tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2110707321921604722024-02-18T21:48:44.966-08:00Tell me why you think so....The ideas of thoughtful humans through the ages are fundamental to life. I want to know what you think, and why you think so.Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-15846049091258339372013-06-03T13:19:00.000-07:002013-06-03T13:23:35.948-07:00Is religious fundamentalism a mental illness? (i.e. can you catch a mental cold?)Evolutionary biologist and atheist free thinker Jerry Coyne at <a href="http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/is-religion-a-mental-illness/">Why Evolution is True</a><br />
blogged on a recent short article at The Raw Story about remarks made by Karen Taylor, neuroscientist and author of the book <i>Brainwashing: The science of thought control.</i><br />
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The headline leads with her speculation that certain religious beliefs might eventually be treated as mental illnesses, with religious fundamentalism as the cited example. This was slightly misleading because her point wasn't really about religion, but that a developing science and technology of thought intervention opens up possibilities and realities that are not morally neutral and that we should start preparing our ethics to handle them. A reliable technology for disposing of a belief and replacing it with another would force decisions on us we currently don't have to think about. The right decision it might not be as easy as banning it's use.<br />
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Of course the ensuing discussion in the comments covered all the bases about the moral pitfalls of treating beliefs as illness. Commenters called out the dubious ethics of labeling someone who disagrees with you as sick (that this makes up a sizable fraction of all internet discourse was not discussed). The Soviet enforced hospitalization and "treatment" of dissidents as proxy punishment was properly brought up. Coyne and followers were also dubious of the epistemic validity of equating beliefs with illness, and at first I agreed.<br />
Religious beliefs can hardly be thought of as mental illness. Taking the word of large numbers of people or even the word of as little as one very charismatic individual is common human behavior. These are just purchases in the marketplace of ideas, not signs of underlying disease.<br />
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But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I might still be missing the point because of the different ways we think of mental illness versus illness in general.<br />
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The general construct <i>illness</i> is fairly broad and contains many variations on the theme.<br />
One may be ill as the result of a hereditary or congenital problem with one's own structural or functional physiology, e.g.. Spina bifida, Prader-Willi syndrome, juvenile diabetes, or cystic fibrosis. One may be ill as the result of a spontaneous malfunction that develops in an otherwise normally functioning body; multiple sclerosis say, or developing breast cancer as a result of having BRCA1. The common thread of these illnesses are that they are the result of being put together wrong somehow or something in you spontaneously failing. The source of the illness being an internal and inherent quality of one's particular body. On the other hand, one may be ill as the result of infection by some external pathogen (e.g. food poisoning, measles, aids) or exposure to some kind of toxin. The illness is not the result of your individual variation, but of widespread human susceptibility to the outside agent like the Spanish Flu of 1918. We also understand that there are interactions. Dangerous allergies are the result of a nominally harmless (or minimally harmful in the case of say bee stings) external agent interacting with a unique inherent individual physiology. Likewise external carcinogens do not induce disease uniformly, interacting more pathologically with the physiology of certain individuals.<br />
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On the other hand when we think of mental illness our current conventional wisdom doesn't include the pathogen or toxin model that would support a concept of a belief as an illness in and of itself. At least part of the reason is easy to spot. This is incompatible with concepts of absolute liberty of thought supported by free will. Beliefs are just thoughts, volitional products of our own agency. If they are bad, it is because the brain holding them is too faulty to act at liberty with free will. A bad belief (if there is even such a thing) can't be an infection of an intact brain. Ergo, mental illness must be inherent. You cannot be MADE mentally ill by the thoughts that get into your head. The logic being that if the just the thoughts were making you ill, you'd just flush them out yourself and replace them with better thoughts of your own.<br />
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The failure of the free will doctrine undermines this however. So it's quite reasonable (albeit potentially frightening for all the reasons lightly touched in the third paragraph) to talk about thoughts as agents of sickness the same way we talk about having a cold or exposure to poison ivy or ingesting strychnine.<br />
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One source of our fear is of course the social stereotype and stigma of mental illness. While the term itself <i>denotes</i> the mere fact of being sick in or by ones thoughts and emotions, the social <i>connotations</i> imply a severe, intractable, quasi-criminal existential threat, or a permanent invalid. This not only causes people to react to mental illness in inappropriate, unhelpful and excessive ways, it also causes them to <i>require</i> claims that something is a mental illness meet that criteria. There's even a confounding ambivalence between the conceptions of threat vs. sufferer. There's an insidious cultural mythology about schizophrenia that the psychosis somehow overrides the ability to be miserable. Spend a week on a psych ward and you learn that is not the case. Psychosis is a wholesale distributor of profound human misery and despair.<br />
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But the fact remains, mental illness in the public mind implies permanent menace or permanent uselessness. In our minds, there are no mental health equivalents to having a cold, or being laid up with a mental equivalent of home-puking-your-guts-out-you-poor-thing. In those physical analogs the ailments are mere impediments to flourishing, calling for the right measures of aid, healing, and understanding. We have trouble seeing mental illness this way. It's getting better but we have a long way to go. This is not to say that we don't respond to mental suffering or struggle properly either. Coming to the aid of someone mentally and emotionally overwhelmed by circumstances (divorce, job loss, death of loved one) is common practice. So is trying to help someone who we realize has misunderstandings that cause them to suffer and grossly impede their ability to flourish. Yet we can't quite bring ourselves to acknowledge them as sickened or afflicted in the same fashion we acknowledge someone with Influenza. They have to be broken by it some way first, and even then there are lots of reservations.<br />
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The point of all this being that until our conception of mental illness develops the same level of nuance that our conception of physical (read not-mental) illness has, tagging anything as a mental illness will be problematic. The originator may have a very properly nuanced claim about why a certain thing can be properly called such, and may even articulate the nuance well. Yet until society is ready to receive that nuance without recasting it into the misconceptions that currently hold sway this this will remain a risky business indeed.<br />
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Still one can't rule out an eventual utility to letting some beliefs get treated as illness. Take a case where a person has trust issues and has come to believe their spouse is unfaithful. There may have even been a past indiscretion, but they've worked hard to reconcile. The transgressor has repented, and is genuinely sorry, and for all practical purposes can be trusted, but their spouse just can't shed the belief in their infidelity. They know that this is because of the trust issues. They have an adult understanding of the psychogenic source of the the belief's persistence. If there were a reliable methodological aide to changing that belief, and if they wanted to access it for the purpose of allowing their relationship to flourish going forward, would it be ethical not to provide it? It may not be possible to abdicate our obligation to solve ethical questions just because they wouldn't exist without the methodology.Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-88536049909644017992013-04-25T12:03:00.001-07:002013-04-25T12:03:51.836-07:00Would our extinction be so bad?It's bad enough that we have to contemplate our own mortality and that of those we love and care for, but our understanding of our state of affairs is forcing us to contemplate the reality that species don't last either.<br />Humans, being a species, are not immune, so it's certain that at some point down the line there will no longer be anything recognizably homo sapiens sapiens.<br /><br />The first thought we tend to have about this eventuality is that it's a disaster, and I'll agree that if were talking about (geologically) sudden extirpation of our kind, say by asteroid, it's pretty easy to put it on the VERY-BAD-NOT-GOOD side of the ledger. But say that in, oh, maybe 400,000 years the earth no longer hosts a single human being, would <i>that</i> be a bad thing? What should we feel about such an eventuality? <br /><br />It could depend on how the disappearance came about. Would my australopithecene great-to-the-Nth grandfather lament the differences between Lucy and my daughter Claire? Should we see ourselves as their triumph through the ages or the record of their eventual downfall? If we view it as triumph, than if we are simply displaced by a new branch of evolutionary descendants, we should see it as surviving. After all, we already know our descendants are going to be a little different, if they eventually become a lot different, how bad would that be?<br /><br />On the other hand suppose our ecological niche slowly disappeared and our numbers dwindled down to zero. Or a virus evolved that impaired our ability to reproduce with the same result. Would that be so awful? If so, why? Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-70412201048792070162013-04-22T18:03:00.004-07:002013-04-22T18:31:20.621-07:00Skepticism vs. Absolute Freedom of ThoughtIs there an irreconcilable conflict between absolute freedom of thought and skepticism?<br />
If we define skepticism as the insistence that all truth claims must be vetted through reason, evidence, and otherwise sound epistemology, then were imposing strong restrictions on our true belief. If absolute freedom of thought implies zero duty to concede anything to anyone; if there are no restrictions on true belief under absolute freedom of thought, whence the necessary restrictions of skepticism?<br />
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A skeptic provides a priori the standards, benchmarks, and requirements by which they are willing to be convinced. This represents a partial abdication of their absolute freedom in favor of saying, "rather than merely believing whatever appeals to me, I will follow the data and the logic to it's best conclusion independent of what I expect or want." A skeptic has obligations.<br />
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Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-47668699673457892942013-04-16T07:52:00.001-07:002013-04-23T18:42:24.812-07:00Why are you safe from me?<br />
There will be a lot of talk about security and prevention over the next few months. As you listen and take part in these conversations, I would have you keep this in the back of your mind.<br />
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We walk past each other daily, most of us as strangers. We rarely notice just how simple and easy it would be to inflict grievous harm on our fellows. Something heavy in the hand, an earnest well-aimed blow, and just like that, a human being is killed or maimed by our hand. Add some other tools and the right knowledge and it becomes even easier to do--to even more people, but such tools and knowledge are not necessary, and in any case they're not difficult to obtain.<br />
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The idea that all our security apparatus, and police, and weapons, and retributive justice do the bulk of prevention of such behavior is a fantasy. They have some effect out on the margins for sure, but their effect pales compared to what really prevents this kind of violence. Desire.<br />
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Like almost everyone I know, I have <i><u>never</u></i> crushed anyone's skull, or set someone on fire, or poisoned them, or blown them to bits with explosives. The reason seems to me very simple. I've never really <i><u>wanted</u></i> to do so. Sure I've been angry, and like anyone my mind has indulged abstract notions of doing harm to someone for some real or imagined grievance. Fortunately this has never risen to the level of my taking action. If (forbid it) my mind works into a state of truly wanting to make such things happen, and I keep this reasonably to myself so that no one knows how dangerous I have suddenly become, what's to stop me? For all practical purposes, nothing.<br />
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Maybe you're feeling a little creepy wondering just how much time I spend contemplating whether to commit one of these gruesome acts. Very little, <i>per se</i>, let me assure you. It's just that we have been mired in a long public conversation about security from national to personal for years, and that conversation is usually framed in terms of "What protects me from others?". I imagined a partial answer was available by casting myself as the potential threat and instead asking "What protects others from <i>me</i>?" The grim musings are a part of this thought experiment.<br />
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It seems obvious that what protects others from me, is, well, <i><u>me</u></i>. I am the chief impediment, or more properly my lack of desire to do harm is. This is marginally augmented by the social protections and sanctions of society and it's laws, as well as the threat to me if my intended victim has a chance to act in their own defense, but only marginally.<br />
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So while the issue of public and private security is revisited in the context of the Boston Marathon bombings, keep in mind that security flows not from its apparatus, but the cultivation of trust, loyalty to strangers, and above all our mutually learning not to want the destruction of other human beings.Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-35511332826941377332012-11-07T07:54:00.001-08:002012-11-07T08:12:54.803-08:00Sorry, this wasn't the real battle with big moneyLoath am I to harsh the well-earned mellow this fine shining morning, but before too much of the adrenaline wears off, a warning. Dark money gets more bang for its buck in the mid-term elections where turnout tends to be low (i.e when the voters suppress themselves). The GOP knows the demographic tides they swim against and they already have plans in place to re-stock the war chests and push ahead for 2014. Even now they hope to achieve again what they accomplished in 2010, floating bizarre reactionaries into office on a tide of money while the bulk of the electorate stays home.<br />
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So while it was critical for all of us to work and turn out for yesterday's outcome, our harder fight is coming. They are waiting for us to stop punching, to stop guarding our heads. Ruling classes never quit--ever.<br />
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If yesterday's gains from our investment is to become a growing portfolio we have to keep working, because as encouraging as the results were, they are not all that big.<br />
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If you are serious about not having yesterday's results cut out from under us in the short term, treat the next two years like you treated the last two, maybe even more so. The tactics are the same.<br />
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Write many letters. Handwritten if possible. Send them to officeholders on both sides.<br />
Raise money.<br />
Communicate regularly with allies.<br />
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Fact-check relentlessly and publish and share all things necessary to drag the opposition into the light.<br />
Be true. The reality-based community swims against a strong tide, but it successfully forced blatant falsehood have a pretty bad day yesterday. We need to sustain that. Hammer reality home at every chance.<br />
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Above all, DON'T. GET. COCKY.<br />
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They have a lot of money to play with.</div>
Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-24999078028467624222012-10-29T07:05:00.004-07:002012-10-29T07:06:08.334-07:00Glen Beck calls Hurricane Sandy God's Last Warning to Vote Romney.<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">C'mon.....you know he's thinking it. He has to be.</span></span>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-32052638200165438682012-10-27T08:34:00.002-07:002012-10-27T16:39:26.070-07:00Myriad Problems with Pascal's Wager.<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">For those of you who don't know, Pascal was a 17th century French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. For most of his early life he was ambivalent about religion, taking it up only to drop it again. Then at the age of 31 he had an intense religious experience late one night in bed, after which he became devoutly Catholic. Still, as a philosopher he realized there was a problem. In the absence of such an experience what compelling reason would there be to believe. Rigorous skepticism, with which Pascal was intimately familiar as a scientist, would suggest not believing. One must expect therefore a considerable number of people "so made as they cannot believe" on perfectly reasonable grounds. What of them? As a probability theorist, Pascal attempted to solve the problem mathematically as a wager in the following terms.</span></span></span><br />
<ol style="background-color: white; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; list-style-image: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 3.2em; padding: 0px;">
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"God is, or He is not"</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to reason, you can defend either of the propositions.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You must wager. (It's not optional.)</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.</span></li>
<li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"><br />In short,<br />If you bet on the truth of atheism and are wrong, you suffer an infinite infinity of misery in hell.<br />If you bet on the truth of atheism and are right, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.</span><br />If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are wrong, it has little to no effect on your outcomes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you bet on the truth of Christian doctrine and are right, you enjoy an infinity of infinite happiness in heaven.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Therefore, Pascal argues, even if the truth of the Christian Doctrine is extremely unlikely, one should still choose to believe in it to maximize your expected outcomes. Why? Because of the math.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The expected outcome of any binary wager is the sum of the two outcomes weighted by their respective probabilities. Say the probability that Christian doctrine is true is ten million to one, or 0.0000001. That sets the probability that atheism is true at 0.9999999. What happens if you bet on atheism. If atheism turns out to be right as the odds suggest, you have simply ended up with some fixed quantity of benefit from your one-and-only life. If you were fortunate it was pretty good even if it seemed a little too short. On the other hand it may have sucked but at least its over now, que sera. In either case its a finite quantity, lets call it X. If atheism turns out to be wrong though, you get an eternity of infinite suffering tacked on after death, which we express as the quantity minus infinity (-inf). The expected return E of a bet on atheism is then negative infinity.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E=0.0000001*(-inf) + 0.9999999*X = -inf</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because even 1 tenmillionth of negative infinity is a negative infinity, and it remains so even if you add 9,999,999 ten millionths of a finite quantity to it. The presence of an infinite quantity overwhelms the finite probabilities and the finite outcome X.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flip it around and for exactly the same reasons, a bet in favor of the Christian doctrine where the reward for being right is an eternity of infinite happiness, or plus infinity (+inf), gives an expectation value of</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E=0.0000001*(+inf) + 0.9999999*X = +inf</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Therefore, says Pascal, using the same logic you would apply to any game of chance, or an investment portfolio, bet on the Christian Doctrine.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That all seems straightforward, right? . Obviously one should believe in the Christian Doctrine.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, no.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Notice first how Pascal drastically and artificially limits the possibilities. Only Atheism or the Christian doctrine are permitted. Then the associated outcomes after death limited to three possibilities: oblivion, infinite eternal torment, or infinite eternal happiness. These are added on to whatever one's worldly life amounts to, which only counts, in Pascal's scheme if Atheism is correct, because then your one and only worldly life is all you get.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 21px;">Pascal gets away with only two options because most of us spend our lives embedded in a society with one dominant religion. Having one option to unbelief seems natural. But there and have been thousands of religions based on myriad gods, with incompatible dogma and doctrines. This means that at least most of them have to be wrong. Pascal just excludes these out of hand, but we have to take all comers. I would argue that as the minimum number of candidate religions that must be wrong grows, the odds that all of them are probably wrong goes up too. Even if we can be sure that there is a correct choice, we should expect to get it wrong given the sheer number of options.<br /></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">We also must ask what constitutes an acceptable wager on Christian Doctrine under Pascal's conditions. When Pascal tells us to just go ahead and believe, what does that mean? How does that go? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;">Starting from a point of unbelief, a lot depends on what holds is necessary and sufficient for Christian salvation. If you have to genuinely believe, then Pascal is assuming that for the right reward (instead of a convincing case) we can, of our own volition, create true belief; spinning it fully formed out of a sliver of doubt in our atheism. On the other hand, if true belief is not required, Pascal would appear to be telling us that we <u>should simply <i>act</i> as if we believe</u>. This runs right up against the debate about whether Christian salvation is a matter of what you really believe, or what you say or appear to believe, or dependent on act commensurate with the doctrine.<br /><br />Neither seems very plausible. Belief isn't a matter of volition. I cannot arbitrarily decide that I believe the the Earth is a flat disc; I KNOW it's a sphere. Is it plausible that merely for some reward (say $2,000,000), I could actually stop thinking that? No! That is not how true belief and knowledge work. On the other hand it's even less plausible that feigned belief would pass as a hedge bet by a true unbeliever. It implies a God that accepts phony Bad Faith, which seems a bit sleazy.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">It's also no accident that Pascal needs the stakes to be so exaggerated, otherwise there would be nothing to offset the utter lack of evidence on which to base a decision. This is simple game theory. Who would buy a $1 Lotto ticket at 47 million:1 odds if the max payout was $15? No one. The stakes HAVE to be outrageous. This is the heart of Pascal's argument.: Given the unlimited size of the purported "Jackpot" isn't even a remote chance worth the gamble? </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;"><br />Well, No. Exagerating the stakes in cases where the odds against are astronomically high is merely an exploitation ploy against human psychology. This is how people are duped into buying Lotto tickets, or penny stocks. Most of us lack the intuition to grasp really large and really small values. When outrageous claims are in play, it becomes almost certain that someone is being played for a sap on that basis.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 21px;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">The last thing wrong with the wager is it's faulty assessment of the cost of belief. Pascal asserted that the cost was essentially nil. If there is no god, no heaven, the true believer simply dies and ceases to be regardless of his belief. In this case, since he is not even alive to be disappointed, Pascal sees this as a wash.<br /><br />But is this true? True Belief spawns large and small changes in one's behavior. A sizable portion of these changes serve to benefit the faith as an institution much more than the believer as an individual. True Believers invest significant portions of their money and time, and cede a lot of their autonomy to the church and its observances. For the private unbeliever, who is merely trying to hedge his bet per Pascal's recommendation the situation is worse. He is still compelled by his strategy to act out as if he were a true believer. To cover remote chance that salvation will be needed, he must make the best show of belief he can muster. If what he really thinks doesn't matter, the quality of his pretense is all that's left. This is the most insidious hidden cost ignored by Pascal. It is physically and emotionally painful to break the integrity between how we truly think and feel and how we speak and act. It feels good to be honest with and about ourselves, both privately and publicly, whereas we suffer when we are false. There are certainly exceptions, and our ability to tolerate a certain amount of ambiguity is one of our better traits. Still, the evidence is that we are more miserable, perhaps most miserable, when we deny true selves.<br /><br />This is not to deny value of the community, solidarity and moral teamwork one finds in church involvement. This can offset some of the real cost of belief, but that's the point. Such things have to be counted because Pascal is wrong in his basic assumption. Belief, true or pretended, comes with a real bill which is often high.</span>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-49688492354671474942012-08-02T09:11:00.001-07:002012-08-02T09:24:17.295-07:00Thank you for smoking: Olympic Edition<br />
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A recent trend on twitter was #RejectedOlympicEvents. Most of them were pretty lame--Quidditch and Twerking came up constantly, but after a little thought I think I have a good one.<br />
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Winter Speed Smoking!<br />
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This event would be based on what those few remaining nicotine fiends at work have to do in December on break now that most public spaces forbid smoking. They would start from a sitting position at a desk. At the gun they would dash to the elevator (or stairs), race-walk outside past the No Smoking Perimeter, light up in the wind and snow, and smoke as many
ciggies as possible while still getting back to their desk in 15 minutes. You’d get points
for the number of cigarettes you smoked but penalized if you were late getting
back to your desk, or for stepping into a No Smoking area with a lit cigarette. You could have separate events for pipe and cigar, or rolling your own.<br />
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Can you imagine the
kind of withered, green-faced tar-fingered, brown-toothed specimens who would excel at
this? The winners would have to be helped up on to
the podium with their little O2 tanks and nasal canulas. The winners anthem would start and you
wouldn’t know whether they were just putting their hand over their heart or clutching at their angina.</div>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-7351129288700819212012-07-19T12:55:00.000-07:002012-07-30T12:54:11.051-07:00There really is no such thing as Supernatural.Advocates for the real existence of spirit entities (whether they be ghosts or gods or the immaterial soul or what have you) or of magic or psychic phenomena, often claim that atheists and skeptics "by ruling out the possibility of the supernatural, are merely being dogmatic in the same fashion that they so love to criticize".<br />
I would like to put this foolish old shibboleth to rest once and for all. I know this is probably a vain hope. Old dogs may not learn new tricks, but they never forget their old ones. Still, with a sigh, I will try to make clear that the concept of supernatural itself is meaningless.<br />
<br />
We start with the word. What does it mean? As an adjective it simply means above or beyond the natural. From the Oxford Dictionaries more specifically:<br />
<h3 class="partOfSpeech">
<span class="partOfSpeech"></span> </h3>
<ul class="sense-entry">
<li class="sense sense-type-core scrollerBlock"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=211070732192160472" name="supernatural__1"> </a><div class="senseInnerWrapper">
<span class="definition">(of a manifestation or event) attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature:</span><span class="exampleGroup exGrBreak"> <i class="example"> a supernatural being.</i></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=211070732192160472" name="supernatural__2"></a></div>
</li>
</ul>
We must then ask what it means to be beyond scientific understanding. It could mean indistinguishable from non-existent. As McKown memorably quipped "The invisible and non-existent look very much alike". However, to those who make affirmative claims regarding the supernatural, it means <i>definitely understandable, but just not via science</i>. If they are of a more agnostic or diplomatic frame of mind, they might soften this to, <i>we shouldn't rule out the possibility, we must take it seriously</i>. Each view is rooted in the idea that we can somehow bypass the requirements of physical evidence, reason and rigorous epistemology, i.e science, and validate claims about what is actually the case in some other way. We must accept the possibility of Other Ways of Knowing. There are difficulties with this, which I will get to.<br />
<br />
Before that we must next ask what it means to be beyond the laws of nature. Nature as a word has <a href="http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/nature">many meanings</a>, and this can obscure rather than clarify.<br />
<br />
I submit that for this discussion it <u><b>does not</b></u> mean <br />
<ul>
<li><span class="definition"><i>the phenomena of the physical world
collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other
features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human
creations</i></span> </li>
</ul>
but instead means<br />
<ul>
<li><i><span class="definition">the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something: (</span></i><i class="languageGroup">informal)</i><span class="definition"> <i>the inherent and unchangeable character of something</i>.</span></li>
</ul>
So when we say laws of nature, we are expressing a fundamental idea--that reality is comprised of things constrained by their inherent character. In Wittgenstein's terms, when we state that something <i>is the case</i>, we are making a declaration about its nature. This is the entire theme of Lucretius' poem <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html"><i>De rerum natura</i></a>, <i>(On the nature of things</i>). It is why the original term for physical science was Natural Philosophy, the investigation into the true nature of things.<br />
<br />
Therin lies the problem. Whenever somebody talks affirmatively about souls, or ghosts, or gods, or spirits, or anything else that gets lumped under the term supernatural, they always end up ascribing an actual nature to them. They have to. This is what it means to describe things that way. So when they claim that someone they know is a real fortune teller, they are saying that it is in that person's <i>nature</i> to transcend the arrow of time to have experiences of the future in advance. When they talk about a god, they might start by claiming it is essentially unknowable. They will strongly suggest that it is impossible for the deity to be constrained in any way. Yet saying this god is unconstrained by nature, is the same thing as saying that it doesn't have a nature of its own. There's no way around this. To <i>have</i> a nature is <i>by definition</i> to <i>be</i> constrained. At heart believers know this to be the case. In any conversation with someone who believes in a god they will eventually make explicit claims about what that god's nature is and isn't, what that god does and does not do.. Make an assertion counter to their account, and they will correct you instantly. They will say, sure, god can be anything, <i>except that</i>. The same is true for believers in ghosts and psychics, immaterial souls. For the believer, these things can be expected and eventually observed to behave in particular ways and not in others according to the nature of what they are. In the end to be knowable is to have a nature, Supernatural is a useless term.<br />
<br />
Which returns us to the idea of something "beyond scientific understanding". As long as your goal is to determine <i>what is the case, </i>you are inquiring after the nature of things. Once you expect to observe something behaving in a particular way, you have exited the realm of "other ways of knowing", and fully entered the realm of science. That is the problem with the doctrine of knowledge by faith which asserts that there are two spheres, one where things can only be known through reason, evidence and sound epistemology--science, and a second where you can know things in some other way without those requirements. This assumes we have the capacity to tell the difference. It would not work otherwise. Without being able to tell which approach to use in a particular case, we end up just guessing and hoping. I can report that have found no evidence for such a capacity within myself. I don't think it exists in others. However, even that might not be important in the end. If science is what we use to vet claims about the nature of those things expected to have observable effects, the only thing we have left to vet by "other ways of knowing" like faith are <i>things without a nature of their own which are <u>not</u> expected to have observable effects</i>. I can't imagine what such things would be. How would we attempt a conversation about them? For all practical purposes this sounds like a null set.<br />
<br />
So this insistence that true critical thinkers must admit to the possibility of the supernatural is at heart bogus, because the term is empty. Supernatural is an abstract point of departure that one has to retreat from the minute any meaningful conversation starts.Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-47828075467489013902012-03-09T08:12:00.001-08:002012-03-09T08:39:33.846-08:00On beating up a cub scout. Rush Limbaugh's Mike Tyson moment.<h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1}" style="font-family: inherit;"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_4f58a6d7bb7f36d70768753"><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1}" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;">Let's be clear.<br />
<br />
I don't want to silence Rush Limbaugh, no matter how dangerous I find his maniacal rantings, or the crazed voice of extreme right-wing radio pundits. I think its better to know how bad, how ugly, how crazy the ideas are that are being injected into our intellectual currency. Racial bigots, for example, have proven to require some watching, so knowing who they are is actually a good thing.<br />
<br />
However, I don't begrudge what's happened to him over his attacks on Sandra Fluke.<br />
<br />
A lot of hay is made over the lack of civility in public discourse these days, and rightly so. Contempt, so it seems, is the new national pastime. Still, the history of our public conversation reveals a consistent distinct and somewhat separate arena of ugly confrontation, an inevitable consequence of our rights to free expression. Those who have made some study of this often point to the scurrilous broadsides Thomas Jefferson had published against John Adams, which didn't so much question his fitness for the office of President, but whether it was safe to allow him to roam at liberty in society at all. The broadsides were, by any reasonable definition of the term, gross public libel.<br />
<br />
The reason they were not treated as libel was the public acceptance of that same accepted sphere of ugly confrontation. </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="font-size: small;">The rules governing what happens in the arena seem very different than those without, and we find this acceptable. In a sense its a lot like boxing or any other violent sport. If I slam my fist into your face in a legally sanctioned bout its just a part of a contest. If I do it to you on the street its a felony without some extreme extenuating circumstances (e.g. you would have to be an unavoidable threat to life and limb). Even if its preceded by our mutually agreeing to have a such fight in the street, its still a felony, because in the absence of a grant of exception by law, <i>fighting is illegal</i>.</span></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1}" style="font-family: inherit;"></h6><h6 class="uiStreamMessage" data-ft="{"type":1}" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="text_exposed_show" style="font-size: small;">The thing about these arenas, whether of ugly confrontation, or physical violence, is that nowadays they're populated with people who walked in with both eyes open looking for, or at least being open to that kind of fighting. The Roman Coliseum where prisoners or slaves were dragged in along with the seasoned professional gladiators is no longer an acceptable model for this kind of thing. This makes the question of who's in and who's out, who's playing and who's not, important. In highly public discourse there might be some ambiguity about who's in the ring and who's out, but that doesn't mean there are no reasonable answers when the issue comes up.<br />
</span></h6><span class="text_exposed_show" style="font-size: small;"> There's a final important distinction to be made. Even in the arena there are definite fouls (a boxer after all can't just knee his opponent in the groin). Still there's a difference between doing so in the ring and outside of it. In the ring you get penalized in the context of the game, possibly even to the point of loss, or qualification), but you usually don't get dragged into court later. (Although a recent NHL case of a player being clubbed in the head from behind with a stick by an opponent did lead to formal criminal charges, of which he was acquitted.). <br />
<br />
What sets Imus' and Rush's gaffes apart is that they fail on both fronts. The Rutgers girls weren't in that arena of ugly confrontation any more than Ms. Fluke was. To the contrary, Fluke and the Rutgers team were operating in very distinct, formally ethical managed contests (sworn testimony before congress, and sportsmanship guided athletics). Imus and Limbaugh were doubly wrong in that they committed what would have been a major foul in the arena, to people who weren't even in it. It was like seeing Mike Tyson bite of the ear of a cub scout.</span><br />
</div><span style="font-size: small;"></span></h6>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-40557967222066239642012-02-04T19:06:00.000-08:002012-02-05T10:36:56.467-08:00Musings on Susan G. Komen and Planned ParenthoodBy almost any measure the recent Susan G Komen affair is an amazing story.<br />
Here are some of my musings. <br />
<br />
To start with, Susan G. Komen for the Cure stands on its own as an exhibition of the primacy, power, and pathology of the branding process in modern culture. In a near-perfect articulation of the marketer's art, the gaudy pink of the SGK brand infiltrated our daily lives in a manner that has been, if you'll pardon the expression, virtually metastatic. Within the last few years a few suspicious grumblings about the wisdom, value, or even good intent of this unchecked march have percolated into the public consciousness, and a few instances of their market penetration have smacked of the bizarre (all that pink clashing with NFL team colors anyone?). The thought nagged that, as with many brands, their relentless presence was becoming its own purpose. Still, their momentum seemed unstoppable, their aura saintly, their position secure.<br />
<br />
Their case also illustrates the how the complementary imperative of <i>protecting</i> the brand works on the institutional psychology of corporations, and often not to the good. Charlie Pierce spoke wonderfully to the force of this drive in a recent article about Penn State's handling of the child rape case, replying to any who would wonder "How Penn State could have let such evil stay hidden?" with...<i> It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.<br />
</i>The point here is not that SGK lied or covered up anything. In that respect the stories differ. What they have in common is how once a brand gets to be a certain size, the drive of its leadership and its loyal following to protect it can border on manic paranoia. The larger and more established the branded institution, the more relentlessly protective they become. It is this fact about institutions, more than any other, that sits at the heart of Komen's Planned Parenthood debacle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
While it is difficult to pull the exact reality out of the <a href="http://nptimes.blogspot.com/2012/02/komen-planned-parenthood-links.html">storm</a> of reports and <a href="http://www.creators.com/liberal/connie-schultz.html">editorials</a>, a reasonable summary of the affair goes something like this. A failed right wing anti-abortion gubernatorial candidate from Georgia, Karen Handel, was hired as a Senior Vice President of Communications at SGK. Whatever else she did to serve the SGK cause, it appears she also came packaged as a classic Trojan Horse hiding a clandestine plan to get SGK to take a public whack at Planned Parenthood. The plan was not one of honest persuasion of the SGK leadership, but rather by a disingenuous political maneuver. A policy was introduced under which SGK would refuse to fund organizations under government investigation. The masking rationale for the policy was protecting the SGK brand from involvement with controversy (a genuine part of Handel's purview). The true rationale was to tie SGKs hands later when Senator Cliff Stearns called for a federal audit of Planned Parenthood, forcing SGK to execute the policy, and terminate its funding for PP's cancer screening programs in low income areas. While the financial impact of the termination was negligible compared with PP's overall budget, the expected political payoff was a different story. They could clobber Planned Parenthood politically as having been found unworthy by the large publicly sanctified and beloved Komen organization. It was planned as a hit and run PR coup for the movement, and a feather in the caps of those who pulled it off.<br />
<br />
At first, on the surface, this looked like a political black-op of almost Mephistophelean cunning, especially the playing of SGK's large institutional paranoia for its brand to set up the attack and then set the pieces in motion. Then almost overnight it all went marvelously, horribly, wrong. Instead of getting their free-hit on and subsequent public ridicule of Planned Parenthood, they instigated a virtual mob to rise up and overwhelm SGK stripping it of its public sanctity, and wrecking a sizable portion of if its brand image, and in all likelihood diminishing its revenue generating power for the immediate future. Even worse, the political and financial fallout for Planned Parenthood was all positive, with compensating donations flooding in, including $250,000 dollars in matching funds from Michael Bloomberg. When your own party's closest approximation to Vladimir Putin pays your actual target a quarter of a million dollars in reparations, your political theater piece has gone from a John LeCarre intrigue to a Peter Sellers' farce in world record time.<br />
<br />
There are only three speculations possible about how to view the role of SGK leadership in all this. Either they were fairly duped by clever people after the manner of Bernie Madoff's victims, or they were not-very-bright rubes that never should have fallen for it, or they fully understood what was happening and thought they were going to be OK. In all but the first case, they can probably be held culpable for what they actually brought on themselves. If you grant the validity of the need to protect your enterprise from the effects of controversy when your enterprise isn't controversial, it seems obvious you have to two basic strategies for deciding who you work with. One is to be controversy blind and work with anyone willing to work with you toward the common goal. Disease eradication efforts by NGO's work this strategy all the time. They take the strict line "<i>We're here about the disease and getting rid of it. Whatever grievances lie behind your local internecine squabbles, we're only here to make sure that when you resolve them the disease will be gone too. Whaddya say?</i>" The second possible strategy is to be controversy avoidant, and limit yourself to only the most vanilla, of non-controversial partners. Here the line is "<i>Don't call us until you work out your problems. We don't want any trouble</i>." The scope of a controversy blind enterprise is potentially larger by virtue of unlimited collaboration than that of a controversy averse enterprise. However if you adopt the first strategy, you have to stick with it. You can't be the slightest bit fickle about your commitment to unaligned benevolence. It will be hard enough to get people to take it seriously when its consistently true. If you give the slightest hint of preference you're lost. The natives will bury you. This I think is what happened to Susan G. Komen this week, and if the leadership was fully aware of what they were doing, then they can be reasonably seen as incompetent rather than innocent.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, SGK has recanted its decision, recommitted itself to funding PP's breast cancer programs, but many of the angered have expressed unwillingness to let bygones be bygones. That may even be the best thing for the overall public good. An aura of sanctity rarely disposes individuals or institutions to behave at their best, and SGK may be better off without it. Also, if there is any merit to the criticism that they were overgrown and had become big simply for the sake of being big, then the backlash will have been a tonic, possibly even curative. Mostly though, it is reasonable to wonder whether the entire Susan G. Komen for the Cure enterprise is a quixotic venture. Its important to compare them with the organization from which they drew their cachet--the national effort to eradicate polio or The March of Dimes. There's something essentially misleading about the comparison this invites us to make. The effort to eradicate polio was vastly different from the ambition to cure breast cancer. At the time of the of the Mother's March there were ... things we knew for certain that made it rational to think the effort would succeed. First we knew polio was a virus, Second we knew that it was the kind of virus to which humans developed permanent immunity after infection. Third, since Jenner and Pasteur, we knew the fundamental theory of vaccination. Infect the subject with enough of something identical to the virus that doesn't give them the disease and let the body do the rest. This was hard knowledge, not hopeful speculation. We didn't have to figure out what would eradicate polio, we already knew. We just didn't know how to make it. Figuring out how to make it, and then scaling that up to a safe and reliable industrial process, then verifying product safety and efficacy in the population, was the whole purpose of the March of Dimes. Since the only real question was how soon we would have it and since we wanted it as soon as possible, the law of diminishing return on investment was a moot point. By contrast there is no such foundation underlying the efforts of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The research they support by nature operates on the boundary of diminishing returns, and factoring in the opportunity costs the value of throwing more funding at Breast Cancer research is a serious issue. Which is all another way of saying that a smaller Susan G. Komen might be a better one. And if it means those ghastly pink football shoes go away too, no one will be happier than me.Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-78792639230304890892012-01-10T10:08:00.000-08:002012-01-10T12:45:30.436-08:00Using the Right Words for Impact<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>(I originally posted this on the critical thinking website <a href="http://www.doesthismakesense.com/">Does This Make Sense</a> , an excellent collection of writers, hosted/edited by the wonderful <a href="http://www.nikkistern.com/">Nikki Stern</a>. I repost it here as a backup.)</i></span><br />
<br />
<div class="blog-text clearfix prel mtm mbm">Certain sports are now being forced into a deep conversation about concussive head injuries, with attendant changes in the terms of the discussion. To begin, the linking of the words head and injury is itself a change. Traditionally sport makes a distinction between the terms <i>hurt</i> and <i>injured. </i> When an athlete is<i> hurt</i> they are in pain but safely able to play, maybe at a reduced capacity, whereas an <i>injured </i>athlete is damaged to the point of being unfit for play or at risk for even graver damage unless they stop playing. Until recently in the culture of sport, to have a concussion, at least in all but the most severe cases, was to be hurt, not injured. Effective lobbying and awareness campaigns by medical advocacy and other groups are largely responsible for changing this culture to where concussion is now being counted as an injury to the brain. The change was helped along by the fact that the victims of these concussions represent a substantial economic asset to their respective professional enterprises as well as themselves.<br />
<br />
Also significant is the growing body of preliminary but ominous evidence for long term physical and psychological damage in retired professionals in violent sports. Granted, <i>dementia pugilistica</i>, the medical term for punch drunk, which is the neurpsychological deficits seen in aging professional boxers that result from a career spent being punched in the head, has been part of the lexicon for a long time, but it is restricted, at least conceptually, to a particular sport. Now an increasing number of aging football and hockey players are reporting a similar diffuse spectrum of cognitive and affective mental health problems over their lifespan, to a degree that has become impossible to ignore. Concern has risen to the point that respective NFL and NHL players associations have started including it in their collective bargaining positions regarding player retirement benefits.<br />
<br />
The most dire evidence has come from the involvement of of neuroscientists who have brought new more sensitive tools to the study of the brain and behavior. Histological analysis, which reveals details at the level of brain cells and their component large molecule protiens, is finding a characteristic neural degeneration in brains of those with history of repeat head trauma. They have introduced a new term into the lexicon: <i>Chronic Traumatc Encephalopathy</i> or CTE. The term was born after a set of post mortem case studies of the brains of a handful of NFL players who died at very young ages, all but one by suicide of one form or another, and who's post football life was characterized by a host of severe neuropsychiatric symptoms and/or bizarre behavior. All their brains showed dramatic evidence of neuronal damage at the fine structural levels now revealed by the neurological assays. (A perfusion of work and writing on the subject is available. I refer the reader to Malcom Gladwell's 2009 essay, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell"><i><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Offensive Play: How different are dogfighting and football</span></i>?</a>, Christopher Nowinski's 2006 book <i><a href="http://www.chrisnowinski.com/head_games.html"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis</span></a>,</i> Ken Dryden's current article on Grantland.com <a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7352942/waiting-science">Concussions in the NHL: Waiting for Science</a>, and <a href="http://www.bu.edu/cste/">The Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy</a> website, for further reference.)<br />
<br />
The NFL and NHL, to their credit, have taken this new evidence and the new way of talking about concussion to heart. While there is some question in my mind whether their measures are sufficient, concussed players are now being afforded more protection and time to heal. Yet, by publicly responding to the problem, the NFL and NHL have also exposed what a Pandora's Box it is, and just how normal it is for their players to have concussions. Cases like NHL star Sidney Crosby who spent 11 months waiting to recover from post-concussion syndrome, only to be re-injured by an incidental blow to the head after less than a month back, serve to underscore the point. The magnitude of the problem only seems to grow the closer one looks at it. This is true of the continuing post-mortem brain research as well, which, if anything, grows more grim. More brains of athletes from sports involving violent collision will have to be studied to get a definitive answer to how many develop CTE, but the preliminary data point frighteningly in the direction of a high rather than low number.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to my closing modest suggestion, that we stop using the term contact sport or violent sport as our general term for these contests and use the term <i>impact sport</i>. Impact sports would be defined as those that <i>employ impacting blows, especially of unrestricted force, and particularly where increased force of impact confers competitive advantage.</i> Thus football would be an impact sport but wrestling would not, although both would be violent contact sports. Hockey would be an impact sport, water polo would not, although both are contact sports. Boxing would be the prime example of competitive advantage with greater impact, since if you hit someone hard enough to give them a concussion, you win the game. The point of the term impact sport would be to prevent these distinctions from confusing the conversation, while also avoiding focus on specific sports. Since there are many impact sports it makes no sense to have one conversation about football, one about hockey, etc. The term would also <i>exclude those sports that are merely dangerous, where an accidental impact is a significant risk without being a formal element of play</i>. Soccer players collide at high speed, downhill skiers and cyclists crash, divers hit their heads on springboards, yet these would not constitute impact sports. Also, excluded from the definition are sports where players are required by rule to avoid impact, such as charging in basketball. What I am suggesting is that we acknowledge that impact is part of some sports in ways it is not part of others, and that unrestricted impact is the single most important factor in the concussion debate. Not contact, not danger, not risk, not even violence.<br />
<br />
In conversation the most valuable result is not just the exchange of ideas, but the negotiation of better ways to talk about an issue. When the language does not conform to what is the case, the resulting discussion can't make reasonable headway. Using injured instead of hurt for sports concussion has represented progress in this sphere, and has already helped a great deal. Having a proper term for the kind of sport we're really talking about can only help further. </div>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-26360260601198236882010-09-30T07:49:00.000-07:002010-09-30T07:49:39.393-07:00A reply to a freind<em>An expansion of a recent short exchange I had on facebook.</em><br />
<em>The questions were posed by my friend Peg (before she took up the sailor's life.)</em><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">When I advocate in favor of gay marriage, I sometimes hear "it will hurt the marriage institution." My response, that gay marriage can't hurt marriage anymore than straight marriage has, is ignored. Would someone explain the rationale behind the "bad for marriage" argument to me? </span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This question is remarkable only for its utter lack of mystery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Religious authority has been losing its position as the definer of truth in many things--government, education, natural philosophy to name a few—for centuries. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They tried to hold the line on these fronts, but inevitably came up short.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marriage has been one remaining refuge where their longstanding priority in saying what goes is still more or less intact. Even after their power to influence sexual mores began to erode, marriage has been a bulwarked fortress from which they have had little cause to retreat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet, that, as the saying goes, was then, and this is now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Society is shifting towards dramatically increased tolerance of homosexuality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worse, there are open demands that homosexuals be allowed the covenant of marriage. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The religious realize they face a society that believes it has outgrown clerical authority on yet another topic. They simply find this difficult to bear.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One cannot completely discount the role of fear and hatred in all this, but we must resist the temptation to assume it is in total control of the reaction. Consider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If even the modest estimates of the proportion of gays in the Roman Catholic priesthood can be trusted (which they probably can, boy howdy can they), then homosexuality has to have been an open secret among thousands of clerical colleagues over years and years. Yet they have gone on rubbing elbows together in the arms of Mother Church without flinching. This is hardly a climate of rampant homophobia. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The idea that they simply can't bring themselves to understand the equivalence of a same sex union in terms of love, honor, commitment and growth is false.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The claim that if they could only be made to see this their opposition would evaporate is utter nonsense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are perfectly capable of seeing that, and the more intellectually reflective of them have probably already acknowledged it to themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might even acknowledge it openly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bottom line is that they just couldn't care less. The hate card makes good rhetoric, but it doesn’t frame the real issue.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>No, the thought process that sets off the alarm in the authoritarian clerical mindset is their unshakable belief that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">marriage IS what the church says it is, and only the church is allowed to say what it is</i>. Of course they'll rephrase that to say “what GOD says it is”, making sure to speak for him if he doesn’t make an appearance. It is one of the areas where they still hold a truly dominant share of the market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Were they to bow to shifting societal attitudes regarding marriage, they would be conceding away one of their last remaining spheres of dominance. The stakes for them are therefore enormous.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In a sense they are perfectly right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Societal introduction of gay marriage contrary to church instruction destroys the institution as they understand it, but only because that would mean it was no longer their sole province. They know damn well what they are being asked to give up.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 14pt; line-height: 115%;">All very good points and well-said. But the person I am trying to reason with is concerned only with the implications of legalizing CIVIL marriages.</span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. Certainly in a society where freedom of religion and separation of church and state are the law of the land, a civil administration of marriage is to be expected. But it is also true that our society in practice has greatly deferred to clerical authority in matters of marriage more than in any other arena. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How many people do we know that still get married by a cleric, even if their personal beliefs are agnostic at best.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The historical bargain of the establishment clause may have required the various sects and faiths to share power in matters nuptial, but the religionists understood that it was still mostly their game, and their ball. To this day faithful of many stripes expect that status quo to be upheld.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It does not matter to them, therefore, that a law allowing civil marriage would not encroach on their right to refuse to proffer the sacrament to homosexual union. The point is that in matters of what marriage is going to be in society they still expect to have the last word.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">This leaves them in a bind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, what they are trying to uphold is not a legal privilege as much as a Gentlemen’s Agreement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They may feel the legalization of civil union violates their purview, but what can they do?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more stridently religious can scream about sanctity, an explicitly religious concept, but that won’t stand long in the face of the establishment and separation clauses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can prattle about the offense of forcing believers to respect a bond sanctioned by the civil authority in violation of their deeply held religious laws, but that won’t hold up to scrutiny either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this society, the reach of religious law is short, and does not increase with the passion with which the faithful embrace it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Otherwise, orthodox synagogues would preclude the establishment of pig farms in the same neighborhood. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Second, a number of clerics and denominations have broken ranks and come out in favor of same sex marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some offer the sacrament where possible, either in accordance with or in lieu of existing civil recognition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One effect of this is to turn the legal landscape a full 180 degrees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It makes proffering the sacrament of marriage a matter of differing religious opinions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Constitution makes it very hard to ask the state to take a position adjudicating between such differences, all other things being equal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our best rule of thumb in such cases is for the state to remain neutral and proscribe sufficient room for all to practice as they see fit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This invariably favors the civil <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">allowance</i> of same sex union for those who want it.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Given all this, what can be said in defense of the old status quo?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not much.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The fall back becomes a preservationist argument.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marriage as defined in the old terms is claimed to be such an important and meaningful concept that it must be preserved <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in toto</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not a dram of its meaning can ever be allowed to evolve or pass away. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They might say something like “What would anyone add to or cut away from the Mona Lisa?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They will accuse us of trying to do something like that to marriage. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I can think of a few objections to this position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, it’s based on an assumption of some kind of perfection in the marriage concept they wish to preserve.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is very problematic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can trot out the theological “God made it perfect” claim in support of this, but it puts them squarely back in the arena of civil vs. clerical separation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beyond that, is there anything to suggest perfection in the institution?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its common practice certainly doesn’t, nor does its history of evolutionary change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At one time it meant a subjugation of a woman’s legal independence to her husband.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We’ve worked hard to rid ourselves of that, with some way yet to go, but the point is that if we thought the marriage concept was perfect, we wouldn’t be still working on it like that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other examples of change in the marriage concept can be brought readily to mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without some kind of static perfection to fall back on the preservationist argument starts to leak oil.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Even if we granted some kind of perfection to the traditional concept, that wouldn’t necessarily preclude anything new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To reply to the Mona Lisa analogy at its face value: Just because we want to keep Leonardo’s masterpiece intact doesn’t mean we have to tell Renoir or Pollock or O’keefe to lay down their brushes, or restrict them to pounding out duplicates of one portrait of an Italian merchant princess. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worthy things can coexist: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the more the better. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When Rodin crafted The Thinker, he did not detract from but added to the value of Michelangelo’s David.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Excellent yet different conceptions side by side offer far more than they do separately.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Finally the preservationist argument is a ploy: an attempt to get you to agree to manacles in advance of the debate. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s based on the knowledge that growth and change attends an annihilation of some fraction of the original. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instances where growth is exclusively amplification or simple addition are rare. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Natural, desirable, inevitable change usually discards some part of its beginning. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Insect and amphibian metamorphosis shows this in extremis. The caterpillar is continuous with the butterfly, yet only a small necessary amount of the caterpillar identity is preserved. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The flaw in the maneuver intended by the status quo defender becomes clear.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They will argue it does not matter what is gained by the expansion of the definition of marriage, if even the slightest bit of the original is discarded or lost, they will demand that it must not be done. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They deny growth, adaptation, and experiment: an excellent strategy, if the goal is to learn or invent absolutely nothing.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So the next time anyone asks you to put on the “preservationist” handcuffs, tell them no, it just doesn’t turn you on. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some may like, even need, bondage to be part of intellectual intercourse, but you simply have to have your hands free thank you very much. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If they complain, suggest that if they can’t “perform” under those circumstances the fault might not lie with you.</span></div>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-82904774447740335422010-09-28T19:17:00.000-07:002010-09-28T19:17:36.803-07:00In political theater the playwright you use matters<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:DontVertAlignCellWithSp/> <w:DontBreakConstrainedForcedTables/> <w:DontVertAlignInTxbx/> <w:Word11KerningPairs/> <w:CachedColBalance/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria Math"/> <m:brkBin m:val="before"/> <m:brkBinSub m:val="--"/> <m:smallFrac m:val="off"/> <m:dispDef/> <m:lMargin m:val="0"/> <m:rMargin m:val="0"/> <m:defJc m:val="centerGroup"/> <m:wrapIndent m:val="1440"/> <m:intLim m:val="subSup"/> <m:naryLim m:val="undOvr"/> </m:mathPr></w:WordDocument> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:LatentStyles DefLockedState="false" DefUnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<div class="MsoNormal"><i>Its been over a week since the undue attention was paid to a grandstanding Florida cleric. My thoughts are definitely out of synch with the news cycle but hey, the country was founded on letters that took weeks to deliver. I might still be in some window of opportunity. </i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Let me say up front: the threat to burn Koran’s by Terry Jones’ congregation should be seen exactly as they meant it to be seen.<span> </span>It is an aggressive provocation of another faith through desecration of its sacred objects, and a cynically intentional piece of political shock theater based on a Nazi trope.<span> </span>Their intention to “fan the flames” to create an increasingly visceral climate of intimidation toward muslims <i>as a people</i> in this country is obvious, and equivalent with the painting of a swastika on a synagogue by the KKK. (One point of exception here--the Klan itself never bothered to buy any synagogue before bombing or defacing it.<span> </span>Perhaps if that were required they might have been thwarted by the demands of frugality). <span> </span>Still, although its probably assumable that Jones’ tiny group of yahoos don’t have the stones to engage in violence on their own, there is every reason to treat them as if they intend to foment violence. <span> </span>If they can ignore decency and the lessons of history to play the Brownshirt, we can take it at face value.<span> </span>If they’re only faking, then as the Lerner and Lowe song says, “Well aint that too darn bad”.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">However this does raise the issue of what to do when an American community of faith comes under threat from other parts of the populace. A fundamental obligation of all civil authority is to protect freedom of worship, but no less than for any other civil liberty constitutionally proscribed.<span> </span>We have to understand that this is true even to the threat or application of deadly force: <span> </span>as when the National Guard escorted students into schools ordered to integrate.<span> </span>The message needs to be unequivocal.<span> </span>A segment of the population may have rights properly granted through due process.<span> </span>Some other antagonist segment may vow that those rights will be exercised <i>only over their dead bodies</i>.<span> </span>If they force the issue to that extreme, then the civil authority must be ready saying, “I<i>f you really won’t reconsider.<span> </span>If you’re really calling our bluff, so be it</i>”.<span> </span>If this results in the antagonist’s corpses gracing the occasion per their own draconian ultimatum, that’s unfortunate.<span> </span>It’s sad, but not necessarily bad. <span> </span><span> </span>This does not justify a hair trigger in such cases.<span> </span>Such action must always be a remedy of last resort. <span> </span>Still there’s a core of principles that must lead us to say at the appropriate time “No, I’m afraid we’re <i>really</i> going to have to <i>insist</i> you leave people to the rule and protection of the law.<span> </span>We’ll repeat this up to a point, but then we’re just going to open fire”.<span> </span>That’s the backstop behind the rights, as Hobbes duly pointed out.<span> </span><span> </span>It’s also the essence of what President Jefferson told the Baptists of Danbury regarding the Congregationalists of Danbury whom they feared.<span> </span>Jefferson’s letter is a beautiful essay on religious freedom and separation of church and state, but also a tacit reassurance that the government would behave as outlined above should the Congregationalists fail to leave the Baptists to live and worship in peace.</div><div class="MsoNormal">It’s a mistake to think that the driver behind this reality was a desire to assure the preservation and promotion of religion <i>per se</i>. <span> </span><span> </span>This view has kind of grown up to inform many people’s understanding of the first amendment.<span> </span>Believers and even a considerable portion of unbelievers think this.<span> </span>But the peaceful promulgation of faiths in order to enjoy benefits from them we can’t otherwise obtain was not the thing about the rights that everyone agreed on. <span> </span>To think this is nonsense.<span> </span><span> </span>The purpose of separation of church and state was to blunt the repeatedly demonstrated transgressions by religious authority, and to keep them from competing to get their hands on the levers of civil power.<span> </span>It’s a civilized alternative to sentiments exemplified in Diderot’s call to “hang the last tyrant with braided entrails of the last cleric”, which he believed would be necessary to fight the compulsion of religions to make men and the world over in their own image. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-75276844368528498592010-09-16T18:40:00.000-07:002013-04-22T18:05:18.611-07:00Mangled Myths (a division of Fractured Fairy Tales)<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>A little nonsense now and then ...</i></div>
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The last winged horse, the kind that could fly one directly to heaven, had to be put down after breaking a leg in a stakes race on Mt. Olympus in 823 A.D. They tried to splint the thing, but horses being what they are, it wouldn't stay off its feet, and they sent it to the celestial glue factory. Tragic really.<br />
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Since then all the Valkyrie have taken to riding mountain bikes. It’s really got them in shape too. Traditionally they carried a lot of body mass, but now they all have flat stomachs, legs like gymnasts and shoulders like Olympic swimmers. They can’t go anywhere without being hit on by unwed demigods, (male and female alike who can still live up to their ancient reputations if you know what I mean).<br />
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Sadly though, when they lost the weight, they lost their famous upper vocal range. They just can't quite hit the high notes of Wagner anymore. Now when they ride down Bifrost singing wildly, its usually some soul or Motown tune—Aretha Franklin mostly—which they bring off quite well. They tried ABBA once, and while the Scandinavian angle seemed like a good fit at first, it just didn’t work out. Nobody, and I mean <i>nobody</i> wanted to be born aloft in glory from the battlefield to Dancing Queen.</div>
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In spite of their new found fitness, the braided maidens really missed their horses. Out of sympathy the Aasgard dwarves tricked out their bikes with these amazing Gotterdammerung and Ragnarok paint jobs that burst into billowing smoke and fire when they ride. They undid their braids to let their golden hair stream behind their helms, and they wear dark Oakley wrap-arounds. Its no longer opera and noble steeds across the Rainbow Bridge, but they get their point across. When a warrior falls in battle, they bear him home: a swarm of stunning, frenzied bike couriers.</div>
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<img height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih-OctrWSnt35paLqrEjmf-Q8-AYAU5qddI9MUJA6C3Jz9rmELy-xG9rquGaHy1znTAx-kBK8mEHag04wg3lBNc78bp3Z1FxHO7-PkshQvLEaefwce_2N2H4dUMmQ55q2cRyJI8TxgC-CY/s640/Valkyrie.bmp" width="409" /><br />
<i>Out of your league dude, trust me</i><br />
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Every Valkyrie used to wear a gilded breastplate that was at least a DD-cup, but after trimming down most aren’t more than a “C” these days. Once some sexist old deity tried to get cute about it with that "<i>more than a mouthful is wasted darlings</i>" wisecrack, but the buff heralds of Woden all carry much heavier spears and shields than in the old days. They opened a can of whup-ass on him like you never saw, all the while singing <i>What you want, baby I got it</i>, and <i>You-better-think-(THINK!)-think-about-what-your-tryin-to-do-to-me</i>. Somehow word of it reached humanity, and this German philosopher Fred Nishy (I think that was the name) reported the deity didn’t survive. Not so. He’s just in rehab with his jaw wired shut, living on a diet of burnt-offering smoothies--totally sworn off women. He tries to say, “I am the LORD thy GOD”, but it comes out “Hy-uma-HOR-eye-GAH”. Its hard to take him seriously, especially if he's just made that slurping sound with his straw in an empty cup. Since then the Valkyrie get R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and plenty of it...even from the demigods.</div>
Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-211070732192160472.post-55467805201023518502010-09-09T18:53:00.000-07:002011-09-08T09:44:02.133-07:00Gypsy<i>My grandmother just turned 98. I've put together some of what she's told me of her immigration story. Its by no means a complete telling, but everything in it happened.</i><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">GYPSY</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Her dark complexion made her strikingly beautiful, but it bothered her. She was young—seventeen, wrapped in a wool coat on the deck of the ocean liner Ile de France. She’d been seasick for three days, found the smell of food from the ship’s kitchen unbearable, and had avoided the dining room since they left port. Not eating had made her wobbly on deck, but the nausea was less keen in the cold salt air, so she spent as much time there as possible. Her name was Antonia.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">She had been born in Sleme, a small Slovenian mountain village, when Slovenia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later, after the Great War, Slovenia became part of Yugoslavia, and in the 1920s, only six small extended families called the village home. Antonia's family owned a small farm and roadside tavern which gave them their living. Her father Josef was hard-drinking, stubborn, and occasionally mean. His main desire was to relocate his family to the United States, but his wife Jenny was against going. So first he went alone, leaving her and their children to fend for themselves. He settled in Cleveland, working and saving what he could. There followed several returns back to their farm, unannounced and unpredicted. He would repeat his pleas for the family to follow him back to America, and stay only long enough to grow frustrated with Jenny's resistance, and to get her pregnant. His returns to Cleveland were usually discovered in the form of a note left behind on the kitchen table.<br />
Antonia’s presence on the French steamer was the final act in her father’s exodus drama. During one return visit he had announced that this was the last time he would ever return to Yugoslavia. He gave his wife an ultimatum; if you want to be with me, follow me. This was enough. While he returned to Cleveland, Jenny made arrangements to sell everything, and buy passage for herself and the children. They included her son Pepe (in his twenties), Antonia, Ludwig, and four year old Sophie, the last two being fruits of father’s abbreviated homecomings.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> In the village, Antonia and Pepe had made an inseparable troika with another boy, and the three simply adored each other. They spent their free time hiking the alpine hills, poaching fish from the river at night (alert for wardens and darting for the cover of the nearby hay fields when the official’s telltale torches worked their way up the riverside). In winter they navigated the mountain on skis of their own make. Once, when the villagers had been distilling brandy from the summer’s surplus plums, they got drunk together (Antonia was around 12 then). The distillers had been "dutifully testing" the quality of their product all morning and needed to lie down. When the children came on the scene, the men asked them to watch over the operation while they went home and took their nap. The three obliged (of course), dared each other to try the sweet liquor (of course), liked it (of course), drank too much, got tipsy, then sick in turn. By the time of her emigration they were welded in a deep and permanent love, but it was especially strong between Pepe and Antonia.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Antonia’s tomboy nature, her easy friendship with older boys and her somewhat olive skin had prompted some in the village to call her <i>Rom</i>--Gypsy—a mean-spirited nickname. This was still an epithet in Old Europe, where the Romany were feared and disliked. Antonia hated when they called her that, not least because it offended an inborn sense of equity. Still, knowing its intent, the name bothered her, and she became sensitive about this aspect of her appearance. Not that she took it in silence. Once a woman who always made a particular point to mock her this way did it once too often, and Toni grabbed an apple off a tree, whirled and pegged the offender in the head as she fled into her cottage. It may not have been directly related to her memory of this treatment, but for the rest of her life she was marked by an ingrained sense of what was fair, so that no one could ever remember her taking advantage of another person or letting someone else get away with it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Their emigration route wound from the village to Ljubljana depot, then by train to Le Havre, the great Atlantic seaport in northern France. There they boarded the steamer to Ellis Island, where her father would meet them. The first leg of the trip ended in heartbreak. The Great War (nobody called it WWI yet) was nearly 10 years past, but it had left old Europe unstable, under a steady, perceptibly increasing sense of dread. The violence of 1914-18 had gone to ground, but you could say that people still felt it seismically as if a vibration through the soles of the feet. By 1928 many concluded another war was inevitable, so at the train station, Jenny presented their travel papers to a government official, who, unknown to them, was there to deny passage to all men who might serve in the anticipated conflict. Yugoslavia was claiming Pepe for the Army, but having already sold everything to make the journey the rest couldn't stay with him. His mother wept, cried in anger, begged the official to let her son come with her. Failing that she offered the remainder of their money to bribe the female official. This enraged the official who told Jenny she would be put in prison if she said it a second time. In grief, they all boarded the train, leaving 20 year old Pepe under guard behind them. Antonia’s most painful memory even in her 90's was walking away from her constant companion that day.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><div style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">On the steamer deck, Antonia was approached by a young man of the ship’s company. He was on the lookout for passengers made ill by the trip. In his hand was an orange. He held it out to her. In the circumstances she was too shy to take it. She had never seen one before; did not know what it was; had no idea what he expected her to do with it. Recognizing the look of confusion, he peeled the orange deliberately so she would understand how to do it herself, separated the segments, and held one up. The fresh scent of the fruit had grown strong, and to her surprise this amplified her hunger instead of her nausea. He mimed eating motions. She took the segment and tasted it. Perhaps due to its unfamiliar flavor, the acidic sweetness was a near ecstasy that pushed her illness aside. She ate the remainder under his watch. He laughed and said something in language foreign to her and walked away. Later he delivered a paper bag that held over a dozen like fruits, which she lived on till she reached New York. Later in the passage, another person took an interest in her. A seemingly wealthy woman began to pay her a lot of attention, going so far as to buy her a hat they wouldn't normally have afforded. Later the woman asked Jenny if she would consider letting her take Antonia home, while the remainder of them went on to Cleveland. They refused, but never knew what to make of the offer.</div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">At Ellis Island, where harried immigration clerks had long stopped asking people to pronounce their names more than once, Antonia was granted entry into the United States as Antoinette. Her friends came to call her Toni. In America, more than anything else she wanted to go to school. She asked her father’s permission for just one year of the free public education available to immigrants, but he refused, insisting she go to work immediately. One of her first jobs was as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family but the situation was bad. They mistreated her, made her work excessively, and did not provide adequate rest or food. She lost weight and grew haggard. When her cousin came for a surprise visit she was so horrified by Toni’s condition she berated the wife of the family, and threatened them with the police. She packed Toni immediately back home. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Too soon the world plunged into the Great Depression, and to make ends meet, Jenny brewed beer and made wine, earning money selling it to fellow Slovenian immigrant neighbors in their east side conclave during prohibition. Eventually prohibition was repealed, and the foreseen second Great War broke out, absorbing both their old and new countries into its unique furies. Back in Yugoslavia, against the Fascists, Pepe became a partisan under Josef Broz Tito. They learned almost nothing of his military service except that he died....ironically...in an American air raid. </div><br />
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</div><div> <i><span class="commentBody" data-jsid="text"><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_4e68efe601a892e21793978">Almost exactly one year after I first posted this, Antonia died. It was an incredibly peaceful passing two days past her 99th birthday and three after the birth of her 5th grandchild. There was no fear, very little discomfort, and no obvious pain. Up until a few weeks ago she was alert, could walk, and<span class="text_exposed_show"> could handle most of life's essential things (eating, and its obvious consequence the main ones) with very little aid. For about a year she'd had some dementia but this merely regressed her into simplicity, and childlike love and trust. A rapid physical decline began with a fall as of a few weeks ago, but its impossible to know if the fall was a trigger of the decline or just a consequence of its arrival. From that point on she began to mostly sleep. It was as if her amazing constitution had this one last card to play, that it would simply use its own brain chemistry to sedate her through to the end. During her brief moments of wakefulness she recognized us and could tell us she loved us, even if she only mouthed the words. When my grandfather passed away I was grateful because he'd suffered badly for many many months and his death came mercifully. When my grandmother passed away today I felt even more grateful, because for her, far against the usual odds, death actually came gently, even kindly.</span></div></span></i></div></div>Jackhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10874835135172141011noreply@blogger.com2