SubscribeAugust 16th, 2011
politics and unintentional humor
I was reading over at the Daily Beast and saw this banner: Stop Attacking Evangelicals! Couldn’t resist and, oh my, is it funny.
Don’t think the author Kirsten Powers had that intention, but read it for your self and tell me you didn’t howl.
Since Rep. Michele Bachmann was asked in a debate whether she would be submissive to her husband as president, the punditry has morphed into a morass of armchair theologians pushing flawed interpretations of what submission means in a biblical context.
Thankfully, nowhere have we seen this kind of behavior relating to Mormons (yet) or Muslims, but it’s open season on the evangelical faith.
Why exactly is it anyone’s business to know the specifics of how Bachmann and her husband interact in their relationship? It was fair to ask the question at the debate—after all, if she had said, “I believe that submission means my husband will tell me how to do my job as president,” that is important information. But that isn’t what she said.
You should read the comments!
But really, the concept of Christian submission shouldn’t be a concern? We should take a politician’s word for what it means in reality? God, stop me, my sides are splitting.
And the thing about not doing this to Muslims? How many fundamentalist Muslims are running for the Republican nomination? What? None?
And if there were, Ms Bachmann wouldn’t be questioning the candidate’s religious need to submit to Allah?
Sure, Ms Powers. Sure.
July 5th, 2011
what on earth possesses people
I went out and walked around for about three hours and feel considerably better for it. The one issue I have with being out in public is that one’s defenses against not-so-self-aware extroverts is reduced. I have to admit that a car is a great barrier against the tide of silliness that counts for friendly conversation.
At lunch time I bought a lemonade and a lentil wrap, went outside, found a table and sat. A man walked by cursing the human race in a rather loud voice and using somewhat violent wording. I kept my face absolutely still but kept my eyes on him, making sure he was aware I was staring. He shut up (a good thing) but glared at me as if the entire human race had suddenly condensed into my particular form. It’s about the only way I’ve found that can make sure my displeasure at his public violence is registered without ramping up the situation to include physical demonstrations of his particular rage and pain.
Unfortunately my response was registered by another man who took it as permission to tell me all about how European people come over to Canada and have babies, get jobs for cash and take welfare then return home with all their ill-gotten wealth. The only thing new about the spew was that it was “Europeans” that got the part of the villain. And, by the way, he told me all this with a very thick European accent.
I mean, really, what possesses people?
In this man’s case, after complaining about people who don’t produce anything for the country he asked me what I did for work. So I told him I worked for the government, finding homes for immigrants. That was fun. You should have seen his face. It silenced him for at least 60 seconds.
I left shortly after to catch my bus.
March 24th, 2011
having a degree doesn’t mean you can think
Lilian has a link over at her site to a review of All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. The book is by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly.
It is one of the nastiest and funniest reviews I’ve read in a long while. If the book is even 20% as bad as the review implies the authors need to turn in whatever degrees they may have been presented with in the past. Clearly they didn’t actually earn them.
Here’s a taste:
To get a healthier responsiveness to sacred rushes Dreyfus and Kelly go back to Homer, who (they say) had no sense of an inner life.
Ouch. Really? Homer had no inner life? Oh boy.
They even say that Helen is a goddess, since dia gynaikōn can mean that. It does not, without the addition of theāōn (to describe, for instance, Hera).
Man. Even basic scholarly knowledge is lacking?
The fall from Homer’s sublime superficiality occurs, in this book, when Augustine invents interiority. He does this by merging the specific time and space of Jesus with the timeless essences of Greek philosophy. “Augustine was the first important Christian to interpret Christianity using the categories of Greek philosophy.” Anyone who knows anything about either Augustine or Greek philosophy knows that this is nonsense.
Gosh. It’s a bit like Creationists speaking about evolution. Think they’re infiltrating the humanities now?
It is hard to imagine how Dreyfus and Kelly could get sillier about Augustine, but they meet the challenge. They say that he invented the inner life of the mind. “Augustine had to get people to realize that they had an inner life.” How did he do this? By pointing out that Ambrose was seen reading the Bible silently. “Apparently, in Augustine’s time everyone read aloud.” This is a myth that Bernard Knox destroyed years ago.
Say what? Augustine invented the inner life of the mind? Wowzers. How stupid can you be and still keep breathing.
Anyway, there’s more. Have fun reading.
February 6th, 2011
“they kill children” Wahoooo dude!
1:29-1:35 – way to go Gates!
You know I’ve always thought that the parents and families of those children that suffered as a result of Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy should think about swearing out a class action suit against the pair. Of course the parents could be counter-attacked for their own stupidity, which resulted in not only the endangerment of their own children but also the rest of the population.
January 6th, 2011
dead birds and word power
You have heard of the dead blackbirds I am sure. Here is the most useful coverage of it I have seen.
Are birds falling from the sky examples of pareidolia, eschatology, or something else?
Essentially the blackbirds died because fireworks frightened them out of their wits. But never mind the facts, this is a “sure sign” that Harold Camping is right. Ugh.
There is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
November 11th, 2010
cultural apoplexy
Through a conversation with a friend I was reminded of that obnoxious as well as hilarious text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (The link leads you to one of the multiple nasty sites that have the text available. If you intend to read the text or the site, you might want to take a good, strong dose of anti-nauseant first. Having said that, the site will give you the flavor of the kind of mind that can believe in shit like this.)
For a strong palate cleanser you might want to watch Marc Levin’s movie about The Protocols and the people who believe it to be true (such as Glenn Beck.) You might also want to look here and here.
I sometimes wonder what my relations in England thought in the build up to WWII about the likelihood of any nation or group of people believing that another war like The Great War could do anything but bring even more devastation, or that mass murder had any chance of producing more than massive death. Despite the evidence of The Great War, it was, apparently, still incredibly hard to believe that people would really spill their vitriol in such self destructive ways when the results of the last conflagration were still in evidence. It still is hard to believe. Yet history says that we will do it again.
I can’t help but think that people like Beck, the tea party dudes and dudettes, the believers in the Protocols, and other such persons, are like a blood clot in the cultural brain and as such will be the cause of the next episode of cultural apoplexy. Some of them will make out like bandits in the mess that they cause, but I do take some comfort that when the dying is done, some of them will be counted amongst the dead, and even some will pay the price as did they of the Nuremberg trials. We will revile them then. What I find a pity is that we can’t just revile them now and save the ensuing horror.
October 20th, 2010
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
This doesn’t surprise me but such willful ignorance pains me anyway. This person wants the right to govern? (Listen to the whole thing if you can bear it but if not go to 7:02.)
via Pharyngula
September 17th, 2010
Empty promises/threats
I’ve been thinking (idly) about failed prophecies. There are so many, and even so, people still come to my door predicting new dates, new ends. My favourite has to be Matthew 16:28 when Jesus (reportedly) says “Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.” Following the description of that “coming” as with “his Father with his angels,” it seems to me that this rather obviously didn’t come true, or if it did, then it is meaningless since not even Christians seem to be able to tell that everything is now OK.
Anyway, I found this site which lists a bunch of other failed prophecies. It’s fun to look at. Then there’s all those fly-by-night sites that predict the fall of the theory of evolution. The fact that they all fail makes no difference, and that it wondrous to me. Then there’s this new one (to me anyway) of May 21 , 2011 and of course there’s the Mayan-based one of 2012. The fact that people can seriously ask “Is it really coming?” is stupendous.
This stuff inevitably reminds me of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending. It is the way in which we need to make sense far in advance of our ability to do so reasonably that I find so wondrous, and frankly, amusing. Just like an addict in the face of his or her drug of choice, many of us display no discernment whatsoever when faced with the need to know the ending of the human story. Imagine that you are a chocoholic and that the exquisite-mouthful ever recedes just past the reach of your questing fingers. I suspect that’s how those who choose to believe these various end-of-the-world scenes feel about having an end to the human story. There it is that surety, that perfect comfort, just at the horizon. Chase it, chase it. And then when it vanishes over the horizon of falsity, another pops up and off like a hare we go, kicking out hind feet with the delight of the new morsel just out of reach.
Without a narrative fix in the offing I imagine it would be like the horrifying discovery that all chocolate is just an illusion, born of a particularly vivid gustatory dream. I expect there would be more than one addict running for the vial of sleeping pills – to dream, better than facing the fact that the comfort will not come; that death will come instead, and before our story is all worked out, before even the most glaring loose ends are knitted back into the narrative.
I’m looking forward to the first morning of 2013, since this is fairly well advertised apocalypse. Even so, I suspect it will be like the first day of 2000, when the credit card bill still existed. (I actually knew a woman that maxed out her card expecting not to have to pay it.) The reason I look forward to it? Because, I predict, there will be a new end-of-the-world date suggested before close of business 2012. Since we will continue as a species to persist, I do suspect, we will persist with this need to chase the end of the narrative.
September 5th, 2010
Gack!
Driving at 3 AM and listening to the radio and thinking about three young men I observed over tea and toast at a Denny’s.
The last guy into the restaurant, comes in on a laughing swagger. His buddies are the servers and the cook. He has just hit a skunk; and at 75 miles an hour he says he still has time to see the skunk spraying as he dies. The man laughs. His car stinks, he says. Turned off the heater, but still. The others laugh at him. They all grin and go on to talk about other road-kill they have known.
I leave after I am done and turn on the radio. The guy being interviewed is an author and musician, based on the few minutes I heard. He starts talking about how we have lost touch with nature, and how he is going to write his second book from the point of view of an animal looking at human beings and I snort the tea I just sipped out of my nose. At 75 miles an hour.
What do you think nature is but what we as humans do? I mean really, what image do we have of nature that we cannot see that killing inadvertently is exactly what nature does. There’s no “advertent” about it. Beings do what they do to meet their needs, whether it is for food, or speed, or socialization and to meet those needs the beings will run cheerfully over the extraneous “other.” What difference if it is truck hitting a skunk or an elk trodding on a shrew?
And as for writing from the point of view of the animal – we all know what an “oreo” is and an “apple” — what are we going to call a fuzzy critter on the outside and an smooth skinned ape on the inside? Oh yeah! Mickey Mouse.
March 20th, 2010
Bad mood or just funny?
Now I’m in a bit of a bad mood, but I don’t think that is why I find this deeply amusing.
A little story: I was asked to catalog a small 1-room school house library so they could get back their accreditation from the state.
I knew that it was small enough that I could do it myself so I agreed without checking out the collection. When I got there, over their spring break, it was so appalling that I really had to laugh. Amongst other egregious errors, they had most science books cataloged as fiction (along with a copy of the Torah) but the Bible was in there as “non-fiction, history.” It was kind of nice putting things to rights but I know that once they had that bit of paper, it would all go back the way it was. Probably a good thing the kids didn’t learn much of anything for those years.
Thanks peardg for the link.