I've never been a big fan of Roger Federer's, and not just because he makes Andy Roddick look like the one-dimensional player he is. So when somebody finally showed up who could beat Federer on a regular basis, odds are I was going to be a fan. And I am!
The main draw of Nadal for me is his defense: I love watching good defense, no matter the sport (except baseball, in which even defense is boring). His charisma and weird spin on the ball and comically asymmetrical arms are dnearing as well, and usually I like his outfits - the capris are kinda charming, I think - but this goes way too far:
I mean, what the hell. The last thing we need is for Nadal to become the Craig Sager of tennis. Still, I'd take a clown-colored Nadal over Federer any day of the week.
Hey Kobe, how about the refs?
"We’ve had games in the past where the officiating has been pretty poor."
Okay, fair enough.
"We’ve had games where it’s been in our favor."
Uh...
"The Sacramento series for example. We felt like we didn’t get a fair handshake [sic] in some games and Sacramento felt like they didn’t get a fair handshake [sic] in some games and that’s just how it is."
So...when you don't "get a fair handshake" from the refs that is "pretty poor" officiating, but when other teams have the same thing happen to them that's just refereeing "in your favor"? Am I really supposed to believe that some unfairness is indicative of bad officiating whereas other unfairness is just the way it is? Really?
Because I don't believe that - not even close. I especially don't believe that after Chauncey Billups got hit with his second foul on what should've been an and-one. I definitely especially don't believe it given that you already said, in what was as much a threat as a promise, that you wouldn't pick up another technical foul for the duration of the playoffs.
I've got my eye on you, Kobe.
Including yours truly, from time to time. But really, though: we've seen people run into problems with infinity, conditional probability, the concept of statistical independence, and apparently even basic calculations. Add to that list induction, thanks to Peter van Inwagen and the Sorites paradox.
Van Inwagen, who's been on this blog before, "attempts to debunk...the claim that For any particular horrendous evil E permitted by God, there is a morally sufficient reason for God's permission of E," says Nick Trakakis. More specifically, van Inwagen thinks he can disprove what he calls MP: "If one is in a position to prevent some evil, one should not allow that evil to occur - not unless allowing it to occur would result in some good that would outweigh it or preventing it would result in some other evil at least as bad." You can already tell the direction that this'll eventually go, but van Inwagen first makes a detour to the land of bad math and even worse philosophy.
The reason that MP leads to problems for van Inwagen is because - and I am not making this up - "a threatened punishment of n days in prison for felonious assault would not have a signi cantly less [sic? this should say "more," right?] deterrent effect on felonious assault as a threatened punishment of n-1 days in prison." This might seem pretty obviously wrong, but he disagrees: "a threatened punishment of, say, 1023 days in prison would not have a signi cantly less deterrent effect as a threatened punishment of 1022 days. But then, by applying reasoning familiar to students of sorites arguments, we quickly arrive at the conclusion that a threatened punishment of 1023 days would not have a signi cantly less deterrent effect as a threatened punishment of no time at all in prison." Then, once you apply MP together with the premise "that the only good that could result from someone's being in prison is the deterrence of crime," you reach the absurd conclusion that one ought not imprison anybody ever.
The problem here is van Inwagen's specificity: when a group of premises imply a contradiction it's true that at least one of those premises needs to be rejected, but the bare fact of a contradiction doesn't say which premise to reject. In this case, van Inwagen produces at least the following premises:
-MP
-1023-day imprisonments don't deter significantly more effectively than 1022-day imprisonments
-1023-day imprisonments are significantly more evil than 1022-day imprisonments
-As a general rule, n-day imprisonments don't deter significantly more effectively than n-1-day imprisonments
-The only morally compelling reason to imprison someone is to deter crime
Of those five candidates, he picks out MP for rejection without even bothering to defend the rest. But why should we accept this? For one thing, almost no moral theories actually support that last premise; for another, as Trakakis says, "sorites-style reasoning is fl awed." By conveniently specifying the one premise he disagrees with as the one at fault - especially when we already know that other premises are probably responsible - van Inwagen oversteps his bounds.
Even though his reasoning for it fails, it's worth taking a look at what Trakakis calls van Inwagen's no-minimum thesis. According to this idea, "There is no minimum amount of horrendous evil that God must permit in order for the greater good(s) he aims at to be secured." This would be a mildly strange situation, but not an outright insane one - at the very least it doesn't seem self-contradictory. As Trakakis notes, however, it also misses the point: "even if there is no minimum amount of evil God had to permit, this does not entail that he would have permitted just any amount of evil." Or, to continue with van Inwagen's legal analogy, the nonexistence of a minimum effective prison sentence wouldn't make it reasonable to punish a jaywalking with a life sentence. Van Inwagen's no-minimum thesis, therefore, is a bit like Alvin Plantinga's free will defense: both identify potential avenues through which a working theodicy may be formed, but neither actually serves as such a theodicy. Without a good deal more work, then, van Inwagen misses the point if he thinks this undoes the problem of evil in any way.
Last, this kind of defense runs a very real risk of being too successful. That is, many attempts to justify evil by way of an overwhelming good are so powerful that they in fact require infinite amounts of evil. Take epistemological contrastism as one example: on this view, God allows us to experience terrible evils so as to be able to appreciate amazing goods, the experience of which outweighs the experience of suffering. But if experiences are connected in this way, why do we not suffer more evil? In other words, if this were accurate, wouldn't the limited nature of our actual experiences prevent us from appreciating even higher levels of goods, thus becoming an unfairly limiting factor? Or think about redemption theodicies in which the imputed moral value of Jesus's crucifixion is said to depend on the extent our sin: if Jesus's death becomes more valuable the more evil he died for, isn't it a net moral loss that we behave as well as we do? And so on and so forth - in order to avoid what might be termed the problem of insufficient evil, this sort of explanation needs to explain in no uncertain terms why the metaphysical returns diminish in what seems on its face to be a totally arbitrary way (i.e., the way they would have to in order to end up with something like the actual world). Van Inwagen, of course, doesn't even come close to proving that his no-minimum thesis wouldn't inadvertently open the door to a matching no-maximum thesis that would be equally capable of disproving his God.
Bad news from the Democratic Republic of the Congo: "militias use rape to fracture communities and the threat of sexual violence to coerce slave labor to mine coltan (a colloquial name for columbite-tantalite ore) which is used to produce capacitors that power cell phones, iPods, and other gadgets." I really like my iPod and my cell phone borders on a necessity, but I'll be damned if I spend money on something knowing that the company that produces it relies, even unintentionally, on rape as a part of their manufacturing process.
This kind of thing, also seen in the blood or conflict diamond market, raises all kinds of interesting questions - here's just one of them: what the hell are we doing with our foreign policy? That's as much an honest question as an implied criticism, because I know that we're frittering some of our resources away in Iraq but I also know that I'm not particularly well-versed in the rest of our overseas ventures. I ask this question in particular because companies simply cannot be trusted to do the right thing over the profitable thing (or, to quote another song lyric, "fuck the morals: does it make any money?").
Along those same lines, I'll certainly do what I can about this - letter-writing and all that; I encourage you to do the same.
Please somebody prevent this from happening. Cowboy Bebop doesn't need a Hollywood remake, it doesn't need a live-action version (though at least it's not all CGI'd or something), and it sure as hell doesn't need Keanu "ain't got no facial expressions or vocal inflection" Reeves to play its male lead.
Please, Hollywood, just stop. You've already let Michael Bay and the "nononononono" kid from the new Indiana Jones movie ruin my childhood - twice. You turned probably the best 2-D fighter ever into an abomination. You signed Ben Affleck - Ben Affleck - up to play Daredevil and you turned Spider-Man into an emo kid. You've butchered pretty much everything Alan Moore's ever written. Isn't that enough? Can't you be satisfied with just those? Pretty please?
But if not, could you at least also do the following:
- Replace Yoko Kanno's up-tempo jazz soundtrack with adult contemporary
- Tap Shaq to play Jet
- Try to make sure that everyone has anime-style hair, physics be damned
- Totally excise all the stuff that made Faye a real character; she's got breasts and that's all the audience needs to know, right?
- Make sure that all the characters learn a valuable life lesson by the end of the movie
- Include a "secret" scene after the credits where someone comes back to life
The saying for when you can't beat 'em recommends joining 'em, but there is another, perhaps more effective strategy: force 'em to join you. This might seem like an absurd or stupid suggestion - I mean, if you could just make them join you, why couldn't you just beat them in the first place? - but it actually happens on a fairly regular basis.
Take religion and science: pretty much everyone loves science (at least nominally) but religion has taken some pretty serious hits in the recent past. Attempts to rebuff science usually fizzle pretty quickly, though, so beating 'em is clearly out of the question. Worse still are the odds that religion will ever join science; all the features that make science so nice, like a defined methodology and reproducible results, are absent in religion. So what do believers now do? They make science a subset of religion.
Some people are satisfied to do this from an historical perspective, but it doesn't prove anything one way or the other about the truth of e.g. Christianity that "the laws of logic and science [use] certain key components from the Christian worldview." Others, like Alex Pruss, think they can do one better and actually build a relationship such that science can't operate or can't operate smoothly in a godless world. For him, this kind of relationship can be built once "one has to say one of two things: Either (1) the theistic underpinning of science did no real epistemic work in bolstering science in the first place, or (2) the non-theistic scientist's hope in science should be significantly lower than that of the theistic scientist." For me, the question will be whether this dilemma can actually hold up.
If I'm reading him correctly, his main support for the dilemma goes like this: "It seems very plausible that there is something right about the idea that theism gives one a significant reason to have a hope in science as a guide to truth. But if so, then it is true that the non-theistic scientist has less reason for such hope." The first sentence is the more interesting of the two, as everything after "but" is just wrong: "if A, then B" doesn't at all imply "if not-A, then not-B." Let's turn, then, to Pruss's reasons why theism should inspire hope in scientists.
These reasons break down pretty clearly into two types, one more general and another more specific. Broadly speaking, he says, Christians can hold to the idea "that the world is created by a God who would be unlikely to give us a thirst for knowledge that we could not possibly have satisfied." The "we" here is a bit deceptive: as enigMan points out elsewhere, "Relativity theory is one of the simplest bits of modern physics, and way beyond most of us." The problem here for Pruss is that the intuitive appeal of this argument, I think, depends on whether "we" means "humanity" or "humans." If "we" means "humanity" then Pruss's claim suffers a bit in believability: his God supposedly cares for us as individuals, which clashes somewhat with the idea of creating a system so complex that it can only be understood after centuries (millennia? longer?) of work and even then only by rather smart and well-trained people. So the sense in which "we" actually understand physics is not, at least on its face, the same sense in which Pruss predicts that "we" would.
On a more specific level, Pruss claims that an atheist scientist "does not in fact have anything to put in the place of theism that would give good reason to believe that simplicity and induction are good guides to truth." Here I think he's just wrong; I'll have to strike out on my own, though, as he doesn't really back up this claim much.
Induction is a subject we've covered before, but the argument is short enough that I can reproduce it in full again. If the physical world is ordered (patterned) on any level, using induction on behaviors at that level will over the long term help find true (or true-ish) laws: when any hypothesized law makes correct predictions, it can be built on; when it makes incorrect predictions, it can be placed to the side as an example of a false or incomplete law. If, on the other hand, the physical world isn't ordered at a given level, no investigative method will produce systematically produce knowledge of events at that level. Take a series of random numbers as an example (assuming such things can really be generated): sure, induction won't help you make consistently accurate predictions, but neither will anything else. In particular, induction is just as useful as any other methodology in this case, so there's not a compelling reason to reject it; and, of course, this is a concession one only has to make in the absolute worst case. Pruss can ask, as others have, how non-Christians can be sure that the world is ordered, but that's a different question altogether: whether or not God exists, induction is the only candidate way for us to gain knowledge pertaining to physics.
As for our reliance on simplicity, I think this can be best understood by trying to propose an alternative system. Obviously we couldn't go around trying to identify the most complex theory that explains a phenomenon, because no such thing exists. And one advantage in seeking the (apparently) simplest explanation over choosing among the many not-too-simple, not-too-complex theories is testability: the more variables a theory attempts to account for as input or predict as output, the harder it is to obtain the measurements necessary to test that theory. Similarly, the fewer variables one includes in a theory, the fewer suspects one has to choose from if and when that theory goes wrong. Going after the simpler theories, then, allows for more rapid progress from one theory to the next (give or take the time needed to develop or acquire devices capable of measuring in new ways or with added precision). This doesn't mean, of course, that the simplest explanation is always or even often right - again, real physics are actually pretty complicated. We just need it to play a useful role in the scientific process, which it does.
I'm guessing the theists who read this post will be tempted to skip right to the punchline and ask how we know that the universe is ordered. Why not, in other words, consider the idea that we've just been extraordinarily lucky so far? Unfortunately, nobody knows (at least, that I've seen): atheists can say that lawfulness just is an essential feature of the universe and theists can say that lawfulness just is an essential feature of God, but I've never seen anybody get much further than that. And this, perhaps, is the most confounding evidence of all for the theist. If we take Pruss seriously when he talks about the absurdity in a theistic world of a thirst for knowledge that we can't satisfy, then that pretty much kills the idea of God: there is not now and there has never been an explanation so thoroughly convincing that we cannot simply reply, "But why?"
Following coolly* on the heels of my last post about a serious aesthetic argument, I'm now starting in on Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just. I've only read a few pages, but it jumped out at me right at the start: to experience beauty, Scarry says, "seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication." I'm not quite sure how I feel about that - it seems kinda iffy but I haven't given it all that much concentrated thought - but it did recall to mind one of the things I like in music.
I don't know if there's a name for this or what, but from time to time musicians will string songs together on an album so that there's no pause between them. Fatboy Slim did this sporadically on his "Halfway Between The Gutter And The Stars," Daft Punk started their "Discovery" that way, Iron & Wine played around with it some on his "The Shepherd's Dog" as did XTC on "Skylarking," The Decemberists (in)famously structured almost all of "The Hazards Of Love" that way, and Girl Talk's last two albums were both basically one long song. I'm pretty much a total sucker for this; I might or might not want to replicate the experience of the beauty in a track, but I pretty much always want to continue experiencing that beauty.
To get a similar effect in my mixtapes - remember my mixtapes? - from time to time I use Audacity to sort of overlay the end of one song with the beginning of another. It's a little ham-handed to be sure, but I like it. Here are some examples:
What's your take on this kind of thing? Clever? Irritating? Awesome? Blasphemous? Not particularly moving one way or the other?
*Right? "Following hot on the heels of" means "soon after," so "following coolly on the heels of" means "not soon after"?
Usually when people refer to the force of habit they mean something like momentum: I have been doing such-and-such for so long that it's hard for me to arrest the pattern, so I just kept on doing it. But habit has another force, namely, the force to give us a level of intimate familiarity that may otherwise seem absurd or unrealistic. Mostly we know about this in the context of sports - when an athlete develops this kind of familiarity we call it "skill" - but probably most of us experience it in some way or other.
I bring this all up because someone spilled coffee all over my desk, soaking my mouse in the process. And, believe it or not, the mouse actually feels heavier. (Also, my fingers keep getting coffee on them when it seeps out of the little cracks that divide the top from the bottom, the buttons from each other, etc.) I guess this is kinda like the change-in-the-phone gag, only not a joke, and actually very annoying because now the scroll wheel doesn't work.
"Oh," you skeptics are saying, "that's just because you know the mouse has coffee in it so you expect it to be heavier." Perhaps, but then how do you explain this? Back when I still played Magic: The Gathering, I was shuffling one of my decks one day and it felt light. After a little while of ignoring it, I decided to count the cards to reassure myself; it turned out there were only 59. (That's out of 60, for those who don't know.) So there's precedent.
All other things being equal, though, I think I'd rather have less firsthand evidence of the human ability to notice very small changes and more ability to scroll.
In what can only be considered an exercise in spin, here is what David Rogstad has to say about the work of Phillip Zimbardo: "In reflecting on Dr. Zimbardo’s research and comments, I am struck again by the 'contradiction' we find in human nature, and how accurately this contradiction is described in the worldview portrayed in the Bible." The "contradiction" to which Rogstad refers is our moral variability, or in Rogstad's words, that "we are made in the image of God, and yet have become people who are 'desperately wicked.'" For his part, Zimbardo said this:
"...human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. The 'situation' is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought."
Got that? Zimbardo, who says that the wide range of human behavior is explained not by human character traits ("the inner environment") but rather outside factors, is being used as support by Rogstad, who says that human behavior is explained by human character traits (the imago Dei, our desperate wickedness). Even worse, Rogstad says that "God's word also provides a way of escape" from this cycle whereas Zimbardo specifically lists "religious training" as ineffectual.
About the only thing the two agree on is that humans sometimes behave righly and sometimes behave wrongly; to use that one trivial point of agreement to make all kinds of grandiose claims about the legitimacy of the Bible is dishonorable in the extreme.
...shouldn't we be just a wee bit more serious about Sotomayor's nomination? When the first three reactions I read are focused on what the far right thinks and not, like, her actual judicial history or what she thinks about issues or any of that stuff, I get a little worried.
Yeah, two of those promised to look into her more later and the third had posts with actual content just a short while later. Yeah, I trust those two (Myers and Brayton) to do their homework. Yeah, we'll all be hearing way too much about her in the upcoming weeks anyway, meaning there's not much chance of her remaining an unknown quantity throughout the confirmation process. So in the big picture, I admit that this shouldn't worry me so much.
And yet...isn't this precisely the sort of thing we should be downplaying, if not totally ignoring? It can be difficult to back away from a position once you've declared yourself to be in favor of it, and there are certainly people for whom "the right hates her" is a convincing reason to declare in favor of Sotomayor even without knowing anything else about her.
Hopefully this is just my "people are stupid" paranoia acting up, but Supreme Court seats are no joke and I'd rather play this slow and get it right than make a mistake because the nomination was treated as an us-versus-them thing from the start.
In case anybody cares, here are the movies I've already seen this summer and my summarized opinion thereof:
Wolverine - eh
Star Trek - pretty good
City of God - excellent, wish I'd seen it in theaters when it first came out
The Boondock Saints - kind of entertaining, but I couldn't get over how morally atrocious it was
The presence of older movies on that list should hint this pretty strongly, but I'll go ahead and say it explicitly anyway: I don't trust summer movies. The only reason I see as many as I do is the $5 movie-and-popcorn deal a local theater offers, and even with that I don't plan on seeing too many more:
Moon - can't be any worse than Sunshine, and I didn't regret seeing that, so...
Dead Snow - "Nazi zombies"? What more can I ask for?
Public Enemies - Depp/Bale.
Harry Potter whatever - I'll get dragged to this by any number of people, but I should want to go anyway so that I can use it as a catalyst for my "ethics of magic in Harry Potter" paper I'm trying to write. For the record, I've been trying to write this paper for almost a year now and I have made literally no progress (stupid grumble real life getting in the way).
District 9 - maaaaybe, depends on the reviews. Peter Jackson's name on the project helps even if he isn't directing.
Ponyo (On The Cliff) - okay, so I saw this one already because I was impatient, but I feel obligated to keep funding quality anime or else risk having Pokemon and Naruto take over, which means I'll be seeing it again. Or at least buying a ticket for it again and then sneaking into something else; we'll see.
Inglourious Basterds - Tarantino - 'nuff said.
9 - is this still summer? Probably not, but I want to advertise this movie anyway cause it looks awesome.
Tokyo Sonata - if I can find it.
And, outside of theaters, Tokyo!, Taxi Driver, and the rest of the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which was on TV but which I had to stop watching when last night's LA/Denver game started.
This list is open for debate, though, so don't hesitate to suggest something for inclusion or removal. Also, since I'm still catching up on my classics and indie/foreign films, I'd be more than happy to hear some recommendations of movies not currently in theaters.
[Ironically, this post had a huge math error in it - see the comments for this. Luckily, it wasn't bad enough to screw up my overall objection, but it was still pretty bad. Thanks to Aaron Boyden for pointing it out.]
Today, fun with math: as you may recall, the book of Genesis claims that various people had absurdly long lifespans, ranging all the way up to the mid-900-year level. This seems like the perfect kind of thing to reject as part of a non-literal interpretation of the Bible, especially if your organization is committed to turning Christianity into a scientifically viable view. That is, unless you're Fazale Rana, Hugh Ross, and Richard Deem, in which case it's the perfect opportunity to argue that certain scientific facts "make the long life spans of Genesis 5 and the decrease of human life spans at the time of the Flood scientifically plausible."
The trio offers four life-extending methods but only attaches numbers to two of them: "administering SOD/catalase enzyme mimetics to a study group of worms (Caenorhabditis elegans) can extend the worms’ average life span by 44%," and "reducing food intake (calories) by 30 to 70% can extend life span by up to 40%." If they'd had the numbers for the other two, I'm sure they would've listed them, which makes me think the other two shouldn't count at all; since I'm in a good mood, though, I'll be super-charitable and say that the other two also add 40% to the average lifespan. That brings the absolute maximum benefit up to about 260% of the current average human lifespan, which means we can start doing some math.
Currently, the highest average lifespan within a society is Japan's 81 - multiply that by 2.6 and you get close to 211. 211, in case you can't tell, isn't even close to the 930-year lifespan imputed to Adam. Further, using modern numbers to measure lifespan assumes modern healthcare, so really we should work with an older number. From that same wiki page it looks like the average lifespan of humans in the absence of real medicine is around 30 years, and 30*2.6 = 78. We are now in the realm of farce: if the closest these people can get is 12% of the lifespan they need, this argument is a joke.
Moreover, they need something much stronger than what they say. Treatments that extend the average lifespan are not necessarily capable of extending the maximum lifespan. Thus, even if they'd managed to accumulate the 775% increase they're talking about (from 120 to 930; this sets the bar too low, as they really need to go from 81 or 30 to 930) they would also have had to get a matching increase in maximum lifespan.
Not satisfied with having thoroughly mucked that up, Rana, Ross, and Deem also propose a scientific cause for this ridiculously huge change in lifespan: the Vela supernova. They place the event at "20,000 to 30,000 years ago (roughly the time of the Genesis flood)," and though the internet disagrees (see here, here, here, here, here and so on) I want to take them at their word so that we can investigate their conclusions. In particular, I'm interested in their claim that the supernova "would explain the mathematical curve—the gradual, exponential reduction in life spans from about 900 to 120 years—reported in Genesis 11." For those who don't know, here's that "gradual, exponential reduction": 950 (Noah, 350 post-flood), 600 (Shem, 500 post-flood), 438 (Arphaxad, all post-flood), 433 (Salah), 464 (Eber), 239 (Peleg), 239 (Reu), 230 (Serug), 148 (Nahor), 205 (Terah). Besides the fact that this is neither gradual nor exponential ("exponential" doesn't just mean "uneven"), it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say that God timed either the supernova or the resulting radiation's arrival to Earth with the flood: if the supernova was timed with the flood, it couldn't possibly have affected Shem, as Vela is at least 600 light-years away; if the flood was synchronized with the radiation hitting Earth, it makes no sense that Noah would've lived on unaffected while Shem would've experienced a 33% decrease in lifespan.
But wait - there's yet more. Even if Rana, Ross, and Deem had succeeded in showing that humans lived for 900+ years until God used an exploding star to alter our biology so that that couldn't ever happen, they would still have to provide some kind of reason why God would've done that. Striking out on his own, Ross offers this defense: "Long life spans make it possible for human technology and civilization to emerge rapidly." Okay, so he's off to a bad start facts-wise - technology and civilization weren't such hot shit 20,000 years ago, so if that was God's aim it seems like God goofed up big time. In actuality, though, it's Ross who goofed up: it's not that we'd make progress faster, it's that the progress would come "in relatively few generations." If people age more slowly, as they argue, those generations would take proportionately longer, meaning that the total time would remain the same.
Finally, it's strange to think that people would consistently live to such advanced ages even if the aging process were slowed. Starvation, war, natural disasters, and predation are all relatively constant threats, so people without any reliable response to those forces would have to be fantastically lucky to live even half that long. Disease, on the other hand, would be affected at least a little bit - immune systems vary in strength by age - but 300 years would be a really long time to go without contracting a fatal illness even with a fully functional immune system. Really, then, the best that Rana, Ross, and Deem can hope for is to say that the lifespans reported in the Bible depend on whether (a) we ignore basic arithmetic and (b) we posit that early humans had superpowers that enabled them to avoid non-age-related threats. This, I should think, makes the whole thing somewhat less than "scientifically plausible."
To my co-citizens: happy Memorial Day. And to everyone else: happy, um, Monday. Unless this is also a holiday where you are, in which case happy that holiday.
At any rate, some (if not all) of you have heard of Stanley Fish by now. After appearing as the villain in any number of blog posts around the internet because of his postmodern take on religion and atheism, Fish can pretty safely consider himself to be a minor internet celebrity - though more the Paris Hilton, please-just-go-away type of celebrity than the good kind. Not having the vast fortune I've always wanted, I haven't had the time to go through each and every analysis of Fish's ideas. The small portion I have seen, while it does not paint a pretty picture, is not entirely...satisfying, somehow. Thus I now give my own analysis - please bear in mind that some or all of these points may have been repeated elsewhere. I'll try not to unwittingly steal content from other authors, but I can't make any promises.
As far as I can tell, this whole controversy originates in a deep emotional dissatisfaction experienced by one Terry Eagleton. Having experienced said dissatisfaction - it seems, from what I can tell, to resemble a midlife crisis brought on by the recession (see also mortality salience, maybe?) - Eagleton decided he ought to build up a theoretical structure capable of supporting (in the sense of "justifying") it. Or, in Fish's paraphrase, Eagleton's argument centers on the idea "that the other candidates for guidance [i.e., other than religion] — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed." I don't really know "what is ultimately needed," and to be honest I don't think Fish or Eagleton know either. On the other hand, I don't think we need to know this to appraise Fish's reasoning, so I'll do my best to proceed without having filled in that blank.
Whatever the thing is that Eagleton and Fish want, they have to prove somehow that it can only be obtained through religious means. The first candidate for this proof is the notion of "theological questions," like "'Why is there anything in the first place?', 'Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?' [sic] and 'Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?'" (Why the label "theological questions" for these? Your guess is as good as mine.) What we need, then, must depend in some way on these questions, at least for Fish, who accordingly argues that "science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions." While this is not strictly speaking true - in many senses of the questions, science can answer those - it seems intuitively appealing: if religion can bring attention to and then address these questions, that would at least be somewhat valuable.
Ah, but there is a problem: "Christianity," Fish says through an Eagleton quote, "was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place." Eagleton, apparently, is very clear on this - I've seen at least four or five other direct quotes along the same lines. But this is a very confused statement: what Christianity was meant to do really has nothing at all to do with how it is used now (if it was even meant to do anything). Fish himself serves as a perfect example of this, because he apparently thinks that Christianity and maybe other religions can at least start to answer (read: offer explanatory stories for) the so-called theological questions he lists.
This double standard reveals his greed. If Fish were really committed to defending a specific, limited version of religiosity, he could have left this subject alone and just admitted that religion isn't useful for explaining things. Whatever he ended up with would've had to abdicate all responsibility for explaining anything, but at least then his position would've matched his rhetoric. By trying to defend religion's explanatory power after denying that it matters, Fish does nothing other than reveal the error of Eagleton's "what religion was meant to be" defense.
The double standards don't stop there, though. When it comes to secular disciplines, Fish claims - and more on this later - that they ultimately rely on faith and are therefore equivalent in some important sense to religion. Despite the importance of this claim, this equivalence only lasts as long as Fish finds it convenient. As soon as he's done explaining why both religion and other pursuits are the same, he characterizes the debate as "a choice between a flawed but aspiring religious faith or a spectacularly hubristic faith in the power of unaided reason." Did you get that? Religion and unaided reason are the same in that they both rely on "some kind of faith" and neither can explain everything, but reason fails in such a way as to make it "hubristic" whereas religion is merely "flawed but aspiring." One wonders if Fish ever had kids, and, if so, whether they too were subject to this brand of unapologetic favoritism.
Much later - and notice now that this doesn't really have anything to do with "what we need" anymore, if it ever did - Fish goes even farther, saying that religion really has no essential content at all: "The religions I know are about nothing but doubt and dissent." The point, he says, "is not a set of propositions about the world (although there is some of that), but an orientation toward perfection by a being that is radically imperfect." Count, if you will, the propositions about the world inherent just in that remark: I am radically imperfect, I ought to be oriented toward perfection. So far, we're up to two - three if you count the oft-included "perfection consists in x." As Fish continues the number just goes up, as anyone for whom "everything visible [is] a sign of God’s love" surely must have an abundance of very important propositions about the world: clouds are a sign of God's love, pickles are a sign of God's love, et cetera and so on. Even if Fish didn't go out of his way to provide the very propositions that he claims don't exist, his position couldn't survive without them: any propositional attitude whatsoever must be built on at least some hypothesized fact about the world, so for Fish to claim that followers of a religion simply have feelings about some stuff without having any truth-apt concepts regarding the same stuff is literally absurd.
So obviously Fish wobbles a bit when it comes to the specifics. When speaking in generalities, on the other hand, he's very firm and seems rather convincing: "reason is a non-starter in the absence of an a prior [sic] specification of what is real and important"; similarly, "the act of observing can itself only take place within hypotheses (about the way the world is) that cannot be observation’s objects because it is within them that observation and reasoning occur." (Note that this latter generality is nothing more than a rephrasing of what I just said.) But the generality in this case disguises a more fundamental truth: even if we admit that all systems of belief ultimately rest on some ungrounded or insufficiently grounded beliefs, there are some such beliefs that are relied upon by both religious and non-religious systems.
If the measure of an epistemology is the faith-requiring fundamental beliefs that it needs to survive, as Fish suggests, then it's stupid to just throw up one's hands as soon as any such fundamental belief is found. Just like other epistemological measures focus on extent - for example, the extent to which an epistemology is reliable, or consistent, or whatever - it makes sense for Fish to look at the number, say, of fundamentally faith-based beliefs/belief systems that a system requires. This sounds hard, but keep in mind that pretty much everyone uses deductive and inductive reasoning, even in religious reasoning - deductive and inductive reasoning, then, are (or are practically) epistemologically neutral. Since he quit before he reached a level this complex we can't say for sure what Fish would think of this idea, but it seems pretty safe to say that religions use more of these than many (most?) areligious systems - and, therefore, that religions are meaningfully more faith-based than science and so on. This is a bit roundabout to be sure, but it works.
(If you aren't inclined to take my word for it, just look at the bevy of theology-tinged degrees: you can be a theological historian, a theological literary critic [e.g. Bible scholars], a theological scientist, a theological philosopher, and so on, just by adding religious assumptions to preexisting ways of knowing.)
Before I wrap this up, it's worth taking a moment to return to the "theological questions" that Fish thought only religion could ask and answer. Put concisely, I don't know what he thinks he's talking about. A five-year-old could ask those same questions without having any inkling of religion (or much else), but just to have some sophisticated non-religious sources of meaningful questions and answers, here are two: art and philosophy. Neither of these is science or liberalism or whatever else he mentioned, but that only proves two things: one, that his list wasn't exhaustive; and two, that Fish's "theological questions" standard isn't really relevant to this conversation. Given the long list of his errors, this last one doesn't do much other than to confirm what we ought already suspect: Fish has no idea what he's talking about.
Because it's kicking his ass, is why.
I mean, to be fair, I'd hate modern technology, too, if I were a high-profile dolt. Will's been a relatively well-respected columnist for who knows how long, but now he'll probably be remembered for that ridiculous article he wrote about blue jeans, all thanks to the internet and Google's archives.
But the snarky wrath of the internet falls just as hard on his serious arguments as it does on his one-offs and his charmingly atavistic love of baseball. When he recently took aim at Ray LaHood for promoting bikes and trains as alternatives to cars, the netizens - or netroots, or whatever the fuck they're called now - fired back.
Will's argument, aptly paraphrased by Erica Barnett, is that the American obsession with cars and the corresponding government support of "spending billions on highways, subsidizing the auto industry, and promoting suburban sprawl [are] just the natural order of things." Any other image seems so alien to Will that he cannot even entertain the idea that "0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work" or that "high-speed rail...will [ever] be [anything other than] the wave of the future."
Despite Will's bemused scoffings, "right now 0.4 percent of commuters normally get to work on bicycles," as Matthew Yglesias reports. He admits that "that’s a small percentage. But it’s forty times larger than a percentage that Will deems unrealistically utopian. This would be like saying Dwight Howard is 2 feet tall." For the uninitiated, Dwight Howard is not two feet tall. While he's at it, Yglesias also defends the viability of high-speed rail, noting that the system works just fine in other countries: in Spain, for instance, "Barcelona and Madrid, which are currently served by a very successful high speed rail link."
But okay - perhaps, despite getting all of his actual facts wrong, Will's overall point is on the mark. After all, who could give up "ample backyards and" all the "other aspects of low-density living" that must have just temporarily slipped Will's mind? I know I would love to have an ample backyard "and other aspects"! Anyway, the government's main responsibility is to "let people get on with their lives," right?
Short answer: wrong. Long answer: wroooooooooong. When "Will's double-gated community (wherever it is) [is] first in line to become free of all these unbearable restrictions that so bedevil us -- including, naturally, all neighborhood covenants and zoning laws," then maybe this argument will have some punch. This point, made and then elaborated on by Dale of Faith In Honest Doubt, is echoed by Barnett and Yglesias, respectively: far from having a general vendetta against this kind of government action, Will "actually adore[s] 'behavior modification' and social engineering," like when the government built "the interstate system [and thus] promoted driving."
The fundamental problem, I think, is the same one I've hit upon in my conversation here: it is not valid to conclude what people want to do from what people actually do. The argumentative commenter on that other post seems to think - earnestly and without pretense or duplicity - that people inherently want to drive SUVs, that something about the SUV appeals so strongly to human (or at least American) nature that we just cannot resist them. From this erroneous premise, he, like Will, goes on to talk about how the government should be doing everything in its power to accommodate this desire: drop the gas tax, stop mandating higher mileage standards, and so on. But it's meaningless to speak of our economic decisions as if they were disconnected from our history, culture, and values: inherently people want very few kinds of things; if this weren't the case there would be no need to advertise to us constantly.
Our culture and so on, then, are what fill in the gaps in our economic motivation. While it might seem scary or dangerous for the government to play a part in this process, really there's no alternative: every government action is also a cultural action. Some have become so ingrained that we take them for granted - like prohibitions against "lead paint, child labor, and smoking on airplanes" (Barnett) - and others are still up in the air - like the permission of "family planning services, a free needle exchange, and medicinal marijuana" (Dale) - but none match Will's ideal of a culturally inert government.
About the only thing Will gets right in this pathetic effort - and keep in mind that there are other fallacies that I haven't even touched on - is his characterization of the GOP. The Republicans, Will says, are "the party...of 'No, we can't.'" You don't have to tell us, George: we already believe that you can't. But that doesn't mean you can or should work to bring the rest of us down to your level.
As a fan of Weird Al Yankovic's - I have all of his music, including his little-known take on "Peter and the Wolf" - I feel justified in demanding a new album of song and genre parodies. It's been three years since his last CD, and even though I stopped listening to pop music around 2002 I still thoroughly enjoy his work. "Trapped in the Drive-Thru," for instance, could easily serve as the basis for a thesis paper in parody (that is, if such a thing existed): since R. Kelly's original work was so close to self-parody to begin with* that Weird Al had to walk a fine line between hitting too hard and simply not being funny. Of course, his version ended up pitch-perfect.
More than that, he's shown an almost frightening ability to adapt to new genres and sub-genres, using some kind of magic artistic jiu-jitsu to undercut rap's typically graphic content instead of trying to meet it on its own terms. I think this also counts as a positive reflection on his band, who've had to deal with who knows how many stylistic shifts. So what's the hold up? I know for a fact that pop radio hasn't managed to get any more intelligent or substantive since 2006, so he can't want for material. I know he's not retired, either, cause he just came out with a single last year. He can't have lost his sense of humor or his vocal talent and I refuse to believe that he's lost the motivation - what else is left to prevenr or delay his next release?
Sigh.
Basically, the point is this: Weird Al, if somehow you find this and you're weighing your options, just keep in mind that I used to watch your TV show and I rented UHF one time from Blockbuster before they disappeared from the physical world. Forget all that other stuff, you owe me.
*If you haven't tried to watch this yet, I implore you to find it on YouTube or whatever and give it a shot. I think I made it to episode 5 or 6 (out of twenty-fucking-two) before I had to stop, but it was totally worth it.
Last time on Rust Belt Basketball Theater, I gave some suggestions to Denver and Orlando regarding how to improve their chances: find a way for Anthony Carter not to be a liability and slow the game down, respectively. Not to pat myself on the back too much, but I was right (give or take one false dilemma on my part).
In game 2 of their series with the Lakers, the Nuggets were saved by Linas Kleiza's 16 bench points, which included four 3s. Though I left this option out of my last post, George Karl apparently found the exact right way to make sure that Carter didn't hurt his team: keep him on the bench. After playing 15 pretty much useless minutes in game 1, Carter only got 6 minutes last night, whereas Kleiza's minutes went from 7 to almost 22. Still, if they'd missed 12 free throws again they would've lost by 2 again (coincidental, ain't it?), so they're not really out of the woods yet. Plus, now it's Phil Jackson's turn to make a move - look, perhaps, for more Jordan Farmar in game 3, especially given the way that Chauncey Billups abused Derek Fisher.
As for Orlando, they slowed Cleveland down to the tune of something like 10 fewer possessions in the second half of their win than they did in the first half. When your defense allows the opponent to shoot 49% from the field, that makes a huge difference. That said, I don't think they can win the series playing only one good half per game - if nothing else, Mike Brown should be able to figure out that it's stupid to let a career 60% free-throw shooter go 14 of 20 from the floor. The Cavs don't have all that much depth at center, but they didn't even come close to exhausting it in game 1: Anderson Varejao ended the game with 3 fouls and Ben Wallace only had 1. While this would pretty much scuttle their ability to push the tempo consistently, it might be the better long-term strategy.
The adjustment I'll appreciate the most, however, will not be made by any of these teams. It will instead be the change in broadcast network: since tonight's game is on TNT, I won't have to mute my TV just to avoid listening to Mark Jackson's impersonation of a broken record full of only catchphrases.
In case anyone was wondering where the saying "a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" came from, I think I know: Hugh Ross. Ross cites his "formal education in classical and statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism theory" as the reason he now believes "that physical laws work on the side of obedience to God's laws" - that is, that even though "Adam and Eve experienced both work and pain before their rebellion against God," any "sin leads to more work and more pain." Let's watch as he stumbles through his reasoning.
Ross's hypothesis appears to be that "God's design of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear forces, and thermodynamics yields this result: the more a person sins, the more work he must perform and the more pain he must experience." To evidence this, he looks at a few general examples. "Gravity," for one, "results in increasing sag and stress over time. Electromagnetic radiation," for another, "corrodes the surfaces of all structures." But these aren't really examples of what he means: gravity and electromagnetism affect everyone approximately equally, with the entirely unhelpful exception of astronauts, and there's basically nothing anyone can do about that. Unless he's subtly trying to imply that everybody sins to a similar extent (again except for astronauts, somehow) - a laughable premise in and of itself - these phenomena actually work against his claim, not for it.
Undaunted, Ross tries again a bit later on. "The second law of thermodynamics," he says, "guarantees that whatever a man organizes, whatever he designs, and whatever information he accumulates becomes increasingly disordered. However, sin speeds up the breakdown. For example, if a man abuses his tools, they become less productive and wear out faster, leading him to experience more pain and more work when he uses them." Now we are in brand-new ethical territory - unless, that is, it was always clear to everyone else that I sin when I use my shoe as a doorstop. I also wonder where he gets the idea that computers used for illicit purposes physically wear out faster than others: if that were true, wouldn't we see a suspiciously high rate of hard drive failures among adolescent males?
Ross, however, isn't done yet with his imaginary sinner. "If he abuses his animals, his employees, or a woman who might become his spouse, their response to the abuse causes him more work, less pleasure, and more pain."* This seems to be the overarching strategy for Ross's argument: start with an example of decay in a hard science (the 2nd thermo law dictates disorder in the very long term), move to decay in a hard-ish science (when placed under unanticipated physical stresses, even sturdy-seeming objects can break), and then talk about decay in only a metaphorical sense. The equivocation stands out pretty starkly, though: there just is no physical law that says that an abuser will experience increasingly greater entropy as a result of being an abuser, and for Ross to suggest otherwise is completely bizarre.
Still, Ross has an article to finish, so he keeps right on going. In order for this to make any intuitive sense at all, Ross has to posit some kind of matching scale, so that's precisely what he does: "the more defiling the sin," he says, "the more pain and/or work it generates." Perhaps sensing the weakness of his earlier examples, Ross avoids giving any here. Still, it's pretty clear that this too reeks of absurdity. Take his earlier example of abusing one's tools: on the scale of sins, that must rank pretty much near the bottom, far below something like suicide. Yet by definition someone who successfully commits suicide has put themselves beyond the reach of the laws of physics, thus totally blowing up this stupid notion.
And that was about the point where I stopped caring. Sure, I could say more about this - in particular, it hurts the Christian cause more than it helps to say that "because free will must be real for love to be real, the potential for sin necessarily existed in Eden" - but the physics part of Ross's argument is basically over and done with. Really, though, this is something I shouldn't even have had to discuss in the first place - physical laws are not punitive, period.
*A question: why did Ross feel the need to specify "a woman who might become his spouse"? He's not saying that it's okay to beat women who aren't your spouse, is he...?
As a person who produces textual artifacts, the phenomenon of ghostwriting pisses me right the hell off: if you cannot write, don't put your freaking name on a book like you wrote it. The reason I bring this up is this, which advertises itself as an encyclical written by none other than the current pope. First of all, I don't even know what an encyclical is - some kind of magical Catholic term paper, maybe? But also, I have to think that Ratzinger just doesn't have the time to write stuff like this in between jetting around to third-world countries and whatnot.
Whatever the case may be, though, the article is a disaster. Don't try to read it yourself unless you have a lot of time on your hands: whoever reads these things apparently gives a lot of bonus points for gratuitous ass-kissing. Once you get past all that, it turns out that the article talks about charity, specifically the Catholic church's role in providing it. I'm going to skip waaaay down to section 26, where Ratzinger examines "an objection...developed with particular insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is claimed, do not need charity but justice." This argument holds that charity, either by design or by accident, serves as "a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and a means of soothing their consciences, while preserving their own status and robbing the poor of their rights." Not surprisingly, Ratzinger disagrees, though he takes a long time to say why.
Before he can get to his actual argument against this, the Ratzinger takes us through his theory of the proper roles of church and state. Because "a just social and civil order...is an essential task" for politics, he feels that it "cannot be the Church's immediate responsibility." I don't quite see the connection there, though - Ratzinger says that he "has no intention of giving the Church power over the State," but I'm pretty confident that the Catholic hierarchy could (at least in theory) work with governments to promote justice, so that seemingly can't be it. Either way, this false dilemma isn't sufficient to prove his point: the Marxist argument wants people not to hinder the pursuit of justice, not necessarily to help. As such, Ratzinger could meet the Marxist standard without even taking a step in the direction of usurping the state. He needs, therefore, an argument that's much stronger than a simple objection to the Marxist: he needs a positive defense of charity.
To mount this defense, Ratzinger calls on the concept of love. "The Church can never be exempted from practising charity as an organized activity of believers," he says, "because in addition to justice man needs, and will always need, love." There are questions to be asked about whether this need entails some facts about justice - which would place this too under the purview of the state on Ratzinger's kinda silly schema and thus bust up the whole thing - but I won't ask them here, mostly because I don't have to. Ratzinger does all the hard work for me by outlining what he calls "the essential elements of Christian and ecclesial charity."*
He begins by stating that "Christian charity is first of all the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations" by volunteers who experience a "heartfelt concern, enabling them to experience the richness of their humanity." In order to achieve this kind of response, he says, "they need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others. As a result, love of neighbour will no longer be for them a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without [like it is in the, y'know, Bible], but a consequence deriving from their faith." Unless this is just an ad hoc restriction, Ratzinger seems to say that only Catholic faith can truly support "heartfelt concern." Not that that helps: this claim, clearly aimed at atheists and other skeptics, is a total canard.
As for the second aspect of Christian charity, I'll just Ratzinger's words speak for themselves: "Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies." Yeah - call me when you figure out how that could possibly work.
Ratzinger's final element does make more sense, but only marginally. The charity practiced by Catholics "cannot be used as a means of engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism," he claims. Great! That sounds like a plan. This makes it seem like there are some things to say here about how, according to the guy in charge, those poor Catholic orphanages ought to quit whining about gay marriage cause they aren't allowed to proselytize, but it turns out Ratzinger isn't totally serious about the whole no-proselytizing thing. See, you can't proselytize, but "this does not mean that charitable activity must somehow leave God and Christ aside." He doesn't explicitly say how God and Christ should be included - indeed, he goes to great lengths not to explicitly say this - but I think it's safe to say they should be included in such a way that might at least resemble proselytizing.
So the church will, according to its leader, provide a unique brand of charity by acting with love just like everybody else but also steering clear of any ideologies (like Christianity), especially ones that endorese proselytizing - except, of course, during approved proselytizing hours (which, I believe, are any hours that start with a numeric value). To call this travesty of an argument merely "bad" would not do it justice. Still, there is one of the pope's statements that I can endorse.
Returning to the Marxist objection for a moment, Ratzinger stumbles upon the following piece of wisdom: "One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now." While I agree, Ratzinger errs in thinking that the proper response to this is to abandon justice altogether to focus on humaneness. The Marxist stance, if he represents it accurately, wrongly assumes that charity cannot take place as part of a larger effort to make a place more just. If this is possible - and I absolutely believe that it is - both Ratzinger's political pessimism and the Marxist extremism are misplaced. If Marxism, Christianity, or Catholicism is incapable of producing just charity, then that gives us far more reason to abandon those systems than it does to abandon charity. On the other hand, if Ratzinger's confused account represents the best of Catholic thought on the matter, there's no need to refer to justice at all: a contradictory view is always its own undoing.
*Note the ease with which Ratzinger extends his claim to all Christians - I can't imagine that this would go over well outside of the Catholic community.
Yesterday I recommended some books for people looking for narrative art in non-movie form, but it occurs to me that something more visual* might do as well. I refer you now to the work of one Li Wei, as featured on The Daily Dish and on Wei's own website. This is my favorite so far:
The thing about Wei's work that I really like, I think, is that he looks like such a schlub. (That's Wei sporting the white shirt and the blue short-shorts, in case you didn't guess as much already.) I don't see too much technical wizardry to appreciate in these photos: just get a tall enough thing that it can stay off-camera, stick some wires on it, attach the wires to Wei in the appropriate manner, and snap some photos. Expensive? Yes, and probably hard to pull off just by virtue of the fact that it's an uncommon thing to do. The concept, though, remains straightforward, almost simplistic: note that the faux-motion in the image featured in The Daily Dish is belied by the lack of wind billowing Wei's shirt backwards. And in the picture above, one has to assume that the airplane in the upper-right corner is not intentional - especially given the thematic confusion it might generate in combination with the imagery of this particular picture a more pedantic artist might have edited it out, so from what I can tell Wei's artistic attention really is focused on the big picture (no pun intended).
Not, however, for no good reason: the richly imaginative nature of the setup - almost all of his pictures seem to take place in a story and not in a vacuum - combined with his plain looks makes for a very appealing combination. While others credit him for creating a sense of "the difficulties, particularly lack of security, of living in the modern age," I see something slightly different, something verging on the celebratory, in Wei's work. The distinction, I think, originates in a subset/superset relationship.
Whatever Wei means, the portrayal of that meaning ranges from the merely exaggerated to the truly supernatural. This suggests to me a widening of possibilities: if this poorly-dressed, not-handsome, basically muscle-less guy can take flying leaps off of construction equipment and conquer highway streetlights and meet girls in the upper corners of rooms, I find myself wondering, why can't I do those things? The element of danger, when it even exists, I take to be much more of a facet of this more fundamental question than an independent aspect of Wei's art - it seems only fair, I guess, that if we normal people now have these metropolitan superpowers we can expect to get kicked off of buildings or thrown around by our ankles from time to time. Danger, then, exists here as it does everywhere else: as a contingent but necessary counterpart to opportunity or power.
I'm willing to grant that my (very, very) latent optimism and penchant for analysis might lead me astray in this case, but either way I see a lot in these unfinished (and, in some sense, unstarted) pictorial stories to appreciate.
*Yes, reading is a visual activity, but you know what I mean.
Miss 12 free throws. This used to be the Spurs' m.o. but it looks like Denver might be carrying on the tradition. Also of note in this box score is Anthony Carter's 0-4: if LA wants to stalk JR Smith, perimeter shots will be available for willing shooters. If Carter doesn't have that kind of range or hesitates to use it, George Karl needs to find some plays that'll use Carter either as a decoy or a setup man.
Meanwhile, Orlando is finding an innovative way to lose: let your opponents shoot over 50% from the field without turning the ball over even once. It looks from the boxscore (I'm not currently watching) like Cleveland decided to push the tempo a little against what they took to be an offensively weaker team (getting 53-54 possessions in a half is slightly on the high side), and so far it's working out. The Magic can't possibly keep up with the Cavs' 126-point-per-game pace and Dwight Howard's 18 first-half points are pretty much dwarfed by LeBron's 26.
But the main way to lose in the NBA playoffs is to fail to make adjustments. Houston's Rick Adelman accomplished this just by being slow: when his smaller, faster team surprised LA's smaller, faster team, he decided he'd come out in the next game with the exact same lineup and gameplan. When Phil Jackson countered by making the completely predictable move of starting the comparatively gargantuan Andrew Bynum, the Rockets foundered. Boston, on the other hand, lost their series because Doc Rivers had no adjustments to make: the remainder of his talent was injured. Of the two teams currently losing, Orlando is actually in better shape long-term, because their players will understand (if their current deficit holds up) that they need to change their play. Denver, on the other hand, might make the mistake of believing that they just got unlucky.
When it comes to May and June in the NBA, I follow the sage words of Michael Stipe: change is what I believe in.
With all of the focus on movies that tends to accompany the beginnings of summer, it's worth pausing for a moment to remember that other narrative art forms exist. Since I sort of missed the boat on doing a post about the fantastic "The Hazards of Love" by The Decemberists, I will instead turn to the written word.
I should first praise Carlos Ruiz Zafon for his The Shadow of the Wind, which totally saved me from falling asleep at the polls yesterday. I'm only about halfway through at the moment but the book so far has been thoroughly enjoyable. Maybe not as good as its book jacket reviews, but certainly worth reading. Along with The Double by Jose Saramago, I think this marks my entrance into Spanish literature - so far, so good.
In other book news, I am thoroughly excited about Haruki Murakami's upcoming novel 1Q84. The title appears to allude to Orwell's 1984, but the picture in that link might indicate otherwise: if Murakami doesn't want this pronounced similarly - "kew-teen eighty-four," say, as opposed to "ichi-kew-hachi-yon," which just translates to "one-kew-eight-four" - maybe the similarity is just coincidental. (On the other hand, maybe that's the way years are pronounced in Japan? "One-nine-eight-four"?) Either way, I love, love, love Murakami's writing and will eagerly await the earliest professional translation of this book. (I've had too many bad experiences with fansubs to trust anything less, despite my generally pro-amateur stance.)
Last, just to have a third thing to talk about, anyone who likes or requires children's literature should immediately seek out George Saunders's The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. I read his The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil in college, at which point I proceeded to forget about him altogether (sorry, George!) until last year, when I read In Persuasion Nation. Saunders, so far as I can tell, writes simple prose in order to disguise and (paradoxically) amplify the nuance of his message. One would predict from this fact that he's well-equipped to avoid the usual trap of children's literature wherein the author dumbs down their writing and loses some subtlety as a result, and indeed, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is more adult than many books written for grown-ups (coughcoughanythingbyDanBrowncough). Readers of this blog in particular might appreciate Saunders's knack for dismantling bad ways of thinking. Oh - and the pictures are pretty neat, too.
So I was going to post something yesterday, but I had to go judge some elections for the county and that's sort of an all-day thing. And then on Monday I was going to put something up saying I might not post on Tuesday, but I had to watch "Star Trek" so I could write about it today and after that I basically forgot. So yeah - sorry, but that's how it goes.
But let's get back to the topic at hand, namely, the new "Star Trek," which I fail to understand as a reboot even though that's what everyone says it is [this has now been rectified in the comments]. The movie was fine: they overdid the lens flares, underutilized the various musical themes at their disposal, and thankfully kept alive the classic Star Trek tradition of having enormous plot holes that don't really detract any from the fun. What does detract from the fun is the pissing contest people have apparently been having over the movie's politics.
On the right, people like Christian Toto struggle to identify "a surprising conservative streak" in the movie; on the left, people like Dana Stevens call it "a blockbuster for the Obama age." In an amazing coincidence, both Toto and Stevens botch their arguments in exactly the same way. Toto is heartened by Spock's dissent when "Kirk suggests showing some mercy as a way of winning hearts and minds" and Stevens (in a sickly-sweet fanboy moment) "picture[s] our president—levelheaded, biracial, implacably smart—on the bridge in a blue shirt and pointy ears." What do these two things have in common, you ask? Both were portrayed as wrong in some way by the movie - and therefore neither counts as a positive representation of a political view.
To put this maybe in a clearer way, these scenes are basically the movie's version of Sarah Palin or Rick Warren's gay friends: their mere existence doesn't tell us anything about Palin's or Warren's feelings about gays because also need to know how they're treated. If an alleged homophobe (or racist, or antisemite, or whatever) treats their gay (or black, or Jewish, or whatever) friends like shit for being gay (or whatever), the fact of them being friends really does not mitigate that any. (And yes, it's possible to treat your friends like shit, especially when it happens only in certain contexts.) In "Star Trek," Spock does advise Kirk to stomp on the Romulans, but he does so wrongly: we in the audience are supposed to recognize that Kirk had the situation perfectly under control and thus that Spock was being needlessly bloodthirsty. Similarly, it's phenomenally stupid to say glowingly that Obama is like Spock because Obama is (at least for Stevens) fit to be president whereas Spock, at least according to the movie, isn't even fit to be captain. What "Star Trek" does to these brief moments of seeming political import, then, is about the same as what Rick Warren does to his gay friends when he says that denying them the right to marry is "a humanitarian issue" and says they're living "contrary to God's word."
If we want to be charitable, we can say that this kind of thing isn't due to stupidity but rather the red- and blue-colored glasses that Toto and Stevens evidently have sutured to their faces. The thing about pop entertainment, though, is that it's precisely these glasses that we're supposed to take off. That doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't analyze cultural artifacts as cultural artifacts - it just means we shouldn't have a preexisting agenda during that process. So Messrs. Toto and Stevens, the next time you sit down to watch a movie, please wait until after it's over to decide how you should feel about it.
WARNING: this post will probably contain spoilers for LOST up to the season 5 finale. I'll try to make them implied spoilers, though, and not explicit ones.
Over at Slog, Dan Savage relates the sad tale of one Sheri Ferber. The sadness begins when we learn that Feber used to belong to Rick "but I have gay friends!" Warren's Saddleback Church: this is sadness strike one. Then, as it turns out, her husband "violently attacked her while they were driving home from church." Sadness strike two: being married to an abuser must be terrible in ways I can barely even fathom. Strike three was, of course, when she tried to go to her church for help and they "called her husband to warn him that Ferber had been 'gossiping about their marriage.'" But actually, this is not a post about Sheri Ferber, despite the real and significant disasters in her life. This is a post about Tom Holladay.
Tom Holladay works for Saddleback as a pastor, and here is what he had to say about this whole thing: "There’s something in me that wishes there was a Bible verse that says if they abuse you in this and such kind of way then you can leave them." Yes: woe is Tom Holladay! Something in him - which, unless I miss my guess, the rest of us call "the conscience" - wishes that the Bible explicitly permitted divorce in the case of abuse, but alas - the Bible (apparently) doesn't say this! So far as poor Tom Holladay can tell, his hands are tied, his course set - his fate, if I may be so bold, sealed. Tom Holladay, it seems, is the Ben Linus of the real world (minus, of course, the sociopathy and whatnot).
This, of course, says nothing good about God, but I think it's a far stronger criticism of Holladay. Ben Linus, we are learning, is a spiteful coward whose only freestanding moral notions deal with himself, and the object of his dependence makes regular in-person appearances in Ben's general vicinity. Along with having the standard community of fellow believers and convoluted supporting mythology, Ben (thinks he) knows where exactly his god lives, can actually talk to people who've seen his god face-to-face, and even receives handwritten notes from his god. Holladay, on the other hand, has only a series of books written well over one thousand years ago which theologians say may not even have been authored by his God. The incredible thing in all of this is not that Ben, having finally broken under the tragedies of his life, chose to rebel against his god: it is that Holladay has not made the same choice.
Because apparently nothing newsworthy is happening these days, the Toronto Star decided to perform an "analysis of winning percentages among professional sports teams in 37 North American cities since 2000." You can find the results of this analysis in map form here, but for the lazy, the full list goes as follows:
Indianapolis, Boston, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Dallas, Montreal, Nashville, Anaheim, Edmonton, St. Louis, Denver, New York/New Jersey, Pittsburgh (thanks, Pirates!), Los Angeles, Detroit, Calgary, Seattle, Minneapolis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Toronto, San Diego, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Phoenix, Tampa Bay, San Francisco, Buffalo, Charlotte, Oakland, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington D.C., Kansas City, Cincinatti
Besides being a huge triviality, this list is also bunk. Robert Cribb writes on behalf of the Star about how this shows which "major North American cities have had their dreams shattered and their collective sporting identities kicked around," but this entire notion is just goofy.
Let's get the obvious stuff out of the way first, shall we? "New York/New Jersey" is not a "major North American city," for one. Also, putting the NFL's 16-game regular season alongside the NBA's 82-game or MLB's ten-thousand-game regular season is highly questionable: I'm sure the Detroit Lions' 16 losses meant way more to the people of that city than the Pistons' thirty-some or however many games the Tigers lost. Also, let's be serious: neither hockey nor the CFL is a major professional sport. I'm willing to give the Star a pass on hockey - it is a Canadian paper, after all - but including the CFL is just narcissistic. Further still, I don't see why this ought to be limited to this decade. Part of the point of being a fan is knowing the history of your team, after all.
Really, though, the study itself is just a piece of fluff - what's worse is the straight face that Cribb puts on it. I guess the guy's just trying to do his job, but how can you take this so seriously? Here, for example, is what the mayor of Indianapolis had to say about the whole thing:
"In Indiana, it's okay to win, but you have to win the right way. You have to do it with a strong work ethic. You have to do it as a team. You just can't do it any other way here."
Oh really?? You mean to say that Indiana's sports fans don't yearn for a team that wins despite playing like lazy, selfish jackasses? They don't value winning the wrong way over winning the right way? Do tell!
And then there's this gem from some random Torontan:
"I see the devotion to sports and the following of sports to be akin in some ways to militarism in history. ...even if your soldiers came back with the snot beat out of them, you'd hope by getting some tougher guys or making some changes, you'd fare better next time."
Yes, that's totally how wars used to work! When a defeated army came home, everyone else just groused about how overpaid their star soldiers were or blamed the management, but then after they got it out of their system they just shrugged and waited for next year's draft. And don't even get me started on signing free agents away from other countries' armies - talk about your tense negotiations!
Sigh. Look, I like sports just fine - and by "sports" I mean "sports," not poker or car-racing or bowling - but can we please stop with this stuff? Too many people are self-proclaimed experts on subjects they know nothing about as it is, there's no need to generate meaningless statistics backed up by pseudo-anthropological gibberish.
And anyway, everyone knows Philly should be below us. Like I said, bunk.
Last week, in the midst of a high-activity/low-sleep stretch, I found an article by Greg Koukl defending God's killing of innocents. My first post on this article centered on the idea that God could have the right to kill innocents and still not be right in doing so, sort of in the same way that my right to flip off strangers if I want wouldn't make me any less of a jerk for doing so. But there's a more essential question underlying Koukl's argument, one that we saw a different answer to a few days later with Albert Haig's informed consent theodicy.
For Haig, even created entities have rights: the evil in our world was, for him, an inevitable (or at least plausibly inevitable) result of God respecting our rights. This kind of move squares well with some intuitions - mainly ones about the universality of moral rules - but is also seen as threatening by believers of a certain stripe, as it puts God in a position of deferring to humans. Koukl, for example, would disagree vehemently with this stance, believing as he does "that there are certain things which are clearly God's prerogative" - including, apparently, murdering innocent people.
One cannot help but hope that Koukl has a really, really good reason for saying something like this, and therefore one cannot help but be disappointed when it turns out he has no such reason. He tries to say that life in general is "a God-given gift," but this manner of speaking is deceptive - the giver of a gift doesn't in general get to take that gift back whenever they please, least of all for no identifiable reason. That said, he may not really mean "gift" as such, because he gives a broader argument that never uses the term.
In this wider formulation, it "is not robbing when He [God] takes away what He has given in the first place." The verb (to give) remains the same but one can give things other than gifts. Thus this weaker phraseology provides Koukl with the agility he needs to dodge the objection I outlined above. But does that mean his argument works? Not really: whereas the "gift" version proved too little because gifts don't really work that way, this version proves way too much because, for Koukl, everything has been given by God.
It's bad enough that Koukl explicitly warns against our "trying to build life or make life happen" - so much for "be fruitful and multiply," I guess - but this argument flatly contradicts Koukl's claim that he's not "simply reducing God's morality to His power." If God can morally do whatever God wants with a God-created object, and if everything other than God is a God-created object, then God can morally do whatever God wants with anything (other, strangely, than God itself). In other words, if Koukl is correct then we as humans have no rights whatsoever: God can treat us in any way at all, so we cannot expect any specific standard of behavior from God; and anything we do to one another or the world at large is at least presumed to be wrong because "we are exercising a prerogative reserved for God alone."
Koukl thinks he's found a clever way around this by identifying "a few circumstances where He delegates that power to us, specifically in my view, capital punishment," but without a larger system of prima facie rights this is just arbitrary. That is, once these delegations happen a system indeed is in place, but then the question reverts to the delegations themselves: why did God delegate (following Koukl's example) capital punishment to us and not any other instance of life-taking? Students of philosophy will recognize this line of thought as originating in the Euthyphro dilemma, and even though Koukl says that he escapes this dilemma altogether he in fact falls firmly into the "morality-as-practiced is entirely arbitrary" column.
The weird thing here is that this is a perfectly (logically) acceptable response. If God shapes morality - which, make no mistake, is Koukl's position, despite his protestations to the contrary - then the killing of innocents by God is just a very counterintuitive good. That he runs away from this position indicates the real trouble that Koukl has gotten himself into. When the position logically dictated by your premises is different than the one you publicize, as in this case, something has gone very wrong.