June 2010

Joe vs. the Logical Volcano

By in fresh hell, media/propaganda, samesecks No Comments

Joe Klein, furiously humping Glenn Greenwald’s leg:

Greenwald — who, so far as I can tell, only regards the United States as a force for evil in the world — has laid out the incredible notion that the liberation of the Kurds, which Jeff celebrates (and so do I, and so do civilized people everywhere) as a happy byproduct of George W. Bush’s dreadful war in Iraq, can be compared to the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland . . . .This is obscene.

Joe Klein, previously:

“I’m entirely depressed about the state of my craft. Newspapers and magazines are losing readers, young people aren’t reading them. You know, I watch as my colleagues get laid off and fired — it’s kind of like being gay in 1982, half the people I know are dying, they’re being, you know, they’re being cut off.”

Joe really, really seems to be unclear on the concept of analogies.

No, Nothing

By in alan watts, atheism, augean stables, ohferfucksake, religion, science No Comments

Figure-and-ground, then, constitute a relationship — an inseparable relationship of unity-in-diversity. But when human beings become preoccupied with concentrated attentiveness, with a type of thought which is analytic, divisive and selective, the cease to notice the mutuality of contrasting “things” and the “identity” of differences. Similarly, when we ask what we really mean by a fact or a thing, we realize that because facts are divisions or selections of experience, there can never be less than two! One solitary fact or thing cannot exist by itself, since it would be infinite — without delineating limits, without anything other. Now this essential duality and multiplicity of facts should be the clearest evidence of their interdependence and inseparability.

The naive idea that there is first of all empty space and then things filling it underlies the classic problem of how the world came out of something. Now the problem has to be rephrased, “How did something-and-nothing come out of…what?”

— Alan Watts

 

I thought Ron Rosenbaum was somewhat of an idiot last year. It is with a heavy heart that I say unto you that eight months later, he’s still an idiot. PZ already said most of what needs to be said, but I thought this part could been seen as the fatuous essence of Rosenbaum’s tirade:

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

I can’t speak for anyone else, believer or not, but leaving aside the fact that I have no problem admitting that I don’t know the answer, I don’t particularly care. Life as we know it exists, and that’s good enough for me. Postulating a single cause of it all only makes us ask how that itself could have been uncaused. Even asking the question “why” poses the risk of taking for granted the existence of purpose as we understand it where there is none to begin with. The absence of an absolutely certain answer does not therefore mean that any alternative that someone can dream up is equally valid; some possibilities are clearly more likely than others. And even if we do assume that science and logic can’t answer the question, how does that change the fact that absolutely nothing we do know about the universe suggests the existence of any God worth the name? Science doesn’t have the answer, I don’t think it ever will, therefore possibly God, therefore agnosticism, Q to tha E to tha muthafuckin’ D?

Listening to Rosenbaum deride the limitations of logic in an essay filled with this sort of fallacious reasoning makes me think of the kind of person who calls tech support, screaming about their shitty computer that won’t work, when they’re too stupid to check and see if it’s plugged in first.

U.S.UCK.

By in jests japes jokes jollies, world football No Comments

One emailer wrote:

I’m actually having a little bit of an existential crisis with this US-Ghana match—I really appreciate the Ghana team and two of my most fantastic colleagues are Ghanaian. I’ll have to muster every little ounce of fleeting nationalistic sentiment I posses to cheer for team USA.

I suggested he watch the game on ESPN. That experience will drive even the most die-hard American fans into Ghana’s camp.

— Ken Silverstein

That’s really funny. At one point, perhaps when Ian Darke, the British half (!) of the broadcast team, said late in the game that he and his wife would celebrate with champagne if the U.S. managed to eke out a win, I found myself wondering if that idiot from Gawker had put up a post complaining about the ridiculously pro-U.S. cheerleading from the commentary booth. If I had a million dollars to bet, I’d put it all on “No”.

It honestly doesn’t bother me too much, because most of the commentary is just inane chatter anyway, from the useless trivia and statistic-mongering that passes for analysis in the studio, to the actual patter during the game. I usually just tune it out for the most part. But really, listening to Darke and John Harkes ceaselessly attempt over 120 minutes to give themselves pep talks after the U.S. fell behind early yet again was a bit tiring. It didn’t help that most of the game, especially the first half, was some of the most sleep-inducing shit imaginable. I’ve taken antihistamines that didn’t make me feel that drowsy. I agree with what Silverstein said before — I don’t view sports as just another excuse to have the same old political arguments, so I don’t root for or against teams based on those issues. The U.S., though, is just frequently excruciating to watch. I don’t hate watching them because of George Bush or our foreign wars or anything like that, I hate watching them because they simply reek. I can’t count how many times I saw four or five players just standing around like spectators when a teammate had the ball in the midfield. No runs off the ball, no sharp passing, just terrible stuff.

Anyway, as far as the chatter goes, Harkes’s Joisy accent is the hardest thing for me to tolerate. He was one of many kids from New Jersey who formed the core of the U.Va. teams when Bruce Arena was the coach there during the eighties and early nineties (with Bob Bradley as his assistant). Another one of them became my high school coach several years after his college career was over, so listening to Harkes reminds me all too much of the angry tirades we had to hear then.

Hopefully, now that the U.S. is done, the worst of it is over.

Update: Hahahaha. To answer my own question, no, of course not, the idiot from Gawker was not at all bothered by hearing a steady stream of rah-rah biased pom-pom waving from supposedly neutral announcers, but he was terribly vexed by a blatant example of malingering from a Ghana player late in extra time, even though the referee adds additional time to account for such things, and despite the fact that it didn’t affect the outcome anyway. Given that such displays of bad sportsmanship are indeed worth getting angry over, however, I assume my good friend is also boiling hot over other examples, such as Landon Donovan’s periodic playacting (I seem to recall one particularly impressive corkscrew dive in the first half after a routine knock on his ankle) and his frequent attempts (not just in this game) to urge the referee to issue yellow or red cards to opposing players — the equivalent of being a whiny snitch or a tattletale in regular life — or seeing Jozy Altidore, built like a tank, going down faster than a slut’s knickers, as the Brits like to say, at the slightest contact.

What’s that, you say? He couldn’t care less? It’s only a problem when other teams do it? All that matters is that he was deprived of a chance to bellow AMERICA FUCK YEAH WOOOHOOO BABY SUCK IT FOREIGNERS!!!!

What a shock. Well, at least he managed to refrain from calling for cruise missiles to be launched at Ghana. Baby steps, baby steps.

A Herd, I Heard Discouraging Words

By in books, calvin and hobbes, writing No Comments

So for anyone who has, however briefly, played that reviled gatekeeper role, a darker question arises: What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?
Ahem! Some reclusive genius on the Internet once said:

[…] Yes, they certainly can publish a blog or even a book through a place like Lulu.com, but as anyone who has toured the blogosphere knows, there’s a whole lotta nobodies out there with a whole lotta nothin’ to say (and I certainly include myself in that description). Nobody has the time and patience to sift through the oceans of misspelled and poorly crafted essays and novellas online, just like nobody sits and listens to countless thousands of mp3s of various garage bands online. Anyone who does will be quickly begging for editors, publishers, anything to force some sort of Spencerian survival of the fittest into effect.

More good stuff from Miller’s essay, though:

People who have never had the job of reading through the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts sent to anyone even remotely connected with publishing typically have no inkling of two awful facts: 1) just how much slush is out there, and 2) how really, really, really, really terrible the vast majority of it is. Civilians who kvetch about the bad writing of Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer or any other hugely popular but critically disdained novelist can talk as much trash as they want about the supposedly low standards of traditional publishing. They haven’t seen the vast majority of what didn’t get published — and believe me, if you have, it’s enough to make your blood run cold, thinking about that stuff being introduced into the general population.

[…] Furthermore, as observers like Chris Anderson (in “The Long Tail”) and social scientists like Sheena Iyengar (in her new book “The Art of Choosing”) have pointed out, when confronted with an overwhelming array of choices, most people do not graze more widely. Instead, if they aren’t utterly paralyzed by the prospect, their decisions become even more conservative, zeroing in on what everyone else is buying and grabbing for recognizable brands because making a fully informed decision is just too difficult and time-consuming. As a result, introducing massive amounts of consumer choice leads to situations in which the 10 most popular items command the vast majority of the market share, while thousands of lesser alternatives must divide the leftovers into many tiny portions.

I make an effort to find different writers and bloggers on a regular basis; I’ve always hated how insular so much of the blogosphere is, with most people linking to the same few sources over and over again. But it’s unfortunately true that there are many days when I spend hours looking to see if anything interesting has been written about this or that topic, only to end up weary and dejected afterward, with nothing to show for my effort. Sometimes it’s because there’s nothing but drivel out there, other times it’s because there’s simply too much to go through.

And I laughed at this part:

It seriously messes with your head to read slush. Being bombarded with inept prose, shoddy ideas, incoherent grammar, boring plots and insubstantial characters — not to mention ton after metric ton of clichés — for hours on end induces a state of existential despair that’s almost impossible to communicate to anyone who hasn’t been there themselves: Call it slush fatigue.

I’m still sometimes horrified to realize that countless hours of reading online has made it so that I sometimes have to stop and consciously think about how to spell certain words or form certain phrases because I’ve seen them done incorrectly so goddamned many times. I can only imagine what it would be like to be a real editor.

Full Metal Jackoffs

By in germans supported their troops too, media/propaganda, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

I finally read about it to see what all the hubbub was about, and came away unimpressed. Your mileage may vary. But Digby and her commenters are outraged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal doesn’t respect the president’s authoritah. There’s a lot of overcompensating dick-swinging going on, a lot of demands for Obama to unscrew McChrystal’s head and shit down his neck and prove once and for all that Democrats can be just as macho and virile as anyone else, but I still don’t have any sense of what they think “the strategy” is that McChrystal is undermining with his dolschtoss. Does this mean that we’re not going to be blowing up more civilians with drone attacks? Is this going to add some irreparable cracks to the imperial foundation? And I’m supposed to be upset about this? I guess they can’t find a clever way to call for endless sacrifice of “blood and treasure” in the name of laptop and BlackBerry batteries, so they’re reduced to spouting authoritarian platitudes about the chain of command and the need for America to face the world with a united resolve, etc.

It’s not really a surprise, of course. Digby, of course, supported Wesley Clark’s bid for the presidency in 2004, which was based entirely on him using his status as a four-star general to challenge the authority and execution of Bush’s wars (and back then, much of the tepid criticism of the wars was that they were being waged “incompetently”; apparently, mass murder is fine for some people as long as it’s done efficiently with a minimum of fuss and bad press). The entire pwoggie blogosphere spent the rest of that year stroking themselves into an jizzlobbing frenzy over what a “war hero” John Kerry was in Vietnam, and how serving as a foot solider in a national shame of a war made him the best choice for being Commander-in-Chief of two others. And when those efforts were all for naught, they spent the next few years desperately hoping for any other dissidents in the military brass to come out and openly denounce Bush and Cheney, while railing against them as traitors for outing a brave, honorable CIA agent (!) who was only trying to protect us from Iran and their nuclear weapons by gathering legitimate intelligence. Now that Republicans are out of office, the rhetoric has shifted away from the immorality of our foreign policy toward what Digby likes to call “the optics”: how does this play in Peoria? How does it affect Obama’s re-election chances? Does this reinforce the media narrative about Democrats being wimps and hippies? Oh, if only the Villagers would quit being mean to Democrats! Lost in the shuffle is any concern for what, exactly, we’re doing still stumbling around in the Graveyard of Empires to begin with.

As Glenn Beck might point out, there’s only thirteen letters separating “D” from “R”, which is the same number of letters in the word “authoritarian”! Coincidence? Or numerological truth?!

Omnipresence

By in waiting for the barbarians, world football No Comments

At the start of every game so far in the World Cup, the commentators always take a moment to say something along the lines of:

“We’d like to welcome the men and women in uniform serving around the world who are watching today’s broadcast of the FIFA World Cup in 175 countries on AFN, American Forces Network. Hope you enjoy today’s broadcast.”

We have at least a token military presence of some sort in 175 countries? I realize that doesn’t necessarily mean soldiers and bases and tanks and warplanes, etc., but still. There’s only about 195 nations in total!

Something Monastic

By in bonsai minimalism, foolosophy, santutthi, writing No Comments

For many of us who love the act of writing—even when we are writing against a deadline with an editor waiting for the copy—there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other reader.

[…] I am not saying that writers need to be or ought to be isolated, either from other writers or from the reading public at large. But writers must to some degree believe that they are alone with their own words. And writers who are alone with their words will quite naturally, from time to time, conclude that some of those words should remain private.

[…] What I fear is that many readers are coming to believe that a writer who holds something back from publication is somehow acting unnaturally. Nobody understands the extent to which, even for the widely acclaimed author with ready access to publication, the process of writing can sometimes necessitate a rejection or at least an avoidance of one’s own readers. That silence is a part of writing—that the work of this day or this week or even this year might for good reason be withheld—is becoming harder and harder to comprehend.

— Jed Perl

I, of course, don’t have to worry about the possibility of publication, so it would seem like cheap posturing if I were to claim that I wouldn’t want a huge audience even if I had the chance to attract one. Well, call me a poser, then, because it’s true!

Seriously, though, I do agree with his points. Even as a simple blogger, I can see the truth of what he’s saying. When I first started doing this, I really had no idea what I was doing or why. I was “raised” on the political blogs; in fact, writing about politics and current events was the purpose, maybe even the definition of blogging as I understood it. I knew that there were people who wrote in a much more personal manner, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why anyone outside of family or close friends would want to read what amounted to an online diary. Very few people are talented enough to write compellingly about their personal lives, even if they do lead interesting ones.

I quickly realized that I didn’t want to be just another political blogger, but at the time, I didn’t have the confidence or even a good sense of how to write about other topics, so I took a hiatus for a couple years and spent the time trying to find different writers who wrote about offbeat topics, to help me envision the possibilities this format contained. When I finally decided to get back into it, I made up my mind that I was just going to write whatever I felt about whatever I wanted, serious or silly, coherent or surreal, and I wouldn’t make the slightest effort to attract an audience. Fortunately, that seemed to do the trick for me, and I was able to find somewhat of a voice of my own, free of the expectations of an audience or a desire to please one. Before, when I felt an urge to keep up with some standard, to talk about the same topics everyone else was talking about, I wasn’t enjoying it at all. It was a chore. Since giving up entirely on the idea of acceptance and putting everything out of my head but the desire to write things that I can be relatively proud of, it’s become increasingly enjoyable, to the point where I feel somewhat lethargic and less mentally focused when I don’t get to do any writing. I actually feel energized and alert for the next day or so following a good day of writing, regardless of whether anyone else read it or not.

So even if I were able to make an actual living at writing, I would probably still maintain a pseudonymous blog just for the freedom it affords. I’m sure there are rewards to writing for a substantial group of people who largely enjoy it and give you positive feedback, but I’m content to keep secretly typing away in my tiny little corner of the Internet.

Mossy God

By in atheism, nietzsche, religion, science, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Einstein and Newton found God in Nature and saw science as a bridge between the human and the divine mind. (To Einstein, in a metaphorical way.) To both, to adore Nature, to study it scientifically, was a devotional act. I find it difficult to criticize this position, whatever your beliefs are. (Although I’m sure some commentators from both sides will…) Religions appear, change in time, and eventually disappear. It’s all a matter of time scale. But as long as we exist as a species, our intimate relationship—and codependency—with Nature will remain. To me at least, it’s quite clear what I should be worshipping.

— Marcelo Gleiser

I hear this sort of sentiment all the time, and I still really don’t know what it even means. Most invocations of “nature” as some sort of higher ideal or guiding principle are either examples of romanticism or tautological nonsense. As always, Nietzsche said it best:

You want to live “according to nature”? Oh you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and fairness, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?— In truth, the matter is altogether different: while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite, you strange actors and self-deceivers! Your pride wants to impose and incorporate your morality, your ideal onto nature, even onto nature, you demand that it be nature “according to the Stoa,” and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image—as an immense eternal glorification and universalization of Stoicism!

Seriously. You all do realize that it’s not all sunsets and mountain vistas and tranquil oceans, right? Nature itself is one of the strongest arguments against any anthropomorphic notion of a god, with most lifeforms existing to be eaten as individuals before going extinct as a species. Like the man said, the sheer wastefulness, the indifference, the immense cruelty that would be psychopathic if there were any agency behind it — what exactly is there to worship in that? What sort of universal principle (or mind) do you think you’re gaining insight into by studying it? And how does this supposedly transcend the divide between science and religion when countless scientists and laymen are content to study nature without a need to mysticize or glorify it?

You can find inspirational examples of beauty, harmony and order in all sorts of things — music, for example. But if you’re talking about any sort of religion or worship deserving of the term, very few non-intellectuals are going to be interested in pantheism, Deism, Gnosis, or any other vague, abstract principle. They want a God that loves them back (or at least claims to). They want the Sistine-Chapel-finger-pointin’-motherfucker. This just seems like a weak attempt to redefine an attitude of devoted scientific inquiry as “religious”, nothing more than semantics.

De Omnibus Dubitandum

By in atheism, philosophy, religion No Comments

David Hume showed that we never know anything with absolute certainty. We try our best to gather and process all the relevant information when we need to make a decision, but we can never possibly plan for every single contingency, and we can never have access to all the pertinent facts, so we just do the best we can, shrug and leave a little bit to chance. Even people who couldn’t care less about eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers or the intricacies of epistemology intuitively understand this in the course of their everyday lives. We don’t know for certain that we won’t be one of the tens of thousands of people who are involved in a fatal accident this year, but we confidently get behind the wheel every morning anyway. We don’t know for certain that we’re going to live beyond tomorrow, but we make plans for what we’re going to be doing in five years. Provisional knowledge is good enough.

Except when it comes to belief in God, it seems.

A frequent objection to atheism I’ve heard is that there’s something particularly dangerous about claiming to be reasonably certain that there is no immortal soul or personal, loving god or gods and living one’s life in accordance with this. I can only think of two reasons for this.

One would be the general idea that knowledge is a good thing in and of itself, there is something undesirable about living in a benighted state, and that we should always seek to reduce confusion and ignorance. Therefore, if someone thinks atheism is simply incorrect on the merits, it’s natural for them to want to bring it to attention. The problem is, all the good arguments are on the side of disbelief. Nothing we know points to proof of a soul or a god other than wishful thinking, which of course is no proof at all. And as many have pointed out, apologists haven’t really come up with any worthwhile variations of the basic (and flawed) arguments for God’s existence that we all learned from people like Augustine, Anselm and Aquinas, whereas science and logic have continued to draw on human experience and expanding knowledge to keep chipping away at theological reasoning. It’s perfectly fine if you think I’m wrong, but simply asserting it to be so isn’t good enough.

It’s more likely, though, that the objection is rooted in the mentality best expressed as Pascal’s Wager (which has many flaws of its own). That is, having been raised in a largely Christian culture, we’ve absorbed the idea that there is a personal god, and he happens to be a fanatically insecure psychopath who’s just aching for the chance to make a horrible example out of anyone who questions or defies him, however mildly. Openly doubting his existence, of course, is the gravest insult one can offer him. Even those who think they’ve rejected the strictures of traditional religion still seem to harbor this psychological remnant. Better to just pay lip service to the old bastard and avoid unwanted attention.

It’s really stunning when you stop to think about it, how we’ve normalized such an insane point of view, how we’ve become accustomed to such a crippling weight upon our minds. In any other instance, what’s the worst that could happen if one makes a mistake in reasoning? Having to admit being wrong? Feeling a sting to your ego? Why wouldn’t that also hold true if it turned out that we do indeed have an immortal soul, and we end up meeting God after we die? Why wouldn’t an atheist be allowed to say, “Well, what do you know? Boy, do I feel stupid now!” Even tyrants, you would think, would enjoy seeing a former opponent bow and scrape and proclaim their mistake for all to hear. Why would it not be good enough that I did the best I could with the mind I had to make sense of the information I was presented with?

And even if it were true, and our soul lives on after death, and there really is a father-figure type of God waiting to grade us on our performance while alive and punish us for making mistakes — why would you want to believe in such a being? Why would you want to accept being ruled by someone with a personality that would get him imprisoned or institutionalized in human society? Wouldn’t you want to rebel against such a state of affairs?

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