Ephemera SCRIBLERUS

So tired of "libertarianism."

2012-01-12T02:02:00.001-05:00

Since government (in the abstract/general sense) is simply the instantiation of the social contract, it's not possible to hate government (in the abstract/general sense) without being a masochist or a sociopath. One can hate a certain government, absolutely -- but it's incumbent upon whoever CLAIMS to do so (it's in fact quite rare, though claims to it are common) to first understand that government, as well as his and all his fellow citizens' legitimate interest in it. That's no small task. Nor is it one that I've found many self-proclaimed "libertarians" to have successfully tackled.

OCR on the Android: Google Goggles, Google Docs, Mobile OCR Free, Evernote

2012-01-10T18:53:00.003-05:00

If you're an avid note-taker when you read, you know how useful OCR (optical character recognition) is. On the desktop side of things, Adobe Acrobat works brilliantly, though there are many cheap/free alternatives. If you're reading a printed book or magazine and want to grab a paragraph to add to your notes, you can always scan it and use powerful desktop OCR -- but what a pain! How nice if you could just snap the excerpt you wanted with your smartphone and boom, have the text (not some big photo of it!) ready to paste into a document or an e-mail. I tried a few programs & below are the results, worst (for OCR) to best.

Not actually OCR: Google Goggles, Evernote

I don't understand the fuss about Google Goggles as an OCR tool: it doesn't work well as one. Its OCR is so-so, but the real deal-killer is that, when Goggles recognizes the source of some text (e.g. the book it comes from), it doesn't OCR the text you're trying to capture; instead, it redirects you to that book's page on Google Books. Goggles is OK for running web searches on things you can snap pictures of, but it's not an OCR program. Evernote isn't either. While it will allegedly OCR text in photos you put into an Evernote note, you can't really get AT that text. It's used for making text in images searchable, and works only on images you copy to Evernote's server -- i.e. not on local notebooks.

Not-bad OCR: Google Docs

Google Docs is a true OCR solution. You install the Google Docs app on your phone, and it includes an option that lets you create a new online doc from a photo, automatically OCR-ing text that's in the photo. Its recognition accuracy is so-so. Below is what Google Docs did with a photo of a block of text from Sam Harris' 2010 book The Moral Landscape; I highlighted the OCR errors in red.

The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have Hgwcd conceptions of physics. Some people think "physics" includes (or validates) practices like astrology, voodoo, and homeopathy. These people arc, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. ln the United States. a majority ofpeoplc (57 percent) believe that preventing homosexuals from marrying is a "moral" imperative." However. if this belief rests on a flawed sense of how we can maximize our well-being, such people may simply be wrong about morality. And the Fact tha: millions of pcoplc use the term "morality" as ai synonym For religious dogmatism, racism, sexism. or other failures of insight and compassion should not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

Near-perfect OCR: Mobile OCR Free

Mobile OCR Free is available here on the Android Market. A $5 paid version adds more languages and removes a splash screen. It had by far the best accuracy of any OCR program for the Android -- near-perfect. It has a bare-bones interface. The app has no built-in camera, so you can't de-skew or crop an image in it; you have to do that in your camera/gallery program, which isn't too hard. Like Google Docs, the app requires a network connection; it uses powerful servers on the web, and not your phone's puny processor, to do the OCR. Its OCR accuracy is much better than that of Google Docs, and it kicks back your result in a much simpler and more usable form: a plain block of text with a "copy text to clipboard" button, letting you paste it wherever you want. Here's how Mobile OCR Free handled the exact same text photo from that Sam Harris book (with the one error highlighted):

The framework of a moral landscape guarantees that many people
will have flawed conceptions of morality, just as many people have
flawed conceptions of physics. Some people think "physics" includes (or
validates) practices like astrology, voodoo, and homeopathy. These peo-
ple are, by all appearances, simply wrong about physics. In the United
States, a majority of people (57 percent) believe that preventing homo-
sexuals from marrying is a "moral" imperative. * However, if this belief
rests on a flawed sense of how we can maximize our well-being, such
people may simplv be wrong about morality. And the fact that millions
of people use the term "morality" as a synonym for religious dogma-
tism, racism, sexism, or other failures of insight and compassion should
not oblige us to merely accept their terminology until the end of time.

The photo these two programs were OCR-ing from was nothing special: medium resolution, so-so contrast, slightly uneven lighting and a decent bit of skew/warp. Here 'tis:

Occupy and our role as well-educated, privileged culture-leaders

2011-11-16T18:58:00.000-05:00

So many of my friends are super-smart, well-educated -- if "privileged" isn't the right word, then maybe educationally "fortunate." I want to say to all of them -- to us -- what I said to a few such friends earlier today:

"Let's folks like us put our heads together to improve our great nation. That's all I'm sayin'. In many respects, especially education, we're the 1%. As such, it's our duty to our country to share good information, to develop smart solutions and to take a bit of time to advocate them. This isn't like a campaign season, where we do our duty by saying Yes to some guy's platform. This is a grassroots-movement season -- a sea-change season -- and as such it's as close as we ever get to the direct democracy that's the gleam in the eye of our representative republic. It's amazing. It's a big deal. It's not business as usual. So whatever side of the fence you're on, let's put aside our normal knee-jerk reactions, put on our thinking caps and step up to the plate. Friends, our country's calling us -- truly asking us, for the first time in our lives, for wise guidance. Let's answer."

Occupy and the homeless

2011-11-16T18:57:00.000-05:00

Like Occupations everywhere, we in Athens have had homeless people of all types join our scene. Some are nutters; others, like the guy who's in my tent right now, worked for decades and lost their jobs in the recession. BOTH types ABSOLUTELY deserve to be represented; they've been a lot harder-hit than privileged folks like me.

They're also a crucial part of the community building that's central to the Occupy movement. Privileged folks like me have a lot to learn from them. I walked such a lady to her "home" from our Occupation camp last night. Her home's a tent in the woods in a park near my house. She needed someone to walk her home because another homeless guy who lives in those woods has been raping homeless women. He's had the cops called on him a few times, but as you can imagine, law enforcement's difficult in that community: nobody's got phones or fixed addresses, lots of folks have mental or substance-abuse problems. This lady's been homeless only for a month or so; she's been mugged, her camp's been raided and she's been physically threatened repeatedly. This is a church-going lady who doesn't read and write so well but has worked every day in her life -- she's in her 50s -- until recently. No lock on her door; no door.

If Occupy looks unsightly because it's got folks like her handing out pamphlets, great: I'm GLAD these folks, for this brief instant, aren't living in the shadows.

Open letter to Jeremy Bird, i.e. Barack

2011-11-16T18:56:00.000-05:00

I constantly get these letters from Jeremy Bird at BarackObama.com asking for support. Here's what I just told him:

Dear Jeremy:

I’m one of those many people who were passionate about Obama in 2008 and aren’t now. You want my support? Have Barack come out in favor of the Occupy movement, which is where my political energy and dollars are going. Give us camping rights at federal buildings nationwide. Post a federal peace officer at every camp to help us and help local police maintain safety. Have Barack go on TV and condemn the mayors who are closing us down. Have Barack support our calls for electoral reform, lobbying reform, tax reform. Have him come out as our champion. I’m the 99%, and if Barack fights for me, I’ll fight for him. If not, I’ll continue fighting — alongside my fellow Americans and in the street if necessary — for the CHANGE he promised us.

Patrick Denker, Ph.D.

Robert E. Park Fellow

Department of English

University of Georgia, Athens

http://www.facebook.com/pdenker

Pretty things.

2011-08-11T13:03:00.000-04:00

Ah yes: hearts, butterflies and instruments for torturing/executing people.

Letter to a Young Atheist: or, A Plea for Premises (scientific evidentiary rationalism)

2011-04-29T20:31:00.008-04:00

The inimitably refined Michael Long and I were having a conversation about atheism — specifically, conversion experiences and conditions and so forth. Michael (who, apropos of nothing, happens to be one of the most thoughtful young men I’ve ever had the pleasure to know), observed that a catalyst of some sort was always or almost-always required for/in a conversion experience. He went on to opine:

“I think the human mind usually take the path of least resistance. If there is no conflict, internal or external, why change one's opinion? (in most cases).”

Which got me thinking.

It’s obviously true, in a general way: that humans, like all life-forms produced by natural selection — like basically all natural processes, really — follow this path-of-least-resistance policy. But of course, one unique feature of the human mind is our capacity to self-generate resistance — our creativity — the extent (sometimes slight, sometimes not) to which our "reality" is a matter of perception, of ideology. For example, so many of us who self-identify as “atheist,” it seems, have these notions like "rationality" and/or "evidence" stuck in our heads, to the extent that they become moral values — elements of conscience, really — that sting us when we fall short and (equally importantly) give us pleasure when we attain. No rocket science here; it’s the way that any ideal operates, in us atheists no differently than in the most ardent theist. We simply have different Jesuses, as it were. We share, with some Christians, “Jesuses” (ideals) about charity, compassion and human value. With others not: a small number of Ayn-Rand-type atheists don’t share these egalitarian humanist ideals, and many theists don’t. Where we most differ is in regard to science and evidentiary reason as ideals rather than intuition, tradition or personal or (most of all) scriptural authority.

It’s true, isn’t it? Ardent atheists don’t become so out of habit, any more so than ardent theists do. They’re both costly philosophical orientations to occupy. They’re hardly paths of least resistance; we ardent a/theists constantly encounter all sorts of resistance, as any ardent theist or atheist would easily tell you. We maintain these a/theistic commitments, of course, out of allegiance to these more basic ideals: allegiances to evidentiary reasoning and science for atheists, and allegiances to scripture and priestly authority for theists.

If that’s so, maybe an effective way to proselytize atheism is not to address theism directly, as we so often tend to do, but rather to promote these other sorts of values: rationalism, realism, respect for evidence, respect for science. Plant THOSE in a mind and they'll do their work, of their own accord and in their own time. So often — I feel safe in saying almost always — this isn’t at all how we atheists proselytize. Instead, we take our value-premises for granted, and assuming them, launch critiques of theistic behavior: “ha ha Belief X is so irrational; ha ha Belief Y is so woefully contradicted by science …”

This should be familiar to any atheist; she could fill in these Xs and Ys with dozens of particulars. It’s our bread and butter. And hopefully it would annoy atheists to realize that it’s no different than the proselytizing strategies of our theist opponents: they start from unquestioned basic value premises about scriptural and pastoral authority and critique us, as we do them, for being wildly out-of-line with the premise.

So to repeat the practical call to arms, then, with a thought experiment. What if we herded cats in the atheist/agnostic segment of society — an expanding segment, today, according to news reports — what if, overnight, we quit playing “gotcha” games and party politics and instead made a concerted and constant case for the basic values that bind us together? Ideals about evidentiary reasoning and the adequacy of science to explain basic natural processes? I mean, who among us, theist or atheist, wouldn’t at least verbally endorse such ideals? OF COURSE it’s common that people actually DON’T — that in practice they DON’T accept that an argument with 10 pieces of evidence supporting it “beats,” in some very real way, an argument with one piece of evidence supporting it. OF COURSE irrationality is as common in mainstream American culture as the common cold (and similarly viral); there are instances of it in our headlines every day: of Birthers, of Hussein (or the CIA) behind 9/11, of god sending hurricanes to Florida to kill gays, of “keep government out of my Medicare,” of “evolution is ‘just’ (like everything in science) a theory,” of every word that comes out of Sarah Palin’s mouth. Irrationality is becoming (or, I think, has become) the lingua franca of American culture, of course — in practice. But in theory, everyone knows this is wrong. Atheists and theists alike. It’s too basic; it’s too obvious that, ultimately, irrationality will get you killed. Jump off a building and you’ll fall. Print money and you’ll have inflation. Pray to cure disease and you’ll stay sick. If I had a nickel for every so-called theist I meet who says “Yeah, but of course I believe in science” I’d be rich, and if I had one for every theist who said “No, I deny that reasons or evidence have any validity” I’d be broke.

If we all stopped making fun of the CONSEQUENCES of religious belief and instead promoted our better premises — premises which almost all theists themselves at least pay lip service to — would that make a difference? It certainly might, no? Imagine how many people could get on board: every fence-sitter, every wishy-washy spiritual-but-not-religious agnostic deist, every rational adult. The challenge, for atheists, is to shift the conversation: not just to focus on and promote the ideals of “evidentiary reason and a respect for scientific explanations of physical phenomena” — what a mouthful! — but to find the better terminology to name these things, these secular and damn-near-universal ideals, these Jesuses. Simple names to name concepts that everyone, in some basic way, understands and embraces. And heck, maybe a logo, too, and why not! Logos work: cross, star, crescent, yin-yang.

So let’s talk terminology.

I think it’s safe if not obvious to say that we as a free-thinking community have made, thus far, very few attempts to do this, and that those attempts (like Dawkins’ red “A”) have failed. The short-hand almost all of us use for our beliefs — “a-theism” or “non-theism” — also fails, for obvious reasons: it’s a perfect enactment of the problem of defining ourselves according to the wrong level of the conversation, i.e. to theism rather than to evidentiary reason and natural science. “Scientism” was a popular term for a while, back in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, but it came to mean a fetishistic, positivist view of science and thus (rightly) fell out of favor. “Reason”-based terms like “rationalist” and “rationalism” were also popular throughout the 18^th-20^th centuries, but came to mean different and often utterly contradictory things — in large part because they were never consistently wedded to the very particular and concrete Enlightenment concept of an evidentiary reason wedded to natural-scientific explanations of physical phenomena. Today, “scientist” is a professional affiliation, and the term “reason” is as likely to appear as an insult (as in “to rationalize,” i.e. to generate false or irrelevant reasons for something) as a compliment (“rational”). And of course there’s the 18^th century’s lovely sounding “free-thinker,” which a lot of us love because it sounds so nice — and it too utterly fails, since it a) means nothing and b) doesn’t refer, again, to the central premises (reason & science) that ground it.

But make no mistake, fellow free-thinkers: it’s that same old mantra — respect for evidentiary reason and respect for scientific explanations of physical phenomena, two methods working inseparably — that’s our Jesus. And if we’re going to get traction in the public sphere and save our culture from its descent into insane, anything-goes irrationalism, we had goddamn well better find some way to “nail the concept,” as they say in advertising, of that mantra. So what’s it to be? “Scientific rationalism”? That certainly hits the concept, but it’s hardly a nail. “Hi, I’m a scientific rationalist.” People in years past have often tried to use “realist” and “naturalist” as simpler or catchier stand-ins, but again, the problem with those sharper nails is that they miss the concept. Theists are damn sure realists: realists who realistically base their beliefs on the premise of a real god who really wrote the blah blah blah. And “nature”-derived terms were too nature-bound and thus easily morphed into “naturalism” (the false premise that physical nature = moral good) or “naturalist” (one who loves trees and plants).

What’s in a name? Maybe it’s not important. “Christian” and “Taoist” and “Buddhist” nail their concepts, but “Jew” and “Muslim” don’t. Maybe the name doesn’t matter, and what instead matters is the intellectual cohesion of the group — the extent to which its members clearly see their uniting premises and can simply and effectively communicate them — to each other and to others. History would indicate that that’s how it works: that the community of belief comes first and the name gets applied post-facto. If that’s so, then maybe the unlovely term “scientific, evidentiary rationalist” is fine, and catchy nicknames unimportant. Regardless: scientific, evidentiary reason had better be something that we “atheists” or “free-thinkers” or “what-you-will” can understand and talk about as clearly and as compellingly as a Christian saying “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” — whatever the hell THAT, when you think about it, means.

You’d think that, in comparison to the cross-eyed mollycoddle of theology, we’d have been better able, by now, to make a more persuasive case in the public sphere. We haven’t, I think, because we’re making a case for basic notions that are already obvious and accepted by most human beings. Perversely, it’s precisely the absurd falsity of theological premises that makes them so easy to frame. Compare the statement “all motion in the universe is relative to the speed of light” to “everything’s relative”: one’s a profoundly true statement about space and time pretty much anywhere in the universe, and is also meaningless to most people; the other’s meaningless hogwash and makes perfect sense. Our challenge as atheists/freethinkers/&c. is that we have to take a similarly profoundly true and universal (in human experience) concept and express it, if we’re going to do more than preach to the choir, and express it in terms that everyone can understand.

So here's my proposal. It's horrible, but it's a starting place. I propose "scientific evidentiary rationalism" as, if not a movement nickname or anything anyone would use to self-identify, then merely a concise way to express "our" (if I may presume) fundamental uniting premises. How would I explain this "scientific evidentiary rationalism" to the average whomever? I'd say:

Ha! Yeah, I'm a "scientific evidentiary rationalist," I guess, and you know what? I'll bet you are too. No, really. Yes, it's a mouthful -- but it's just a complicated and precise name for something very simple: a three-part way of thinking. About anything, really. Those three "parts" are premises -- basic, fundamental assumptions. It means they're ideals -- that they're true, or OUGHT to be, of everything we say. And they're simply that:

1. "Scientific." We accept that scientific explanations are the right way to explain physical phenomena. All this means is that, if something happens in the physical world -- the world of stuff made from particles and chemicals -- then scientific methods are the right methods to use to talk about that stuff. Example:

If Joe says that the theory of evolution by natural selection is wrong and basically everyone in the life sciences (biology, geology, etc.) says it's right, Joe's wrong, and the only way he'll ever be right is to prove his case in the life-sciences community. Period.

2. "Evidentiary." We accept that you can't just make up reasons for something and expect anyone to accept those reasons. You have to give evidence to support them. Example:

Joe says "Humans never landed on the Moon; it was faked." We ask for his evidence; he says: "I don't know; I read that somewhere." In the meantime, we can provide TONS of hard physical evidence (see Rule #1) that the Apollo missions were real and that people really did walk (and hit golf balls) on the Moon. Until Joe comes up with MORE evidence than ours, he's wrong. Period.

3. "Rationalism." We accept another notion, so basic it's often overlooked: that yes, you really do have to provide reasons to support claims you make! You can't just make a claim and expect people to accept it without your saying why it's true. This hardly needs an example, but here it is:

Joe says "The Moon's made of cheddar cheese." We say: What makes you say that, Joe? Joe frowns. "I don't have to give you reasons. What I say is so. You're wrong if you disagree and you're wrong to demand reasons from me." Joe's a jerk, period.

It's just two concepts, really -- or ought to be, since if you accept the necessity of "evidence," then "reason" should go without saying. Another way to put it might be:

1. Feeling that one owes evidence to support one’s claims rather than accepting “whatever” — i.e. “fuck you” — as valid reasoning.

2. Relying on scientific explanations for physical phenomena rather than accepting “I haven’t learned, therefore it’s not so.”

That's what I'd say! Or something along those lines. And there, I've said it.

Obama's "long-form" birth certificate released

2011-04-28T04:14:00.000-04:00

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/obamas-long-form-birth-certificate-released/?hp

We’ll see what good it does. Remember, when he wasn’t stockpiling WMDs, Saddam Hussein planned 9/11. Or was that the Jews?

When more than 50% of Americans believe in the literal existence of fairies and demons, what do you expect? Up is down, black is Wednesday, right is LOL. Orwell: so right about the cataclysm, so wrong about the cause!

Learning from spam.

2011-04-26T15:38:00.002-04:00

Interesting how spam, despite its million guises, seems to have four primary targets: 1) people who believe in free money, 2) people who are insecure about their penises, 3) people who are illiterate and 4) Christians.

_______________________________

Re: My Dear Beloved in the Lord!!!!!!!!!

When my late husband was Alive he deposited the sum of ($18,000,000.00 USD) Eighteen Million United States Dollars with a Bank in England whose name is witheld Until we open up communication,this money is still with the Bank till date.

Following my ill health, my Doctor told me that i may not last for the next Couple Of Months due to My cancer problem. the one that disturbs me most is my inability to move Around and Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a Charitable organization or a Trusted Person that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein,according to the desire of my late husband Before his death. I don't want a situation where this money will be used in an ungodly Way.This is why I am taking this decision. I am not afraid of death Hence I know where I am going. I know that I am going to be in the Bossom of theLord. Exodus 14 VS 14 says that "the lord will fight my case and I shall hold my peace". I don't need any telephone communication in this regard because of my health hence the presence of my husband's relatives around me always.I don't want them to know about this development and i want you to know that With God all things are possible.

Sunset with electric chairs.

2011-04-25T17:51:00.002-04:00

You could almost forget that they’re for executing people.

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T21:01:00.001-04:00

— mosquitoes, fire ants, black widows, brown recluses, scorpions, rattlesnakes, copperheads, Pentecostals: what poisonous vermin do we lack? Sure, Alaska has grizzly bears AND Sarah Palin. But we’ve got Stone Mountain, birthplace of the KKK and home to the Confederate Mt. Rushmore. Top THAT, Mama Grizzly!

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T20:54:00.001-04:00

San Francisco is just a dream in the collective consciousness of humanity.

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T20:51:00.002-04:00

one well-placed suitcase nuke and boom, there goes football.

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T03:33:00.000-04:00

every spring, the trees spew their yellow sexual reproductive cells onto every square millimeter of the city. It's a sexy place to be a tree. Plus they can own themselves.

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T03:06:00.001-04:00

it's the city that'd vote Paul Broun out of office if it weren't in a district gerrymandered to include Phoenix, Uzbekistan and Hell.

ATHENS IS A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE BECAUSE

2011-04-20T03:05:00.001-04:00

it's barely a five-minute drive from scoring crack on East Broad to a prostitute on Hancock, and you can stop for a latte at Starbucks midway.

Video updates

2011-04-19T12:33:00.001-04:00

Some old videos, like “20 in 20,” updated: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvAc6L5qqmg

And a few new, but just little trinkets (for now): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA2BR_IpgGg

Old friend, borrow-and-spend! You weren't gone long.

2011-01-07T14:20:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05rules.html

Barely seated and the big-deficit, credit-card Republicans are at it again with their economic policy of, rather than tax-and-spend, borrow-and-spend. Referring to the new House rule that caps spending by requiring spending-cut offsets for any new expenses legislated. Great! Except there’s an exception for the health care repeal bill that they want to pass, which will create billion$ of new spending by killing the deficit-REDUCING healthcare reform act.

So the new Republican contract with America: no more borrow-and-spend! — except for really expensive things. Or anything we really want. Or anything we can’t pay for because it’s such stupid economic policy. Hey, maybe we can re-deregulate financial markets so that we can have another round of speculation and economic collapse! Hell, the Great Recession, that was what — two years ago? Four? Who remembers that far back?

Hotels

2010-06-21T04:06:00.001-04:00

Paying for a room to sleep in! It’s always felt so extravagant to me. Even a $40 Motel 6 room. All to yourself. It’s not the wrapped soap or made beds. It’s that it’s a temporary home, at your absolute convenience, anywhere, off any highway, at any hour. Ring the bell, swipe your card, get your key and voila, instant intimacy, instant home, anytime, anywhere. And it is strangely intimate, as in homey, for me. I don’t need much to be at home: walls, a power outlet, running water. Bed, shower and ashtray are nice but can be improvised. My house has little a hotel room doesn’t, and nothing I couldn’t happily do without.

I love the modern portable American life: that with a car, a credit card, a laptop and a phone, you can live anywhere. I love the fact that you can live happily and indefinitely out of a shoulder bag. If they ever built a full-size keyboard into my phone, I wouldn’t need the bag. A second pair of pants is for people who play golf. If it can’t fit in a bag, you don’t need it. If it can’t fit in the trunk of a car, you definitely don’t need it.

Home is where the job is.

I wanted to be a writer when I was ten because I thought that, if you could make it as a writer — sending stuff off and getting paid for it — you could live anywhere.

Texas country, in both senses

2010-05-31T15:48:00.000-04:00

I'm from Texas, where country music was invented. Cowboy poetry and cowboy music, John Lomax's Smithsonian collection. Texas swing, Bob Wills, Don Walser, The Texas Playboys. Buddy Holly -- who, with Chuck Berry, invented rock. And of course the recent crowning glories of Texas country/rock: Willie and the Vaughn brothers. As a Texan, the only "Nashville sound" artists I'm allowed to formally acknowledge are Patsy Cline and The Man In Black (who were from VA and AR respectively).

I'll listen to Nanci Griffith and the Cowboy Junkies and John Prine til the neighbors are begging for Fatboy Slim and The Crystal Method. But don’t tell my mother.

Now, if we're talking R&B, like John Lee Hooker or BB King, that's another matter altogether.

Of course, nobody kicks it like Public Enemy.

Except for Tito Puente.

Or Yma Sumac.

The western topography makes me much happier than anything east of the Mississippi. I like deserts, canyons, scrub. Violent, recent mountains -- not the eroded things that pass for mountains out here. And the trees on the east coast! I hate 'em. All these fucking TREES! You can't SEE anything. Where's the fucking horizon? Dead overhead! Suffocating.

Fucking trees. A tree should have a good mile of clear space around it. Except for redwoods. They can do whatever they want. And trees with spanish moss. Oh, and mangroves. Oh, and cypresses. And mulberries. Oh, and dogwoods and redbuds. Need lots of those, packed dense in riots of mid-Atlantic spring color. And Blue Ridge fall foliage, need that carpet of fire. Other than that, too many trees here. OK, pecans are delicious and oaks are majestic.

ELMS SUCK

Mainlining vanity.

2009-05-23T15:49:00.003-04:00

The man was insane, thought Dennis. This was an investment-bank executive? He sounded more like a preacher working the inspirational-speaker circuit. He was on a six-way overdose of smugness, as if vanity-packed heroin needles hung from his every vein: as a Jew, he was Chosen; as a Calvinist, he was Elect; as a Protestant, he was in personal communion with God; as an American, his destiny was manifest; as a New Ager, he was one with universal Energy; and as a successful capitalist, he was the animal at the top of the food chain. Any one of those things was enough to kill you. This guy appeared to be mainlining all of them at once.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 4: Hoarding & Wasting. Work in progress.

Chinese Prices ALWAYS!

2009-04-22T19:32:00.000-04:00

The names didn't matter. No one thought they did; no one thought about them at all. They were just placeholders, numbers expressed as proper nouns. Even the stores' names didn't matter. No one was bothered by the fact that Best Buy was as ridiculously hackneyed a name as Downy fabric softener or Ivory soap. It didn't matter. 1995 was long past the point where people took postmodern pleasure in mocking mid-century advertising literalism. It was the lifestyle associations that mattered, and the name that they were associated with was nothing but a handle, an icon, an empty plastic bucket. Coke could just as easily have been -- was, in fact -- Pepsi, Snickers Baby Ruth, McDonald's Burger King, Popeyes Church's KFC. Even Dennis' own employer's name was merely an unfortunate historical accident that no one paid attention to. It didn't matter if the founder's name was or wasn't Walton any more than it mattered that that long-dead man's long-dead company had once proudly wrapped its stores in banners that read "100% Made In America." Buying American was a lifestyle myth once profitable to market to; no longer. Buying at Chinese Prices Always took its place. One day it too would die. It wouldn't matter if the sign out front said Walton's Five-and-Ten or Shanghai Mart or Accenture Global Tradeplace LLC; the candy bins would always be up front. Across the parking lot, the Fernglen or Glenlake or Lakewood 12 would keep shoveling out ever-larger grocery bags of popcorn and hogsheads of fountain soda and keep tearing out seats to accommodate the wheelchairs of those whose ankles couldn't bear their body weight; on every corner, the McTaco Burger Churches would keep slinging ever-larger quantities of ever-cheaper salt-and-sugar delivery devices and keep adding additional drive-through windows for its ever-growing base of customers who were too ashamed to, or physically incapable of, getting out of their cars.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 3: Gluttony. Work in progress.

Sorry, Walter Benjamin.

2009-03-15T19:23:00.000-04:00

Sure, computer-generated porn makes perfect sense. Even considering the advanced state of modern medical technology, there are still physical limits to the human body. Aren't there? Surely there must be a few left. Either way, there aren't any limitations to the virtual realities that computers can generate -- in three-dimensional high-res, with naturalistic shadows and lighting and photo-realistic textures bit-mapped onto every surface. Here breasts are bound by no physical limits of saline bags, here models need no quarter-inch of makeup, here photos require no retouching, here chainsaws are used as dildos and no one's the worse for wear, here every girl is fourteen and has eyes as big as saucers in fear and trembling anticipation, here every boy is not leather-faced and beer-bellied but handsome, young and cut, here children can be as young as you please and no one gets arrested, no one gets sued, no one needs anyone's permission or releases from models because there are no models and there is no anyone: there's nothing but 256 colors assigned to little squares arranged into a matrix, and behind that matrix the 1s and 0s that tell machines how to generate the matrix, and behind those 1s and 0s there's only more 1s and 0s, those of animation software packages and more machines, there is no human original, no aura, Walter Benjamin, no fragile bag of blood somewhere back there that could wash away the sins of mechanical mediation, no physical or legal limit -- no limit whatsoever save what the engineer can enable, what the designer can imagine and what the market will consume.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 2: Lust. Work in progress.

Fogs.

2009-02-15T19:17:00.000-05:00

Tuesday rolls around and the marine layer with it, thick and damp and low, as if the Pacific were smothering the Los Angeles Basin in a warm, wet blanket. It's not the sort of fog you might find elsewhere -- not the icy knifing fogs that cartwheel down the streets of San Francisco, so animated and charismatic that you can't help seeing the faces of murderers in them, nor the static fogs of Massachusetts, monstrous banks hundreds of miles wide that silently materialize in place, not at all icy but just below the temperature of a human body, just enough to make you think that you can stay outside as the microscopic droplets of water on your skin silently suck the warmth out of you until you suddenly realize that you've lost core temp and it's too late, you've got a cold or something worse. No, the Los Angeles marine layer is more like an apology, more like the gentle Pacific's saying Sorry, you're about to get a sunburn, you'd better cover up. Or maybe You didn't forget what weather looked like, did you? But she just wants to protect you from the sun's harsh rays. She just wants you to be well-rounded. She doesn't want to ruin your day, so around mid-afternoon she gathers her gauze up from the city and takes it back out to sea to keep it cool and damp, returning you to your regular programming.

Excerpt from American Inferno, Circle 1: Limbo. Work in progress.

Snap, Crackle, Holy Ghost.

2009-01-10T19:05:00.001-05:00

A two-part message says conflict: one-two punch. It's in motion: left, right, left, right. A three-part message is stable, like a tripod. It's complete: it's got Snap, Crackle, Pop! That's the seed right there of every story; that's world literature in three words. Even the meanings, sounds and word-lengths (all three) fit: you slip into a snappy start; you crrrrackle through the development, as cracks open up in the story and things get crackin'; and then you Pop 'em in the eye, send 'em out with a kick in the pants, Biff Bam Boom! Earth, Wind & Fire? Three-cheese bagel. Blood, sweat and tears? Triple-Berry Blast. Past, present, future? Coats, soothes, relieves. Father, Son and Space Ghost? Triple-protection! Three bears, three pigs, three mice, three meals, three Stooges, three strikes; what a Breakfast of Champions. We Try Harder. Why? Just do it: ABC, RBG, that's how easy love can be. Veni, vidi, vici with a triple-blade razor. i'm lovin' it!

Excerpt from American Inferno, Prologue. A work in progress.

Yalie-In-Chief goes nucular

2008-11-19T15:06:00.001-05:00

Re: Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy

What I can't stand is that Obama insists on saying "nuclear" -- as if it were a nucleus at the center of an atom and not, as we've learned from our current Yalie-In-Chief, a nuculus. (Which I believe is a type of cloud formation, isn't it? Cumulo-nuculus?)

Bush is himself excellent evidence in support of his own argument that simply throwing money at an education doesn't necessarily result in having one.

Patriotism.

2008-11-05T11:30:00.003-05:00

And it's not just me. Here's just one sample from a friend's e-mail that came in this morning: "The BBC said that this election has wiped out America's original sin of Thomas Jefferson owning slaves whilst proclaiming equality for all. Obama's win has rekindled a sense of Patriotism that I have not felt since I was a little child."

YES WE DID!

2008-11-05T11:27:00.005-05:00

OH MY GOD. I can't believe it. I can't post anything at the moment more than an incoherent, jubilant, BARBARIC YAWP. Last night in Athens was a celebratory madhouse: people crying, strangers hugging each other, everyone congratulating each other, people streaming out into the street to call their parents and friends. There was one line in Obama's acceptance speech that sent chills down my spine. It was when he said, in effect: for those of you who have doubted whether our Founding Fathers' dreams of the American Ideal, the Great Experiment, were possible anymore -- tonight you have your answer. The crowd went berzerk. They started chanting, at the top of their lungs: USA! USA! -- this crowd of Democrats, liberals, college students. For SO LONG we've felt embarrassed about our country -- have had to apologize to people when we went overseas or met foreigners on our soil. "Yes, I know -- the United States is ugly these days. Warmongering, unjust, unilateral, uncharitable, anti-intellectual. But we were the site of a Great Experiment in human governance -- once." Shouting USA! USA! has for so long been something that generally only big crowds of Republicans could do. The rest of us -- the people who REALLY care about values and about the American Dream -- have had to take small pleasure and cold comfort in dissent, in serving our morally unhinged nation by being its Loyal Opposition. NOT ANYMORE! It felt SO GOOD to be able to be truly, madly, unabashedly proud of our country again -- to hope that we might once again be a moral leader among the nations of the world. And it's possible; it's happening. Did you hear the interviews of the people all around the world who stayed up late to watch the election results come in? Germans, French, Kenyans, Japanese people -- people all around the world, in whose eyes we've fallen, were last night talking about American like it was 1945 again, saying what a great nation America is, expressing hope that it can become a moral world leader once again.

Digga Digga Town

2008-08-01T22:58:00.007-04:00

If you Google (and can we still use that verb? or must we be Cuiling things now?) the phrase "digga digga town," you'll get nothing. No results at all. Does that mean that the phrase exists nowhere, truly, on the mighty infinite Internet? That no upright hominid has ever typed these 16 characters into any document online? I don't know how exhaustive Googling something is. Perhaps if we Cuiled it. But it's a shame, because "digga digga town" is Jim Morrison has just done, about an hour ago, at the beginning of "LA Woman." Oh I know, he's widely supposed to have "just got into town." But that's not what he says. He clearly says "digga digga town," and it's a shame that, apparently, no one's looked into this.

PS: I admit that it's possible that Jim's saying that he "digga leena down," but I haven't Cuiled that.

PPS: About 5 minutes after I posted this entry, Googling "digga digga town" no longer returns zero results. It returns one: this entry. So my faith in Google has been restored.

The Jawbone bluetooth headset and wind noise in a convertible

2008-04-27T23:30:00.013-04:00

Have you been trying to find the best bluetooth headset to deal with wind noise, especially while driving in a convertible? If so, then you've undoubtedly read all about how the best noise-cancelling headsets can't do much of anything about wind noise. Holding out hope? Don't. When it comes to even relatively mild wind noise, bluetooth headsets suck. I tried three of the allegedly most wind-and-noise resistant -- the Plantronics 510, the Blue Ant Z9 and the much-touted Aliph Jawbone. The Jawbone was the best of the three, and also the most expensive -- but it still isn't half as good as the regular old handset, with no bluetooth headset at all, when driving in a convertible with the top down and the windows up.

What I did NOT find was very many sites with audio recordings of how the headsets performed in wind -- and the manufacturers' own promotional recordings aren't to be trusted. There's one excellent site that I did find: a thorough comparison, with postings, by Dan Craft at SiezeTruth.com. Since Dan didn't include any recordings of the Jawbone, I've included one below. While the Jawbone was the best of the lot, its outgoing audio in a convertible with the top down at anything much over 40 mph is peppered with spikes of wind noise every few seconds, and much more unpleasant for your listener than if you use no headset at all. Dan concludes that the best bluetooth headset for driving in a convertible with the top down is no headset at all, and I concur.

The solution? We might have to hold out until either the makers of The Boom come out with a bluetooth version, or until Motorola releases (what was) the Invisio Q7, a true bone-conduction headset which, unlike the Jawbone, uses no external microphone at all, but instead digitally reconstructs your voice from vibrations in your ear bones. Nextlink (the original developer of the Q7) released a few pre-production models before selling it recently to Motorola, which will release it who-knows-when. Early reports from these pre-pro Q7s were that they suffered from tinny sound, but that wind didn't affect them at all.

Until then, take a fashion hint from The Royal Tenenbaums' Baumer and strap your cellphone to the side of your head with a tennis headband.

(2007 Miata convertible, top down, windows up, 60-70 mph, backdraft windscreen, not much engine noise, very little cockpit wind)

The efficiency of free markets.

2008-04-22T04:04:00.001-04:00

"Of course, imitation and adulteration are the essence of competition—they are but another form of the phrase 'to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest.' A government official has stated that the nation suffers a loss of a billion and a quarter dollars a year through adulterated foods; which means, of course, not only materials wasted that might have been useful outside of the human stomach, but doctors and nurses for people who would otherwise have been well, and undertakers for the whole human race ten or twenty years before the proper time. Then again, consider the waste of time and energy required to sell these things in a dozen stores, where one would do. There are a million or two of business firms in the country, and five or ten times as many clerks; and consider the handling and rehandling, the accounting and reaccounting, the planning and worrying, the balancing of petty profit and loss. Consider the whole machinery of the civil law made necessary by these processes; the libraries of ponderous tomes, the courts and juries to interpret them, the lawyers studying to circumvent them, the pettifogging and chicanery, the hatreds and lies! Consider the wastes incidental to the blind and haphazard production of commodities—the factories closed, the workers idle, the goods spoiling in storage; consider the activities of the stock manipulator, the paralyzing of whole industries, the overstimulation of others, for speculative purposes; the assignments and bank failures, the crises and panics, the deserted towns and the starving populations! Consider the energies wasted in the seeking of markets, the sterile trades, such as drummer, solicitor, bill-poster, advertising agent. Consider the wastes incidental to the crowding into cities, made necessary by competition and by monopoly railroad rates; consider the slums, the bad air, the disease and the waste of vital energies; consider the office buildings, the waste of time and material in the piling of story upon story, and the burrowing underground! Then take the whole business of insurance, the enormous mass of administrative and clerical labor it involves, and all utter waste ..."

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair, 1906

Poetry and poverty.

2008-04-13T20:22:00.002-04:00

"It is a kind of anguish that poets have not commonly dealt with; its very words are not admitted into the vocabulary of poets—the details of it cannot be told in polite society at all. How, for instance, could any one expect to excite sympathy among lovers of good literature by telling how a family found their home alive with vermin, and of all the suffering and inconvenience and humiliation they were put to, and the hard-earned money they spent, in efforts to get rid of them? After long hesitation and uncertainty they paid twenty-five cents for a big package of insect powder—a patent preparation which chanced to be ninety-five per cent gypsum, a harmless earth which had cost about two cents to prepare. Of course it had not the least effect, except upon a few roaches which had the misfortune to drink water after eating it, and so got their inwards set in a coating of plaster of Paris. The family, having no idea of this, and no more money to throw away, had nothing to do but give up and submit to one more misery for the rest of their days."

- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Letter to a young secularist (pace Rilke)

2008-03-21T10:50:00.002-04:00

More specifically, Letter to a young secularist (raised in and having rejected radical Christian Evangelism) having a depression/existential crisis:
______________

> Everything is okay for the most part. I'm just terribly unhappy,
> to the point where I've lost motivation for everything. Maybe
> I'm just having an existential crisis. Maybe I need Jesus. ;-)

Dear X:

For what it's worth, here's my take on depression/misery and its causes. Since you mentioned existential crises, I focus maninly on (3). (3) is also, ultimately, the bottom line.

1. Depression caused by external stressors. A chronic single or a couple of simultaneous big misfortunes overwhelm someone's normal emotional resources. If there's a chronic stressor, it's important to end it. May often require meds to break the cycle and get back to (3). See below.

2. Purely physiological. May very well require meds and therapy to break and resume (3).

3. Normal. Happiness isn't a given. It's not a default setting. Unfortunately. It's necessary to construct structures in one's life -- goals, activities, call 'em myths if you like -- and to work on them in order to give oneself a sense of accomplishment, progress, meaning. That's the primary engine of day-to-day happiness. Triage measures -- meds and therapy -- don't and can't replace that meaning-structure / happiness-engine; they're designed merely to free up a person so that they can get out of bed and back to the business of creating those goals/activities and plugging away at them.

(3) is precisely what "Jesus" -- religion -- is: a created structure of goals, activities and rewards. The reason that religion is a popular meaning-structure/happiness-engine is that so much of it is arbitrary: effortless actions (speaking magic spells) can produce infinite rewards (eternal bliss). (3) is also easier for religionists because religion is a widely- and strongly-enforced myth structure. Crises of faith are strongly discouraged. It's very easy to go from day to day with utter certainty that the religious meaning-structure you're committed to and working on is Right, not just a hamster wheel: everyone around you is utterly insistent that it's so.

(3) is more difficult for secularists. You've seen through the Big Meaning-Structure, i.e. that it's just a hamster wheel, just a tool for generating self-satisfaction somewhat arbitrarily. That calls all other meaning-structures into question. Help others? Do good work? Write or paint? Teach? Make friends? Influence people? Why? Aren't they all just hamster wheels? To a scary extent, yes -- and voila, that realization is what we call an "existential crisis." If a secularist wants to be happy, he has to "re-enchant" himself. He picks a structure (goal/activity) that he sort-of believes might be worthwhile, and that he has at least some interest in and capacity to do, and he persuades himself, like the religionist does, that it really is worthwhile. And it's not pure delusion: it's worthwhile to be happy. It's perfectly fine to answer, when asked "Why do you do X?" that "You've got to do SOMETHING." Of course, the more you can persuade yourself that X has value, the easier it is to do it.

(3) is the most difficult for FORMER religionists. Growing up in a religious environment is like being conditioned to live on pure sugar: the meaning-structure requires minimal input for maximal reward and is universally acclaimed as True. Self-enchantment for former religionists is difficult: non-religious meaning-structures a) require harder work-input, b) offer less fabulous reward-outputs, and c) are far less universally acclaimed. It's an obstacle, but it's soluble; you have to a) lower your expectations and b) make an additional effort to form a little mini-religion, as it were, around yourself: a religion of fellow artists, fellow teachers, fellow writers, fellow freaks, fellow gamers, fellow serial killers, whatever the hell your meaning-structure is.

"To be is to do." Sartre. If true, then non-doing = non-being, and non-being doesn't sound like it'd feel very nice. So all the above boiled down to a one-word injunction, would be: "Do."

There's an important flip-side. The above is all, obviously, totally un-Zen. If Zen were reduced to a one-word injunction, it'd be "Don't": don't strive, don't desire, don't self-enchant, don't do anything at all. But this is just a tool of Zen -- what you do in brief periods of meditation -- not the goal of Zen. The tool is designed to clear your mind of everything customary and habitual, of all the crap you've been TOLD to want. With a mind cleared of other people's crap, it's easier to sense what YOU actually enjoy, value, want to do. Then you get up from your meditation and go out and do it. That's the goal of Zen. Zen is really just a programmatic method of disenchanting yourself from crap and re-enchanting yourself with something better and more reliable. There's a wonderful little book called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki that's available everywhere. Suzuki was the cat who brought Zen the US in the early 20c. Check it out. Also, if you don't have Kahlil Gibran's little book "The Prophet," get it. Two little books that are worth as much as a truckload of Wellbutrin.

Spengler, Obama, dissent and distribution.

2008-03-06T13:21:00.000-05:00

Re: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html

What an excellent essay. Extremely well-written. And a very interesting fellow, this Spengler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spengler_%28Columnist%29

I'm not surprised that journalists are turning to Obama's familial background to try to get some insight into his character. Spengler's right: we hardly know the guy.

I loved Spengler's acidic characterization of anthropologists as "the curators of soon-to-be-extinct cultures," and of how Bush "squandered a great strategic advantage in a sorry lampoon of nation-building in the Muslim world."

But I take exception to one of the fundamental premises of his argument: that the sort of dissent he attributes to Obama (via his mother and wife) equals "hatred of America" or presages “handouts.” Neither equation is necessarily the case.

Dissenters usually see themselves as patriots, not traitors. This isn’t an unreasonable assumption on their part. One needn’t make any unweidldy value-judgements about whether a culture’s headed in a “good” or “bad” direction at a given time in order to characterize its dissenters as more patriotic than treacherous; one must merely assume that mainstream thought -- received wisdom -- usually deserves critique and can stand improvement. A reasonable assumption. And if true, dissenting critique might be wise or foolish, but its motivations are constructive. And if we WERE to venture into “unweildy value-judgements,” there are a lot of very bright and patriotic folks today, of both political persuasions, who make cogent arguments that America has drifted alarmingly far from its founding principles.

As for handouts, Spengler oversimplifies. The sort of dissent he alludes to is socialist, ergo obviously top-down redistributive. What’s NOT obvious is whether that sort top-down redistribution is more expensive, or is worse for the economy, than the sort of bottom-up redistribution we’ve seen a resurgence of since 1980. Again, one needn’t come down on either side of the (eternal?) debate between supply- and demand-siders; but one SHOULD acknowledge that it’s not cut-and-dried, and that both sides can legitimately critique each other’s (re)distribution policy.

There’s a deeper premise lurking behind Spengler’s position: the fool’s errand of libertarianism. All societies redistribute. The very nature of social living -- mere law -- IS distributive. What constitutes “fair” social interaction isn’t given; it’s precisely what law (social agreement) stipulates. Every society -- every group living impacting each other -- has to muddle through who gets what of how much there is to go around. Some societies choose to distribute wealth narrowly, others widely -- but it’s all (re)distribution, and its nature is according to values that we choose, not values that alight on us from an alien planet.

A Mighty Fortress

2008-02-11T02:36:00.002-05:00

"There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or
hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and
ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or
hundreds of millions of "true believers"; each damns all the others, with
more or less heartiness -- and each is a mighty fortress of Graft."
- Upton Sinclair, The Profits of Religion, 1927

Acceptable absurdity.

2007-12-21T16:49:00.000-05:00

''Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities'' - Voltaire

Gregory Peck

2007-12-10T13:56:00.001-05:00

Gregory Peck
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

is NOT pleased.

Someone's not

2007-12-10T13:54:00.001-05:00

Someone's not
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

there.

No.

2007-12-07T15:20:00.001-05:00

No.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

My friend Nate is 'not listening.'

Abuser.

2007-12-07T15:15:00.001-05:00

Abuser.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

My friend Nate is keeping Blumenberg 'in order.'

"Whosoever

2007-12-03T23:46:00.001-05:00

wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason."
- Martin Luther

I'm sorry, was that not clear?

"Reason should be destroyed in all Christians."
- Martin Luther

Right then. Go to.

The Amazon Kindle: dog, dog, double-dog!

2007-11-19T20:15:00.002-05:00

Re: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/amazon-pitches-a-wireless-ipod-for-books/

Another dog! Another device that does exactly what laptops and handhelds already do! Sorry, Jeff Bezos, but this is another step in the direction of a dead end. People want to carry FEWER use-specialized electronic devices -- not be encumbered with more. You should dump your efforts in this vein and invest them, instead, in getting every book on Amazon in electronic formats that are already widely available. Just about everyone's already walking around with a smartphone or Iphone or PocketPC or Blackberry. All these devices can display documents in whatever format you like: PDF, text, Word, proprietary. We don't need another freakin' device! We need content.

Also, Nancy Pelosi loves Hitler.

2007-10-20T03:01:00.002-04:00

The em that spurred today's rant isn't worth reprinting. It's accessible
through the Snopes.com link below. Suffice it to say that it's ...

"False.

As in: false. As in: someone is, yet again, forwarding internet chain mail
without bothering to do even LESS reasearch (i.e. Googling "pelosi windfall
tax") than any high-school student is expected to do.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/pelosi.asp

Hey, did you hear that Bill Gates is paying $.01 for every e-mail that you
send? No? Maybe you heard about that poor child with cancer who's
collecting e-mail pen-pals?

We Americans are taken in and outraged by fakeries and, when presented with
points backed by evidence, are bored by or hostile to it. Evidentiary
reason is the only support of a democratic union.

Every day I teach the kids of the so-called Millenium Generation. They're
the first generation to be rasied without any notion of, much less respect
for, evidentiary reason. You don't want to live in the world they'll
govern. But no worries: you won't -- because they won't. Because
ultimately, power is truth and stupidos flip burgers. The torch of reason
(ergo power) has long passed beyond our borders. Either we reclaim it or
we're the next Former Empire, e.g. Iran.

Bye America! Bye "Great Experiment," and thanks for the rules by which to
govern every democracy on Earth save ours! Don't forget, America, to
mindlessly mouthe "Jesus" and, if you're really sophisticated, "values"
before you stick your head in that wood-chipper! Bye now!

Athens sodium-scape.

2007-09-27T17:46:00.001-04:00

Athens sodium-scape.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

Inner East Broad St., Athens, GA, near the Jittery Joe's roastery.

Bean, Meet Lion.

2007-09-27T17:40:00.001-04:00

Bean, Meet Lion.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

That pervy Boccaccio.

Celebrating tyranny.

2007-09-26T12:21:00.001-04:00

In response to http://www.congress.org/congressorg/bio/userletter/?id=637&letter_id=1411869811

What is this fucking nonsense? Un-American, unpatriotic, undemocratic, selectively quoted (academic dishonesty -- instant F) and illiterate. That's what.

A properly sourced report on the issue is at http://www.snopes.com/politics/religion/australia.asp .

As a militant atheist, I'm the last to sympathize with theocracy. But to dispute someone's right to peacefully advocate, in a free society governed by the rule of law, theocracy -- or any other political notion or form of government -- is unconstitutional, un-American and ignorant of the values that our nation is founded on. It's to reject the values that distinguish our society from theocracies in the first place -- values that we say our soldiers fight for when they go to war.

History lesson. By 380 AD, the politically contentious and religiously tolerant Roman Republic/Empire (after which our Founding Fathers modeled American government) had prospered for about 800 years. In 380, to unify the empire, Christianity was made the official state religion. Within a century Rome was dead.

s90

2007-09-17T17:54:00.002-04:00

s90
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

Celebrate groundhogs.

2007-09-04T16:33:00.000-04:00

Stop the madness and celebrate groundhogs.

Video uploading frenzy.

2007-09-04T14:38:00.001-04:00

Now that I have a proper internet connection, I've been uploading videos like mad. All videos I've made at one time or another. Check out parts 1 and 2 of "20 in 20" -- and much more on my sparkly new YouTube account.

And: NEW Cortona video.

2007-09-03T14:46:00.001-04:00

Never before seen! Had to do something with these video clips while cleaning up my hard drive.

Cortona video

2007-09-01T20:36:00.000-04:00

Finally! (As in: 3G finally came to Athens.) UGA in Cortona program, Spring 2007.

Everyone looks so happy and healthy! Well, this was early in the semester, you see. Before all the students' livers gave out.

Si nihil novum

2007-08-31T13:14:00.001-04:00

Si nihil novum
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

Soapboxes for everyone. Me too. And while we're at it, fuck you.

2007-08-22T01:50:00.001-04:00

The thing I notice most often these days -- the thing that makes me madder than anything else -- is how people don't converse. They don't talk to communicate. They don’t listen. When you say something, they don't respond; they resume their monologue. Everything they say back to you is a non-sequitur. Noticed?

And they can't, can't, can't ever hold a conversation with more than one other person. That above all. Oh no -- they can't wait that long to resume talking. If there are four of them, they'll break into two -- "conversations." A conversation among four people? Or five, or six, or (god forbid) ten? Just think how inefficient that is -- that is, when your conversational MO is to maximize your own floor-time.

Who are "they"? I'm not sure, but it's kids primarily that I have in mind. The under-30 crowd. I spent a semester in close quarters with them, teaching abroad, and that's when this phenomenon was really shoved in my face. Now that I'm "back" I see it everywhere, all the time. They do it like clockwork. How, when you added people to them, conversations would with mechanical precision split into proliferating pairs, as regular as cellular division. I even started experimenting with it, there in that semester with our cultural future. I'd be in a four-way convo that'd pair off. I'd keep an ear open to what the other pair was saying and, after a bit, respond, trying to reunite the four. And every time, as soon as the one I'd addressed replied, the other two would realign and form their own pair. If you bet on it you could make millions.

I'd seen how low the quality of communication was, even among grad-students and academics (who are supposed to be in the business of interlocution, but who instead repeatedly sacrifice communication and rational mutual critique to grandstanding). But these undergraduates were different creatures altogether. It's as if even the traditional social roles that made some kids talkers and some wallflowers -- as if even these roles had given way to the new dynamic. That of narrowcasting -- of Warhol's "15 Minutes of Fame" meets the Internet, the medium that can simultaneously realize Warhol's promise and make it -- not absurd, because he intended it as an absurdity, but real, quotidian and pathetic -- just another tool of entertainment, of distraction, of control.

Sit in a group of kids and watch. See how often they do it. The default interlocutor ceiling is 1. As you add interlocutors, discomfort increases. The grandstanders, the storytellers, the charismatic "life-of-the-party" good-time guys and gals -- these personality types still exist as much as ever, but they don't play the social role they once did. Grandstanders can't hold the stage. Narrowcasting -- niche markets -- My Computer, My Music, My Weather, My News, My Opinions, My Reality, My World.

It's so fucking ridiculous, all this MyCasting that the mature persuasion machine is cashing in on. An example close to hand being the icon in the top left corner of your PC's "desktop" (itself a homey euphemism for the cold "screen"). Customization (of course) has always been a marketing edge, and it's NEVER been in the consumer's interest -- not to mention society's interest, which of course we can't even mention -- which is, to our own Neocon public "guardians" like former FCC Chairman Michael Powell, an utter fiction, a pipe dream of utopian college profs productive of nothing more than a savvy, dismissive laugh. Customization isn't in the consumer's interest any more than the difference in the lifestyle-brand auras hazily surrounding two otherwise-identical pieces of useless, obsolescence-engineered crap.

Fucking crap. A culture of crap. Entertainment crap. Even the Romans with their races and occasional bloodsport wouldn't settle for this crap. Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for food. Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for religion. Sugar-coated dogshit that passes for political policy. A pox on all our houses!

Jesus vs. Mohammed, Coke vs. Pepsi.

2007-08-10T17:23:00.001-04:00

Protestantism was originally a marginal fanatic theological sect later co-opted by power (rising middle-class Parliamentarians) for its political utility. JUST LIKE early Christianity was a fanatic marginal sect co-opted by the late Roman emperors to unify the empire. JUST LIKE "Islam" served as a mere tag under which to unify disparate and disempowered Arab populations to grab land back from the domineering Christian empire in Europe. "Religions" -- a misleadingly broad term -- are only actual philosophical/theological belief systems in their early gestation days; mainstream “religions” are political power-plays at work. The Heaven's Gate cult, the Branch Dividians: these are "real" religions, if by "religion" one means a philosophical belief system and spiritual practice -- which is what people DO mean. Surely no religious apologist would say that "religion" is simply a meaningless group-identification tag, and a misleading tag at that.

But natch. An esoteric spiritual practice WOULDN’T become widespread on its own. Average folks don't give a fuck about Spiritual Exercise or Life’s Great Questions. They care about immediate well-being: food, shelter, power, social standing. A “religion” only BECOMES mainstream when it allies with a widespread political power-shift that delivers those things. Once mainstream, it can hang about as a useful fiction as long as it doesn’t obstruct well-being -- or get out-competed by a new political force uniting under a different religious brand logo.

Religious faith is brand loyalty. Theology is advertising.

Like mainstream religious "belief," brand loyalty is radically divorced from the utility or function of the product. We eat billions of dollars of "fast" food because we're biologically programmed to hoard sugar and fat and because mega-corporations make gazillions by stimulating and exploiting this biological predisposition -- NOT because the food is "fast," or fresh or tasty or inexpensive or sustaining. It's none of those things. Physiologically, it's not even food: if you tried to live on it, you'd get sick and die. (And we Americans do -- get sick and die. #1 in obesity, diabetes, heart disease.) We're #1 in debt per capita because (again) humans are naturally lazy and want something for nothing, and (again) because ultra-mega-corporations with armies of marketers and psychologists in their service spend billions to stimulate and exploit this natural predisposition.

Over the Hillary.

2007-07-28T11:25:00.001-04:00

If Hillary gets the nomination, I'd vote for Nader. Noam Chomsky. Bill Hicks. I'd move to Canada.

PS: please send rain.

The role of religion in social conflicts; OR, the old Crusades-Vs.-Abolition squabble.

2007-07-27T16:46:00.001-04:00

Perfectionism and religious upbringing often go hand in hand (i.e. latter causes former). Mainstream religious worldviews tend to be oversimplifications of the world, full of notions about knowable ultimate good, knowable ultimate evil, knowable steps to perfect redemption or perfect damnation, knowable ultimate standards of conduct, absolute certainty of intuition, &c. -- in general, *the mainstream versions* of religious belief systems are laced with all sorts of notions about absolute certainty in respect to all sorts of things that are in or that impact the real world. An untenable standard of judgment, natch, since no human knowledge is certain in any "strong" or absolute sense -- human knowledge (including every scientific "fact") is all evidentiary. Expecting strong certainty creates an impossible standard of judgment. And when judgment's blocked, one either freezes (takes no action) or flails (takes irrational action, e.g. Crusade, jihad, laying on of snakes, speaking in tongues).

The "out" which many religious Americans take -- these being modern, practical folks who want to retain evidentiary rationality (science and commerce and so forth) but also want to retain religious self-identification (often for social reasons) is simply not to take their religion seriously. And we've seen this secularization of religion (and clerical criticism of same) since colonial times, and especially in the 19th century (cf T.J. Jackson Lears' history _No Place of Grace_).

So the hypothesis would be that 1) the more "fundamentalist" or over-simplistic a religious belief system is, the more it will tend to be certaintistic and promote strong certaintism in its core logical tenets; 2) that certaintism will tend to produce irrational action in one of two forms, either a) paralysis or b) hysteria; and 3) that religious worldviews will tend to produce constructive/productive rational action only at their own expense, i.e. when they're held more lightly, relativistically, or in more ad-hoc ways.

For (2b), easy: fundamentalist religious history is replete with examples of religious mania (crusades, visions, &c.) The footprint of (2a) is harder to discern, it being a stance of inactivity, but for it see the many descriptions of religion as an "opiate" (Marx et al), as a tool to inspire social passivity.

(3) is very interesting because of the way it enters into endless debates about the pragmatic value of religion. Critics of religion cite (2)-type phenomena; apologists reply with citations of religion's role in social goods: abolitionism, the 1960s American civil rights movement, the doctrine of the soul invoked in humanist democratic constitutions, &c. Our thesis would suggest that these progressive applications of religiosity emanate from elite sub-groups of educated and enlightened persons within a religious tradition -- not from the more mythological/certaintistic mainstream. And when you consider who the abolitionists and civil-rights activists WERE, (3) starts to come into focus. Also recall how religion was invoked by both sides in both conflicts: slavers and white supremacists appealed to religious belief for backing as often (if not more so) than abolitionists and civil-rights activists did.

This suggests that social conflicts fought with religious weaponry are battles of literary interpretation, entirely secondary to the rational and practical arguments underlying them. Two points were at stake in the slavery issue, for example: 1) whether it was philosophically justifiable in a democratic society with a Constitution and DOI such as the US' and 2) whether we as a nation were prepared to sacrifice the percieved economic benefit of it. Christianity had no obvious position in this debate; ergo it could be (and was) cited emphatically by both sides. And it was appealed to so often -- i.e. the debate was couched so often in religious terms -- because the real terms of the debate were too 1) philosohpically demanding and 2) economically shameful for the average Joe to face them. Abolitionists and slavers were fighting (as ususual) for the fence-sitters, the middle ground, the swing vote -- and they fought on the distantly removed literary ground of religion because those were the only terms upon which the middle ground would listen to the debate. But it's totally secondary to the real terms of the question. Americans gave up slavery when they could afford to: when an industrial economy was showing itself to be ultimately a source of greater profit than a slave-based ag economy could ever be. People only make lasting human-rights sacrifices when they can afford to. Bye-bye slavery, hello overseas sweatshop.

Theism and the "pragmatic appeal."

2007-07-25T02:29:00.001-04:00

On about god this week! Sorry. From another letter in response to a curious interlocutor. I had mentioned ontology; he, a theist, looked it up and, in doing so, stumbled across Anselm's "ontological appeal," and asked about it. Reply:

"Ontology," in plain language, is the branch of philosophy (as opposed to aesthetics, politics, epistemology, ethics and so forth) that deals with questions about the fundamental nature of the universe and of being. And right again: there are many traditional arguments for the existence (variously defined) of God (also quite variously defined). The "appeal to scripture," for example, is just that: when a religious person cites as evidence the foundational writings in their religious tradition in which god is discussed: a Hindu the Upanishads, a Christian the Gospels, a Jew the Pentateuch, and so forth. (Obviously the appeal to scripture is a weak argument, since the veracity of the claims made in various traditions' scriptures is precisely what's in question.)

The "ontological argument" (for the existence of god) is another one of those arguments. (There's a nice roundup of them at http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/arguments.html . ) The "ontological appeal" is a very shady bit of logical trickery that even most Christian theologians (e.g. Thomas Aquinas, essentially the founder of modern Christian theology) have rejected. It's widely considered to have been substantially demolished by the time of Kant -- mid-1700s. It's a very technical argument, as you'll see from a summation of its history at http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm -- very twisted and purely deductive reasoning, which is very typical of the Scholastic thinking of the medieval period which it comes from. (These are the same guys who argued about precisely "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.") To oversimplify, it boils down to the claim that we can prove that a supreme being exists simply because we can form a concept of one. Obviously, this is a remarkably ambitious claim; it would be the only one of its kind. Because we can imagine an infinite number of things (like horses with wings), but never does our being able to do so IMPLY that those things exist.

You've heard of "intelligent design." The whole squabble about evolution vs. creationism, the Scopes Monkey trial early this century, Dover recently, Kansas Board of Education -- here in Georgia too. "Intelligent design" -- aka "the argument from design" -- is the only argument for the real existence of God with any life in it. I'm not endorsing it; I'm just saying that it's not universally discredited. But most folks feel that David Hume's critique of it (1751) has yet to be overturned. But who today has read or even heard of David Hume, or Immanuel Kant, or Thomas Aquinas for that matter?

In my opinion, the best argument is the pragmatic one ("appeal to pragmatism," "appeal to utility"). It's not an argument for the existence of god, but for the acquiescence to belief in god as a social good. It was very popular in the 19^th century. In short, it says: yeah, we know God probably doesn't exist -- certainly not if what one means by "God" is some anthropomorphic father-figure / tribal-chief figure who dispenses grace and justice. But theistic myths are good: they're philosophy for folks who don't have time for philosophical nit-picking; they're an ethical code for folks who don't have time to be professional ethicists. 'God' is shorthand for truth and beauty and justice and awe and humility: don't knock it." That's the pragmatic appeal. Idealists hate it because it's condescending. Pragmatists like it because they think it works. But when some guys fly a plane into a skyscraper in the name of God -- when a country declares a holy war or "crusade" in order simply to pursue its economic interests -- when someone justifies slavery or fascism with the church's backing -- that that makes trouble for pragmatists.

It's a ripping tough question. I've been wrestling with it, and on the fence about it, for years. Bertrand Russell -- the benevolent-granddad philosopher of the 20^th century -- was very hostile to it. He thought it was cynical and condescending to maintain a double standard -- to say that "what I believe is wrong" is nevertheless "OK for you, because it's all you can handle." But Russell was an aristocrat; he was very naïve about the life of the average Joe. In the trenches, religion can convert fucked-up drunk wife-beaters into loving, productive members of society. I've seen it -- often. Still, one has to wonder: if we as a society put the same force behind a secular moral code -- say, a simple Secular Humanism -- would it have the same persuasive force that religion has, in those trenches? No question that preaching Kant or Mill or Habermas to a fucked-up drunk wife-beater has no effect. But simple cognitive therapy does. What if every church in America were a mild-mannered free therapy clinic, and there were no (insane) stigma attached to therapy? What if magical thinking were stigmatized and common sense was lionized, flattered, celebrated, was treated as sacred, was preached in every pulpit, on TV, was required to get elected President?

Atheism, theism, pantheism, panentheism, trepantheism ...

2007-07-18T03:04:00.001-04:00

(Trepantheism is when you believe that god speaks to you via a hole drilled in your skull. Alternately, releasing mental demons via said hole.)

My gentle, caring interlocutor (see previous post) asked me what I meant when I called myself an "atheist" and, in that same communique, identified himself as a "monist or panentheist." To wit:

Atheism: in short, simply non-theist. Theist: in short, belief in an anthropomorphic (key term) supernatural deity. Anthropomorphic: having human qualities, e.g. thought, feeling, consciousness, sympathy, memory, opinion, judgment, &c. Not to mention more flagrantly obvious things like gender. And a robe and beard are RIGHT out. As is the willingness (or refusal) to help a bloke get his girlfriend back.

By that definition, "atheist" doesn't imply anything else, e.g. that the universe is ultimately knowable, that western science is the only method of procuring knowledge, or any of the other positions that are frequently but needlessly attributed to atheism. "Theism" is a well-understood term with a rich linguistic history: western history has no shortage of extremely well-known examples of belief systems built around anthropomorphic deities -- always creator-gods and usually personal-judge-gods. Atheism is simply the rejection of such beliefs. Is it a "certain" rejection? That's a red herring; don't eat it. No human knowledge or belief is certain. Thinking otherwise is simply naïve; notions of absolute certainty (rather than evidentiary reasoning) have been discredited since the Renaissance. Any questions of "certainty" in any strong or absolute sense shouldn't enter into ANYONE's beliefs, theist or atheist or scientific or intuitive or anything else. To say that one is "certain" in any absolute sense about any belief that one can form in the mind or express in language is merely epistemological naivete.

Sorry to harp on certainty, but that's the sticking point for many folks about the term "atheism." They (including many naïve atheists) mistakenly think that "atheism" implies some absolute certainty about the non-existence of anthropomorphic deities, and that thus it's somehow incompatible with agnosticism. False. Atheism is a stronger claim about "gods" than agnosticism is, but it's not an absolute or certaintistic claim. It merely means that there IS evidence -- a LOT, in fact -- against the claims that are frequently made about the existence of anthropomorphic deities. It doesn't mean that these claims CAN'T be true; it means that there's a tremendous amount of reliable, intersubjective, verifiable evidence that they're not. And if one believes that, then to self-identify as "agnostic" -- a more socially palatable term -- is kowtowing to social nicety for self-serving reasons. And while some socially graceful white lies MIGHT be OK, presumably lying about one's beliefs about god/s -- about the ultimate nature of all things -- is not an OK little white lie, since it shows disrespect to the thing demanding more respect than anything we could ever know.

Now, as for monism and panentheism ...

Well, monism is a general term: it simply characterizes the number of irreconcilable first principles that a belief system can be reduced to (or, consequently, the number of irreconcilable categories of Stuff that follow from said first principles). Hard-core scientific materialists are usually monists: everything is ultimately reducible (they might theorize) to one ultimate particle. Hard-core idealists (e.g. Berkeley) are usually monists: everything is an idea in the mind of God. Pythagoras (maybe) is a monist: everything ultimately numbers. Plato's one paradigmatic dualist: there's matter and spirit and the twain shall never meet.

But since "monism" merely characterizes the logical structure of a belief system, it can be applied to various belief systems, not just ontological beliefs (i.e. beliefs about the ultimate nature of being). One can be an ontological monist but an epistemological pluralist, &c. Supposedly. There's also the fascinating question of self-awareness: if one calls oneself monist but acts pluralist -- i.e. doesn't at least strive to apply the same standards of judgment across the board -- what is one? Most Americans (and perhaps most humans) obviously act like pluralists, applying different standards in different situations in a totally ad-hoc way -- and call themselves nothing at all. What are they? Monists? Pluralists? Higher-primate calorie machines?

As for panentheism, well. As an atheist, what's there for me to say about an academic theological argument? Panentheism is merely a version of theism. It might be a more sophisticated one than traditional anthropomorphic theism (i.e. Santa-Claus type foolishness, Jesus helped me win the lottery and so forth) -- but it needn't be. Panentheism (as opposed to pantheism) is a theological debate about whether "God" is immanent-in-but-transcends the universe (panen), or whether "God" is synonymous with the universe (pan). As an atheist (or non-theist or call-it-whatever), this question is at best secondary, since first I need to know what someone means by this "God" that's a crucial part of their belief system. If they mean an anthropomorphic deity (see first paragraph) then I'd say no, I don't believe in THAT, ergo the question of whether this "God" is transcendent or synonymous with the universe don't arise.

Some folks try to weasel out of all this justificatory difficulty by stripping their notion of "God" of any anthropomorphic qualities. A pantheist might (might) make this move. It was a popular move among science-friendly Enlightenment Deists (and others, e.g. many fundamentalist theists): God, they say, is absolutely beyond human experience, completely, and thus not in any way subject to evidentiary reasoning, either for or against. Freud said some very funny things about this stripping away of all attributes from "God" until "God" is nothing more than a wholly empty logical principle. In short, this move "protects" God by claiming nothing of God. Obviously, that won't wash. No theist would be satisfied by a notion of God that knew nothing, did nothing, felt nothing, judged nothing, never acted, never touched or affected any human life in any way. A Zero God is just that: not a "god" in any sense of the word. Not even in any technical sense -- and ABSOLUTELY not in any common sense, because when 99% of people say "god" they mean an anthropomorphic deity that does or did stuff touching human experience in some way. (And of course 98% of the time they mean a LOT more than that. The Christian god, of course, isn't a Zero God at all: for most Christians -- certainly contemporary American ones -- "God" is a notoriously "thick" notion; i.e. they make LOTS of ambitious, specific, testable claims about their god.)

But of course we should say Christian gods, because there's not much that's monotheistic about Christianity -- CERTAINLY not Roman Catholicism. But that's another matter.

Sweet vs. saccharine.

2007-07-18T02:15:00.001-04:00

A sweet, gentle and caring interlocutor was recently touting to me the virtues of sweetness, gentleness and caring. "What do you think of that?" they asked. "Pretty cheesy, eh?"

No, actually, I don't think that's cheesy at all. You're (I said to them) very specific, for one thing -- sweetness and gentleness and caring are very specific qualities -- and "cheesiness" is almost always recognizable for its vagueness. Secondly, "cheesiness" means, supposedly, saccharine and sentimental -- in the pejorative sense -- and there's nothing saccharine about being sweet, gentle or caring.

But caring, I think, is the absolute Good among the three -- something everyone should want to aspire to be, if they're paying attention. Who would WANT to be careless? Of course that doesn't mean that a lot of people aren't perfectly willing to stick their heads in the sand and be extremely careless when it suits them ...

Sweetness and gentleness are more situational. There are situations in which it's appropriate to be gentle and sweet, and situations in which it's not appropriate. That doesn't mean that malice is ever called for, but roughness, stridency, bluntness, ferocity? You bet. I strive to be sweet and gentle when it's appropriate, and strive to be strident and forceful when that's what's called for. Teaching's a great model, since it requires you to reach so many -- and so very different -- people in order to do positive good, i.e. enlighten them, sensitize them, reach their hearts and minds. Hearts so often cold and minds closed. Sweetness in the classroom is crucial, no question, but also unquestionably insufficient on its own: sometimes you have to put holy terror into them to wake them from their apathetic stupor. Writing's the same way: to reach and move the reader requires carrots and sticks. But natch: life, thus truth, is such: a mixed bag, sweetness and sorrow. Imagine The Tempest with no Caliban; imagine a piano with no black keys. Life is light and dark in equal parts; ergo truth, life's reflection, must be so.

But Caring (or something like it) must be the constant; there has to be a higher purpose (e.g. enlightenment) behind both gentle and rough gestures. If there's not, we all know what that looks like: sweetness for its own sake is no different from bitterness for its own sake: groundless gestures made for purely aesthetic, self-satisfying reasons. The cheesy Hallmark card and the morbid Goth pose are flip sides of the same worthless counterfeit coin.

This could only be

2007-07-08T16:38:00.001-04:00

IMG_5986
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

something that happens when one's working on one's dissertation. One suddenly realizes pressing concerns otherwise non-obvious: the pressing need to sweep the porch, the pressing need to fix the sink, the pressing need to set up one's childhood train set.

The boys

2007-07-06T11:08:00.001-04:00

IMG_5955
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

fully in character.

KSzH BFPK

2007-07-02T02:52:00.001-04:00

IMG_5914 - KSzH BFPK
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

That's right, flip off the cameraman. That's fine, he's an asshole. But you're still barefoot and preggers in the kitchen. Praise Jesus.

Staircases Not Homogenous.

2007-06-27T11:16:00.001-04:00

IMG_4853
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker

Also "slippery." So to speak.

Criticism is patriotism.

2007-06-05T19:05:00.001-04:00

A thoughtful Republican friend of mine recently saw _The Fog of War_, Errol Morris' excellent documentary about Robert McNamara. He writes:

> I lived through that era and recall how passionately he and others
> espoused the domino theory. It’s why I am so skeptical now when
> Bush-Cheney et al tell us that all of the middle east will
> disintegrate if we leave.

Right -- and I'd underscore "we." Why isn't an increasingly radical sub-set of fundamentalist Islamists worldwide targeting Honduras? Or Taiwan? Because what sort of a history do those countries have of stationing troops in the middle east or meddling with middle-eastern political regimes?

I'll say this, though. I don't disagree that there's something like a global war on Something that we need to be engaged in, and that terrorism is included in that Something. The problem is in part that these Bushies simply aren't thoughtful -- but more, I think, that they don't have the courage to act on conclusions that pretty much any simpleton could reach.

To wit. What is "terrorism," anyway? Well, that's fairly easy: it's illegal warfare. It's using force against non-combatants to achieve political ends. It's eschewing the rule of law and international customs defining the parameters of humane warfare.

If that's the case, then, one doesn't fight terrorism by committing it: by killing Iraqi civilians by the tens-of-thousands (by even the most conservative estimate); by strongarming weak allies into our cause; or by promoting torture, by backing away from international legal institutions like the UN and the International Court, or by riding roughshod over some very longstanding civil rights here at home.

What else is "terrorism"? It might not be part of the formal definition, but we often associate it with religious extremism. We might call an IRA bomber a terrorist, but folks would just as often call him a "freedom-fighter" or "rebel" or "insurgent." But if a jihadist bombed the same pub in the name of Allah, it'd be hard for us to find a word for him OTHER than "terrorist."

So if "terrorism" implies some degree of religious extremism or irrationalism, then again our "war on terror" is something we ought to be fighting here at home, on ourselves, as much as -- not necessarily instead of -- overseas.

Take Iran. "Theocracy," we say. They've got a semi-secular but still fairly religious President who rules uneasily and is heavily dependent upon the radically religious mullahs who control the hearts and minds of a small but politically active radical religious minority. And is the situation here so different? Religious radicals are a solid and powerful minority in the country as well as in the Congress, and politicians in both parties compromise to placate this "religious right": both parties have to pay it lip service, and Republicans who flaunt it get axed. Giuliani will be a very interesting bellweather on this point -- but it's telling that it takes a 9/11 flag-wrapping to protect a Republican from the religious right (and this is assuming that G. acutally WINS the nomination). It says as much if not more about the party in general that every other Republican candidate is much closer to the RRight's stance on key issues.

This isn't to conclude prima facie that religion has no place in politics (it might), nor that both religion and politics in Iran are more radical than their American counterparts. But if the question is whether, for example, the religious-political landscape of the US is more like Iran or more like, say, England or Canada -- well, that's a different question, and I think one with a much less clear answer.

So a global war on terror? If we're even a LITTLE bit consistent about what that has to mean, I'm all for it.

Something else to mull over. We all tend to thoughtlessly categorize critics of US policy and culture as alienists or anti-Americans in some way -- as socialists, Euro-fags, godless commies, anti-capitalists, what have you. But hasn't it generally been the case that a country's greatest critics are its greatest patriots? Patrick Henry? Maybe, but I'm thinking about, for example, George Washington himself. An American patriot, no? -- but he WASN'T American. He wasn't born or raised American. He was a British citizen -- a critic of and rebel against British political culture. And every Brit recognizes now (as did many at the time) that Washington and the colonial rebels were fighting FOR true British rights: self-determination, representation, the rule of law, due process. And Lincoln? Only the greatest critic America has ever had: the only individual to lead the country into war on itself. How about FDR, who dragged this country kicking and screaming into WWII?

Flag-wavers on the one hand and critics on the other. Who turn out to be our heroes, in the long run? Was it the folks who got us into Vietnam or the folks who got us out? Nixon's whole political reputation -- perhaps the most damaged of any president -- was salvaged by the sole fact of his embracing China; the then-beloved McCarthy, however, who held US mainstream culture (and Hollywood) in his hand, is the villain now.

The public's turning against the Iraq war it demanded -- but it's still early, we're still engaged. Nevertheless, folks who opposed it from the start are now deriving political capital from that opposition. Obama, whose opposition was theoretical, is trading on it. Dems who voted for it are having to backpedal. Eventually, what will we say about the 23 Senators and 133 Reps who voted against Joint Resolution 144 in 2002?

The Catholic church as cultural repository.

2007-01-29T04:22:00.000-05:00

Interesting experience at Amelia, an ancient walled town up in the mountains in northern Lazio. We parked outside the walls and hiked in -- a substantial hike, very steep. The town -- or at least what we saw of it -- was actually very dreary, even for a Sunday evening: narrow streets, black walls, no lights, deadly few citizens. But the arc-lit cattedrale kept shining magnificently at the top of the hill, so we pressed on. We heaved up more winding and utterly dark cobblestone streets and staircases until we finally crested the hill. The outside of the cathedral was bleached white and absolutely without ornament. We went in a small door that I assumed was the side door -- and lo, a Baroque masterpiece cracked open like a geode, fully lit and radiant in orange and gold and blue, opened up over our heads. We poked around for a bit. Pretty soon an old-ish man -- sort of a self-appointed docent -- came up and insisted that we see the dioramas in a side room Very impressive dioramas (of the life of Jesus), actually, with animated figures and running water. This was to be only the first stop, it turned out, on an hour-long tour of the cathedral. The old gentleman was very knowledgeable, and clearly very proud of Amelia and its grand (and mostly long-gone) history -- a history that was (and this is the key) largely encapsulated in and represented by the wealth of paintings, sculptures and objects of antiquity housed in the church: a Turkish flag from the (very) battle of Lepanto; a working 17th-century pipe organ; &c. The gentleman reminded me very much of the attorney/chorus character in Fellini's Amarcord: the old gentleman who represents the town's memory and its pride in its cultural treasures. What struck me was that this was the role that the church clearly played in the life of Amelia (not to mention that of this old fellow). There was nothing religious (from what I could make out) in his discourse His enthusiasm was that of a city booster, not that of a religious proselytizer. This you don't see in America. With the exception of a few historical-landmark churches (St. Patrick's, the Washington Cathedral), American churches don't play this role as cultural/historical repositories -- obviously, since 1) there's precious little culture or history to reposit, and since 2) they're Protestant, and thus generally suspicious of (if not overtly hostile to) the contamination of religion by art. It's a role of the overseas Catholic church that we don't clearly perceive in America; we tend to see it (if at all) as the institution that burned Bruno and jailed Galileo, if we're secular, or if we're Protestant then as a suspiciously idolatrous cult, with its saints and shrouds and icons. What we don't get is the ROLE that these icons and artworks play in the life of the parish: that they're not merely objects of befuddled worshipfulness for benighted old ladies, but that they're tangible objects of the community's identity.

Natural-language philosophy, 19th-century style

2007-01-16T02:44:00.001-05:00

The informal definitions of popular language are the only medium through which theory really affects the mass of minds even among the nominally educated. - George Eliot

An open letter to Mark Foley

2006-11-09T01:07:00.000-05:00

Dear Mark:

We took it out and measured it, Mark, and it appears to be 232 reps, 51 senators, 28 governors and 50+% of state legislatures.

Fondly,

UGA in Cortona.

2006-09-27T14:04:00.000-04:00

UGA in Cortona.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

Rattlesnakes and brown recluses vs. a semester in Italy. Hmm.

On Myth.

2006-08-22T23:04:00.001-04:00

Myth; Or, Lady Windermere's Baby Lap-Gorilla

"Oh, Mrs. Cadwallander! You postitively MUST join us for dinner. Charles has brought back the most perfectly ENCHANTING little homunculus from the wilds of the Dark Continent!"

Fast forward to dinner five years later. The banquet table is upended, most of the cutlery is embedded three inches into the walls of the parlor, and the bodies of several guests lie broken under heaps of silk and taffeta on the dining room floor, heads crushed like cantaloupes. The silverback is upstairs, playfully trying on Lady Windermere's skin.

Hints you never got from Heloise.

2006-08-20T18:27:00.000-04:00

Hints you never got from Heloise.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

"If you like yogurt, you don't have to worry about eating 'too much.' Women who have yeast overgrowth/infections in the vagina will also put the yogurt into their vaginas. It's very soothing and often cuts the yeast growth directly." -- http://www.fwhc.org/qa/wh-yeast2.htm

Get on the bus.

2006-07-29T10:39:00.000-04:00

IMG_0909 Termini
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

Tickets may be purchased at any of 500,000 convenient ATMs located nationwide. Don't wait! Something for everyone!

Penis envy envy.

2006-07-27T21:49:00.000-04:00

Penis envy envy.
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

I've geeked this week about as much as I possibly can. And (of course) have, at the end of all this, a laughably microscopic "device" to show for all my troubles. Alas! Miniaturization and high technology have really done a number on macho penis compensation hobbies. Because fifty years ago, a man could obsess about a CAR. And have 455 cubic inches and 500 horses-worth of steel to show for it. What do we get today? A "converged device" that allows us to compress our already-virtual life into a two-inch screenful of pencil-point icons. It's pathetic.

But it DOES have a microscopic backlit keyboard. And it comes with a little family of ants to type on it. Anglophonic ants. They take dictation. It's really quite convenient.

Who in his right mind

2006-06-27T08:38:00.001-04:00

misses Georgia? (Pace Wm. Nelson.) Notwithstanding: this linguistic isolation is killing me. It was easier in Africa, where I couldn't even TRY to speak the language, and simply gave myself over to books and solitude. But solitude in Rome, like anywhere magical, is a dish of parsley and salt, of water and sand. A double negation: restricted to small talk and that incompetently. The only people who have time for small talk are gods and ghosts. And to imagine a language is to imagine a life-form. So with a 1000-word vocabulary and a tongue lacerated with conjugations and declinations, I'm the ghost of an idiot.

La parlata è come la faccia: la nostra caratteristica più ovvia, di cui siamo il meno consci.

WiFi Thievery

2006-06-22T17:31:00.002-04:00

Oh this confounded thing. I've had it. I'm getting a cellphone before I come back -- a cellular pocket cock. This hunting around the city for unsecured wifi signals to poach is absurd. I've wandered for miles, followed directions off the web for a free hotspot here or there, hung upside down from trees, stood on top of Hadrian's column. I signed up at the local Comintern office for a free account that doesn't work in the public parks. I found an unlocked office signal to poach near the local metro station, but they got wise of me after a few days and locked it. So I leave the blasted wifi turned on while walking home and lo, it appears that there are two unsecured signals right outside the door of my apartment. Or were, at any rate, at noon. But the wind's shifted direction since then, so we'll see.

American Erbs

2006-06-22T17:31:00.001-04:00

For some reason I've been remembering a joke my British friend Phil told me "You know how American and English pronunciation often differ ..." he started.
"Sure, Phil."
"You know, then, how Yanks say Erb but Britons say Herb, aspirating the H."
"Sure."
"Well, do you know WHY Britons pronounce the word that way?"
"No, why?"
"Because it's got a fucking H in it."

Lingua impestata

2006-06-22T17:31:00.000-04:00

Italian. It's certainly got its prepositions, and which are notoriously variable: you can be in a store but you have to be at a bank and under a car repair place and who knows what. You walk at foot and ride in a bike. But can we use any of these broken-down old prepositions to indicate who gives what to whom? Oh NO, that'd be too easy. We have to 1 use inflected pronouns which 2 change their spelling when they combine and 3 are often truncated and 4 have to agree with the number and gender of the participle ending -- but only in the third person, and only with certain verbs. So to say "I gave it to her" you WOULD have to say "To her it I have given" (because they use the compound imperfect as their standard past tense, and call the regular old preterite past the "passato remoto" and don't use it -- so you can't say "I went" -- you have to say "I have gone," which means "I went") -- which would be, at any rate, "Le la ho dato," but Le becomes Gli and adds an E and combines with la (we're assuming what I gave her was feminine, like, say, a bus) AND it contracts AND the participle changes to agree with the bus, so you end up with "Gliel'ho data." Which is a lot of fucking work for a simple present indicative sentence with a couple of pronouns.

And that's just the pronouns. The verbs are all inflected, so it's madness Haven't these fucking Romans ever heard of a goddamn modal? I know, I know, all the Romance languages are like that, and that English has its share. But English's share of ending-changes is tiny. What, third person singular present indicative? I drive he drives? -- and one more change from present to past, drive-drove? Yeah, but that's it. This fucking language has to change six times per tense, times maybe another five tenses that all have their own unique sets of endings. All of which are subject, naturally, to a large set of irregularities and various spelling changes to preserve hard and soft sounds across the plethora of various endings that stems can take on.

And that's just the grammar. The lexicon is its own madness. Since this impoverished language has half as many words as English, there are about sixteen different English senses for every one Italian expression. Which is partly why the prepositions are so crazy for English speakers: they rely on different prepositions to inflect a given word in different directions.

Then there's the subjunctive, which allegedly represents a whole other category of proposition-force -- call it the that-I-walk rather than the I-walk -- that doesn't exist in English because it serves no purpose: while you can say "You walked," you have to say "I'm glad you walkebbered." Because being glad about something obviously necessitates an entirely separate dependent verb system. With 24 different endings, of course (2 number x 3 persons x 4 tenses).

And to top it all off, no one speaks Italian. Even today, regional dialects, which can differ dramatically from "standard" (originally Florentine) Italian, are widely spoken. And we're talking major syntactic variations, not just pronunciation.

So simply trying to buy bread is like living through that scene in Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" when the Centurion is correcting the grammar of Brian's graffiti. "A! No, E! No, I! Plural, genetive, third declension! RomanI ..."

On the other hand, the nice thing about Italian is that about 80% of the lexicon has an English congnate, so if you can get the hang of where to add an O and where a ZIONE you're in good shape.

When in Rome: news from the language tourist

2006-06-16T18:00:00.000-04:00

Dateline: Viale Regina Margherita, Policlinico Metro, Roma. Case in point regarding this pestilent tongue: The Article. English has four: one definite (the) and three indefinite (a an some). Italian has about twelve, the use of which depends on number, gender, adjacent vowels, the sense of the phrase, idiomatic exceptions and the phase of the moon. But the pronouns are worse: they have all of the aforementioned peculiarities, plus they behave like subatomic particles, unpredictably changing when placed too close together and projecting their properties across whole sentences to change the spelling of perfectly innocent bystanding words. Now I understand why Italians gesture so much when they talk: you have to gesture when you talk to make what the hell you're trying to say clear, because the sentences are all like "to him for her some of it right out there already I put" -- except with no prepositions, so it ends up looking like "Io gli ci l'ha i lei le ne gia è put." And if you change the l'ha to l'ho you've just told someone to fuck their dead ancestors. Which in fact in the Romano dialect is "li mortacci tua," so don't say that, because it's really not very polite. But you CAN say that something (or someone) is SQUILIBRATO, which is a very entertaining word for squirrelly, deranged, nuts.

The credulous mind: religion and Nigerian e-mail scams.

2006-05-20T12:52:00.000-04:00

A must-read article about a sophisticated Christian psychotherapist who gets taken in by Nigerian e-mail phishers for hundreds of thousand of dollars.

The New Yorker: Fact: "Despite everything, he insisted that he still believed he had been dealing with the real Maryam and Mohammed Abacha. "I think they were legitimately trying to use me and my resources to get their funds out of Nigeria into a safe place where they could have access to them," he said. Worley wasn't sure whom to blame for the bad checks, though Nduka was suspect. "Somehow there was a buyoff, a payoff, or something that went on there, and then it got switched to the point where I was then dealing with fraudsters," he said. "

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

2006-05-07T12:20:00.000-04:00

Kristen's moments.

2006-05-04T11:02:00.000-04:00

"I'm so sleep deprived that I actually can't see things as solids right now. Everything is pixels and particles and vapor."

Kristen is having a Marxist moment. "All that is solid melts into air." The revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie! You loved the movie, now play the game. Coming soon to a Gameboy near you. Play. That's a order.

"And all I want to eat are things like pineapples and plums."

Food products from tropical colonies. Kristen is having a Mercantilist moment.

Coffee and smokes.

2006-05-04T10:41:00.000-04:00

Kristen wakes up in the morning and immediately begins reading about bituminous coal.

You don't say.

2006-05-03T21:54:00.000-04:00

IMG_5430
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

Off in her head again, thinking about bituminous coal.

Colbert's "biting" satire. But who got bitten?

2006-05-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

"Several veterans of past dinners, who requested anonymity, said the presentation was more directed at attacking the president than in the past. Several said previous hosts, like Jay Leno, equally slammed both the White House and the press corps. 'This was anti-Bush,' said one attendee. 'Usually they go back and forth between us and him.' Another noted that Bush quickly turned unhappy. 'You could see he stopped smiling about halfway through Colbert,' he reported.

The WH Correspondents' Dinner: institutionalized satire: the system's internal safety valve. Which may be why Jon Stewart's out-of-character stunt on CNN's "Crossfire" made more of a splash. For all its "biting" mockery of the POTUS, Stephen Colbert seems to have given the media a pass, by comparison, restricting his mockery to more obvious right-wing media targets. And regardless of how one feels about the POTUS, the media is the target of the more subversive critique. The more radical break with tradition would've been to stand up there and deliver a detailed, objective, scientifically valid press-ownership analysis a la Chomsky. Or to have smuggled Chomsky himself in, and handed the mic over to him. Or lined up a bunch of Iraq bereaved. Or stood up there for 15 minutes of silence while the cameras rolled and the audience squirmed. Or peppered the president with direct questions, highlighting the absuridty of this "WH press corps" housepet. Anything that didn't play for laughs. It's the capacity to go off-message -- to know when NOT to play for laughs -- that enables a critique to ruffle the system's feathers. It's why Stewart's ploy got play. Colbert's a comic and he performed his standard routine. When you give the people the product they regularly pay you to deliver, that's entertaaaaaaainment! Ergo I think Snow's characterization of it as such was correct, despite the dismissive way he meant it.

Whatever!

2006-04-28T23:46:00.000-04:00

Oh, you MUST post a submission to Kristen's Blast-The-Bromide contest.

I would SO like to be witty and funny and lighthearted, but there's a bromide that's so common and so immoral that I just can't see straight -- or rather, can't see a comically curved path around it. It's 'Everyone's entitled to his own opinion' -- the paradigmatic gesture of closed-minded self-indulgence masquerading as liberalism -- the short form of which being, of course, 'Whatever!' Both are gestures that imply that there's no disputing matters of opinion. This bit of cowardice or laziness (as you please) would be, if true, bad news for anyone who was foolish enough to say anything, since all statements, even the most 'objective,' are only opinions variously warranted. For this same reason, the 'entitlement' aspect is banal flummery: are you really 'entitled' to have something that you must always only have? The most insipid thing about the platitude is that it uses an ostensibly liberal and wise gesture to cover conservatism and ignorance; nine times out of ten, it means 'I neither know what I'm talking about nor care to,' i.e., 'Fuck you.' But this bromide all by its lonesome is merely absurd. To be sublime, it must be followed by the corollary: 'Einstein proved it.'

Hentai, tentacles and The Pirate Act.

2006-04-22T18:15:00.000-04:00

I could never figure out how the Japanese developed a whole sub-market of porn dedicated to women being penetrated by octopi. Duh. Island nation.

But why didn't the Brits invent tentacles hentai, then? No fishy flesh in English vaginas, THANK you very much. No, it's all horses and stockings and French maid costumes. Maybe the occasional pirate.

I think everyone should have to dress up like a pirate one day of the year. Particularly serious, dignified public figures: statesmen, poets and, above all, scholars. How can you take someone seriously who thinks they'll be annihilated somehow if they dressed up like a pirate and said "aaaargh"?

I'd sooner trust the judgment of a fundamentalist Christian who dressed up like a pirate now and then than that of a philosopher who didn't.

Of course, I must concede that acting in a subtly piratical fashion daily might beat dressing up like a pirate one day of the year.

Or it might not.

BTW, moon = cheese

2006-04-21T00:41:00.000-04:00

“Let us be on our guard against supposing that anything so methodical as the cyclic motions of our neighboring stars obtains generally and throughout the universe; indeed a glance at the Milky Way induces doubt as to whether there are not many cruder and more contradictory motions there, and even stars with continuous, rectilinearly gravitating orbits, and the like.” -- Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.

A carefree science, that with a glance disputes Newton and Kepler. Let us be on our guard.

Addio a Dio

2006-04-21T00:36:00.000-04:00

Thinking since 1500 means struggling with the problem of judgment; thinking prior to 1500 means having the problem of judgment.

"Endless entailment is an impossible travesty of verification."

2006-04-21T00:22:00.000-04:00

"Does 'This is a telephone' entail 'You couldn't eat it'?" -- J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, 1962

This is terrible

2006-04-16T13:49:00.000-04:00

This is terrible. You -- one -- I’m unable to say “I” -- can post directly and immediately, from Word, with one click. No wonder people post so much ephemera. For whose eyes, though?

Definitions.

2006-04-16T13:30:00.000-04:00

"Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publiquely allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION." Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651.

Virgil.

2006-04-16T11:42:00.000-04:00

"It never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be."

A valentine from Diderot

2006-02-14T12:52:00.000-05:00

To his readers: "Filthy hypocrites. Leave me in peace. Fuck away like unsaddled asses but allow me to say 'fuck.' I allow you the action. Allow me the word. You boldly use words like 'kill,' 'steal,' 'betray' all the time but only dare to pronounce that word under your breath. Might it be that the less you allow such supposed impurities to pass your lips the more they remain in your thoughts?" Diderot, Jacques The Fatalist

Information overload

2006-01-15T12:59:00.000-05:00

"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe." Denis Diderot, Encyclopedie, c. 1770.

If you're so tough, try La Mettrie's new-year's resolution

2006-01-01T12:59:00.000-05:00

"And you, philosophers, help me: dare to speak the truth and may childhood not be man's eternal age. Do not fear men's hatred; fear only being worthy of it." La Mettrie, Anti-Seneca, 1751

IMG_4975 - Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum

2006-01-01T12:56:00.000-05:00

IMG_4975 - Vienna, Kunsthistoriches Museum
Originally uploaded by Patrick Denker.

Kunsthistoriches. Say that 10 times fast.

Onions and Cats

2005-08-28T13:00:00.001-04:00

“Time at last produced philosophers who saw that neither onions nor cats nor even the heavenly bodies had organized nature. They did not immediately tell the people, for anyone who spoke badly about onions and cats in front of old women and priests would have been stoned.” Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary

It’s all good.

2005-08-27T11:50:00.000-04:00

Stupid me. I only today realized that “It’s all good” -- that amoral, irrational, asinine and masturbatory phrase that I’ve detested ever since it became au courant -- is fully and almost literally the same arrogant, spoiled, self-satisfied and facile 18th-century Christian Panglossian bromide that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The vile thing about postmodernism is its self-congratulation for being, allegedly, ahistorical. But it’s so obviously Baroque Redux! -- in its irony, its bricolage, its spoiled carelessness and its vacuous, murderous optimism. And why not? The price technology has charged for power has been laziness since Yahweh flattened Babel, since Socrates declined to write. When have better vacuum cleaners NOT made housecleaning more convenient? Stand outside THIS telos, postmodernist: arrow, gunpowder, oven, Bomb, remote control.

More signs of the Apocalypse

2005-05-12T11:51:00.000-04:00

As for [an aquaintance’s] literal interpretationism -- "literal translation," I believe you called it -- have someone point out to her that the very phrase itself is oxymoronic. A reading can't be literal if it's an interpretation, nor certainly if it's already been translated, i.e. interpreted.

In truth, "literal" reading of anything doesn't actually exist. When we use the phrase "to take something literally," we mean to interpret it in the most customary, normal, commonly understood way. Obviously, this too is something one could never get "right" -- we just make estimates based on our understanding of normal usage. And if you don't understand normal usage all that thoroughly, like most uneducated folks don't -- simply because they haven't been trained in it, or norm-alized -- then your sense of "normal" will be a little off. As you can see, the more remote one is from a given culture, the less familiar one is with its linguistic norms. Less-than-hugely-literate ("literal") people have trouble guessing at the norms of their own culture; how much harder, then, to guess at the norms of a culture from the Middle East 2,000 years ago?

This is precisely why all serious people of faith, including the Catholic church, rejected "literal interpretation" as heretical and impossible nonsense over 400 years ago. These "literalists" are defending a position that their own tradition rejects. On what grounds? None. Pure ignorance. Well-meaning; an entirely understandible grasping for truth in the absence of education. But they're as ignorant as medieval serfs, who were the last people to believe in literal interpretation of the Bible. But they're also increasingly common -- among the masses.

Meanwhile, the leaders of science and education and business don’t even believe in God, much less literalism. But they profess belief, or spout it through mouthpieces like DeLay and Frist and Bush, in order to organize the zealots. Just like the Nazi regime (3rd Reich); just like Rome (which was, to the Nazis, the 1st Reich, Hohenzollern Germany being the 2nd). Religious zealotry is a cultural cancer that spreads like wildfire and, when it reaches a critical mass, kills its host. Look at the Middle East; this wasteland is the smoking shell of what 1000 years ago was the world's most advanced empire. The Muslims carried the light of the world's advanced science and philosophy while the wreck of Rome smouldered for 1000 years. Look at them now: a third of the world, suicide bombers in mud huts. They've been that way ever since Europe snatched back the prize of economic prosperity in the 18th century, and zealotry swept the Middle East. What you're hearing down the road and on the airwaves is what they heard in Rome, Baghdad and Berlin as the empire collapsed and chaos filled the void.

And zealotry IS chaos. When literalists like Christy can't give a reason to justify their oxymoronic reasoning -- when they reject the demand that they must -- when they refuse to talk, reason, justify -- what can their beliefs governed by, then? Any arbitrary thing behind their veil of irrationality: any whim they feel, anything suggested to them. "Order" in society means reason, not mere organization; mere organization is habit, and animals have that. Only humans are capable of JUSTIFYING an order (or failing to). Lemmings are perfectly organized as they commit mass suicide, but they can't tell you why they do it. When lemmings preach to their choirs, exchanging greasy falsehoods with those who agree and refusing to debate and justify points they can't -- this is the mark of reason having died and habit won; this is, and has always been, the mark of the antichrist, the final symptom of cultural death.

Republican leaders today mistake Christian organization for rational order in exactly the same way that Soviet leaders mistook Communist party organization for rational order and Nazi leaders mistook German nationalism for rational order. The "orderliness" that they all think (or thought) they were celebrating is in fact a terrifying cancer of animalistic, anti-rational habitualism spreading like wildfire through their culture. And just as a creature that can't think won't live long, a culture that can't think won't, and never has. Unless we exterminate the poison now, the irrationalism that's poisoning American society will explode in our national bloodstream the minute the massive Asian economies pinch our economic windpipe. There are two retirement plans for a former empire: Switzerland or Iran. And all this sort of religious insanity is not what one hears yodeled in the impeccable streets of Zurich. Either one goes gently into that good night, or one goes violently. We are not a gentle nation; we are greedy, drunk on our former power and desperate to retain it as it slips away. These are the exact ingredients of Weimar.

Last time we talked, you said that history repeats itself. It does. You meant that the history of decades repeats itself -- the shallow left-right swings of generational politics. Absolutely. But history repeats itself by century as much as by decade. My students naïvely believe that the horrors of World War 2, which happened only a generation ago, are impossible today. I ask them: has humankind been miraculously struck wise and moral once and for all in the last short fifty years? Lucky us! -- to have grasped that holy grail that mankind's pursued for all human history. Of course, if we have NOT been struck wise and good, hold on to your seat: the next disaster's coming, and it'll be fought with suitcase nukes in our home towns. Humans are clever, but as a whole we've still not learned to put truth before greed. And truth is holy, and greed is a sin -- and, as wise Christians once said without hypocrisy, the wages of sin are death. Either we love and nurture and educate and communicate or we all go to hell in war. Mark my words: Switzerland or Iran. Name a epoch in human history when the choice has not been that.
So vote for sham irrational "Order," look out the window and say goodbye. "Order" isn't coming; it's here, and simply coming into power.

CCC: Christian crusade against campuses

2005-01-14T11:52:00.000-05:00

Campus Crusade for Christ http://everystudent.com/features/isthere.html > reassures us that: “Just once wouldn't you love for someone to simply show you the evidence for God's existence? No arm-twisting. No statements of, ‘You just have to believe.’ Well, here is an attempt to candidly offer some of the reasons which suggest that God exists.” Their six reasons follow.
“1. Throughout history, in all cultures of the world, people have been convinced there is a God."
Fallacious appeal to the popular. Throughout history, most people have also believed that foreign races and/or women were inhuman, that weather and earthquakes were gods’ punishment for human conduct, &c ad nauseam. Or we can take another tack, accepting the appeal and pointing out that most people have believed in gods other than Jesus.
“2. Does God exist? The complexity of our planet points to a deliberate Designer who not only created our universe, but sustains it today.”
Intelligent design's appeal to complexity is a non-starter. Every physical phenomenon CCC cites has a physical explanation. The place where physics peters out is a place few people have the scientific wherewithal to discuss; it’s certainly not the sort of Newtonian-scale physical operations to which CCC (like most who make the argument from I.D.) refer. Worse: any definition of what counts as "complex" is anthropocentric and ad hoc.
“3. Does God exist? Mere "chance" is not an adequate explanation of creation.”
See 2.
“4. Does God exist? Humankind's inherent sense of right and wrong cannot be biologically explained.”
Incorrect. Altruism is widely observed in nature. Theories of group and kin selection account for it nicely. For humanity's many less obviously altruistic moral codes, with which religions are replete, cf political economy for starters.
“5. Does God exist? God not only has revealed Himself in what can be observed in nature, and in human life, but He has even more specifically shown Himself in the Bible.”
A deeply historico-political text, well-documented as such, though it may perfectly well simultaneously be an extremely fine piece of literature. Also, citing the Bible as proof of God's existence is circular. Also, as noted earlier, other religious texts have more adherents -- if you’re going to make the popular appeal, which is in most contexts fallacious.
“6. Does God exist? Unlike any other revelation of God, Jesus Christ is the clearest, most specific picture of God.”
Highly subjective. Also assumes what’s at issue (Christ = God). Worst of all, presumes that best “picture” of God is one that's "clear" and "specific." Of GOD, for heaven's sake? The ultimate transcendental principle of the universe? Clear and specific? Unlikely. Simplicity is, however, a quick path to a deficit of awe, as is grossly apparent in our spiritually impoverished society: cf Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny.
In what sense is this the reasoning of a “campus” crusade for Christ? These aren’t even clever or pertinent religious questions; this isn’t even middle-school-quality thinking, much less “campus” anything. It’s obviously less a “campus crusade for Christ” than a Christian crusade against education. Students, teachers and administrators should have the courage and honesty to call it that.

A pox on all our houses.

2004-10-10T11:53:00.000-04:00

From a recent incoming letter:
> In your next email, could you say something about
> Kerry's inane ambiguous ramblings during the debate? SNL
> attacks both sides, and I'm pretty convinced you're more
> intelligent than they are, so I know you can do it.

Your faith in me is, alas, misplaced. After all, I read philosophy and actually like it, so naturally I don't see Kerry's ability to make distinctions other than binary ones as ambiguous (ambivalent, yes, I should ardently hope) nor certainly as inane. He makes sense to me, occasionally good sense, whereas Bush has for ten years struck me, no less when he was governor of my home state, as obviously, embarassingly and, today, dangerously simple-minded. I wish merely that Kerry would play to the center by making naturally vigorous appeals to liberal principles (e.g. the rule of law) a la Dean and Nader, rather than making unnaturally vigorous appeals to violence; his 'kill terrorists' rhetoric is most definitely inane, and clearly an unnatural play to the middle, as well as politically unwise and morally tarnished. Last time I checked, fighting hatred, violence and injustice with hatred, violence and injustice wasn't a Christian value. They're all playing up the rhetoric of hate, and they should all be ashamed of themselves.

Some deluded little Indian fellow once said that "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," and, inexplicably, managed to parlay this nonsense into the liberation of the second-most-populous country on Earth; he was soon followed by a similarly deluded and also deeply religious black upstart in the American south, who parlayed similar nonsense, again inexplicably, into a massively successful political movement. It boggles the mind! Such utopian claptrap would never work on us today, of course; we're much more clever, and will never again fall for starry-eyed metaphysicians the likes of Jesus and Gandhi and King. Turning the other cheek, indeed! How, to use Bush's word, "naïve." When someone wants to kill you, you root him out of his 'hole' -- they invariably hide in 'holes,' of course -- and kill him. It's important to 'kill,' and it's particularly important to use that word to get the NASCAR ( = violent Hollywood blockbuster = violent poular/profitable video-game) vote. To 'bring to justice' is just more of that same old religious utopian idealism, and we don't believe in that silly stuff anymore. Worst of all, it's boring; what fun is a Terminator who says "hasta la vista" only to come back and sympathize, meditate, communicate? Christian values make for SUCH bad sales today that even Christians (Gibson) can't sell them in popular form unless they're slathered in gore. And what a relief! Thank heavens for Bush's realpolitik, because Kerry's religious fanaticism -- you did know that about Kerry, didn't you? -- would get us all killed.

Kerry is oleaginous, excessively diplomatic, a lamentable political robot a la Gore. I don't care for him and may well not vote for him. But Bush is a hypocrite and a fool, and that's worse: he's too stupid even to see his own hypocrisy. Together they make an extremely accurate reflection of the American electorate: polite instead of right, ignorant instead of malicious. And have no doubts that politeness and ignorance are vile: the Weimar Germans who elected Hitler as chancellor were sophisticated, polite, well-mannered, repressed, self-eluded and utterly schizophrenic. We have every right to worry about more 9/11s; we have just as much right to worry about more 1939s, and both sorts of violence -- individual and collective, rebellious and institutional -- occur every day, around the world, now. When 'we' get hit, regardless of who 'we' are, it's news; when 'we' hit it's not. And this should come as no surprise: men have always been immoral, selfish cowards. In 20 years we'll look back and say "O, we hit then, yes we did, that was wrong of us," just as today we look back on the puppet-propping policies of the middle-20c and rue them -- from the safe position of history's winner -- caveatting "O but that was then, we're very moral now." Mankind is rather obviously not 'more moral'; the world, however, is measurably slightly wealthier, and therein lies what 'progress' we observe. It's easier to share when you're not competing over limited resources.

How I do run on. I guess it's all those dead bodies that wrongful politics generates. Sentimental me.

As for SNL, I could never hope to compete with that particular standard of political discourse. And give some thought to the relationship between ad-supported pop TV entertainment and the 50-50 political split in the general TV-watching U.S. audience. If consuer entertainment doesn't play to the audience, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, if we assume that SNL's core audience already leans liberal, its producers can't raise profit margins by appealing yet more to the left.

Commercial media are nothing more than well-researched, well-designed and obviously successful money-extraction machines; networks generate profits, nor small ones. Also obviously, they may continue to function successfully as long as they know their audience better than their audience knows itself. The principle is simple; its application merely requires good social science and a bad educational system. These things are, again obviously, easily had.

It once -- about 1,000 years ago -- occurred to Christians that profit was fundamentally immoral. Today, Christians in America line up behind the politics of profit. Democrats whine a bit before selling their souls to Mammon. If there were a hell, cupiditous profiteers would go there. Since we're all cupiditous profiteers, we obviously don't believe in hell anymore. The lip service we pay it recalls nothing so much as the false piety of the Satan of Christian lore.