Rust Belt Philosophy

So the book was good enough that I thought it worthwhile to see if David Mitchell had said anything pithy enough to wind up on the internet. On one of the quote sites that showed up in the resulting search, I saw this:

Can somebody explain why this is tagged under "inspirational"? "Gallows humor" would make some sense or maybe even something darker, but "inspirational"? Color me puzzled.

Okay, it goes like this:

Knock knock
Who's there?
An original idea
(hysterical laughter)*



Fine - so that's a little on the unfair side. Then again, so is subjecting David Mitchell's The Cloud Atlas to the Wachowski siblings:

"[Reportedly,] Tom Tykwer is adapting the David Mitchell novel titled Cloud Atlas for The Wachowski Brothers [sic]. Written in 2004, the novel went on to win the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard and Judy Book of the Year award.

The book is comprised of six seperate [sic] but loosely connected stories that take us from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to the far future after a nuclear apocalypse."

Back in 1999, just after The Matrix came out, this move might have made some kind of sense - that was a very good movie and a skillfully handled one. But then there was The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions and...well, it doesn't get much better from there (although, in fairness, the first ten minutes of Ninja Assassin were not terrible). Tykwer, on the other hand, is a good sign - he wrote Run Lola Run and one of the better vignettes in Paris, Je T'Aime. Still, I have to ask, is it really worth it to turn every decent novel into a movie?

I'm not the first to gripe about this - hell, this isn't even the first time I've done so on my own blog - but c'mon. If every adaptation could be directed by the Coen brothers or John Hillcoat or Christopher Nolan that'd be one thing, but it's absurd to think that the people who made Speed Racer will treat Mitchell's very literary Cloud Atlas with any degree of deftness at all. (Almost as absurd, actually, as thinking that the guy who directed Dodgeball could handle The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.) They may well get the gist of scenes across, but could they really capture the full effect of, just to pick one, this passage?

"The other evening, the Dhondts came to dinner and Mrs. D asked for some piano music to help the food go down, so I played that 'Angel of Mons' [ref] piece I wrote on holiday with you in the Scilly Isles [ref]  two summers ago, though disclaimed its authorship by saying a 'friend' had composed it. I've been rewriting it. It's better and more fluid and subtle than those sherbety Schubertian pastiches V.A. spewed out in his twenties."

To be clear: most of the book is that well written, and it's 500 pages and six genres long. As much as I love what the screen has done for A Clockwork Orange and High Fidelity, I doubt very much that even "sherbety Schubertian pastiches" will translate easily - "and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you. That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write a voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character." But I'm not supposed to be worried, right? These aren't just any idiots, they're the idiots who let their masterpiece devolve into a badly strained Jesus allegory!

Yeah, thanks but no thanks - you still owe me for what Sam Raimi did to Spider-Man, Hollywood. I'll consider us even when Stephenie Meyer decides to novelize Citizen Kane.


*I now feel like I owe you a real knock-knock joke, so:
Knock knock
Who's there?
To
To who?
You mean, "To whom."

It's the snowmageddon! The Snowtorious B.I.G.! Snowgnarok! Snowm al-Qiyamah!

Okay, so maybe it wasn't all that bad.


Sorta looks like these are marshmallow birds, dunnit? Turns out that those actually exist!


I mean, they're not called marshmallow birds, but that doesn't change the fact that they are marshmallow birds. And really, if the snowpocalypse brings to mind marshmallow birds, how bad can it really be?

Still, whenever there's snow in Pittsburgh it can only mean one thing: it's time to put a chair in your parking space.


"The philosophy," says our Post-Gazette, "is simple: If you dig it out, it's yours." Is this legal? Nope. Is it polite? Not particularly. Should it be necessary? Of course not, but with city services being what they are...

"A woman had spent more than an hour clearing away heavy snow from a spot, then left to run an errand, leaving a chair behind.

When she returned, she found the chair pushed aside and a car parked in its place. Seething despite the sub-freezing temperatures, she got her revenge.

When the parker returned to his car, he found it encased -- including its tires -- in a layer of ice from the garden hose."

Normally, a significant impediment to understanding art is trying to play Madame Cleo and divine what the artist was trying to say. One can always just state what that art means to oneself, of course, but that has certain undesirable limitations - for example, I (like most people) used to think that "Every Breath You Take" was a normal love song. It can be nice, then, when artists come right out and tell you what they meant: if you like their explanation then your experience of that artwork is usually enriched; if not you can at least have the satisfaction of believing that you're smarter/cleverer/more creative than even they are. Or, alternatively, you can do what Jill at Feministe does and believe that the whole world is out to get you.

When it comes to this series of French anti-smoking ads...

...Jill says that she agree[s] "with the French feminist who commented that 'what is most shocking [about this ad] is the banalization of sexual violence,' and that 'It’s a poverty of imagination. When people have no ideas they use female bodies.'" Where to start?

Let's get the easy one out of the way first. Thanks to his being conscious and not a thundering moron, Dan Savage is able to observe "the two-boys-to-one-girl ratio" in these images, which seems to have escaped Jill's notice. Maybe, if you want your claim of sexism to be taken seriously, it would help to look at all of the evidence and not just the part with women in it; if this is the way Jill operates in general I'm surprised she hasn't yet come to the conclusion that the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were purely misogynistic because of all the women they killed. Granted, the New York Times article in which she encountered this story does mention the girl first...but it mentions the boys all of two sentences later. There's either a ridiculous lack of patience at play here or an active desire to thwart reality in order to make a political point.

Further, she and her French counterpart are reacting as though the sex-negativity in these ads is somehow a mistake or an accident due either to artistic incompetence or, I guess, a certain amount of sublimated sexism:

"The vice-president of the advertising firm that created the ad says it intends to portray smoking as 'an act of naïveté and submission.' Which is apparently what oral sex is? Complicating the issue is that the teenager with the cigarette in his/her mouth looks scared; the person with the cigarette in their pants has a hand on the teenager’s head, and the whole situation looks more like abuse than sex (or naivete or submission, for that matter)."

It is abuse, you dolt. That, in case you are somehow unclear about the purpose of anti-smoking ads, is the point. To cast it as a contest between naivete, submission, abuse, sex, fear, and control is absurd: by their nature, the ads are supposed to include all of those things: when you naively submit to someone else's control and have sex even though you're afraid to do so, that's abuse. Moreover, there's really no reason whatsoever to think that this company regards, or that these images portray, all oral sex as abusive or evil or disgusting: there's a reason that all three abusers are older men and that all three abusees are frightened young adults.* If anything, this company wants very much to avoid making sex abuse look only marginally wrong or conflating bad sex with good sex: if the sex abuse suggested above came across as insignificant, then the smoking (the thing being compared to sex abuse) would also come across as insignificant, which in turn would sort of undermine the whole anti-smoking vibe that these anti-smoking ads are supposed to generate.

If there is sexism here, I just don't see it; the same goes for general sex negativity. There's a paucity of political correctness, perhaps, and maybe just a touch too much subtlety, but these ads are hardly the sinister embodiments of anti-woman sentiment that Jill makes them out to be.

*Hint: it's because that's an easy way to portray sexual abuse without writing "THIS IS SEXUAL ABUSE" in big letters across the top; also because cigarettes look a whole hell of a lot more like penises than like vulvae.

You'll have to figure this one out on your own - it's worth it, trust me.

Here is a friendly tip about governance: if your guiding principle is to "challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual," you are not fit to govern. Our Libertarian party is evidently so terrified of the government that they count it as the only actually-existing threat to us normal people:

"We support a clean and healthy environment and sensible use of our natural resources. ...Free markets and property rights stimulate the technological innovations and behavioral changes required to protect our environment and ecosystems. We realize that our planet's climate is constantly changing, but environmental advocates and social pressure are the most effective means of changing public behavior."

Ha ha! So adorably naive.

"We support full freedom of expression and oppose government censorship, regulation or control of communications media and technology."

Hmm - without government regulation, how do you "support full freedom of expression" in the face of "corporate tampering"? Ask politely?

"We favor free-market banking, with unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types."

Good luck with that.

Stranger still than all of those cases of obstinate non-learning is their contention that "the only [economic system] compatible with the protection of individual rights, is the free market." As I understand it, political libertarianism is predicated on the vague notion that we should all get to do what we want except in cases that violate others' rights; specific libertarians, of course, frequently sharpen this notion into something more usable. But why, to ask a very strange question, should each and every one of our non-rights-violating desires be taken seriously?

To start with, this isn't how we treat children. (Yeah yeah, adults aren't children. Just slow down - I'll get there.) Even libertarians aren't credulous enough to let their kids do whatever they choose, so we know for certain that some humans don't qualify for all of this self-determination stuff. Presumably many libertarians also feel the same way about people with certain mental conditions, which means that this isn't just a question of age. That's a good thing, by the way: age is an arbitrary measurement based loosely on our planet's rotation around the sun and has no inherent connection to a person's ability to function at any given level of society. It does, however, raise the issue of why libertarians exclude children and some adults from their system. One good guess, phrased in an intentionally imprecise way, is that children and some adults with mental disorders lack the ability to make the right decisions, for some sense or other of "the right decisions." If this is an accurate depiction of the libertarian position, the next obvious place to go is to check whether mentally well-ordered adults have this ability.

This clip represents one reason to think that we do not, at least not to the extent that we might tell ourselves:



If Charles Mudede's extrapolation of this is correct and future "retailer[s] will know [whether you're buying something] before you even know," could libertarians also manage to avoid casting that as a potential source of very worrying problems? Probably, given their successful track record of obliviousness so far, but it would still be interesting to see how they pull it off.

Today on Rust Belt Philosophy, we follow Jeffrey Shallit in his examination of an argument that lies at the intersection of two of our previous topics: justificatory liberalism and overly precise language. Justificatory liberalism, which Stanley Fish calls "Classical Liberalism," is typically interpreted to advocate for the position "that policy decisions should be made on the basis of secular reasons, reasons that, because they do not reflect the commitments or agendas of any religion, morality or ideology, can be accepted as reasons by all citizens no matter what their individual beliefs and affiliations." Whereas our previous run-in with this topic examined the idea that religious arguments can be included, Fish (referencing the claims of one Steven Smith) wants to argue "that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another." This may sound like the usual anti-atheism line about how you need God for morality, but in fact it goes in a very different (though still unsuccessful) direction.

I should say before I start that, while justificatory liberalism sounds neat, I'm not sure that I'm in favor of it. When one's main guiding principle is that all citizens understand one's reasons, the chances of getting anything done are practically nil; people, as a general rule, are stupid. We can't even easily transition into the similar view that one's reasons must actually apply to everybody, because even though most of us would agree that e.g. Scientologist reasoning is irrelevant there are some of us (Scientologists, mainly) who would disagree. Unless we import some other metric to help resolve these conflicts, I don't see how justificatory liberalism can get off the ground.

Anyway, back to Fish and Smith. Fish admits that "secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count," but he also feels that "it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it." This attack, however, is not directed against the normal understanding of secularism: he elaborates by saying that what's missing is any kind of "presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle)" (emphasis mine). Whereas most of us would probably define "secular" as "non-sectarian, especially with respect to religions," Fish and Smith are apparently using it to mean something much stronger. The question, then, is whether or not pure data requires "a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle" in order to become actionable.

Despite the fact that Shallit seems to have missed this subtlety (and therefore understates Fish's stance somewhat), his response is a good one. Where Fish makes several convoluted arguments for the grandiose claim "that there are no secular reasons, at least not reasons of the kind that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another," Shallit's disproof is simple: he lists one. "Self-interest," he says, is easily sufficient for guiding behaviors. "I don't want to be tortured, so it is in my best interest to support a universal ban on torture." In fact, the banality of his phrasing undersells the strength of this argument: the only thing that allows us to guide our own self-interest is precisely the "statistical analyses, controlled experiments, and rational decision-trees" that Fish mocks. There is, however, one thing that I've still not considered, to wit, what if this isn't the sort of "reasoning" that's under discussion?

In his article, Fish lists at least seven different kinds of reasoning, the first of which we've seen already:

1. A reason is anything "that could justify a decision to take one course of action rather than another."
2. A reason is anything that can "answer normative questions, questions like 'what are we supposed to do?' and 'at the behest of who or what are we to do it?'" Or, phrased differently, a reason is anything that is "capable of determining precisely what is commanded or prohibited in particular situations of choice."
3. A complete list of reasons must be "sufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments."
4. A reason must contain "content enough to guide deliberation."
5. A reason "will always come from the suspect realm of contested substantive values."
6. A reason must be "filled in by some partisan or ideological or theological perspective."
7. A reason must "flow from a prior [i.e., not empirically obtained] metaphysical commitment."

It should now be very easy to see why he's having so much trouble finding secular reasons: no such things exist, because no such thing as a reason exists.* As in the above-linked post about color and mental activity, Fish is simply stitching together as many incompatible concepts as he can, trusting the whole time that his philosophical Frankenstein's monster will eventually meet up with a lightning bolt magical enough to bring it to life. He hasn't found such a source of energy in pure reason, he says, and so pure reason must be deficient! That line of reasoning would be perfectly acceptable if not for the unwarranted - and, as we'll see momentarily, badly flawed - assumption that his mad science is even capable of paying off.**

A reason of type one (hereafter "reason-1") could very well be Shallit's self-interest: we all know pretty reliably what we do and do not want in the short term, so it's usually pretty easy to "justify a decision" without first checking up on all of our various metaphysical commitments. Reasons-1, however, are not compatible with reasons-6, because not all self-interested reasons ultimately trace back to an ideology. Nor do reasons-1 fit with reasons-5 or -7; nor reasons-7 with reasons-4 or -2; nor reasons-3 with any other kind on the list; and so on. In the same way that the single colloquial word "blue" references many dissonant concepts simultaneously and thus is a poor subject for a rigorous philosophical investigation, the single colloquial word "reason" tries to do too much for its own good and thus must be broken down into its component parts before any real work can be done with it. Certainly some of these reason types don't fit with a strictly empirical investigative style - reasons-7, for example, exclude secular thought by definition - but some of them don't. Moreover, it's not clear which, if any, are supposed to be relevant to justificatory liberalism. (Remember justificatory liberalism? All of this is supposed to relate back to that.)

To conclude, note also Shallit's objection that "Christians [for example] can't even agree on the most basic fact about Christianity, whether good works or faith alone gets you into their heaven. So advancing religion as the answer to ethical quandaries is not in the least helpful" in terms of "determining precisely" the "full set" of factors with "content enough to guide deliberation." Again, this may or may not matter in the end - justificatory liberalism is not exactly the alpha and omega when it comes to human decision-making - but that doesn't let Fish (or, presumably, Smith) off the hook for the many-car pileup that is his argument.

*Please keep in mind that I'm continuing to use his terminology for the sake of consistency - on my preferred terminology, both reasons and secular reasons do exist.
**Incidentally, I'll adderss a similar concept in my next LOST philosophy recap, so don't let this go in one eye and out the other.

Just in case you don't believe me yet about how great it would be if we could sleep more - or, to phrase that maybe less stupidly, if our lives were better structured in order to encourage sleep - even a ninety-minute nap can, "at a neurocognitive level, [move] you beyond where you were before you took a nap." Don't necessarily take that as a generalized remark, though, because the improvement in question was really only studied in the limited context of learning:

"At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn."

So, technically speaking, at best this study shows that more sleep would help us learn better, not think better overall. As a result, we can't say that naps will make too big a difference for people who don't practice learning of any meaningful depth or with any meaningful frequency. Which is to say, we can't say that naps will make too big a difference for almost anyone. But wouldn't that be a great way to incentivize learning? "Sign up for a course related to your job and we'll grant you an hour-long nap break!"

Of course, no cognition-related story is complete these days without comparing the brain to a computer, so in order to fulfill my obligations I will now pass on that comparison. "It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full," says the lead investigator, "and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you're not going to receive any more mail. It's just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder." I give him two-and-a-half stars out of five on his analogy: technically speaking it does the job of getting the basic impression across, but (a) nobody's email inbox gets full anymore and (b) moving stuff to another folder won't actually help the problem he's describing. Still, if anybody out there was entranced by Marvin Minsky, you now have incrementally more information about how we might one day emulate human minds with computers.

To Ann McIlhenny: please read yesterday's post.

"James Cameron is a self confessed unrepentant greenie, and in the world he creates mining is evil and life in the rain forest is just spiffing. So lets throw a few facts in the way of Cameron’s gorgeous but idiotic narrative.

Mining makes everything about James Cameron’s life and our lives in the developed world, beautiful, possible, bearable, majestic, gorgeous and full of promise. The people of the rain forest on the other hand who live the simple, organic, back to nature life so adored by the Hollywood elite such as James Cameron, also have short lives of misery, disease and squalor. They would do anything to have a piece of the James Cameron life and escape their subsistence hunter-gathering nightmare.

...So I have a suggestion James Cameron, go and live there, burn whatever passports you possess and do it, live it, be that guy who walks the walk with no escape route back to the unnatural but fabulous life of development. Go to the rain forest, try it and see just how awful it is to live without electricity, computers, roads and medicines that come with modernity."

Ahem: "By harping on how things used to be, 'marked by a search for food and a fear of disease' and so on, [you've managed] to take the astoundingly obtuse position that we must either give ourselves carte blanche with respect to the environment or else return to the Bad Old Days when bathing was considered evil. This dilemma is so obviously flawed I won't even bother to discuss it further."

Also of note is her contention that "[m]ining companies bring jobs, roads, infrastructure, health clinics and opportunities to some of the poorest people on the planet." Evidence-free as always, of course, but it gets better: "in the 14 [U.S.] counties where the biggest coal mining operations are located residents reported higher rates of cardiopulmonary disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, diabetes, and lung and kidney disease." And that would be residents, not just mining workers - and yes, the study did "adjust for variables of age, income, education, county poverty rate, smoking rate and obesity rate." So mining isn't exactly as flawless as she makes it out to be.

Seriously, though, can we leave this alone? James Cameron doesn't exactly hold a PhD in biosphere sciences or cultural anthropology or economics or, apparently, filmmaking. If anybody out there would feel desolate and unfulfilled without making stupid arguments about environmentalism, could you please not involve this movie anymore? Pretty please, with sugar on top?

Confirming what marketing executives and propagandists have known basically forever, a recent "study finds that people 'more readily count someone as an expert when that person endorses a conclusion that fits their cultural predispositions.'" In other words, rather than waiting to analyze somebody's credentials and reasoning before determining their level of expertise, people tend to only take a person's conclusion into account: if it matches what they already believe, that person is an expert; if not, not. So, for example, when a putative "expert declared global warming to be risky, 89 percent of Egalitarians [hippies] found him trustworthy and knowledgeable while only 23 percent of Individualists [yuppies] did. On the other hand, when the putative expert suggested that the dangers posed by global warming were highly uncertain, 86 percent of Individualists found him credible, while 51 percent of Egalitarians did." Again, no big surprise there - people in general are not nearly as rational as they are political. The oddity here is what these researchers propose as a solution to this uncomfortable situation.

"To increase the chances of securing open-minded consideration of scientific findings, the Yale researchers argue that risk communicators [scientists, sociologists, etc.] 'must strive to present it in a way that avoids making it needlessly threatening to the identities of one or another group of culturally diverse citizens.'" I don't want to be too terribly ironic in my response, but this strikes me as being utopian in more or less the same way and to the same extent as free market ideologies and what Tariq Ramadan calls "an ethics of citizenship": it assumes that absolutely everybody believes in, and is willing and able to abide by, a level playing field.

The case is more easily made with respect to markets, so I'll start there. Roughly speaking, the idea behind deregulating markets is that everybody's self-interest will cancel out everybody else's. Why that might happen has always been somewhat of a question, but that's the general idea. However, this assumes at the bare minimum that nobody is out to get anybody else, because it's always harder on average (both psychologically and materially) to help a person than it is to hurt them.* Since people often are out to get one another - as individuals, as groups, consciously, subconsciously, openly, covertly, whatever - so-called free markets quickly devolve into markets dominated to an unhealthy extent by whichever group had the biggest initial advantage (like, say, white males). Even free market proponents don't deny the fact of this domination; they just flip it around and say that white men deserve to be overrepresented and therefore that the concept of a level playing field is anathema.

While the "ethics of citizenship" case may be more complex, the gist is the same: pace Ophelia Benson, "many 'religious and cultural backgrounds' are strongly and coercively anti-egalitarian." Trying to include each and every such background in one's concept of citizenship, then, is pretty much guaranteed not to produce anything like equality or fairness or justice - you know, the sorts of things one might want to have in an ethic of citizenship. In short, while it's true that fair play implies fair (or, if you prefer, just) results even in the absence of strict controls, it's only true in the trivial sense: it's never going to be the case that everybody plays fair, so that implication is not helpful in terms of figuring out how to obtain fair or just results. And now we return to the issue of how "risk communicators" ought to behave.

Our plucky researchers from before recommended that people treat the public as though we were all adults. If an evolutionary biologist, say, can "present [information] in a way that avoids making it needlessly threatening to the [religious] identities of one or another group," then that should significantly reduce (if not altogether eliminate) the effects of this gosh-darn culture war that's been going on. To make one of the relevant analogies, this is very much like asking the economically responsible to live without legislation that's "needlessly threatening" to the economically profligate and antagonistic: "don't upset the nice insurance companies by trying to enact any kind of universal health care, they'll come around eventually!" Or, equivalently, it's like asking an oppressed class not to support "needlessly threatening" laws that would deprive a privileged class of its ability to oppress others: "if you silly homos can learn to leave the Church alone, they'll leave you alone!" Right - and then I'll be able to walk on air if I just stop thinking about gravity like I'm a cartoon character. Scientists and other experts can spend all the time they want massaging their communication into a form that's not obviously at odds with certain "cultural identities," but (shock!) scientists and other experts aren't the only ones who disseminate information. Politicians, religious leaders, corporations, and even other experts all have a vested interest in maintaining "contests between warring cultural factions"; neutering the initial announcement just makes it easier for them to do so. At the very least, these researchers should admit that this suggestion goes well beyond their experimental conditions - they didn't test what happens with conflicting accounts of the same information, so they've got literally no data to support their proposition.

Really, it seems like the current state of the Obama presidency - the "no red America and no blue America, just the United States of America" presidency, the one founded on shiny, happy bipartisanship - should be enough to make these people question their conclusion. Unless, of course, acknowledging reality would be too "needlessly threatening" to their cultural backgrounds.

*Or else we wouldn't have to teach ethics to children. Even as adults, there are billions of people around and most of us (myself included) can barely find the sympathy to help those in our immediate vicinity or those who happen to be the subject of the most recent media frenzy. As for materials, that's just a consequence of entropy: it requires more physical resources to make something than it does to destroy it or make it useless.

Because there are reasons for me not to, aren't there? They haven't shown any spine on the U.S.'s long-running practice of torturing prisoners, they continue to honor the fiction that gay marriage is in any way problematic, they've managed to form the first-ever fifty-nine-vote minority in the Senate - the list goes on. In fact, if pressed I don't think I could name five positive, non-trivial achievements that the Democrats as a whole or any specific Democrat has achieved in the past, let's say, decade. So why should I bother at all?

Well, let's see if you can't figure it out with the help of some clues. At CPAC, the recently-concluded far-right-wing conference, no fewer than nineteen elected Republicans lent their credibility to an event that hoped to save freedom from "tyranny," "fascism," "enemies of sovereignty," "the hoax of global warming," "Obama's immigration plan," "[an] oppressive justice department," "vote fraud," "big labor's drive to remake America," "ObamaCare," and "the California model." That's a bad enough sign just as it is: if that many things are legitimate threats to freedom, we might as well throw in the towel now. When you look into the actual content of these presentations, things get much worse. Take Glenn Beck's claim that "there's no difference [between revolution and evolution] except one requires a gun and the other does it slowly, piece by piece": yeah, no, those two are exactly the same except one of them is horrible and bloody and the other isn't. Other than that teensy weensy difference, voting is exactly like overthrowing the government in a coup!

But that's tame compared to the things that Republicans do in their actual jobs. In Oklahoma, it's illegal to have "IM GAY" as one's license plate. And if you think that's bad, in Mississippi it's apparently okay to force criminals "to work as a chicken hanger at Tyson Foods." What's a chicken hanger, you ask? "A chicken hanger catches live chickens and hangs them by their feet to a moving wire." Think about that again: in Mississippi, one of the United States of America, a Republican-run state government tasked a criminal with working for a private company in an environment "covered in chicken feces," a likely result of which is that he actually contracted tuberculosis. At least this explains why they don't mind the idea of torturing foreign criminals, I guess.

And I'm not done yet! Utah, famous for headquartering the Mormon sect of Christianity, is very close to enacting a piece of legislation that "creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by 'reckless' behavior. Using the legal standard of 'reckless behavior' all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn't intend to lose the pregnancy." It's hard to know what to say about this because it's the sort of thing one never expects to see. What benefit would this law produce? Is there really a scourge of villainous miscarriage-inducing Utahan women? Even if this is somehow actually a response to a really-existing problem, are they sure that this is the best way of dealing with it?

So while Democrats are in general not all that pro-prisoner's rights or pro-LGBT equality or pro-women or really pro- any of the things they say they are, at least they won't make you work off your prison sentence in a chicken slaughterhouse after they convict you for "murdering" your accidentally miscarried fetus that is itself the result of you having your natural sexuality suppressed at every turn.

Before this NBA season started, I marked last Thursday's game as meaningful because it would feature a once-great home team (Cleveland) and a once-mentally fragile team (Denver). In theory, that meant that we would get to see whether the Cavs could still play up to the level they reached last year and also whether Denver learned how to overcome adversity. But then Danny Ferry traded for Antawn Jamison.

The result was a completely uninformative 118-116 overtime victory for Denver. Does this mean that the Nuggets are the real thing this year? I dunno, Cleveland played without their new acquisition (and missed several layups). Does that mean that the Cavs are out of the running? Should they feel good about nearly beating Denver even without Jamison? Again, it's just not realistic to say that based on this particular game. The one and only point I feel comfortable making is that Cleveland cannot win unless they shoot better than 58% from the free throw line: you can get away with that one game at a time, but that's too big a weakness not to exploit in a seven-game series.

Y'know, when I finally saw Avatar in theaters, I didn't think anybody could possibly be dumb enough not to get it. Not even if a woman gave birth in the middle of the movie would her newborn child not immediately understand the stupefying simplicity of Avatar's plot, "character" development, and Aesopian moral. But Einstein had it right when he said that he only knew of two infinite things: somebody has indeed found a way to misapprehend Avatar.

After locating an interview in which James Cameron characterized his movie as maybe the first time that "nature ever [got] to fight back in a movie,"* Leon de Winter thought that this message was so effective and cutting that it deserved a reply. In that reply, de Winter huffs that we see nature fight back "every time we see a person in a film who dies of a disease like cancer or tuberculosis, or as a result of floods, earthquakes, or hurricanes, we see how nature fights back. In reality, as in Haiti, we see what happens when nature takes control and destroys houses and roads and bridges — does it make him happy to see how nature destroyed a whole country?" No, that's not a typo: for de Winter, the meaning behind Avatar is that we should celebrate what happened in Haiti. Impressive, isn't it, that somebody could make so obviously moronic an argument?

Disease, for a start, doesn't fight back against anything. Even if we agree with de Winter that e.g. cancer fights, which is questionable, it does so on its own without any reference to any putative wrongdoings by its human hosts. The same goes for floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, and so on: as a rule, nature doesn't fight back against anything at all because nature just happens. That, in fact, is what makes it nature and not Gaia or the All-Mother or whatever. Moreover, this doltish confusion on de Winter's part hides the fact that Cameron's Na'vi have something to fight about. We can agree with de Winter's idiotic point about how it's unfair that humans get sick and die and still understand Cameron's point about not wrecking the planet just to make a profit.

As if that weren't a bad enough argument, de Winter continues his ludicrous attack by saying that "we human beings seem to have a physical system fit for thirty to forty years of existence. According to nature, that’s enough." It's not really clear how that second sentence follows from the first or even what it means - "enough" for what?? - but the problem really lies in the first part. By harping on how things used to be, "marked by a search for food and a fear of disease" and so on, de Winter manages to take the astoundingly obtuse position that we must either give ourselves carte blanche with respect to the environment or else return to the Bad Old Days when bathing was considered evil. This dilemma is so obviously flawed I won't even bother to discuss it further.

Despite the significant degree to which this feels like abandoning my aesthetic principles, I have to admit that James Cameron is the lesser of two evils in this case. His work is almost completely derivative, it was badly conceived and poorly executed from start to finish, its famed visual components are at best no more (and, I would argue, a great deal less) compelling than your average episode of "Planet Earth" - in short, it adds nothing of any value to the world of cinema, and certainly nothing worth the billions of dollars that the moviegoing public has thrown at it. Yet all of this - the never-ending mediocrity, the flagrant waste of money, the tone-deaf self-congratulation - pales in comparison to the mental acrobatics that de Winter employs in his gratuitous quest to slander Cameron's work. Fighting fire with fire is all well and good, but I dearly hope that this is the last time I witness someone fighting fatuousness with fatuousness.

*Besides, of course, Fern Gully, Princess Mononoke, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and more or less any film wherein an indigenous population is portrayed allegorically, among others.

I don't quite know what this business about Adam(1) and Adam(2) is - I have a guess - but it doesn't really matter:

"1.0 It is wrong to punish Smith for going wrong in his life.

Let Jones be a person (not identical to Smith) that also lives a short life, again, 10 yrs. Suppose Jones’ life is quite bad. I take (1.1) to be obviously true.

1.1 For all x and y [where x≠y], is unjust to punish y for x’s transgression.

1.2. It is unjust to punish Smith for the transgressions of Jones. (from 1.0, 1.1)

Let Adam(1) and Adam(2) be two distinct 10yr parts of Adam. We know that Smith ≠ Jones and we know that Adam(1) ≠ Adam(2). Suppose Adam(1) goes badly wrong in his ten yrs. It follows by the same reasoning as above that it is wrong to punish Adam(2) for the transgressions of Adam(1). But it is impossible to punish Adam without punishing Adam(2). So we can never justly punish Adam for the transgressions of Adam(1).

1.3 God is perfectly just and would never punish anyone inappropriately.

1.4 Punishing Adam entails punishing Adam(2) unjustly.

1.5 God would not punish Adam.

It is easy to see, by generalizing the argument, that God can never justly punish anyone. But then, good news!

1.6 Universalism [the doctrine that everybody goes to heaven] must be true!"

All I care about is premises 1.1, 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5, so all that stuff about parts of Adam can mean whatever he wants it to. He's a bit loose with his terminology between 1.3 and 1.4, but it sure looks like he's saying that an unjust punishment is an inappropriate punishment. And, from 1.1, we can safely say that it is unjust to punish Jesus for my transgressions (or your transgressions, or Carrot Top's transgressions, or anybody else's transgressions). Yet Christianity is founded on the idea that (all together now) Jesus died for your sins, from which I gather the following:

1. For all x and y where x≠y, is unjust to punish y for x’s transgression. (Premise)
2. God is perfectly just and would never punish anyone inappropriately (which includes unjust punishments). (Premise)
3. Punishing Jesus for my sins entails punishing Jesus unjustly. (From 1 and the fact that I am not Jesus)
4. God would not punish Jesus for my sins. (From 1 and 3)
5. If Christianity is true, God would (indeed, did) punish Jesus for my sins. (By definition)
6. Therefore, Christianity is false. (From 4 and 5)

Neat! Thanks for the info, Mike!

"We have," hypothesizes Jay Rosen, "come upon something interfering with political journalism’s 'sense of reality'...The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus 'prove' in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things!" Hopefully most of my readers won't find this idea too confusing or novel. Just in case, though, let me see if I can't help illustrate Rosen's point with some help from Bryan Lambert:

"[Recently] the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park considered a divestment resolution, in an attempt to keep the city from investing in corporations that are complicit in the genocide of Darfur. That's not dumb. What's dumb is the glorious fake controversy summed up beautifully in the Star-Tribune's blurb about the resolution. ACTUAL BLURB TIME!

'St. Louis Park is considering joining seven other Minnesota cities in taking a stand against genocide. But should they?'

Should they take a stand against genocide? Here, let me answer that question for you in the simplest way possible. YES. It's GENOCIDE. Everyone should take a stand against genocide. Nobody should be pro-genocide. Nobody should even be somewhat neutral on the topic of genocide, on account of the fact that it's GENOCIDE! And if the city wants to make sure it's not using its money to inadvertently support genocide, more power to them.

But modern American journalism requires two sides to every issue, even if that issue is geno-mother-fucking-cide, so they dug up some asshole city council member from some asshole town (Edina, in the least surprising reveal of the millennium) who suggested that it's not the place of suburban Midwestern towns to concern themselves with Africa:

'I guess I have an old-fashioned view. We ought to make sure police are taken care of, that we have good parks and that roads get clear. I think foreign policy and things like that are for the president and secretary of state.' - Scot Housh, who is currently petitioning Hillary Clinton to secure the release of his first name's second T."

This story, even besides the insane implication that genocide might be okay if it helps "roads get clear,"* is rife with shoddy reasoning. By seeking the opinion of a city council member, the paper makes it seem as though he's an expert in something - but clearly that's not true. The city council member himself seems to think that basic morality waxes and wanes based on the title people hold - but that's not true, either. There's even a hint buried in there that supporting genocide is the only way to "make sure police are taken care of" and so on, which of course is nonsense. Worst of all, the newspaper itself is actually complicit in these absurdities, from deciding to write this story in the first place to giving this nutcase a voice to neglecting to print any of the blindingly obvious refutations of his position.

The one quibble I have with Rosen is that I don't think he takes his position far enough. Political journalism surely does suffer from a lost sense of reality, but it's not the only brand of journalism to do so. Granted, the madness of political journalism might not be the exact same madness of sports journalism or arts journalism or science journalism or what have you, but I would be hard-pressed to name one sphere of journalism that does its job well. Describing things, to steal Rosen's phrase, just should not be as difficult as journalists make it seem.

*And believe you me, if anything would convince me to make that trade this winter would've done it.

Besides its veritable addiction to cliffhangers, the calling card of LOST is its ability to interweave real philosophy with its character development and plot progression.  After five seasons of this the show's mysteries had more or less completely overshadowed its other aspects, but its sixth season has (in my mind, anyway) renewed LOST's focus on its unique blend of philosophy and storytelling. Last week's episode featured an especially well-executed case of this.



Fans best know the character of John Locke for his repeated insistence that people not tell him what he can't do. At first it seemed like this was related to his paralysis and that Locke simply wanted to retain his sense of self-sufficiency, but subsequent flashbacks revealed that he'd had the same attitude at least as far back as his high school years (decades before the fall that paralyzed him). This obsession even contributed to his belief that he had a unique and powerful job to perform with respect to the island: it had cured him, he thought, and so he must use his recovered health to fulfill the destiny that he was meant for. Since we were so caught up in discovering the overall mythology of the show, few if any of us fans asked the now-obvious question: is this what Locke really wanted for himself?

Phrased in that way the query might seem dangerously illogical. Whatever a person wants, it seems, is what that person really wants - there is no distinction to be made. Such an analysis misses the point of the question, however. We know that Locke wants to overcome his handicap, true, but we had no reliable explanation of why he wanted this - whether for himself, for others, to spite his father, to get into the Guinness book of records, or whatever. By contrasting the original character with his counterpart in World X - and by invoking yet another concept from the world of philosophy - the show's writers made it clear that World α's Locke has lived his life mired in what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith.

Over at his Journeyman Philosopher blog, Paul Mealing addresses this existentialist concept in another artistic context, that of the recently released movie Up In The Air.  A major theme of that movie, Mealing rightly says, is "authenticity," the quality of "being honest to one’s self." Although this sounds like a trivial goal to obtain if not one that's impossible not to achieve, "many of us fail to follow the dream and instead follow the path of least resistance, which is to do what is expected of us by our family, our church, our society or our spouse." Take this stanza of Bob Dylan's "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)":

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

In World α, Locke displays nothing short of animosity towards his destiny, to say nothing of the various authorities to which he finds himself subject. Thanks to a fortuitous encounter in World X, however, he manages to slough off that attitude and orient himself towards the positives in his life, suggesting one reason to think that World X is indeed the superior world (i.e., our heroes are more true to themselves than they are in World α). Here, however, is where a significant irony enters: World X lacks the show's main (if not only) advocate for authenticity.

Jacob, World α's God figure (at this point, perhaps its Christ figure), has been shown to be a believer in the human capacity for both goodness and authenticity: in last season's finale, Jacob defends human nature and tells Hurley and Ben that they "don't have to do anything [they] don't want to." Perhaps, then, this tension between cosmic battle morality (seemingly at work in World α) and existentialist morality (seemingly at work in World X) is the fundamental ideological conflict of the show. If so - and if the latter is indeed the more preferable - we should expect World α to be very nearly irredeemable.

As a final note, this suggests (what is to me) a radical response to the soul-building response to the problem of evil: that any religion with a Grand Story to tell necessarily undermines authenticity and therefore is directly at odds with soul-building. This might not seem obvious, and indeed most theologians will go through lengths to deny this, but consider World α as a paradigm case of a world that's headed towards what Alvin Plantinga calls a "towering good." Since any given person's existential freedom is at best a minor good - it is, after all, only worth as much as any other person's existential freedom, and there are billions of people - a morally good god who can see the way to a towering good (like, say, victory in a cosmic battle with evil) will always choose to snuff out a person's authenticity rather than allow that towering good to slip away. And, in fact, so should the people themselves: it would be absurdly selfish to put one's own interests above a towering good. Yet this act of forgoing our own interests in favor of "what is expected of us by our family, our church, our society" or what is demanded of us by odious authorities is nothing other than the self-dismantling of our characters. Whether LOST follows through on this line of thought, of course, remains to be seen.

Yes, friends, today we reach the grand finale of my recent trip to Israel. The trip itself was long and strange and, appropriately, this series has been long and strange as well - I hope you've enjoyed the latter as much as I enjoyed the former.

Tel Aviv's population is not at all shy about using its beaches, as I discovered upon waking. Windsurfing, horseback riding...


...yoga (triangle pose, I think). Not that I can blame them: I'm a big water person myself.


Our schedule took us away from the beach way too fast for my liking - but, then again, I would probably have said that no matter how long we'd stayed there.

Remember that night shot of the buildings from yesterday's post? I dunno why, but I decided it'd be a good idea to take that same shot during the day.


And so I did.

Tel Aviv is connected to, or maybe contains, the ancient port city of Jaffa ("Yaffo" in Hebrew), which was our first scheduled stop of the day. "While Tel Aviv is a modern, Jewish city dating back one century" - if you just did the math in your head and are confused, I'll get to this in due time - "Jaffa's sleepy harbor mostly serves small, private boats, and its renovated old city is home to art galleries, sidewalk cafes, and souvenir shops." We didn't actually see any of those things, but we did see the wishing bridge.


My wish? That people stop taking zodiac stuff seriously.


As of yet it has not panned out.

Any art students in the house might want to try their hand at interpreting this statue we saw...


...because I have an answer key for it:


Personally, I don't see it. Anybody think they can explain it to me? If not, no worries - just enjoy the view of Tel Aviv from Jaffa.


Jaffa felt a lot like Jerusalem's old city: lots of narrow walkways, lots of high walls.


I don't think that lighthouse is still active, but it should not matter. Any lighthouse-shaped building with that classic red and white paint job is a welcome sight.


All of these shots were taken walking from that bridge to the Israeli Defense Forces History Museum, which as it turned out was not so much of a museum as it was a bunch of warehouses filled with stuff. Again, so as to not inadvertently glamorize the idea of blowing up other people, I refrained from taking pictures in the museum - except for one, which I just could not resist.


Why this car, you ask?


Because it's a Cadillac Fleetwood, mac! (You're welcome.)

Hearkening back to Laura's comment about countries being victims of their founding mythologies, there was one particularly interesting fact we learned at the museum. Take a look at what Israel's Medal of Valor looks like:

A six-sided star and the color yellow: remind you of anything? Yes, that's right - according to the museum's tour guide, this medal was intentionally designed so as to suggest the Holocaust. More interestingly still, Israel hasn't awarded its Medal of Valor in over thirty years. It seems to me that this gap or lull has to be meaningful in some way, but I can't quite figure out how. Have the Israelis so magnified the Holocaust that they can no longer assent to anything that signifies overcoming it? Or what? It just seems awkward to me that they should have gone out of their way to create this symbol and then suddenly stop using it.

Anyway, from the museum we went to lunch - the absolute worst chicken tikka I've ever had - and then, surprisingly, to a classroom.

Alma, we were told, is an institution that engages in Bible and other Jewish studies from a secular point of view. I didn't expect to get any real chance to practice philosophy on this trip, but that description piqued my interest. And, in fairness to Alma, the experience certainly was educational, albeit not in the way they probably intended for it to be.


Our...instructor? Mediator? Guide? Whatever role she played, her education was in art and the philosophy of religion - and it showed. She split us up into pairs and gave us a sheet of excerpts and basically just told us to work out what we thought about them. To give you an example of the mental place in which she resides, one of the excerpts was this one:

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard
In the place
Where the ruined
House once stood

SPARE ME.

Look: I'm not the best guy to talk to about poetry. I've got nothing against poetry in the way that some people do, and in the right mood I can be very appreciative of it. But this sort of thing drives me absolutely crazy - it does nothing interesting with language, its message is drivel, and its imagery is too cheap and trite even for a Hallmark card. Only the last stanza even approaches the beauty that poetry can achieve, and it doesn't fit with the rest of the poem! Gah!

During our two-person conversation and subsequent group conversation I took nearly a full page of notes. Some people brought up contrast theodicies (you all know how much I love those), one of the ladies in our group said that John Lennon's "Imagine" lyric about having "nothing to kill or die for" meant that there was "no passion," another person said that the elimination of nations would make everything exactly the same (as though Massachusetts is the same as Florida or Montana or California) - and how did our host respond? That nobody has any answers, just assumptions and opinions. It took a significant amount of self-control not to put my head straight through the nearest window.

My plan at first was to take these notes and work them into this post somehow, but on further reflection I determined that that would put the length of this post somewhere around dissertation levels and decided not to. If you're having trouble sleeping at night because of the suspense of not knowing do drop me a note, but otherwise I'll just take a deep breath and move on.

The rest of our trip was basically last-minute shopping opportunities for people still looking for tchotchkes to bring home. First up: an outdoor market in Tel Aviv's main shopping district.


Just the place to go for, say, a fake Rolex.


Sadly I already have my lifetime quota of fake Rolexes (i.e., zero of them), so I chose to visit some more reputable stores instead.


Or, at least, I tried to. Can you believe that anybody actually wears that stuff? Because I'm not sure I can. Remember that everything over there was in Hebrew, so for all I know this store was some kind of avant-garde art installation or a practical joke. I mean, look at these shoes!


They have three tongues! What kind of deranged mutant serial killer needs shoes with three tongues? And don't you tell me that people who buy these shoes aren't necessarily serial killers: only a deranged mutant would wear this shoe and if I've learned anything from the movies it's that all deranged mutants are serial killers.

Once I had sufficiently recovered from the optical assault of those outfits, I met back up with the rest of the group and we took off for Independence Hall. Much like how our Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia and not D.C., Israel's was signed in Tel Aviv and not Jerusalem. This wasn't a totally arbitrary choice - the city "was founded [way back] in 1909, the first city designed expressly as a 'Hebrew urban center' by its founders." Another fun fact? Tel Aviv is named after a book, a practice that I think deserves to be continued. I wouldn't want to live in Paradise Lost, say, or The Heart Of Darkness, but it would be so great to list my address as Difficult Loves or Cat's Cradle or Childhood's End. Anybody who wants to join me in founding a city named after a book is welcome - that may well be my new goal in life.

But yes: Independence Hall. We didn't actually get to see much of it, but we did get a taste of what it's like to attend a press conference.





The outside was super-stylish, but there's only so much you can do with a mall's interior.


Not having any shopping left to do, I explored a bit and found this:


From a distance this looked like a digital marquee for a movie theater (which would've been the first movie theater we'd encountered in the entire country), but on closer inspection it was a train schedule. I'm not sure whether that would be exciting or depressing, arriving in Tel Aviv by train and immediately entering a shopping mall.


For our final group event, we ate a very tasty dinner together at this lovely restaurant. And I don't just mean visually lovely, either: for maybe the first time on the whole trip, we had well more than enough to eat and drink. It's easy to figure out when you're starving, but I learned on this trip that it can be difficult to tell when you've been eating just too little.

After that? The airport and another century and a half of flight time. As I recall, something like eight or ten people in the group either extended their trip or decided to stay in Israel permanently; another several were already making plans to return. For my part place is subordinate to company and activity, and I almost always prefer to see something new than to repeat an experience. Still, the trip as a whole was most certainly a success. Now if only I can find a free trip to Japan...

Thanks in large part to Georg Hegel, the intellectually tentative have an at least somewhat well-respected escape route when two of their cherished beliefs come into conflict: the dialectic. Besides serving this dubious purpose, dialectical reasoning also plays to whichever part of the human mind appreciates the resolution of tension and the forging of a unified whole out of seemingly disparate parts. Herman Hesse explores these ideas in depth in his Magister Ludi, but I'm not a cruel enough person to subject my dear readers to Hesse. If you have several hours to waste and an as-yet unfulfilled desire to read a novel with page-long paragraphs, Hesse is your man; otherwise, join me as I leave Hesse behind, taking only his focus on the strange magic of synthesis.

Although I've never seen it written in precisely these words, one of the more persistent arguments for theism is that it alone enables us to reach a synthesis that unifies all of the apparently discordant facts in the world. Robert Gressis, for instance, says that a person's coming to accept God is like his experience

"trying to make sense of Kant's various positions on the nature of freedom. I couldn't figure out how to make them all cohere until I came upon a description of how Berkeley understood freedom in Wayne Waxman's Kant and the Empiricists. Once I came upon that description, Kant's various writings on the subject seemed to be unified by a single principle that allowed me to see them all in a new light: I now saw them as different ways of articulating that main principle, or as different ways of exploring the consequences of accepting that principle. In other words, upon thinking of them all in a different way, I could see how they related together--they all became pieces of a single puzzle, pieces that fit together and completed the puzzle. And now they all made sense; this was evidence for the rectitude of that interpretation."

Note that Gressis's account features all of the key features of a synthesis. He had to test himself against several ideas that seemed mutually exclusive and was frustrated by this period of testing; he found a unifying fact; and, once he felt confident in his new understanding, felt relief and something akin to beauty. The key step in his account is the very last one, his conclusion that his feelings were "evidence for the rectitude of that interpretation." It's this same leap that theists make when they connect God-feelings to the claim that God really exists.

There's a good deal to say about this subject, especially taking into account Gressis's other story about getting angry in a church, but for this post I want to narrow my attention to just one response. According to Gressis, "immediate, direct, non-inferential, basic apprehension of God works like this...

(1) I have some experience E.
(2) It occurs to me that a powerful, benevolent being ('God') is responsible for E.
(3) The thought that God is responsible for E just make sense."

It's a bit stupid that he calls this "direct" and "basic": a direct or basic perception, you'd think, wouldn't have three steps and wouldn't need to "make sense." But whatever - his choice of vocabulary matters very little in this context. Rather, the important thing here is that Gressis stops his description after three steps.

Had Gressis made his analogy with a scientific discovery and not a philosophical one, it would be trivial to unravel his argument: science doesn't end when a scientist feels warm and fuzzy about their data. That is, in fact, what makes it science. Philosophy might not have as respectable an image in the public mind - Edie Brickell didn't just make up that stuff about philosophy being "a walk on the slippery rocks" - but take my word that it requires more than three steps as well. (Or, alternatively, take this blog: since so much philosophy bears no relationship to the empirical world we typically require it to be checked against the world of ideas, and that's what I flatter myself that I do here.) Up to and including his third step, in other words, Gressis gets everything right. He just quits too soon.

Bad though that is, the really bad news here is far worse: Gressis planned to quit too soon. He calls his "thought that God is responsible for E" a properly basic belief, which is a concept Alvin Plantinga invented more or less just so that he could apply it to the belief in God. A belief is properly basic by definition if its justification doesn't rely on any other belief, which is a fancy way of saying that it's based on a whim. These whims might well be syntheses that accord well with everything else that a person has in mind at the time - Gressis's certainly was - but no amount of feel-good can substitute for rigor. Hesse admitted as much in his novel and even Gressis's own analogy betrays that inescapable fact. Whatever else his post does, it does not do the impossible: it does not prove that feelings about God are more reliable than feelings about anything else.

No, really - one day people will take the winter Olympics just as seriously as they take the summer ones. One day!!

Almost to the finish line!

As if we hadn't been dragged around enough over the first week of the trip, day nine began with a pre-dawn (and pre-breakfast) hike up Masada ("Matzadah" in Hebrew), which "became legendary during the Jewish revolt against" - well, if you can't guess how that sentence ends by now, you don't really deserve to know.


...although not as amazed as when modern people still haven't figured it out. This kind of thing makes me think that the people who design Mario levels are tapping into some kind of primal human desire to accidentally fall off a cliff and die.


Doesn't look so bad from the bottom, does it?

While eating breakfast (finally) and waiting for the rest of our group to catch up, I and the other speedsters were treated to the dulcet tones of fighter jets roaring past over and over again. In case you have never heard a fighter jet flying by at low altitudes, it sounds more or less like either the destruction of spacetime itself or else the tearing asunder of one's sanity. Again, though, the Israelis didn't seem to even notice them - attenuation, I suppose.

Everything was forgiven, though, when we reached our next stop: the world-famous Dead Sea.


Okay, so that wasn't our immediate next stop, but it was across the street from our next stop. These statues are made from Dead Sea salt and are permanently housed in the lobby of some cosmetics company or other. If you ask me they're pretty much right in the uncanny valley, but if you're gonna pay hundreds of dollars on foot cream I guess you'll put up with just about anything.

This place also had the worst gift shop in history.


Strangely, I cannot seem to find "ARMEGEDON: The Return of the Messiah" on IMDB. It must be some sort of temporary error with their database or something, because this is clearly a masterpiece of the cinematic arts.

Okay, but seriously: the Dead Sea.


This little beachfront business had a hot spring as well, which this time I did get to photograph.


See all those old people? They really needed to wear larger bathing suits. Be very happy that I'm not posting those pictures.


If you're wondering why a beach needs a cobblestone path leading down to the water...


...you're forgetting that Israel is the rockiest place on Earth. It was a very bad mistake on my part to do this barefoot.

At any rate, the reason people get so excited about the Dead Sea is that its high mineral content makes you float.  And yeah - that was pretty cool. Plan on taking a shower really soon after you try it, though, because that stuff dries on your skin and it feels really grimy.

Oh - and did I mention that there were cats there?


There were cats there.


We chatted a bit with the soldiers here as well since they would leave later that day - nothing too interesting other than a fair amount of sentimentality. It was a good thing that we did it before their departure, though, because their departure consisted of them piling off the bus at a random street corner in Tel Aviv and us driving away.

Speaking of Tel Aviv, that was the one and only recognizable city we visited.


Recognizable as a city, I mean. Right? Doesn't this say "city" to you?

If not that, how about the suspiciously suggestive advertising?


Yes..."massage." Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more.

Our accommodations in Tel Aviv were located at the Golden Beach Hotel, which as you can see is nestled comfortably in between a restaurant and a toy store:


(It's also right across the street from the Mediterranean Sea, but I couldn't really get that to come through in any of the night shots.)

Yes, that's the Golden Beach Hotel, brought to you by Jean-Paul Sartre:


Tel Aviv was also the first place we went where you had to try in order to find kosher food, and so I will conclude the evening photos with an image of food:


Babbly gum: the gelato that just won't shut the hell up.

There are two more pictures in this post, though.  I apparently rushed through the day 7 post, cause I left out these two shots of the kibbutz:


Look closely near those windows on the right - see that thing hanging down?


It's a bike! What's the deal with suspending a bike from the ceiling, kibbutz inhabitants? It won't do you any good up there.

Okay, now this post is over with - only one more to go!