Wingnut of the week -- Lawrence Auster

I should explain that my fascination with wingnuts is fairly specific. There are dozens of right wing bloggers who are merely stupid or repellent, and there is also a correspondingly sizable army of leftists who take on the task of mocking them. I'm not very interested in playing that game. The right-wingers on my list are those that exert a peculiar fascination on me, those whose raving seem to say something about the human condition, or at least my condition. Those who seem to be radical enough, in the sense of wanting to get to the root of things, that they have something new to say. Mencius Moldbug may be the prototype of this class, but I am discovering others.

Today's wingnut is still not my current favorite; I am still leading up to that one. Instead, I am taking a look at Lawrence Auster, who I mentioned awhile back as one of the star kooks of the "Preserving Western Civilization" conference:

...people like Lawrence Auster, who calls "Darwinism" "the biggest intellectual fraud in history" and displays an unhealthy obsession with Michelle Obama's looks?

Auster divides his time between virulent racism and tired arguments against evolution. He's reasonably intelligent and literate (apparently related to the novelist Paul Auster). Why is he interesting?

Well, one rather trivial thing we have in common is that we were both censored at the Secular Right blog: see here. More interestingly, his attempts to disprove materialism verge perilously close to my own speculations on the nature of immaterial objects. Take this one:

Also, the problem of universals shows that there are indeed non-material existents. Most or all of math is a non-material existent. One cannot find math anywhere as a physical object. Thus, one must accept the existence of non-material existents, unless one wishes to claim that mathematics does not exist. One knows that the number two really exists, but where is it? Two tables before me and two chairs behind me both use the exact same existent "two." However, can we point physically to this number two? No, it is a non-material existent, as are most or all universals. Thus, one cannot reasonably claim that there is no such thing as a non-material existent. This opens us up to another realm where there are things that are real, and exist, apart from physical phenomena, such as mathematics and consciousness.

Thus, the evidence based-atheist who says that there is no evidence for God, and therefore God does not exist, is using an invalid method for the debate. One cannot use any purely material based approach to the question of a non-material existent, such as God.

[Actually this was written not by Auster, but by one his correspondents, J. Istre, but Auster gave it a stamp of approval.]

A collection of my own posts that touch on the idea of immaterial objects: here, here,here, here, here, andhere. I find any convergence of my ideas with those of reactionaries disturbing, but interesting. Does it mean that my own line of thought is going to inevitably lead to me becoming a wingnut? Hardly. I don't think there's a cosmic requirement that a taste for the transcendental must go hand-in-hand with being a hate-filled ranter, even if those appear to be locally correlated. Like what happened with the American flag: normal, intelligent, non-rightist culture has ceded a huge chunk of cultural territory to its enemies. I'd like to start to reclaim some of it.

Let's start by splitting the transcendent from transcendentally awful politics. A recognition that, let us say, there is something more to the world than "atoms and the void" is somehow supposed to automatically lead to the inference that traditional religion is true. There seems to be an awfully big gap there. Acknowledging that immaterial mathematical entities exist is one thing; using that to claim that you have direct knowledge about a gaseous vertebrate who made the universe and cares deeply about humans sexual configurations and whether we can eat shellfish -- that's something else. The transcendent says that simple-minded materialism is not true, ie, that the universe is not mere "stuff", but anybody who has even a cursory familiarity with modern physics knows that the stuff of scientific materialism is not mere stuff, either.

My goal (on the rare days that I think about this stuff) is to rescue the idea of the transcendental from such primitive superstitions. Traditional religion should not be dismissed entirely, as the New Atheists do. It should be considered as the product of early humanity grappling with realities that were much too difficult for them. To a desert tribesman, the transcendental appears as an alpha primate bigger than any other; it's the chief, warlord, lawgiver and judge writ onto the fabric of the universe. We have learned a lot since then. Being finite beings, we can still only grasp at shadows of the infinite, but we ought to have better shadows, or at least different ones. Traditional religions are intellectually untenable; materialism has deficits that even its best advocates have trouble papering over.

Oh well, this doesn't have much to do with Auster, but he is not, in the end, all that interesting anyway. Scipio is more entertainingly unhinged; the next blogger in this series has a more creative approach to metaphysics (and is also completely around several different bends). Auster's style seems too austere for his content.

Here is Auster's very latest, where he tries to explicate the links between liberalism and atheism:

Liberalism, as I define it, is the denial of any truth higher than the human self. From this denial comes the belief in the equality of all human selves and human desires, and the liberal program of rejecting the order of being, meaning the divine order, the social order and the natural order, all the dimensions of reality that are external to the human self. Under liberalism, the only legitimate order is a bureaucratic and technical apparatus aimed at supplying everyone's needs and ensuring everyone's equality....the dogmatic materalist atheists deny the entire order of natural and human existence. They close out, they exclude, they HATE, any reality higher than that which can be expressed in terms of genetic accidents selected via the survival of the fittest. They are at war with the structure of the world as normal human beings experience it.

Again, I am fascinated by the ways in which his post is not entirely wrong. There are bits of truth embedded in the nonsense and paranoia, like the seeds sparrows pick out of horse turds. There is much about the politics and spirituality of NPR liberalism (my default affiliation, having exhausted my radical tendencies decades ago) that I find dissatisfying; that gives me a (very small) measure of sympathy for the wingnut worldview. And while the nourishment of the seeds is hardly worth picking through all the shit, I don't see anybody else trying to give a systematic critique of what is more or less the consensus view of the educated mainstream.

Wingnut of the week -- Scipio

[Updated below]

I have a new favorite wingnut, who is so good that I have to work up to him slowly. In the meantime, there's this guy, for whom the phrase "over-the-top" was coined:

Obama has effectively dismantled the entire constitutional basis of our republican government, opened up the economy to the socialization of health care, set the stage for a radical overthrow on the 2nd Amendment, laid the groundwork to re-institute the "Fairness Doctrine"™ to squelch dissent, moved the US Census into the White House to control the 2010 redistricting of political parties and so reduce the Republican Party into irrelevancy, tremendously expanded abortions overseas, put in place a cadre of anti-Semites to pressure Israel, moved to normalize relations with the terror regimes of Syria and Iran and began the gradual end of American law so as to replace it with international law emerging from the UN.

Obama accomplished all of this in two weeks.

Or his inaugural-day diatribe, when most of the country was feeling pretty good about itself:

The end of the Republic will be broadcast live today from Washington. Never have a people been able to witness in a mere few hours the end result of their decades of flippancy toward their own heritage. We have become as Esau. Liberty is too burdensome, too demanding, too hard to maintain, and so we have sold it for the mess of pottage promised by those apes in silk who rule over us.

Watch the mob gawk with hands outstretched as its new god draws near! Hear the teeming multitudes become as one as they cheer the coming of their messiah! See the media grovel and scrape as they perform their ablutions! We might even gape at the crass and vulgar idolatry of the thing.

Why, one would think that a Roman emperor was approaching!... We once produced a Lincoln. Now all we can offer up is a fey beast who revels in mendacity.

This creature adopts the outward trappings of Lincoln–”the train ride, the food, the Bible–but to those with eyes he looks like a boy child who puts on daddy'™s shoes and scampers about the house yelping, "œLook at me! Look at me!"

And that is exactly what hundreds of millions of gawpers will do this day. They will stare in reverent awe as that callow and grim thing climbs the podium and assumes the mantle once worn by Jefferson....

The Golden Age of our Republic is a distant memory, our Silver Age wasted upon a host of Asian land wars, Middle East phantasms and confiscatory taxation to fund myriad panes et circenses. Now we begin our Age of Iron, the very stuff from which are forged chains of slavery.

The level of froth this guy works himself into is quite amazing. And he's apparently a teacher of some sort. Scary to think that children are in the care of this guy, who is apparently only a hair's-breadth away from believing that Obama is the actual Antichrist.

Next week's wingnut combines this kind of seething hatred with a penchant for metaphysical speculation and punning that really defies description.

Update: well, on second look this guy looks more deranged and less entertaining than before:

Looking at them, there is not a one into whose guts I would not shove a sword if I could possibly get away with it.

In other words, he's an eliminationist, one of the horde of armchair killers that creates the atmosphere in which real violence takes place.

Reading these Christians who fantasize about mass-murder of their political opponents makes me dream about having a moment where I pull Jesus out like Woody Allen did with Marshall McLuhan so he can tell them "I heard what you are saying. You know nothing of my work."

Wingnut of the week -- Spengler

To qualify for Omniorthogonal's prestigious wingnut of the week award (which needs a better name, since I hardly do this weekly), the recipient has to exhibit above average intelligence, erudition, or imagination, as well as being a right-wing maniac. We're not talking ordinary mouth-breathers here, or the likes of Jonah Goldberg. I'm not looking simply for dumb people to mock; those are too common and too boring and plenty of other places take care of them. I'm looking for people who think differently from me and do so in a way that's strong and strange enough that I might actually learn something or be convinced to change my opinions. Then I mock them.

Spengler is the pseudonym of David P. Goldman, who used to write at Asia Times and now is an associate editor and blogger at the reactionary religious First Things, and before that had an apparently interesting and varied career in finance and philosophy. I'm not sure this guy deserves the wingnut label; his writing seems orders of magnitude more organized than most. He seems to represent the best sort of conservative thought: acerbic, learned, and rigorous. He's also knowledgeable about classical music, and I have to admit to being intimidated by people who can claim that, since it's one of my larger blind spots.

So why would he even qualify as for my prestigious award, seeing as he has the wing but not the nut? Well...in a lengthy confession of his political history, he admits to having been a dedicated follower of Lyndon Larouche for ten years! This mystifies me, because I distinctly remember figuring out for myself that the Larouchies were creepy crackpots when I was about 17 years old. If my unformed youthful self could figure it out, how could someone of such manifest intelligence waste ten years of their life chasing these ideas? Oh well, people are different and what is obvious to one person is not necessarily so to another. Anyway, Spengler gradually figured out that he was beholden to a "gnostic cult" and extricated himself.

If that wasn't enough to interest me, it turns out that before he hooked up with Larouche, Spengler was affiliated with Hashomer Hatzair, a Socialist-Zionist youth movement that I myself belonged to for a few years (also around age 17). How one transitions from that to the vaguely anti-semitic Larouche cult is another mystery. Goldman has a complicated relationship to his Jewishness and his present conservatism seems to be an effort to recapture something that he missed in his red-diaper-baby childhood.

I sometimes wonder why I never had this kind of rebellion. My parents were conventional liberals, I was somewhat radical in my youth and am now more or less a conventional liberal myself. My brother, on the other hand, became a raving right-wing nut, and many other people from left-wing backgrounds have become rightist ideologues. I think the people this happens to are those who take their political beliefs too seriously, who want to use a political ideology as a personal identity and a root philosophy. As a math and computer geek I looked elsewhere for that stuff, and so I never expected politics to conform to a neat conceptual system, so never felt the need to shift from one extreme to another.

Blame Game

The tragic shootings in Arizona are a good place to look at issues of how people think about causality and its agentive correlate, blame. Why do things happen? Physics says that ever damn thing in the trailing light-cone of a given event contributes to its happening. But that's completely useless to everyday cognition. Some things seem more causal than others, and some things seem blameworthy -- that is, they are both causal and according to our moral feelings, they should not have occurred, they only occurred because some agent did something wrong, whatever that means.

Usually someone who shoots and kills someone else is to blame, because we think they caused this regrettable action. But if the person is insane, whatever that means, we assume that they do not actually have the same kind of non-caused causation that a normal, free-willed person has. They are machines at the mercy of chemistry and brain anatomy -- unlike us. They are not to blame. Even Jon Stewart last night was talking about "the complex ecosystem of causality", which is pretty heady stuff coming from a fake news show.

If we can't blame the individual, can we blame the various factors that caused or enabled his action? These include:
- the ready availability of guns (and in particular automatic weapons with high-capacity magazines)
- the atmosphere of violence in current politics

Krugman makes the case as well as any, referencing the concept of "eliminationism" which I believe was originated or at least promoted by Dave Neiwart. The rightwing response is to dredge up some instances of violent rhetoric and imagery on the left, which of course exist. But is there anything really comparable to the gun-toting rallies of the right? Doesn't seem that way to me, or anybody else I respect, but maybe I'm biased.

The wingnutosphere is in full counterattack mode. Here is wingnut hack writer Andrew Klavan:

"To be sure, there is a lot of heated rhetoric in American politics, as ever. For instance, last spring, three Democratic congressmen cruelly slandered Tea Party members by accusing them of spitting on them and calling them racial slurs"

And here is shrieking harpy AtlasShrugs deciding that Palin and the tea parties can't be to blame because Loughner had "targeted" Gifford back in 2007. Of course the source she cites does not actually say what she says it does.

It is interesting to see these kind of moves being made -- it's an attempt to break a causal chain by showing that it has origins elsewhere, because if Loughner was "targeting" people in 2007 thent he tea parties aren't to blame because they didn't exist. Technically this is called "explaining away". In this case, it's a weak move because (a) the report doesn't say anythign about "targeting" in 2007, and while the tea parties and Sarah Palin may not have been factors in 2007, the eliminationist rhetoric of the right was certainly in the air, and had been for many years.

Glenn Beck trying to equate an armed militia with an elderly university professor.

Here's a pretty good roundup of wingnut spinning.

There is an interesting two-stage socio-cognitive process going on: first, telling causal stories to make sense of events, in which we try to build causal chains out of the seamless web of the physical world. Second, the moralizing and politicizing of these chains, in which we try to assign not just causation, but moral value and blame. Krugman was quick to blame the right, maybe too quick, and the right was quick to try to counterattack to break this linkage.

My point is that this is a somewhat fictional process. We're battling over what stories are most real, and concomitantly, who are the good guys and bad guys. Like religion, it is a form of ritual collective cognition. We even have institutions for official, ultimate, socially-sanctioned blaming -- courts of law. The quasi-religious atmosphere that still adheres to courtrooms reflects the sacramental aspects of this process, the hushed acknowledgement that they are places where we have the awful and mysterious power to make fictions and reality coincide.

Perhaps the ultimately real story is that we are all pretty much like an insane person, our actions not under the control of some mysterious acausal freedom but instead subject to the generalized causal workings of the universe, as much as a falling rock or the lion hunting the deer. But it's vital to pretend we aren't.

[[update: here's another nice instance from Rush Limbaugh:

"What Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party in this country. He's sitting there in jail; he knows what's going on. He knows that ... the Democrat [sic] Party -- is attempting to find anybody but him to blame...He knows if he plays his cards right that he's just a 'victim.' He's the latest in a never ending parade of victims brought about by the 'unfairness of America.' The 'bigotry, racism, homophobia' of America. The 'mean-spiritedness of America.'

The poster at Washington Monthly seems to think that this is gibberish, but it makes perfect sense in the analytical framework I've sketched out. The Democrats want to blame the Republicans, and so the Republicans, as a defensive move, want to blame Loughner alone, and thus attack any connection between "mean-spiritedness" and his actions. And Limbaugh just takes the battle one step further and asserts that Democrats are "supporting" Loughner because they want to remove some of the blame from him and put it on the Republicans. This is of course nuts, but it's the product of Limbaugh's honed instincts as a propagandist and wholly political animal.]]

Brothers in Arms

I was at a family event in Chicago recently, and so naturally had a couple of run-ins with my wingnut brother, the one who not only reads Ann Coulter but hangs out with her. In other words, he lives in a moral/political reality as opposite as possible to mine. I don՚t think we planned it that way, but as an outcome it is almost tiresomely cliched, like those old movies where one brother becomes a cop and the other a gangster.

It doesn՚t take much to set us off. Since he was in town for his step-son՚s graduation from Northwestern, I quite innocently asked him about the commencement speaker, which led us by some inexorable process to the closest current wingnut political brainworm, namely being outraged that several such speeches by Republican types had been cancelled due to the Stalinist fervor of the politically correct. Condoleeza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Christian Lagarde (head of the IMF) all have had their right to free speech gravely trampled on.

Natually I thought this was high-order bullshit, if only because people like that have absolutely no problem getting their views into the public sphere, whether or not a particular speaking gig is interfered with. Doesn՚t matter, because there is an infinite stock of equally lame reasons for frothing available to a member of the Fox News Borg. Soon after we had exhausted that topic, we somehow were onto how it was the fault of labor unions that the US economy was a basket case.

Later, a few minutes of Googling was enough to show that his whole spiel was even more bullshity than I had previously thought. Rice and Lagarde withdrew from speaking because they were faced with protests (that is, other people exercising their free speech rights). Ali՚s offer to be presented honorary degree at Brandeis was withdrawn when her remarks calling Islam “a nihilistic cult of death” came to light, but in the process of doing so the university extended her an offer to come be a speaker at any time, which was entirely proper, given that a commencement speech is an honor – universities should provide a place for controversial speakers to be heard, but not necessarily be granting them honoray degrees.

Well, despite severe temptation I didn՚t restart the argument when I saw him next. I didn՚t want to be the one to make a family gathering into a shouting match, and we managed to be relatively pleasant to each other for the rest of the trip. I don՚t regret that, but I do kind of regret not initiating the meta-conversation that might actually be interesting to me, if not him: how is that we have built for ourselves such entirely separate worlds of discourse? How is it that two people with the same background should fasten on such different understandings of how things are? This is what I wanted to say; and perhaps it would at least create a shared feeling of mutual incomprehension; allowing us to find common ground in our lack of common ground.

That did not happen, sadly. So I continue to think of him as a slave to crappy ideas that nobody with an ounce of an intelligence should take seriously, and he continues to think I՚m a boring member of (what he considers as) the establishment who doesn՚t have the courage to break with the mainstream. Our lives don't intersect very often, which may be for the best, since I can't imagine any way to reconcile our points of view.

Wingnut update

Let's check in with our favorite right-wing lunatics:

Mencius Moldbug was going to give a talk at a conference on seasteading organized by Milton Friedman's grandson, but pissed off another, more prominent speaker by calling him a faggot and got disinvited. Oops.

Lawrence Auster was weirdly obsessed for awhile with the "The Game" aka pick-up-artistry. He's the most popular search keyword for this blog, so I guess I should mention him again.

Scipio was the subject of an profile in Esquire (the author shared my alarm that someone this deranged was in charge of a classroom of children), after which his site went down, and has remained that way for weeks. If he was hacked, well, maybe it was by one of the liberals he fantasized about stabbing to death.

Spengler is trying to protect some rigid definition of Judaism from the practices of actual Jews. L'shana Tovah, bro.

Gagdad Bob continues to spew forth metaphysical mush interspersed with attacks on the left. I still find something fascinating in how coherent his worldview is, although it's both wrong and repellent and supported with transparent lies.

Both Gagdad and Moldbug strike me as creatively intelligent people who for whatever reasons could not accept the consensus worldview of their peers, and so struck out in (somewhat) original directions. That's the source of their continued appeal to me, but in their determination to separate themselves off from liberalism have veered far into paranoid craziness, and have hence dug themselves into intellectual corners that they can't escape. Their ideologies are impervious to critique -- Gagdad like to crow about things he knows with "absolute certainty" -- or argument from outside; facts are selectively chosen or radically twisted to fit the paradigm.

There are certain kinds of genius who create their own worlds; many of the greatest artists belong to this group. That's all well and good for fiction and art (Joyce, Tolkien, Picasso, Sergio Leone come to mind), but for poltics it is ultimately either tedious or dangerous. Politics is the art of the possible; the only justification for thinking about it is if doing so can help to understand and improve the real world. Too many people think it's about building castles in the air. This was always at the core of my long argument with libertarians -- they are nerds in love with an elegant theory and don't care about the mismatch with reality. Gagdad and Moldbug are more interesting but have the same general flaw.

All of which is to say I am trying to get over my unhealthy fascination with wingnuts. They are just not that interesting except as pathology. Besides, now the academics are getting into it. My Yom Kippur resolution is to spend less time on these wackjobs and more on tikkun olam.

Random links

Report from the doom conference.

Wingnut discovers link between Obama and psychedelic theorists Terence and Dennis McKenna. (h/t some commenter on Poor Man).

But it turns out that Western culture is built on those very same sacraments!

Rightwingers really just don't get the concept of humor.

Bad new word: "warfighters". (via)

You can purchase Zimbabwe's hyperinflated currency (current top denomination: 50 billion dollars) on eBay.

New #1 favorite wingnut: Gagdad Bob

Finally, I present my new favorite right-wing lunatic. My criteria for this coveted spot is someone who hates everything I stand for, but isn't a complete moron, and has something reasonably fresh to say. Not too easy to find. Mencius Moldbug has occupied that slot for awhile, but he's gotten rather repetitive. So the new dude is "Gagdad Bob", a logorrheic devotee of Tarot and James Joyce, apparently some kind of psychotherapist(!) who projects projection, among other nifty mental feats:

It is the unrepentant spiritual terrorism of the left that frightens us.... Progressivism is the expression of thanatos the "death instinct." It is perverse, sadistic, and authoritarian. Which is why, of course, they project these things into conservatives.

To which this is the only proper response.

Before descending into the abyss of antagonism, let me mention the stuff on his blog that I sort of like: the larger portion of it is devoted to a kind of whacked-out metaphysical speculation, for which he has invented his own system of metaphors, symbols, and puns. This is the sort of thing, like continental philosophy, that I can sometimes enjoy, because despite it being foreign to my own way of thinking it almost makes sense; I enjoy the mental exercise of trying to understand what the hell it's all about. And there are occasional resonances with my own fumbling attempts at spiritual thinking, even though I'm coming at it from a very different starting point.

So half the contents of his blog is this somewhat amusing foray into amateur theocomedy, and the rest is hate-filled rants against people like me -- "the psycho-spiritual left". Some examples:

Here he spews rabid, mostly groundless fulminations against Obama:

You will see the false love -- the hate -- behind the Obama phenomenon should he lose the election, for in every denizen of Blue Meanies, police are making plans for violence. In fact, they are also planning for violence should he prevail. But that violence is only a prelude to the violence to come.

If there's been an apology or retraction for this failed prediction, I've missed it. Of course there has been threats of violence since the election, but it's all from the lunatic right.

Back to the Emperor. Among other things, the Emperor is the symbol of divine authority on earth. He is not a replacement of divine authority, but its horizontal prolongation. And along these lines, perhaps the most important point is that, as UF writes, "God governs the world by authority, and not by force. If this were not so, there would be neither freedom nor law in the world."

This automatically excludes Obama from being a legitimate ruler, in that the left is all about governing by force. He will not "lure" you toward the good by his intrinsic authority, but compel you to "share" and "spread around" the fruits of your labor with his purely earthly power. And that's all it is. His profound lack of understanding of Christian doctrine is too well documented to discuss here.

I like that bit about how "the left is all about governing by force". Uh-huh, and the right is all about governing by -- what exactly? pure love? This is nothing more than another attempt to delegitimize Obama's election on no grounds whatsoever, an effort which permeates the wingnutosphere. Obama by definition can't be legitimate, can't have any authentic spiritual power, because he lacks understanding of Christian doctrine. (I wonder where the idea that "spreading wealth around" is un-Christian -- seems to me Jesus was quite in favor of it, ie in Matthew 25:34-43 and many other passages. But no doubt my understanding of Christian doctrine is even more deficient than Obama's).

And specious explanations of politics:

As we just witnessed with President Bush, a leader who fails to resonate in this unconscious manner simply will not be perceived as effective, no matter how competent he is. From even before day one of his presidency, Bush was unable to use language in such a way as to bind up the anxiety and hatred of liberals. First, just as it is difficult for the non-evil to understand the evil, it's also difficult (at least without training) for the non-crazy to truly understand the crazy. On top of that, Bush never appreciated the level of liberal bitterness and resentment over Al Gore's unsuccessful attempt to exploit the judicial system to steal the presidency to which liberals were entitled.

Yes, Bush's failure was an inability to communicate, so his effectiveness and competence was not appreciated. There is actually someone on the planet who believes this! And please note that this alleged psychologist is perfectly willing to diagnose the liberal half of the country as crazy. Here's another half-baked psychological diagnoses of "the left":

leftism is by definition a perpetual rebellion against these principles -- against the Real. Thus, it is de facto the maninfestation of a spiritual illness, often rooted in a psychological one.

His hatred of the left is paired with an equally virulent hatred of materialism and science:

Here again, this is why the materialist can neither know reality nor love, since he does not recognize the absolute reality of subjects. Rather, the subject is simply a side effect of matter, and matter is obviously "one," which is an inverted doctrine of spiritual oneness. This material oneness is the false unity that inspires the left. It is why "what's yours is mine," and why Obama's conscience (such as it is) is untroubled by taking what belongs to you and and Joe and "spreading it around." Yes, Obama loves us. But like nature, he loves us ruthlessly.

Another major element is anti-Darwinism supported by age-old bad arguments, laced with of half-digested trendy notions like catastrophe theory and autpoesis:

Let's not kid ourselves. We really only have two choices. Either this cosmos is in fact grand -- not to mention, beautiful, awesome, sacred and numinous -- or our genes, for reasons we cannot know, randomly mutated in such a way that we imagine that such entirely chimerical things as grandeur and beauty exist...Obviously, on any strict Darwinian view, "beauty" cannot objectively exist.

And FTW, how Obama is...the Antichrist! Well, no, Bob is not that literal-minded a religious whackjob, so he's going to cutesy it up when he accuses Obama of being in league with Satan:

First of all, let's get this out of the way at the outset. Are we calling Obama the antichrist?

Yes, of course.

No, wait -- let's not engage in ad obomanem. Let's just say an embodiment of the antichristic principle. Please, let's discuss this in terms of abstract cosmic principles, without getting personal. No need to demonize someone just because he's an instrument of satan. Besides, he's just the vehicle, not the driver. The surfer, not the wave.

Now, what do we mean by "antichrist?" I would say that, as Christ is Word-made-flesh, the realm of the antichristic would analogously represent the "lower principle" made flesh -- the instantiation, as it were, of the energies of the Fall.

I'm trying to figure out the horrid fascination this site exerts on me...it's not like the normal wingnuts, who for the most part are just hateful cretins. This guy is a smart, funny, occasionally insightful, hateful non-cretin. That's not a combination you see everyday. We share some likes (Joyce, Rahsaan Roland Kirk) and dislikes (Deepak Chopra, Bill Maher). In some respects he's the worst kind of douchebag: the kind who doesn't realize he's a douchebag, but instead believes he has some kind of privileged line to the almighty (actually, it's not so surprising that he's a psychotherapist). Yet I kind of like his stuff. I may have to order his book.

The Internet was invented for me to get access to this kind of weirdo.

Shocking news: religious foundation run by homophobic wingnuts!

Over the past few years I've observed the Templeton Foundation with some bemusement, as it seems to sponsor all sorts of things that seem interesting-but-bordering-on-flakey. I don't have a problem with its general goal, which to explore the connections between science and religion. As a moderate in the God wars I'm all for people trying to find a middle way.

So, I was a bit disturbed to find out that a boatload of Templeton money is going to the forces behind California's regressive Proposition 8, which would strip away the rights of gays to be married (rights they gained under a recent CA Supreme Court decision). John Templeton (son of the founder of the Templeton Foundation and its current chairman) has contributed $1 million dollars to a collection of groups campaigning for this odious law (along with Howard Ahmanson, another crazy rich guy who funded the similar but less respectable Discovery Institute).

Templeton funds many interesting scientific and quasi-scientific efforts, including the Foundational Questions Institute, which lists many prominent people as members and affiliates, including science bloggers Scott Aaronson and Sean Carroll.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with taking money from the Templeton Foundation, no matter what dubious causes they may be linked to. Money they spend on actual research is money not being spent on supporting regressive legislation. However, if I was taking money from such people (and I have been in somewhat similar situations, where I've accepted military funding for my own research), I would feel some extra obligation to speak out for goodness, righteousness, and truth in areas where my patron is spreading evil, hatred, and lies. Just saying.

On the intellectual level, I'm disappointed to learn that Templeton-brand religion is the fundamentalist/wingnut variety -- the kind of God that hates teh gay, not the kind of abstract principle of existence and value that an intelligent person might conceivably have truck with; not the unnameable of mysticism or apophatic theology; no, this is a God with very firm opinions about the proper deployment of human genitalia. There are sane people who work on reconciling science and religion, but they apparently have no crazed billionaires behind their efforts.

The Quest for Intelligent Trump Supporters

I՚ve indicated in the past that I was looking for intelligent Trump supporters to engage with, and couldn՚t really find any. Well, Scott Alexander at SlateStarCodex has published his own thoughts on the election (advocates voting against Trump), leading to over 2000 comments at this writing, many of them pro-Trump. Scott is very intelligent and draws an intelligent crowd, so there we go. Lots of bright people are engaging with the nature of Trump and politics in general, and they represent a diversity of views on the political spectrum.

Unfortunately it all seems like a waste of effort to me, because it is 100% unquestionably obvious that Trump has no serious policy knowledge or positions, so there is no point debating them. Scott acknowledge this:

Donald Trump not only has no solution to that problem [full employment], he doesn’t even understand the question. He lives in a world where there is no such thing as intelligence, only loyalty.

But he nevertheless goes on to pick apart Trump՚s policy statements in detail, because he apparently has boundless time and energy. I certainly didn't have the time to do the same, nor to read all 2000 comments, but here are a few pro-Trump people and their arguments:

Protest Manager

“President Obama set out to change that, since the only think he hates more than American power and success, is a Republican success.”

This is standard wingnut delusional resentment. The guy is also anti climate science, and eventually got himself banned.

Richard

Racism doesn՚t exist, it՚s something invented by Democrats and a threat, and thus

“A vote for Hillary is a vote increasing existential risk!”.

That this is elaborate nonsense should be obvious (indeed it seems obvious to the writer).

SSC people are big on existential risk except they seem to think that the most significant factor is not climate change or hostile AIs, but mean SJWs. Charitably, this means they are very young and overly influenced by their college experiences, or possibly living too much of their lives on the internet.

E. Harding

This guy has the most seemingly-fact-based arguments for Trump. If I wanted to have an argument, I might start with him. But of course most of it is wildly colored, eg:

“Obama created ISIS, almost certainly deliberately.”

This is a ridiculous distortion of the truth, which is that the west had some complicity in the creation of ISIS but it was due to the usual incompetent meddling in foreign wars, not some nefarious plot because Obama likes it when Americans are beheaded.

Luke the CIA Stooge

“Trump Is not an existential threat. THE US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT.…I support trump [because] He’s most likely to permanently damage the authority, legitimacy and power of the US federal government.”

At least this is consistent. If I was the anarchist hothead I was 30 years ago, I might buy this argument. Trump indeed is likely to do permanent damage to the US government, and if that's what you want he's a good choice.

In summary, I՚m not impressed and at this point I don՚t even feel much of a need to have this debate, because it is obvious based on character alone that Trump would be a terrible president. But – I suppose it must be acknowledged that not all Trump supporters are idiots or racists. They have arguments, just not very good ones.

Finally, I should mention Scott՚s conclusion:

The enemy isn’t leftism or social justice. The enemy is epistemic vice.

When the Left errs, it’s through using shouting and shaming to cut through the long and painful process of having to justify its beliefs. It’s through confusing disagreement with evil, a dissenter who needs convincing with a thought-criminal who needs neutralizing.

First, this acknowledgement is an indication of the fact that to a large segment of Scott՚s audience, the enemy is in fact leftism and social justice. That there is a large body of people to whom “justice” has become a curse word is alarming.

Second, I think this exposes a deep philosophical rift between me and Scott and his fellow rationalists. The idea of “epistemic vice” presupposes “epistemic virtue”, that is, that there is some objective model of the world that if we could all somehow figure out, it would solve these difficult problems like full employment and foreign religious wars.

Regardless of whether objective truth exists, elections are not about figuring it out, they are battles over which alliance of forces will get to rule. In this particular election, the lines couldn՚t be clearer: it is the liberal globalized capitalist elite, with generally enlightenment values including technological progress and human universalism, against whatever it is Trump represents, which is some ill-defined mess of ethnic chauvinism, aggressive nationalism, and anti-rationality.

There is no objective reason to prefer one of these sides to the other. There՚s a lot to dislike about the Davos elite, and there are various reasons people have for being on the side of Trump (or the equivalent in other parts of the world, like the National Front in France). These reasons make sense to them, and I don՚t think there՚s much hope of reason convincing them otherwise. No amount of epistemic virtue can settle what is at its root a radical clash of worldview, a power struggle, not an argument.

BUT, it is glaringly, painfully obvious which side of this someone like me, or Scott, or his readers, should support. If your primary values are reason and fact-based decision making, the choice is obvious. If you put overall human welfare over the interests of your immediate ethnic group, the choice is obvious. If you are repelled by violence, the choice is obvious.

[ update: ok, here is a large list of "scholars & writers" who support Trump. Oddly there are no links to any actual writing, so who knows what the arguments are. The list seems to be a mix of well-known worthless right-wing hacks (Bill Bennett, David Horowitz, John Lott] and unknown academics from places like Hillsdale College. But I guess they count as "intelligent". ]

Weimar? No wei!

The protests and counter-protests and mildly violent mobs that are occuring at town halls around the company reminded me of Weimar Germany, and Mark Kleiman had the same thoughts. But a little thinking made me change my mind. What's going on now is nothing like the street brawls between factions of that time, because we live in a wholly different media environment.

You can bet that when Nazis went out to the beer hall after beating up some communists, they were bragging about how many heads they smashed. In our era, when union people and random conservative nudniks mixed it up briefly, each side was bragging about how much they had been victimized. One black conservative goes down for 2 seconds and its a national scandal, amplified to hysteria as only the perverse echo chamber of the right can.

In Weimar Germany the street was an actual locus for political contestation. How much power your side wound up with was directly related to how much muscle you could bring to a brawl. In our time, the locus is the media, and your success depends on whether you can get your YouTube clip picked up by the cable talking heads. Everything is spectacle: "All that was once directly lived has become mere representation."

I have sometimes complained that Americans these days can't get off their fat asses and protest outrages that demand action. On the other hand, Weimar did not end well. Maybe we are all better off now that the struggle goes on in TV studios and Google's PageRank engine.

On the other hand someone is bound to be killed or seriously hurt at one of these things soon enough. The wingnut hysteria seems like it has to keep increasing, "doubling down on craziness" as some put it, and there are an awful lot of unstable individuals with access to guns out there. What happens then, I don't know.

Personhood USA

First: I thought I was pretty immune to the oddities and offenses of wingnut thought, but I must say I was taken aback to see people parading around a banner with the word "rape", not to protest it but to celebrate the results of it (via Rachael Maddow):

Proposed personhood amendments failed in Colorado two times. Mississippi will be voting on its own personhood amendment this year. In an effort to promote its cause, Personhood Mississippi has started a "Conceived in Rape" tour featuring Rebecca Kiessling, who says she was conceived by rape and was slated for abortion. Kiessling states on her website:

Have you ever considered how really insulting it is to say to someone, "I think your mother should have been able to abort you."? It's like saying, "If I had my way, you'd be dead right now." And that is the reality with which I live every time someone says they are pro-choice or pro-life "except in cases of rape" because I absolutely would have been aborted if it had been legal in Michigan when I was an unborn child.

Second: OTOH, give them credit for a smidgen of intellectual consistency. If you really believe that any zygote with around 46 chromosomes is a full-fledged person deserving of full legal protection, then why would that protection suddenly be withdrawn just because that person happened to come about as the result of a violent assault? If abortion is murder, then it's murder no matter how the vessel containing the victim might feel about it.

Third: OTOOH, not really. As I've pointed out before, if the proposition above was really adhered to, then the infant mortality rate would about around 50% and we'd be holding funeral services over discarded tampons. [[Update: Guess I'm not the only one to notice that. I think that link is a joke site, but I can't be sure.]]

Alright, all of the above was just an excuse for me to write about a perpetual term that won't leave me alone: personhood, now with its own lobbying group and proposed constitutional amendments. The concept exerts a strange fascination, perhaps because it is obviously a social fiction while at the same time absolutely essential to living life. I wrote my dissertation on a related topic (agency and computation), and apparently that was not enough to get it out of my system.

I suppose it is compensation, or a reflection of a basic maladjustment. I figured out a long time ago that my interest in sociology is directly linked to my difficulties with normal society (to put it simply: being a sociologist is like a fish suddenly noticing that they are swimming in this weird "water" stuff and wanting to have a theory of it – and only a fairly weird fish would feel the need). Personhood is just another aspect of the same dynamic, and no doubt underlying it is that faint trace of Aspergerishness that is so common in my chosen profession.

From my point of view personhood appears to be have maddeningly contrary qualities: fictional yet real, elusive yet mundane, unknowable while necessary.  I don't think a constitutional amendment is going to help.

Transvaluation of Values

[[updated below]]

Remember how around the time of the Sotomayor nomination, "empathy" became a swear-word on the right? Here's Thomas Sowell and Charles Krauthammer:

...if nothing else it [conservatism] stands unequivocally against justice as empathy -- and unequivocally for the principle of blind justice.

Sometime later, Glenn Beck decided that "social justice" also could be turned into an ooga-booga scare term for his idiot minions:

I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church website. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words....Now, the idea -- hang on -- ... am I advising people to leave their church? Yes. ...If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, 'Excuse me. Are you down with this whole social justice thing?'

And now apparently the idea of "sustainable development" has turned into something to organize against, presumably because it might lead to more people living in cities which are notorious dens of vice and Democrats.

Here's a Teatard group in Maine that is up in arms because a 4-H Club activity dared to promote ideas of sustainability:

Indoctrination only works if you are not aware its being done. Waste not want not is a good frugal way to live. Respecting G-d's creation is absolutely a right way to live. They have turned these ideals and principles into a way to deliver a godless concept of wordshipping [sic] creation and reducing humans to parasites upon the earth...the programs/policies that are vehicles for the massive reduction of private property ownership. If you do not have the right to property precisely what rights do you have? Without the right to property, you are reduced to slavery. Your life? Your natural right to use your life and your liberty to the result of your property is being taken literally, right out from under your own feet.

Raising the children up to believe that the very air they expel, CO2, is a poison to the planet is raising a generation of slaves, primed for complete control by the state.

I repeat, the apocalyptic rant above was generated by a 4-H Club project. IMO, it would certainly be nice if there were some sort of green youth corps that was being radicalized by cadres from the state Ag schools -- that's the sort of thing that might conceivably save this sinking ship. But I think the teabaggers are a wee bit hysterical in this case.

Anyway, call me old-fashioned but I always thought that empathy, social justice, and sustainability were good things. Nowadays I guess that makes me weird. I bet if Democrats sponsored a bill to give everybody a kitten, somehow purring would be made to seem evil by Fox News and its collaborators. And, given how the rest of the media and culture falls into line, evil would be the denotation of kittens from that point forward.

And speaking of transvaluations, that website is called "paintmainered". When did "red" become the color of the right? (actually I know the answer to that -- it was the TV coverage of the 2000 election which assigned red to the Republicans and blue to the Democrats, and for some inexplicable reason it has stuck that way ever since). Is communism really so dead that one of its main symbols can already be recycled by the other side? But it also serves as another piece of evidence, as if one were needed, that the tea party is simply a wing of the Republican party, despite some protestations to the contrary.

[[update: a further thought -- I realize that the three terms above all partake of the ethos of caring and thus have a slight tinge of the feminine about them. At some level all the political crapola boils down to that -- Republicans are calling the Dems pussies, and more importantly, getting agitated that feminine weakness might undermine their own masculinity.

Taken to its extreme, this style of politcs leads directly to fascism. I've smelled traces of fascism in wingnut language before. It's hard to imagine the roly-poly Glenn Beck as an embodiment of the fascist ideal of masculinity -- OTOH his main advertiser is some gold scam that has G. Gordon Liddy as a spokesman. I don't completely get what's going on there, which I guess is why I am drawn to watching the trainwreck.]]

How Dumb Spreads

If I had another life to spare I'd like to do research in memetic epidemiology -- how ideas spread and mutate through populations. Yesterday, Glenn Beck publicized a deeply moronic piece of hysteria -- that cars.gov, the Fed-run consumer site for the cash-for-clunkers program -- was the thin edge of a wedge of complete government takeover of everything on your computer!!!! Of course, there is approximately no basis. There is a bit of legalese on a page that is only for car dealers, consumers never even encounter the hideous piece of text that supposedly permanently hocks your computer's soul to Obama.



This looks like an interesting case, epidemiologically speaking. There appears to be a single source (Beck) and you can see it trickling slowly through the blogosphere. It's pretty easy to identify. Probably it won't spread too widely; even the wingnut sites have comments pointing out how silly it is.

What's amazing to me is the mainstreaming of this kind of stuff. It's one things for stupid memes to propagate over random blogs, but this is being instigated from a major television show, backed up by one of the largest media corporations. Kimberly Guilfoyle is if anything even more hysterical than Beck -- this is a woman who used to be an assistant DA and was wife to Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco and likely next governor of California. People in stations like this used to have a smidgen of responsibility, but these people clearly haven't got the slightest interest in the truth, and are perfectly willing to spread bullshit if it helps stoke their narrative of the evils of the Obama administration.

Well, this meme will die out soon I predict. More significant winger memes include those the drive the birther movement (apparently infection rates in white Southerners are an astonishing 70% or higher) and the idea that that Obama's health care plan involves mass euthanasia of the elderly (some examples here and here). Ooooh, here is a neat convergence!

check out this perfectly usable (until the federal government got a hold of it) Volvo being purposefully destroyed because of this program...Imagine instead of a car purposefully being put to death its your grandmother or grandfather being put to death by the federal government.

The euthanasia meme is going to go far, I predict. It just has the perfect combination of ingredients -- simple facts inflated wildly out of proportion, gruesomeness, paranoia, the invocation of sacred family ties. And seniors are easily manipulated.

Gary Farber does a good job with this sort of thing. Here, for example, he tracks the fauxtrage over a photo from the recent white house beerfest. But he's just one man and is not using systematic techniques. We need some serious analytics applied to this stuff.

Talking to Trumpers

So I tried to engage with a bunch of Trump supporters at one of the wingnut websites I occasionally frequent [sorry no link]. Kind of thought of it as a civic duty. Unfortunately all I have to report back is basically what I knew going in. These people are:

• stupid: the kind of stupid people who think they are smart, bringing to mind this classic scene.
• racist: not the virulent kind, more the whiny kind who think blacks are getting special advantages and the decks are stacked against white men
• assholes: in all manner of ways, but most striking to me was when I pointed out that Trump had a habit of stiffing the contractors who did work for him, they replied that “the work must have been substandard”. In other words, in a fight between a rich and powerful guy and a lesser power, automatically back the rich guy. This may be due to something basic in the core of the authoritarian psyche, but it is incomprehensible to me.
• convinced that there is something called “the left” that includes everybody from Hillary to Stalin, that is deliberately evil and devoted to “destroying our liberties”, and basically is in league with Satan.

This last point of course means that whatever Trump՚s flaws, he appears to be the better alternative to them. So pointing out Trump՚s near-total ignorance, his vile personality, his fraudulent background, and his absurd and destructive proposals means nothing. They claim to be conservatives but are willing to take the risk of vast destruction of our existing system of governance, simply out of hatred for someone who exemplifies the existing system.

These people are lost to sanity, and all we can do is hope that they aren՚t a very big or influential group come November.

[addendum: I don't think I did a very good job of doing what needs to be done -- that is, getting some kind of sense of what these people are really about. That is (a) hard to do on the internet as opposed to f2f and (b) probably better accomplished by people with more empathic skills than me. Here's George Saunders, who normally writes fiction about the broken people of the modern world, giving it a go.]

What's on my mind

Messing around with some computational language tools, I generated this list of words which are more frequent on this blog relative to a standard corpus (some misspellings removed), in order from most overused. Many of these are unsurprising, but I had no idea I used "cannot" more than is normal. Or "parasitical", which is more worrying.

cannot simpleminded parasitical excoriate delegitimize kvetching temperamentally treacly politcs cosmopolitans authoritarians twitter rightwingers inexpert constructivists constructionists entertainingly clathrate undesireable frenzies mystifies wastefulness repurpose gintis wobblies kunstler turmoils bukovsky bankrolls laitin smidgeon sociopaths scienceblogs cleavon oddsmaker vegetating reifying situationists doper yecs popularizer nobels cultish solidary arduino militarist prolixity congealing proft larded atran nixonian seatmate appeaser rationalists leftish libertarianism literalist materialist vitalism rejoinders schuon fusty facebook torahs arduously hugeness universalizing tinkerers factuality autoworkers parasitize rationalist dominionism physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically ferreted gourevitch glaringly symbiote averagely incisively shitheads skimped netzach appall metonymic onrush chokehold halldor churchy scampers starkest agentive dalliances emet mistimed ceasefires hallucinated reimagined overplaying bioethicist copleston disempower flippancy oversimplifies outrageousness indvidual ginned douchebags explicates plumbs mencius metaphysically schelling foregrounding polarizes outlives subtexts acquiesces nostrums undescribable malkuth marketeer analagous preeminently remediable flamers slipperiness bunraku proles burkean peaceniks materialists unaccountably athwart mcworld petraeus romanticizing unnamable huffpo ineffectually commonsensical interoperating empathizing wingnut supplicants hypostasis inchoate obama transhumanists fulminate affordance nonviolently geneological gashed mussed chuppah charnel felin reconstructionism verbalizing tegmark crabbed armys shalizi dehumanization hoohah vannevar copyable bungler unlikeliest preindustrial legitimated downscale fugs bilin slavering egomania naveh determinedly oligarchies chasten reappropriated bekki taleb bioethicists valdis ultraconservative wahabi straussian rewatch anthropomorphism ecstasies libertarians ruination exceptionalism vacillate overreach forthrightness informationally bushites rottenness biomorphic parceled twittering sorley parapsychological irreligious statists maddeningly selfing militarists bushite infuriates deconstructionist dallying harrows glutted worths misplacement engross jewishness hearkens girdled zombified prohibitionist braf sniggering positivists prostrating doomy schmaltzy yesod hewing philosophize doomsayers unconcern conflate jibes misappropriate convulse constructionist relabeled cavalierly mesmeric phantasms atrophied nattering reductionist personhood asocial placating incuding amorality incontestable weida greybeard inescapably scrabbling foreordained puthoff antiabortion commandeering iphone reinterpreting fudges minsky spluttering obsessional explicating rovian subdues ascription graeber counterargument plops

Now I'm playing the Burroughs-ish game of trying to find meaning in this shredded language. "physicalist incarnating idiocies axiomatically" sounds applicable to a number of discussions I've been having lately.

What cannot be said

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.
What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

-- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The idea of apophatic theology has gotten some play in blogs recently, mostly due to a book by Karen Armstrong defending the idea, and some leading uncompromising atheist scientist flamers have attacked her. I'm not sure I see why. Apophaticism by design does not make any positive statements about God or anything else, thus it cannot conflict with science. You'd think that would satisfy the militants, but no, they will not rest until anything even vaguely smacking of religion is razed to the ground.

Not me! I have a mystical streak and a contrarian streak, so this form of enlightenment through negation appeals to me. I see Jerry Coyne is having a contest to name those atheists who like me are less than thoroughly hardcore. I think I like "placatheist" the best of his candidates so far.

One good argument for apophatic theology is to look at what happens when douchebags and pinheads think they have a line on God and "the Absolute". Apparently He's not only American, but a wingnut Republican as well. I think the wingers have (in embryonic form) something of a new religion, in which the saints are the founding fathers and Ronald Reagan, and Sarah Palin is playing Joan of Arc. In keeping with the apophatic approach I am not very comfortable giving attributes to God and I can be pretty sure that he doesn't pick sides in US electoral contests, nor does he have some special affinity for people born in North America.

The obnoxiousness of the noisy religious right is a large part of what drives intelligent people to atheism, but I think it's a tactical error. There is generally a hidden metaphysical core at the heart of most political belief systems, and the left needs to be more explicit about it. There is a vague correspondence between the apophatic demand for silence about metaphysics and the liberal walling-off of religious arguments from the public sphere. But it's not clear that apophatic religion can compete with the more primitive forms as a political organizing tool.

If you can't say anything about that-which-we-usually-call-God but probably deserves a more mystagogic name like "the One" or "the Absolute", what can you do with it? Contemplate it silently I suppose. Keep it in mind as a reality underlying the visible world. Or, you can just deny that the concept has any meaning or utility at all as the hardcore atheists do, but that is boring and philistine. Or you can make meta-level statements about your inability to say anything about it itself. This is what Wittgenstein and others do. A great deal end up being said about that of which we cannot speak.

I'm in the business of effing the ineffable.
-- Alan Watts

Why I, like others, am compelled to issue words on this topic which demands silence, I cannot say. Call it a nagging dissatisfaction with the standard stories. Neither the materialist nor the standard religious pictures of the world make much sense to me, so I'm trying to construct my own. The loudmouths for God or for atheism strike me as team players, which I am not. Universal skepticism is more my thing. Even the existence of an apophatic tradition makes me suspicious; I wouldn't want to accidentally be part of a movement.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
-- Samuel Beckett

Links to the tradition:

• Maimonides advocated an apophatic approach.
• Apophatic theology and neoplatonism.
• Apophasis as a literary genre

Boob obsessed

I don't usually spend that much time viewing the really retarded wingnut sites, or bother to comment on the nuggets of inanity found there. There are many other sites that do a fine job (and in fact, it's voting time for The Golden Winger Awards). But here's a good one from Debbie Schlussel (sort of a down-market Jewish version of Ann Coulter) that hasn't gotten much play:

Much is being made of the photo of President-elect Barack Hussein Obama shirtless and buff in Hawaii (where he's still failed to memorialize "typical White person" granny).

But in fact, it's a carefully orchestrated exercise in the homo-erotic, dreamed up by the Uber-conceit of Obama himself (look at me, I'm bugg) and his largely male team of advisor-ooglers. Just wondering if this is his sad attempt to mollify the gay men who are angry over his invitation to Pastor Rick Warren to make the invocation at the Inauguration. Don't count that out. A lot of gay men can be bought off by a man who looks nice (in their eyes) with his shirt off.

The bit about his grandmother was a gratuitous near-lie, since it was well-known that Obama was planning to attend a memorial service for his grandmother towards the end of his Hawaiian trip (and did). The part about homoeroticism, though, achieves a certain near-perfect combination of dumbness, nastiness, projection, and obsession with trivia. Stuff like that isn't flashy, it won't garner Schlussel a Kippie any time soon, but I salute it for its presentation of the conservative mind in all its splendor.

Blogyear 2016 in review

This was a sucky year for my blogging, in addition to all the other ways in which it sucked. Politics dominated of course. And loss and grief. My company went under at the end of October, which I haven՚t written about here, but it certainly contributed to the overall feeling of disaster.

This is also the year the rabid wingnut fringe of the internet went completely mainstream. I feel a touch of perverse pride in having been tracking it from years before, although I՚m not sure why – if I was a professional pundit or prognosticator, detecting important ideas early should raise my reputation. But to be honest I had no idea these maniacs would turn out to be important, rather than just amusingly weird in a repulsive sort of way.

As is my practice, here՚s an attempt to cobble together some thematic unity after the fact:

The departed

• Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert both
• So many beloved artists: Gene Wilder and Leonard Cohen have been linked to in the past, but I also felt Prince and Bowie and Carrie Fisher just yesterday.
• Political hope

Politics and darkness

• The Dark Side
• Horrified Fascination
• Election Day Narrative Special

The sacred, work, play

• Holy Labor
• Not going to Burning Man
• Yom HaShoah

Technology and geek culture

• The Soviet Internet
• The End of Argument
• Stealing the Future
• The A Word

I declared a goal of writing about goals, but didn՚t end up doing much about it, at least not publicly. Lots of half-written ideas, waiting for the proper framework or format or moment to be fully articulated.

Prince gets the last word:

Life is just a party and parties weren՚t meant to last.