This Is Probably An Interesting Blog (But In The Offhand Chance That It's Not…)

From Eric Baker’s “Today” archives at Design Observer.

His spirit haunts this city.

Charlie Brooker unveils his plan to save mankind at The Guardian. It’s actually pretty commonsensical:

[We] fail to take painful measures in the present that could ease our existence in the future, because we think they’re too arduous – unless you’re a spluttering contrarian, in which case you think the whole climate change thing is a load of trumped-up phooey anyway, and that all scientists are shifty, self-serving exaggerators, apart from the brave handful who agree with you. Hey, I’m no scientist. I’m not an engineer either, but if I asked 100 engineers whether it was safe to cross a bridge, and 99 said no, I’d probably try to find another way over the ravine rather than loudly siding with the underdog and arguing about what constitutes a consensus while trundling across in my Hummer.

Ah, but there’s money to be made in sowing seeds of doubt. Brooker uses the example of exercise and how, though we understand the benefits and have seen the studies showing how physical activity can lower risk of heart disease and other illness, still nearly 60 percent of individuals refuse to exercise. But what if it’s all a big conspiracy by the shoe companies who stand to profit from the masses lacing up their jogging shoes?

That’s generally how I choose to think about the debate surround global warming. There was a time when there was such a thing as “doctor recommended cigarettes,” meaning every faction and interest has their experts on retainer. So how are we to be sure of anything? Consensus and the peer-reviewed method seem to be a good place to start. Granted, some folks will refuse to acknowledge science in the face of calamity, but I’m not concerned about those few patches of misery. I’m more interested in how we form our public policy, and that involves experts, consensus and, well, trust.

I’m not sure a paranoid humanity has it in them to survive the long haul.

(via)

The Texas Board of Education has seemingly succeeded in changing the state’s curriculum to add more emphasis on conservative and religious figures. This excerpt was striking:

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

[...]

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

This is one of those palm-to-the-face moments, which wouldn’t seem so disappointing if the decisions of the Texas Board of Education didn’t affect almost every other state in the union. But most infuriating for any student of history should be the rewriting of our past regarding the separation of Church and State, which was actually proposed to Thomas Jefferson by Anabaptists, Quakers and Baptists seeking freedom and protection from persecution by Calvinist theocracies that governed early American communities. In other words, the Separation of Church and State wasn’t championed to keep religion out of government, but government out of the free practice of religion.

Anyone with a library card or basic access to the internet could research this stuff.

And we wonder why we’re falling behind.

My thoughts exactly.

Design Observer never fails to unearth the strange and beautiful:

From 1913 to 1971 five thousand one hundred and twenty one mentally ill patients were cremated on the grounds of the Oregon State Hospital. Their remains were sealed in copper canisters. The canisters were stored in the hospital’s basement until the 1970s when they were moved to a memorial vault underground. The vault was subjected to periodic floods. In 2000 they were removed from their institutional crypt, placed on plain pine shelves in a storeroom, and were left virtually forgotten until David Masiel heard of their existence and photographed them.

William Galston dissects our uniquely American relationship with government:

As schoolchildren, most Americans encounter the ancient maxim, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. Within limits, it is. But taken too far, the spirit of vigilance yields what the late historian Richard Hofstadter termed the “paranoid style in American politics”. Most political observers dismissed last summer’s raucous town meetings and “Tea Party” demonstrations as an angry fringe phenomenon. That cannot be said today. In a CNN survey released two weeks ago, 56 per cent endorsed the proposition: “The federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens”. This is deeply troubling. Moderate anti-statism helps preserve liberty. But extreme anti-statism undermines democratic self-government.

I appreciate Galston putting a pin on the map marking the decline of institutional trust. But where Vietnam, Watergate and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal created legitimate concerns about government power and interest, it seems more likely that we’ve fallen into a sort of political self-fulfilling prophecy. There is an entire political movement and for-profit media enterprise built around the idea that government, as an institution, is not to be trusted. But instead of being rooted in legitimate disappointments from scandal, crumbling infrastructure, failing educational standards, war or a public displays of failure, today’s distrust seems to be firmly planted in fear-mongering and special interest favors. I simply can’t understand the logic of assuming a human institution like a corporation will be more benevolent than the human institution of government. It’s hard not to feel like any failure of government is anything more than our own failure of imagination and resolve.

My, we’ve come a long way.

Over at The Guardian, Andrew Brown proposes a game of threes:

I was prompted by an exchange in comments to wonder whether it was really true, as A. N. Whitehead claimed, that everyone thinks their own beliefs are the summit of western philosophy. So the challenge is a simple one. Name three people, preferably contemporaries, whom you honestly believe are smarter, better educated, and more honest than you are, but who disagree with you about God. So atheists must name believers, and vice versa.

Hmm. My being an agnostic creates some structural difficulties, so I’ll try to name a few of each.

Theists: I’m going with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the prolific authors John Updike and Annie Dillard.

Atheists: Richard Dawkins, Umberto Eco, (who incidentally has an excellent dialogue with the Arch-Bishop of Milan readily available for consumption) and for discursive purposes, Christopher Hitchens.

Positive Liberty provokes some interesting discussion:

If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.

Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.

The comments section from their original post is fascinating. It’s like a walking into a bathroom stall in a gas station and realizing the walls are covered in mathematic formulas.