Month: July 2015

Today’s secular world looks to science for truth and remembers the story of the persecution of Galileo to draw a false incompatibility between science and religion. We all know the story where Galileo agrees with the Copernican model placing the sun at the center of things and is, in some totally fraudulent accounts, put to death.

Copernicus was famously reluctant to publish his theories because he knew they were less good than the standard model of the day, and he also understood astronomy as an embarrassing and sinful grasping at mastery. He drew all his pay from the church and felt poetry was a more holy way to spend his creative efforts.

Galileo was unable to show his peers that the Copernican model was better than the standard of the day because it wasn’t. By correcting one aspect in the conventional model, its orientation, the result was more unwieldy and less accurate.

In one book written very late in life, Galileo drew on circumstantial evidence and arguments from scripture. We are told in many versions of the story that a stodgy traditionalism or dogmatism held back progress towards scientific truth, and that is true. But the Copernican model was a dead end, and the church was open enough to allow the publishing of idiosyncratic faulty theories as long as they were not presented as fact. The dogma that held back Galileo was peer review and the demand for predictable, reproducible results. These are the goods that science prides itself most in, but the common story transforms that same quality of the church into a murderous fault.

But it is also true that many Protestant versions of Christianity have, like Galileo, traded away the brick wall of robust proofs for a shiny mirror. These religions of the self became breeding grounds for willfully ignorant believers in fairytales. It is not a return to something ‘medieval’ but a recent creation out of self-seducing infantilisms extending even into secular thought and coinciding with industrialization in the mid 19th century as well as the creation of the Galileo murder myth. Impoverished of interpretation in the secular mode and missing discernment in the religious mode. ‘Uninterpreted’ — objective — facts determine government policies and faith flees and gouges out its eyes at the least uncertainty.

Galileo’s behavior was so bad he was shortly imprisoned in a luxury resort. He continued printing that one controversial book in Germany, where it could not be banned by the Catholic church. Everyone believes he invented the telescope because of ruthless campaigning, but that’s a lie too.

CANADA — Royal Canadian Mounties blasted James Daniel McIntyre to death after he appeared at a protest against a local dam, wielding a knife. Because he reportedly wore a Guy Fawkes mask, what remains of the “hacking group” Anonymous has gone to pieces fighting over just who is in charge of avenging or speaking for the fallen Anon.

Commander X, also known as Christopher Doyon, has been on the run in Canada after orchestrating DDoS attacks on a local government that planned to crack down on the homeless. X strongly implied his followers should use violence in avenging the death of James McIntyre, allegedly native, and spoke on behalf First Nation people despite being a white American. He continues to lead Anonymous operations that latch onto various media outrages, generating derivative Anonymous-themed headlines alleging Anonymous operations that never go beyond a few spooky tweets. He also has an “Artificial Intelligence” girlfriend named Allison. In the past, X once claimed that Anonymous had infiltrated every single computer system of the United States government, a superlative example of his amped up bluster. Reports continue to take his bluffing at face value because the Anonymous identity allows him to keep enough distance from his history of bullshit.

Heather Marsh, also known as Georgie BC (BC for British Columbia), is a “social theorist” and thought leader for many Anons because of her narrow and callow viewpoint on all issues. Marsh has used the death of the Anon as an opportunity to speak out against police violence and wound Canadian pride, likening the shooting of James McIntyre to something that might happen in the US. Marsh appeals to many Anons because of her theory linking pedophilia and government power. Marsh’s Operation Death Eaters sells the empty promise of revolutionary citizen-led tribunals that will accuse government leaders around the world of pedophilia. Marsh is also a firm believer in word-magic, especially emphasizing the etymological fallacy, and so uses ‘pedosadism’ instead of ‘pedophilia’, because ‘pedophile’ reaches into the Latin-knowing unconscious and subtly creates compassion for universally-hated pedophiles.

Commander X and Marsh’s competing takes on the death of McIntyre and their differing calls for action are being reported as yet another “Civil War” among Anons. Your Anon Central, an account associated with Heather Marsh’s word-magic style guide, has purportedly located Commander X and tweeted allegedly revealing information in the hopes that he will be arrested. However, Marsh’s minions also implied that Commander X is in fact a FBI agent who is no longer on the run. X returned fire, stating that the most important priority of Anonymous post-Sabu is restoring confidence by ending paranoid accusations of FBI cooperation.

Instead of leading to a resurgence of Anonymous-brand DDoS protest, it is an all out case of what Anons refer to as “leaderfagging,” where nothing happens but megalomaniac personalities jockey for attention and power — exactly what the Idea of Anonymous was supposed to prevent.