Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last week, Emma posted a link on her Facebook stream, linking to a blog post by The Honest Courtesan. While it’s interesting to see Emma’s reading choices ;), the point of the blog post was to rebut a post by someone calling themselves Eve’s Daughter who made a post entitled “A Man is a Rape-Supporter If.”

In this list, Eve’s Daughter sets out a list of things which, if apply to you, make you a rape supporter. However, it’s written in a way in which every adult man falls into the category, making every man alive a rape supporter.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, once or twice in the past I have been known to troll a little. A was particularly pleased with my pre-election night throw away comment “oh no! I’ve lost my polling card, now I can’t vote :(“, as dozens of people rushed to tell me I could still vote 😀 .

So when I read the post by Eve’s Daughter, the first thought that went through my mind wasn’t, “what a load of nonsense this is”, it was simple one word – troll.

Of course, I could be wrong. There are a lot of radical extremist feminists out there and some of them probably do believe this. But here is why I believe it could well be a troll:

1. It’s clearly designed to get people really angry. It makes the bold claim that every man ever is a rape supporter in a bold and uncompromising way, stereotyping an entire gender. And it’s works. Check out The Amazing Atheist going mental on YouTube.

Strip out the WordPress header and insert a logo for The Daily Mail and it suddenly seems a lot more in context. To me, it almost seems like a job application for The Mail Online.

2. It is designed to draw in as many people as possible. Everyone checks boxes on this list so everyone who reads the list can’t help but been drawn in to the debate.

Again, it works really well. Not only are people commenting on the subject matter across the internet, but even I am here blogging about whether it is a troll or not.

3. It’s obviously not true, but is written in a way to make it almost plausible. The author could have just written “all men are rape supporters” and everyone would have ignored it as obviously nonsense. Instead the piece leads you through a series of leading questions to slowly heat your blood, without setting it straight to boil. That way, you don’t switch off straight away, you begin reading and get hooked before the fire is really stoked.

4. The author shows some signs of intelligence and satirical humour. On May 25th of this year, they made a post entitled “Life, the Universe, and Everything”. While this could be a coincidence, it is almost certainly a reference to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a fantastically clever piece of fiction that people like myself and you, my well educated yet probably bitterly sarcastic audience, enjoy.

Of course, I could be reading far too much into this, but if you accept the premise that the author of this blog is a Douglas Adams fan, and then ask the question “if a Douglas Adams fan published such a piece, is it serious or satirical trolling” the last option is suddenly a very appealing one.

5. There is no author information on the blog. If you were seriously campaigning on these kind of issues, surely you would put your name to it? Meanwhile if you were just doing it to get a rise out of people, you might as well publish anonymously, especially if you were a troll and people knew the real you didn’t actually believe any of this.

There was some mention of death threats somewhere on the blog, which could be a reason to publish anonymously, but I don’t think this is the case because who would actually make them? Surely anyone smart enough to rebut such arguments isn’t the kind of person that makes death threats so who would be so angry about this kind of writing to do that? Not to mention that if you believe in a cause strongly enough, which we’re supposed to believe the author does, that kind of thing won’t stop you.

As I said however, I could well be wrong. One of my points was going to be that it is simply too OTT, that reading the comments showed that this was clearly a comically absurd character created by the author and that clearly it was impossible to create a worldview so shielded from reality that truth was so utterly unable to penetrate. But I’ve been working in atheism for five years now, and from my experience, I know that this just isn’t true.

Still, so many of the techniques used in the article just seem to ring a little bit too true of the tried and tested strategy for a good troll post.

Last Saturday saw the final of the 2011 Indian Premiere League. The two teams who were fighting out were the Chennai Super Kings and the Royal Challengers Bangalore.

The Super Kings made a fantastic start, reaching 205 runs by the end of their innings. This left the Royal Challengers with a huge hill to climb and when Chris Gale fell in the first few balls, you knew it was all over.

The cricket was followed by the UEFA Champion’s League final between Manchester United and Barcelona. Man Utd played reasonably well but were ultimately completed outclassed by a team with mirrored the superb play of the World Cup winning Spanish side.

The biggest surprise of the day however was that I actually spent some time watching sport. Could it be that two years working in the sports betting industry has finally got to me? Is this s a sign that the rapture is on its way after all? Only time will tell…

Last Friday saw the Secular Ball 2011. Re-named from the End of Year Ball which has run annually for the past three years, the Ball brought together groups from across Yorkshire for one amazing night.

The evening started with a three course meal at the beautifully furnished Brook Merrion hotel in the city centre, which provided a great setting for the evening. Before dinner, Leo Dragon set about wowing attendees with some great magic.

After much merriment at the hotel, the party moved onto Bar Risa for the after party at which we enjoyed a champagne reception and partied long into the night. A great night, enjoyed by all who attended.

Last week, Atheist Society were taking it easy during the exam period, with a screening of the film Saved. It has an important moral message – that we need to book Michael into Mercy House. He didn’t seem to keen on the idea though.

Afterward, we headed down to Stick or Twist, where I enjoyed a free mixed grill after having filled out all the required stamps on my loyalty card 😀 .

With Viki pretending to be ill to avoid paying for breakfast, like the cheap Mackem she is, and keeping George firmly under her thumb while at it, it fell to Norm to fire up the grill for this month’s post-Wendy fry up. He didn’t disappoint.

We decided to celebrate the rapture not happening in the traditional way – by having a Wendylicious party before heading out for everyone’s favorite night. Good times.

I recently finished reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which, after only a month at the top, has probably already knocked Nineteen Eighty-Four off the top spot of my favourite novels list.

Brave New World presents a dystopian future in which the idea of family has been completely removed. New humans are not born but are grown in bottles in giant hatcheries, before finally being decanted. Everyone is conditioned through gestation and childhood to be a certain class, and to be happy with that class. And if anyone ever is unhappy there is always soma – the happiness drug.

To be honest, though, I didn’t see what was so bad with the this future 😀 .

Throughout the book, I expressed to a few people this thought and they all responded with “wait until you get to the end – then you will see what a horrific vision of the future it is.” Well, I’m there now, and it still looks pretty good lol.

Ultimately, it probably isn’t a world in which we would choose. The characters in the novel have no freedom – they are born into a predefined class from which there is no escape and there happiness is shallow and superficial.

But then, if you were born into that world, you would actually be perfectly happy with it. It sounds horrible to be preconditioned from before birth to be a certain class, but imagine being truly satisfied with their job. I mean, I love my job, really love it, but I wouldn’t choose to do it if I didn’t have to, nor do I feel like I’m an important part of society – there are many other software developers out there that could do my job just as well. But what if I was conditioned to think I genuinely was an important cog? That might genuinely be nicer.

Furthermore, what exactly is superficial happiness? Isn’t that what we tell ourselves when we see someone who just seems too happy because they have money and fame and it’s all the stuff we want but can’t have so we tell ourselves that they aren’t really happy on the inside even though deep down we know that they actually are probably deeply contented 😉 .

And finally, there is soma. Some of the characters in the novel rebuked its use, but then, what is really wrong with it? Imagine we had a drug which could make us feel fantastic so that whenever we wanted to escape reality, we could just take it and all would be well.

Well, we do, and it’s call alcohol. There really isn’t an argument to be made for claiming that having soma in our society would be undesirable because it’s basically the same as alcohol but better, and side-effect free – and ultimately, most of us choose to go out and get wrecked, despite the very significant side effects.

All this is slightly tongue in cheek of course – no democracy, a class system, a religious cult-like worship of solidarity, none of this is desirable. But soma, sexual freedom and a focus on happiness are three things I’m very much down with.

Last week, we welcomed Dan Dewsnap to Skeptics in the Pub, to talk about the Zeitgeist Movement.

This was a movement launched off the bank of a film called Zeitgeist Addendum which claims that the major world problems are inherent to the capitalist money based system which our society currently runs on. It then goes on to propose a solution to these problems by putting forward the idea of a resource based economy. This is one without money or ownership, where people are provided with access instead and everything would be in abundance.

While the movement seems to suffer from many of the problems of utopian visions do (how do you motivate people to work, what do you do about things we can’t reduce scarcity, how do you stop people ceasing power, how do you coordinate everything), it was certainly interesting to hear about a movement which was expelling the virtues of technology and science and it was great to have a strong debate going at the meeting with people speaking for both sides.

Last week I headed down to York Brights for their monthly meeting. It was the second time I had been to the city in a month, having visited North Yorkshire Humanists two weeks prior.

The topic of much of this week’s discussion was Derren Brown. Derren has done amazing things for reviving the art of magic, but it always a divided opinion in the skeptics community because although he says it is all magic, he then goes on to pretend a lot of what he is doing is real.

Take the example, when he correctly predicted the lottery numbers. Of course, he didn’t, it was a simple camera trick. But be started the show by saying “this is all magic” and then took you on an hour long journey about the wisdom of crowds, which is of course nonsense. I spoke about this at Skeptics in the Pub in 2009.

One of the group members, Michael, went on to explain just how much of Derren’s material relies on this. Take for example his TV show Trick of Treat, although he claims to use no actors, they almost certainly did, partly because some have been identified as actors but also because you just can’t morally do a lot of that stuff to unsuspecting members of the public.

You could argue of course that that is part of the show though. When we watch fiction or magic, we suspend our disbelief for the purposes of entertainment (deep down, we all know there probably isn’t a man traveling around space and time in a vehicle disguised as a blue police box but it’s fun to pretend for those 45 minutes), and maybe it’s just part of that.

Many of us feared that when Terry Wogan stood down from presenting the British coverage of Eurovision, that it was all over. But, having sat down with Norm and Elina for a bit of a Eurovision shin dig last week, I’m fully behind Graham Norton as a worth successor.

It proved to be a hugely entertaining evening, with us gathering more points by the first few results than we managed in the whole competition last year. That said, I’m no longer friends with Elina after Finland failed to give us any points.

The competition is of course ridiculous – the phone lines open before the songs have even been performed. Is it just me that thinks it would be nice if we at least pretended it was about the music, rather than people just tactically voting for their neighbors? Not to mention that the best song, ultimate didn’t win.

Special mention goes to Estonia, for the campest performance I have ever seen:

Her dress is also adorable. Second special mention goes to Georgia for actually being good:

But ultimately, there was only just one song that deserved to win. Despite Graham Norton’s mocking, Moldova’s So Lucky was clearly the entry of the competition:

Martini. Whiskey on the rocks. Life on the top, my party never stops. So lucky! I think Elina is starting to get sick of those lyrics being sung into her ears…

Btw, does anyone know where I can get her some unicycle lessons?