Log (page 1)
This is the “blog” bit. All the wanky introspective stuff you’d expect – I’ll even try and throw in the odd post apologising for not blogging regularly. Seriously.
And I feel fine.
I wish to make a few predictions about the end of the world. Which is coming soon. [429 words]
Proposition 8: ‘No Rational Basis’
California’s Proposition 8, the statewide ban on same-sex marriages, has been struck down. It’s a good thing, but it has little effect on us directly.
However, some potentially useful things came out of it. In particular, the legal process required evidence to be presented and assessed for all the claims made by those both for and against same-sex marriage. Given the perfect opportunity, and no lack of funding, those arguing that same-sex marriage was destructive and undermined the institution of marriage were able to find… no convincing evidence at all. The law was struck down primarily because it had, in the judge’s words, ‘no rational basis.’ No evidence could be found that same-sex marriage is harmful.
I suspect most of us intuitively know that anyway, but it’s helpful to know that there is concrete evidence for that view, and none against.
A couple of summaries of the judge’s findings can be found at Fannie’s Room and the Yes Means Yes blog.
Cancer of the Colony
Colonial expansions leave three kinds of ex-/post-colonial nations in their wake: Rich & White, Poor, and Fucked. No matter which way you cut it, the indigenous people are never left in good shape. Here’s how it breaks down. [727 words]
Absolution
When I was a child I was taught in all seriousness that, if the Nazis were ever to come to your house and ask straight-up ‘are you hiding Jews in your attic?’ (and you would be, because that’s, like, the holiest thing possible) the correct response was to say ‘yes, we are,’ then to hold your breath and clench while you waited for God to swoop in and Jedi-mind-wipe the Nazis into thinking you’d said ‘no’ (and of course because God put the words there the Nazis would believe it and just go away.) This, despite the biblical precedents of the Hebrew midwives lying through their teeth to Pharaoh and ‘do not put God to the test.’ It always seemed a monstrously bad idea. (I imagined God shaking his head and muttering “am I going senile? Because I don’t remember sending a fucking PLAGUE OF STUPID.” God has a way with words.)
Or take, for another example, Tibetan buddhists. It’s against their moral absolutes to kill animals, but it appears to also be against their absolutes to starve to death. So they will frighten yaks into running off cliffs and dying prolonged, horrible deaths on the rocks below.
The end result (animals dying) is of course exactly the same, but because they have to sidestep past a moral absolute, they end up taking the path of greater suffering.
Or take the Hindu absolute of not interfering with the sacred cow. What starts out as respect for the divine is twisted into something quite different when that absolute (‘don’t interfere’) is taken to the logical extreme – Indian cities are crowded with diseased and injured cows, because medicine and care require ‘interference’ in the technical sense.
Want another example? Look at the increasingly ridiculous interpretations of ‘honour the Sabbath and keep it holy’ during the time of Jesus’ ministry – all of which Jesus himself hand-waved past when he was hungry, or people were sick, or there was work to be done…
Moral absolutes are unworkable.
Because I Have To
I am a cold, hard pragmatist. (I hear you laughing; bear with me.) My advice for a long and happy life would be roughly ‘don’t think too much, and don’t make things more complicated than they need to be.’ (Your laughter is growing.)
Seriously, I do my best to follow my own advice. It’s all about defining your terms. Easiest first: I think I make things only as complicated as they need to be, it’s just that that proves to be still quite complicated. Which makes sense. We’re all quite complicated people.
If I’m honest, I think a little too much. I’d define ‘too much’ as the point where you stop seeing results; where the thinking is no longer making your life better. Most of my thinking, though, most of it, still gets me results. And in the last couple of years I’ve managed to greatly reduce the amount of completely useless spinning-in-a-loop second-guessing that I used to do, so that’s something.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone copy my approach to life. It’s a lot of work, and it is quite complicated. But the point is that it’s necessarily complex, and it’s working pretty wonderfully for me. Sure, I can’t manage a real job, or a conventional faith, or (maybe) monogamy — if I could, I probably would. But I live the only way I’m able to live.
The State of the World as of Now
We’re currently paying for our reliance on oil at the rate of an entire Exxon Valdez spill every week. Meanwhile, no one seems to care that the Nigerian pirates turned to piracy in the first place because the same thing has been happening on their coast for a good decade now, and there’s no fishing left for them.
To summarise the last half-century: we made it through the cold war, invented the Internet and the iPad, and were just getting up a good head of panic about the 50-years-off conclusion to cascading climate change, only to get well and truly blindsided by a malfunction in state-of-the-art 19th century resource exploitation.
Seriously. It’s 2010 and the end of the world as we know it is a fucking oil spill. Extra deliciousness? Our only hope might be to hit it with a nuclear bomb.
Of course, still no one cares about the spill in the Niger delta. Unlike US happenings, we actually have to seek out news from most of the rest of the world.
(The relative newsworthiness of the different regions can be seen clearly in the efforts put into censoring news coverage of each of the spills. There’s no big effort to conceal the effects of the African disaster.)
And, to no one’s surprise, the piracy in the Niger region is portrayed as a criminal matter to be stamped out, rather than, you know, a perfectly legitimate response to horrifying, survival-threatening injustice.
All of which to say, really: old news. Old fucking news. Welcome to the future.
Whoosh
I think a lot about the kind of god I could believe in, and what her characteristics are, and why I’m no longer a Christian.
I come to this:
The god I imagine, the true one, the ‘fount of all being,’ is a wild limitless overflowing thing of life, joy, and love. A thing totally unconstrained and unpredictable. Has to be. Nothing less. As wild as Pan – god of the earth and forest and ocean as much as god of the sky and the stars. A being of sweet, terrible life. Something like the god whose back Moses is shown a glimpse of, up on that mountain.
Unfortunately, YHWH falls a little short of the ideal. He comes close at times, true – and party-Jesus doing wine-tricks is a glimpse of the ultimate truth – but ultimately YHWH is constrained by ‘rules,’ or ‘justice,’ or hand-waving about ‘the way things are.’ C.S. Lewis has Aslan speak of a ‘deep magic’ that cannot be undone or avoided; the penal substitutionists (and the satisfactionists) speak of some code or law that even YHWH must honour – and, therefore, that we also must yield to if YHWH is to save us. (I guess god did manage to create a rock so big even he can’t lift it?)
Even further – YHWH gets upset at the things people do. And not just for their sake, either (which would be permissible.) He gets offended! And jealous! He punishes people for doing obviously good things, because they contravene his arbitrary moral code! He endorses – encourages! – mass slaughter and pillage of people outside the chosen few.
I can imagine a god greater.
Of course, the flaw in the ontological argument is the assumption that imagining something means it must exist. I hold no such assumption. Nonetheless.
Any god who falls short of the best I can imagine is a god not worth worshipping.
MMIX
(because everyone else is.) What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before? etc. [898 words]
あなた
This is by way of a lead-in to a post on identity and labels I have percolating.
Japanese manners of address are fascinating, because they contain so much information. Usually, a person is addressed with some combination of name and descriptive suffix.
The suffixes express relationships (and, incidentally, power dynamics), with examples (and rough meanings) like san (Ms/Mr), sensei (teacher), senpai (senior), oniisan (older brother), chan (cute wee thing), or kun (little buddy.)
There’s also a solid hierarchy of formality → intimacy. From least to most intimate:
- Family name, suffix (Wilson-san)
- Given name, suffix (Matt-san)
- Given name (Matt)
- “you” (あなた, anata)
Anata is usually reserved for the closest of intimate partners – spouses or lovers. Given names with no prefix are for romantic partners and, perhaps, very close friends. Family names with a suffix are the default, first names with a suffix for good friends. (English obviously has parallels with use of titles, given names etc.; Japanese just makes it a little more apparent.)
The thing I find most interesting about all of this is that the more intimate the form of address, the less information is carried.
The more intimate the situation or relationship, the less cultural notions of identity seem to matter.
If you don’t know someone well, you address them in a way that makes explicit your mutual status, and in terms of their family. If you know them a little better, you still define them by status, but no longer by their family. (Names also carry cultural implications – “a good family,” “a noble name” etc.) And in the most intimate situations, there are no labels, no carried meaning, nothing more than the other person’s self.
Women in the News
First, this article, headlined “Women caught drink-driving overnight”
…although, as it turns out, it wasn’t only women. In fact:
Police pulled over 7524 cars at checkpoints in Manukau and Papakura overnight. In total, 81 drivers would be making court appearances, facing charges of excessive breath alcohol. Thirty-two of those caught were women, Inspector Heather Wells said.
So, a little less than 40% of those caught were women. Perhaps a better headline would have been “More women than usual caught drink-driving, but still fewer than the number of men.” Although we don’t even know that it’s more than usual, as the only ‘stat’ is the less-than-useful “years ago, it was just men were dumb enough to drink drive, but this appears to be changing.”
Secondly, an unpleasant little dose of blame-the-victim in “Celeb sex victim ‘angry’ at name suppression”:
The girl [the victim of the attack], now 17, said she had been subjected to cruel and untrue stories about her reputation since the court case.
…and:
“Afterwards, the police rang me and said that the musician was offering $200 to go towards a charity,” she said.
“They suggested I should ‘have some compassion’. My dad went berserk about that.”
I just love that. “They suggested I should ‘have some compassion’.” You know, for the guy who shoved his junk in an unwilling 16-year-old girl’s face. The dude just needs some love and understanding, people.