From The Iliad to the Odyssey

As homicides in New York have fallen sharply over the last two decades, the tit-for-tat violence between crews like 3 Staccs has persisted…[T]estimony has given jurors a look at the warrior subculture of some young men in and around Harlem projects. The gang members described how they would venture into another gang’s territory to commit assaults, and then trumpet their exploits on Facebook, daring their rivals to respond. They would pool money to buy communal guns that they would keep close at hand for fights that escalated…Though some gang members sold marijuana and cocaine, the disputes were mainly about respect and revenge.[1]

It is tempting to characterize the 3 Staccs as ‘barbarians’. In fact they were behaving exactly like Greeks of the Heroic Age. Revenge and the quest for ‘respect’ drove them; they raided enemy territory and fought to win honor for themselves their mates. Stripped of its literary packaging, the Iliad is an account of the gang warfare in the warrior subculture in the Eastern Mediterranean, doing violence for the sake of honor and for the possession of a woman.

Nowadays population is denser and gang warfare is largely restricted to city neighborhoods; then it occupied the Mediterranean, from Ithaca to Troy. But the story is the same: violent young men, under the direction of a few warlords, fighting for the chance to rape and pillage, and to capture slaves, women and loot. This is the way the world was when muscle and guts were what mattered.

These days heroism has receded like the ebbing tide, leaving only isolated pools of violence and machismo in the Global South and elsewhere in urban slums, where young warriors replay the Iliad.

The Odyssey is another matter. According to psychologist Julien Jaynes, it was the transition from the world depicted in the Iliad to the world of the Odyssey that marks the dawn of human consciousness as we understand it. ‘Iliadic man’ he writes, ‘did not possess subjectivity as we do…he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon’.[2] In the Odyssey, ‘wiley’ Odysseus comes into his own: the Greeks have gotten the idea that there is such a thing as intelligence, and that it is advantageous. Women figure, not merely as spoils of war, but as powerful agents.

The 3 Staccs are not barbarians. They are Iliadic heroes—anachronisms from an age when the whole world was a slum, and all but a few warlords lived in poverty because resources were burnt off in endless warfare. In a warrior culture players are locked into a sub-optimal equilibrium. Each imagines that he can, and will, win consistently and, eventually, get all the loot. But in fact, the game goes back and forth, and the rapers and pillagers are themselves raped and pillaged. In the process, lives are lost, resources are wasted, and everyone is worse off than they would be if they just minded their own business.

The West only escaped that trap when people realized that military adventurism was wasteful: better to invest in plowshares, in manufacture and trade, than in swords. It happened once: we became civilized. Civilization spread and in the end only a minority was left out—in urban slums and in the Global South.

The mystery is: how do we get here from there—from gang warfare to rational self-interested business, from a world where muscle and guts are all that matter to one where intelligence (Odysseus’ wiliness and Penelope’s prudence) is decisive? That is the problem of violence at home and international terrorism. What will it take to get latter day Achaeans to abandon the ethos of romantic heroism, the quest for honor and revenge, in favor of the rational self-interest?

How do we get from the Iliad to the Odyssey?

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[1]    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/11/nyregion/murder-trial-plumbs-gang-violence-adding-to-a-familys-pain.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

[2]    http://www.bizint.com/stoa_del_sol/conscious/conscious3.html

Awake, My Blog!

OK, I'm going to get back to blogging, and clean out the Chinese spam. Wait and see!

Spiritual But Not Religious

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/29/my-take-im-spiritual-not-religious-is-a-cop-out/

Why on earth would anybody want to be 'spiritual but not religious'--whatever that comes to? Religion provides the machinery to produce religious experience. Why bother with meditation or whatever SBNR people do to get that experience when religion produces it more reliably, with greater intensity and with much less effort?

I poke around on blogs to get an idea of what motivates the spiritual-but-not-religious. One theme seems to be "I don't need religion." How true: we don't need anything beyond the food, clothing and shelter requisite for bare, boring survival. But we want more. We don't need religion--any more than we, as my mother said, need recreational drugs: according to her we can enjoy ourselves without them, and anyone who uses them is sick and weak.

But recreational drugs are great! If you can get high more easily, more reliably and more intensely on drugs, than drugs are a good thing and you should enjoy them--even though you don't need them. I am, therefore, in favor of recreational drugs and of religion--rightly characterized as the opium of the people. We don't need them--but we want them because we enjoy them.

Other SBNR people congratulate themselves on their critical acumen and intellectual independence. They do not, the are proud to say, uncritically buy into dogmatic packages promulgated by religious authorities. Ho-hum: neither do we religious people. We look to religion to provide the machinery to produce religious/aesthetic experience--the buildings and ceremonies--not for some doctrinal package. We can, and do, believe whatever we please. Unlike most religious believers, I enjoy doctrine because I do metaphysics. But I do not see it as a package of doxastic obligations. Christian doctrine is a conceptual playground, where I can monkey around on the metaphysical monkey bars, so to speak. Nothing hangs on getting it right--if indeed there is a right. It's just a lot of logic puzzles to play with.

I suppose in the end it comes to what one wants out of spirituality/religion. What I want is art and elaborate rituals which will, at their best, lead to aesthetic/religious experience--a sort of intellectual/aesthetic orgasm. Of course the SBNR will immediately jump on this, assuming that intellectual/aesthetic orgasms can only be a substitute for the more conventional variety. But not so. The issue isn't other but more: religion isn't a substitute for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll but more good stuff, more pleasure.

Naturally, for most churches official doctrine impose restrictions or prohibitions on these other pleasures. But who pays attention to this bullshit? They couldn't enforce their silly rules and prohibitions even if they wanted to. And most are all to happy to get our butts on their pews, no questions asked.

So, what does one want out of spirituality/religion? A slam-bang aesthetic/mystical experience. That's what I'm in the game for because religion has nothing else to offer. And because nothing but religion can provide that aesthetic/mystical experience as reliably or intensely, with the least possible effort on our behalf. So if religion dies out, if those buildings aren't maintained, if those ceremonies aren't performed, we will be deprived of that experience--just as we will be deprived of valuable experiences if recreational drugs aren't available.

So I evangelize. Not because I have the slightest interest in "saving souls" or making other people's lives better in any way, but because I want to promote the interests of the institutional church so that it can maintain those buildings and keep the fancy rituals going for my entertainment and for the pleasure of others who, like me, enjoy religiousity.

Romney and the 47%

It's always a kick to discover what other people say about your kind of people behind your back. My best find was a student conversation overheard at my campus. "The professor was wearing a tee shirt," said the first student, "a striped one." The other said, "We're paying to be here: you don't have to stand for that."

So now we know what Romney and the Republican donors who had the bucks to kick in for a $50,000 a plate Republican fundraiser, think of the rest of us--or at least 47% of us. They believe that we're chronic whiners who imagine ourselves victims and are unwilling to "take personal responsibility and care for...[our] lives."

The remarkable thing about Romney's pitch, and the audience at which it was directed, is that in spite of being educated and presumably competent, they were so utter lacking in imagination. That is a characteristic of primitive people--people in "traditional" societies and the lower classes. They just don't get counterfacuals. Ask a bigoted redneck or working class white ethnic how he would feel about things if he were black and the response is invariably, "But I'm not black." Ask it again, "But what if..." and the answer will be the same. They're not capable of achieving the level of abstract thought that makes it possible to understand counterfactuals--including the Golden Rule. They just don't have the imagination. But maybe that's because they can't afford imagination: they're too busy scrounging and fighting for survival.

Uneducated people behave themselves--when they do--because they're afraid of punishment--in this world or the next. Apart from that, they can't imagine any reason not to lie, cheat and steal or, if they're young men, rape and pillage. And that is why the lower classes are so keen on get-tough policies and religion: they simply can't imagine why anyone would behave themselves if it weren't for fear of punishment, in this world or the next.

Remarkably Romney and his supporters--rich, educated people who have the time and leisure to reflect--are just as unimaginative. They can't seem to imagine what it would be like if their circumstances were, though no fault of their own, different--if they'd been born dirt poor, or black, or on the opposite side of the southern border, or in any of a number of circumstances that would have put them at a serious disadvantage. And they can't or won't understand the extent to which circumstances beyond their control including pure dumb luck were responsible for their privilege.

I'm happy--in fact, delighted, with the life I live. I'm not a victim--indeed I'm vastly privileged--and I'm not whining. I've got a much better life than I ever dreamed I'd have. All I've ever wanted in life was to avoid boredom, and in particular, to do a work that was challenging and interesting. I got that. But it was a matter of pure dumb luck--because my family had money, because I lucked out in getting an academic job, because, most fundamentally, I won the genetic lottery and turned out to be smart. But all this is dumb luck. I didn't make it. It is simply a matter of pure dumb luck that I'm a professor and not a Walmart cashier, or a freeway entrance beggar, or a citizen of the Global South living in extreme poverty, or the child of such a citizen, dying of malnutrition in early childhood.

Romney is now pushing the self-serving self-deceiving idea "we made it." We didn't. We got it--from the government, from biology, from fate, from a variety of circumstances beyond our control. And if we have the ability to understand counterfactuals we should recognize that if our circumstances had been different we'd be members of the 47% that Romney has dismissed as irresponsible whiners. If my fate had been different, if I hadn't been able to go to college, I would have gone on welfare. I'm not interested in promoting socialist policies for the sake of the lower classes, whom I detest, but for my sake--because I could have been in their position. I want to see these policies in place because I want to live in a world where no one has their back against the wall with no room to maneuver, because I escaped a life that I would have found intolerable by the skin of my teeth. I don't care about the poor--I care about myself and people like me, people who are a hair's breadth away from being trapped in an intolerable situation.

I don't have any problem supporting the idle poor--because if I were in their situation I wouldn't want to be forced to do work. I don't begrudge them their idleness because it is exactly what I'd choose if I were in their position--one of those counterfactuals. I'm still amazed though at Romney and his followers. Can't they imagine the hell in which the 47% live--choosing between poverty and agonizing work, and most often ending up with both? Can't they imagine what work is like for most of us? In the morning, it's like you dive into deep water and see how long you can hold your breath--how long you can do the job before you start going mad, crying, cracking up. That's the way it was for me when I did "real work"--by 10:30 every day I was crying. Yes, I'm a stinking spoiled brat. Yes, most people cope. But I don't want them to have to cope--I don't want them to do what I myself couldn't do. I want them to have the good life that I have because it's a matter of pure dumb luck that I do and they don't. Why is this so hard to understand?

Let's have a demonstration!

Let's get out with signs and tell the world, and the Muslim world in particular, that we Americans do not support the lunatic Islamophobia of "Pastor" Terry Jones and whoever concocted the offensive film that set off this outrage.

Sorry Muslim people. That film is not the behavior of Christians, or Jews, or Americans of any religion or no religion. It was the work of detestable trash whom we repudiate. This is not who we are. The people of Libya have repudiated the murder of our ambassador and other Americans and throughout the Islamic world people of good will have come out to tell us that they reject groups that perpetrate this violence. And for our part we should let them, and everyone else, know that we reject the bigotry of the minority of Americans who insult Islam and promote hate.

How about 2 pm Sunday in front of the San Diego Civic Center for you who are local--with signs, like the one in the picture to get the message across that Koran-burning Terry Jones does not speak for us? And if you are not local, how about getting something going in your area.

OK, it probably won't work. I'm not an activist or an organizer. But on the off chance that some one who reads this, one of my Facebook friends or their friends of friends, is an activist and organizer, please consider this project.

Core Curriculum

I've signed up for a Saturday workshop at school on "core curriculum" and, having just read the "materials" for this monstrosity I'm probably going to drop out--even though they give us $100 and a free lunch for going. The stuff is sickening--inflated, vacuous, pious bullshit.

So what do I think about "core"? I prefer "general ed" of course because it isn't core or central to the mission of a university, which is vocational training for professional occupations. General ed courses are a wonderful luxury. However one of the items I read did ask us to reflect and get clear about what we thought the role of core/GE was. So I did, and here it is:

(1) Brain-Candy. The primary role of GE is to stock students heads with amusements and give them the skills for a lifetime of intellectual entertainment. It takes work to be entertained by art, literature, science and all the good stuff of culture but it pays off magnificently. Uneducated people simply can't enjoy themselves as consistently or intensely as we can if we've learned to understand and appreciate high culture, to understand things that are difficult and intricate. Anna Karenina, the Bach B Minor Mass and San Vitale just pack a much, much bigger hedonic punch than any pop cultural crap, but to get the thrill you have to do some work.

(2) Intellectual Jewelery. We want to adorn ourselves, turn our lives into works of art by acquiring beautiful things--by decorating our houses, having fine furniture, and decorating ourselves with skills and knowledge. We decorate ourselves by learning to play musical instruments and to draw, by reading works in the evolving "canon," by learning about history and politics. The aim is to become what used to be called "cultivated" or "cultured." It's narcissism and snobbery--and I'm all for it.

Of course this won't fly because, incredibly, even though we are vastly wealthy most Americans seem convinced that we're on the edge of economic disaster and have to engage in endless belt-tightening. We're told we can't afford universal health care, can't afford to pay public school teachers decent wages, can't afford decent working conditions or shorter hours. And of course we can't afford hedonistic, narcissistic luxuries like a liberal education. So we have to sell it as something edifying, religious, and "core" to social well-being.

If that's so I suppose colleagues who run projects like core curriculum revision are doing their job, persuading the general public that there should be courses other than business and engineering, that people like me, who don't do anything useful or of practical import should be employed. So these noises, I suppose, have to be made--and in order to make them credibly, they have to be made by true believers. Cynical actors fail because acting is hard.

But I'm a person of little faith and a poor actor. So I think I can do without the $100 and free lunch: time for strategic withdrawal.

Evolution and the Science Guy

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/27/bill-nye-slams-creationism/

Good Lord, what is this nonsense about evolution? When I was a little kid, in the wake of Sputnik, all Americans wanted to promote Science, and there was no nonsense about "Creationism." There were TV shows about life emerging from the primordial soup and that's what we learnt in biology. No one doubted it.

In high school we had an assembly at which a biologist who was a college professor spoke to us about evolution. I remember it well: he was young, very good looking, and the first man I'd ever seen in person who had a beard. I was impressed.

So what happened? As a child I heard that in the Olden Days there were people who objected to evolution, and that it all blew up during the Scopes Monkey Trial. But that was long ago and far away--and now the theory of evolution was established as solid fact, and everyone accepted it. What happened???

Were there people around when I was growing up who were Creationists? I think not. I think there were a great many people who simply never thought about the origin of species. They were mostly poor, uneducated people who had enough problems dealing with their own lives and didn't worry about such things. In was only during the late 70's with the emergence of the religious right that demagogues got these people riled up and recruited them.

Chris Christie cometh

http://prospect.org/article/chris-christies-dark-vision-america

“Christie-ism”—an aggressively anti-worker conservatism that uses working-class affect and the promise of solidarity to push right-wing policies and mask a broader assault on the social safety net. It’s an approach that could take Christie to the White House. Indeed, this speech was a virtual audition for 2016 and Christie’s inevitable run for the presidency if Romney loses in November.

 OK, Obama, you mealy-mouthed wimp: listen up. Romney will lose and you will have four more years to show your stuff. So let's see some guts for a change: show the white working class Republican "base," what a welfare state can deliver. Put together a WPA-style works project to get those dumb grunts out on the streets hacking and hewing. And it's not as if this is pointless make-work: the infrastructure is crumbling. Especially Harbor Drive, San Diego, which is pocked, potholed, and perfectly miserable for biking. And which has been under construction in a desultory fashion for about two years now. Get those guys out and digging!

And if a Republican-dominated congress says that we can't afford it, get up on your bully pulpit--on TV, radio and the Internet, and tell those guys that you're just asking the rich to pay their fair share to fix the roads so that they can drive around in their fat SUVs, and creating jobs for workers to fix and maintain them. You might even want to explain a little about public goods--those grunts aren't that dumb. They might actually understand.

Show these jerks what a welfare state can deliver, what it can do for them--not some mythical Welfare Queen.

You got four more years to deliver a European style socialist welfare state. Get going.

Liberal Christianity

 http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/what-is-liberal-christianity/

If all publicity is good publicity Ross Douthat has done a service to the Episcopal Church by announcing its forthcoming collapse in his NYTimes column and blog. His thesis is the standard, discredited explanation from Dean Kelly's 1972 book Why the Conservative Churches are Growing

By the same token I suppose liberals are doing good simply by responding--even though their defenses of the faith range from unconvincing to offensive:

Unconvincing: "My wonderful inclusive parish is vibrant and growing." (Congrats to your vibrant, inclusive parish but, sorry, the stats overall for the Episcopal Church, and all other mainline churches are terrible)

Offensive: "People are leaving because they're a bunch of ignorant, homophobic bigots who prefer to check their brains at the door: our church is too good for them. And we have a low birth rate because our people are conscientiously choosing to be child-free in order to save the environment." (No comment)

For heaven's sake, isn't the problem obvious? People look to churches for religion--not endless politically correct harangues and volunteer work. The problem isn't that liberal churches have become too liberal socially and politically, or that they've rejected "traditional morality"--the problem is that they've jettisoned traditional metaphysics and liturgy. Currently slightly more than half of Americans support gay marriage: the Episcopal Church is hardly showing "prophetic witness" in this regard. If some 51% of Americans agree with the Episcopal Church's sexual ethics, how come the Episcopal Church now represents just under 1% of the population?

The problem isn't that the Episcopal Church is too ethically and socially liberal for most people's tastes. The Church is collapsing because of lack of faith--because the leadership has rejected supernaturalism, believes that theism is completely out of the ballpark for educated people (as Spong declared in his 12 Theses) and regards religion as uninteresting and basically a waste of time. Given these assumptions it's hardly worth making the effort to get more people into the pews (as long as the endowment holds out). Anyway, they should be out in the World, doing social service and political activism--not wasting their time in church.

Why, why couldn't the church have ditched "traditional morality" but kept the metaphysics and liturgy? Isn't this what the whole "spiritual-but-not-religious" movement is about? People want the the woo-woo, the ceremonies and paraphernalia, without the Biblical literalism, puritanism and social conservatism they associate with Christianity. Here is a market niche the Episcopal Church was ideally situated to capture: fancy churches, good music, elaborate rituals, and mysticism without "traditional morality" or Biblical literalism. But it didn't. It adopted a stinking new Prayer Book, contemporary English, the Peace and other detestable garbage that expunged every bit of the numinous from the liturgy.

And ironically, that was just more puritanism, more moralism. Liberals condemned conservatives for puritanitanical restrictions on sexual activity, but liberals were even more puritanical about fantasy, beauty and "escapism." Don't you dare enjoy church--you're here to be edified, to be pushed to go out into the World and work for Justice, Freedom and Peace. Of course if we had a moral motivation drug that we could put in the water supply to make everyone go out and work for social justice we wouldn't need religion at all! We'd sell off all those wasteful churches--every grain of incense is bread from the mouths of the poor--and spend all that money on Justice, Freedom and Peace.

Religion Dying Out

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/religiosity-plummets-ireland-declines-worldwide-atheism_n_1757453.html

Hard to accept but religion is dying out--slowly, lingering in the Third World and among the poor, but inevitably dying.

I don't understand why people are pleased about that. The death of religion means a duller, deader, more prosaic world--without rituals and myths. I prowl the blogs and read the comments, and I'm baffled why there is virtually no one who has my take on religion.

I love religion. I wish I lived in a world where religiousity was all pervasive, where there were innumerable churches and little shrines where people stopped to mumble the quick prayer, where every other day was a holy day honoring a saint, a dogma, or the translation of some holy bones, with processions in the street, where people engaged in 1000 little rituals, swore by Saint Loy and went on pilgrimages.

It's a fantasy, a dream. I just don't understand why it doesn't appeal to other people in the way it appeals to me.

Food Desserts

We aren’t all fat here in the US—just some of us. Mainly, poor people.

According to the received view, the poor are more likely to be overweight because they live in food deserts where fresh vegetables and other “healthy” foods are unavailable. Without access to transportation, they’re forced to eat locally available junk food. To remedy this, social reformers have introduced green carts stocking fresh fruit and veg to slums.

A recent NYTimes article however challenged the received view. According to a recent study, most poor neighborhoods “have more… grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants” than more affluent venues and there is “no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.”[1] The introduction of green carts made no difference to slum-dwellers’ eating habits: they simply preferred tasty junk food to healthy vegetables.

The article drew outraged responses. Most critics were skeptical—convinced that there really were food deserts whose residents could not get “healthy” green food. Others weren’t having it, and roundly condemned fat slum-dwellers for their irresponsibility, laziness and lack of self-control.

Food is the new sex—the focus of purity regulations and moralism, and a class marker. Victorians condemned the undeserving poor for promiscuity and non-marital liaisons, for irresponsibility and laziness. The new guardians of morality despise them for promiscuous eating, for being too lazy to cook from scratch, and for their irresponsible consumption of fatty, salty, sugary junk food.

Most of these moralists live here in California, the slimmest state in the nation, where everyone carries a water bottle for ongoing hydration and all women do yoga. Being fat in California—at least in the upper middle reaches of society—is hell. In upscale neighborhoods you are liable to get the hate stare just for walking down the street while fat. You do not dare to admit eating meat—unless it’s grass-fed and certified by a boutique butchery—and vegans condemn mere vegetarians as slackers.

There’s no mystery why poor people disproportionately run to fat. They don’t have to live with these moralists so they have less incentive to sweat and starve to be “healthy.” Amongst the working class fat is acceptable—and for women of a certain age the norm. They can enjoy chili, burgers and cheap beer at tailgate parties, far from the censorious gaze of fastidious foodies and exercise enforcers. They can shop for extra-size clothes at Walmart without embarrassment and shamelessly consume junk food at the in-store McDonalds. In their world fat is not a moral failure or a loathsome disease: it is not punished.

Living amongst censorious microbrewers, spandex cyclists, and yoga moms I finally succumbed to social pressure. I joined a gym. I work out every day and starve myself so I am now “healthy” and can appear in public, even in upscale neighborhoods, without shame. But I still don’t care for this regime.

Last month I went to a conference in Arkansas, a poor Southern state and so, along with Alabama and Mississippi, one of the fattest in the country. I wish I lived there! It would be so relaxing not to be always under the gun, not to live in a place where one has to work so hard to avoid social opprobrium. I wish I lived in a place where it was ok to be fat!

---

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-of-food-deserts-and-obesity-challenged-in-studies.html?_r=1

Obama is an Atheist

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/franklin-graham-obama_n_1290657.html?ref=christianity

Of course he is. The odds of members of his demographic being religious believers are minimal and there is no reason to think that Obama is any different from his cohort. He's not a Muslim, of course. He's just a common or garden variety atheist who joined Rev. Wright's church because membership in a Black Congregation was de rigeur for aspiring black politicians. But I don't have the least doubt that back at the U. of Chi law school he sniggered at us benighted Christians as good as the rest of them. He despises us, as they all do.

But I don't hold that against him. I voted for him and will vote for him again because I don't care about what the candidate believes, or for that matter about the candidate. I vote for the party, that is, the ideology.

But I do hope that at some point in his next term--for which I fervently pray--Obama will come out of the closet and admit that he's an atheist. I am sick of being patronized and manipulated, sick of the contempt of upper middle class liberals who despise me for my religious beliefs, who play games with me imagining that I'm too stupid to recognize what they're doing.

The Joy of Religion

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/09/09/bloomberg-sundays-911-ceremony-a-civil-not-religious-occasion/

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is defending his decision to exclude religious leaders from New York City's commemoration of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, saying Friday that "government shouldn't be forcing" religion "down people's throats."

 Fuck you Michael Bloomberg! How is it "forcing religion down people's throats" to have religious ceremonies at the 9/11 site? You can participate without believing anything. Who cares?

We had a big Discussion over lunch and Son objected that having religious ceremonies in the public square was the slippery slope to creationism in the public schools etc. He didn't think there was any way to draw the line. But surely there is. We just tell the fundamentalists: no respect for your "values" or your idiotic ideas about the origin of species. We allow, and promote, all the superficial religiousity anyone pleases--school prayer, religious ceremonies at Ground Zero for 9/11, crosses on hilltops, but give no ground to your stinking conservative "values."

Of all the detestable things that the evangelicals have done the worst is destroying the pleasure of religion. Now we can't have religious goodies without worrying that they give support to the lower class stinking shit evangelicals and their detestable conservative views. Up the ass of the working class! Evangelicals eat shit--die you detestable, stupid, tasteless filth.

US judges rule for teacher who called creationism 'superstitious nonsense'

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/0819/US-judges-rule-for-teacher-who-called-creationism-superstitious-nonsense/%28page%29/2

“Aristotle … argued, you know, there sort of has to be a God. Of course that’s nonsense,” Corbett said according to a transcript of his lecture. “I mean, that’s what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, ‘Well, if all this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.’ Faulty logic. Very faulty logic.”

He continued: “The other possibility is, it’s always been there.… Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic.”

Wait a minute. He didn't just call "Creationism" nonsense--he called theism, belief in God as such, nonsense. But neither he nor the headline writer are making what they must assume to be niggling fine distinctions between theism and "creationism." It's all very simple. There is Science, which presupposes atheism, and everything else is magic, nonsense and faulty logic.

This guy wouldn't know logic if it kicked him in the teeth. He seems to think that deductive reasoning is a particular kind of fallacy. But I'm sure he passes as one of the grand intellectuals of the San Juan Capistrano public school district because he spouts this crap in his AP history class.

This story has gotten play all over the internet as an inspiring victory for freedom of speech over the narrow-minded bigotry of conservative evangelicals. And of course neither the media nor the public make fine distinctions: all religious believers are tarred with the same brush. No one dares criticize this guy for fear of being tagged as an ignorant, bigoted fundamentalist.

But there are very good reasons why this guy's performance was unacceptable. It was first of all gratuitously insulting. But more importantly he doesn't know what he's talking about but sets up as an authority awakening kids from their dogmatic slumbers. "Faulty logic"--I'm sure the kids, and their parents are impressed. What an intellectual! And he mentions Aristotle. What an intellectual!

The President Surrenders on Debt Ceiling - NYTimes.com

The President Surrenders on Debt Ceiling - NYTimes.com: "The President Surrenders

- Sent using Google Toolbar"

That stinking wimp Obama has sold me down the river--and my kids. I'm furious!

We can't win because liberalism has become a style instead of an ideology. Liberals eat arugula and lite healthy things--not nasty red meat gotten by killing animals. Liberals are nice. So in December when BO should have pressed the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling he didn't because he trusted them to "behave responsibily"--the very phrase, the quintessence of school marm goody-goodyism.

Well life is war--it is a constant, ongoing fight and whoever blinks loses. That is something Obama and his supporters don't seem to get. But Republicans do--and so they win. But we are still back in the Summer of Love passing out flowers

We have to beat the crap out of these bastards and take no prisoners. Lie, cheat, steal make those shits suffer, humiliate and crucify them.

Religious Quandry

Now here's a question. Is religion really just a mechanism for social control and, in particular, for promoting a socially conservative agenda? Is there any more, or other, to it than that?

I'm inclined to think that there is. And I have no sympathy with the standard socially conservative agenda--on sexuality, abortion or "family values." But what else is there to religion now, as it is on the ground? Culture Wars has shaped up into a conflict between a liberal, secular elite--whose "values" I support--and a socially conservative, religious proletariat, with whom I have no sympathy.

What do I do? Oh, yeah. The Episcopal Church is socially liberal. But the problem is that they're a bunch of politically correct dingbats and don't believe in God. So the church scene is just the secular society scene in microcosm. Religious believers who are socially conservative, i.e. they want me typing and filing, nurturing and doing womanshit vs. atheists who despise me for my religious beliefs. What a bummer!

Mladic’s Arrest: What Did Serbia Know? by Charles Simic | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books

Mladic’s Arrest: What Did Serbia Know? by Charles Simic | NYRBlog | The New York Review of Books: "The big question is why the Serbian government waited so long to arrest him, because it is difficult to believe that security services had completely lost his trail after he ceased to be protected by the army some years back.

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Why? Because the Serbs are a primitive tribal culture. They take care of their own, as understood in terms of race and blood. What do you expect? Obliterate all stinking non-Western cultures.

Solution: Give Everybody Money!

I've been reading Nixonland, a journalistic history of Nixon and his times--times I remember from my college days, when there were riots and protests, sit-ins, teach-ins and occasionally love-ins, and when I marched for something I knew not what.

One thing I learnt in college was that rich people were in just about every way better than poor people. I came from a gritty city where people were cynical and corrupt. The working class people I knew led dreary lives and were perfectly awful people: completely conventional, intolerant and tasteless. The men were brutal--and when young prone to violence.

I went to a small overpriced college for rich underachievers in a posh suburb of Chicago and there met adults who were, at least on the surface, decent human beings. Even if they were hypocrites that was a step in the right direction: at least they had shame. You could talk to them: they weren't just, like the working class people I'd known, tape loops making noises about immediate features of their environments and repeating trivial cliches. They weren't obsessed with discipline to enforce rigid conformity in even the most trivial details. The men weren't scary.

Anyone who likes the working class has never met the working class.

So the solution to all our social problems is simple: the obliteration of the working class through social mobility. When people have money, comfort and material security they become better people because they can afford to be better people. They can afford to be honest, generous and kind. It's when people are living on the edge they can't risk decent behavior: when they live in a tough, brutal, unfair world they become tough, brutal and corrupt. So the solution is simple: give 'em money! Make them upper middle class!

The trouble is that Republicans have sold themselves as the party of tough appealing to the lower classes and promoting policies that will make things even tougher for them--insuring, they hope, a permanent Republican majority.

Secular Studies Major

I don't know whether to be surprised that it happened or surprised that it took so long: a California college has become the first in the nation to offer a major in secularism.

Ho-hum. More of the usual New Atheist boosterism, harping yet again on the same old theme: in a world dominated by bigoted Christians brave atheists are at last asserting themselves and being recognized.

I suppose somewhere there is the world they imagine, where religious believers are in a comfortable majority, where atheists have been closeted and are only now able to "come out" because of the efforts of brave secularists. Where these places are I do not know. I've lived in every corner of the US, the most religious nation of the Global North, and I've never been to a place where anyone cared about anyone's religious beliefs or even noticed their religious affiliation or lack thereof.

Identifying individuals as "atheists" seems peculiar--like characterizing people as "sighted," "hearing" or "literate." In Academia, where I've spent most of my life, religious belief is pecular: we talk about "theists," not "atheists." And if people discover you're a theist (as I am) they're amazed and look at you funny. So it's hardly surprising that a college is offering a major in secularism: it's our culture.

Still, I wonder how long atheists can make out they the are a brave, counter-cultural minority. In the last 20 years the percentage of "Nones" in the US--individuals who say that they "have no religion" has more than doubled, from 7% to 15%. And amongst young Americans, aged 18 to 30, 40% are Nones. Atheism is a status symbol: it marks you as young, educated, urban and smart. About the only thing more uncool than being religious is being fat.

Still it's hard to see how secularism can provide enough material for a major. There are a great many religions and a great deal to say about them even if you don't believe any of them are true. And virtually all religious scholars, who study them, are atheists. But how much can you say about secularism--the absence of religious belief and practice. Do you copy everything that religious studies scholars study and add "not"?

A major in secularism seems suspiciously like making illiteracy the a subject of a college major. There's a lot of literature in English and other languages--more than enough for a major in literature. But there does not seem enough to say about illiteracy to make illiteracy studies a major. There is something to be said about illiteracy, which may be of interest to sociologists and other social scientists, but not enough for a major. And the same seems to be true of secularism.

The Revolution is On!

I wonder now how deeply implicated the US was in keeping the despots in the Middle East in power. I'd suspect lots. And I was taken in by the propaganda--was blind and now I see.

The real question always was: "Do we want these countries to like us or to be like us." The propaganda intentionally muddles the two questions. So the Bush administration pushed for regime change by persuading us that democracy meant installing one of our clients as a benevolent despot. And of course we assumed that our friend Saudi Arabia, where it's illegal to build a church and women can't drive, was a model of freedom, justice and the American Way.

Well, I sincerely want them to be like us. And I no longer assume that being our friend, or being under our thumb, is either necessary nor sufficient for being a democratic, decent human society.