I don't like Dawkin's big red A is for Atheist thing. It just bugs me. When I see it, I don't think, ah, here is a fellow freethinker. I think, here is an angry git. I'm not sure why this should be. When I see someone wearing conspicuous religious clothing or jewelery, I don't think that. Is there any good reason for this habitual tolerance of mine? I can't really see any reason why the one is worse, or better, than the other. I guess it may be that traditions get a pass, because people follow them for all sorts of reasons. About the only reason to wear a big red A is a kind of smug, hateful, alienated surlyness.
Speaking of which, is there anything society can do about fake baptist websites? I don't think there is, but it bugs me. They're textbook bigotry with a protective ironic coating, and do real harm to the gormless who don't get the joke. The world is bad enough without trying to fool people into thinking it's even worse.
I seem to be grouchy. And I may need to try to get a grip on why I think Hitchenesque thundering about the harm religion does seems okay to me in moderation, but the notion of godless pride parades just bothers me. I can see that maybe they do some good. I'm not the audience. Rather, they're aimed at people who don't realize we walk among them. I'm just not pleased by my self-nominated representatives, I guess.
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(11)
10:08:36 AM,
Thursday 23 August 2007
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Battle for Westnoth: an open-source hex-based tactical RPG. It's good! Like Panzer General with orcs.
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(5)
12:49:05 PM,
Wednesday 22 August 2007
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St. Johns in the Washington Monthly college rankings. Needless to say, scroll right to the end. For Fe, I mean right to the end. 200 out of 201. Annapolis is 169. This isn't even slightly surprising: they're ranking schools based on how much good they do in the world, and St. Johns isn't an engine of social mobility and doesn't do research. They use predicted vs actual graduation rates to measure social mobility, and we can all reel off lists of bright people who dropped out. Also, not many PhD's. (How many together, ambitious johnnies do you know?) Lots of peace corps volunteers, though. I'd forgotten about the difference in graduation rates between the campuses. Having been both places, my impulse is to blame the drugs, and general feeling of being outside civilization. Any other theories?
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(3)
08:37:05 AM,
Tuesday 21 August 2007
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If you've somehow avoided the Michael Vick dogfighting thing, more power to you, and don't bother reading this entry.
If you run a dogfighting ring, isn't it worse not to kill the excess dogs? I mean, you can't very well let them go. The trouble is the dogfighting in the first place. What makes dogfighting a non-victimless crime, and not open to the same libertarian defenses as, say, gambling, is the creation and abuse of dangerous animals. Though it is nice to see that no one seems to be defending Michael Vick, except in the broadest right to a fair trial sort of way. Torturing puppies is bad. This is something all of america can support. I feel bad for even blogging about it at all, but a women was just hospitalized for a dog bite a couple blocks from here. A pit bull, if you trust the police to correctly identify dog breeds. I've always been prone to seeing dogs as monsters since I had a paper route. Happy, a black labbish beast, used to chase me halfway home. I remember the feel of his breath on my right ankle as I was pedaling. He probably wouldn't have bitten me, but I wasn't about to stop and find out. (Though I discovered that the boxer, who also chased me, was a total wimp, and if I turned around and chased him, he'd hide in his garage for hours.) The only dog that actually injured me was a toy poodle with puppies.
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(6)
05:48:46 PM,
Monday 20 August 2007
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10:43:50 AM, Sunday 19 August 2007
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When I heard the radio news headline about this Edwards foreclosure thing, I thought maybe this was something he owned for good reasons. After all, loaning money to poor people can be a good thing. But it doesn't look like it. Then I thought it might be a random thing in a big portfolio. Doesn't really look like that either. It rather looks like he was rather indifferent to effects of his capital. For me, he could explain his way out of this a couple ways, by talking about the fundemental amorality of capital, and why that requires government regulation. Doesn't look like he's doing that, though. By offering to redress the harm his capital did out of his own pocket, he seems to be conceding responsibility for the actions of his capital. And it that's the case, well, he looks either reckless and greedy in the past, or insincere and maneuvering now. Is he done? Here's a gleeful WSJ account. The quotes are pretty devastating.
Near the close of the poverty tour, Mr. Edwards traveled to a Cleveland neighborhood that has a high foreclosure rate. "This is wrong. This is not complicated, it is wrong," he said, as he walked along. "These people have been taken advantage of." Records show the county Sheriff's Office has scheduled three foreclosure auctions at the behest of Nationstar in August and one for Green Tree.
Now I actually think he's wrong, and that it is complicated, and that his main sin was working for one of these companies for half a million dollars, part time, because, well, I don't think he's worth that much unless they were buying influence. _
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08:56:12 PM, Friday 17 August 2007
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We is consisting largely of the punctuations.(sorry... cat taken from here) _
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06:26:32 PM, Friday 17 August 2007
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Huh. When you work for a huge public company, you get a much better class of CEO. This is a very typical annual report company meeting, but he's got me spellbound. Great jokes, thoughtful asides, no buzzwording, just a pleasure to listen to. A masterpiece of the genre.
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01:31:44 PM,
Friday 17 August 2007
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I was going to say something about Hitchen's god is not Great (his capitalization) but then I didn't, and it hasn't stuck with me. The middle chapters on scripture were awful, rehashed stuff you've heard a thousand times. The only good bit in all that was some C.S. Lewis quotes about the silliness of the humanist non-divine Jesus. That was the biggest surprise to me, reading the gospels, just how central his being God was to just his basic decency. If he wasn't God, he was a bit of a jerk. I had been all ready for humanist Jesus, but you have to really squint to see him. There were some other things as well, things I've thought but never really heard said, or that I would say myself, because there's no real point saying them, but it's somehow nice to see them in print. But the core of the book is basically where he lays many of the problems with the world on the doorstep of religion. Religion doesn't deserve all of it, but it does seem to get off rather lightly. It's more or less a gleeful trampling of the taboo against considering religions as political movements, the acceptance of many swindles ande crimes in the name of God. Like all tramplings, it's indiscriminate and destructive. And the taboo has real function in making modern society possible. It's interesting to remember it's there, though. And he's got some good stories, and some lovely sentences. Wodehouse is really his main influence. Not a reason to take him seriously, but a reason to read him, if you like such things. A wodehouse striving to be a martyr. He's seriously jealous of Salman Rushdie.
So I don't forget, things he recommended that sounded interesting: The God that Failed (essays by ex-communists in 1950) and the documentary Marjoe.
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12:56:49 PM,
Friday 17 August 2007
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Warioware is disturbing to me. It's the terrifying logical conclusion of japanese twee.
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09:39:30 PM,
Thursday 16 August 2007
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"CARE has stopped accepting food aid from the federal government, giving up $45 million to do so. The US government buys food, gives it to (often religious) charities, who then sell it in africa for 70% to 80% of the cost, and use the money raised to fund their programs to help develop agriculture, while undercutting local agriculture.
"If someone wants to help you, they shouldn't do it by destroying the very thing that they're trying to promote," said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi, Kenya's capital.
Time has more about this sort of aid, and the political context of the announcement. _
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11:46:38 AM, Thursday 16 August 2007
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In other news, I finished Zelda, Twilight Princess. It is a very good game. Terrible piece of dramatic fiction, but very satisfying puzzles and such.
Most of the art I consume seems to be aimed at children. Not quite sure what to make of this. By reading Harry Potter, the case could certainly be made that I was declining to challenge myself. I'm not sure the same thing can be said of Zelda, though. Don't know. I suppose when it comes to video games I mean I'd rather not imagine doing anything that makes my soul recoil in horror. It's not fair to say Resident Evil or GTA aren't aimed at children. I prefer art that parents wouldn't mind their children consuming, is a more accurate way of putting it.
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10:57:36 AM,
Thursday 16 August 2007
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