Up the Irons: A Personal Tribute to Iron Maiden

It was pretty much pre-ordained that I was going to be a rock'n'roller.   When I was just seven a friend of my older brother introduced me to Alice Cooper and "School's Out."  If there is a hard rock song out there accessible to a seven year old, it has to be that one. 

           

            No more teachers, no more books

            No more teachers dirty looks...

            School's been blown to pieces

I could relate, you want I mean?

I don't remember the guy's name, even what he looked like, but I still remember exactly what his room looked like. It was in the basement with not much light and wallpapered with rock posters.  He  had a picture of Donny Osmond on his dart board.  And he had an Alice Cooper poster that probably looked like this:

It was this or Donny Osmond

And I remember the guy telling me that Alice Cooper had a certificate proving he was insane.  It made sense to me--who on Earth would change their name to  girl's name?  Ugh! 

Then, in England, another older friend introduced me to Queen, playing some tracks he liked from Queen II.  This was just before Queen hit superstardom with "Bohemian Rhapsody" and they were still very much an underground band.  Although, at ten, I was too young to really "get" Queen, I had never heard anything like Freddie Mercury's operatic vocals, and, as a student of classical piano, the symphonic sound appealed to me.

Note the lighting effect to hide the fact that they are all butt-ugly.

 Then, as a teenager, I was at a party when someone played a song that started with the immortal Vincent Price intoning "Woe to you, O Earth and Sea, for the Devil sends the Breast with wrath..."  That went into a frenetic, galloping sonic assault called "The Number of the Beast."  Pretty mellow in comparison to later bands like Metallica and Avenged Sevenfold, but by contemporary standards, this was sheer heaviness.   I was hooked right away.  Soon after, they even got radio play (rare for a heavy metal band at the times) with "Run to the Hills."

Where would people get the idea that Iron Maiden was Satanic?

Iron Maiden was one of the earliest concerts I went to.  These guys put everything into their live show and toured relentlessly.  I saw them four times in as many years, I think.  They always had the greatest productions and put 110% into every show.  I was never disappointed. Well except maybe when they hired Twisted Sister to back them up.  Poor Dee Schneider, Twisted Sister's singer, got beaked by a pizza box when he played in Vancouver. No offence, Dee, but that nose of yours was an easy target.

See what I mean, with the schozz?

The lads in concert.

Iron Maiden's musical style again appealed to my classical sensibilities from all those years of piano.  (By now I'd switched to guitar, much to my mom's chagrin, but bless her soul, she went out an bought me an electric guitar.)  Most of the heavy rock'n'roll up to that time--Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Aerosmith--was based on the pentatonic, or five-note, scale that gave it that blues-oriented feel.  Iron Maiden guitarists Adrian Smith and Dave Murray used the classical seven-note scale, primarily in the minor keys, combined with complex guitar harmonies.  The rhythm section--Steve Harris on bass and Nicko McBrain on drums--were fast and incredibly tight.  And Bruce Dickinson, the singer, had incredible range and power and leaned into every syllable.  He also had a great sense of dynamics building from a baritone growl to a gut-wrenching scream.

Steve Harris, the bass player, was also the band's primary songwriter.  They got into a lot of trouble with "Number of the Beast" as  a band of Satanists, and their records were promptly burned in some areas of the southern US.  But (unlike, say, Alice Cooper) their entire stage presence and songwriting wasn't exclusively dedicated to evil.  Even if you listen to their "horror" songs, lyrically they are more akin to, say, an Edgar Allen Poe story than "Let's all go get bent and worship the devil." 

Many of their best songs were actually about wars.  The Trooper is based on the Charge of the Light Brigade, an epic poem about the Crimean War. Aces High is about World War II flying aces.  And Run to the Hills is about the war between the North American Indians and white settlers from Europe.  They’ve also done heavy metal versions of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and the old British TV classic The Prisoner.  Quite eclectic.

Iron Maiden went out with the 80s.  A new age of metal heralded by Slayer, Pantera and especially Metallica, with a more raw, heavier sound and without the spandex.  Iron Maiden suffered from association with the 80s hair bands, which was unfortunate.  Iron Maiden pushed musical boundaries and were one of the hardest working acts in rock'n'roll.  They deservedly enjoyed a resurgence in the early 2000s, selling out stadiums again world-wide.  Sure there were more beer guts and balding pates in the crowd, and their sound was now decidedly "retro," but good music never dies.  And Iron Maiden was, in my opinion anyway, a bright spot in the cultural dead zone that was the music of the 80s.

While other rock stars were busy picking up various drug addictions, Bruce Dickinson was busy becoming an internationally competitive fencer and a jumbo jet pilot.  In 2006, Dickinson flew in a Boeing 757 and rescued about 200 stranded British citizens caught in Lebanon during the Israel/Hezbollah crisis.  

Flight 666.  

My son watched the Iron Maiden documentary Flight 666 about five times on a flight from Vancouver to Cape Breton, and was quite enamored with Bruce Dickinson.  So as for Oscar having a role model who's a rock, star, swordfighter and heroic pilot--I'm OK with that.

Have a listen to Maiden playing "Run to the Hills" at Rock in Rio" in 2001.  To a crowd of 350,000.  Incredible energy.   Up the Irons!

The Myth of the Mainstream Media Bias

One of the prevailing myths on the political right these days is the liberal Mainstream Media (MSM).  That is the notion that most mass media disproportionately represent a liberal viewpoint.  The further one goes right from the centre, the more fervently this belief is held.

This idea is not peculiar to the right-wing.  There's examples of similar accusations of systemic media bias from the left too; the idea that the media represent corporate or political interests.  But most of the noise, at least right now, is coming from the political right.

As President of the (then infamous) University of British Columbia Engineers student body back in the mid-fourteenth century, I had some regrettable dealings with UBC's student newspaper, the Ubyssey.  I don't think I've ever run into a pack of misanthropic leftists since.  The student Engineers--brash, male-dominated, headed for prosperous careers building weapons and destroying the environment-- represented everything to be loathed by those folks, I suppose.  Not that the Engineers of UBC were angels; I and we did plenty to deserve some (but not all) of the bad press we got.  The gentle reporters at the Ubyssey may have espoused grand egalitarian ideas, but on a personal level they were just mean.  They would spend their evenings redacting the "Engineers" jacket logo from old university file photos.  Their explanation was they wanted everyone to look "representative"; the same.   Meanwhile they've got rings through their noses and their hair dyed pink.  I think the irony was lost on them.

Here's an old newspaper picture of me, as President of the UBC Enigneers,
returning the Rose Bowl we allegedly borrowed from the '92-93 Washington Hsukies.

Anyways, all that to say, if anyone should be predisposed to the idea of a liberal media, it would be me after that experience.  But I'm not convinced.

If the MSM are liberal, then why is FOX news the top-rated cable news network in the US?   Why do right-wing pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Charles Adler rule the radio ratings?   Why did virtually every major newspaper in Canada endorse the Conservatives in the last election?  It's not obvious to me that the MSM are liberal, though I'm a liberal myself, so I may not be seeing things with an unjaundiced eye.

So, I do what all good science-types do.  I went out to examine any academic studies on the subject.  Turns out there's loads. 

The one most often cited by proponents of the "liberal MSM" is a 1986 book called The Media Elite in which the authors--political science academics-- surveyed journalists and found that they tended to be more liberal, on average, than the general population.  I'm not surprised by that, actually.  I imagine a similar study conducted for, say, bank managers would find that they tend to be more fiscally conservative than the general population.  Engineers, also, are apparently given to have more conservative viewpoints.  Or so I've been told.

Let's assume that the study in The Media Elite was conducted impartially. So, even accepting that journalists tend to be liberal, does it necessarily follow that the MSM will necessarily be biased left?  I think that's speculation.  After all,   journalists don't decide what goes in a newspaper or on the air.  The owner ultimately gets to  decide that.  And media magnates like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black don't strike me as the most liberal guys. 

It's also worth noting that the book was written before the advent of the internet, the blogosphere and cable news outlets such as CNN and FOX.  Viewers now have coverage of news 24/7 and access to thousands upon thousands of news sources from which to choose, each applying its own angle.  Consequently, I would argue, the line between news and opinion has become more blurred than ever.  And scandals by various "respectable" news outlet mean that not even the staid old giants such as the national newspapers have the appeal to authority that they used to.

The right-wing is not alone in their accusations of bias.  Noam Chomsky, in his highly cited work, Manufacturing Consent, established and tested his theory of a the Propaganda Model and concluded that the media were essentially acting as an arm of established political and economic (e.g. advertising) interests.   He measures "column inches" of coverage of various issues and finds that "deserving victims" (those portrayed as victims by the US government, such as people in Communist regimes) got more press than "undeserving victims" (such as victims of US-supported right-wing dictators in South America).  I read that book but I never found his argument that convincing.  While reading his book, I could think of several counter-examples to his model.

Chomsky's book had the same fatal flaw I find with just about every study I've seen on media impartiality.  When these studies are conducted by those with a conservative ethos, they see the media as having a liberal slant, and vice versa.  It's just another form of advocacy science that is slowly subsuming science and the quaint idea of intellectual honesty and objectivity these days.

One problem I noted is that the studies almost always concern contemporary US politics . There is no historical or geopolitical context.  Is the media biased in other countries?  Has the US media always been biased liberal?  What about government-owned news outlets such as the CBC in Canada?  Or the Xinhua news agency in China?  Is the Chinese media liberal?  Does the term "liberal" even make any sense in that context?  To me this lack of any context is an indication that most of these so-called scholarly inquiries are political in nature

Another problem with almost all most of the studies is that --surprise, surprise--that so-called scholarly inquiries into media bias tended to confirm preconceived biases of those undertaking the study.  Studies by conservative think tanks concluded that the MSM were liberal, and studies by liberal think tanks found the news slanted to the right.   

Yes, we're introducing an old nemesis of this blog: advocacy science.  And the fundamental theorem of advocacy science:  Torture the data long enough and it will confess to anything.   (No that's not my line, but I wish it were!) 

I also checked Wikipedia, more for a laugh than anything.  Sure enough, their article on media bias is quite a hodgepodge, and a visit over the "talk" page for the article shows why.  It's full of people decrying the article in particular and Wikipedia in general as having a liberal or conservative bias.

And let's say that a Perfectly Objective Observer managed to conduct a Perfectly Objective study that determined irrefutably that, yes indeed, the MSM were liberal, or that the MSM were conservative.  What then?  Pass a law?  You do not want to go there.  Shame them?  If the media had a conscience there wouldn't be paparazzi.  Or start your own media enterprise--which is exactly what has happened with the blogosphere.

The fact is that if you are right-wing you will see a Perfectly Objective news item (if there were such a thing) as slanted left.  The further right you are, the more slanted it will seem.  If you fail to account for the fact that you are a biased viewer, if you assume that you are a Perfectly Objective Observer, then you will likely draw a false conclusion.  It's the Theory of Relativity applied to politics.

There's a political motivation as well.  Complain about a liberal bias, or a conservative bias, loud and long enough and maybe people will start to believe you, and maybe you can create the perception of bias even where none exists.   Maybe, if you can get enough followers or if you can get folks like Sarah Palin to run with the baton, you can even get media outlets to consciously swing their news to your political viewpoint, to counter the perception of bias.  So part of the "liberal MSM" movement is probably aimed at trying to move the "centre" towards the right.

Newspapers and networks are highly competitive enterprises.  Taking political viewpoints as a typical bell curve, the most profit is to be made by appealing to the centre. You can create niche markets to the left and right of centre, but that gets more difficult as you approach the fringes.  People who own media companies are interested in making lots of money--no surprise there.  You don't make lots of money by appealing to the fringes of the bell curve. You make lots of money by printing a paper that appeals to preconceived beliefs.  A buxom beauty on Page 3 doesn't hurt either.

Entropy and the Origin of Life

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, states that the universe moves from order to disorder.  To the initiate, this would seem to contradict a common observation:  that life systems in general and humans in particular move from a disordered state to an ordered state.  Life seems to move in opposition to entropy.  If the universe moves towards disorder, how, then, does life evolve? These are questions that early researchers in thermodynamics, such as Schrödinger and Prigogine, asked themselves.

In fact, we can see order spontaneously created from disorder around us all the time.  When water starts to go down the drain in the tub, for example, you will see a little whirlpool (vortex in physics-speak) form around the drain.  

Order spontaneously created from Disorder.

Or when a heated solution moves from mere conduction heat transfer to heat transfer through convection cells.  Or when you flick a super-saturated solution of copper sulphate in water and the whole test-tube freezes as the copper sulphate crystallizes. In each case, when faced with a large energy gradient, an organized structure (vortex, convection cell, crystal lattice) spontaneously formed.  So spontaneous organization is not peculiar to life.

What is required in each case is the energy gradient (potential energy from the height of the water in the case of the vortex, heat in the case of the convection cell and concentration in the case of the copper sulphate solution).  The system "wants" to maintain its equilibrium, and the most efficient way it can do this is by organizing itself to dissipate the energy gradient and return to equilibrium.  Order can only appear from disorder if there is an energy gradient to exploit.

In complexity theory, these are known as self-organizing dissipative structures.  "Dissipative" because they "seek" to dissipate the energy gradient and return the system to equilibrium.  These organized systems that spontaneously appear are, in fact, low entropy.  However they only decrease entropy locally, and only in order to more efficiently increase entropy globally.

Moving up in scale, the planet Earth is subject to a huge energy gradient, namely the massive influx of energy from the sun. Recall that exergy is a measure of the quality of energy, the availability of that energy to do something useful.  The energy gradient, or Exergy, is basically a measure of distance of a system from equilibrium.  At equilibrium, exergy is zero. The system (Earth) receives a exergy from the sun in the form of electromagnetic radiation (mainly heat and light).  The system responds in a way to dissipate that exergy, to move it towards zero (equilibrium). 

So taken on their own, humans and other life forms are indeed a reversal in the tendency towards increased entropy.  However, taken within the context of the system as a whole (Earth-Sun system) we are actually increasing the rate of the entropy.  From a thermodynamic perspective, we are self-organized dissipative structures seeking to dissipate the exergy from the sun.

The late Waterloo professor James Kay wrote extensively about non-equilibrium thermodynamics and self-organizing systems.  He cites studies where an overflying aircraft with thermal multispectral analysis capability measures the "canopy temperature" of different ecosystems, including an astroturf field, a mowed lawn, a farmers field, and a complex rainforest ecosystem.  The surface temperature of the rainforest ecosystem was the coolest, indicating that the most complex ecosystem was also the most efficient at using the incoming solar exergy.  The astroturf was the warmest, because there are no life systems (such as photosynthesis) to effectively use the incoming solar radiation.  The rainforest, conversely, had a rich array of life systems to effectively use all the incoming solar energy.

A human being, I have heard said, is an organism that takes perfectly good food and manufactures it into crap.  That is one way we increase entropy.  We also must keep the furnaces of our bodies going, so we constantly generate about as much heat as a 100 W light bulb. On a social level we increase the disorder of the environment around us in order to increase order of our societies.  We take low-entropy bound carbon in oil and release it as very high-entropy gaseous oxidized carbon, for example. We know from the Second Law of Thermodynamics that the amount of disorder we create in the environment is greater than the amount of order we reap (thus, globally, entropy increases).

It’s a great theory and make s a lot of intuitive sense. 

However, I was left wondering:  the energy gradient due to the sun on the planet Mercury is far greater than that of Earth, yet as far as we know, there is no life on Mercury, no super-high level of self-organizing dissipating systems. Same with Venus.  So why only Earth? 

Schrödinger hypothesized that self-organizing dissipative systems only happen within a "window of vitality."  Too little exergy and there is not enough of a gradient to drive the creation of a self-organizing dissipative system.  Too much energy and the system is overcome and becomes chaotic.  But nobody has been able to develop, to my knowledge, any of the science around what the limits of the window of vitality are. 

Until then, the theory of life as a self-organizing dissipative system remains and enticing idea, but it is missing a crucial link.

You Are Free to Think What You Will of This

We have, in Canada, enshrined in our Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Charter, among other things, guarantees any person in Canada certain fundamental freedoms including: freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. 

Canada, unlike the US, also has a limitations clause (Section 1), that these freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."  For instance, inciting hatred against identifiable groups or publishing child pornography are not protected by these fundamental freedoms.

I must admit to be a little puzzled at Freedom of Thought.  What would Canada look like if that particular fundamental freedom were removed?  After all the state has no idea what someone is thinking and no definitive way to find out.

As there is and never has been any state power over thought, why include it as a freedom?  Even North Korea, which controls every facet of its peoples' lives, cannot know or control what those people are thinking.  Sure the serfs prostrate themselves before Kim Jon Il's portraits, but how do the rulers know that the guy in the seventeenth row, fifth one in, isn't thinking, while groveling, "Geez, what a douchebag."

How would they possibly regulate thought anyway?  Without Freedom of Thought, I suppose they could constitutionally pass a law making it illegal to imagine a colander.  Wouldn't that be interesting.  Were they imagining a future where the imagination could be read, and safeguarding against that?  Were the writers of the Charter mindful of Orwell's of "Thoughtcrime" in his cautionary tale 1984?  What were they thinking?

I also note that the Canadian Constitution contains no right to life itself. Interesting.   The founding ideals of the American Declaration of Independence are the rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  (Just the pursuit of happiness; apparently actual happiness is unconstitutional.)  Compare that to steadfast, boring old Canada's ultimate ideals of "peace order and good governance."  Interesting.

In a related note does anyone know the difference between a right and a freedom?  I was once told that a freedom guarantees that the state will not interfere (so if you say you don't like the current government, they will not, for example, arrest you), whereas a right is a guarantee the state will interfere (so the state will actively intervene against others threatening your freedom of expression).

This seemed to make intuitive sense to me, however I ran into some folks who were offended by that interpretation because it defined rights and freedoms in reference to the State.  Fundamental rights and freedoms, they argued, arose not from the State but from being human. This is expressed in the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."  Beautifully written. 

So, this view holds, despite the fact that a given state does not grant human rights (such as in Syria, where the security forces have turned on their own citizens to horrific effect), those people still have these fundamental rights and freedoms.  A fat lot of good it does them; a right won't stop a bullet.

If a person is born with these rights--if they are, in fact, unalienable--then where are they?  I can see a baby's nose and her cute little toes. I can hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth.  But in which toe can I find the right to freedom of conscience?  What instrument can I use to find the gene that expresses her freedom of belief?

The idea that we are born with these rights is essentially metaphysical.  A human right, by this definition, is not rational, but metaphysical.  A freedom is not empirical, but ineffable. 

More importantly, who put that freedom there?  Where did it come from?  Societal mores and ethics change incredibly over time and space--every virtue was once vice and vice versa.  Yet these Human Rights are specific, unyielding, and absolute.  (NB Brad H--note the use of the Oxford comma!)  To my mind then, you can't say that every human is born with human rights without positing the existence of an Absolute Good, which is tantamount to God.  Perhaps that is why ,in its preamble, the Constitution of Canada recognizes the supremacy of God.  It's an inexorable precursor to an unalienable human right.

The Darwinian approach to rights is different.  In this model rights started out as good ideas, which grew to habits, and evolved to tradition, and then were codified in law and ultimately became morals.   The idea here is that morals are "good" because civilizations that adopted these morals were more successful than civilizations that did not.  There is, for example, a commandment that says "Thou shalt not kill."  My brother is a bit of a biblical scholar and he informed me that a more accurate translation would be "Thou shalt not murder."  Every high-functioning civilization I can think of makes allowances to kill--war being the classic example. 

However, a society cannot function if people can kill each other arbitrarily, without consent from the state.  So the prohibition against murder makes a society, from a Darwinian perspective, more fit to survive.  I would argue (without having the time to research this extensively) that contemporary states that that assert fundamental human rights are more successful, in terms of both peace, order and good governance and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Historian Will Durant agrees:

The development of external danger and competition unified the members of a group into some measure of fellow-feeling (sympathy), group-feeling (kindness), sociability, and mutual aid; those simple virtues... were really social necessities for group survival; and the strange paradox appeared that the very violence of competition and strife among societies was the cause of cooperation and peace within; it was war, or the possibility of war, that make morality, as it made morale. ...In the light of this biological approach it becomes sufficiently obvious that the natural and inevitable basis and definition of morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole

Nietzsche made a differentiation between the two types of good.  There's good=successful, as in being a "good hockey player," and there's good=virtuous as in being a "good man."  The Darwinian model says that rights and freedoms are good in the former sense; the Absolute Good model, in the latter sense. 

This is exemplified in the doves versus hawk game in fundamental games theory.  A dove will never fight for food and a hawk will always fight for food.  The perfect civilization would be all doves, but it is unstable; a single hawk would wreak havoc.  John Lennon could have sung "Imagine being able to perpetuate indefinitely the unstable solution of an all-dove society."  Hard to rhyme I guess.  The optimal solution is a some mixture of hawks and doves based on the boundary conditions.

In the Darwinian model, the precursor to human rights is the effective rule of law (law, being essentially, codified morality).  And I also note that the other ideal, besides the supremacy of God, to which the Constitution of Canada commits itself in its preamble is "the rule of law."  They covered both bases--the Absolute Good model and the Darwinian model!  Maybe those drafters of the Constitution are more clever than I give them credit for.  But I still have my questions about Freedom of Thought.  You're free to think what you will of that.

And the White House Burned Burned Burned (But the Americans Won't Admit It)

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

   -- Michael Scott, The Office

Canada is celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812 this year. All year.  In 1812, the United States declared war on Britain for various stated reasons, none of which included conquering Canada.  Then they promptly tried to conquer Canada (or what was then known as Upper and Lower Canada, to be specific).  The British forces, allied Indian tribes and Canadian militia repelled several attacks by the US. Ten American armies invaded Canada.  Ten armies were sent home.

Read all about it on Wikipedia.  The article itself insists that the war was a tie or that all sides (except the Indians) won. It’s quite a little rah-rah piece if you’re an American, waxing poetic about great feats of the nascent American navy against those nasty British.  The idea that the US would invade Canada for reasons as base as US expansionism is dismissed.  Americans?  Expand?  Fie!  The Americans had no interest in Canada at all, and were quite surprised to find themselves there!  Sure Thomas Jefferson said that conquerig Canada was a mere matter of marching--but he was talking about a game of Risk.  And I'm sure that if one of the reasons the US declared war was to snatch Canada while Britain was busy with Napolean, then the politicians at the time would have said so.

The Talk page that accompanies every Wikipedia article forbids any more discussion about who won the war.  Not that that stops anyone; it's practically the only topic of conversation, and even when not being discussed directly is not far below the surface influencing everything.  Mostly filled with outraged blustering Canadians and gormless Americans shocked--shocked--that anyone would accuse them of bias.

One outraged commentator insists that Wikipedia “is not a popularity contest.”  Really?  I beg to differ.  That is exactly what Wikipedia is.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the first step to recovery is acceptance. Acceptance that, yes,  Wikipedia is a popularity contest.  Anyone (in principle) can change an article, so it stands to reason that, given equal zeal, the side with the greater numbers will eventually see the article they want to see. 

And just about every wiki commentator swears up and down that he is not biased, and is just taking time out of his busy day as a Perfectly Objective Observer to correct bias he sees.  Hogswash and Codswallop!  We’re all biased.  I’m biased.  Do you think, if I were a Nepalese Buddhist monk, I’d be cruising the “Talk” page of the War of 1812 Wikipedia entry?  I wouldn't be getting snippy right now if my (biased) Canadian nationalist sensibilities were not offended. The very fact that I am reading the piece at all means that I have some interest in the subject.  


Yes, we’re all biased.  But that's not the problem. The problem is when we refuse to admit as much.

Wikipedia is a great place to learn about a Taylor series expansion or what a pancreas does.  But head on over to controversial social, cultural or political topics and there's a roiling thunderstorm underneath that clean Wikipedia front, a subterranean world populated by folks with sensitivities as delicate as a desert orchid, and the zeal of a Jehovah Witness on speed.

And so, behind the scenes a the War of 1812 page, the arguments go on and on and on and on.  And this is some relatively obscure war from 200 years ago.  You should see the pages regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.  Those articles are clenched up tighter than Rick Santorum’s buttcheeks at a Gay Parade, and it’s a real bunfight over in  the Talk pages.

But you have to remember that this is the Era of the Internet; we live in a post-objective world and Rule 1 in the Post-Objective World is:

Not  a bad definition really.  I don’t think philosophers have managed all that much better as far as a workable definition of truth goes.  After all, we say that a  psychotic is suffering “delusions” based solely on the fact that he is experiencing a reality that is not shared by the consensus.  Conversely, if nine out of ten people tell you that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings, then the truth is that Fiddy Cent is flying around in a pink tutu and fairy wings. And the War of 1812 was a tie.

I've submitted an edit to the War of 1812 page (it, like most popular Wikipedia pages is locked, and you have to submit to some anonymous person somewhere to make a change) mentioning the results of a recent poll (where Canadians rate victory in the War of 1812 second only to universal health care as defining their national identity), and also pointing out that Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie released a popular song in Canada called "The White House Burned (The War of 1812)" that pokes fun at Amercian sensitivity on the outcome of the war.  We'll fly that one up the flagpole and see who salutes, so to speak.

I’ll let you know how it goes:

Here’s the refrain the song:

And the white house burned, burned, burned.

But the Americans won't admit it,

It burned, burned, burned.

While the president ran and cried,

It burned, burned, burned.

And things were very historical,

And the Americans ran and cried like a bunch of little babies (Wah-Wah-Wah)

In the war of 1812.

Anyways just in case you thought Wikipedia was bad, check out Cracked.com Terrifying Bastardizations of the Wikipedia Model  just for lulz.


Edit:  For clarification, I'm not suggesting that Canadians (or Upper Canada militia) burned Washington.  My understanding is that the British Navy burned Washington, and there were probably as many Upper Canada militiamen involved as there were impressed American seamen, i.e. not many.  I'm sure Three Dead Trolls knows this too.