One of us?

Matt Taibbi, has gone undercover with a Christian fundamentalist group. I don't know if he's brave or just another glutton for punishment looking for a new fix. Whatever the truth about his motives, he pulls some hard insight out of the experience:

...by my third day I began to notice how effortlessly my soft-spoken Matt-mannequin was going through his robotic motions of praise, and I was shocked. For a brief, fleeting moment I could see how under different circumstances it would be easy enough to bury your "sinful" self far under the skin of your outer Christian and to just travel through life this way. So long as you go through all the motions, no one will care who you really are underneath. And besides, so long as you are going through all the motions, never breaking the facade, who are you really? It was an incomplete thought, but it was a scary one; it was the very first time I worried that the experience of entering this world might prove to be anything more than an unusually tiring assignment. I feared for my normal.

Like American Psycho before him

Bryce: He makes himself out to be a harmless old codger, but inside... inside...

Bateman: [voice-over] ..."but inside" doesn't matter.

There is a sense that as long as you say and do what is expected of you, you are one of the chosen and the happy. I remember reading that the Puritans all acted happy even when miserable because they didn't want the others to know they hadn't been saved. The Lord had not revealed their pre-selection for Paradise. If Biddy Jones was really saved, why was she so sad? Goodman Smith must be saved, look how happy he is....

Why do people do it? Why do they make mechanical their lives?

It's that once you've gotten to this place, you've left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you're thinking with muscles, not neurons.

They, do it, we do it, I do it, because we want to belong, we want to not have to think our own thoughts. We do it because we watch American Idol. We do it because we would prefer a comedy to a drama. We do it because we are tired, just tired of trying at everything. Those that can do, those that can't... believe.

Science was "Framed" I Tell Ya!

ScienceBlogs... has long been abuzz with Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney's impassioned pleas to the scientific community that scientists begin "framing" their subject matter. PZ Myers of Pharyngula has been one of their greatest critics. The debate has gone so far that Prof. Myers' expulsion from a showing of the latest creationist argumentum ad Hitlerum has been "framed" by Mr. Nisbet as "[r]eally, [r]eally bad for science." In Mr. Nisbet's words:

The simplistic and unscientific claim that more knowledge leads to less religion might be the particular delusion of Dawkins, Myers, and many others, but it is by no means the official position of science, though they often implicitly claim to speak for science.

I am not an experienced exegete of the Pharyngulaic word, but I don't recall Prof. Myers ever claiming he was, as it were, the Voice of Science.

What's worse, I haven't seen or heard Mr. Nisbet on his blog or his recent Point of Inquiry appearance address a concern which for me is core to my own hesitations about "framing science." James Hrynyshyn of Island of Doubt, puts it best (thx to PZ for the link):

Science does embrace simplicity over unnecessary complexity, insofar as parsimony is a useful tool. But scientists are not trained to simplify as an exercise in communications. And they are certainly not trained to emphasize certain elements of their studies at the expense of others just to suit the biases of an audience. (Well, maybe an audience that's reviewing a grant application...) They are trained to do the precise opposite: prioritize according to genuine importance, regardless of who's paying attention.

Indeed, the whole point of science is the pursuit of objectivity, is it not? Framing, by contrast, seems to embrace subjectivity.

So to the scientist, if framing is anything of consequence, then it's contrary to good science. I don't think anyone objects to dressing up science to attract attention. To many scientists, anything more substantial amount to "spin."

This same objection occurred to me after the enthusiam for Lakoff's "Don't Think of an Elephant!" wore off... Isn't this the same crap that Fox News foists upon its audience every day? What's the difference between the "false spin" of the typical FN broadcast and "framing" away the boring, distrubing, or just plain weird aspects of scientific discoveries. I grant the point that repeating over and over again that "science = atheism" is like gift-wrapping your t***icles and sending them to your enemy but where do you draw the line between the personal opinion of one scientist and the "Voice of Science" ? Mr. Nisbet doesn't clearly show us where this line is or even a range where it might be found. I'm not sure there is a clear line between "marketing" and "propaganda," "false spin" and "framing."

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
The Northeast
The Inland North
Philadelphia
North Central
The South
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

But....but...I'm not from the Midlands!

Dialogues with Machiavelli

Last year I began reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy anew. After a short while I conceived the notion that I should follow his example and comment on the Discourses in the same way that the Discourses comment on Livy. Soon I had several very rough pages summarizing and commenting on Machiavelli's ideas. After a while, however, this grew tedious. Around the same time I discovered that there already was a published commentary on the Discourses. Faced with my growing boredom with the format I was utilizing but still charged by the idea of a discourse about Machiavelli's ideas, I suddenly realized that a dialogue might be a better format.

So, several months ago I began a dialogue between a "young lawyer" and Machiavelli on aspects of the Discourses. This project did not get very far before I realized that it might be a good idea to familiarize myself with pre and post-Machiavellian thought on the issues in the Discourses. Since then I have been reading Tacitus,Sallust and other ancient authors and preparing to read "modern" work such as Cato's Letters and Montesquieu. Eventually I plan to use my reading experience as source material for referencing in the dialogue with Machiavelli.

I mention all this, Dear Reader, because I may post this dialogue serially on this blog for your perusal and criticism. Stay tuned.

Squeeb Nation

Matt Taibbi, the acerbic reporter for Rolling Stone has recently made the following observations about the effect of the media,the candidates,

A laid-off worker in Ohio will go to a Hillary Clinton speech, hear Hillary talk about the dangers of electing a president without "experience," and then five minutes after the speech he'll be shaking his fist at the ceiling at the very idea of someone without "experience" even trying to run for president. A teacher in New York will go to an Obama event looking curious and happy, then come out furious at the politics of "the past," rambling like it's been on his mind for years about how we need to "look to the future" instead of staying stuck "where we are." A Republican turns on the TV, hears some asshole like Michelle Malkin say the surge is working, then turns around and with his arm draped around his wife gives you a long spiel about how the surge is working and how those damned liberals don't want to admit it.

Crucially, however, those same people never tell you the same story for more than a few weeks. A few weeks later, their brains are a clean slate again, and the next story they tell you is the one they heard even more recently on TV. Now the outrage might be Barack Obama getting a free ride in the media (your squeeb-citizen here might cite the SNL skit about Barack getting offered a pillow by debate moderators), or John McCain not knowing al-Qaeda is Sunni and therefore not an ally of Iran, or Hillary misspending campaign money on luxury suites in Vegas. "That just shows she's not fit to manage money," he'll say, solemnly.

The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything that smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and policy.

What disturbs me the most about this is that I have noticed the same phenomenon in those around me and myself. The suggestion that has been made by several pundits that Obama's name and racial minority status would be a foreign policy boon struck me as at least partially true. Hence I have almost mindlessly repeated it in discussions about the Senator.

Is there a way to combat our squeebishness? Any suggestions?

Once more around the sun my friends!

Well Happy New Year to anyone who reads this. At some point I plan on giving this blog a topic or topic(s) which people might actually like to read. Maybe that's a New Year's resolution? If anyone has any suggestions, please comment on this post.