They share a common ethos, an ideal of attitude, behavior, and lifestyle that characterizes something they all share, though they don't agree how closely any one of them must adhere to that ideal to still be considered one of them.
They often dress alike, across the different cultures and nations they live within.
They have a body of writings they all admire and repeat to one another, with strange expressions that outsiders don't understand. They often feel these writings are among the most beautiful and meaningful in the world.
Many of these works are openly acknowledged to be extreme, yet those who say this often celebrate the extremism, believing it is a more true form of what they value. Some of the most extreme leading people are the most admired by even mainstream followers.
Even the writings that are considered more mainstream, not extreme, often include passages that celebrate violent or destructive and illegal actions and images. Followers will tell you they would never actually carry out such actions, but these writings remain very important to them.
Gatherings of these people often have ritualistic and ceremonial characteristics. Religious images are displayed, a lead figure exhorts the crowd to group chanting, shouting, stylized simulations of violence, and it is not infrequent that participants are injured.
They can be found in nearly every country.
As religions go, heavy metal may have more followers than Mormonism and Judaism together.
20140715
20140707
20140207
chimeralhalfmanandcuttingedgetech
Carl Sagan is one of the people I've most admired in my life. The Cosmos series helped instill in me, and so many others, an appreciation for the wonders of science, and an understanding of science as a method for approaching Nature, rather than what schools too often beat down to a list of approved answers to be repeated. Sagan eventually developed a blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome, for which he received blood stem cell transplants. In 'Billions and Billions', he muses in one of the essays about how receiving a stem cell transplant from his sister means that for his life afterward, part of his body would be from hers, and genetically female. I now share this life step with him.
If, for some pointless reason, you went back to the earliest entries of this blog, you'd find a few made from the 8th floor BMT unit at LDS Hospital in Utah. That was about six years ago, and in many ways my life since has been focused on not coming back here. But here I am.
In 2008 I was here for relapsed Hodgkins lymphoma, a disease where the first-line standard treatment is usually effective enough, meaning relatively less research was put into second-line treatments. The medically standard next step after a relapse was autologous stem cell transplant (if your own bone marrow is still clear of the disease) or allogeneic stem cell transplant (if you're marrow's not clear or if you've already had an auto). I was here for an auto, and typed some things into this blog.
My Hodgkins is refractory, it doesn't ever go away forever. When I relapsed a year later, the next-line standard treatment was an allogeneic transplant, but I looked at the life survival numbers they had and decided no way. Through my oncologist and clinicaltrials.gov, and with help from my mom who's skilled at researching things, I found some clinical trials for current cutting edge drugs for Hodgkins, and got into one for what's now called Brintuximab (always be SGN35 to me).
That set up a life pattern for the following years. Always a salvage treatment or a clinical trial to try to contain the cancer, maintainig a relatively normal life for many years throug various chemos and some radiation. That lasted until December 2013. My oncologist and I had put one chemo to an end because the last scan showed only mixed results, some shrink some growth. We'd figured to try another chemo for containment, or look what was on the clinical trial horizon, but there was a problem that my blood numbers were falling even without the chemo. I had a bone marrow biopsy and on the 9th they called me with an alarming new development: Leukemia.
Leukemia changes the situation tremendously. Hodgkins I know, I can deal with in various ways (including a few nutritional/herbal things I've come to trust --my standard is if someone with actual medical credentials is researching it somewhere, and I've also had reliable results from Chinese nutritional and herbal medicines). Even if I gave up and did nothing about Hodgkins, it would probably take a year and a half to actually kill me. Leukemia will kill in weeks, or a couple months at most. Now the allogeneic transplant I'd been avoiding seemed the likeliest option.
It turns out I'd made the right choice in avoiding the allo transplant five years ago (and the team leaders here had been subtly encouraging me to avoid it). In recent years, they've developed a new standard of donor transplant using haplo donors --relatives exactly half-matched. Hodgkin's patients do worse than other cancer patients at allogeneic transplants, but haplo transplant seems to be giving Hodgkins history patients good odds. It's still very new, so there aren't long-term results to compare. But the horizon looks hopeful.
It's been a difficult process. I was checked in days after diagnosis, started standard Leukemia induction treatment the 16th of December. After that the expectation was watch the blood numbers and plan for the transplant treatment. It took them awhile to decide exactly how to treat (Hodgkins and Leukemia together make a rare and challenging combination), then to get my health provider to approve. I'm now Day 7 post haplo, and the worst is over for now. I've been in the hospital far too long and hopefully can be out in a couple weeks.
If, for some pointless reason, you went back to the earliest entries of this blog, you'd find a few made from the 8th floor BMT unit at LDS Hospital in Utah. That was about six years ago, and in many ways my life since has been focused on not coming back here. But here I am.
In 2008 I was here for relapsed Hodgkins lymphoma, a disease where the first-line standard treatment is usually effective enough, meaning relatively less research was put into second-line treatments. The medically standard next step after a relapse was autologous stem cell transplant (if your own bone marrow is still clear of the disease) or allogeneic stem cell transplant (if you're marrow's not clear or if you've already had an auto). I was here for an auto, and typed some things into this blog.
My Hodgkins is refractory, it doesn't ever go away forever. When I relapsed a year later, the next-line standard treatment was an allogeneic transplant, but I looked at the life survival numbers they had and decided no way. Through my oncologist and clinicaltrials.gov, and with help from my mom who's skilled at researching things, I found some clinical trials for current cutting edge drugs for Hodgkins, and got into one for what's now called Brintuximab (always be SGN35 to me).
That set up a life pattern for the following years. Always a salvage treatment or a clinical trial to try to contain the cancer, maintainig a relatively normal life for many years throug various chemos and some radiation. That lasted until December 2013. My oncologist and I had put one chemo to an end because the last scan showed only mixed results, some shrink some growth. We'd figured to try another chemo for containment, or look what was on the clinical trial horizon, but there was a problem that my blood numbers were falling even without the chemo. I had a bone marrow biopsy and on the 9th they called me with an alarming new development: Leukemia.
Leukemia changes the situation tremendously. Hodgkins I know, I can deal with in various ways (including a few nutritional/herbal things I've come to trust --my standard is if someone with actual medical credentials is researching it somewhere, and I've also had reliable results from Chinese nutritional and herbal medicines). Even if I gave up and did nothing about Hodgkins, it would probably take a year and a half to actually kill me. Leukemia will kill in weeks, or a couple months at most. Now the allogeneic transplant I'd been avoiding seemed the likeliest option.
It turns out I'd made the right choice in avoiding the allo transplant five years ago (and the team leaders here had been subtly encouraging me to avoid it). In recent years, they've developed a new standard of donor transplant using haplo donors --relatives exactly half-matched. Hodgkin's patients do worse than other cancer patients at allogeneic transplants, but haplo transplant seems to be giving Hodgkins history patients good odds. It's still very new, so there aren't long-term results to compare. But the horizon looks hopeful.
It's been a difficult process. I was checked in days after diagnosis, started standard Leukemia induction treatment the 16th of December. After that the expectation was watch the blood numbers and plan for the transplant treatment. It took them awhile to decide exactly how to treat (Hodgkins and Leukemia together make a rare and challenging combination), then to get my health provider to approve. I'm now Day 7 post haplo, and the worst is over for now. I've been in the hospital far too long and hopefully can be out in a couple weeks.
20130823
plainS-wordrhetoric
..an exercise, I'll just leave this here..
People who work for a living should earn a living.
If a company cannot afford to pay production- and service-layer employees enough to meet their needs for housing, food, medicine, and still enjoy leisure and prosperity, how can that company afford to pay its managers even higher salaries and benefits? How can it afford to pay its executives salaries and bonuses? How can it afford to pay its investors dividends?
If the claim is that managers and executives are much more critical to the company's success than production and service workers, then that is an argument for centralized, top-down command decision-making in an economic structure.
If the claim is that investors' right to growth is more important than workers' right to a living, then that is an argument for the right of a minority (investors) to live in ease off the hard work of a majority (workers).
People who work for a living should earn a living.
If a company cannot afford to pay production- and service-layer employees enough to meet their needs for housing, food, medicine, and still enjoy leisure and prosperity, how can that company afford to pay its managers even higher salaries and benefits? How can it afford to pay its executives salaries and bonuses? How can it afford to pay its investors dividends?
If the claim is that managers and executives are much more critical to the company's success than production and service workers, then that is an argument for centralized, top-down command decision-making in an economic structure.
If the claim is that investors' right to growth is more important than workers' right to a living, then that is an argument for the right of a minority (investors) to live in ease off the hard work of a majority (workers).
20130407
useofweapons
Weapons are used, knowingly, to compel a change in states of mind and courses of action.
Too much martial arts class brooding, and a nod to one of science fiction's modern greats.
A Personal Statement From Iain Banks
Too much martial arts class brooding, and a nod to one of science fiction's modern greats.
A Personal Statement From Iain Banks
20130116
zenthesisanarchis
What Arises also Ceases.
Species is a temporary local phenomenon.
Local and temporary, spacetime itself
may be emergent and conditional.
What then are your nations and your laws?
Rejoice that empires fall, but then take no shelter in them.
We must communally build system and structure
to enable our greater liberty,
but not idly let what is built become entrenched and enshrined,
a power over our liberty.
Polis, community, harmonic structure
are continually examined and rebuilt,
and continually examined and torn down.
To Alter or Abolish
Species is a temporary local phenomenon.
Local and temporary, spacetime itself
may be emergent and conditional.
What then are your nations and your laws?
Rejoice that empires fall, but then take no shelter in them.
We must communally build system and structure
to enable our greater liberty,
but not idly let what is built become entrenched and enshrined,
a power over our liberty.
Polis, community, harmonic structure
are continually examined and rebuilt,
and continually examined and torn down.
To Alter or Abolish
20120918
scottyneedslesspower
The future might be like Star Trek after all.
Actually if you read the thing, "more feasible" means instead of needing a large planet's worth of hypothetical exotic matter they've never detected, they'd only need 30kg. And "working on building one" means trying to detect the hypothetical phenomenon on extremely small scales.
I'd mostly written off FTL, but hey if they think it's worth a shot, go for it. Solving the "infinite energy to accellerate to c" thing doesn't solve the time paradox thing where FTL would allow information to be sent to the past. Let's-try-it-and-see-if-causality-itself-breaks might be a most recklessly awesome future experiment.
Of course, FTL is one of the things that might make the aliens step in and say, "okay, NOW you people might be a problem."
klaatu barrada nikto
Actually if you read the thing, "more feasible" means instead of needing a large planet's worth of hypothetical exotic matter they've never detected, they'd only need 30kg. And "working on building one" means trying to detect the hypothetical phenomenon on extremely small scales.
I'd mostly written off FTL, but hey if they think it's worth a shot, go for it. Solving the "infinite energy to accellerate to c" thing doesn't solve the time paradox thing where FTL would allow information to be sent to the past. Let's-try-it-and-see-if-causality-itself-breaks might be a most recklessly awesome future experiment.
Of course, FTL is one of the things that might make the aliens step in and say, "okay, NOW you people might be a problem."
klaatu barrada nikto
20120729
hotdogs
I think a more serious issue is, if Chick-Fil-A employees wanted to donate to political issues (on any side of any issue), it would take many thousands of them seriously tightening their belts to just barely match the influence their big boss can donate as a trivial gesture with no impact on his living. His wealth is only possible because of them, but his voice makes theirs irrelevant.
If you're gonna buy mall fast food, go to Hot Dog On A Stick which is owned by its employees.
If you're gonna buy mall fast food, go to Hot Dog On A Stick which is owned by its employees.
20120727
sampleselfdoubt
Stumbling bleary half conscience-ness.
I am just aware enough to sense I haven't really Woken Up.
The words "still a good person" sound like hollow excuses.
Aren't I too not-Catholic for Catholic guilt?
The word "catholic" is said to mean "universal."
I am just aware enough to sense I haven't really Woken Up.
The words "still a good person" sound like hollow excuses.
Aren't I too not-Catholic for Catholic guilt?
The word "catholic" is said to mean "universal."
20120627
crucialmovement
I don't get why so many people (most of the crowd) go to rock or metal shows and just stand so still. Like drinking Pabst in a dive bar makes them too cool for this shit. If you wanted to just stare at something while loud music played in the background, you could have watched the band on Youtube. It's not a requirement to mosh or bang your head as fast and hard as possible, but still..
Metal is ecstatic music. It creates a sustained unusual emotional state and holds it for the length of a riff, a song, an album, a show. You let the music tell you how to move and what to feel.
I left my usual atheistic coffee and beer friends (alas, not many metalheads) last Thursday (Jun20) to hear Subrosa perform as part of Crucial Fest, a mostly-locals many-genre many-venue music showcase put together by Exigent records. I've forgotten how Subrosa first got my attention, around the time "No Help For the Mighty Ones" came out, but I'd been waiting for a chance to see them perform live. It's cool seeing a Salt Lake band get acclaim from metal reviewers across the world, even if they don't become a huge act.
Unfortunately Subrosa had at least three mics fail on them, but they let the violins and bass do most of the talking. Also performing were Reality, Salt Lakers whose set I just missed; Lord Dying, Portlanders with Salt Lake ties; and Witch Mountain, also Portlanders. It was a night of thunderous doomy music. I managed --in my usual social ineptness-- not to have any real talky-speech with the singer of Witch Mountain when I bought her CDs, but I really liked her bluesy rock singing style.
I think there's something to be said for coming from a subculture that happily takes symbols of darkness, fear, and evil and makes them into symbols of personal empowerment. It can prepare you to let go of other easy "good guy" and "bad guy" labels fed through the system. Of course not every metalhead becomes a free-questioning political independent, but if half your favorite bands have inverted pentagrams and bloody knives on their album covers, you're less likely to take society's presumed Moral Guardians seriously when they label an idea or a person "evil," and it might prepare you not to take them seriously when they label an idea or a person "foreign," "dangerous," "socialist," or "terrorist." At least I like to think music of rebellion helps one be more free-roving in the ideological landscape, better able to share the same ideas with different symbols and metaphors.
Metal is ecstatic music. It creates a sustained unusual emotional state and holds it for the length of a riff, a song, an album, a show. You let the music tell you how to move and what to feel.
I left my usual atheistic coffee and beer friends (alas, not many metalheads) last Thursday (Jun20) to hear Subrosa perform as part of Crucial Fest, a mostly-locals many-genre many-venue music showcase put together by Exigent records. I've forgotten how Subrosa first got my attention, around the time "No Help For the Mighty Ones" came out, but I'd been waiting for a chance to see them perform live. It's cool seeing a Salt Lake band get acclaim from metal reviewers across the world, even if they don't become a huge act.
Unfortunately Subrosa had at least three mics fail on them, but they let the violins and bass do most of the talking. Also performing were Reality, Salt Lakers whose set I just missed; Lord Dying, Portlanders with Salt Lake ties; and Witch Mountain, also Portlanders. It was a night of thunderous doomy music. I managed --in my usual social ineptness-- not to have any real talky-speech with the singer of Witch Mountain when I bought her CDs, but I really liked her bluesy rock singing style.
I think there's something to be said for coming from a subculture that happily takes symbols of darkness, fear, and evil and makes them into symbols of personal empowerment. It can prepare you to let go of other easy "good guy" and "bad guy" labels fed through the system. Of course not every metalhead becomes a free-questioning political independent, but if half your favorite bands have inverted pentagrams and bloody knives on their album covers, you're less likely to take society's presumed Moral Guardians seriously when they label an idea or a person "evil," and it might prepare you not to take them seriously when they label an idea or a person "foreign," "dangerous," "socialist," or "terrorist." At least I like to think music of rebellion helps one be more free-roving in the ideological landscape, better able to share the same ideas with different symbols and metaphors.
20111127
bookisusuallybetter
Alan Moore- Meet the Man Behind the Protest Mask
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest?CMP=SOCNETTXT6965
I think it's kind of interesting that Guy Fawkes had been a figure of ridicule in British culture, and also an icon for anti-Catholic sentiment because the real Guy had been for Papal control. Alan Moore is British, knew that, and deliberately chose to invert it for his revolutionary antihero.
In spite of some comic book silliness and 70s-80s Cold War post-apocalypse silliness, the printed V for Vendetta holds up well. The movie was pretty good but had problems where it deliberately stepped back from the comic book's vision. Notably that in the movie the nationalist leader is killed in secret by V. In the book, he's assassinated publicly by an ordinary woman whose life had been ripped up by happenstance in the machinery of State. Also the movie tacks on a romantic love angle to V's relationship to Evey, both unnecessary and seriously detracting from the theme and character.
Mostly, it's that the movie dumbs the message down to social liberal versus conservative (which many of America's Bush-era rightist pundits were coherent enough to notice and get mad about.) In the book, it's very stark, anarchism versus fascism. The neat thing is that Moore lets fascism have every possible advantage. Anything that might make an ordinary person say "of course it's bad, but under these conditions for these reasons it might be necessary," Moore grants them and then says it's still wrong. Moore's postapocalyptic Britain is starved, battered, and one of the only surviving societies after nuclear (and possibly biological) exchange. His fascist leader isn't looking for personal gain but really believes in strength and unity as the greater good. The leader is assisted by a superhuman intelligent computer to make decisions. There are invaders on the outside and plagues within. And the alternative is V who is not kind but brutal, destructive, insane. "Because I love you, because I want you to be free" is a truly chilling line (as much as the better-known Moore line from a later project, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago.")
For this tonal omission, both the delightful early dialogue between V and the statue of Lady Justice ("you always did have an eye for a man in uniform") and the later speech about Authority and the fear of Chaos are cut. The point in the film where it actually uses the word, a robber shouting "anarchy in the UK", is the very point where the book V teaches "this is not anarchy, this is chaos." Movie audiences never heard "anarchy is the absence of leaders, not the absence of order."
I saw it written on a forum, and I fully agree, when watching the movie, the point toward the end where V tips over the domino assembly is where you should stop playback or skip to the end credits (maybe watch the explosions on the way.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/nov/27/alan-moore-v-vendetta-mask-protest?CMP=SOCNETTXT6965
I think it's kind of interesting that Guy Fawkes had been a figure of ridicule in British culture, and also an icon for anti-Catholic sentiment because the real Guy had been for Papal control. Alan Moore is British, knew that, and deliberately chose to invert it for his revolutionary antihero.
In spite of some comic book silliness and 70s-80s Cold War post-apocalypse silliness, the printed V for Vendetta holds up well. The movie was pretty good but had problems where it deliberately stepped back from the comic book's vision. Notably that in the movie the nationalist leader is killed in secret by V. In the book, he's assassinated publicly by an ordinary woman whose life had been ripped up by happenstance in the machinery of State. Also the movie tacks on a romantic love angle to V's relationship to Evey, both unnecessary and seriously detracting from the theme and character.
Mostly, it's that the movie dumbs the message down to social liberal versus conservative (which many of America's Bush-era rightist pundits were coherent enough to notice and get mad about.) In the book, it's very stark, anarchism versus fascism. The neat thing is that Moore lets fascism have every possible advantage. Anything that might make an ordinary person say "of course it's bad, but under these conditions for these reasons it might be necessary," Moore grants them and then says it's still wrong. Moore's postapocalyptic Britain is starved, battered, and one of the only surviving societies after nuclear (and possibly biological) exchange. His fascist leader isn't looking for personal gain but really believes in strength and unity as the greater good. The leader is assisted by a superhuman intelligent computer to make decisions. There are invaders on the outside and plagues within. And the alternative is V who is not kind but brutal, destructive, insane. "Because I love you, because I want you to be free" is a truly chilling line (as much as the better-known Moore line from a later project, "I did it thirty-five minutes ago.")
For this tonal omission, both the delightful early dialogue between V and the statue of Lady Justice ("you always did have an eye for a man in uniform") and the later speech about Authority and the fear of Chaos are cut. The point in the film where it actually uses the word, a robber shouting "anarchy in the UK", is the very point where the book V teaches "this is not anarchy, this is chaos." Movie audiences never heard "anarchy is the absence of leaders, not the absence of order."
I saw it written on a forum, and I fully agree, when watching the movie, the point toward the end where V tips over the domino assembly is where you should stop playback or skip to the end credits (maybe watch the explosions on the way.)
20111125
merit
Meritocracy is a useful illusion. It tempts us to identify ourselves with the powerful and against the powerless. Because we are sure our own merits are great and our problems only circumstance, it comforts us that our own gain in future status in is assured. Because we are unfamiliar with others' circumstance and assume their problems are character flaws, it offers us the thrill of looking down on their unworthy laziness. It is useful because it encourages our complacence and discourages questioning our fundamental assumptions.
20111110
Saganday(belated)
Yesterday was, or would have been, Carl Sagan's birthday. I think church never really had a chance with me because "Cosmos" plus some illustrated science books had sparked a sense of wonder that the stark walls and bad music at the local Mormon ward could never hope to match. (Who knows what the interplay would have been had our family gone to a more aesthetically evocative church?)
What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)
What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)
20111103
Americanvalues
America was born in Rebellion. America was born On the Verge, where ideas, ethnicities, philosophies, religions, languages, histories and narratives from around the world came together in the cities, salons, pubs, coffeehouses, courts, churches, lyceums, presses and public squares, to mix, intermingle, and radically transform.
In all of the great moral conflicts that have defined American freedom, there have been those who sought justice and greater human dignity for all, and there have been those who defended established hierarchy and social restriction. The struggle between cosmopolitan embrace of all humanity versus the provincial, factional, traditional and powerful was old in our republic's youngest days.
Ending the rule of kings is a fundamentally radical concept. Abolition, free speech, women voting, civil rights, labor rights, freedom of conscience, have nothing traditional or conservative about them. The truly American spirit is Speaking Truth to Power.
Freedom is the freedom of dissent, disruption. Freedom is not merely freeing the businessmen. The untrammeled right of men of wealth to do as they please and influence decisions without concern for democratic participation is not the radical gift of the American experiment, but rather the ancient way of dominion and empire. Freedom is not merely freedom to live a comfortably unexamined life in one's steady cultural tradition, regardless if that culture is Bantu, Persian, Scandinavian, or the much mythologized and over-marketed American "heartland." Freedom obligates one to engage the world, doubt oneself, and see all cultures as sources anyone might draw from to grow and change themselves.
Goodness is not America's essence but its aspiration. No one gets to assume they're the good guys, especially not trying to justify something they would condemn from anyone less good than they. There never was a Shining City on the Hill, and a city presuming itself to be that one is guilty of pride. That City is not yet built and will never be completed.
This is the "liberalism" I learned from the example of many, and is nothing like the Strawman "liberalism" pundits on the right sneer at, nor the counterfeit "liberalism" focus-group technocrats in the Democratic Party might offer, nor the empty "liberalism" the compromised media occasionally name-check when they need to say something about "both sides."
This is America as I know it and love it.
In all of the great moral conflicts that have defined American freedom, there have been those who sought justice and greater human dignity for all, and there have been those who defended established hierarchy and social restriction. The struggle between cosmopolitan embrace of all humanity versus the provincial, factional, traditional and powerful was old in our republic's youngest days.
Ending the rule of kings is a fundamentally radical concept. Abolition, free speech, women voting, civil rights, labor rights, freedom of conscience, have nothing traditional or conservative about them. The truly American spirit is Speaking Truth to Power.
Freedom is the freedom of dissent, disruption. Freedom is not merely freeing the businessmen. The untrammeled right of men of wealth to do as they please and influence decisions without concern for democratic participation is not the radical gift of the American experiment, but rather the ancient way of dominion and empire. Freedom is not merely freedom to live a comfortably unexamined life in one's steady cultural tradition, regardless if that culture is Bantu, Persian, Scandinavian, or the much mythologized and over-marketed American "heartland." Freedom obligates one to engage the world, doubt oneself, and see all cultures as sources anyone might draw from to grow and change themselves.
Goodness is not America's essence but its aspiration. No one gets to assume they're the good guys, especially not trying to justify something they would condemn from anyone less good than they. There never was a Shining City on the Hill, and a city presuming itself to be that one is guilty of pride. That City is not yet built and will never be completed.
This is the "liberalism" I learned from the example of many, and is nothing like the Strawman "liberalism" pundits on the right sneer at, nor the counterfeit "liberalism" focus-group technocrats in the Democratic Party might offer, nor the empty "liberalism" the compromised media occasionally name-check when they need to say something about "both sides."
This is America as I know it and love it.
20110902
restatement
Liberals are stupid. Conservatives are evil. The pattern holds true.
Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.
Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.
20110806
twobarswhamyagottacross
I don't think there is any being in charge of the whole universe. I also have not been inclined to align with the organization American Atheists. This does not prove to be an exception.
Jon Stewart Mocking American Atheists for Opposing Cross at 9/11 Memorial
If someone were specifically constructing and installing a cross to "represent the faith of the people here," that would definitely be a First Amendment violation, using a public memorial to grant favorable status to a particular religion. In this case, it's a found object among the ruins, which some people have taken as meaningful. It's an emergent part of the narrative. If you go to many monuments or National Parks here around the West, you'll find Native American sites or religious artifacts, as well as historic churches or artifacts of settlers, displayed or pointed out on hiking/driving maps, because they're a significant part of what's there in the story of the area. I don't see that as violation of the First Amendment so long as it's not emphasized in a way to privilege a particular religion or culture in the story.
It's a question of how it's displayed, not whether it's displayed.
Jon Stewart Mocking American Atheists for Opposing Cross at 9/11 Memorial
If someone were specifically constructing and installing a cross to "represent the faith of the people here," that would definitely be a First Amendment violation, using a public memorial to grant favorable status to a particular religion. In this case, it's a found object among the ruins, which some people have taken as meaningful. It's an emergent part of the narrative. If you go to many monuments or National Parks here around the West, you'll find Native American sites or religious artifacts, as well as historic churches or artifacts of settlers, displayed or pointed out on hiking/driving maps, because they're a significant part of what's there in the story of the area. I don't see that as violation of the First Amendment so long as it's not emphasized in a way to privilege a particular religion or culture in the story.
It's a question of how it's displayed, not whether it's displayed.
20110617
communitynotdeity
You've probably heard, every couple months or so, of some town in the U.S. with atheist-themed billboards or bus signs, and angry people reacting with protest, stonewalling, or vandalism. Nontheists tend to see this reaction in terms of "see, they're so crazy even a completely inoffensive sign that we exist sets them off."
Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.
We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.
If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.
But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.
Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.
We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.
If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.
But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.
20110531
pure
Of course, an interest in heritage, culture, even ethnicity, is neither racist nor fascist. However, an interest in the purity of that heritage or culture or ethnicity, a desire to keep it from dilution and free of anything foreign to it, is the very substance of racism and fascism.
Purity is a corrosive antimoral value that reliably leads people to evil conclusions. Whether in matters sexual or spiritual or cultural, unless you're talking about refining chemicals and ores, purity is not a value or goal worth having.
I'm thinking of two otherwise unrelated things here. One, wishing an easy way to navigate the musically compelling but politically volatile pagan- folk- and black-metal scenes. Another, clashes over the immigration issue. At that debate (three months ago) between United for Social Justice and Utah Minutemen, the assertion there's no American identity to mold oneself to (sorry, forget the exact words) struck me as a good one. Of course one of the Minutemen vocally disagreed. I'm sure they think themselves just normal people wanting what's right (that's what's so insidious about cognitive frames), but their idea of what it is to be American is arbitrarily limited. I align more with Naomi Wolf who identifies being "American" with the attitude of speaking truth to power and willing to free all people from authorities and systems of control. By her account Americans need not have ever trod the soil of this continent beneath their sandalled feet, and probably not even lived while the place bears that name. It's an excessively idealistic, slightly sappy notion, argued specifically to lure those with narrow views of America to expand their horizons, but it's a desirable one that manages to embrace a broader humanity.
Purity is a corrosive antimoral value that reliably leads people to evil conclusions. Whether in matters sexual or spiritual or cultural, unless you're talking about refining chemicals and ores, purity is not a value or goal worth having.
I'm thinking of two otherwise unrelated things here. One, wishing an easy way to navigate the musically compelling but politically volatile pagan- folk- and black-metal scenes. Another, clashes over the immigration issue. At that debate (three months ago) between United for Social Justice and Utah Minutemen, the assertion there's no American identity to mold oneself to (sorry, forget the exact words) struck me as a good one. Of course one of the Minutemen vocally disagreed. I'm sure they think themselves just normal people wanting what's right (that's what's so insidious about cognitive frames), but their idea of what it is to be American is arbitrarily limited. I align more with Naomi Wolf who identifies being "American" with the attitude of speaking truth to power and willing to free all people from authorities and systems of control. By her account Americans need not have ever trod the soil of this continent beneath their sandalled feet, and probably not even lived while the place bears that name. It's an excessively idealistic, slightly sappy notion, argued specifically to lure those with narrow views of America to expand their horizons, but it's a desirable one that manages to embrace a broader humanity.
20110524
kantyousee
Logical corollary to the categorical imperative: Anything you try to justify doing to anyone else, you implicitly grant everyone in the universe permission to do to you. Your only refuge is in highly specific circumstances or in confessing to having chosen to do ill.
20110504
absenceofleaders
Haymarket Affair, May 4
"Anarchist" is a term that was generally adopted with some sense of irony. Apologists for status quo hierarchic government and business domains, sincere or self-serving, generally attacked any attempt to improve the lives and restore the rights of underclasses as bringing on "anarchy" in the chaos-brutality-and-riotous-destruction sense. If bringing about genuine freedom, opportunity, voice, and participation for laborers, women, ethnic outsiders, and the poor is "anarchy," many people reasoned, then let us be for anarchy. If institutional power of the wealthiest few dominating the impoverished many is civilization, then let civilization burn. "Anarchist" has acquired a long list of hyphenated adjectives, as visions of just how to build up a better civilization vary, but what many anarchists have actually envisioned is a very loose federalism, built up of otherwise independent local community organizations and labor unions.
I'm about as (un)comfortable with the label anarchist as I am with liberal, socialist, libertarian, or progressive. In some contexts, I even count as conservative. I also am dubious of the value and virtue of violent revolution. I like to place a bit of hope (not faith) in the Arab Spring, and also in open communication, strikes, building occupations, mass demonstrations that block ordinary business of government and trade, and other instances of badass pacifism.
(The last is a TVtropes link; hope you've got three hours to kill if you click on it.)
"Anarchist" is a term that was generally adopted with some sense of irony. Apologists for status quo hierarchic government and business domains, sincere or self-serving, generally attacked any attempt to improve the lives and restore the rights of underclasses as bringing on "anarchy" in the chaos-brutality-and-riotous-destruction sense. If bringing about genuine freedom, opportunity, voice, and participation for laborers, women, ethnic outsiders, and the poor is "anarchy," many people reasoned, then let us be for anarchy. If institutional power of the wealthiest few dominating the impoverished many is civilization, then let civilization burn. "Anarchist" has acquired a long list of hyphenated adjectives, as visions of just how to build up a better civilization vary, but what many anarchists have actually envisioned is a very loose federalism, built up of otherwise independent local community organizations and labor unions.
I'm about as (un)comfortable with the label anarchist as I am with liberal, socialist, libertarian, or progressive. In some contexts, I even count as conservative. I also am dubious of the value and virtue of violent revolution. I like to place a bit of hope (not faith) in the Arab Spring, and also in open communication, strikes, building occupations, mass demonstrations that block ordinary business of government and trade, and other instances of badass pacifism.
(The last is a TVtropes link; hope you've got three hours to kill if you click on it.)
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