July 2011

Jackoff Smirnoff

By in jests japes jokes jollies, philosophy, who's žižoomin' who? No Comments

John Caruso:

I’ve never understood the appeal of Slavoj Žižek, whose main talent appears to be to take any topic, no matter how straightforward, and obfuscate it with meandering pseudo-intellectual bafflegab. He’s like Yakov Smirnoff without the hilarious jokes or penetrating insights. I admit I haven’t read much of his stuff (for the aforementioned reasons), and I’m willing to be proven wrong about this if someone happens to know of a particularly brief and brilliant article of his that I absolutely must read, but as it stands, oy vey.

Ahahahahaha. I’ve always had much the same reaction, but never got around to articulating it. Thanks to John for saving me the effort.

Inner Meet Me, Oh, You Can’t Decide

By in religion, spiritual-not-religious No Comments

Philip Goldberg:

No fact summarizes my argument more succinctly than this: The fastest growing category of American religion, particularly among young adults, is “spiritual but not religious.” That the land of the free gave birth to such a designation makes perfect sense, and those who identify with it should not be dismissed as frivolous or noncommittal, as certain critics have contended. They are, for the most part, serious questers who are not inclined to take on faith either religious dogma or facile secularism. They are mystics and idealists who also happen to be rational, pragmatic and independent.

They are, for the most part, privileged enough to have been raised and educated within a, uh, “facile” secular society that provides them the opportunity to subject metaphysical beliefs from around the world to rational scrutiny in pursuit of a Western concept of objective truth independent of the cultural and familial ties that might otherwise bind them to an ideal of obedience. They are often confused dilettantes who use those exotic beliefs to adorn an all-too-ordinary egocentric consumer perspective that goes unquestioned. I’m just saying.

Tragic Collage

By in foolosophy No Comments

It’s been a long, hard week, so I’m just sitting here contemplating some words of wisdom I’ve come across in the brief time I’ve been online.

Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It’s a good observation, and in my opinion it’s the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It’s OK to remind yourself that you’re not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved.

Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That’s not a unique David Simon perspective. That’s the perspective of anyone who contemplates anything as simple as mortality. You’re gonna die, and everyone you love and care about is gonna die. Life is finite. Some of them are gonna die too soon, and some of them are gonna die with things unsaid and things unfinished. And if you look at life in a fair and accurate context, you see that it is often deeply tragic, regardless of how well or poorly you live portions of your life — and certainly some people get luckier than others.

Like a Giant Dildo Crushing the Sun

By in jests japes jokes jollies, sex-you-all No Comments

Germany’s Green Party is worried about the health risks of sex toys. Dildos and vibrators contain dangerously high levels of phthalates and other plasticizers, which can cause infertility and hormone imbalances, they claim. Now the party wants the government to take action to protect the 20 percent of Germans who use sex toys.
Because dildos and other sex toys are widely used in Germany, the Greens see the issue as a problem for society as a whole. While children’s toys are subject to strict regulations that allow only the smallest percentage of plasticizers, a 2006 study by the Öko-Test consumer magazine found that sex toys contain high quantities of the chemicals. Plasticizers comprised up to 58 percent of materials used in such products, the magazine wrote. More than half of the vibrators examined by Öko-Test contained so many toxic substances that they failed the test entirely, it said.
Not that anyone asked me, but I’m a bit alarmed that only 20% of the population uses them. I keep hearing about these degenerate European welfare states, but I would at least expect to find that each household contains government-issued sex toys for each person living there; otherwise, what is socialism for?

I Only Wanna be Your One-Life Stand

By in marriage, sex-you-all No Comments

Mark Oppenheimer:

Savage’s straight-talk approach has an intuitive appeal: our culture places a huge premium on honesty, or at least on confessional, therapeutic, Oprah-fied admissions. We are told to say what is on our minds, so why not extend that principle to sex? Why not tell your spouse everything you want, even if that includes wanting another person? My sense is that this kind of radical honesty may work best for couples who already have strong marriages. Where there is love and equality and no history of betrayal, one partner asking if she can have a fling may not be so risky. Her partner either says yes, and it happens, you hope, with only the best consequences; or the partner says no, in which case their relationship endures, maybe with a little disappointment on one side, a little suspicion on the other.
That is the ideal situation. What if the revelation that a partner is thinking about others creates a shift, one that plagues the marriage? Words have consequences, and most couples, knowing that jealousy is real and can beset any of us, opt for a tacit code of reticence. Not just about sex but about all sorts of things: there are couples who can express opinions about each other’s clothing choices or cooking or taste in movies, and there are couples who cannot. I don’t mind if my wife tells me another man is hot, but it took me a long time to accept her criticism of my writing. We all have many sensitive spots, but one of the most universal is the fear of not being everything to your partner — the fear, in other words, that she might find somebody worthier. It is the fear of being alone.
I’m skeptical of making an absolute out of any generally good principles, honesty included. People who proudly describe themselves as “brutally honest” only make me think that they’ve found a way to be supercilious about being a self-centered, inconsiderate blowhard. So I have no problem with the idea that each of my loved ones has some sort of sensitivity that requires certain things to go unsaid. Kindness sometimes trumps honesty. And not only that, but not every fleeting thought or impulse is worth voicing, let alone acting upon. It’s great that we have the privilege to customize our comfortable lives to such exacting specifications, but you’re not really being deprived if you can’t have absolutely everything you think you want.

Apsychic

By in extraordinary popular delusions, philosophy, religion No Comments

More from Peter Watson’s book:

 

The modern concept of the immortal soul is a Greek idea, which owes much to Pythagoras. Before that, most ancient civilizations thought that man had two kinds of soul. There was the “free-soul”, which represented the individual personality. And there were a number of “body-souls” which endowed the body with life and consciousness. For the early Greeks, for example, human nature was composed of three entities: the body, the psyche, identified with the life principle and located in the head; and the thymos, “mind” or consciousness, located in the phrenes, or lungs. During life, the thymos was regarded as more important but didn’t survive death, whereas the psyche became the eidolon, a shadowy form of the body. This distinction was not maintained beyond the sixth century B.C., when the psyche came to be thought of as both the essential self, the seat of consciousness and the life principle.

…Both Socrates and Plato shared Pindar’s idea of the divine origin of the soul and it is here that the vision took root that the soul was in fact more precious than the body.

…In fact, life after death, resurrection, judgement, heaven and paradise were all Zoroastrian ideas first, along with hell and the devil.

 

I just like knowing who to squarely blame for things like this.

Six of One, Half-Dozen of the Other

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion No Comments

“For all of the Catholic Church and its horrible faults, and there are many”—here, Egginton ticks off a list that includes the Church’s restricting a woman’s right to choose an abortion and proscribing condom use during the AIDS crisis—“I love the ritual of the ceremony, the smell of the incense, the stopping of time. Even though I’m a liberal and often progressive in my thinking, I’m impressed with the anchor of time that is part of religion.” It’s been more than 20 years since he took confession, but he’d like to try it again soon, he says. “I could see putting myself before the question of guilt and forgiveness.”

I wasn’t finding much of value in this article about William Egginton, but man, I just had to stop and marvel at such a potent mixture of self-unawareness and fortunate privilege. Yeah, sure, if you’re a woman, a homosexual, or a sub-Saharan African with AIDS, you might lack the necessary perspective from which to appreciate the pageantry of the Church. But if you’re a white male professor in America, you can wax rhapsodic about perverts in gowns waving incense burners and chanting in dead languages while still being taken seriously as a voice of reason. Nice work if you can get it.

I Put the Mean Back in Meaning

By in atheism, calvin and hobbes, language, science, spiritual-not-religious No Comments


Elaine Ecklund:

This would be a typical response from the atheist scientist who is not spiritual when I ask, “So how do you answer questions that have to do with the meaning of life, big questions such as why are we here, what’s the purpose of my life?” They would answer, “I don’t think those are important questions to be asking.” Those questions just don’t matter. It wasn’t that they had an answer that was different from the general public. They just didn’t think those were important questions. Now, the atheist scientists who are spiritual would give answers to those questions, and they would give them through the sense of being spiritual. They would talk about how they found awe and beauty in nature, they found awe in the birth of their children, they found awe in the very work that they do as scientists. They just couldn’t see that as being explained only by science—there has to be something else out there beyond themselves. But then they did not see that as being God, or needing to name it as theism of any sort.
So what should people take away from your study?
Many of these scientists who are atheists are not hostile to big questions of the meaning of life. I thought there would be scientists who were religious. I thought there would be probably a lot fewer scientists who were religious than people in the general public who are religious. None of those findings were surprising. But this spiritual atheist finding has really been surprising to me personally.
Yes, this is another installment of “the utterly vapid meaninglessness of the word “spiritual”. But you know what makes people hostile to the “big questions of the meaning of life”? The understanding that there is no one-size-fits-all “meaning of life”. The question itself betrays an inherent confusion that wears just a mite thin after, oh, about the thousandth repetition. What’s the meaning of your life, other than annoying me with facile generalizations about people who supposedly walk around all day thinking of art, music and love in terms of subatomic particles? (Thank you, Martin Figura.)
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