see the representatives of many other er, “dichotomous” Christian denominations, however mutually antagonistic their expressed positions, so thoroughly moved to drown each other in spirited accusations of being “cult”-like, or particularly primed to deploy the caustic discursive power of this C-word at all.

Granted, my theoretical exposure to LDS thought is limited largely to my interaction with a few real, live, practising Mormons, most substantially Clint, along with some kids I went to high school with. But all the same, I simply fail to see whence the applicability of “cult” is derived, along with all the other bitter hatred.

Although I command no expertise in the area whatsoever, I am compelled to say that it seems like a very reasonable, pragmatic, and tolerant theology. On the other hand, being an atheist, and an ill-educated one at that when it comes to these sorts of matters, I also don’t have that part of the brain that scoffs or takes offense at any of the LDS (re)interpretations or revisions to whatever other Christians consider established, uncontested historical, spiritual or exegetical fact. Clean slate here.

Because I’ve mostly engaged LDS theology in the larger context of social, moral, and personal issues (as opposed to, say, deeply esoteric fine points of scripture or doctrine), there is a heavy inflection to the sort of thing that I take away from it.

Four thematically recurring features that stand out to me as an outsider are:

1. Extremely heavy role of community, distributed involvement, lay ministry.
2. Very strong emphasis on human volition, willpower and metaphysical free-will libertarianism. A view of God that presumes the inalienability of uncoerced human choice participating before Him.
3. Importance of character development, decency and qualitatively positive personal featuers on an extrinsic, interpersonal plane.
4. Views on topics of extrinsic, worldly applicability — social issues, moral conduct, law, politics, etc. — tend to be grounded in very accessible, generalisable terms that do not rely dogmatically on the force of scripture nor on fundamental or literal interpretation of scriptural prescriptions. Almost all views I have heard from Mormons on a variety of topics of common social interest — and sometimes accompanied by frequent controversy — have been grounded in basically worldly terms. There is frequent recourse to observations in sociology, psychology, and other areas, whether considered part of established scientific knowledge, or just otherwise inhabiting a shared communicative universe with a non-Mormon. This resonates with me extremely, as it leads to thought-provoking, inspiring, transformative and polemically effective reasoning that I can engage, converse with, and benefit from even as a nonbeliever/secularist. (I don’t really mean to suggest that LDS positions on worldly topics have a wholly secular basis; of course, in the final analysis, they don’t. But that is not the point; the point is that there is very deliberate effort to reconcile those positions with some degree of universalisable empirical reality.)

Seems very pragmatic, tolerant, and reasonable to me as an outsider to Christian faith. Definitely among my top choices of interlocutor in discussions involving topics on which theology has a bearing, although I imagine individual exponents of the faith vary as much as individual exponents of anything in particular and acknowledge the possibility that I may have just had incredibly good opportunity to surround myself with high-quality people.

So, where’s the source of this inference to “cult”? Where is the source of this profound contempt?

Is it because Mormons do seem heavily invested in a unitary conception of doctrine through centralised, intersubjective revelation? How does that differ from Catholics or many others?

Is it because Mormons are characteristically unapologetic about the strength, relevance and primacy of their faith? How does that differ from anyone else of actual religious conviction?

Is it because Mormons have a well-disciplined, structured and effective international church organisation and a very deliberate public outreach strategy that relies on the cultivation of individual relationships, proselytisation, etc? While I’ve seen where people are coming from when they generalise about many Mormon missionaries in “monolithic” and “homogenous” terms, that is neither true nor particular to the LDS.

Is it because they seem to have a very tightly-knit, integrated, and distributed community and form close–dare I even say, sometimes exclusive?–relationships within their localities? How does that differ from many other communities of faith, or shared belief systems of any kind, really? Is it any secret that strong moral convictions shared by a group of people tend to lead to clustering and reticence toward pervasive moral relativism and ideological eclecticism?

Misconceptions about lifestyle choices and/or the role of certain overblown historical relics such as polygamy? Well, I don’t know any polygamous Mormons that belong to the LDS proper. Do you? Besides, if that’s your beef, is it not best directed at secular relativism, “post-modern” sexual politics, and other prime factories of “novel” lifestyle advocacy and “revolutionary” deconstruction of “traditional” morality? And what does this have to do with cultism?

So, what is it? Why did I run across a flyer the other day encouraging me and my fellow churchgoers to come to a seminar about “combating the cult of Mormonism?”

My dad sent me an article about a main job-hunting avenue for thousands of Ph.D. candidates in philosophy in this country.

Must say, it makes for quite a sad read for me. The crux of the sadness seeming to be tied up in:

The competition is so intense that many applicants consider themselves lucky to get any kind of tenure-track job, even if it is a poorly paid job teaching critical thinking to prospective refrigerator repairmen in rural Oklahoma.

In general, compared to almost any other industrialised “Western” nation, the U.S. is abysmally impoverished in its ability, and especially its willingness, to meaningfully support the development of its truly educated — specialists in the arts and humanities.

The U.S. is by far the most illustrative example of an economy and a universe that adheres most closely to Marx’s dictum that cultural life in a society is a rather literal projection of its productive relations — in a word, blind economic imperatives that cater to the lowest common denominator.

There is something about the nature of the relationship between academia/higher education and the hoi polloi that makes the former inordinately sensitive to the vicious hostility of capitalism (and whatever “democratic’ inner compulsions may be ascribed to its marketplace dynamics, the authenticity of which as suchly characterised I am generally moved to question) to the intellectual achievements of world culture, and places it in the precarious position of needing a conscious and concerted subsidy.

I am not, in general, persuaded by counterarguments that don the thin veneer of “democratic” pretensions in their suggestion that the state of affairs for scholars is simply a reflection of a system that elicits the maximum expression of human “freedom” in that it gives people to organically make choices about the appropriation of their share of the social product — for good or ill. And if it’s ill and adversarial to the fruition of intellectual life of the society, the fault lies nowhere but with its own constituents.

As the worldview — which strikes me as incredibly simplistic and overly technocratic — captured by this statement would have it, subsidising scholastic work in a way that makes it tenable to build a career of it is an imposition of an “artificiality” upon the realities of market supply and demand. The claim is that the threadbare “demand” for it indicates its marginal value to the whole of a society, and thus that any attempt to tinker with the results amounts to some form of “coercion,” “liberal elitism,” “big government knows best,” and so on.

The first problem is rather obvious, and I will plead guilty to a certain “liberal elitism” in this area as charged. Most of society — especially inasmuch as a large part of it consists of lazy, narrow-minded and unthinking consumers — is ill-educated and does not have sufficient perspective to make intelligent decisions about the role, and indeed, the indispensability, of higher education to its own well-being.

This is not really spoken from intense contempt for the common man; I am still an optimist about people overall, believe their motives to be basically good, and their collective intelligence quite capable if given the proper resources.

However, the structure of this society, the self-perpetuating socio-economic dynamics present therein, and the power inequalities that obtain widely act strongly to preempt the exercise of that capability, and its provision with what I have chosen to term “proper resources.”

This aside, the more sophisticated and recondite critique is structural, although it is enourmously brought to bear on the significance of the last sentence.

As turning one’s profession into a survival strategy that includes a sustainable compensation plan is concerned, the inner compulsion of capitalism is toward the remuneration of things of relatively simple goods and services that have the immediacy of perceptible commercial or hedonistic-subjective value. Basic economics even accounts for some of this in a variety of mundane areas in its treatment of “negative externalities,” although what is typically underemphasised is that so many of them result from the inherent shortsightedness of the profit motive, strengthened by the nature of competition to drive the long-term sustainability of certain practices down to the lowest common denominator. Oft-invoked examples of this include pollution, unsustainable agricultural practices, the depletion of natural resources, logging, etc.

The appreciation of purely scholastic work and high culture is even more capricious and exacting in this regard — and thus, when unfulfilled, more vulnerable — than the environment, I would venture to say. Much of the “output” of the liberal arts lacks any of the immediacy associated with economically transformative activities in that it cannot be commodified and readily applied or “experienced” as a good and service, and indeed, lacks even the most rudimentarily quantifiable properties of anything persuasively construed as a “good long-term investment” whose immediate benefit is not “readily” obvious.

It is just one of those things that is extremely socially necessary, and indeed foundationally supports much of the development of human society in ways readily evidenced from even a cursory examination of the pedigree of human understanding, but you can’t affix price tags to it, nor show how to a refrigerator repairman in rural Oklahoma its obvious and fathomable “benefits.” Not that there is any shortage of attempts to try to shoehorn it into some sort of economic model, but such misconstructions fundamentally pervert the very fabric of academic work.

In short, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just give the “social benefit” of an English professor or a philosophy student or an artist or a specialist of music theory a “value” and put it on the shelf at Target.

The humanities are not a “market datum.” They do not have verifiable or measurable quantities, they do not send “pricing signals,” they do not earn “investor confidence,” and do not produce “feedback.” It seems to me that it is by an ontological virtue that they participate outside the sphere of market activity; they are not “products.” Yet what we have done, for the most part, is precisely to subordinate them to those metrics, for which they cannot possibly be more ill-suited, and then wave our hands with great pep and vigour and sing encomia to our consummation of “freedom.”

Somewhere, somehow, higher and exclusive wisdom has had to step in to rescue our world from its seemingly suicidal — or at least misanthropic — propensity, however “elegantly organic” or “democratic” the mask you want to paint over the terrifying physiognomy of the process, to descend into the abyss of ignorance and cultural stagnation.

Of course, the process has always been explainable — dare I say justifiable in the eyes of the applicable contemporary proponents — in the terminology, language, and cosmological assumptions of the socioeconomic order fashionable in the time.

You’ll have to forgive me if that doesn’t make me feel any better. Surely you’ve read about the Dark Ages.

It was a beautiful grey day in Atlanta yesterday, where, for once, I stayed part of the weekend. (Usually, I am in Athens visiting parents and Lisa.) Quite appropriately for the holidays, I opine.

Unfortunately, I do not own a digital camera, so the best I’ve got to offer is shoddy, grainy, low-resolution phone camera pics:

I have always liked dark, grey, cool weather far more than sunny. I suppose it has to do with what one’s formative experiences of the world are, and I come from Moscow, where it is that way as often as not. It was in northern Indiana — where I spent a lot of my childhood — as well, but in an oddly contradictory way where it would often be humid and hot but grey, or below-zero but sunny.

Aside from snow, which I miss far as a persistent presence for several winter months far more than words can express, it’s also something I find psychologically necessary especially in winter. It is a core fibre of my expectations of what winter “feels like.”

I gather I’m rather strange in this regard. So many northerners who live in the Sun Belt express to me how glad they are to be rid of snow as a lifestyle imposition. Everyone seems to love the pervasive and unabating sunniness of this area. I personally can’t stand it; I find sun acceptable in moderation, but for the most part it irritates and blinds me.

I feel much more alert, awake, alive and productive in crisp, chilly, and cloudy weather — no, not “partly cloudy,” but truly, wholesomely cloudy. I gather it’s the exact sort of thing that makes most other people drowsy and unmotivated.

I’m quite partial to rain (indeed, the good Lord knows we need it), but do not find it to be a necessary ingredient for the enjoyment of a nice grey day. It just has to be very cloudy and cool.

I really wish most days of the year were like this.

While meeting up with Deanne (the marital complement to Jonathan) at the airport last night, I noticed that in the “Atrium,” the retail space and lobby between the North and South terminals, there was a sign advertising that the “SSID” of the airport wireless access point was such and such.

Is it a reliable indicator of market penetration and consumer acceptance of a technology when relatively arcane IEEE standard acronyms make their way onto glossy posters directed at traveling end-users?

Also, although I understand being annoyed at construction and utility noise very well, I do not think this is a moral or constructive way to deal with it.

After discussing this with Lisa a little while ago, I wanted to make sure everyone else was just as mystified as to the meaning of “fixed income.”

I cannot count the number of times that I had gotten calls in a technical support capacity (at a certain small Athenian ISP) about billing issues from older, typically more rural customers. They were often frustrated with computer problems — ostensibly outside the scope of the ISP’s control, concern or interest — and demanded to know what we were going to do to fix them.

It was policy then to provide residential consulting services (a ridiculous idea) at a certain hourly rate, which I quoted to these wretched. At times, I was met with considerable indignation — “Young man, I am retired. Us senior citizens live on a fixed income! We can’t just be paying through the nose day after day!”

Now, I understand where they’re coming from. Also, a lot of these people came from areas like Greene County, GA, one of the poorer areas in Georgia with collapsed median incomes and a gradually eviscerated economic base whose legacy is connected with manufacturing. They may not be able to easily afford such professional services. That’s not a problem.

But on a purely semantic level, my insatiable curiosity leaves me with the quibble — what on earth is a “fixed income”?

Are only senior citizens beset with this cruel and unusual impediment?

In their estimate, do I not live on a fixed income too?

Aside from this, I have also seen the term repeatedly associated with people of geriatrically tending demographics in a number of articles dealing with personal finance, and so on. “Older people have trouble stomaching the copayments associated with many coverage plans because they live on a fixed income.”

Pray tell, what is a fixed income?

Of course, I’m being a little pedantic; I think I know what it means. I assume that what it means is that once a person reaches retirement, they are no longer actively generating income for themselves (unless they have made successful investments that continue to pay substantial interest to form the basis of their income). Therefore, their pool of livelyhood is static and depleting, encouraging maximum frugality so that it might last long enough, one might hope.

But that is a “fixed” pool of wealth. That is not a fixed income. A fixed income is simply a quantiatively bounded disbursement collected with some regularity.

Even Donald Trump has a fixed income. Its fixture may just be so large so as to be considered practically inconsequential, as it would not appear to limit most of his conceivable ambitions, up to and including buying small Third World countries.

If any of you really have non-fixed incomes, would you be interested in funding Evariste Systems? Or at least send me the stock ticker symbol of your company and an invitation to the IPO? Will pay for options. Also, please send me your product literature on your Cold Fusion, Red Sea Parting, and Warp Travel offerings?

Or if you would like to pay me an unfixed income, I’ll shoot you my resume.

For quite some time now, I have hypothesised that the comparatively high prevalence of passive voice-reliant formulation in common Russian observational language is an indication of underlying cultural differences in worldview and cultural outlook.

Years after first synthesising this observation, I stick by it, despite little empirical or scientifically admissible data to mine or research — and even less time to comb the landscape for credible supporting evidence.

This may mean that my idea is baseless, especially if one is to proceed from my mom’s dictum regarding my attempts to help teach Lisa Russian — that I, a person of no formal Russian education or pedagogical training, ought to write a book, “Novel approaches to the Russian language.”

I have always had problems — or rather, problems were always encountered by me — with what appeared to my English teachers as an excessive fondness for passive voice constructions. Passive voice, as you probably know, is a configuration of sentence in which the grammatical subject is the receiver of the action of the verb, as opposed to an explicitly identified agent that performs an action — a transitive verb — unto a subject.

For instance:

• Active voice: The flying ball hit Billy squarely in the face.
• Passive voice: Billy was hit by the flying ball squarely in the face.

In the sort of writing technique generally disseminated in American public education and introductory university composition courses, passive voice is discouraged in rather ebullient terms as a stylistic device. Nobody ever bothered to give me satisfyingly explicit reasons for this; in fact, now that I think about it, there really aren’t any memorable answers at all. Something about obscuring and/or confounding the actor in a sentence, and so on and so forth.

One day, having thought about it, it hit me that my motivation in using it in many of the situations under my active consideration was a very deliberate one, rather than a fact of syntactical or grammatical happenstance or some form of aesthetic willy-nilly. It conveyed precisely that which I intended to convey about an action — usually a complex action with a multitude of causal links and conceptual dependencies — that resulted in a certain state of affairs by transpiring in a self-contained way, participating unto itself, in and of itself.

Notwithstanding any role that the highly bureaucratic, intensely ideological and rather technocratic Soviet regime may play in contributing to this effect through its presentation of press releases, newspaper articles and communiques to the polity, there is something about the prominence of passive voice in Russian that I think indicates differences in how the incumbent culture of its native speakers sees the world.

Those differences strike me as being almost ontological in scope and significance.

Orthodox and mainstream Anglo-American formulation of thoughts tends to grant very generous emphasis to the agency and, where applicable, individuality associated with the carrying-out of actions. I am fairly certain some of the foundation for this ideological; the mythos of English liberal values, of socio-economic orders that in their official exhortation give prominence to free agency and private enterprise, and other things making frequent appearance in the common intellectual inheritance of American and English thinking seem to demand that the agent be underscored.

This orientation engenders a clearer and more distinct sense of individual responsibility and accountability for actions, as well as giving credit where credit is due to individual initiative or assigning blame in case of error. That is the optimistic appraisal, anyway; all of these dominant features of the language we use to describe our world have representational connection to the underlying power structure, and the interests of empowered constituencies in telling a certain story about the world’s structure, organisation, operation, and justifying the roles that some people play in it and others don’t.

The Eastern European mind has always had a more collective psychology, even prior to the advent of socialist revolution. For the majority of the population, conditions created a greater atmosphere of community - more specifically, communality - as it related to the appropriation of the social product. Individual accomplishment was not as significant; individual contributions were often seen more as parts of a distributed endeavour than unique and distinctive, and often anonymised or played down in popular culture.

Furthermore, Russians do not really have a democratic tradition in their history, either in some degree of fact or the illusion of such. For as long as Russia has existed hitherto, it has essentially been autocratically ruled to one degree or another. This leads to a different perception of personal and popular empowerment, and the displacement of individual actions upon macroscopic events.

In much the same way as people chalk up anonymous and unpredictable natural disasters to the whims of “Mother Nature,” in a tone of resignation at their powerlessness before it, I feel that Eastern Europeans are more inclined to view political and macro-historical events in a similar vein. Not merely the account of history, but indeed its content, has a more contrived, “manufactured” and “official” character to it, executed (if not necessarily, but possibly dictated) by a strong and ever-present bureaucratic outfit — an apparatus, a nomenklatura.

It is not an unparsimonious leap to suggest that the perception of day-to-day events can be shaped by this paradigmatic idiosyncrasy. It is more often the case, it seems to me, that it would seem gratuitous, unbecoming, or simplistic to dwell on the importance of the assignment of an actor to events. It may even seem like a gratuitous semantic fetish. Situations often simply “arise,” facts “come into being,” considerations “obtain” and events “take place” to engender a certain outcome.

I’m not trying to call anyone out, but, I got an employment solicitation from a recruiter a few days ago that may strike some of you, who heard me rant about fighting with the BroadSoft in a previous line of employment, as slightly ironic:

I would like to inform you that we have an opportunity to add additional personnel to our engineering staff. We are specifically trying to find a Broadsoft VoIP Expert. Are you the one?

Santa María, ¡que Dios me bendiga! No, I am not the one. I am never touching that piece of equipment again. Or hopefully anything else like it.

A week or two ago, I read Chekhov’s Grisha to Lisa in her kitchen while she cooked¹, at her encouragement. It surely has to be the shortest of Chekhov’s short stories, as its textual footprint did not exceed three pages.

It is a very pleasant and endearing story, but that notwithstanding, I made the observation at the time that the narrative, whether as a direct correlate of Chekhov’s intent or a byproduct of the English translation’s flavour, struck me as a having an unusually matter-of-fact and inertly concrete phraseology (and tone) as compared to my general expectations of a story.

Personally, I am inclined to chalk it up to a loss of authorial precision in translation, although it might behoove me to read the Russian original to gain more perspective. The effect I refer to above is not intensely perceptible, nor even especially verifiable exegetically. It’s really just a hopelessly vague intuition of mine as to the narrator’s / translator’s “mood.”

Russian has markedly different literary tendencies in narrative voice. There is a tendency to expose sequences of events with a greater investigative stoicism, as well as an eminently more liberal employment of passive voice in general speech and thought in order to emphasise the quality of events participating more “objectively” and “in and of themselves,” which seems to me to tap into a core fibre of a characteristically Russian poetic outlook.

The difference is that in Russian, it sounds “normal” to me; but if these features are grafted in an unembellished manner into English, they tend to sound rather awkward, rigid and stiltified — dare I say “bureaucratised?” — to the extent that they are not favoured devices in varieties of English-language storytelling generally thought artful.

I’ve found this to be absolutely true of my own translations, especially the hasty, real-time ones where there is no time to devote thought to the cultural and idiomatic idiosyncrasies that might be brought to bear. I recall this feeling numerous times when translating complete Russian phrases or lyrics for Lisa, spurred on by her keen and indefatigable curiosity.

At any rate, it got me thinking; aside from allusory, shadowy reproductions of Russian narrative and mythos, what is it about this descriptive account that seems so familiar? It dawned on me that it reminded me of my own attempts at writing stories, mostly for various high school class exercises requiring such and “creative writing” contributions to the newspaper of my elementary school, the illustrious Paw Street Journal of Madison Elementary.

Don’t misunderstand me; I would never purport to arrogate upon myself those qualities which deem one analogous or comparable to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov in his principal area of competency, nor even entertain claims of my being an effective writer of stories or situational descriptive accounts in any way, shape, or form.

Actually, that’s the problem — I’m not. I couldn’t write a good story to save my life. It just doesn’t sound like a story.

Part of that is probably accounted for by my reading habits growing up and into hoy en dia². The overwhelming preponderance of my voluntary reading has consisted of non-fictional expository text, typically concerned with the subject matter of history, politics, social sciences, psychology, or technology. I have read preciously little literature. Some people seem to harbour the illusion that I am well-read, and contrary to your claims, the lot of you, I am abysmally, apocalyptically, catastrophically bereft of literary pedigree. I have read very, very few classics issuing from any canonical lineage of literature. If you can name it, I haven’t read it. In fact, I have dealt relatively little with text produced outside the confines of the 20th century.

Needless to say, not a day passes that I don’t feel enourmous guilt, shame and regret for having gotten to be such a Philistine. And the insult to injury is that it’s not even that I don’t enjoy fiction or have some principled aversion to it, although I allow for the effects of a slight preferential bias. But mainly, I just didn’t get around to it somehow.

The value judgment aside for a moment, it seems fairly uncontroversial that my schooling has been in plainly expository text and prose, not in accounts of things — the sorts of things that fall into the province of tales, adventures, myths, fables, epics, legends, sagas, plays, anecdotes, etc.

But still, I’ve read enough of those. Come on, I went to public high school; that’s the trenches, and Charlie’s still going to lob certain quantities of literature at you from his artillery cannons. Helmets don’t help.

But I can’t write them.

From a front-row seat in the constellation of storylike vantage points, my stories sound the way that my drawings of most phenomena significant to humans in the natural world appear. I can’t draw people, animals, foliage - anything involving complicated gradients, transitions, contours.

Oh, contours, how estranged we are! Can’t do those at all. No internalisation of natural contours that allow for their original reproduction in drawing seems to have occured. Either that, or some sort of cognitive impairment. Hmm. Can I get on disability benefits with that?

But give me simple, rigid geometric figures consisting of straight lines or simple, uniform arcs, and I can probably sketch something passable in an art class. An introductory one. At a night school. For ex-convicts trying to rebuild their life.

I can do even 3D prisms!

If stories — elegant narratives with rich, inviting and engaging descriptions, graceful transitions, delicate nuances and intricately vivid reproductions of colloquial interaction among human actors — are pictures of people, and expository essays — rhetorical exercises, argumentation and prosaic, stolid descriptive accounts at best — are Soviet apartment blocks, then I fall in that continuum much as I do with visual reproduction.

To the extent that I can write anything at all, it is unfailingly of the latter variety.

I wonder if there is something about the psychological profile and attendant cognitive focus of the sort of people that elect for themselves a reading background through acknowledged preference — however slight — toward argumentative essays and scientific craft similar to my own… that impairs their faculty of troubadourship?

Or is it that there is no dichotomy here, and I just haven’t had much experience writing stories?

^{1 Quite deliciously, I might add. Praise of her culinary talents is something that easily warrants a wholly separate blog devoted solely to this purpose. For the sake of brevity, it will have to suffice to say that they are nothing short of extraordinary.}

^{2 Although the good Lord knows I cannot remember the last time I had time or energy to read recreationally.}

I want to talk about a particular type of captcha that has earned my contempt on grounds of its utter perversion.

Of all the things I could be moved to rant about from this vantage point (truly, a pool of manifold things), it is not entirely clear to me why I want to talk about this one. Besides, there are enough ridiculous applications of Internet technologies to fill a respectable galaxy in and of themselves, let alone the other things that belong to the genus “ridiculous.”

But wait, that’s what they told me a blog was for! So folks can rant about everything from the texture of their navel hair to their pet hare, and stuff like that. Nothing will stand in the way of my quest to get what I paid for.

Yes, I too hear the bells of irony tolling, in light of the chosen theme of “ridiculous applications of Internet technologies.” It’s an “interesting twist!” Ba-da-dooom! Cue for laughter.

Perhaps it’s because I feel that it blasphemes upon what is otherwise an interesting concept from a theoretical point of view, as far as computer science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence are concerned. Let’s chalk it up to striking a disciplinary nerve.

First, a brief explanation¹ of what a “captcha” is for those in the audience that haven’t picked this up mission-critical, synergistic, high-ROI Web 2.0 cross-platform collaborative content blogosphere term.

You’ve probably run into situations filling out forms online, entering bank information, posting to blogs, signing up for new services, and so on, in which you are required to manually input a series of characters as they appear in an image. This is basically intended to either prevent spam or add an extra layer of security by authenticating that the user is in fact human, thwarting automated processes that can fill out forms mechanically and submit them via a “robotic” HTTP request.

Malicious spammers and fraudsters often use these types of scripts to automatically create thousands of accounts for a particular purpose (to use as spam reflectors?), initiate batched credit card transactions with stolen numbers from a hijacked host in a short time, etc, etc. Fill in the blanks here; I’m so benevolent that I’m obviously hurting for creativity in the area of e-malice. [spreads angel wings]

Among the reasons this technique works are:

• The rendering of characters in an image as opposed to plain text makes it considerably harder to read the character stream; at the very least, it would require grabbing the image and running it through OCR (Optical Character Recognition)² software; all of which would have to somehow be worth the effort to defeat a particular captcha.
• The image is typically complex. The alphabetical characters are usually distorted or warped somehow, or appear with the superimposition or overlay of polychromatic lines or complex visual patterns rather similar to anti-counterfeiting designs that are not easily reproducible in copying. Government treasuries use these types of patterns in their printing processes to confer distinction upon an official, treasury-backed currency note. In this case, this has the effect of confusing OCR software by making it problematic to discern an alphanumeric character from extraneous data.
• Even if such schemes are theoretically defeasible in a programmatic way, the effort to defeat a particular captcha is absolutely not worth it in most cases. It would require very complicated image processing, and good captchas rotate the distortions employed. A spam or fraud effort would have to scale or pay very, very well to go through that kind of rigamarole.

That’s what a captcha is. In fact, many blogs have them to prevent comment spam. Numerous captcha modules are available for WordPress, as comment spam is a very common phenomenon due to the ubiquitous proliferation of WordPress installations.

Spammers have picked up on the fact that all WordPress form interfaces use the same basic form field ID keys and devised elaborate (ro)bot scripts that trawl the Internet in search of unsuspecting WordPress blogs and automatically post comments to them en masse.

If this blog becomes extensively linked on Google, where (ro)bot scripts can learn of the site URL, I very well may have to set one up for commenting as well, unfortunately. But we’ll tackle problems as they come - reactively, not proactively, otherwise I forfeit my admission to slacker heaven.

Anyway, of course folks quickly intuited that alphanumeric characters in captchas a relatively weak way to approach this problem, or at the very least an uninteresting one. Instead, one could design something that places even more complex demands upon a machine, but which would be utterly trivial to human subjectivity, thus highlighting the distinction between the two more acutely.

For instance, one could generate a series of pictures of various animals, and entreat the user to select the kittens of the group. It’s been done.

It would be a very difficult feat of image processing to accurately detect whether a picture contains a kitten. Possible, for sure; in fact, many enterprise content filters used in school systems attempt to do this for porn³. But accurately? Worth the effort? Absolutely not.

In theory, the concept is an interesting one. If nothing else, it’s a succinct statement about a fundamental problem explored in artificial intelligence and cognitive science: how could one make a machine mimick the adaptive subjectivity of the human mind, even with respect to relatively elementary sensory phenomena? Is it even logically possible?

Rather fascinating to think about, although I don’t claim the scholarly credentials to offer anything particularly intelligent or conceptually robust.

And now, we come to HotCaptcha.com, a captcha implementation that relies on the user picking three attractive people of a given gender from a group. The language of its error messages suggests that if you fail to pick the correct “hot” people, you aren’t certifiably human: “Die, bot, die!”

From a technical point of view, it’s actually a rather commendable implementation. It is easy to insert into a web application. It pays excellent homage to what the Web 2.0 lexicon terms mashups by, well, using them. The images are actually syndicated from the swill known as HotOrNot.com and the evaluation is performed based on the three highest-”rated” pictures. It even claims to use a HotOrNot API to do this - good use of web services and libraries.

Yet something about this is very off-putting. I’m not entirely sure what it is.

I suppose I could furnish some rather basic anticipated objections, sound prudish as they might to some of you. The user can only pick pictures of people that they are socially expected to find “hot.” But aside from the obvious reasons why that’s ridiculous, I don’t exactly feel that some jugular vein of sexual politics has just been sliced open.

(I did learn, from trying “switch to men” — out of idle curiosity as to whether the bias toward “mass-culture endorsed attractiveness” was the same — that I was apparently a bot, because I appear to not only lack the anything but the foggiest clue as to what it is that women find attractive about men, but — far more importantly for this exercise — have no expectation whatsoever of what is the “prescribed” social expectation of attractiveness by the masses of plebians submitting HotOrNot.com ratings. I imagine that’s a good thing from a heteronormative standpoint?)

But none of this cuts through to the essence of it.

I think if I had to pin it down to something, it’s probably some form of disgust that humans have once again managed to infuse - yea, pollute - yet another interesting and otherwise inertly formal innovation with sexual evocations, technology aiding and abetting.

At least the site acknowledges some form of that in its subtitle, “Using mashups to reach new heights (or new lows?) in security.”

Lows. Definitely new lows.

But then again, perhaps this objection is metaphysically problematic, rather as if I said that I suffer on behalf of the integrity of the concept of “comparisons” from the invention of beauty pageants.

That’s OK. If I wanted metaphysical coherence — or even to use the term “metaphysical” in a way that is truly correct — I wouldn’t have dropped out of the philosophy program.

You might say I ride the metaphysical short bus. These Presidium.org people are paying me by the word, so, garbage in -> garbage out as far as that goes.

^{1 Those who know me will understandably chuckle at the suggestion of brevity in connection with any explanation I deliver. But little did you know, these Presidium.org people are paying me by the word.}

^{2 The sort of stuff used to automatically turn scanned documents from mere images to editable text by “reading” the printed characters from the raw image.}

^{3 And fail. The only ones reported to work, in my experience, fall back on some sort of flat blacklist in the end.}