The MediaWiki is restored to its proper location at www.naptastic.com/wiki, but this is temporary: I am moving all content from there to a new wiki, which is not currently world-accessible, powered by DokuWiki instead of MediaWiki.

I like DokuWiki’s syntax a LOT better, though it does take some getting used to. It uses flat files instead of a database, which is less efficient, but much easier for me to manage.

In case you’re wondering, what broke on MediaWiki with the upgrade was the way LocalSettings.php was handled. It’s always used symbolic links, but it was possible to just put it in /var/www/wiki and have things work. With the update, that’s not allowed anymore, and /etc/mediawiki/LocalSettings.php ended up becoming a symbolic link to itself. Guess how well that worked?

Frankly, I’m surprised the file system allows such a thing. Maybe I should tell someone…

I did an apt-get upgrade on my server last week which went off without complaining, but when I went to access the wiki again, it showed the setup screen, as if it had just been installed. “OK, no problem,” I thought, I’ll just run through the installation again, and since the database hasn’t been changed, it will just start working again. No dice. It now complains that LocalSettings.php needs to be moved from the config/ directory–a directory which doesn’t exist–into the wiki root–which is where it is. Correct permissions. I’m not running SElinux.

The people in #mediawiki were most helpful, invoking a chatbot to tell me I should install the latest version from a tarball, rather than using Ubuntu’s built-in version, and they’d be happy to assist me once I’d done that.

Fnord.

So much of my writings are currently inaccessible, and I don’t have my usual place to put things I’ve written, so I’ve got a bit of mental constipation going on right now.

What’s some good wiki software I can switch to? Ideally, it would have proper, per-page permissions using ACLs, and use flat files instead of MySQL for storing everything. I don’t care about WYSIWYG or skinning.

It’s been almost 8 months since I posted on addiction here and in the last 24 hours, a lot of new and important stuff has come together for me.

Things that one becomes addicted to are poisonous, or become poisonous when taken excess. Nicotine, cocaine, opiates, amphetamines, etc., are poisonous in any quantity. Alcohol is poisonous in large quantities. THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, becomes poisonous at ridiculously large doses, which is part of why so few people really get addicted to pot.

I see a pattern here: the strength and gravity of an addiction is directly related to how poisonous the substance is.

Why would this be the case? Why would our own bodies develop addictions most strongly to those substances which are most harmful to us?

I believe that it comes down to the structure of judgment. (Since all addiction is really judgment anyway.) Judgment is a complaint that something, or someone, or some group of things or people, should not be the way they are. Judgment feeds on itself: you judge; judgment is bad, wrong, evil, sinful, whatever–which is more judgment! (Note the emphasis on “are”: a judgment assumes that the way the judge perceives things is actually the way they are, which is frequently wrong.)

When I first learned how this worked, I’d fall into this trap all the time, passing judgment on people who were passing judgment on others, then passing judgment on myself for having judged those other people, then judging myself for judging myself, and then I was off to the races! It can be a really vicious cycle! But what’s this got to do with heroin? Keep reading.

What does a doctor do if no one is sick? What do managers do when their business is running smoothly without their intervention? What does a fighter do after he’s beaten everyone? What did Elvis do when he reached the top? What do you do when who you have defined yourself to be is suddenly obsolete?

(What actually prompted this line of thought was my long-time involvement with Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons. I’ve been thinking for a few weeks now that everything to do with religion is becoming toxic to me, but I have such a hard time not jumping into the conversation again, reading the latest thing that so-and-so wrote, putting my two cents in, and I realized that I don’t want to spend my whole life fighting for equality; I just want to be equal, and then I have other problems that are worth working on.)

I can’t describe to you the cravings I felt to go back to church, and even more, to the temple. I did go back to church a few times, and found it every bit as poisonous as when I’d left it before. I couldn’t stop reading the posts people would make about Mormonism, homosexuality, homosexuality and Mormonism, BYU, Zion, all of it, it just sucked me in. I actually plotted ways I could steal a temple recommend and go back. I’m glad I didn’t now. That would just be feeding the addiction.

In order to tolerate nicotine, your body has to develop a resistance to it. It resists and resists and then discovers there’s nothing to resist–but wait! We have all this infrastructure built for resisting! We have to have something to resist! Gimme another cigarette! (Imagine the hundreds of thousands of people who would suddenly be out of work if, in the United States, we suddenly went to a single-payer health care system: people who file claims, process claims, deny claims, stamp the claims denied, file them in appropriate places, answer the phones, and design and build the monumental structures needed to keep all this going! This health care system is killing us and we can’t get rid of it!)

I believe this is why countries in the Middle East are constantly descending into chaos: they spent so much time fighting the Ottoman Empire, they don’t know how to not fight anymore. They have to have an enemy!

And me! I spent so many years developing the tools and the practices to survive in the church, and it keeps gnawing around the edges waiting for something to chomp at, and without the church, it’s getting bored and looking for something else to chew on. Something else to judge. To resist. To fight. To endure. To survive.

Please tell me if this makes sense at all. I believe I’ve laid out here why, logically, all addictions begin with judgment, which might be the most important thought I’ve ever had in my entire life.

(PS – If you’re thinking that chemical addictions aren’t judgment, because chemicals can’t judge, I disagree. The chemicals in your body are incredibly complex, and have an emergent quality to them, like your brain does. I believe that, when you develop a resistance, tolerance, and dependency on a chemical that is bad for you, the emergent quality of your body’s chemistry lab is essentially saying “this should not be here,” in a language we don’t understand yet.)

(I’m going to operate inside of a “believing” context for this entry. This is a comment I made on a Facebook post and I’m rather proud of it so I’m putting it here for posterity.)

A True Prophet is one who speaks what he has been told to by God, without making any timid concessions to the popular opinion. I see no such thing happening from any LDS church leaders. On the other hand, the bit about them saying flattering things, and we give them our substance, gold, silver, fine clothing, and find no fault with them–that sounds a lot like present-day church leaders.

When’s the last time there was a real Revelation in the Church? Something worth adding to the D&C? I reckon it’s been a long time. Spencer W. Kimball explicitly stated that Declaration #2 wasn’t revelation; Wilford Woodruff explicitly stated that Declaration #1 wasn’t revelation. The Proclamation on the Family explicitly claims to be the opinions of the men who wrote it, and not divine in nature (hence “We […] proclaim,” “we declare,” etc.) Section 138, while nice, is an account of a personal vision given to Joseph F. Smith, which we canonized because it happened to the president of the Church. But it doesn’t contain instructions or words which he was commanded to say to the world.

How do you deal with Section 132, in which God himself (“Alpha and Omega,” v. 66) says that there is more He wishes to tell us on the subject of eternal marriage–a prophecy which has never been fulfilled or even acted upon? (v. 66 again) How do you deal with the fact that God, who knew we’d be having this debate 170 years hence, saw fit to leave the sealing promise gender-neutral? (v. 46-48) How do you explain that the Church’s position on homosexuality, which didn’t come to exist until the 1960’s, almost perfectly matches the most popular opinions of that day? Remember, Section 89 said that smoking was bad for you back when doctors thought it was good for you–that’s a character of genuine revelation. How do you explain that the best guidance of church leaders until very recently was that we gay folks should try to change, something which has, as far as I can tell, never worked? How do you account for the discrepancy between this promise, which never turned out, and other promises God has made, which did turn out?

If you’re not supposed to question the Prophet, then why does God bother giving us the Holy Ghost, or the gifts of Discernment dispensed liberally in the Temple? How will you explain yourself before God if he tells you that what you did wasn’t the right thing? Will you say you were “just following the Prophet”? Do you think God will reward you for that? If so, why? What sense does it make for God to reward you for following someone who’s been led astray?

The Astute Consumer and the Clever Hacker have been at it for ages. This week, the Astute Consumer has gone to the store and bought the new Totally Secure Computer, with the new Trusted Program Moderator, which makes it literally impossible to execute any program on the computer that hasn’t been signed by a trusted provider with their private signature.

What the Astute Consumer doesn’t know is that the Clever Hacker has found a weak spot in the computer’s design: the BIOS code is not signed, so the Clever Hacker has replaced the genuine certificate of authority for the computer with his own.

Now, here’s the really clever part: the Clever Hacker knows that if the computer steals the Astute Consumer’s credit card number on the first try, the Astute Consumer will realize the computer was compromised from day one, and take it back. But, if he’s able to make 99 transactions securely and the 100th one compromised, he will assume that the problem was on the other end. After all, he trusts his computer’s trusted authorities! They have done him right 99 times! Much easier for him to believe that the big box store’s online presence has been compromised than that his Totally Secure Computer, which has served him faithfully and securely, is ever not secure.

With any luck, the Consumer will cancel that credit card and get a new one (but not before the Clever Hacker has bought thousands of dollars of merchandise) and continue using his compromised computer. The Clever Hacker only need include a plausible delay between information thefts to maintain, for the Consumer, the illusion that his Totally Secure Computer actually is.

There are two parts to this exploit:
1. By getting in at a low enough level, anyone can become “trusted.”
2. By behaving well almost all of the time, you can easily convince the person you’re trying to fool that any bad behavior is actually coming from another actor.

Now here’s the clever part of this post: you may have thought I was talking about computers, but no, not really! I’m talking about religion.

Religion always seeks to get in at the lowest possible level: children. They may hold off on baptism until a slightly older age (though never the age of majority) but the indoctrination starts As Early As Possible. How soon after birth does a baby see his first picture of Jesus?

Religion also seeks to do people right most of the time. Individually, this is because people really do have the best of intentions and want to help people as much as possible. But institutionally, the motive is completely different: the institution does good things always and only in order to justify, excuse, and allow the bad things to continue. It does the minimum amount of good necessary to keep people coming back–to maintain trust in the eyes of its people–in order to maximize the bad it can do to people. It will only stop doing bad when faced with an existential crisis, either by driving too many people away, or under pain of sudden dissolution.

(This is one of the rare cases where it’s worth distinguishing between the church and its people, because in this case, the motivations of the whole have an emergent quality, rather than representing the motivations of all the individuals in aggregate. The church, as an entity, is motivated by the preservation of its own identity first and foremost; being right, looking good, absolving itself of responsibility, etc.)

For three years, I oversaw a small group of gay Mormons and former Mormons with weekly meetings and occasional special events. I met a lot of people in that time, and noticed a striking pattern: the desire to “reconcile” faith with sexuality seemed to be exactly inversely proportional to the severity of pain that had been inflicted on them at the hands of their church. We had people who would defend the church nearly to the death (they were most annoying) and refused to even hear the complaints of people who had actually been wronged by church leaders. There were those, on the other hand, who underwent shock treatment at BYU (yes, it happened, I’ve seen the scars on their arms) and who never wanted to see another LDS chapel, book, or person ever again–though most of them, predictably, stayed far away from our little group. The amount of hostility towards the church was completely predictable as a function of how hard the church had kicked them. The more frequent and severe the abuse was, the more likely the person was to revoke their trust of the church.

The church will continue its abusive behavior until it faces an existential crisis, such as a sufficiently large lawsuit, the loss of enough members (don’t try organizing for it; the scale required is much too large) or other colleges refusing to play against BYU because of their policies.