I’ve been set back a bit on my posting schedule, thanks to a delightful combination of factors: I was going to try to integrate TypeKey identification into my comments sections in order to help control spam; but first I found out that I’d have the joy of having to reformat my hard drive and get back up to speed from a clean install and, thank God, up-to-the-minute full backups. (It’s a tale of woe, but also a boring one. Don’t ask.)

TypeKey is, I think, close to completed. Immediate effects you may notice: (1) you can now sign in using your TypeKey identity when posting comments on individual entries; (2) if you don’t sign in using a TypeKey identity, your comments will be held up momentarily for moderation. It’s not that I don’t love you all, it’s just that spammers run amok here as elsewhere, and I’ve had to deal with one no-conscience asshole too many lately. If you do comment pretty frequently here, and you don’t have one already, it may speed things a bit for you if you sign up for a TypeKey identity (all you need is a valid e-mail address). If you don’t, that’s fine too–your comments will just go up as soon as I have the chance to screen them.

Let me know what you think about the changes; and forgive me if things are a little dusty in the comments department for the rest of the night. Actual content should be resuming within (I hope!) the next day.

Today (or yesterday, depending on how you count these things) is the 6,000th birthday of the Universe, according to the calculations of Bishop James Ussher. I hope that Young Earth Creationists around the world are living it up over this sextamillenial weekend.

Well, not really: life, the Universe, and everything was calculated by Ussher to have been created around 6:00pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC; and from 4004 BC to AD 2004 is actually not a round 6,000 years, but rather 6,007 (remembering that there is no year 0). The cosmos’s 6,000th actually passed us by at this time of the year in 1997. But if a preference for nice round numbers can make 2000 CE the time to mark the beginning of the second millennium, it can make 2,004 the time to mark 6,000 years from the Beginning.

In the meantime, you can celebrate the occasion with a delightful article about Pufferfish genomes from The Panda’s Thumb, or Roderick Long’s post on the shared premises of creationism and (state) socialism from earlier this year at Austro-Athenian Empire. (Let me just add that Long’s comments on socialism apply to state socialism but not to those of us whose flags are Black as well as Red. There is no place for central production boards or Five Year Plans here, and spontaneous unplanned harmony is no problem for us in nature or in politics–just ask Prince Kropotkin.)

You may or may not have noticed that Geekery Today uses the SimpleComments plugin by Adam Kalsey to combine TrackBack pings and comments into a single list (because, as Adam puts it, TrackBacks are comments–they’re not comments on your site, but they’re comments nevertheless). Recently, though, I upgraded to MovableType 3.1–I’ve had persistent problems with the amount of time that it takes large category indexes to rebuild when I create new posts, and so I wanted to take advantage of MovableType’s new dynamic publishing engine. At which point I ran into a big, fat problem: none of my plugins work on dynamically built templates. It turns out that MT‘s dynamic publishing engine does allow for plugins, but they need to be written in PHP, whereas all the MovableType plugins that you have used heretofore on your static pages have been written in Perl. Oops!

Well, I think that this was kind of a boneheaded design decision on the part of Six Apart, and if I were sticking to my ideological guns I’d just refuse to use dynamic publishing until the problem is fixed. But I don’t run MovableType for ideological purposes; I run it to generate a weblog. So I held my nose, cracked open the source code for Kalsey’s SimpleComments, and wrote my own port in PHP. If you use SimpleComments with MovableType 3.1 or later, then all you need to do is download the zip file, upload each of the PHP scripts therein to the php/plugins directory of your MovableType installation, and voil?@c3;a0;! you can switch templates from static to dynamic and back again without any change in your ability to use SimpleComments tags.

The current version of PHP SimpleComments is 1.31–so called because it mirrors the functionality of Kalsey’s SimpleComments 1.31. All of the tags and attributes are implemented–I think. You can download everything you need from the project page; let me know if it works for you, or if there are any lurking problems that need to be fixed.

Enjoy!

(Link thanks to bean at Alas, a Blog 2004/10/15)

I don’t care about winning same-sex marriage privileges (for feminist reasons that I’ve laid out in comments and in my essay, The Cake is Rotten). But that doesn’t mean that I’m indifferent to electoral fights such as Oregon’s Measure 36, one of the latest rounds in the Religious Right campaign to write homophobia into federal and state constitutions. So I’m pleased as punch to have found (thanks to Alas, a Blog) the four arguments that M. Dennis Moore has managed to get published in the official Oregon voters’ pamphlet–in favor of the measure to ban same-sex marriage.

Yeah, you heard me. In favor. All of them are great, but my favorite by far is his fourth argument, Let’s Vote:

LET’S VOTE!

The recent OCA signature drive for the Divine Sovereignty Life Amendment, if successful, would have given Oregonians the extraordinary opportunity to vote on the existence of God, yes or no. Religious dogma would have been decided democratically by popular vote — essentially creating an official state religion with GOD ALMIGHTY enshrined in the Constitution as

Oregon State Deity!

Although this initiative drive failed, the Christian Coalition has now created a Commandment Amendment to the Constitution! Measure 36 ordains us to

VOTE ON THE THEOLOGICAL BELIEF

of whether churches, synagogues, and temples shalt not be permitted to marry gays and lesbians.

And this election thus establishes the glorious precedent for democratic electioneering on ALL of the

Official Oregon State Dogma!

COMING SOON
TO A THEOLOGY BALLOT NEAR YOU:

• Shall churches, synagogues, and temples be permitted to marry divorced persons (Luke 16:18)? Let’s vote!
• Shall baptism be by sprinkling, pouring, or dipping? Let’s vote!
• Shall the Lord’s Prayer be translated forgive us our debts or forgive us our trespasses? Let’s vote!
• Shall adulterers be stoned to death(Leviticus 20:10)? Let’s vote!
• Shall obnoxious religious-right hypocrites be allowed to marry? Hell no! Let’s vote!
• How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Hey, let’s just vote!

This is democracy! Religious beliefs belong on the ballot, and winning beliefs become public policy in the Constitutional Catechism! Minority adherents, straight and gay, should have the statesmanship to accept that religious freedom does not protect losing beliefs in a theological election.

Your special right to practice your moral beliefs (including marriage) is subject to the whims of popular vote!

It’s not discrimination, it’s electoral theology.

In Oregon, democratic dogma is inspired by initiative and referendum — in the

Holy Marriage
of the
One Official Oregon Church and State!

VOTE FOR OREGON:
State beaches, the bottle bill, land-use planning, and now
THE OREGON DOGMA!

(This information furnished by M. Dennis Moore, God for Oregon Deity-PAC [GOD-PAC], Family Alliance of God.)

Yes, that really will be going out on state letterhead to every voter in Oregon; you can confirm it at the Secretary of State’s website (the arguments he submitted are the first three arguments in favor and the next to last).

Electoral theology! Mmm, sacrelicious.

Further reading:

• GT 2004/03/10: Traditional marriage”
• GT 2001/08/07: Religious Right wants to write homophobia into the Constitution
• Comments on Civil Rights and Family Values: In Defense of Homosexual (and Heterosexual) Marriage: in which I trash my own argument for gay marriage
• Essay 2001/11/28: The Cake is Rotten: in which I give an extended version of the argument against marriage-privilege

Some more from Tolkien’s letters, to go along with his comments on the horrors of war:

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically conceived, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to unconstitutional Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance at recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to King George’s council, Winston and his gang, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.

–letter to his son Christopher Tolkien, 29 November 1943. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #52

I suppose that Hans-Hermann Hoppe would like the kind words for unrestrained Monarchy. Otherwise, though, a lovely statement.