cognitive dissident

In an Internet awash in Hitchens quotes, Ed Brayton picks an unheralded one. In this clip, Hitch is defending free speech against all manner of religious and political encroachments:

The whole speech is--of course--worth listening to, but the money quote is about 7 minutes in:

"My own opinion is enough for me and I claim the right to have it defended against any consensus, any majority, anywhere, any place, any time. And anyone who disagrees with this can pick a number, get on line, and kiss my ass."

The OWS movement is inspiring all sorts of creativity:

As one commenter wrote:

Republicans say "Don't blame Mordor for being evil, it was the Elves that created the rings of power. The Dark Lord is a job creator for millions of orcs and trolls, so it's time to defund the regulatory agencies like Gondor and Rohan that [prevent] evil from growing."

...in a rhetorical sense, of course:

H/t to Chris Bowers at DailyKos, who noted that "This may well be the first time a protest movement will air a positive branding ad."

Here's the original (un-aired) version of Apple's "Think different" ad, narrated by Steve Jobs:

The Westboro Baptist Church's assholery continues with a threat to picket the funeral of (Buddhist) Steve Jobs:

(Note the unintentional irony of sending this tweet from an iPhone...)

Today is International Blasphemy Rights Day, on the anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons (see here for my previous comments).

Believers may wish to ignore the inconvenient parts of their scripture, but Leviticus 24:16 clearly demands that I be stoned to death for this offense (among others).

Come at me, bro!

Today's moment of sanity is brought to you by Jon Stewart (h/t: David Taintor at TPM):

The Bulwer-Lytton contest (which "challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels") has announced their 2011 winner:

Cheryl's mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

Sue Fondrie (Oshkosh, WI)

There are some real gems there, but the punster in me got a special chuckle out of the "Purple Prose" winner:

As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.

Mike Pedersen (North Berwick, ME)

At the risk of exhibiting a prematurely triumphalism, Nigel Barber's upcoming study looks promising. He wonders, "Why do modern conditions produce atheism?"

In a new study to be published in August, I provide compelling evidence that atheism increases along with the quality of life. [...] The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms.

First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

The study's abstract is intriguing:

Findings show that disbelief in God increased with economic development (measured by lower agricultural employment and third-level enrollment). Findings further show that disbelief also increased with income security (low Gini coefficient, high personal taxation tapping the welfare state) and with health security (low pathogen prevalence). Results show that religious belief declines as existential security increases, consistent with the uncertainty hypothesis.

As people's actual lives improve, there is less need to imagine a supernatural successor.

David Sirota observes in "why Americans can't afford to eat healthy" that Americans' worsening eating habits (as in the Gallup poll showing that we're eating fewer servings of fruits and vegetables) is due less to epicureanism than economics. The Right's "carefully crafted mix of faux populism and oversimplification," writes Sirota, "dishonestly omits the most important part of the story. The part about how healthy food could easily be more affordable for everyone right now, if not for those ultimate elitists: agribusiness CEOs, their lobbyists and the politicians they own:"

...the tale of the American diet is a story of the worst form of corporatism -- the kind whereby the government uses public monies to protect private profit.

In this chapter of that larger tragicomedy, lawmakers whose campaigns are underwritten by agribusinesses have used billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize those agribusinesses' specific commodities (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc.) that are the key ingredients of unhealthy food. Not surprisingly, the subsidies have manufactured a price inequality that helps junk food undersell nutritious-but-unsubsidized foodstuffs like fruits and vegetables. The end result is that recession-battered consumers are increasingly forced by economic circumstance to "choose" the lower-priced junk food that their taxes support. [...]

The aggregate effect of such market manipulation across the agriculture industry, notes Time [from NYT], is "that a dollar [can] buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit."

Subsisting on poor-quality foods with high caloric contents will doubtlessly cause even more problems as the Great Recession continues.

In writing is bad for you, The Guardian's Rick Gekoski wonders about readers' "need to justify the reading and study of imaginative literature." "I wonder, too," he asks, "if this insistence on the improving qualities of our baptismal dips into the waters of literature does not blind us to the real thrill of reading; the recurrent reason why we come back for more, remember, quote, argue, share our experience of books?"

For me, reading needs to be justified not in terms of some notional moral benefit but - that more dangerous and enticing category - pleasure. I read because I love to read, because, in the company of a book, I am happy, engaged, and inexorable. This may well be bad for me, as selfish pursuits often are: taking me out of contact with my nearest and dearest, making me shirk obligations from washing up to keeping up. "I am reading! Leave me alone!" is the mantra of every true reader.

Writing, he observes, is far more detrimental than reading:

It has become increasingly clear to me over these last 10 years, in which I have written more regularly than before, that the more I write the worse I become. More self-absorbed, less sensitive to the needs of others, less flexible, more determined to say what I have to say, when I want and how I want, if I could only be left alone to figure it out. [...] It is embarrassing, being thus conquered by an inward voice desperate to formulate, reconsider, construct, deconstruct, seek out the right phrase, amend it, think again.

I could post much more frequently if my perfectionist procrastination weren't quite so pronounced.

Kim Brooks' piece at Salon asking "Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?" contains my Quote of the Day:

There were courses I took in college, courses in Renaissance literature and the anthropology of social progress and international relations of the Middle East and, of course, writing, that will, in all likelihood, never earn me a steady paycheck or a 401K, but which I would not trade for anything; there were lectures on Shakespeare and Twain and Joyce that I still remember, that I've dreamt about and that define my sensibility as a writer and a reader and a human being.

After the debacle with his last campaign slogan, Rick Santorum has switched to a new one in conjunction with his official announcement this morning that he's "in it to win:"

ThinkProgress lists Santorum's 12 most offensive statements, reminding us that his "courage" is largely the craven demonization of gays, feminists, and Muslims.

I'm so impressed.

There's a surfeit of silliness on the Right, attempting to revise history so that former half-term governor Palin's mangling of Paul Revere's ride somehow becomes a little less like word salad. Andrew Sullivan nails it:

One of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions. And her vanity and pathologies are so deep she will insist that black is white until her minions actually find a source to prove it.

She's dangerous; she's shrewd; she's an exhibitionist. But she is also, we must keep reminding ourselves, a farce. What worries me about this political leader incapable of telling fantasy apart from fact is that, in a long and deep recession, someone who can lie that readily and manipulate religious and cultural resentment as well as she does is a danger. Not just to America, but to the world.

Do you remember the conservative accusation that New York City workers deliberately slowed down blizzard cleanup? An investigation into the allegations "found no evidence of an organized slowdown:"

In fact, the report found, Mr. Halloran had no evidence for his accusation, and his account of conversations with two workers differed sharply from what the workers told investigators.

"In toto," the report said, "Mr. Halloran's information about city employee statements contributed no actual evidence about a possible slowdown."

H/t to Oliver Willis, who summarizes:

It's almost as if conservatives, Republicans, and the conservative media pushed a fraudulent story simply to kick unions in the balls as part of the decades-long attempt to bust unions and screw over working-class people. Wait, that's exactly what happened.

Inconceivable!

Today is American Hiking Society's National Trails Day:

Through National Trails Day, American Hiking Society introduces people to a wide array of trail activities such as hiking, biking, paddling, horseback riding, trail running, and bird watching. Held every first Saturday of June, National Trails Day brings together people who enjoy trails and the outdoors to participate in trail work projects, educational workshops, trail dedication ceremonies and gear demonstrations.

Ross Beeley's "OPEN LETTER TO THE GENTLEMAN BLOW-DRYING HIS BALLS IN THE GYM LOCKER ROOM"

You're welcome.

Michael JW Stickings writes about Palin's upcoming bus tour, asking "Notice how she's back in the news? Notice how we're writing about her again?"

This is what she wants. This is what she needs. This is what feeds her. Like any celebrity whose time is almost up, she's desperate for more, for the spotlight to shine brightly once more, for all the attention that fame brings. This is why she's back, and why she's dipping her toes into the pool.

And if and when she loses? Well, so what? She'll have been martyred and her admirers will be all the more devoted. And she'll be able to blame the loss on her usual targets, the coastal elites, the "lamestream" media, even the GOP establishment, anyone and everything beyond her bubble of self-aggrandizing delusion.

The NYT discusses a pair of health studies showing that "a person's fitness level at midlife is a strong predictor of long-term heart health, proving just as reliable as traditional risk factors like cholesterol level or high blood pressure:"

"When you try to boil down fitness, what does fitness mean?" said Dr. Jarett D. Berry, assistant professor of internal medicine and cardiology at Southwestern Medical School and a co-author of both papers. "In both these studies, how fast you can run in midlife is very strongly associated with heart disease risk when you're old. The exercise you do in your 40s is highly relevant to your heart disease risk in your 80s." [...]

From the study data, Dr. Berry calculated that a man in his 50s who can run a mile in 8 minutes or less, or a woman who can do it in 9 minutes or less, shows a high level of fitness. A 9-minute mile for a man and 10:30 for a woman are signs of moderate fitness; men who can't run better than a 10-minute mile, and women slower than 12 minutes, fall into the low-fitness category.

The categories make a big difference in risk for heart problems, the study found: Subjects in the high-fitness group had a 10 percent lifetime risk, compared with 30 percent for those in the low-fitness group.

PZ Myers writes about the Rapture-believers being wrong once again, noting that "everyone is laughing at Harold Camping now, except his followers... But you're missing the real joke:"

Look at every Abrahamic religion, with their myths of prophets and favored peoples and fate. Look at the crazy conservative church in your town, that preaches homophobia and anti-science and supports Israel because of the Armageddon prophecy. Look at the liberal Christian church down the street from you that has the nice Vacation Bible School and puts on happy plays for the older kids, and also teaches that one day you will stand before a great god and be judged. Look at your family members who blithely believe in death as a mini-apocalypse, in which they will be magically translated into another realm, again to be judged.

It's the very same rot, the poison of religion that twists minds away from reality and fastens them on hellish bogeymen. They're demented fuckwits, every one, and the big lie rests right on the fundamental beliefs of supernaturalism and deities, not on the ephemera of one crank's bizarre interpretations.

Ted Rall posted a top ten comics of all time list, and asked for his readers' favorites. Over the course of several tweets, I mentioned a few that I have here categorized and alphabetized:

comic strips
Calvin & Hobbes (Watterson)
Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel)
Gasoline Alley (King)
Krazy Kat (Herriman)
Little Nemo (McCay)
Pogo (Kelly)
Prince Valiant (Foster)
The Spirit (Eisner)
Tarzan (Hogarth)

mainstream
Dark Knight (Miller)
Fantastic Four (Lee/Kirby)
Green Lantern/Green Arrow (O'Neill/Adams)
Nick Fury (Steranko)
Swamp Thing (Moore/Veitch/Totleben)
Walt Disney Comics & Stories (Barks)
Watchmen (Moore/Gibbons)

alt/indie/underground
American Splendor
Cerebus (Sim)
Cheech Wizard (Bode)
EC war comics (Kurtzman)
"Master Race" (Krigstein)
Maus (Spiegelman)
Moebius
Persepolis (Satrapi)
Raw
Ring of the Nibelung (Russell)
Zap

As with my favorite books, I'm lousy at making a list of n anything--my mind seems to gravitate toward a list of 2n items. I have a strong temptation to pull several anthologies down from the shelves, and spend the afternoon perusing them...

Newt's spokesweasel Rick Tyler fired a floridly full-bore fusillade against critics of his boss:

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment's cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won't be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

It's ridiculous to suggest that Newt is anything but a Washington insider who makes his own living from distortions and falsehoods, but Rachel Maddow ridiculed the statement as "The Epic of Gingrich" for its overblown heroic rhetoric:

The text has also been adapted into a delightful cartoon (h/t: Alex Pareene at Slate):

(Click here to see the whole thing.)

Our director announced that a new employee would be joining our group next week--someone with a common Indian surname. One of my co-workers remarked to a few of us later, "Why couldn't they hire an American?"

Given the existing ethnic mix of our co-workers--and the fallacy in determining someone's nationality by their surname--I had some fun with his racist/xenophobic attitude:

"Hey [Italian surname], there's something I wanted to ask you about.

I was thinking about some of our co-workers here, like [German surname] and [Scottish surname] and [British surname], and I was wondering what you would consider to be an 'American' name...something like Chief Ten Bears, perhaps?"

Ted Rall writes about the rise of the Obamabots, beginning with the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

The media gorged on an orgy of psychotic right-wing rhetoric. Flags everywhere. Torture suddenly OK. In a nation where mainstream political discourse was redefined between Dick Cheney on the right and libertarian Bill Maher on the not-as-right, there wasn't any room in the paper for a left-of-center cartoonist. My business was savaged. Income plunged. [...]

McCarthyism--blackballing--made a big comeback. I had been drawing a monthly comic strip, "The Testosterone Diaries," for Men's Health. No politics. It was about guy stuff: dating, job insecurity, prostate tests, that sort of thing. They fired me. Not because of anything I drew for them. It was because of my syndicated editorial cartoons, which attacked Bush and his policies. The publisher worried about pissing off right-wingers during a period of nationalism on steroids.

"It feels a little weird to write this," Rall relates, but "there's less room for a leftie during the Age of Obama than there was under Bush." The problem he identifies is the willingness of Obama supporters to accept a tepid centrist in the White House--perhaps Teabaggers aren't the only ones who are confusing wingnut rhetoric (about Obama's alleged "radicalism") for reality. Rall continues by noting that Obama "has been a terrible disappointment to the American left:"

He has forsaken liberals at every turn. Yet they continue to stand by him. Which means that, in effect, they are not liberals at all. They are militant Democrats. They are Obamabots.

As long as Democrats win elections, they are happy. Nevermind that their policies are the same as, or to the right of, the Republicans. [...]

I don't care about Obama. Or the Democrats. I care about America and the world and the people who live in them.

Hey, Obamabots: when the man you support betrays your principles, he has to go--not your principles.

I really need to read his latest book, The Anti-American Manifesto.

Although I've never read any Joyce--quite an oversight, given my love of wordplay--I always thought that the public reading of Ulysses on Bloomsday was an intriguing idea. Long reads--not that kind of longreads...this kind--is apparently a burgeoning activity in academia.

Literature professors are tackling not just the obvious candidates such as Homer for these marathon reading events, but also works such as Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Moby Dick, and even War and Peace. As long as such readings are focused on the text, and are more like events than stunts, this sounds like a great way to imbue students' lives with the classics.

Phil Zuckerman follows up on the secular studies major that I mentioned here, describing it as "an interdisciplinary programme focusing on manifestations of the secular in societies and cultures, past and present:"

It entails the study of non-religious people, groups, thought and cultural expressions. Emphasis is placed upon the meanings, forms, relevance and impact of political secularism, philosophical scepticism, and personal and public secularity. Students will be expected to take classes from various disciplines: philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, science ... and yes, religious studies.

Zuckerman notes that "for centuries, the weight of scholarship has been disproportionately on religion," and I fully expect this single small contrary example to provoke a torrent of Christianist commentary.

Richard Dawkins tears WaPo faith-heads a new one for treating the Rapture-happy loons (led--this time around--by evangelist Harold Camping) seriously. The paper asked, in part:

What does your tradition teach about the end of the world? How does end time theology impact real world behavior?

Dawkins responded:

Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. [...]

So, the question becomes, why are there so many well-heeled, gullible idiots out there? Why is it that an idea can be as nuts as you like and still con enough backers to finance its advertising to acquire yet more backers . . . until eventually a national newspaper notices and makes it into a silly season filler?

He then took aim at the question itself:

What my 'tradition' (or your 'tradition' or the Dalai Lama's 'tradition' or Osama bin Laden's 'tradition' or the bad-trip 'tradition' of whoever wrote Revelation) says about anything in the real world (including its end) is no more likely to be true than any urban legend, idle rumor, superstition, or science fiction novel. Yet, the moment you slap the word 'tradition' onto a made-up story you confer on it a spurious dignity, which we are solemnly asked to 'respect'.

Science is not a tradition, it is the organized use of evidence from the real world to make inferences about the real world...

In addressing a different instance of accommodationism, PZ Myers writes about his unconcern that "harsh criticism of cherished beliefs, like religion, leads to an immediate, emotion-based shutdown of critical faculties by the target, and makes them refractory to rational evaluation of their ideas:"

I don't care what happens in the mind of a believer five minutes or a day after I make an argument... [...] What I'm interested in seeing happen is the development of a strong cadre of vocal atheists who will make a sustained argument, over the course of years or generations, who will keep pressing on the foolishness of faith. I also don't mind seeing believers get angry and stomping off determined to prove I'm a colossal jackhole -- that means they're thinking, even if they're disagreeing with me. At the very least, I hope that a few of them will realize, even if they don't change their mind about the god nonsense, that quoting the Bible at me has no effect, and maybe some years down the road I won't be hearing as many idiots telling me "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'" as if they've made a profound point.

I just saw what may be the dumbest bumpersticker ever:

How stupid are you? Let me count the ways...

...but you can't hide!

Newt's video announcement of his candidacy may not be worth discussing, but there are plenty of other things to talk about. Mother Jones posted Newt in his own words: 30 years of bomb-throwing, David Mixner reminds us of Newt's many "particularly harsh" failures on LGBT issues, and Paul Waldman dismisses Newt's "campaign of ideas" by describing a typical Gingrich C-SPAN speech about healthcare:

It was all future-y and visionary and fundamental and transformative, and after listening to it, I couldn't tell you a single thing he actually wants to do about health care. What Newt's "ideas" lack in depth, they make up for in rhetorical flourish and sheer volume; by the time you've asked, "What the hell did he just say?", he's moved on to three other fundamental transformations of society and government he wants to usher in, none of which have any substance to them, either.

update (5/13):
WaPo fact-checked Newt's announcement interview with the hacktastic Sean Hannity, spotlighting a mere half-dozen of Newt's "misstatements, bloopers, and exaggerations."

John (The Pun Also Rises) Pollack was a guest on NPR's Radio Times this morning, and I emailed a fellow punster out of courtesy. Along with thanks, I received some snark:

I notice the author was a speechwriter for Clinton, so I'm sure he's a master of fiction and fantasy.

My reply, after listening to the interview, began innocuously enough:

I liked the Samuel Johnson quote that was mentioned, but couldn't find an authoritative attribution; here it is anyway, just in case you liked it too:

"If I had hung my head for every pun I shed there would not be a puny shed in which I had not hung my punished head."

[I did find a variant in Get Thee to a Punnery]

Then I ventured forth with a few puns:

The callers to Radio Times have probably been hounded by their friends and family (doggedly so, I would imagine) for being far too tame when confronted with such a renowned punster, but I suspect that they would liken [lycan] the experience to being thrown to the wolves.

I couldn't let the obsession with Clinton slide unnoticed, and I contemplated listing a few WH speechwriters who penned some truly pernicious prevarications--Tony Blankley, Pat Buchanan, David Frum, Michael Gerson, Peggy Noonan, John Podhoretz, Tony Snow, and Ben Stein came to mind most readily--but I decided to try a less inflammatory tactic:

Your remark about Clinton seemed intended to start a flame war; I had originally planned to come out with puns blazing, but instead decided to temper my remarks. I don't want this to become a trial by ire between us, but I'll still give you a little morsel to stew over: I'm glad to see any speechwriter who is primarily a writer and only secondarily a partisan hack [too many to list]. I consume an unhealthy amount of half-baked punditry (little of which is well-done) and find the confluence of style and factual content to be quite rare.

update (5/12):
This fabulous Parthenon of punnery (h/t: Jim Culleny at 3 Quarks Daily) arrived in my RSS feed this morning:

The Agamemnon Rag
.
Atlas, you're Homer. I am so glad you're Hera.
Thera so many things to tell you. I went on that
minotaur of the museum. The new display centaurs
on how you can contract Sisyphus if you don't use
a Trojan on your Dictys. It was all Greek to me, see.
When I was Roman around,
I rubbed Midas against someone. "Medea, you look like a Goddess,"
he said. The Minerva him! I told him to
Frigg off, oracle the cops. "Loki here," I said.
"In Odin times men had better manners." It's best to try
and nymph that sort of thing in the bud. He said he knew
Athena two about women like me, then tried to Bacchus
into a corner. Dryads I could, he wouldn't stop.
"Don't Troy with my affections," he said.
"I'm already going to Helen a hand basket."
I pretended to be completely Apollo by his behavior.
If something like that Mars your day, it Styx with you
forever. "I'm not Bragi," he said. "But Idon better."
Some people will never Lerna. Juno what I did?
Valhalla for help. I knew the police would
Pegasus to the wall. The Sirens went off.
Are you or Argonaut guilty, they asked.
He told the cops he was Iliad bad clams.
He said he accidentally Electra Cupid himself
trying to adjust a lamp shade. This job has its
pluses and Minos. The cops figured he was Fulla it.
He nearly Runic for me. I'm telling you,
it was quite an Odyssey, but I knew things would
Pan out. And oh, by the way, here's all his gold.
I was able to Fleece him before the museum closed.
.
(Jack Conway, from the July/August 2005 issue of Poetry)