If George Carlin Were God . . .
. . . things would make much more sense.
Life is tough . . . What do you get at the end of it? A death. What’s that, a bonus? I think the life cycle is all backward. You should die first, get it out of the way. Then you live in an old-age home. You get kicked out when you’re too young, you get a gold watch, you go to work. You work forty years until you’re young enough to enjoy your retirement. You do drugs, alcohol, you party, you get ready for high school. You go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating — and you finish off as an orgasm.
An Economic Ice Age
Very exhausted, so this won’t make much sense . . .
The other day I “tweeted” approximately “America is in decadence; we’ve had it too easy for too long; can a nation get out of decadence? how?” Jason the Commenter tweeted back, “Let individuals face the consequences of their choices.”
I keep thinking of that as I watch the steel jaws of this recession relentlessly closing on so many of my friends (flash of Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”), and I observe that we are now to be relentlessly punished for every wrong choice we’ve ever made: every opportunity we ever let go by, every reckless investment we got seduced into, every job or home value or interest rate or state of health we ever took for granted, the happy heedlessness bred of affluence and security that felt like it would go on forever. Everyone who was the grasshopper instead of the ant, everyone who was vaguely rather than ruthlessly “creative,” everyone who was stupid enough to be unlucky or wounded enough to be unsure — all who hesitated and all who impulsively leaped off the beat — will be lost.
(Well, no. Many will adapt, strip down, toughen up, and survive. But so much of what we thought was rightful entitlement — to do what we pleased, say what we thought, fulfill and amuse ourselves, deposit a paycheck — turns out to have been luxury.)
Elegantly Fisking Materialism.
David B. Hart, reviewing Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind:
Again and again, Robinson emphasizes the degree to which the mind’s experience of itself continues to elude the reach of the monist materialisms that want to subdue it.
And yet the reductionist project apparently understands itself, and certainly presents itself, as a kind of scientific project. Thus it generates the literature of what Robinson aptly calls “parascience”: a form of discourse whose rather grand, frequently incoherent, and usually irreducibly metaphysical assertions about the nature of the universe, the self, the genealogy of morality, and so on, masquerade as purely scientific claims. This is a literature that systematically blurs the distinction between fact and theory, and between legitimate theory and ideological invention; but it is marketed to readers who for the most part lack the special training needed to recognize when they are being misled, and so enjoys — as Robinson says of the works of Dawkins and Dennett — “the effective authority that comes from successful popularization.”
A great deal of the pleasure that Absence of Mind affords the reader comes from Robinson’s patient deflation of parascientific pretensions. She does not counter the reductionist case with vague appeals to hopeful sentiment, but instead quite effectively demonstrates how much of that case consists in baseless assumptions, ungoverned metaphors, and sheer assertion.
I love it!! This is on the Templeton Foundation-sponsored website Big Questions Online, which looks like the kind of sandbox I love to play in. You see, while Hart doesn’t suffer fools gladly, neither does skeptic.com‘s Michael Shermer, who in another piece on BQO eviscerates Deepak Chopra’s “quantum flapdoodle.” (Shermer may be a parascientist, but that doesn’t make Chopra’s equation of subatomic and mental nonlocality anything but fanciful.) You end up not knowing which is worse, the so-proud-to-be-boneheaded parascience or the mooshy new “spiritual” pseudoscience, but in any case being glad that there is a place that is ready to scrutinize all varieties of bad thinking with an endangered intellectual rigor.
Mad As Hell! Not Going to Take It Anymore! [UPDATED]
Guest rant by Jean S. Gottlieb
Much of our lives seem to be consecrated to making simple things complicated without the benefit of making complicated things simpler. Why is it so hard to get basic information, like a telephone number now that phone books have become endangered species? Computers were designed by people who like intricacy of the Dungeons and Dragons kind of thing, so they don’t “think” in a simplifying streamlining kind of way–at least not for the likes of me. I hate what has happened to the home page on the computer. Full of jumping ads and “information” I neither want nor am interested in. I hate what has happened to television which has been poisoned by the computer bug–all commercials and maybe 10 minutes of programming–I’m speaking of news broadcasts. All channels do the same stories at the same point in their broadcast; all synchronize their commercials to minimize viewers’ opportunity to get news on channel A while channel B is trying to sell you a car or some medication that they warn you to check with your doctor about because it can have ominous side effects.
I guess I am just in a ranting mood, but even simple things, so-called, like ordering tickets, airline, theatre, whatever, has become a humiliation, as has airline travel. What happened to the notion that service was what some of these bozos were supposed to be offering us? Why, with the the marvel of the computer to handle great gobs of data so that our records will be orderly, intelligible, and simplified, are medical records, for instance, often a muddle? Why does the doctor have you fill out the same form with the same (dumb) questions every time he sees you? Why doesn’t Dr. A. EVER seem to ask Dr. B. what he has been prescribing for you, or why is it sometimes the alert pharmacist who says, “You better not take both these medicines, they react badly on each other”? With all his record keeping the Dr. seems not to know something as important as conflicting medications that are both supposedly listed in your records!
I AM crabby tonight. Dad whupped me again at scrabble . . .
[reprinted with permission from an e-mail to amba]
Jean adds in response to comments:
What comes to mind as a further insult to the senses and the intelligence (?) of consumers is the totally distracting and unnecessary number of varieties even something as basic as TOOTHPASTE comes in: whitening, whitening with cavity preventer, gel or paste, extra scrub power, I can’t even begin to name the huge, unnecessary number of kinds of just that one item.
As for the respondent who says he prefers online shopping, I understand and sympathize. Retail has lost its lustre as a location where knowledge, charm personality, intuitiveness, whatever, are prized–or even exist. That’s a fault of employers who won’t or can’t train people to see the work as dignified. So selling a pair of shoelaces is like selling someone a winter coat (almost). What we gain is quick and easy and sanitized retail, no interpersonal relationship, no exchange, only snippy or bored “associates,” who are undifferentiated from the seller of hamburgers at McDonald’s.
The Survivors Club
Jacques and Charlie Miller have been through more between the two of them than all the rest of us put together. Charlie was fascinated by Jacques and gave him the first smile of the visit.
For a better view of Charlie:
They’re both miracles — Jacques who survived gangrene and boxed and did road work on his scarred legs; Charlie who came through brain bleeds and intestinal resection and just being born one and a quarter pounds, and claps his hands, stands on his feet with a little help from his friend above, laughs and says “Da-da” and “Ca” — cat — not known before today to be in his vocabulary.
For more and better pictures, watch Danny’s blog in the days to come. Danny and Kendall went out of their way from Chicago to see old friends in Durham, and Danny and Charlie came out of their way from Durham to see us.
Oh, I feel blessed.
Ladies and Gentleman, Your Global Political-Religious Conspiracy
If this Politico article is to be believed, the fierce controversy over the Cordoba House/WTC Mosque will end as it should – with a gnab gib:
The Cordoba Initiative hasn’t yet begun fundraising for its $100 million goal. The group’s latest fundraising report with the state attorney general’s office, from 2008, shows exactly $18,255 — not enough even for a down payment on the half of the site the group has yet to purchase.
The group also lacks even the most basic real estate essentials: no blueprint, architect, lobbyist or engineer — and now operates amid crushing negative publicity. The developers didn’t line up advance support for the project from other religious leaders in the city, who could have risen to their defense with the press.
The group’s spokesman, Oz Sultan, wouldn’t rule out developing the site with foreign money in an interview with POLITICO — but said the project’s goal is to rely on domestic funds. Currently, they have none of either.
Weeks into the controversy, Sultan told POLITICO that the project’s developers are hoping to get their “talking points” together.
“Give us a little time,” he pleaded.
“They could have obviously done a lot better in explaining who they are if they really wanted to get approval,” said publicist Ken Sunshine, a veteran of New York’s development wars. “There’s a real question as to whether there’s money behind this.”
“As I understand it, there’s no money there,” said another prominent business official.
A prominent supporter of the project was blunt: “This is amateur hour,” he said.
“That’s why the idea that this is some big conspiracy is so silly,” said the supporter. “Yes, you could say this is not a well-oiled machine.
Clearly, the dark forces driving for “Islamication of America” are no match for the hardened realities of New York City real estate.
“We Are the Freaks of Freedom.”
Michael Reynolds restates American exceptionalism for our time.
What I’ve Been Trying, and Failing, to Tweet . . .
. . . about Imam Rauf, splendidly said by Rick Moran at Right Wing Nut House:
[T]he more I read about this fellow Rauf makes me ask my liberal friends if they know who they are getting in bed with when they so viciously attack those who are opposed to building the mosque. I don’t trust people who say one thing in one language, and another thing in another language as Imam Rauf has done repeatedly. He has also been silent in the face of extraordinary statements by his colleagues in Malaysia about suicide bombings, Hamas, and hatred of the US. He has blamed the US for 9/11, defended Palestinian terrorism, refused to disavow Hamas’s goal of eliminating the state of Israel, and attended at least one conference with known terrorist sympathizers.
This guy is about as moderate a Muslim as Rush Limbaugh is a moderate conservative.
Despite this, to summarize my take on the “mosque” controversy (otherwise strung out on Twitter), the actual building and its location do not merit the rabble-rousing verbal description of a triumphal structure “towering over Ground Zero.” It is neither towering nor over Ground Zero. It doesn’t live up to its blazing marquee billing as a symbol either of Muslim triumphalism and dhimmitude, or of tolerant pluralism. It’s just another building in a busy neighborhood. The overwrought Right has made it much more important than it really is, thus elevating Imam Rauf to celebrity (rather than subjecting him to outside-the-limelight investigation) and causing the idiot Left to rush to the “mosque’s” defense. Maybe that was the plan. Maybe it was just a political trap that the Democrats obligingly fell into in plenty of time to lose them more votes in November. If so, does the end justify the means? Or does cranking the volume of our political “discourse” up to 11 over this poor choice of symbol merely deafen everyone further, locking the left into their defense of yet another dubious ally and the right into an ever-hardening opposition to all of Islam? The Left is too uncritically eager to designate and embrace Muslim allies, but the Right has now created a litmus test in which the only possible good Muslim is one who opposes the Ground Zero Mosque.
By the way, I bolded the line in the quote above because the encounter of my brother, an education journalist, with the Fethullah Gülen movement (depending on your point of view, a modern, tolerant, world-peace-promoting strain of Sufi Islam or a stealth Islamist attempt to theocratize Turkey and resurrect the Ottoman Caliphate), which actually runs (without admitting it) over a hundred charter schools in the U.S., got me thinking about taqqiya, the Muslim precept of deception in the service of the faith. (Here, about a third of the way down, is Gülen allegedly, and eloquently, advocating taqqiya to followers back in the 1990s. If authentic, this speech should probably not be understood as plotting for world domination; it’s all about Turkey and, perhaps, Turkic Central Asia.)
It struck me that one of the best ideals of the West (even though richly honored in the breach), and at the same time one that can render us vulnerable, is the assumption that people mean what they say, that we can take them at their word, that candor, forthrightness, transparency are aspects of honor, values we can trust we share with most of those we have dealings with. Given this noble yet naïve orientation, perhaps unique to a young and fortunate civilization, we are particularly ill-equipped to cope with the unnerving concept of taqqiya. We are bound to meet it with either excessive trust or excessive paranoia.
If . . .
Hitchens has a deathbed conversion after all, and swears that the him who told us that wouldn’t be the real him wasn’t the real him, which one do we believe?
(My answer in the comments.)
Ambiance 