tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13477866166368144082024-03-05T13:37:59.656-05:00The Audient Void...wherein one man's delusions of profundity are communicated to the world.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.comBlogger38125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-23754570723438269532017-07-25T14:42:00.001-04:002017-07-25T14:42:36.898-04:00The Importance of OppositionPeople don't like being wrong, and they <i>really</i> don't like being told they are wrong. Some have more tolerance than others for it, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying it's a general truth about humans.<br />
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One of the big challenges that the modern world presents stems from one of the greatest advancements in my lifetime. The Internet has connected so many people in far-flung places with different views and different value systems. Initially, I thought this would be a boon for critical thought. I figured we'd all bump into each other, and it would teach us how to live with one another. That's how cities work, after all. In New York, for instance, all different kinds of people have had to learn how to live with each other's cultures and customs, and I think it has fostered tolerance.<br />
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Instead, though, our increased connectivity seems to have had the opposite effect: it has allowed us to find large groups of people who don't tell us we're wrong, and to make communities out of such groups that are uninviting to dissenters or even outright ban dissent. Whatever extreme, far-out views I might have, I can now go online and find others who espouse similar ones and form communities that provide reinforcement and support. It feels good and affirming. It can even be addictive. A whole group of people telling me that my suspicions are valid, that what I think has merit, that they think the same way! Views are reinforced and their holders are given a sense of validity that can only come from the nodding of heads.<br />
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And when the outside world looks in and says something contrary? Well, that's just persecution. That's bias. That's the uninformed others. Everything they say is ignorant. After all, I have my views, and look at all these people who agree. We've talked about it all in the group, and that's the conclusion we've come to. It doesn't matter that your counterpoint is logically sound. What matters is that it doesn't agree with mine, so it must be wrong, even if I can't say exactly why. It just is. I've thought through all my views, and they all make sense to me on a deep level. They can't possibly be wrong.<br />
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That's how it is. Instead of using this huge tool of connectivity to reach across borders and explore new ideas about the world, we've used it to find the people who are most like us and build exclusive niches, where we can reinforce each other and treat the outside world with mockery and scorn.<br />
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This isn't about one ideology or another. Yes, it's <a href="http://time.com/3528958/conservatives-liberals-news-pew/" target="_blank">more common</a> for <a href="http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2017/04/study-conservatives-liberals-read-different-scientific-books" target="_blank">conservative </a>types, given the nature of conservatism, but it certainly isn't exclusive to them. I'm guilty of it myself. I can only read Fox News or something similar for so long before I just get fed up. I used to be active in an online community that catered to a lot of different views from across the political spectrum, but as society became more segregated, the atmosphere there became less tolerant and more hostile, and the whole thing eventually withered away.<br />
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Given the lack of exposure to opposing views, it becomes easy to make assumptions or judgements about them - to build straw men of their arguments and to write off their concerns as misguided. And that's unfortunate, because we all need opposing views to reel us in when we go off to far. We all seek validation, but we need to be aware of that desire and suspicious of environments that never challenge us or make us think critically about what we believe. We need to react to opposing views with intellectual honesty. If we can't refute something, we have the be able to consider that maybe it's right and we're wrong. It's not so bad being wrong, really.<br />
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At this point, the problem is beyond any individual's ability to counteract it. It might be a lost cause. Honestly, there doesn't seem to be much common ground between the various factions that seem to have taken hold in the political sphere. But I do hope that we find a way to understand one another better, and that we learn to admit when we are wrong sometimes.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-36861404559356014042016-07-08T20:46:00.001-04:002016-07-08T20:46:38.120-04:00Sadness Rules the WeekI am sad. As an American citizen, I am sad. As a father of mixed-race children, I am sad. As someone who has, time and again, fallen into the trap of mistakenly believing that things have gotten better, I am sad. As a human being, I am sad.<br />
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A few days ago, there was another police shooting. And then another. Both of them weighed heavily on me. The videos were heartbreaking to watch. And then Dallas. The city has added another high-profile sniping to its history. And then there was another shooting, one people aren't even really talking about, in Tennessee. Everyone is shooting at each other, all for no good reason, it seems.<br />
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I can't say what happened in either of the two police shootings, but I can say that I doubt death was a necessary outcome in either case. It rarely is. Two men are dead, one shot in front of a four-year-old. Several children have instantly become fatherless. And what good has come of it?<br />
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I don't believe the police go into these situations with the intention of killing black people. They're not intentionally assassinating people. But I do believe that, when they see a black face, it gets their guard up. They are quicker to draw a weapon, quicker to assume that they themselves are in danger. I do believe that they react out of a genuine sense of being in danger.<br />
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But there are two problems. One is that that sense of danger is probably overblown in the vast majority of cases. The other is that, in far too many cases, the police escalate rather than de-escalate a situation. Traffic stops should only ever result in deaths when there is a very clear and present danger, when a gun is pulled or there is an uncontested move to cause harm, not when an officer is merely scared.<br />
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Yes, that makes it more likely that an officer loses his life. But it makes it less likely that an innocent civilian does, and that should be the overarching goal. We don't live in some authoritarian state, and we need to remember that the police are agents of the government. They need to be better trained to use nonlethal methods, even when faced with lethal methods themselves. I know that the general rule is to always counter with a more lethal weapon, but lethality is rarely necessary. Guns don't have to be the first line of defense. By signing up for the job, a police officer knows the risks he or she faces. I don't have the guts to do their job, but they need to have the guts to do it.<br />
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A police officer's primary goal in any situation shouldn't be coming out of it alive. It should be upholding the law. Upon becoming police officers, that is their sworn duty, and they have to be willing to make the biggest sacrifices, including their own lives, for it. That's what is so amazing about so many police officers - they are willing to put themselves in the line of fire in order to protect others.<br />
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I look at my own kids, and I know that they have to be a little more careful if they're ever pulled over, in a way that I wouldn't, simply because of their mixed heritage. That's not how things should be, ever. <br />
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Others have made the arguments I'm attempting far more eloquently than I can, so I'll move on to the next notch: Dallas.<br />
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What happened there was devastating. The protest event going on was a model of how police and community members should be, united against crime and wrongdoing. By all accounts, it was a peaceful and dignified protest going on. Then some maniac with a warped mind gets the idea that he's doing some kind of good by unleashing a hail of bullets. Something people who do such things need to realize is that, when you do this, you hurt your cause. A peaceful protest works because it gives your enemies nothing to latch onto as wrong. Violence allows them to equate your cause with your violence, drowning out any positive messages your group is trying to make.<br />
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Maybe it was inevitable that someone would snap, given the lack of justice in so many previous cases. But it doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't have to be one side trading shots with the other. There don't have to be sides, even. Don't we all (mostly, anyway) want to have peace? Don't we all want to be able to do our jobs or ride in cars or stand around outside without worrying that someone will kill us for it? <br />
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Again, others have made this point far more eloquently than I can - foremost among them, Dr. King himself, whose justly over-quoted quote I will end with:<br />
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<div class="st" style="margin-left: 25px; margin-right: 25px;">
<i>Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. <i>Hate cannot drive out hate</i>: only love can do that.</i></div>
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If only we could take that in and process it and truly understand the wisdom of it...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-38578364912042109102016-06-16T17:45:00.000-04:002016-06-16T17:45:02.715-04:00An explanationI know, I know. I said I would write here more consistently, and I haven't written in months. Sorry about that, Void. I know you've missed me.<br />
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There's been good reason, though. The energy I had been putting into writing entries here has gone mostly into creatively productive pursuits. In particular, I've finally been mapping out some world-building ideas that have been bumping around the inside of my skull for years. I've also developed a sudden and pronounced interest in conlanging - that is, the creation of constructed languages - since reading a couple of books on it. Of course, these two things are related, so I find myself building constructed languages for a constructed world. It has been fun and fulfilling, in a very geeky sort of way.<br />
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As for the exercise, well, I haven't been consistent. I have surges where I'm good. I go for walks, I use my little exercise machine. But then I drop off and forget until some combination of guilt and gumption causes me to take up the effort once again. Like most Americans, it seems, I have trouble getting and staying in good shape, and I can't seem to find a good strategy to change that - at least not one that works for me.<br />
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Anyway, I will make no further promises regarding the regularity of my entries here, but I do intend to keep coming back, to write more.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-84408804603371178382016-02-09T11:02:00.000-05:002016-04-27T17:42:55.786-04:00The Unfortunate Shortcomings of Humanity, Including MeI've been taking some audio courses lately. I've taken two philosophy classes, a linguistics class, and a class on the history of ancient Rome. Currently, I'm taking a class on modern political thought. I feel so much happier when I'm learning new things, particularly in areas that have always been interesting to me but which I haven't really pursued.<br />
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It has been interesting to see how the classes, all taught at different times by different professors, have actually overlapped. The linguistics class overlapped with Rome, which overlaps with political thought, which overlaps with philosophy, etc. So much of the human condition is mirrored in other aspects of itself.<br />
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The story of language and how it has spread and evolved reminds me so much of evolutionary biology. Everything is constantly changing, evolving with no goal in sight. People misunderstand evolution enormously. There is a tendency to talk about a "next step" in evolution, as if it is going somewhere specific. It's really just like language. Changes happen for reasons too intricate to determine, and ones that seem to work catch on, sometimes for reasons only tangentially to how useful a change actually is. There is no inherent benefit to speaking Latin, but it spread because it was a trait of the Romans, who were powerful and conquered a lot of land. And then, eventually, Rome fell, and its language mixed with local dialects and such to become the Romance languages, and those further evolved and influenced other languages, including English. Those, in turn, mixed with the languages of African slaves to pepper the world with various creole languages. There is this constant interchange between the languages in a pattern that is incalculably intricate yet simple and fluid. So much of reality seems to fit that same description.<br />
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Unfortunately, our human minds aren't really capable of really understanding things as they are. We have this need to categorize and filter that, while useful for our survival, particularly in earlier times, can be a real hindrance to a quest for knowledge of any kind. We become blind to our blindnesses, believing we know things when we only suspect them, and we build beliefs on top of beliefs in such ways that the removal of one would cause the rest to crumble. We are biased and easily duped.<br />
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I was watching the Republican debate the other day. Primaries have begun, and they were going at each other, trying to win the favor of the people. What struck me strongly was that there were these five or six guys up there on the stage, spouting canned lies and misleading statistics, and the vast majority of people seemed to take what they said at face value. Blatant lies that would get a person fired from a job or hit with a divorce in some other settings are just eaten up. Even when lies are revealed to be lies, people just kind of shrug and continue. It should be a bigger deal when someone claims, "I never said that," but there is video of him saying it. It should be a bigger deal when someone claims they created jobs when they clearly didn't. It's lying in the job interview, and they're caught red handed. But no one cares.<br />
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We seem to have a tribal kind of approach to elections. It's like a sport in so many ways. I am automatically biased against Republican candidates because I can't help but think of them as the Bad Guys. I'd like to say it's for real well-considered ideological reasons, but often it isn't. It's just knowing that they are Republicans. It's mostly like how I'm a Mets fan and will automatically root against a team if they are playing against the Mets. There is no rational reason for it - they're just part of my tribe.<br />
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It's not exactly the same, as there are certainly some ideological differences between the Republicans and myself. But I automatically put them in a certain box as soon as I know they are Republicans. I know I do it, and I don't think I can actually stop myself from doing that. I can only acknowledge that bias and do my best to consider it as a factor in my own judgements.<br />
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I can't say I'm blown away by the Democratic candidates, either. I like Bernie Sanders, but the man is unelectable. And Hillary Clinton? Well, I guess she'd be better than the guys I saw the other night, but she's far from an ideal candidate. She has too much of her husband's slippery slickness, but she isn't as good as him at pretending to be sincere. I just don't trust her very much at all. I look across the ocean at countries like Norway and wonder why people here are so reluctant to take some ideas from them. There's no shortage of innovation, and the people are much happier and better educated. Oh well.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-38933494281648779882016-02-01T22:28:00.002-05:002017-07-25T14:45:08.822-04:00Democracy and the Political MachineTonight, voters in Iowa take the first step in determining who the next President of the United States will be. It's just the beginning of the nomination season, but already I'm tired of it. Election years can be so draining. Donald Trump has been leading the way for Republicans in the early going, and Hillary Clinton seems to have a pretty good lead over Bernie Sanders. The prospect of a Trump vs. Clinton showdown in November does not fill me with anything close to delight.<br />
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As a young adult, I was not what you would call a politically-minded person. I was vaguely aware that there were various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but their names and faces were mostly just a blur. I didn't vote at all because I felt like I never wanted to be part of it. National politics were too far removed from me, and local politics didn't matter much because I wasn't in one stable place. <br />
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Nowadays, I'm considerably more aware of the specifics involved. There are still various crooks and liars vying for control of the country, but at least I know who some of them are now, and I can see that some are worse than others. I vote now, but mostly it's to keep someone out of office rather than to put someone in. It's always a least-of-all-evils situation. I sometimes wish I could get caught up in the magnetic pull of a candidate I really believed in, the way so many people seem to be caught up, but I've never even come close. I guess the closest I ever did get to that was Obama's first turn. The idea of <i>someone different</i> being in charge was a pretty nice one. He didn't look the same or speak the same, and he was so much less embarrassing on the world stage than Dubya. But people tried to make a deity of him, which set him up to fail.<br />
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He didn't quite fail - overall I think Obama did a pretty good job with what he had to work with, which was constant opposition and an increasingly circus-like atmosphere in Washington. I think he'll go down as a middle-of-the-pack president, maybe a bit better than that.<br />
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Anyway, getting to the point I wanted to make here... I'm really disheartened by the whole state of politics in this country. I'm not sure it's fixable. One of the biggest problems is the general ignorance of the population. A democracy simply can't function properly if its constituents are not educated well. I don't mean we need a nation of Rhodes Scholars. We just need people to not be completely foolish. Young Earth creationism? Really? That's a thing that a significant number of people in this country adhere to? And the so-called "anti-vaxxers"? Our anti-intellectual culture has allowed a variety of such fact-challenged worldviews to proliferate among the masses, and their influence has allowed those pulling the strings to manipulate them into voting against their own best interests time and again.<br />
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And those strings are getting tighter. All that dark money will ensure that whoever wins the seat in the Oval Office will be beholden to the interests of the elite. That, or they'll be Donald Trump, and they'll just be awful.<br />
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The ancient Greeks knew that the biggest weakness of democracy, the thing that could bring about its downfall, was an uneducated voting population. We know that now, too, of course, and that knowledge is used to keep people dumb and distracted enough that they can be manipulated more easily. I guess it's better than having a totalitarian in charge, but it's not the shining light of hope that people seem to think it is.<br />
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The United States set an awesome example for how to have a functioning nation, but it has been surpassed. In the marketplace of ideas, the US has stalled out. The framers were breakers of tradition who wanted ideas rather than people to be held up as examples. How would they feel about how often their names are used as if they are gods or saints, to be venerated like kings?<br />
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We spend too much time staring in the mirror and admiring ourselves while the rest of the world moves on. It would be so much better to spend that time figuring out how to improve.<br />
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Anyway, I'm tired and at this point I'm just ranting, probably somewhat incoherently. Maybe I'll come back and fix this post up tomorrow. Probably not. No reason to spend time fixing it when I could write another instead.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-57003768384042259662016-01-24T22:38:00.000-05:002016-01-24T22:38:29.052-05:00The Folly of ScientismI was reading through a rant that someone posted on an atheist site today in which the poster claimed that science is only the religion of the moment and has no more to back it up than religion does. It's an odd claim to make, but upon reading more, I could see what the poster was trying to express, although the choice of terminology could have been better.<br />
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What he was trying to rail against was not science, but scientism. One is often mistaken for the other, and the term "scientism" is not well known. Scientism is a trap easily fallen into for many science-minded people. I find it difficult to define in any succinct way, but essentially it is a glorification of science beyond any reasonable level. The particular version of scientism argued against in the post, though, was the glorification of <i>scientific results</i>.<br />
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Science, by its nature, never arrives at an answer. One of its core ideas, really, is that you can approach knowledge, but you can never fully attain it. You put forth a hypothesis and test it out, and if your hypothesis is demonstrably better than every other hypothesis, it becomes the leading theory on whatever it is about. But if someone else comes along with a better one, well, yours is gone. There is a constant progression toward knowledge without ever a true acquisition of it. Even something as seemingly obvious as Newtonian physics was upended when Einstein came along with something better. Nothing is sacred, and nothing is set.<br />
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However, one who has fallen into the scientism trap will often take whatever the latest consensus is on a given topic and treat it as irrefutably proven. Let's look at global climate change as an example. All the evidence we have points to it being real and being influenced by human activity. As it stands now, that is the overwhelming scientific consensus. It could be wrong, and all true scientists must admit that it could be wrong, but it represents the best explanation for the data that we have.<br />
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The general public has a hard time with the lack of certainty in science. Unscrupulous talking heads will often prey upon this by sowing an inordinate amount of doubt in a scientifically reached consensus. There is usually some political or personal motivation behind this. Someone will go on television to point out some perceived inconsistency, claiming it refutes the consensus view. It can be very tempting for a scientist or a science-minded person to counter back with a claim that the consensus view is irrefutable fact. This is one of the traps of scientism. It is unscientific to claim any fact is irrefutable.<br />
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This doesn't mean we shouldn't consider global climate change to be a real and legitimate threat. If we were to wait around for things to be proven before acting on them, we'd never do anything. We all have a threshold beyond which we consider something to be proven well enough to act on. It's important to keep that threshold consistent and to understand what it is. Science is a tool to help us do that. When scientists write up results, they usually include a confidence interval, which basically gives you an idea of how likely their conclusion is correct based on the data. The confidence interval is never 1.00 (a "perfect score"). Acknowledgement of the possibility of error is built into science.<br />
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Most scientists do understand this, but it's very hard for the human mind to handle uncertainty well, it seems. We find what we think works and we stick to it, and we're loath to admit when we're wrong. We don't want our personal philosophies to be undermined. We aren't logic machines. Science is an acknowledgement of that, and it presents us with a way to move forward without denying the uncertainty.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-21098092841376976042016-01-17T19:14:00.000-05:002016-01-17T19:15:27.895-05:00Self ImprisonmentThe sting of social isolation can be a little more barbed at some times than it is at others. While I am often most comfortable when I'm alone with my thoughts, lately I have been feeling a real emptiness when I look left and right and see no one. Don't get me wrong. There are people all around me. I have wonderful kids who give my life meaning, great relations with my coworkers, and even an ex-wife with whom I get along very well. But there are certain roles that can only be filled by certain kinds of people, and the empty places in my life have been increasingly on my mind.<br />
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This is partially of my own construction, although I would hesitate to say that it has been a <i>willing</i> construction. It is more the sort of thing I've done as a defense of sorts. I am responsible for these two boys of mine, and they rely on my attention quite a bit. I adore them more than I could ever adore anything else. Anytime I have attempted to build a life for myself outside of my children and my job, things have gone off the rails for me. It has become a major distraction, and the areas of my life I care about most have suffered.<br />
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My default state has always been one of being alone. Left to my own devices, I do not seek companionship. This is not because I don't want it, but because it doesn't come naturally to me. It is a true effort to seek out and form relationships of any kind with other people. It requires time, energy, attention, and focus. When I devote those resources toward forming relationships, I take them away from other places, and those other places (home, work) are the ones that need the most attention, especially the home. I've generally been able to live with this.<br />
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Well, now it's getting harder.<br />
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Now I'm starting to see some negative impact of my complete lack of a social life. The emptiness I am feeling in one area of my life is affecting how I feel at unrelated times. As someone who has spent a good deal of time thinking about the human mind, this isn't surprising to me. An imbalance in life like the one I have isn't really mentally healthy. But I've been trying to sneak by like this for as long as possible.<br />
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My old friends are mostly all busy with their own lives now. Everyone is married or in a relationship and doesn't have a lot of time to get together. And, to be honest, I really have no idea how to make new friends at my age. When I was younger, there seemed to be so much time. Friends could get together on a whim, and there could always be people around. Now that I'm in my forties, the only way to meet people is through some kind of structured program like online dating or meetup or something like that. I suppose I could find a nice meetup group or something, but I find myself coming back to the issue of time and energy.<br />
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I find myself wishing for some kind of romantic partner as well, even though the last time I tried to make that happen, a few months ago, it just didn't work out. Again, time and energy. But if this frustration and emptiness keeps clawing at me from inside, it's going to reach some breaking point where I just need to do <i>something</i>. I'm not there yet, but I can see it coming.<br />
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I have a lot to think about.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-44347371763457481752016-01-10T21:53:00.000-05:002016-01-10T21:54:17.488-05:00Flawed ArgumentsI am an unapologetic liberal. Or, as liberals tend to call themselves today, "progressive." While I don't agree with the liberal consensus on every little thing, I'm overwhelmingly supportive of liberal causes and ideas. There was a time when I would have called myself "middle of the road," but two things happened to change that. For one, the "road" veered right, leaving me farther to the left of it, and for another, age has had the opposite effect on me that it is said to have on people: it has made me more liberal in my views.<br />
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That said, I can't help but cringe sometimes when I visit progressive websites. Just as I'm sure there are many conservatives who hold their heads in their hands when they see the loonies on Fox News, I often find myself rolling my eyes at some of the items I see on liberal sites. Without going into specifics (because I don't want to get caught up in them, since they are not the point here), I'll see people defending behaviors by members of the progressive "team" for which they would have derided conservatives. I see people using extremely flawed logic and straw men to make arguments, and then basking in the echo chamber of righteousness. I see people overstating a case, making things far more black-and-white than they really are, or distorting information to fit it into their argument, blurring the line between fact and opinion. And if you call them on it, they say, "Well conservatives do it too!"<br />
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The most powerful arguments are ones backed up by facts. They don't appeal to authority or to some nebulous concept of "common sense." They flow logically from evidence, making as few suppositions as possible along the way. Unfortunately, despite being more powerful, such arguments are, the vast majority of the time, unsexy. They lack in superlatives and generally come across as half-measures to both sides in a debate.<br />
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Look, any argument will have opinions and interpretations in it. No answer is so straightforward that it can be arrived at through pure reason. Science is messy and has to make due with real world situations. Not everything can be tested in a randomized controlled trial. But it really gets to me when people build assumptions on top of one another and treat those sets of assumptions as fact.<br />
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It's been suggested before that language developed not to communicate truth but to win arguments. If that's the case, then I guess this is a lost cause. But I do wish that people would care less about winning the argument and more about reaching a truthful conclusion.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-45437842684497195762016-01-04T17:26:00.000-05:002016-01-04T17:26:01.835-05:00Music and Life, Recorded and LiveI can't rightfully call myself a musician anymore. I write that sentence with feelings of sadness, and a bit of both shame and guilt. After all, I spent many years thinking of myself primarily as a musician. Right up until the arrival of my first son, and even for some time after that, I saw myself as a musician, and whatever job I had as a way of making money until music worked out. Admitting that I am not a musician anymore is a little difficult, but it is also obvious. These days, most people who meet me are surprised even to learn that I once was a musician.<br />
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In truth, "musician" was never a fully appropriate word for me. I played keyboards a bit, but <i>playing</i> music was never central to my experience with the art. First and foremost, I always considered myself a composer. And, I'm happy to say, that part of me still exists, although no one can hear the music I write these days. Lacking the means to record it (due to physical space limitations and the time restrictions involved in being a single parent), everything I write these days stays in my head. But I still think up new music all the time.<br />
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Most people probably think of music as a live art form. Throughout most of history, the only way for music to be heard was if people played it live on instruments. Only with the innovations in recording sound near the end of the 19th century did that change. By the latter part of the 20th century, one could purchase recorded music of such quality that it could sound crisper and cleaner than even live music could.<br />
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Similar innovations around the same time came in film. Before the late 19th century, actors were people who performed live in front of an audience. When movies came to prominence in the early 20th century, film was an art form that grew very much out of theater. Early movies were essentially filmed plays. It didn't take long, though, for filmmakers to experiment with new techniques that would set film apart from theater. Even in its very early days, special effects brought images to film that could not have been shown on a stage. <span><i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uhaFhsI6Uk" target="_blank">A Trip to the Moon</a></i>, a famous 1902 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès, is an amazing work for its time that showed the world what possibilities film held.</span><br />
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<span>Over time, film became its own art form, distinct from theater in many meaningful ways. The use of camera angles and special effects were the two most obvious, but even the acting styles changed. Film actors do not need to project their voices for an assembled crowd, and they can use nuanced facial expressions in ways that would be invisible on stage. Film is a much more visual art form than theater.</span><br />
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<span>What is interesting to me is how the same thing did not happen with music. As with film and theater, the innovations allowing for the recording of music led to techniques that could only be applied to recording. We got the ability to record on multiple tracks, allowing musicians to record together asynchronously, without even meeting. As recording quality improved, more details could be added to the music. Quiet background noises that would have been drowned out in live performances could be added to recorded music. Sound could be manipulated post-recording. We would eventually get pitch correction and the integration of computers. Nowadays, you can directly edit waveforms on a simple personal computer. In a sort of meta twist, sampling - essentially, recordings made from other recordings - became popular in the 1980s, particularly in hip hop music, which is itself a genre born almost completely out of the manipulation of recorded music.</span><br />
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<span>Still, people tend to think of recorded music and live music as two modes of the same thing, whereas theater and film are different. With rare exceptions, people don't go to see live versions of the movies they love. The actors don't follow up a film with a tour of performances. And we don't expect even the most popular plays to produce a film version with the same set of actors. Yes, there are film versions from time to time, but they are always quite different in flavor and feature a different set of creators.</span><br />
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<span>There are bands that do not record their music, to be sure, but generally speaking, recording your music is considered to be an essential part of making it. Likewise, there are certainly people who only record music and don't play live, but it's not anywhere near the standard. The expectation in music is that you will have both a live and a recorded product, and that they will reflect one another. Ideally, the musicians involved in both versions are the same. </span><br />
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<span>Nowadays, of course, it's not really possible to make a living purely on recorded music. And that is one of the big reasons (among a few other big reasons) I gave up when I did. I never had any drive to play live music. I was always much more interested in recording it, in playing with waveforms on computers and fooling around in a room to come up with new music. When I was younger, I dreamed of making a career of that. Not of recording <i>other people's</i> music, mind you - that job exists in the form of a record producer. I wanted to make my own music, send it out there, and let the money roll in.</span><br />
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<span>Of course it doesn't work that way. Music is not like film. Nowadays, if you are not a top pop singer, you aren't making money on recorded music. In fact, if you make it, you're probably losing money or breaking even. It's hard to sell recorded music because it's just so easy to make a perfect digital copy.</span><br />
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<span>This is a shame to me. I think of recorded music as a distinct art form. I enjoy it far more than I enjoy live music, and that feeling has only increased as I've gotten older. I realize that I'm very much in the minority on this, but music, for me, has always been </span><span><span>best </span>experienced in headphones. I can hear all the details, all the background stuff, all the texture. Live music sounds muddled and messy, and while I do enjoy that from time to time (especially if performed by highly skilled musicians), it doesn't bring me the joy that listening to a really good recording does.</span><br />
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<span>I'm not even what you'd call an audiophile. I don't collect vinyl, and mp3s are usually clear enough to me. I don't make minute adjustments to graphic equalizers for different albums. I just like the experience of hearing recorded music.</span><br />
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<span>When I was recording music myself, I made music that I wanted to hear. I made it to be listened to in headphones. But that's not something that can be a career anymore. Given the other elements that led me to abandon music as a career path - my parental responsibility, my lack of affinity for self-promotion, maybe my self-doubt, etc. - this was by no means the only thing that led me to give it up, but it was certainly a contributing factor.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-79344268373637830112016-01-02T00:30:00.001-05:002016-01-02T00:33:05.001-05:00New Year, New MeI have pretty much always scoffed at the idea of New Year's resolutions. Not because I feel like I'm above them, but because I don't think I've ever met anyone who has kept a resolution for more than a month or so before giving up on it. It's all well and good to promise the universe that you're going to do (or not do) something, but the actual act of changing your habits in some substantial way is a lot more difficult. In the case of a resolution made solely based on the fact that it's a new year, well, there's a reason you're not already doing whatever it is you have resolved to do, and until you've addressed that reason, you need to do more than make a resolution.<br />
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Today is the first day of 2016. Actually, by the time I post this it will probably be the second day, since that is five minutes away and I'm not likely to finish this in one quick blast. Despite what I said in the first paragraph, I have decided to make a resolution for this year. In fact, I've decided to make two, which is either overly ambitious or a good way to give myself a fallback option in case one doesn't work out (so that I can say I at least partially kept my resolution!).<br />
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The first resolution I'm making is one I've thought about every year but have dismissed as a setup for failure. It's the same resolution that roughly 90% of the people who make resolutions make (by my very unscientific calculation): exercise more. Now, I know if I don't define it any better than that, it will never happen. No one ever keeps the resolution to exercise more because it doesn't provide any measurable goal.<br />
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So what I am going to do is to set a goal for myself that is so ridiculously easy to reach that I really have no excuse not to reach it. I'm going to say that I will set aside five minutes every weekday explicitly to exercise. This doesn't mean walking to and from the train station. That's just incidental exercise. What I mean is that I will specifically have a five minute period of time whose main goal is to exercise. I can either lift some dumbells, use this elliptical machine that has been gathering dust, or do some other aerobic or calisthenic activity not in the service of some other goal. Just five minutes. I can do more if I want, but that doesn't mean I can exercise less the following day. No banking exercise minutes.<br />
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I have no reason I can't meet that goal. I have done it plenty of times before, but I'm usually too lazy to bother. I say, "well, I walked instead of taking the bus today, so I got exercise." I can't do that. I mean, I can walk instead of taking the bus, but that doesn't count toward the exercise quota. I'm hoping that by setting the bar so low, I can create a pattern of behavior that I can expand upon over time. Once I'm setting aside a few minutes a day, it becomes simpler to simply increase the number of minutes. We'll see how it works.<br />
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So that's the first resolution.<br />
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My second resolution is to write at least one entry for this blog per week. A quick look at the history here shows that I got off to a pretty good start with this thing, but I faded fast and have only on rare occasion come back to post some random thing or other. I skipped all of 2014 and made one miserable post at a weak point in 2015. No one is reading this anyway (except for the void, I suppose), so it's not like I'm interacting with others, even if I am publishing. It's easy to say that there's no point.<br />
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However, I do like the feeling of keeping a blog going. I like the idea of it. I feel a small sense of accomplishment each time I post. I'd also like to hone my writing skills a bit, as I think they've fallen off somewhat from when I was younger and more energetic about things. I'm middle-aged now. Let this be my crisis. I am not going to try to enforce a focus for this blog, although I guess it's possible one could develop. I'm just going to post about anything and everything I find interesting.<br />
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So here I go, 2016. I've put it out there for all to see. Can I do it? I'll make updates here, and I'll be honest if I fail.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-46966808018095638572015-09-01T09:41:00.001-04:002015-09-01T09:44:09.121-04:00An Unexpected ScarYears ago, there was this girl I had a crush on. I'll call her J. She was one of the only girls I ever actually had the nerve to tell about the crush I had on them. I'm a coward, you see, and my biggest fear is rejection. The roots of that fear reach deep down into me, and they are plentiful, the deepest of them dipping into my early childhood experiences of loss, of two members of my household dying by the time I was 8, and the seemingly continuous stream of deaths in my extended family as I got older. Somehow my mind seems to have experienced these losses as rejection, and it has done its best to build defenses against anything that might make me feel like that again.<br />
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The best way to avoid rejection is not to put anyone in a position from which they can reject you, which has the unfortunate side effect of not putting anyone in a position from which they can accept you. But in J's case, I made an exception. I was 24 years old, and she was 20, and we worked together. We started hanging out, and I told her that I liked her.<br />
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At first, she seemed to like me back, but she had recently broken up with a boyfriend and wasn't ready to pursue anything. Being a young and naïve idiot, I took that to mean I could wait things out and eventually she <i>would </i>be ready. Even now, all these years later, I still beat myself up about this. It still upsets me.<br />
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We spoke on the phone almost every day for several months. An initial crush became infatuation, and then – I can honestly say this after all these years – I started to fall in love. I had never been in love before. I had never even had a serious relationship. In fact, I probably had less relationship experience than an average high school kid, yet there I was, a college graduate.<br />
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I foolishly let myself keep believing that one day it would come to be, that we would be together. She did nothing to dissuade me. She was young and didn't know how to reject me, so she let me go on believing. This continued for the better part of a year.<br />
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Then one day she finally told me it was never going to happen. Our relationship had solidified for her as a friendship (yes, I was friend-zoned). In fact, she had actually gotten involved with another guy at work. He was a really good guy, too, not some creep I could easily make the target of any kind of negative feelings I had. I actually pleaded with her, but it had been over for her a long time before. There had never been any chance. <br />
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By initially telling her how I felt, I managed to work up the nerve to face the possibility of rejection, my biggest fear. And now here it was. But this wasn't just rejection. It was humiliation. It was the worst version of my worst fear coming to fruition.<br />
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I did not date again after that. The fear of rejection I'd had before was multiplied. It was something I absolutely wanted to avoid at all costs. So I gave up. Years passed by. Other crushes came and went, and I never spoke a word of them. I did my best to make myself not feel them.<br />
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Eventually, I got asked out, and of course I ended up marrying the woman who asked me out, and of course that ended in divorce. When you believe that something is your one and only shot, you turn a blind eye to even the most glaring deficiencies. <br />
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Nowadays, I'm back in the dating pool, except that I'm not really because I am the same way I was before. I can't bear the thought of rejection, so I avoid situations that might lead to it. I have dabbled in online dating, but it hasn't really led anywhere because I can't bring myself to put in the effort, knowing that the likely result will be the thing I fear most.<br />
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What amazes me, thinking about all this, is that this stupid experience I had with J nearly half a lifetime ago seems to have had a more long-term damaging effect on me than even my divorce did. I am over the divorce, and I've reached a happy point and formed a good relationship with my ex-wife. We are co-parents of two wonderful kids, and I think we do as good a job as we can with it. <br />
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But I am amazed at how long the scars of my experience with J have lasted. It seems to be a permanent kind of damage. There's a chance it will prevent me from ever having a solid romantic relationship again in my life. I'm middle-aged now, and I feel like a teenager when it comes to these things. I am embarrassed by it. <br />
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Today is J's birthday. I feel like a fool for even remembering that. She'd be 37 today, and she probably remembers me as little more than a blip in her life, if she even remembers me at all. I essentially broke off contact with her after the rejection, and I have no idea where she went or what her life brought her. I feel no antipathy towards her – she was basically a kid – but the scars of that experience still feel fresh sometimes.<br />
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I guess you never truly know how you'll be affected by something until the dust settles and it has found a spot to take up residence in your memory.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-81738966568270277862013-12-11T11:46:00.000-05:002013-12-11T11:48:59.931-05:00The Non-Traditional Family UnitEarlier this month, actress <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0004742/" target="_blank">Maria Bello</a> published a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/fashion/coming-out-as-a-modern-family-modern-love.html" target="_blank">fascinating article</a> in the <i>New York Times</i> about her "modern" family. I found it fascinating not because she has outed herself as bisexual (the sort of thing that really isn't as big a deal as the media thinks it is anymore), but because of her musings about the word "partner" and her inclusive definition of her family.<br />
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My own family, while not as far from the traditional setup as Ms. Bello's, is unusual. I live with my ex-wife and our two sons. My ex-wife and I get along quite well as friends and complement one another's parenting styles. We work together as co-parents, and we are also good friends. I care about her not only because she is my sons' mother, but because of who she is as a human being. We did not work as husband and wife for a variety of reasons, but as friends and partners-in-parenting, we work rather splendidly.<br />
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However, I have had a hard time defining my relationship to my ex-wife in ways that people can understand. When I say that I live with my ex-wife, people assume that either we live together strictly out of financial necessity, or that we are still together (i.e., sleeping together). While finances are certainly a factor in our living together, our children's special needs are also part of the equation, and I believe our friendship factors in as well. Our relationship has been platonic for so long now that sometimes I find it odd to think that we were once married. The awkwardness of the shift is gone, except for when I need to explain it to others.<br />
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My ex-wife and I have both dated other people (although, to be honest, living with your ex puts quite a damper on that part of life), and we have both moved on romantically. We get along far better than we did when we were married. I'm so glad to have her as my sons' mother. We do things together as a family, and it really does feel like a family, even if the mom and the dad are separate from one another.<br />
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Reading Ms. Bello's article made me feel good about my own situation. It can be a pretty lonely one, generating odd looks and occasional scorn from people. But it feels right, and despite some of the drawbacks, it has mostly worked well.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-16089782488247203092013-02-05T23:29:00.001-05:002013-02-05T23:34:45.186-05:00Safety Not FirstAs a parent, I obviously care deeply about the welfare of my children. I do not want them to get hurt, and it bothers me greatly to see them in any kind of pain. I try to keep them out of harm's way in order to avoid such things.<br />
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However, I also realize that pain is a necessary part of life, and that it teaches and informs us. To withhold it entirely from my children would be to deprive them of important lessons. Now, this doesn't mean I pull out whips and chains and beat the kids to teach them or anything nearly so psychotic. No, I don't advocate <i>inflicting</i> pain on children. But I do advocate letting them experience it as a result of their actions. I do advocate allowing them to enter into situations where they might be mildly hurt, situations involving some level of risk or failure, in order to teach them how to deal with pain and failure.<br />
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This is an opinion I hold that seems to be at odds with many (maybe most) parents I have met. I let my kids ride their scooters without protective gear, for instance, which some parents would say is irresponsible. However, my kids have learned how to be a lot more careful and mindful of their actions while riding their scooters than I think they otherwise might have been. My older son, who was quite reckless and willing to charge head first into walls as a toddler, now has a pretty good understanding that if he does things like that, it will hurt.<br />
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Maybe you're reading this and thinking, well <i>of course</i> pain teaches lessons, but a parent's role is to make sure his child is safe until the child is able to do so for himself. To a degree, this is true, but I believe a more important role for a parent is to teach his child to reach that level. It must be a balance. You can't stick your kid in the wilderness and tell him to fend for himself without guiding him and training him first. But you also can't expect him to learn how to fend for himself if you keep him tucked away in safety.<br />
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It is difficult, as a parent, to let your child walk into a situation that you know is dangerous, but I believe that just as a parent must be aware of when the risk is too great for the child, he must also know when the risk is work taking. Far too often, parents err on the side of caution. That is the better side to err on, but it is still an error, and we should work to correct our errors.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-80790581022646098382012-10-23T23:47:00.001-04:002012-10-23T23:48:56.036-04:00The Evolution of Bucket-ManAbout three and a half years ago, when he was six, my son A created his own superhero. He and his brother were living with his mother in Rhode Island at the time, and I was visiting. I happened to have a video camera with me to capture the birth of Bucket-Man.<br />
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Like most kids his age, his invention was mostly an imitation influenced by available materials. He was obsessed with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o29VoxtsFk" target="_blank">Spider-Man</a> and knew the three <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000600/" target="_blank">Sam Raimi</a> movies scene for scene. He also had a big blue plastic bucket that could fit on his head like a hat. Bucket-Man was pretty much Spidey, but with buckets. That is, he saved the city by using his "bucket webs" and his "bucket climb." Apparently he could shoot buckets from his wrist and use buckets to climb walls.<br />
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He looked like this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijdh2I5TQCyNFxDxV8Xc6oEyCV3x-EKEsd5TzJb9Jcit4cfefmFEe79HLByd2HwyeDZcuGsSpKJId8EzEC0VXxYJzcYVlLbNOdKxGvVl8k9TPGnwBNoE9tt5uJB02Z4k8TctOlNx0hyphenhyphen8FP/s1600/bucket-man.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijdh2I5TQCyNFxDxV8Xc6oEyCV3x-EKEsd5TzJb9Jcit4cfefmFEe79HLByd2HwyeDZcuGsSpKJId8EzEC0VXxYJzcYVlLbNOdKxGvVl8k9TPGnwBNoE9tt5uJB02Z4k8TctOlNx0hyphenhyphen8FP/s320/bucket-man.jpg" width="278" /></a></div>
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<br />
<br />
...although I think in his head he looked closer to the image <a href="http://eshwin.blogspot.com/2012/09/bringing-back-krayola-commissioned.html" target="_blank">here</a> (I have since learned that bucket-headed superheroes are rather common creations for kids).<br />
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In the three years since then, A has done a lot of growing. He'll be ten in January, and those chubby cheeks have thinned out quite a bit. He has lived with me for three years now and is in fourth grade. However, when he and his friends play superheroes in the schoolyard, he still plays as Bucket-Man.<br />
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But Bucket-Man is not quite the same. A recently told me that he has been making an effort to flesh out Bucket-Man and make him less like Spider-Man. He doesn't want his character to be a simple imitation, but an original superhero. The bucket is not actually a bucket, according to the revised story. It is a bucket-shaped alien that came to Earth and attached itself to a regular kid's head one day, like a parasite. It gave him special powers related to buckets - he can make them materialize and capture bad guys, for instance - but it also exacts a toll on him. See, in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormbringer" target="_blank">Moorcockian</a> twist (though he has never been exposed to the Elric story), the bucket creature is actually evil and tries to influence Bucket-Man to do bad things. One of the many plotlines A has created for Bucket-Man involves defending the planet from an invasion of other bucket creatures, presumably because they would make everyone evil.<br />
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The development of Bucket-Man into this sort of semi-tragic superhero has been gradual, and it has been interesting as a marker of A's mental development. Layers of complexity he could not have understood when he first created his character have made the character more interesting. He only has a couple more years before his obsession with superheroes is replaced by the hormonal craziness of adolescence, but it should be interesting to see how the character changes from here. Perhaps a love interest will creep in, or maybe some deeper levels of angst, or more exploration of the huge gray area between good and evil, which is something of which A has become precociously aware.<br />
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I look forward to finding out.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-59107125992529087672012-07-03T13:09:00.000-04:002012-07-03T13:13:37.090-04:00I Am Clark KentWhen I was a wee lad, I was obsessed with Superman. I have vague memories of seeing the first movie with Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel in the theater with my father when I was three years old. I can recall the extreme, full-body excitement of finding out that there would be a Superman II. I even have fond memories of my parents taking me to see Superman III. I will not speak of Superman IV, as I try to think of it as little as possible.<br />
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At home, my friend Joe and I would play Superman. Somehow, through warped kid-logic, we both got to be Superman. Eventually we made up our own superheroes who were thinly disguised versions of Superman. Mine was Supersonnix. He was from the planet Criptanian. He was exactly 100 times as strong as Superman (whatever that means), had blonde hair (as I did), and mostly did all the same stuff.<br />
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I guess you could say that I wanted to be Superman. Superman was everything a man should be to me. He was fearless and utterly benevolent. He was both strong and smart. He exuded confidence and made those around him feel safe.<br />
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But Superman was also Clark Kent, and Clark Kent was like a totally different person. I understood, even then, that Superman had to use the Clark Kent disguise in order to walk among people without being treated like a god, and also to protect the people he cared about. His Superman persona - his real persona - had to remain somewhat mysterious, since the only way to hurt an invincible man is to hurt the things about which he cares that don't have the same protections. Clark Kent was all that Superman wasn't. He was meek and fearful, shy, clumsy, and socially inept. He had to be all that in order to throw Lois Lane off the scent, I guess.<br />
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Anyway, I think a seed was planted deep in my mind when I was young. I knew I wanted to become Superman. Being human, I would never have Supe's unearthly powers, but surely there was much about me that would set me apart as some better form of human, I thought. But I knew that being Superman also meant being Clark Kent. It meant learning not to show off, to be humble. It meant not ever really revealing the true amount of power I could harness.<br />
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Since I wasn't really developing any powers, I got to work on what I could do. I took on traits of Clark Kent. I was shy. I was deeply modest and never wanted to show off anything I could do (partially, I think, because attempting to show off might reveal to me that I did not and would not ever have super powers, and I wanted to maintain the illusion of my own specialness). I became socially inept and, as the lack of super powers became more evident, I withdrew.<br />
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As an adult now approaching middle age, I've overcome (or learned to deal with) a lot of the anxieties and such that plagued me when I was young. However, I still have that boy-scoutish drive to be Clark Kent. I never drink or smoke or do drugs or even use particularly harsh language, even though I really have no deep moral issues with any of those things (as long as they do not hurt others). I feel a strong need to make those around me happy, and I am driven by an internal moral compass to the degree that I find it difficult to do things I consider "wrong," even when alone.<br />
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These might seem like good things, and indeed they are traits that have generally worked out for the best. They have made me good at my job and at getting along with others, and they've really helped me to be a good example as a parent. But they are also burdens. They are things that single me out and make me feel like an outsider. I am always concerned that my way of life will be viewed by others as a judgement about their own, which it is not. I am driven by an internal drive, not by some consciously considered decision to act a certain way or a belief in some externally ordained right way of doing things.<br />
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I find that I sometimes envy those who just don't care, who swear like a sailor and get drunk from time to time and go to wild parties and have fun. I wonder why the Clark Kent urge still exists so strongly for me. Is it habit? Fear of change? I don't know, but neither of those feels like the whole picture.<br />
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I suppose I'll just have to keep on being who I am. I like who I am, but I wonder about these things sometimes.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-21030865679156781182012-04-14T00:29:00.001-04:002012-04-14T00:30:44.915-04:00Free willThe existence or non-existence of free will is one of the longest-running debates human thinkers have had. Thousands of volumes over millennia of human existence have attempted to provide answers, or at least frameworks for discussion. Do we make choices, or do we only think that we do? Do our decisions make fundamental changes to reality, or are the decisions we feel we are making merely the inevitable outcomes of reactions within our brains?<br />
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The answers to such questions have far-reaching consequences. Is it ethical to punish someone for a crime if they had no real choice but to commit it? Are there infinite timelines existing for each choice made, or do we follow a linear path from beginning to end, the script already written, whether by some superior being or by the irregularities of the early universe?<br />
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However,I have never been completely comfortable with the debate over free will, and the reason is that I think it is a false one. The very concept of free will seems to rest upon assumptions that are themselves questionable to me. In this post, I will try to articulate what I mean.<br />
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Free will, as I am using the term, refers to the ability of a thinking, rational entity to consider options and choose one. It comes into play only when there are multiple options available and the choosing entity is conscious of at least two available options. It does not include reflexive or instinctual action. Awareness of choice is central to free will, which is why it is often said to exist only for humans (and possibly a few other kinds of creatures capable of higher brain function).<br />
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Free will is a central concept for most religions. Without the assumption of free will, there can be no karma, no reward or punishment for good behavior, since no behavior would have come about through personal choice. It is also central to our legal system. If no one has a choice, then no one can be responsible for anything that happens. All actions and outcomes might be unknown, but they are predetermined. I might perceive that I have the option of stealing money or not stealing money, but the option I select will be the result of powers that reside outside of me.<br />
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So let's start with the idea of making a choice. What is it to choose? Do we choose with our minds or with our actions? If I think to myself that I will commit an act but I do not do it, have I chosen to commit it? As an example, imagine that you are hungry and you see delicious food for sale in a store. You have no money. The store attendant is not paying attention, and you determine that you could take the food easily without being caught. The decision of whether to do so or not is yours. Now imagine that you move to take the food, but you trip, cause a commotion, and you attract too much attention to take the food without being noticed. Your plan ruined, you walk away. Did you choose to take the food?<br />
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Now imagine the exact same situation, but without the clumsiness. Instead of tripping, you get to the food, but at the last second, you have a change of heart and decide not to take the food. In this instance, did you choose to take the food? Did the fact that you changed your mind negate the fact that you had previously decided otherwise? <br />
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In the first scenario (the tripping scenario), your unexpected fall changed the situation before you could complete your action. But this does not mean that you would have completed the action even if you hadn't tripped. As the second scenario shows, you have up until the moment of taking an action to decide whether or not to do it. So is the intent to do something the choice, or is the action the choice? Does changing your mind before you complete an action qualify as a second choice, or is it part of the same choice?<br />
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The boundary between deciding to do something and actually doing it is not as clear-cut as it might seem. It all gets fuzzy when you look at it closely.<br />
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Let's look at another scenario. Imagine a man - we'll call him Bub - finds himself very strongly attracted to a woman named Anya, whom he has just met, and Anya has dropped many signs that she feels the same about him. However, Bub is married to Bertha, and he believes in commitment. Anya invites Bub back to her place for drinks (and more). He is faced with a decision: does he follow his instinct to go home with Anya, or does he keep his head about him and decline the offer? Which decision is the rational one?<br />
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Well, the rational decision depends upon the outcome Bub wants. He has to weigh his desire for a quick fling with the very attractive Anya against his desire to remain committed to Bertha, including all that each option entails. Perhaps he even tells Anya to wait a moment while he sits down and draws out a chart of probabilities of outcomes, being extremely rational about the whole thing. In the end, he decides do decline Anya's very tempting offer because he feels that the long-term consequences of cheating on his wife are a bigger negative than a romp with Anya is a positive.<br />
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How does he decide this? How does he assign values to each consequence? What unit of measurement does he use, and how does he make the measurement?<br />
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Here is the problem: A choice made by pure reason is not a choice. It is, by definition, predetermined. Adding one and one together will give you two. You don't get to decide. However, the decision to <i>follow</i> the conclusions of pure reason <i>is</i> a choice, with the alternative being to follow one's heart or instinct. However, isn't the choice to follow the reasonable conclusion also an instinct? If not, what is it?<br />
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Reason, for all its uses, provides no impetus. It is a means without an end, a way of reaching a conclusion. Why do I do anything that I do? Why do I not simply sit down, stop eating, and wait to die? Not because of reason. Because of instinct. I don't want to die. Why do I care if I die? Why do I care if I live? I care because I am driven to care by instinct, by internal drive. It is animalistic. There is no rational need for me to live. To what end? However far you go, however much you reason, you will never arrive at anything other than instinct and irrationality.<br />
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Therefore, at their roots, all choices, no matter how well reasoned, are irrational and instinctive. Reason and instinct are not dichotomous. Instinct provides a drive. Reason provides a means of fulfilling that drive. I work so that I can afford food and shelter. I eat because I want to live. I want to live because I am driven to do so by instinct. The decision to get a job is rational given my desired end, but the end is not rationally determined The fulfillment of desire is not a rational choice. It is instinctive.<br />
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Given all that, what are we doing when we make a decision? What is the difference between our decisions and those of worms? The same force that drives a worm to bore through the dirt is what drives every decision that everyone makes. Our rational capacity might make the process more complex for us or allow us to make an estimate of what might happen a few more steps down the road, but it does not provide any reason for moving forward on the road.<br />
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So if we are driven by irrational desire and all decisions are ultimately attempts (however convoluded) to fulfill that desire, and we do not choose our desires, what are we doing when we choose?<br />
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Imagine that Bub, feeling too irresistibly drawn to Anya, decides that the only way to stay committed to Bertha is to kill Anya. He brings her to a dark alley and shoots her dead. Why did he do it? Should he have done something else instead? How did he reach the conclusion that he did? And, the million-dollar question: Is it his fault?<br />
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Bub killed Anya because he figured that he would feel worse about cheating on Bertha than he would about killing Anya, and he determined that he would cheat on Bertha if Anya lived. Couldn't he stop himself in some other way? He reached the conclusion, possibly through faulty reasoning, that no, there was no other way to avoid cheating on Bertha. Why did he care so much about cheating on Bertha? Because he wants to minimize his guilt, and he knows that he will feel a good deal of guilt if he cheats. Couldn't he have come up with something else? Perhaps, but he did not take the time to reason it out. Why not? Because his urge to cheat was too much for him to take. Could he have sought professional psychiatric help? Maybe, but he didn't think of it. Why not? Because he was preoccupied with thoughts of cheating. Why was he so preoccupied? Because he was driven by instinct to be that way. Is that his fault?<br />
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See, there's a problem with the concept of "his fault". It assumes causality. If something is someone's fault, it means they caused it. But what is causality? The concept of cause and effect is a simplification. It is an abstraction. In truth, everything causes everything else to some degree or other. We call something a cause when it reaches a certain threshold of likelihood that an effect will follow it. The threshold is rather arbitrary. It is tied to our tendency to categorize as a means of understanding things better, except that we mistake the abstraction for the reality it represents. The concepts of cause and effect are human impositions. They are categories we created to help us make sense of our surroundings in a hostile world, not real things. <br />
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So should Bub go to jail for murder if he is caught, even though it's not his fault that he was driven to do what he did?<br />
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I would say yes. Why? Because I think it will deter others from doing the same thing by increasing the weight of negative consequences for the act. Why do I want to do that? Because I want there to be fewer murders. Why do I want there to be fewer murders? Among other reasons, because it reduces the likelihood that someone I care about will be murdered. Why do I care if someone I care about is murdered? Because it would make me very sad. So what? Well, I don't want to be sad. Why not? Because it is unpleasant. I am driven to make myself happier by instinct.<br />
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See, even if the assumptions I make (such as the assumption that locking up Bub will deter other murders, or that deterring other murders will reduce the chances that someone I care about will be murdered) are logically flawed (indeed, if you followed the questions along the path of why I think it will deter murders, you will eventually come to a point of irrationality), it all leads back to an irrational drive anyway.<br />
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So what does this say about free will? Does it exist?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-20635388250517482102012-04-06T10:15:00.000-04:002012-04-06T10:15:04.705-04:00PunishmentI have been thinking lately about the concept of punishment. It seems quite natural to us that when someone does something wrong, he or she should be punished. When someone commits murder, we may argue about the nature of the punishment deserved, but the fact that they deserve to be punished is not often questioned. I wonder, though: what is the utility of punishment? In what ways does punishing a crime make things better, and do the improvements warrant the cost?<br />
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When we speak about someone going to jail or serving some other sentence for a crime committed, we usually do so in terms of fairness - did they get what they deserved? Are we really the arbiters of fairness? Is that what we are doing: maintaining some sort of balance? To what end? When we put someone to death by lethal injection, are we correcting some kind of imbalance in the universe? Avenging a victim or a victim's loved ones? When we throw someone in jail for possessing marijuana, are we trying to keep the person off the streets? Are we teaching them a lesson?<br />
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To my mind, none of the usual reasons given for punishment hold a lot of water. I believe that the most important reason for punishment is one that doesn't sit well with the American ideal of individualism. It is that by punishing one person for a crime, you disincentivize the crime for others. This is essentially the only rational use of punishment for cases in which the perpetrator poses no further threat to society, and it is the most important reason in most other cases. By creating a punishment for a crime and showing that you will, in fact, enforce it, we attempt to make the commission of that crime less attractive to others who are inclined to commit it.<br />
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I believe there is too much emphasis, at least in this country, on punishment as a means of retribution. We often hear about whether a person is getting what he or she deserves. I think that completely misses the point of punishment. We are not trying to restore a cosmic balance. We are trying to create a society that is shaped in the way its members want. The only way to do so is to create incentives and disincentives where they do not otherwise naturally exist. It is not and should never be about revenge.<br />
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What has primarily steered my mind toward these issues is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Trayvon_Martin" target="_blank">Trayvon Martin case</a>. The anger in this case is understandable, and based on the knowledge I have of it, it seems to me that it was a real travesty and the shooting was not justified. However, calls for the lynching of his killer, George Zimmerman - and yes, I have indeed read those online, written in some cases by people who likely have not-so-distant ancestors who were victims of lynch mobs - are disturbing to me. The justice system in the United States is far from perfect, but it certainly beats lynch mob justice. That does nothing to fix the problem. Nothing will bring back Trayvon Martin. His killing is a wrong that cannot be righted. However, by using his case as a way to shed light on the problems with the system and to bring about changes for the better, we can make sure it wasn't for nothing.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-54635538650543680172012-02-21T12:44:00.000-05:002012-02-21T12:44:52.485-05:00A Nation DividedI am utterly and completely baffled that Rick Santorum is being taken seriously as a candidate for the Presidency of the United States. I always try hard to see things through the eyes of others, including those with vastly divergent views from my own. In fact, I take a sort of pride in my ability to do so even when I personally find a particular set of beliefs to be reprehensible. I feel that only by fully understanding why a person would come to believe such things can you form a decent argument against those beliefs.<br />
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Now, I didn't intend for this blog to be a political blog. However, we Americans are heading into election season, and it's hard to avoid thinking about such things when you're reading about them wherever you look. Besides that, there is a lot to think about beyond merely this election. The future of the country as a whole is something less clear than it was once thought, and there are issues that will need to be addressed in the coming years.<br />
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Back to Rick Santorum, though. This man has an extremely regressive belief structure with gaping holes in every argument he makes. He is a bigot who is blind to his own blind spots, a fatal flaw for any leader as far as I am concerned. But, unfortunately, he is also expressing views held by a large swath of the country, where a very strange mix of libertarianism and Christian evangelicalism has taken hold (never mind that Christianity and libertarianism are not particularly compatible). Essentially, they want the government out of their financial matters (i.e., they don't like taxes), but they want strong government presence in social matters, with an emphasis on Christian morality (on which they believe this country to be founded).<br />
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This view is completely at odds with reality in many ways. For one, the country was demonstrably and explicitly not founded with Christianity at its center. While it's true that Christianity was the dominant religion at the time (and still is), those whose ideas shaped the country clearly wanted a country whose laws did not depend on the popular myths of the day. The original ideas are very humanist, not particular to any religion.<br />
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Another issue I have is that you can't defund the government and also make it a moral guardian. Defunding the government - the libertarian ideal of making it as small as possible - has gained traction as a way to stop it from being wasteful. After all, if the government has less ability to act, it has less ability to waste. But there are many areas where the government is the only party equipped to act properly (defense, law enforcement, infrastructure), so you need it for some things. And you need it to maintain the collective good in cases where individuals damage it by acting toward their own ends.<br />
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As an example of what I mean, I turn to baseball, ten years ago. Steroid use is rampant among major leaguers and gives anyone who uses it a leg up on the competition (i.e., other players). It's a highly competitive sport, so a large number of players use steroids, despite their dangers. If a player doesn't want to use steroids, well, he puts himself at a disadvantage and, if he's a borderline player, may shut down his career. So even though he doesn't want to, he uses steroids. It requires an external force, a governing body, to impose a regulation on player behavior, mandating a lack of steroid use, in order to stop this spiral from continuing, one that will end with all players being collectively worse off but no one having an advantage (because everyone is on steroids). It's better for everyone if no player uses steroids, but it's better for each player if he uses them. Therefore, you have to maintain the collective health by imposing rules that limit behavior.<br />
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This is what the government can do that private industry cannot do.<br />
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Unfortunately, the government is indeed wasteful. But the way to cut the waste isn't to defund it. That just keeps the same proportion of waste to good work and doesn't fix the problem of what to do about all those things for which a government is needed. Do you think that pork projects will be the first thing to go when you cut government funding? No. Realistically, there will always be waste in the government. All we can do is create incentives to mitigate it. But that's for another diatribe.<br />
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Getting back to my point, a portion of the country sees pluralism and the embracing of our changing culture as a bad thing. It sees all movement as degradation. Those who are railing against gay marriage are the modern equivalent of those who railed against miscegenation. They channel the neophobic tendencies of the people into specific causes masked as religious ones (e.g., if being against gay marriage is so against the will of God, where are all of the people protesting divorce, which is much more explicitly condemned by Jesus in the Bible?).<br />
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It deeply bothers me that this country has so many people in it who think Rick Santorum is presidential material. Mitt Romney isn't as scary because he doesn't actually stand for anything. He's all of Bill Clinton's sliminess and ideological meandering without any of the charisma. Newt Gingrich is intelligent but a total hothead and clearly not a man who believes in what he says.<br />
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So I've been thinking that it would be kind of cool to try out splitting the country up. I say let the south secede. Let them try it their way. See how far it gets them. Let them see how it works out when you remove social safety nets and force religion down people's throats (see <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/us/virginia-bill-requiring-ultrasound-before-abortion-nears-vote.html?ref=us" target="_blank">Virginia's soon-to-be law</a>), when you stop regulating companies. We'll see if that invisible hand forces them to stop poisoning the water.<br />
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Of course that won't happen. We're stuck together. I guess I'll just have to figure out some way of understanding how people can think these things.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-67861215781746852452012-01-12T11:58:00.000-05:002012-01-12T13:23:09.262-05:00I You TheySo much about how we think can be found in the structure of our language. I often think that I should have studied linguistics, but I think that about so many fields of study, and my problem is that I never could make up my mind.<br />
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But let me not get away from my point only two sentences in. What I've been thinking about a lot lately, since I'm rather odd, is how language contributes to our sense of identity. In particular, I have been thinking about first, second, and third person (I/we, you/you, he/she/it/they, respectively), and how this separation reflects the way we divide the world.<br />
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When I say "I", what do I mean? Do I mean my physical form? My mind? Something else? It's not exactly clear cut. Religious folks I've known tend to say it's the soul, but that word is pretty meaningless. It just opens up whole new worlds of things that need to be defined (e.g., what is a soul). The soul is what we call the thing that we are, but it doesn't define it.<br />
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When I refer to myself, I clearly do not mean my physical form. I am not talking about my body. I can refer to the body as something that belongs to me, as I just did. It is <i>my</i> body. So who is this "me" that owns the body? Is it my pattern of thoughts? My set of memories? No, again, these are all things that I can describe possessively. They are <i>my</i> pattern of thoughts, <i>my</i> memories. So what am I?<br />
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Language doesn't serve particularly well here because the language itself is built upon the assumption of the division between first, second, and third persons. But the best I can define myself is: I am the thing that experiences the world subjectively. It is not a perfect definition, but I think it captures the idea. To avoid confusion, I will refer to the generic "I" (as opposed to the "I" I use to refer to my actual self) as <i>Sum</i>. I will refer to the second and third person as <i>Es</i> and <i>Est</i>, respectively (I always knew taking Latin would be useful at some point!).<br />
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So what are you? What is Es? That is a little easier. Es is the thing to which Sum directs its output. Sum speaks to Es. Es's experience is not important to the definition of Es, since Sum is, in any given situation, the only thing with a subjective experience. When I speak to you, I am Sum and you are Es, at least from my vantage point.<br />
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Est, then, is anything else. Est is not necessarily involved in the conversation but can be referred to within the conversation.<br />
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Ah yes, the conversation. The division into Sum, Es, and Est reveals the importance of conversation to language. Don't give me that look now. You know, the one that says, "Well, duh, you Laputan nudnik!" What I mean is that we usually think of it the other way around, that language is necessary for conversation. But in truth, it goes both ways: conversation that is needed for language as well. Any use of language assumes a conversation, even if one is speaking to oneself (occupying both the Sum and the Es, in my invented argot).<br />
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As I've written before, language is one of the many tools with which we force a continuous reality into categories in order to better understand and communicate it. This kind of abstraction, though, always introduces a degree of imprecision. Sum, Es, and Est do not truly exist as separate things. They are merely categorizations. There is no hard line of division between you and me and the air between us. Each flows into the other, so that there is no "other". The Sum, Es, and Est are different parts of the same thing, which is everything.<br />
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Again, language itself fails me whenever I get to this level of thought precisely because its utility is the opposite of what I am trying to communicate. But my point is that language creates hard edges in the continuous reality. Not <i>points out</i> or <i>accentuates</i>, but <i>creates</i>. There is no division. We impose one because it is more efficient for our brains to function by pattern recognition, and pattern recognition requires categorization. When we make assumptions about the nature of reality based upon these decisions - when we refer to Sum, Es, and Est as if they really exist and base theories of reality upon them, we are building upon abstractions of reality rather than a view of reality itself.<br />
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Okay, enough for now. I have no idea how comprehensible to anyone else this might be. If I could ever organize my meandering thoughts into something coherent, I'm sure I could write a book -- not that anyone would necessarily want to read it, but I could write one.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-14351040868386490092011-12-22T22:17:00.000-05:002011-12-22T22:26:42.095-05:00Atheist ChristmasI have posted here about my atheism before. It's a topic I tend to think about a lot at this time of year when various religions celebrate their solstice-based holidays. I am fully comfortable with my own atheism, but not everyone else always is. What can be puzzling to some are my reasons for celebrating Christmas wholeheartedly while dismissing Christmas.<br />
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My answer is simple: Christmas is not a Christian holiday. It is just a renamed pagan festival.<br />
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Before I go any further, I will give my usual disclaimers when it comes to religion. I am not some sort of atheist proselytizer. I have a very live-and-let-live approach to personal beliefs. I believe what I believe, and you can believe whatever you like, as long as you do me the same courtesy in return. But I will explain my own beliefs and conclusions about the nature of reality and how I came to them.<br />
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Christmas comes on December 25 each year. This date has nothing to do with the birth of Christ. It is not Jesus's birthday. The early church made an active attempt to replace pre-Christian holidays with Christian ones by overlaying a Christian meaning on a pre-existing festival. That's how we ended up with holiday traditions that are decidedly not related to Christianity - Christmas trees at Christmas, for instance, or the Easter Bunny (or even the name "Easter" which comes from the name of a pre-Christian goddess).<br />
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In my family growing up, which was nominally Catholic but quite lax about it, we never really talked about Christ on Christmas. It was all about decorations and food and presents (especially presents). It was always a fun day for me and I have many great memories of Christmas. My own kids enjoy it as much as I did, though I have never made any attempt to associate the day with Christianity. It is simply a fun day to get gifts from Santa.<br />
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Ah yes, Santa. Let me step aside to address that for a moment. Do you sense a sort of hypocrisy in my telling my kids there's a Santa Claus while not telling them there is a God? Why does Santa seem so much more benign to me? It's a fair question, but one that is not difficult to answer (at least to my own satisfaction).<br />
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Santa Claus is not a belief system. There is no set of dogma associated with him, and his existence or non-existence affects little about one's understanding of the nature of reality. He is not some end-all-be-all source of wisdom. He's just a guy who gives gifts. I don't mind allowing my kids to believe in myths. I enjoy cultivating their imaginations, and it is fun for them. But I do not feel comfortable telling them that there is some sort of God who is the explanation behind everything everywhere. I feel like that stunts their inquisitiveness. The explanation "because God made it that way" cuts off further digging, and I want them to dig further. I want them to seek knowledge and not stop at the first potential answer they get.<br />
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Anyway, back on the topic of Christmas, it is a holiday for me that is more of a cultural tradition than a religious one. I roll my eyes when I hear people talk about "the real meaning of Christmas". The real meaning of Christmas is, in our modern world, increased revenue for retail outlets. Whatever meaning the Catholics and their offshoots have grafted onto the holiday, that is not the "real meaning". It's just an imposed one. <br />
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I suppose any meaning is an imposed one, really. That's what we do - we impose meanings on days and objects and events that help us divide and differentiate the continuum of our lives so we can try to make sense of it all.<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-73538531221234513972011-12-18T22:27:00.000-05:002011-12-21T11:53:41.422-05:00Environmental ConcernsWhen I hear environmentalists say that we need to treat the Earth well and be good to the environment, I can't help but think that they're going about it all wrong. Their message is one of altruism and genuine concern for the well-being of the planet, but the people who need to hear it most are those for whom altruism and concern for anything outside of their own backyards are something akin to alien concepts.<br />
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The argument needs to be reframed, with emphasis shifted from what can be viewed as tree-hugging hippie naivete to something more personal. Never mind all the millions of insect species that go extinct as we bulldoze the jungles. Really, most people don't empathize much with mosquitoes and their cousins. All the talk about the majesty of ancient trees or beautiful landscapes or spotted owls really doesn't do much to convince anyone who needs convincing.<br />
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No, probably the best thing to do is concentrate on how they will be hurt personally by not tending to the needs of the environment. I think <a href="http://gospelofreason.wordpress.com/2007/05/24/george-carlin-the-planet-is-fine/" target="_blank">George Carlin said it best</a>.Of course, this was just part of his stand-up act, but as with many of his rants, there's a lot of truth in it. The planet is going to be around for a while. It's the people who are in danger (and the other life forms).<br />
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If you want people to do something about the environment, don't tell them about polluted air or even some poor endangered animals or something that makes them shrug. It has to be personal if it's going to make an impact.<br />
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I also think that it's important to understand the concerns of those who are not in favor of environmental regulation. There aren't many people out there who actively want to destroy the environment. Bad guys are for action movies. No, most of the people who are against regulations just think environmentalists are wrong, that the economic cost of dealing with regulations is higher than the cost of not dealing with them, and that we will only fall behind other countries more willing to put aside environmental concerns (e.g., China).<br />
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Personally, from what I have heard and read, there is overwhelming evidence that we can affect the environment's stability to a degree that it can be good or bad for us, and the cost of making it worse is higher than the cost of dealing with it. I'd also like the world to be something other than a burnt out husk for my kids when they're older. It would be in our enlightened self-interest to manage the environment better than we have. We've gotten better about it, but we're still creating <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch" target="_blank">oceans of plastic refuse</a> and such, with no clear solution for how to reconcile our desire for modern luxuries with our desire for a livable planet.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-67179710467090699922011-12-07T10:30:00.000-05:002011-12-07T13:56:08.937-05:00Life, non-life, and the space betweenFor some reason, I've been reading a lot about abortion lately. It's not a topic that has any real personal importance to me, nor does it impact my life at all. However, I do find the arguments made by either side to be fascinating, mostly because they deal with the murky problem of defining life.<br />
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Life is a word with no precise definition. There have been numerous attempts to come up with one. Look in the dictionary, and you'll find one there. But no one definition is both sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently specific. The border between life and non-life is rather arbitrary, like most borders between concepts. Our need to categorize everything falls short of describing the continuous reality.<br />
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Regarding abortion, those who wholly oppose it state that life begins at conception. For these "pro-lifers", killing an embryo is the moral equivalent of killing a child (or an adult, for that matter). It is murder. Even some forms of contraception, by this definition, are murder. From this standpoint, it is not hard to see how people can be so up in arms about the issue. Effectively, as they see it, doctors charged with guarding the well-being of people are unceremoniously and gruesomely killing people, and it is legal. It is even easy to see how some extremists would go to great lengths, like shooting abortion doctors. For them, it is the moral equivalent of shooting a serial killer.<br />
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On the other side, "pro-choicers" believe that life begins at birth. Until then, the embryo/fetus is effectively part of the woman's body. It acts as a parasite, taking nutrients and oxygen from the mother and generally ravaging her body until it is large enough to come out. And then it does, and it is a separate being. Until then, however, it is a parasite. It is the woman's choice as to whether she wants to allow this parasite to use her body for nine months or not.<br />
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So what we have at stake here, are some of the core values of the United States: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Is abortion the taking of a life? Does not allowing it strip a woman of her liberty and ability to pursue happiness?<br />
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<b>The Life Argument</b><br />
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The argument that life begins at conception is a sound one. It is at conception that the novel set of chromosomes that define the person to be made comes together. In most cases, barring interference from external forces, the embryo grows into a recognizable human being. There is no other point in fetal development (including birth) where such a clear distinction can be made between one state and another.<b> </b><br />
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However, the argument is not without problems. Yes, we can say that a distinct life comes into being at conception. But is it <i>human</i> life? After all, that is what is at stake here, isn't it? The people who are arguing against abortion aren't generally trying to stop us from eating eggs or slaughtering cows. It's humans that concern them.<br />
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The newly formed embryo does indeed have human DNA. However, DNA does not define a being. It is a blueprint. An embryo does not think or feel. It doesn't do anything except grow, and it can't do that on its own. Without the mother's cooperation, it will die a quick death, and it will never know it because it is incapable of acquiring knowledge. Is it human? If so, that opens the door to many other things potentially being called human. Any living cell of a person must then be considered fully human. If it is not human, what is it, and at what point do we consider it human?<br />
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These are not small or easily answered questions. It involves the very quiddity of humanity. No answer is without problems.<br />
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<b>Viability</b><br />
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The next stopping point for those who argue against abortion, and one that is often considered the middle ground of the argument, is fetal viability. That is, a fetus becomes a person when it is capable of surviving without the mother's help. The most obvious problem with this argument is that there is no clear point at which a fetus becomes viable. It happens gradually over the course of the pregnancy, and there is some degree of variation between fetuses. Some are born premature naturally and need an incubator to survive. Are they not people yet? Is it okay to kill them? Is it okay to kill a fetus at the same stage of growth that is still in the mother?<br />
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A very costly and impractical but morally sound route, given fetal viability as a cutoff point, would be to induce delivery rather than abort once a fetus reaches a stage at which it would have a chance at survival (with medical assistance) outside of the mother. So instead of an abortion, the doctor intentionally delivers the baby prematurely, and if it can survive on its own, it does, and it's a person. If it can't, well, it doesn't (and I suppose that means it was never a person to begin with, right?).<br />
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<b>Birth</b><br />
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Currently, the legal definition of human life includes having been born. Once the baby pops out, it changes into a person. It's not difficult to see the many problems with this, the most prominent of which is that there really isn't a difference between a baby that has just been born and a fetus that is about to be born. There is no sudden transformation. We have Caesarian sections for babies that are, by our clocks, overdue. Does something magical occur when the doctor cuts open the mother's belly and pulls out the child? No.<br />
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<b>Beyond Birth</b><br />
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After birth, a baby still relies heavily on his or her parents to survive.<b> </b>Left to fend for himself, the newborn child will not last long. Unable to really do much of anything, he just cries and cries, and if no one feeds him, he doesn't eat, and he will die. This doesn't sound much more viable than a fetus, does it? So maybe a newborn baby still isn't a person, right? Should we legalize the killing of any child that can't get her own food or keep herself alive without assistance? Not many people would support this, I think.<br />
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<b>Brain Function</b><br />
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Backing up a bit, one of the more sound cutoffs for considering a fetus to be a human being is when the brain is formed fully enough to process signals, including pain. I would consider this to be an argument from a different set of goals, though. Rather than determining whether human life exists or not, in this case, we are trying to determine whether it has some level of awareness that it is being aborted. From this perspective, we say that we cannot determine presence of human life (or that it is not part of the equation), but we can say that if we terminate a pregnancy earlier than a certain point, we are causing no pain to the fetus.<br />
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This sounds reasonable, but again, the point at which signals can be processed is not easy to determine. The fact that a signal is being processed does not mean that there is an awareness of it. What does it mean to feel pain, if one is not aware of the pain one is feeling? Does that even make sense?<br />
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<b>Pragmatism</b><br />
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Sometimes, when it is difficult to determine the morality of something, the best thing to do is to fall back on the consequences of it, direct and indirect, and determine the practicality of allowing or disallowing it. In the case of abortion, this viewpoint clearly favors the pro-choice group.<br />
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For one, fewer births means fewer people - specifically, abortion means fewer <i>unwanted</i> people, and probably fewer inept parents (though that is debatable). If every child aborted is unwanted (which, discounting medical emergencies, is pretty much always the case), allowing them to be born would result in an abundance of children who are either not well cared for by their parents or who become a public burden by entering into foster care or some other publicly funded child-rearing scenario. Some may find homes with adoptive parents, but many will lead very difficult lives.<br />
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For another, women with unwanted pregnancies will find ways to abort even if it is illegal. They will just do it in ways that are much more dangerous and unsanitary, which can create an economic burden for society as a whole, since many of them will end up in public assistance programs.<br />
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<b>Verdict?</b><br />
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So what is my conclusion, after thinking this through? There are other considerations I haven't listed, such as other potential cutoff points in fetal development, but I've written about what I consider to be the most reasonable ones.<br />
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My primary conclusion is that I am very glad that I am not the one who has to decide such things. If I were, no solution would leave me feeling at ease with myself. There is a genuine conflict of interest between the unwanted fetus/baby and the mother who does not want it. The fetus is unable to state its own case, but I think the assumption that it would want to avoid pain and suffering and death is a sound one.<br />
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Beyond that, though, I think the argument with the fewest flaws in it is the one for brain function. Consciousness is central to what we think of as the human experience. I find it hard to think of something without it as a living human being. It also addresses the freedom of the woman. The point at which brain function is achieved is sufficiently far into the pregnancy that the woman would have known for some time that she is pregnant, so the opportunity to abort would have been there. But it is not so far in that anyone is physically hurt by the abortion. No pain is involved for the fetus.<br />
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I think abortion is a sad thing. It's not something to be celebrated. But I also think that women need to have some level of freedom regarding their own bodies. If a woman truly feels that she cannot go through with a pregnancy, perhaps the best option for her, sadly, is to abort. Adoption is something that should be considered in most cases, though adoption does nothing about the rigors of pregnancy on the body. Ultimately, if a woman does not want to give birth, she shouldn't have to, as long as she is causing no pain to someone else. If that someone else has not yet developed a capacity for feeling pain, she is not.<br />
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So that is my take on it. Like I said, there's no easy answer, but I suppose an answer has to be given.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-35887123191285172722011-11-30T10:11:00.001-05:002011-11-30T11:15:31.483-05:00Occupy EverythingWhen I was a kid, my grandfather, who lived with my grandmother on the downstairs floor of our two-family home, would occasionally cook crabs. I remember him saying that you start them out in cold water and bring it very gradually to a boil while the crabs are still alive. If you drop crabs in water that is already boiling, he said, they jump around and splash the water, but if you bring it up gradually, they remain relatively calm until the water grows so hot that they die, and they are cooked.<br />
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I have no idea if this is really the best way to cook crabs. Frankly, it sounds horrifying to me. But it also makes a pretty good metaphor for what has gone on in the United States since the late 1970s or so.<br />
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From the end of the Great Depression until the late 70s and early 80s, there was relative economic stability in the United States. We enjoyed steady but not explosive growth. Taxes on those making the most money were astronomical compared to what they are today, but it didn't stop rich people from continuing to try to get more rich.<br />
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Then came deregulation. Mostly under Reagan, regulations put in place after the Great Depression were gradually removed. The theory was that by doing away with constraining regulations, we could encourage growth, allowing people to get richer, and then the money would trickle down to the less fortunate people through new jobs and such. The magical <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand">Invisible Hand</a> would do its work, driving the economy forward.<br />
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It seemed like a reasonable idea, I guess. And the economy looked to be on a radical upswing. But it had some flaws. The whole point of regulation is to keep things in line, to stop people from cheating the system and making illegal maneuvers. Removing regulation opened the door for cheats and swindlers, and in they came.<br />
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Also beginning under Reagan, we began to see an enormous decline in tax rates on the wealthy, which was in line with the idea of trickle-down economics.<br />
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Unfortunately, very little trickled down. The wealthiest people became more wealthy, while most others plateaued. The 90s were a booming time, so people felt pretty good, but the seeds of our undoing were being planted as deregulation continued under Bush I and Clinton. <br />
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The workings of the economy changed. Whereas we had seen a stable rise before, it became more of a cycle of booms and busts. The 90s were mostly a boom, but the boom was falsely built. It was bought with credit cards and other forms of debt. It was only a matter of time before it all collapsed, and in the aughts, it did.<br />
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Everything had come so gradually, most of us never saw it happening. A little deregulation here, an upper class tax break there, and over time, we were in boiling water. Most of us were, anyway. Some were standing at the stove, turning up the heat and preparing to feast.<br />
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We have turned over the reins of power in this country to a wealthy elite who use their money and influence to control everything. And it might just be too late to stop them. How can we pass laws to change things when they own the politicians? When corporations have been granted personhood by the Supreme Court?<br />
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Some of the memes that found their way into popular consciousness during the era of deregulation have made change more difficult as well. Calling "socialism" at any idea that involves the use of public funds to help disadvantaged people seems ridiculous after we just bailed out the richest corporations in the land with far more than we've spent on all the mythical "welfare queens". But still, people do. The fact is that we have socialized risk while privatizing benefits for those with money. There is a massive safety net weaved from public funds ready to catch those with enough power and influence to convince people that they are too big to fail.<br />
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No one should be too big to fail. Being too big to fail allows one to become a bully and suffer no consequences for poor decisions one makes.<br />
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But is it really too late? Have we reached the boiling point? Can we jump out of the pot before we become crabmeat? I don't know.<br />
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The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought much of this into the public consciousness, but you can bet that the forces that made things how they are will do their best to shove it back out. As we showed after 9/11, Americans are really good at falling back into complacency, as long as we're comfortable enough.<br />
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We need major change. We need to re-examine our traditions and old ideas, keep what is good, and discard what no longer works. Ideas must stand based upon merit and evidence, not tradition and habit. We need to rethink the system, because it's failing. We can't say that something should work a certain way because Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton said so. We should use the 200 years of acquired knowledge since their time to determine if they were right. And we should proceed with an appropriate mix of caution and resolve.<br />
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Those in power now do not want this, and since they are in power, they will act to keep things as they are, to the detriment of the rest of us. Is this a call for revolution? Not in the sense of armed uprising, no, but we need a massive paradigm shift. Are the American people up for this, or are we doomed to suffer the fate of all previous empires, becoming so mired in outdated ideas that the upstarts become the conquerors?<br />
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Are we crabmeat?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-8578110100398231812011-11-29T20:54:00.001-05:002011-11-30T10:09:57.354-05:00The War on FestivusEvery year it comes from somewhere. As the stress of my needing to buy gifts on a budget builds and the last of the leaves are blown from the trees, as I dig through the closet for the gloves and scarves and heavy coats, someone brings it up. Usually it's Fox News, but I don't watch Fox News, so I hear it from someone who inexplicably does. Christmas is under attack, they say. We're not allowed to say "Merry Christmas" or put Christmas trees up or have nativity scenes in the town square. Instead it's Happy Holidays and holiday trees and no one's allowed to bring up Christmas, they say.<br />
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The whole argument grates on my nerves. It is founded in a sort of xenophobic right-wing paranoia that I've never fully understood. What I see as acceptance of a diversifying culture, these others see as an attack on their culture and traditions. But there is no attack. No one is on the offense.<br />
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Yes, it's true that there have been efforts to stop the use of public space and public funds to support celebrations and displays of a religious nature, and it's certainly true that some people have taken that to ridiculous extremes that rely on highly questionable interpretations of the First Amendment. But the switch to saying "Happy Holidays" and the broadening of Christmas themes to "Holiday" themes in general is not part of some nefarious plan hatched by grinches intent on destroying Christmas. It is not part of a war.<br />
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Quite the opposite, actually.<br />
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We have made this shift, as a society, because we are becoming more diverse in our constituency. It has never been easy to pigeonhole Americans because we are not a single people, and this fact has grown more true over time. For most of the nation's history, the WASP culture dominated all media and set all agendas. The portrait it painted of the ideal American family was one that excluded and ignored huge swaths of the population due to race, creed, and ethnicity.<br />
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But the various marginalized groups have grown in both number and strength in proportion to the shrinking WASPs. When one says "Merry Christmas" now, it is much more likely than it has ever been (and growing more so) that one is saying it to someone who does not celebrate Christmas. It makes more sense to use a general term. Since this time of year is a celebratory one for most of the population, including those who do not celebrate Christmas, "Happy Holidays" makes sense.<br />
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One argument I hear is that those who come from elsewhere should assimilate. What are we, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29">Borg</a>? No, it doesn't work that way. People continue with their own traditions when they come here, and those traditions sometimes bleed over into our culture and become part of the mainstream. How do you think we got jazz and rock music? There is a give-and-take, and this strengthens us all. The emracing of diversity begets adaptability, which allows us to build the tools for moving forward. Nothing weakens a society like rigid adherence to outdated traditions.<br />
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We all have our comfort zones, and many people fear nothing more than being removed from theirs. I suppose that's where the xenophobia comes from. But by staying within our zones, we calcify and grow less relevant. Instead, it would be wiser to embrace new ideas and push our own boundaries outward. You keep a culture alive by moving its best elements forward and discarding those aspects of it that are no longer necessary. It's a process of evolution, like anything else. There is no One Right Way, only the way that works best for the current situation.<br />
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The one part of this whole trend toward generalization that does bother me is the homogenization of the culture. It seems that, all too often, people believe that being blind to differences between us (or ignoring them entirely) is the same as acceptance. We make a taboo out of anything that is culturally specific. I think this is most disturbing in public school settings, where topics such as religion and race, if addressed at all, are treated with an oversensitivity (necessitated by threat of legal action) that distorts them. It creates a room full of 800-pound gorillas, which I'd imagine is an extremely constrained place to be.<br />
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Blindness does not equal acceptance. Acceptance is being fully cognizant of cultural differences but not letting those differences bother you. Saying "Merry Christmas" to someone who celebrates Hanukkah or Yule or Festivus or Kwanzaa is kind of ridiculous. Do you say "enjoy the movie" to someone when you're going to see a movie and they aren't? Do you say "have a nice vacation" to someone who isn't going on one?<br />
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I could go on and on with this, but I think I've made my point. Have a safe and happy Festivus, dear reader.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1347786616636814408.post-61190083008974022152011-09-27T13:24:00.000-04:002011-09-27T13:25:44.560-04:00An Inconsistent TruthI was asked in conversation not long ago what bothers me most about religious thinking. First, I have to say that I am not truly bothered by religious thinking. I believe it to be a part of the human experience in many ways. While it is not a part of my own experience as I live my life, it does not bother me that others have it in theirs. But I am bothered by some versions or aspects of it.<br />
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First and foremost, I am bothered by the use of religion as science. Religion should not be used, in my opinion, to make factual statements about the world or universe. Religion involves the acceptance of certain things as fact without regard for evidence. This is what is called faith. We all have faith in things, whether religious or not. We wouldn't get very far without faith. However, it is important to recognize that faith in something is not sufficient to regard that thing as some kind of universal truth.<br />
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For that reason, I am bothered by, for example, faith healers, who believe that praying for someone's recovery from a physical ailment will bring it about without the intercession of medicine. There is no evidence for this, but there is evidence for medicine. Foregoing medicine for faith healing is erroneous and wrong-headed. I have no problem with someone praying <i>in addition</i> to medicine, but you cannot replace medicine with faith. <br />
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Another thing that truly bothers me is when people use religious reasoning in public policy debates. Saying that homosexuality is a sin in God's eyes is not sufficient reason for denying gays the right to marry. You have to be able to demonstrate what harm would be caused to others by allowing gays to marry.<br />
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I recently read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/opinion/why-the-antichrist-matters-in-politics.html?scp=2&sq=evangelicals&st=cse">an article in the New York Times</a> that gave a good, detailed explanation of the reasoning of evangelicals in regards to the governance of the United States, and it just killed me. The idea that there are enough people in the country willing to vote for someone because he or she will help usher in the glorious end of the world is a little funny but very scary. It is the same sort of thinking that grips those in the Arab world who believe they will attain glory by blowing people (including themselves) up.<br />
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The very worst aspect of religious thinking, though, is that it can be co-opted by anyone with sufficient charisma and steered towards destructive ends. The fact that it requires no evidence, only faith, means that nothing more is needed than the words of a person who claims to know the Truth. The most egregious example of this sort of thing would have to be the Catholic Church. Millions of people across the world believe that a single man is the primary conduit for God's word. He lives in splendor and riches provided to him by the (often very poor) faithful, preaching about a need to help the poor and about the virtue of poverty. The friction between the stated belief of Christianity and the gaudy glamour of Catholic churches and cathedrals and such doesn't stop this from happening. For many Catholics, the thought process is something like, "Sure, these things seem to be at odds, but the Pope is the word of God on Earth, so the flaw must be in my understanding." This is the "mysterious ways" defense of religion that can be used to gloss over any set of inconsistencies.<br />
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Obviously there are plenty of other examples of this. Cults of personality are not confined to religious institutions either. Hitler's rise had little to do with religion, for instance, though the Nazis had the same sort of religious thinking - belief in a concept regardless of evidence.<br />
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People can be made to feel that just about anything is true. That is the very reason that science exists. It is a confession that we are flawed in this way and need some external means for estimating the truth of things. I say "estimating" because a core aspect of science is that even its most seemingly sacred tenets can be challenged using the same methods that brought them to their exaulted status. Recently, scientists observed a particle traveling at speeds that seemed to refute one of Einstein's core theories upon which much of the physics of the past hundred years has been based. That sort of thing just doesn't happen in religious circles. Science admits that we can never be completely certain about anything, but we can develop better estimations of the truth by manipulating the world around us and seeing what happens.<br />
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And this is something that rings very true to me. I don't believe it regardless of evidence. I believe it because of evidence. Thousands of years of praying to God for a cure never had nearly the effect of the development penicillin.<br />
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Maybe there is a God up there somewhere. Maybe he's playing with us like dolls, or we're in some kind of video game like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sims">The Sims</a>, in which we are just pawns at the mercy of some occasionally sadistic player. He certainly can't be the omniscient, omnipotent, ominbenevolent, omnipresent being I grew up being told about, as such a being would not have created this cruel and unfair universe (though I'm sure I'd be told that I see it as an inconsistency only because the human mind lacks the ability to see God's glorious grand plan for the wonderful thing that it is). I don't see any good reason to lob prayers at him, but others can go do that if they want. It doesn't seem to hurt.<br />
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I guess you could call me an apatheist - I don't really care if there is a God or not. It's not an interesting question to me because it's completely unknowable, untestable, and without impact upon anything in my life. If he wants me to shower him with praise, well, he's never told me so. As far as I can see, those orders came from people, and they didn't have much backing them up. If he wants me to behave a certain way, he hasn't told me or given me any good motivators to do so. There are various groups of people all over the world who are absolutely certain that they know what God wants, spouting off a variety of wildly inconsistent truths.<br />
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So I just live my life as if there is no God, and I think I'm happier for that.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16538383398107370407noreply@blogger.com0